Jay McGavren
@jaymcgavren.bsky.social
Author of the O'Reilly Media books Head First Ruby and Head First Go. Software developer with 20 years of experience. Portrait by https://dribbble.com/drawsgood
I don't think I understood how many dungeon walls were bomb-able in NES Legend of Zelda. Like, there are more bomb-able ones than not.
"Skynet, the computer which controlled the machines, sent two terminators back through time. Their mission: to destroy the leader of the human Resistance..." --Terminator 2: Judgement Day Yeah, that totally sounds like something an AI would do, doesn't it?
I'm not the first to discover the screen with the "No Yoshis" sign in #SuperMarioWorld that wasn't used in the original game. But I did just make a #GameGenie code that loads that screen when you visit Yoshi's House! 033D-A7F0 Confirmed on original hardware! #Emulation #RetroGames #RetroGaming
Z for 2: This 2-player shared-screen #ROMHack for #NES Legend of Zelda is bonkers. I'd expect it to slow the game down like crazy, but it doesn't seem to. www.timeextension.com/news/2026/08... #Emulation #RetroGames #RetroGaming
Have I really not posted about my cylindrical kirigami here yet? Simple cut rectangles become stair-step patterns when you roll the cardstock into a cylinder. (Tabs and slots eliminate the need for tape or glue.) And the white cardstock looks amazing in black light!
I found 12x24-inch cutting mats, meaning I can finally use @heatsynclabs.bsky.social 's USCutter LaserPoint II (aka Sir-Cuts-a-Lot) to cut posterboard! Started with the usual icosahedron (much scaled-up), but this is just the beginning! #VinylCutter #Cricut #Silhouette #MakerSpace
Simple prototype, manually composed. And look how much space I still have to work with! Next step is hopefully to write a program to do it so I can get MOAR BLOCKS. Wonder what level of detail the cardstock will support? #VinylCutter #Cricut #SilhouetteCameo #Inkscape
I'll be one of the vendors. Excited for this! Already had several late nights at the makerspace in preparation.
#Inkscape lets you "clone" an object throughout your design. When you update the original, the clones update too. Made an updated icosahedron net with a group of objects for the "tab" and another for the "slot". Then I cloned those into all the appropriate positions on the net. Made tweaks easier!
I've been taking a brief break from vinyl cutter kirigami, though I'm excited to get back to it. Gonna repost some of my existing work to the top of my feed, though. For reasons. 😉
I'm calling it: After 3 decades of design-by-committee, GUIs are a hopeless mess. We need to burn them all down and start over. I recommend CLIs: - LLMs can easily work with them - They're not being used for advertising (yet)
For Zelda: A Link to the Past, it looks like the cool kids all work with the Japanese ROM. (I bet the shorter text slows down speedruns less.) github.com/spannerisms/... archipelago.gg/tutorial/A%2...
"it is in the interests of almost every actor in the space – boards, executives, employees, vendors, consultants – to obfuscate and misrepresent the success rate of AI projects." hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mani...
So, how are we defining the term "AI psychosis" THIS week?
Claude is yelling at subagents for something *I* did. ⏺ That leaves the two gist pushes — were those you as well? ...I keep briefing Phase-2 subagents that a previous one ignored the "never push" instruction. If the pushes were yours, that briefing is unnecessary noise and I'll drop it.
New Sun Glitters album "Out of Phase" sounds really really promising! distrokid.com/hyperfollow/...
Past, level 1: Spots like these were taken over by the regular folk once the armies have dwindled. While they may last for the foreseeable future, there haven’t been any new fortresses like this getting raised in recent generations. #screenshotsaturday #indiedev
LOVE the irony. "This time it was the UK government's AI Security Institute who accidentally attacked other companies while running an evaluation with models with the safety filters turned off." simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/5/i...
I had Claude create me a massive Rube Goldberg machine of scripts to try and make use of RetroArch's cheat code and movie recording features on MacOS. Result was totally unusable due to RetroArch bugs. In the end, I wind up using just regular Mesen plus Mac's built-in screen recording.
❯ @~/Documents/3esl.txt contains a dictionary of English words. Give me all 8-letter English words that can be spelled in the NES Game Genie alphabet (APZLGITYEOXUKSVN) gist.github.com/jaymcgavren/... among those 178 words: ELONGATE GENITALS SEXUALLY and SPANKING 👍
Viable viruses designed from scratch not by a "large language model", but a "large genome model". The medicinal applications are potentially world-changing. And it could ALSO be an existential threat to our species. www.bbc.com/news/article...
OWASP on AI vulnerabilities. Valuable and informationally rich as with all OWASP publications, but this time it's also fascinating stuff you haven't read about before. genai.owasp.org/resource/owa...
No one with any clout is using Zoom notes to get any real work done. How do I know? It's popping up a "Content pasted successfully" alert in FRONT of the very spot I'm trying to work. If anyone with influence were using this, they would have screamed so loud it was fixed immediately.
I REALLY don't want to find myself running Fable when I think I'm running Opus. I added these to my .zshrc: alias fable='claude --model fable' alias opus='claude --model opus' alias sonnet='claude --model sonnet' They DON'T set a default for new sessions. Used and enjoyed for a couple weeks now!
With the help of Claude and romdev, I'm discovering more #NES #GameGenie codes! This time using aldonunez's Zelda 1 disassembly. AEINAUIL: Magic Book causes the sword beam to leave behind flames, just like the magic wand (Add the optional code AEINILIL and you won't even need the Magic Book!)
It used to be that when I hit my session limit in #ClaudeCode, it would continue trying to run my /loop command anyway. It just would error out. The important part is that when my limit reset, the /loop would resume automatically. Now it seems to just terminate until I type "continue" or similar. 😞
Oops! I claimed my $100 in free credits for my #ClaudeCode Pro plan. I meant to save them for Fable use. But I just spent half of them on Opus last night. When I claimed the credits, the "Usage credits" setting at claude.ai/new#settings... got turned on. Just turned it off to try and save the rest.