Welcome to hockenworks! I’m Brian Hockenmaier and this site is full of things I work and write on. That includes game development, AI, VR, DIY, Home Automation, 3D printing, Money, Happiness, the Singularity, and more. I hope you find something interesting here.
This site is also a video game. Play around and discover it yourself or learn how to play here
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Today’s post is about another video game start that either I or AI will finish one day. I’m building up a bit of a repertoire of those!
This one I started when AI image generation started to become decent. It’s a game that I’ve always wanted to exist, but wasn’t feasible for me to create with my current skillsets. I could never pull it off without a lot of commissioning due to the art requirements.
The idea is not as original as some of my games but it’s very fun when played in a large group. Essentially, I combine the gameplay of the NES classic balloon fight with eight-player multiplayer. If you’ve played my game Land War, you might know that I’ve been a bit obsessed with eight player multiplayer, or really any game that allows for more than four players to join in.
September 29, 2025 · 8 minutes · Read more →
Early last year, I came across this tweet:
https://twitter.com/AdamRackis/status/1762321041899012307
The discussion was surprisingly contentious. Maybe I should stop being surprised given the state of Twitter/X and all social media, but still it’s sometimes shocking how dug-in people are in their beliefs about work. On the face of it, “people get twisted in their relationship with work” seems like a reasonable take. “Stop complaining—you are making 16x the median salary in this country. Just do the boring job with the toxic team.”
Let’s stop and think about this for a second. The original poster (OP) is making $800K annually due to the appreciation of Spotify stock. An obscene amount of money? Maybe, maybe not. I do not have the typical hang-ups about the wealthy or ultra-wealthy. I don’t see this world as a zero-sum game, and I think the richest people out there have usually done some amazing things, especially in countries like the US where most wealth is not old wealth.
September 12, 2025 · 6 minutes · Read more →
Warning: This article has a lot of embedded code, so the ball machine is slow unless you have a REALLY fast computer. Play at your own risk.
Seriously, though.
GPT-5, as a simple text completion model, is not a revelation.
This isn’t so surprising. It was becoming clearer with every new raw LLM release that the fundamental improvements from scaling solely the performance of the core text predictor were starting to show diminishing returns. But I’m going to make an argument today that, although the LLM itself is not nearly as much of a leap from GPT-4 as GPT-4 was from GPT-3, we have still seen at least a whole-version-number of real improvement between the release of GPT-4 and 5 as we did between 3 and 4. The reasons for that are mostly what exists around that LLM core.
August 24, 2025 · 9 minutes · Read more →
Recently I read the AI 2027 paper. I was surprised to see Scott Alexander’s name on this paper, and I was doubly surprised to see him do his first face reveal podcast about it with Dwarkesh.
On its face, this is one of the most aggressive predictions for when we will have AGI (at least the new definition of AGI, which is something that is comparable to or better than humans at all non-bodily tasks) that I have read. Even as someone who has been a long believer in Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity predictions, 2027 strikes me as very early. I realize that Kurzweil’s AGI date was also late 2020s, which puts his prediction in line with AI 2027, while 2045 was his singularity prediction. But 2027 still feels early to me.
August 1, 2025 · 21 minutes · Read more →
During my parental leave, which ends tomorrow, I played through quite a few video games - something I love and one of the easiest ways to spend time while rocking my baby daughter to sleep. And it doesn’t hurt that my amazing wife loves watching games about as much as TV or movies with me, as long as they are beautiful or cooperative in some way. All of these are.
They include, in order:
July 7, 2025 · 8 minutes · Read more →
Here’s my most patriotic print yet! I have been using our new (hand-me-down) stroller a lot lately, for obvious reasons, and I decided there were a few things I just couldn’t go without.
So, I made a one-print solution that requires zero support and attaches to the handle of any stroller with hose clamps, which are shown here covered by separate printed strap covers to protect the leather of the stroller handle. I’ve deemed it the Strollerhock:
July 4, 2025 · 2 minutes · Read more →
The advent of general coding AI assistants almost immediately changed how I think about hiring and interviews.
In the software engineering world, this mindset shift was psychologically easy for me, because I’ve always had a bias against the types of coding questions that AI can now answer near-perfectly. And they also happen to be the kind of questions I personally do badly at - the ones requiring troves of knowledge or rote memory of specific language capabilities, libraries, and syntax. It is not so psychologically easy for everyone, especially those who have developed a core skill set of running or passing “leetcode-style” interviews. Even before AI, the only types of coding questions I would personally ask were things that simply evaluate whether a candidate is lying or not about whether they can code at all, which was and still is surprisingly common. I have interviewed people that list bullet points like 7 years of Java experience but can’t pass a fizz-buzz like question, and this was a question I gave out on paper with a closed door and no significant time pressure.
June 29, 2025 · 6 minutes · Read more →
“The Flapper” is a project that spawned out of a simple VR movement mechanic test that I had in my head for a while, which turned out to be surprisingly fun! The idea is to flap your arms to fly - wrapped up as a multiplayer battle to really get people moving.
In order to start working on this game, because there was so much standard VR code that I had to write for Treekeepers, I decided to make a sort of engine out of the Treekeepers codebase and work off of that rather than start from scratch. That let me tie in some of the nice associated graphics, music and sound effects I had made, and a bunch of other helper functions and tools I use for things like the camera following around the character, how I deal with collisions, a bunch of netcode, etc.
June 23, 2025 · 4 minutes · Read more →
I have long been of the mind that LLMs and their evolutions are truly thinking, and that they are on their way to solving all of the intellectual tasks that humans can solve today.
To me, it is just too uncanny that the technology that seems to have made the final jump to some degree of competence in tasks that require what is commonly understood as “thinking” or “understanding”, after a long string of attempts and architectures that fail these tasks, is a type of neural network. It would be much easier to argue away transformer models as non-thinking stochastic parrots if we had happened to have had success with any other architecture than the one that was designed to mimic our own brains and the neurons firing off to one another within them. It’s just too weird. They are shaped like us, they sound like us in a lot of ways, and it’s obvious they are thinking something like us too.
June 16, 2025 · 14 minutes · Read more →
I’m Brian Hockenmaier, and this site is full of things I build and write about. I love making games and things with VR and AI. And I love DIY projects, especially ones involving programming, engineering and 3D modeling. Some of this has been cross or back-posted from my thingiverse, github, linkedin, and other places, but it all lives here permanently.
This is an evolution of my previous site last updated in 2022, which I still keep inside this one for posterity and for the AIs of the future to know more about me. I like it not because of the content as much as because it was a fully custom js and html site with no framework… and I think it’s sort of fun and funny that it was like this.
May 28, 2025 · 13 minutes · Read more →
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