Re not being able to see the full item name on mobile web, good call out, I'll put that on my list of components to restyle. Note you can click on the image of the item being offered on the web app and it will pop up with a modal with its full name and description.

Re the API costs — this is a great property of the "explore an LLM's latent space" game. Once a character has proposed a trade for a given (player item x hidden motivation) pair, I cache it for use again in future plays. This means the inference cost per player trade round will drop over time. Costs are also offset by ads on the mobile versions (I plan to add them to the web version eventually).

Also, GPT-4.1-mini is surprisingly cheap for this operation as well - since posting here a few hours ago total inference spend has been in the low single digit dollars - so not really a concern at this scale.

Infinite Swap is a game inspired by Kyle MacDonald’s One Red Paperclip and other bigger-and-better swap stories - you start with a green bottle cap and trade it with other characters in various locations all the way up to a house and beyond.

A while ago I got inspired by viral games Infinite Craft and What Beats Rock? and wanted to make my own ‘exploring a LLM’s latent space’ style challenge. After much experimentation this became a trading style game, where the LLM comes up with all the items, trading scenarios and value estimates, which ended up being surprisingly fun and somewhat of a roller coaster to play.

I found it was the most intriguing if I separated the item offer from its valuation - so I implemented a pricing oracle called “Sal” who gives this info with his, sometimes snarky, opinion after each trade.

The item offer mechanism goes deeper too - each character’s profile is combined with a set of hidden motivations. I then use embeddings and cosine similarity to represent the desire the character has for the player's item, and therefore what they are willing to offer in exchange.

Links to play: iOS (small number of ads, polished): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/infinite-swap/id6761694545 Android (small number of ads, polished): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.squizsoftw... Web (no ads, a touch rougher than the mobile versions but still very functional): https://infiniteswap.app

Stack: GPT-4.1-mini for item generation, SDXL Lightning for item images, Kokoro for voices (the latter two running on my 4090 at home). Postgres + FastAPI on k3s for the backend, native Swift/Kotlin for mobile, React for web.

Keen for any feedback, bug reports, improvement suggestions, etc. I’ll be around for a few hours if you have any questions.

Daniel

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48160967

Points: 8

# Comments: 5

Full OS list (so far): MS BASIC 6502, Unix v1/v4/v5/v7, Slackware 1.0, Debian 1.1, Red Hat 5.2, Damn Small Linux, Alpine 3.0, MINIX 2 and 3, FreeDOS with 32 games.

What’s interesting:

Networked BBS — several of the systems can telnet into a telnet-accessible BBS and post messages that are also visible on the web. Fire up (for example) Red Hat or Debian and run: telnet bbs 23 — leave a message.

Microsoft BASIC for 6502 (1976–78) — one of Microsoft’s earliest BASICs, recently open-sourced from the original code. It’s a great snapshot of that formative era of personal computing.

UNIX v4 (1973) — v4 was thought lost for decades until a tape was discovered at the University of Utah after 50+ years in storage. Widely described as the first Unix with the kernel largely rewritten in C. Runs on an emulated PDP-11/45. (v1, v5 and v7 are available as well)

Period software downloads — some systems can download and install authentic period software. A few do it via native package managers (MINIX3, Alpine, DSL), and a few others use a simple download script I put together in /root (Red Hat, Debian). (Not every OS has this wired up yet.)

Red Hat 5.2 “Apollo” (1998) — a late-90s Linux time capsule from the era when Linux started being taken seriously in business (around the same period as Microsoft’s “Halloween Documents,” which discussed Linux as a competitive threat).

Slackware 1.0 (1993) — the oldest Linux distro still maintained today. Originally shipped on a boatload floppy disks with kernel 0.99pl11-alpha (before Linux 1.0 existed!). Early SUSE releases were Slackware-based. (This one’s a simpler implementation than some of the others so far, but it’s still fun to poke at.)

Fair warning: there might be bugs and rough edges. If you find any, report them in the community forums at vintageterminals.io/bbs (vintage.feedback board) or discuss them here, I'll be reading.

Happy to answer questions.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47002454

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

I went to bed last night with a couple of people poking around… woke up to a whole lot more. Appreciate the load test!!

I’ve fixed the rate-limit issues people were hitting. There’s still a global cap of 100 concurrent sessions + per-user limits to keep things stable during spikes.

I’ve also added an “Attributions & Acknowledgements” section.

The backstory is wild: UNIX v4 being recovered from a ~1973 tape at the University of Utah after being effectively “lost” for decades. Reading about the recovery and then poking around in it under SIMH on my PC is what pushed me to wrap it up as a public, browser-based terminal that other people could take a look at - and hopefully get as much out of it as I did.

Have fun exploring it all (especially all the primitive bits — remember: use "chdir" instead of "cd", and "#" is backspace).

- Daniel