Fermi Aperture
Initial attempt here: https://jwbatey.com/fermi/
Fermi Aperture is a strategy game built around the Fermi Paradox. I want it to plays as an incremental (idle-style) civilization builder: you guide a society from early development to a spacefaring stage, with one clear 1st-act objective, launching a seed ship.
The interesting part is what tries to stop you. The game generates events and hazards inspired by common Fermi Paradox explanations:
- Civilizational collapse or catastrophe (think Great Filter-type scenarios)
- False signals and near-misses that raise hope and then evaporate
- Resource constraints that force ugly tradeoffs
- Powerful technology that solves one problem and creates a new one
Even while the game is idle, your civilization may be accumulating resources and knowledge. At the same time, unattended risks can compound and end the run.
If you launch the seed ship, you can explore other worlds and discover how they collapsed. Ultimate end-game are ‘bigger’ threats and maybe just heat death of the universe.
Superdiff
I feel like I’ve been this a dozen times. Superdiff is meant to be a document comparison tool built for long, revision-heavy documents. A normal diff is great for code, but it can be miserable on Word/PDF exports where page numbers, tables of contents, and formatting churn can bury the real edits.
Superdiff aims to surface the changes a reviewer cares about:
- Additions, deletions, and rewrites in sentences and paragraphs
- Meaningful edits to clauses, requirements, or definitions
- Updates to figures or tables that change content, not just layout
At the same time, it tries to ignore the high-noise categories:
- Renumbered pages and sections
- Table of contents refreshes
- Pure formatting or style tweaks
The output is an annotated report that calls out substantive edits cleanly. It also computes a simple “change density” score, and can suggest a rough review time based on how much content moved.
I’ve written a version in PHP, C++, js, python… I usually get it to a point where I can run it on an entire work corpus, run it, then forget about it. The need seems to resurface every couple years.
I think this is like ToDo Apps, where every programmer seems to have made one. With so many samples on github, next time I’ll probably just use AI to code/do it
Semantic Diff is what I’m using now.
Auto-censor kids’ books for comedy
This project takes children stories and adds “unnecessary censorship” for comedic effect. Automatically pick a few words or phrases and replace them with black bars or symbols, as if the text contained something explicit, even when it does not.
Example:
“The princess sang to the frog happily in the forest.” becomes “The princess ██████ the frog happily in the forest.”
It is basically a small algorithmic prank: the story reads normally until a censored block appears, then your imagination does the rest. It’s adjacent to “This Week in Unnecessary Censorship” (Jimmy Kimmel) and the broader unnecessary censorship meme… although I didn’t find these until searching to see if anybody else had this app already.