https://sygi.xyz Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2026-03-08-three-ai-projects.html Recently, I built three small AI-related projects. The common theme was simple: using LLMs to write custom software is now easy enough that it is often worth trying an idea instead of debating it for a week.

]]> Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2026-03-08-three-ai-projects.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2026-01-11-jane-street.html Jane Street is a hedge fund with a strong puzzle culture. They have published a math/computing puzzle every month since 2014. Anyone can submit a solution, and each month’s puzzle page lists the people who solved it.

]]> Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2026-01-11-jane-street.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2025-05-26-gaudi-guide.html When visiting New Zealand a few years back, we stumbled upon Urbantics scavenger hunt. It feels like an escape room outdoors, solving puzzles while getting to know the city’s history. I enjoyed it and tried to create a Barcelona guide in a similar format, as I’ll likely be there with my parents later this year.

]]> Mon, 26 May 2025 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2025-05-26-gaudi-guide.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2025-03-31-electronics.html The last time I had contact with electric currents was during physics class in high school more than a decade ago. Paradoxically, the contact was a non-physical one: we would calculate answers to some theoretical, closed-form problems without building any real circuits ourselves.

]]> Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2025-03-31-electronics.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2025-02-24-atc-game.html I find the work of air traffic controllers fascinating, scary, and powerful as they can move the planes with the power of their voices. To act on this feeling, I made a simple game prototype in which the player is an ATC trying to land the airplanes safely.

]]> Mon, 24 Feb 2025 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2025-02-24-atc-game.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2025-02-09-multiagent-llms.html Multiagent algorithms are not in the mainstream focus nowadays, in particular, LLM development rarely incorporates them. This post explains why I think the characteristics of LLMs make them ideal candidates for multiagent algorithms.

]]> Sun, 09 Feb 2025 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2025-02-09-multiagent-llms.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2025-01-16-llm-says-buttons.html The default interaction method used with contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs) is a text chat: user asks a question, LLM gives an answer. Inspired by Will Whitney’s post and conversations with Varun Godbole, I propose an alternative interface that could be implemented with current technology.

]]> Thu, 16 Jan 2025 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2025-01-16-llm-says-buttons.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2025-01-10-turing-machine.html I recently found a copy of a Turing Machine game under a Christmas tree. While not related to the actual Turing machine, it’s a cool game with some interesting mathematical properties. In this post, I describe and analyze the game.

]]> Fri, 10 Jan 2025 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2025-01-10-turing-machine.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2023-03-14-webrtc.html The internet typically relies on a client-server model, where a server hosts websites or applications, and users access them through their devices. However, this model may not be suitable for certain functions, such as file sharing or video calls. That’s where peer-to-peer communication comes in, enabling users to directly connect and communicate without a server. To make building peer-to-peer applications easier, developers created the WebRTC protocol.

]]> Tue, 14 Mar 2023 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2023-03-14-webrtc.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2022-12-04-creative-ai.html Humanity is making art since the dawn of time. With the improvement in technology, the entry barriers for starting a creative endeavor had been steadily lowering: what used to require lifetime training can now be achieved by hobbyists. Most recently, machine learning models have entered the scene, distilling the experience of generations of artists into a set of weights everyone can download and use.

]]> Sun, 04 Dec 2022 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2022-12-04-creative-ai.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2022-11-11-android-apps.html Mobile devices currently generate most of the traffic on the Internet, with Android being the most popular mobile operating system. I find it amazing that the whole ecosystem is open, and one can write applications for everyone with free tools. While I don’t write mobile apps professionally anymore, I still occasionally create small programs for personal use.

]]> Fri, 11 Nov 2022 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2022-11-11-android-apps.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2022-10-18-import-3d-characters.html In my point-and-click adventure game, I use 3D characters. They are easier to get online than 2D ones, and modifying them or adding animations is also easier. On the other hand, the whole process, from downloading the free assets to getting them into Godot is quite involved, so I decided to document it here.

]]> Tue, 18 Oct 2022 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2022-10-18-import-3d-characters.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2022-07-17-3d-landscapes.html Recently, I got into creating 3D environments in Blender. While it involves a lot of artistic elements, there are some rules and workflows that make the process easier. I watched dozens of youtube tutorials about the topic and wrote down the lessons I learned in this post. Warning: this is a long read.

]]> Sun, 17 Jul 2022 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2022-07-17-3d-landscapes.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2022-05-22-cloud-computing.html In recent years, cloud computing became very popular: it is both used on single pages with CVs and governments’ apps worth hundreds of millions. As I wanted to publish online a couple of smaller projects, I played with a number of cloud-based services to see how easy to use and costly are they for a hobby project.

]]> Sun, 22 May 2022 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2022-05-22-cloud-computing.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2022-04-18-geometry-nodes.html Blender recently introduced a new way of manipulating 3D meshes: geometry nodes. It combines a standard node-based UI (similar to the one used for constructing materials) with a script-like expressiveness to control each vertex arbitrarily. I learned the basics of geometry nodes and did a simple project using the new mechanism to try them out.

]]> Mon, 18 Apr 2022 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2022-04-18-geometry-nodes.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2022-03-23-bezier.html To improve my 3d modeling skills in Blender, I made models for a set of chess pieces. Given their rotational symmetry, I constructed them as traces that Bézier curves leave when they are rotated around an axis.

]]> Wed, 23 Mar 2022 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2022-03-23-bezier.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2022-03-13-customs.html Here goes a story of a package with private items that I sent before moving from Switzerland to Poland. One may be surprised that this mundane topic is granted a blogpost, but the story is filled with absurdities. As I am afraid they would not be understandable if I tried to express the drama in English, this post is exceptionally written in Polish.

]]> Sun, 13 Mar 2022 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2022-03-13-customs.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2021-12-01-pbr-materials.html 3D scenes consist of objects, each of which has a shape and a material. The shape is defined through a mesh: a collection of vertices, edges, and faces living in a 3D world. The material describes the color of the object and how it reflects and transmits light. In this post, I inspect a popular way of expressing the material: a principled BSDF to see how its numerous parameters influence the look of an object.

]]> Wed, 01 Dec 2021 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2021-12-01-pbr-materials.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2021-11-28-pbr-101.html After watching one of the Two minute papers videos: a short video summary of a research paper made by ‪Károly Zsolnai-Fehér‬, YouTube algorithm suggested I should watch the rendering course of the same author next. My physically-based rendering knowledge is very fragmented: I was immersed in the lingo without understanding it through friends who are doing PhDs in related areas, and I tried and failed to read PBRT. I watched Károly’s course to connect the dots and, hopefully, to understand Blender better.

]]> Sun, 28 Nov 2021 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2021-11-28-pbr-101.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2021-10-27-tts.html Adventure games, the genre I like, tend to contain a lot of talking. Apart from writing the character statements on the screen, bigger game studios hire voice actors to record them and play the recordings. It is a lengthy and costly process. I decided to see how far text-to-speech is from being able to substitute human actors for indie adventure games.

]]> Wed, 27 Oct 2021 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2021-10-27-tts.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2021-10-22-blender.html When I was doing the graphics for the T.I.M.E stories expansion, I tried out various workflows for creating the content. Looking for inspiration on how professionals make art faster, I encountered a GDC talk titled Concept Art is Dead. It claimed that no one is drawing things from scratch and everyone uses quick shortcuts like rendering a scene in Blender to get nice shadows or copying the texture from the internet instead. I tried it out to see how learning the basics of Blender may help me in creating 2D graphics.

]]> Fri, 22 Oct 2021 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2021-10-22-blender.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2021-09-29-graphic-workflow.html At the end of last year, I made a fan time stories scenario. Concretely, only the “story” part was finished then, with all the graphics missing. This year, together with Michalina, I was working on and off on adding the custom images to the game. Being relatively new to graphic design, I tried a couple of different styles and workflows for creating the content.

]]> Wed, 29 Sep 2021 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2021-09-29-graphic-workflow.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2021-09-06-alma-survey.html I did a Masters in Computer Science at MIM UW in Warsaw, Poland. Many of my fellow alumni have successful careers, both in Poland and abroad. I wanted to know whether this was a statistical phenomenon or just a bias based on the group of my friends. To do so, I ran a survey among MIM graduates to know their fates better.

]]> Mon, 06 Sep 2021 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2021-09-06-alma-survey.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2021-07-06-tax-residency.html Tax rules, which describe what portion of one’s profit needs to pay to the government, are famously complex. If they involve multiple countries, they are even more confusing. Having moved to a different country for the 2020 pandemic, I studied the regulations in detail and decided to write down my observations for the future.

]]> Tue, 06 Jul 2021 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2021-07-06-tax-residency.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2021-06-20-board-game-inserts.html Board games are often sold in boxes that are bigger than necessary to fit the game elements. It makes sense from a marketing perspective: oversized shiny covers are better at grabbing the attention of buyers in a shop. Once bought, the big boxes are a pain: they are problematic when moving homes and take more shelf-size than needed. For this reason, at the end of 2018, we tried to design new, smaller boxes for board games with my girlfriend.

]]> Sun, 20 Jun 2021 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2021-06-20-board-game-inserts.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2021-05-09-digital-painting-exercises.html I think I am learning the quickest when doing a sequence of well-defined challenges of appropriate difficulty. As I didn’t find a course of digital drawing I’d like to follow, I was compiling separate exercises from various sources. They helped me to make small steps of progress in improving my digital painting skills.

]]> Sun, 09 May 2021 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2021-05-09-digital-painting-exercises.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2021-04-05-choosing-game-engine.html The idea of telling stories interactively through video games is appealing to me. Some time ago, I started writing a scenario for a first, test game. In this post, I write down my experience of choosing a game engine.

]]> Mon, 05 Apr 2021 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2021-04-05-choosing-game-engine.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2021-01-30-digital-painting.html Having drawn a lot of black-and-white ink sketches, I have now moved to draw digitally. Last summer, I got an iPad Pro, and I’m learning the basics of digital painting now. It has unlocked a myriad (literally) of colors and new techniques to acquire, so I felt like wandering in the fog again.

]]> Sat, 30 Jan 2021 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2021-01-30-digital-painting.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2020-12-07-auschwitz.html Ever since I got T.I.M.E stories for Christmas a couple of years ago, I was planning to make a fan scenario. I have finally found some time to develop the expansion recently.

]]> Mon, 07 Dec 2020 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2020-12-07-auschwitz.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2020-10-10-proko.html After finishing Drawabox, I tried to learn drawing the human figure with the Proko courses. I went through the free videos of the Figure and Head drawing courses and did a lot of exercises.

]]> Sat, 10 Oct 2020 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2020-10-10-proko.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2020-07-11-drawabox.html In May 2019, I decided to learn how to draw. To structure my learning, I was following a free online drawing course: Drawabox. 14 months later, I finished it and I am writing down my experience.

]]> Sat, 11 Jul 2020 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2020-07-11-drawabox.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2020-06-19-time-stories.html T.I.M.E stories is a cooperative board game where the players take the role of agents, who remotely control the avatars which are put in some turbulent moment of history to prevent spacetime disintegration due to events not going according to the historical record. Together with my girlfriend: Michalina Pacholska we decided to make a digital version of it.

]]> Fri, 19 Jun 2020 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2020-06-19-time-stories.html Jakub Sygnowski https://sygi.xyz/posts/2016-03-24-init.html In this post I am just testing various features of the blog. There is nothing interesting here.

]]> Thu, 24 Mar 2016 00:00:00 UT https://sygi.xyz/posts/2016-03-24-init.html Jakub Sygnowski