Since hacker news last saw it, it’s been translated into English, German, Spanish and Chinese. If, say, a Chinese speaker wanted to learn more English words, then they could go to https://threeemojis.com/zh-CN/play/hex/en-US/today and play the game with English words with Chinese definitions and interface. This is the first cross language daily word game of its kind (as far as I know), so it’s been a lot of fun watching who plays which languages from where.
The next challenge that I’m thinking about is growing the game. The write ups and mentions on blogs add up, the social sharing helps, but I’d really like to break into the short form video realm.
If you read interviews from other word game creators, every successful game has some variation of got popular riding the wordle wave, or one random guy made a random TikTok one time that went super viral, and otherwise every other growth method they have tried since then hasn’t worked that well and they are coasting along.
So, sans another wordle wave, I am working on growing a TikTok following and then working on converting that following into players, a bit of a two step there, but that’s how the game is played these days. https://www.tiktok.com/@three_emojis_hq for the curious. Still experimenting and finding video styles and formats that travel well there. Pingo AI and other language apps have shown how strong TikTok can be for growth, so I think there’s something there. That’s all for this month!
Came across via chatgpt as I was debugging some weird hint generations for https://threeemojis.com. Depending on the emoji set one uses, emojis can have very different meanings culturally speaking, the designs are just varied enough that they accumulate significance in different ways.
Very neat. It reminds me a bit of how pages in the Talmud are laid out. From a gentile perspective, it was very interesting to me to see how hundreds (thousands?) of years of commentary are contained within the same page.
Code isn't linear the same way, and pages don't make as much sense, but that idea of layers of commentary rings out in this Linux Kernel Explorer as well. I very much like the notes on the side!
Long-time HN lurker here! Was excited to see this discussion around my major interests of Talmud, Kabbalah, and tech.
There are a lot of misconceptions and mystique surrounding the Talmud. I'd like to take the opportunity to clarify some fundamental aspects, as relates to the discussion here:
The famous "Talmud page" (discussed in the links in the parent comment) was set by a Christian printer in the 16th century.
It emulated a common layout in medieval Christian manuscripts for Christian primary texts and commentaries [0].
The analogy of the Talmud to a hypertext isn't especially apt, IMO. The Talmud indeed extensively cites Bible and Mishnah, and uses lots of technical terms. In this regard, a better analogy is to legal literature (which is what the Talmud in fact is). While being couched as a (fictional) "conversation"/dialogue between rabbis who lived over the course of ~400 years (100 CE to 500 CE).
In fact, Kabbalah (as another commenter mentioned) is a better example of a “hypertext,” since it’s full of recurring symbols that point to different Sefirot and other core concepts.
(By way of credentials: I hold an MA in academic Talmud and Kabbalah, write on these subjects in several venues, and have presented at academic workshops. Over the past two years, I’ve also been developing digital-humanities projects related to this work.)
That's awesome!! Thank you very much! I would have next asked you, what do you think of those apps for studying the Talmud, https://www.sefaria.org/app et al, but in those links you already mention it. Looking forward to reading these, thanks!
Sefaria is incredible, it's revolutionized access to classical texts. And their API gives full and complete access. My vibe-coded Talmud reader website fetches Talmud, Bible, and translations from Sefaria, you might be interested in checking it out :)
> The analogy of the Talmud to a hypertext isn't especially apt, IMO.
Isn’t it? Every page of the Talmud includes marginal notes (Masoret HaShas, Ein Mishpat, Torah Or) giving cross-references to relevant parts of the Torah, Talmud and other legal codes. In a web-based version I think it would be natural to represent those with hypertext.
>"Isn’t it? Every page of the Talmud includes marginal notes (Masoret HaShas, Ein Mishpat, Torah Or) giving cross-references to relevant parts of the Torah, Talmud and other legal codes. In a web-based version I think it would be natural to represent those with hypertext."
But my point is that those marginal notes are an artifact of the 16th century print edition. It's not anything inherent in the Talmud text.
The famous 16th-century Mikraot Gedolot edition of the Bible also features extensive marginal notes (the Mesorah) which function much like a dense network of cross-references.
In fact, the Mesorah is a medieval work (drawing on ancient sources) and is arguably was one of the most elaborate systems of cross-referencing found anywhere, at the time it was promulgated.
This differs from the Talmud’s cross-referencing, which doesn't predate the printed edition (as I note in the Seforim Blog article; the page citations are reliant on the universal page numbers that started from the first print edition).
> But my point is that those marginal notes are an artifact of the 16th century print edition. It's not anything inherent in the Talmud text.
OK, fair enough, if ‘the Talmud text’ is taken to be only the Mishna and the Gemara. (Though when I think of the Talmud it’s the printed edition that comes to mind, with all its accompanying commentary.)
This is something I've gone and forth on for https://threeemojis.com/ as well. I think it's pretty hard to generate a story of a complicated puzzle, in part because the person you are sending it to doesn't have an idea of the terrain you were playing on and so kind of doesn't care. I do see some people doing custom share images with their puzzles, but it doesn't seem to have caught on so much.
Good point! I like some but not all of the interjections, so they'll be getting more filtered out. And yes, I'll bring the word count even further, there's a sweet spot that it isn't quite hitting yet time wise. Thank you!!
Of course! There's persisted local storage for storing games. The nice/hard thing about doing two languages is that you can't just throw everything in the same place by default and expect it to still work.
Another friend reported "ween" as well so I looked into this. It's been marked as vulgar, mostly because it's most widely known as slang for penis (at least according to ai). There is also the word "wean" which sounds the same but has a different and modern meaning. So for now, ween is still filtered out until somebody shows me better proof it has a modern non vulgar usage.
Huh interesting. It's using React for the most part, plus a physics engine for the falling engines. It might also be the css as well, there's a lot of gradients and transparencies in there. I'll make a note to include turning those off in (coming soon) performance mode. I might have it turn on automatically if it detects lag. Thank you for the report!
Since hacker news last saw it, it’s been translated into English, German, Spanish and Chinese. If, say, a Chinese speaker wanted to learn more English words, then they could go to https://threeemojis.com/zh-CN/play/hex/en-US/today and play the game with English words with Chinese definitions and interface. This is the first cross language daily word game of its kind (as far as I know), so it’s been a lot of fun watching who plays which languages from where.
The next challenge that I’m thinking about is growing the game. The write ups and mentions on blogs add up, the social sharing helps, but I’d really like to break into the short form video realm.
If you read interviews from other word game creators, every successful game has some variation of got popular riding the wordle wave, or one random guy made a random TikTok one time that went super viral, and otherwise every other growth method they have tried since then hasn’t worked that well and they are coasting along.
So, sans another wordle wave, I am working on growing a TikTok following and then working on converting that following into players, a bit of a two step there, but that’s how the game is played these days. https://www.tiktok.com/@three_emojis_hq for the curious. Still experimenting and finding video styles and formats that travel well there. Pingo AI and other language apps have shown how strong TikTok can be for growth, so I think there’s something there. That’s all for this month!
reply