39ed293f4f
Three things, and the first one was a bug. Your own hand didn't move until the lap ended. bump() keeps the bots' fans honest and has always refused seat zero, and nothing else touched yours — so a +4 landing on you at the top of a lap put four backs into your hand and then nothing, and the cards themselves turned up seconds later when the script finished and paint() finally ran. You spent the whole lap looking at a hand you no longer held. The engine now stamps your hand onto every event that changes it (Event.Hand, seat zero only, which is the one hand the browser is already entitled to see) and the table redraws as the cards land. Measured in the running app: 2 -> 3 cards at 414ms into a 1791ms lap. You couldn't call UNO, and not because the button was missing: going down to one card *was* the call. discard() fired the uno event by itself, which made it a thing that happened to you rather than a thing you did, and a rule nobody can fail is not a rule. So now you say it or you don't (Move.Uno), and if you don't, every bot still in the game gets one look at you before any of them plays — because a bot that has moved on is a bot that has stopped watching your hand. It runs the other way too, and that half is the fun one: a bot forgets often enough to be worth watching for, and when it does it says *nothing*. No event, no badge, no tell on the felt except the count beside its fan reading "1 card". Catch it and it takes two; call a seat that had nothing to hide and you take two yourself, which is what stops the catch button from being a thing you simply mash. Which cards owe the call is the engine's answer, not a count of your hand: No Mercy's "discard all" takes every card of its colour with it, so a six-card hand can land on one, and a browser subtracting one from six walks you into a catch it never warned you about. And the room was silent. Every sound in here is *made* — an oscillator, a burst of filtered noise, an envelope — the same bargain the weather engine takes with its clouds. A card is a slap of noise through a bandpass, a chip is two detuned sines with a knock on the front, a win is four notes going up. No asset files, no round trips, and a sound can be pitched and detuned per call instead of being the same wav three hundred times. Hooked into the FX layer rather than into the games, so every table that throws a chip or turns a card got it at once. The multiples moved, and the test that exists to catch that caught it. The naive strategy now calls UNO, because calling is a button and not a strategy — what these tiers price is bad card play, not a player who ignores the felt shouting at them — and on that footing the normal tables come back to where they were (40.1 / 28.5 / 23.1). No Mercy Full House did not: it was paying a *negative* house edge, which is the house paying you to sit down. Re-priced 3.8 -> 3.5. Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_013M5nD7PgUboJXoDcYHzpuJ
Pete
A Matrix news bot that ingests RSS feeds from curated sources and routes each story to a configured channel.
Features
- RSS ingestion from configurable sources (Guardian, Ars Technica, Time Extension, …) with per-source polling intervals
- Direct routing — every source declares a
direct_routechannel; Pete posts there. No LLM, no classification step - Deduplication — GUID exact match, canonical-URL match, normalized-headline match, and per-channel canonical-URL cooldown
- Metered release — per-channel post queues with minimum interval (5min) and burst cap (3/30min)
- Round-robin mode — opt-in pacing: one story per N hours (default 4), cycling through channels in sorted order, skip-and-advance over empty channels, state persists across restarts
- Reaction tracking — records emoji reactions on posts
!poston demand — type!postin any configured channel room and Pete force-publishes the next queued story for that channel, bypassing min-interval, burst cap, and daily cap (canonical-URL dedup still applies); replies in-thread if the queue is empty- Paywall detection — if an article's visible body text is below threshold, Pete swaps in a Wayback Machine snapshot URL for both the lead image and the posted link
- FTS5 search — full-text search across headlines and ledes
- Image validation — HEAD-based checks filter tracking pixels, uploads valid images via MXC
- Video thumbnails — extracts a frame via
ffmpegfor video sources; also falls back toffmpegwhen Go's stdlib JPEG decoder rejects a source image - Seasonal weather — canvas-based ambient overlay (snow, leaves, rain, etc.) driven by a Portugal/Lisbon calendar; visitors can toggle it with the ⭐ star button in the nav
- Web UI — read-only browser interface (Tailwind, Animal-Crossing-ish vibe, day/night palette that follows the visitor's clock) at
/plus a section per channel. Designed for anews.parodia.dev-style deployment
Channels
| Channel | Purpose |
|---|---|
gaming |
Gaming news, releases, platform announcements |
tech |
Technology news, product/industry stories |
politics |
Political, policy, current events |
eu |
Portugal and the wider European beat (web-only — does not post to Matrix) |
music |
Records, scenes, artists |
anime |
Series, studios, manga |
foss |
Kernel, distros, free/open source |
kids |
World news written for younger readers (web-only) |
Requirements
- Go 1.25+
- A Matrix account for Pete with access to target rooms
- SQLite (bundled via pure Go driver, no CGo)
ffmpegonPATH— used for video-frame thumbnails and as a fallback decoder for JPEGs the Go stdlib rejects- No CGo dependencies — E2EE uses pure Go crypto (goolm) via mautrix v0.28
Setup
# Clone and build
git clone <repo-url> && cd pete
go build -tags goolm .
# Create config from example
cp config.example.toml config.toml
# Edit config.toml — fill in Matrix credentials, room IDs, and a direct_route for every source
# First run: seed current feed items as seen (prevents flood)
./pete -config config.toml -seed
# Post one story to verify the pipeline
./pete -config config.toml -test
# Run
./pete -config config.toml
Configuration
See config.example.toml for the full structure. Key sections:
matrix— homeserver, credentials, channel room IDs, optional admin roomposting— rate limiting (min interval, burst cap, daily cap), optionalround_robinblockstorage— database path, retention windowssources— RSS feeds with tier, polling interval, and requireddirect_route(must match a key inmatrix.channels). Optionallanguage = "en"drops items whose per-item<language>tag doesn't prefix-match — handy for multilingual feeds like Politico Europeweb— read-only HTTP UI (enabled toggle, listen address, site title, public base URL)
Environment variables can be referenced with ${VAR} syntax in the TOML.
Web UI
Set web.enabled: true (default port :8080) to expose Pete's classified-story archive over HTTP. A landing page at / plus one section per channel (/gaming, /tech, /politics, /eu, /music, /anime, /foss, /kids), all pulling from the stories table. A /weather page demos the seasonal canvas overlay in isolation. Adding a section is two lines in internal/web/server.go (the channels slice) plus a matching theme color in internal/web/static/css/input.css.
The frontend uses a small Tailwind build:
npm install
npm run build:css # produces internal/web/static/css/output.css
# or for live editing:
npm run watch:css
The Docker image runs the build automatically as a first stage, so deployments don't need Node.
Front the server with a reverse proxy (Caddy, nginx, Traefik) terminating TLS for e.g. news.parodia.dev → 127.0.0.1:8080. The day/night palette is driven by the visitor's browser clock — no server-side timezone needed.
Round-robin mode
Set posting.round_robin.enabled: true to switch Pete from "post immediately" to a paced rotation. On each tick (interval_hours, default 4) Pete picks the newest unposted story routed to the next channel in sorted order, posting through the existing queue. Empty channels are skipped; the rotation pointer advances to whichever channel actually posted, and last_channel / last_tick_at are persisted so restarts don't reset the cycle. Rotating by channel (not by source) guarantees variety even when one channel has many more feeds than the others.
With a 4-hour cadence Pete will post at most 6 stories/day, so set posting.daily_cap_total to 0 (or ≥6) when enabling this — otherwise the daily cap can silently swallow a tick.
Flags
| Flag | Description |
|---|---|
-config <path> |
Path to config file (default: config.toml) |
-seed |
Ingest all current feed items as seen without posting, then exit |
-test |
Post one story to verify the full pipeline, then exit |
-local |
Web/RSS-only mode: poll feeds and serve the web UI on web.listen_addr. Skips Matrix login and posting — useful for local testing |
Docker
docker compose up -d
Set PETE_PASSWORD in your environment or a .env file for the Matrix password.
Architecture
RSS Feed → Poller → GUID/Canonical/Headline Dedup → Article Fetch → Store → Route by direct_route → Image Validate → Queue → Matrix
↓
Paywall? → Wayback snapshot
Packages
| Package | Purpose |
|---|---|
internal/config |
TOML config loading with ${ENV} expansion |
internal/storage |
SQLite with WAL, FTS5, all queries |
internal/ingestion |
Per-source RSS polling, feed parsing, image validation, paywall detection |
internal/dedup |
Canonical URL + headline normalization helpers |
internal/matrix |
Password auth with device persistence, posting, threaded replies, reaction + message listener |
internal/poster |
Per-channel metered release queue, reaction tracking |
internal/scheduler |
Round-robin posting scheduler: paced rotation across channels when enabled |
internal/web |
Read-only HTTP UI: Tailwind templates, day/night palette, per-channel feed pages |
Post Format
[lead image if valid]
**Headline** → article_url
Lede text from feed
`source name`
Testing
go test ./...