Stop Chasing Unicorns - ‘When it comes to ways of working, what do the companies that beat you in deals do better product, design, and engineering-wise?" Silence. “Do they do better discovery and research, ship higher quality work, run more experiments, kill bad decisions faster, retain passionate team members, or have a more effective org design?'

The S&P 500 is largely a historical artifact - Index funds.

About Placemark.io - Is there room in the TAM for a startup like me? Seems representative of starting a software-business, there needs to be room in the market, a chance to make it big: “As I’ve said a bunch of times, the biggest problem with competition in the world of geospatial companies is that there aren’t many big winners. We would all have a way different perspective on geospatial startups if even one of them had a successful IPO in the last decade or two, or even if a geospatial startup entered the mainstream in the same way as a startup like Notion or Figma did. Esri being a private company is definitely part of this - they’re enormous, but nobody outside of the industry talks about them because there’s no stock and little transparency into their business."

Don’t Get Canceled: How To Overcome GenAI Consumer Backlash - I am interested in enterprise AI governance and policy. I’m not even sure what that is! But what does security, audit, and governance look like for AI? What is DevSecOps, secure software supply chains, all that type of thing for enterprises using AI?

CMOs Must Protect Consumer Trust in the AI Age - “only 20% of consumers are comfortable with businesses incorporating the use of GenAI into their operations, according to a survey by Gartner."

You can generate really big Dungeons & Dragons battle maps with Midjourney. It takes some iteration and tinkering, but the maps are great. I like big battle maps so that characters, NPCs, and monsters have lots of room to move around and take tactical advantage of ranged spells and attacks. While the big images are grainy when you zoom in, if you save the series of original images that you zoomed out of, you can always zoom back in, so to speak.

In this post, I’m going to show you how I went from this map:

to this map:

There’s also four maps in-between, which I don’t include all of here.

(1) The Story

To guide what your map looks like it needs to be part of a story. This gives you the setup, the environments, etc.¹

I’ve been solo role-playing Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden and I wanted an ambush encounter with the Knights of the Black Sword.

For a good ambush, you need a choke point, and a bridge is great. Characters are forced to go over a bridge (sure, they could fly, but not the character I was playing), you get exposed (it’s hard to hide as you cross a bridge), and you can get trapped. You could even be cinematic and have the bridge destroyed, ropes cut, whatever.

So, I needed a bridge-cross in a icy environment.

(2) Find a starter map, or stop with one

There are so many D&D maps out there, tons and tons of them. Often, you can do a Google Image search and find exactly what you need.² I found a good map in Reddit³ - an icy setting with a a bridge going over a deadly gorge. But, after setting it up for an ambush, I realized there was nowhere to hide really. Plus, like I said, I like really big maps.

So, I went to Midjourney and after some tinkering, I came up with the maps above.

I loaded the original map from Reddit into the Midjourney prompt window, and gave it Midjourney this prompt:

Expand this dungeons and dragons battlemap of a bridge crossing an icy gap in a glacier. Overlaid with 5 foot by 5 foot grid as in standard d&d battle maps

First, it didn’t actually expand the map, it just used it as inspiration. Second, it took several go-rounds and re-starts with Midjourney. This is key to Midjourney stuff: before you blame your prompt, just have it try from scratch several (four or six) times and pick, like, two you like, and continue refining those).

Here’s a particularly goofy one Midjourney made:

What’s goofy here is, of course, that tunnel in the upper right, but you’ll notice that the 5x5 grid is all messed up. If you let this live on through your zooming out, it will continue to be messed up.

Here’s the one I picked to build on:

The grid is not perfect, as you can see if you zoom into the larger versions, but it’s good enough and that good enough persists as you scale up. Is a 65 foot long, 16 foot bridge realistic? How about the sizes of the rocks and trees? I don’t know, they seem good enough to me. As with a lot of D&D realism check, if I got too deep down making things perfectly realistic, I remind myself that this is world where gnomes and ships flying in space is realistic. And, you know, the point is to have fun.

(3) Zooming out

Then, I just used the zoom 2x option several times, you can the buttons for that in the screenshot of the Midjourney web UI above. I zoomed first to this, this, and then this. Each time, of course, discarding the goofy results.

During this zooming, I’d also pan to fill in direct filling in, mostly the right and then up. You can see the pan buttons highlighted in the screenshot above as well.

Finally, I ended up with a pretty good one. But, when I zoomed in it was grainy. So, I had it upscale it; see the buttons in the screenshot.

I don’t actually know what that means (or any of the Midjourney things), but it sounded right. I tried upscale on “subtle” and “creative,” and I think “subtle” is what you want to have it stay pretty much the same. Creative gets uh, super “creative."

The final map is this one:

(4) Using the Map

Then, I loaded it up into DND Beyond’s map tool, added in the tokens, to get this:

If you squint, you can see the little tokens clustered around the bridge, the cultists hiding out here and there, and my character approaching the bridge. It’s impossible to use at this scale, but look at that: 1,160 feet! That’s about two full-range long bow shots and plenty of room to run around (chasing, retreating, pulling back and hiding, and on and on).

You can zoom in (and, of course, pan around) to actually play:

The tokens are still small, and the image is grainy enough to notice. But, it was super fun to create and use.

For next time

Here’s some analysis and ideas for improvement:

Map size

When I played this encounter, the focus only moved 300 foot from the bridge, so, in theory that’s all the room I needed. Still, it felt nice and open. So, the map I ended up with is probably too big for an encounter, and I think I’ll scale it down to one of the smaller ones next time.

DND Beyond’s map tool only zooms in 500%.I don’t actually mind the grainy and blurry zoom in, it’s actually the tokens that are too small, it’s difficult to read the token names on my monitor. But, on my new M3 Macbook Pro, the screen is actually crisp enough to read them…barely.

Grids

I should also learn how to overlay my own grid. For example, here’s an example of a glacier-to-sea cliff. The grid on this one isn’t too good, but I think the results fit my criteria. That said, I wonder if the 5 foot by 5 foot grid helps Midjourney keep scale right? If that’s the case, maybe I could still turn the Midjourney grid off and be clever and say “use an invisible 5 foot by 5 foot grid.”

Buildings

For buildings, I’ve used Midjourney, and even sections of towns. My success there isn’t so great, largely because I haven’t figured out prompts to break out of the standard, square structures. But, what I really dislike about them is the lack of space around the buildings. I’ve done a little bit of work there: here’s a “small” building map, and then a larger, zoomed out one. Here’s an exterior town/settlement zoom-up: from a tight map, to an expanded one.

Hex Crawls and Sandboxes

An idea: could you use the panning to roll up random terrian for a hex crawl? Let’s say you wanted to see the actual terrain over a six mile hex? A mile is 5,280, so you’d need to pan a lot more to go from 1,160 feet to a mile. Would it even go that far? Instead, I’m wondering if I could take one thin slice of a side of the image and make tiles.

This kind of detailed, “real time” playing is terrible with a group of players, but when you’re solo role-playing, it can be just what you want.⁴ And, another aspect of solo-playing is world building-by-playing. If you had some good enough encounter tables (and there’s a lot of that in “Rime"), it could also be pretty great. I feel like Paul Bimler’s solo role-playing systems would work well here with its details on wilderness travel, encountering settlements, and the story-point and adventure-loop system he uses in his solo adventures. He goes especially bonkers-good in the second volume of his solo role-playing toolbox.

Aesthetics

As with most Midjourney images, the default style is distinct. I think of these as the Inkarnate-style of D&D battle maps…which is totally fine! But, if you browse Midjourney, you can see variations, e.g., adding in “white lines on black background," and sometimes it just shifts the aesthetic on its own.

DALL-E

I use ChatGPT for my main generative AI driven solo roleplaying. Sometimes I create images in it (“make an image of the current scene,” and the like). But, it’s not the best. And when that happens, as with Midjourney, you have to keep iterating and refining. That’s a big distraction from the role playing chat session. Plus, iterating on images consumes your message quota right-quick.

Still, there’s probably something that I could do: maybe generate really quick, simple line maps, or just NPC pictures.

ChatGPT is pretty good in the opposite direction: giving it images and saying “this is the tavern we’re in,” or “this is what Kadroth looks like.”

It works!

Overall, it’s great! My principles for using AI for solo role-playing are that I don’t want to spend too much time tinkering with it, let alone programming. The point of generative AI is to reduce all that toil, after all. In this instance, I think that princple works: now that I know what I’m doing, it should take only 10 or 15 minutes to get a good result. Or, it’s one of those things you can check in on for 30 to 60 seconds between other tasks you’re doing.

Tell me how you’re doing this, which is to say, give me the good prompt strategies and prompts.

And, hey, if you’re interested in more of my solo role-playing with ChatGPT, check out my videos on the topic.

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1. Well, not always. I like to proactively generate maps to have on hand for future playing. For example, in my campaign setting there’s a huge forest, so just generating forest maps is useful. And, I’ll admit, it’s also both calming and fun. But, obviously, if you’re going to make an encounter map, you need to know the encounter. ↩︎

2. I don’t really know the contemporary norms in the D&D world of copyright and using material. It seems very loose, especially for personal use. I apologize if I’m offending people here, I am a lone D&D playing hermit who has only recently emerged into the world since second edition long, long ago, before all this “Internet” stuff existing. ↩︎

3. Maybe I’m too crazy with book-keeping, but when I have maps from the Internet, on MacOS, I put the original URL in the file’s comment - hence being able to link back to it here! ↩︎

4. This is a theory I’ve been developing in the past several months of solo role-playing: you can make the boring parts fun. When you’re playing in a group (let’s say with three or five other players), it’s less fun to focus on just an individual’s actions. Let’s say a gourmand halfling wants to have a detailed conversation about elvish bread, or a thief wants to scope out and pick pockets of drunk merchants (both things I’ve done with AI-driven solo role-playing, the first several times, just with different foods). That kind of stuff would kill the vibe of a group-game. But, on your own, you can do whatever boring stuff you want. So, here, with a generative AI driven hex crawl, you could get really solipsistic - more like _solo_psistic, AMIRIGHT?! ↩︎

Relative to your interests

• Sometimes, Lipstick Is Exactly What a Pig Needs! - Abby Bangser, Syntasso & Whitney Lee, VMware - How can you start to take a design/UX-driven approach to building your platform (you know, your pile of Kubernetes stuff to pull it all together for app developers)? Whitney Lee & Abby Bangser have a good mind-model to think about designing the interfaces (how people use parts of that stack). Thinking through how you design your platform “interfaces” for app developers is especially important if you’re building your own stack instead of buying one of the already integrated ones.

• “Designing for Success: UX Principles for Internal Developer Platforms,” Kirsten Schwarzer, KubeCon EU, March, 2024. - Good tour of applying design-think to platforms. That is, what do designers do on platform engineering teams. Some items: (1) Do at least one hour long user interview a week. This gives you an idea of what your users (developers) are doing, struggle with, how your improvements are helping or not, and give you data to decide what to do next. The last is especially useful for fending off The Boss and others who have suggestions that are not helpful: show them the data about what is, at least that you do things driven by analysis, not hunch. (2) Progressive disclosure - only show what people need for a given talk, not everything the tool can do. Can help with cognitive (over)load. (3) Errors are a good source for finding what’s wrong.

• “Boosting Developer Platform Teams with Product Thinking,” Samantha Coffman, KubeCon EU, March 2024. - A lot of good commentary and advice on product managing the platform, some techniques, mindsets, etc. Chief among them: focus on the value/problem you’re solving first, then how you solve it second…also trying to quantify what the problem is so you can measure if it’s fixed, and prioritize it.

• State of Platform Maturity in the Norwegian Public Sector - Hans Kristian Flaatten - If you’re interested in how the Norwegian government is using cloud native stuff (like Kubernetes), this is a survey readout circa 2023/2024. The Q&A section is pretty great for walking through the usual concerns for a platform, especially compliance/governance.

• Ex-technology companies. - “Organizations that spun up dedicated in-house build and deployment infrastructure have fixed engineering costs to maintain that infrastructure, and the math that convinced executives earlier–some sort of argument about the multiplicative effect on the impact of other engineers–doesn’t make as much sense anymore. But often you can’t just stop maintaining those investments, because that would require slowing down to decommission the existing systems, and ex-technology companies have little capacity for maintenance. Instead they’re focused on survival or roleplaying the motions of rapid product development despite actually spending the large majority of their time on maintenance.” // This is pretty great! Finally, a business strategy model for deciding build vs. buy. Look at the costs of building, running, and maintaining your own stack over (whatever, let’s pick a number) 3 to 5 years. Is it higher than buying, assuming revenue is single digit growth? Put another way, with software, it’s the maintenance that kills your numbers. // Also, to ponder: “They no longer believe they can change the business' outcomes through R&D efforts, and as a result they shouldn’t include engineering as a major stakeholder in business decisions.”

• “Analogpunk, or, Tools, Shoes and Misery,” Bruce Sterling SXSW 2024 - He has a skill for turning mundane objects into lectures and relating them to culture. Put in direct link to MP3.

• How B2B Organizations Can Win With Younger Buyers - What the kids are up to. This feels like a description of youth of all generations. As the kids age in power, they both get tired, have their own kids, or otherwise just get tired and want to delegate, have help, or just coast. Until then: so much energy! So much flat hierarchy! So much energy! So much caring!

• Untranslatable - “We’ll let him do a trial run for a week first, to see what kind of meat we have in the tub.”

• 101 things I would tell my self from 10 years ago - “You are high in neuroticism, a trait that correlates with worse social relationships and an unhappier life. Sorry; there’s not much you can do about it other than be aware of it. Its saving grace is that it means you are attuned to what is wrong in the world and driven to fix it.” // Typical listical, but, sure, some fun stuff.

• The Justice Department Accuses Apple Of Smartphone Monopoly - ’When you’re as big as Apple, there’s a target on your back. The company’s market capitalization flirts with three trillion dollars, but more importantly, it commands a resounding 60%+ share of the smartphone market in the U.S. Therein lies the rub – our phones are the primary portal into how we live every moment of our waking (and sleeping) lives. What Apple chooses to allow or disallow has outsized implications for every provider hoping to get in through the portal and play a role in the digitally addicted lives of American consumers.’ And: “Apple’s obsession with its customer experience leads it to control the experience tightly, make decisions on its customers' behalf, and maintain an ecosystem that consistently delivers on the experience the brand promises. That philosophy limits choices for consumers. To that end, there is no dearth of people who are irked by this handcuffing and choose not to frolic in Apple’s walled garden. Then there are others who are part of the Apple family precisely because of the carefully managed ecosystem’s ease of use and intuitiveness.”

• A few thoughts on the Apple DOJ antitrust case, from someone who isn’t riding his first rodeo - “In organisations that are under antitrust pressure, ideas that might get put forward are held back, because people would rather not spend the time having them checked through legal and compliance teams. Acquisitions which a company might make don’t happen, because it would rather not appear rapacious or that it’s stifling nascent competition. And contractual clauses with partners can’t be as aggressive in locking them out of doing business in a way which doesn’t favour you.”

• AI means it’s Springtime for open source, says CNCF - “Bold words, alongside a prediction from the keynote stage that the cloud-native development market will be worth $2.3 trillion worldwide by 2029, up from $547 billion in 2022 – a 320% increase in less than a decade.” // Seems like a lot, especially when IDC forecasts the Kubernetes (“Container Infrastructure Software”) market to be $5.56bn in 2027. But, if you look at the CNCF “landscape” is basically all of infrastructure software now (a rewrite of the existing stack used to run applications), I mean…sure?

• From Here to GitOps and Back Again - GitOps as a feature of CI/CD.

• How People Are Really Using GenAI - It makes jargon-based work more accessible, and complex things easier to understand. Also, just some everyday uses. And: an alternative to the garbage filled results you get from search, a way to filter the Internet. // “just 10% use ChatGPT which enjoys 60% market share regularly”

• Late Night With the Devil: why people are boycotting the indie horror - “I’m not going to boycott an indie movie and the work of everyone else for what amounts to 20 seconds of AI title cards, because that doesn’t help artists either”

• Exit, Voice, and Loyalty - “The Exit, Voice and Loyalty model states that members of an organization, whether a business, a nation or any other form of human grouping, have essentially two possible responses when they perceive that the organization is demonstrating a decrease in quality or benefit to the member: they can exit (withdraw from the relationship); or, they can voice (attempt to repair or improve the relationship through communication of the complaint, grievance or proposal for change).”

• First custom brand font for TJ Maxx built by McCann Design - ‘The Maxx typeface has a family of four weights and is apparently “chock-full of little gems in the Open Type features”. Typing out two X’s will bring up the option of the famous XX ligature that appears in the logo. There are also alternative shorter glyphs for the I and J, “to close the leading more naturally in tight typesetting”.’

• Battle of the Redis forks? - Commercialized open source is a mess right now…for the past ₃ years. Like other types of software, cloud has really been, uh, “transformative.”

• Content Editing: How To Handle Major Rewrites - Pretty detailed guide to editing (corporate) content that isn’t good enough.

• Platform Maturity Model with Abby Bangser - Good framing: providing internal (dev) services to internal (dev) customers. (Abby has been doing a great job, devrel wise, in the past year+.)

• The Unbundling of ChatGPT (Feb 2024 Recap) - AI is a feature, not a product.

• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon - if you build it, your customers might not come. Why? - Platform as a product!

We’ll tell you what’s up with my work now. All the cloud, platform engineering, Java, development, cloud native, yadda-yadda you know you like stuff. April 3rd, coming up soon! You can watch in LinkedIn or YouTube. Register (for free!) at one of those two and you’ll get notified when it’s started and reminded after it happened.

Wastebook

• “Full Stack IT Elimination.”

• I’m sorry for your loss/thank you for your service/thank you, please drive through.

• “toddler-led walks” Here.

• “Richard Stallman, too. He is our hero. Stallman does not visit our Brain Dump hackerspace, because he refuses to use Google Maps on principle.” bruces.

• “I don’t believe in most recycling. I may believe in recycling cans, though I know it takes much higher heat to smelt. I may believe in non-intermingled paper pulp recycling. I may believe in glass recycling. I say may believe because I don’t know enough about it. It is possible it is all a sham. I do believe in French wine and the money it requires to buy it so I took a load of cans to my local recycling center on the way home from the swapmeet.” Coco’s Dispatch.

• “It’s so quiet, I can hear my hair grow.” Here.

• “Judy says the problem with lentil loaf is the word ‘loaf.’” Alex.

• “not an expert on the day of the week.” RoTL, #530

• “Essentially, level five is utopia.” Cloud Native Maturity Model.

• She is the only person who is more me than me.

Korean-flavored, American Soul food sold in the Netherlands, delivered by Internet-enabled courier. Back when my peers were throwing bricks into McDonald’s windows, they had no idea what was hurtling towards them - some real cyberpunk shit, man. Now, we’re the ones ordering this stuff. Plus: it’s damn good chicken. Their Korean chicken-fried cauliflower is amazing too.

Logoff

The solo D&D with AI has been rocky of late. I’ve hit the problem of the AI not being able to move to the next action. It lingers on a sort of “what will happen next?” cliff. Instead, I’m looking for it to take that active roll of moving the plot forward that a DM would.

I’ve been looking at the Plot Unfolding Machine (PUM) for some inspiration. It seems to be built around this problem in solo role playing. Instead of the usual oracle mechanics, injecting random plot twists, and inspiration for the solo-player coming up with a new story…PUM tries to get closer to saying exactly what happens next.

Also, I’ve tried Gemini Pro (I have a two month free trial). I don’t have the ability to upload files (because I’m on the EU…or just can’t find it), which is very limiting: you have to start all over. I thought the huge context window would help, but I’m not sure.

All in all, I haven’t been able to capture that wonder and awe of the first week of doing AI driven solo role playing. The work continues!

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon - if you build it, your customers might not come. Why? - Platform as a product!

The Unbundling of ChatGPT (Feb 2024 Recap) - AI is a feature, not a product.

Java 22: Making Java More Attractive for AI Apps/Workloads - “Java is embracing a minimalist approach by continuing to reduce ceremonies around writing initial steps of code, via instance main method and implicit classes, making it easier for folks to get started learning Java. With constructor makeover (statements before super[…]), Java has proven again that it supports responsible innovation, and relaxing language constraints that existed from Java’s version 1.0 without breaking any existing code."