The last couple of nights I’ve fallen asleep to the Syrric YouTube Channel. It is a group of dudes who read out fun facts about video games. The thing that differentiates it from a bunch of other channels? It’s not designed to be watched – but rather listened too as you fall asleep.
Last night I had a hectic day and wasn’t in until about 9pm. I try to fall asleep between 10 and 11pm, so when I went to bed I was still rather awake.
10 minutes of hearing a calming voice talk about the history of Super Mario Brothers? Zonked out.
Also, quite nicely, as their output has been so regular the inevitable questions about it being AI generated came out – which they were quick to answer in this video.
In short, I’ve really enjoyed this channel, and recommend checking it out. Hope it continues for ages as they’ve been burning through franchises like nobody’s business!
Also, through it I discovered the Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer plugin, which pushes your blog posts to the Internet Archive (something I’ve installed on the site now – so it’d be interesting to see how it works). Very cool. And there’s probably dead links all over this blog. Will report back.
As always, it was good to speak with Nathan and Michelle, and good to meet MarcBenzakein too!
LLM’s I find are terrible at problem solving. They’re good at interpreting what people want to do, but it doesn’t really think about the box. I have an example I’ll probably talk on next week’s Now page, but will share it here.
I had a problem with some code in my game, in that I couldn’t get a hitbox (the yellow circle) to sit within the sprite. The problem was the rotation script I use pivots the sprite around the bottom right hand corner of the sprite, so whilst the hitbox remains in the correct place, the hitbox does not.
The LLM was rewriting my code, and getting nowhere fast. It was trying to change the pivot point but going nowhere. Confidently wrong as it hit the brick wall.
The solution? Don’t have a hitbox. Determine that a bullet is outside of the white circle, and if the colour of the pixel at the bullet’s x & y co-ordinate is not black, then determine a hit. This was applied and fixed.
Programming requires a different approach that is often found by taking a walk and thinking about the problem in a different way. There was a famous case with Wing Commander where a bug in some versions was a memory error that existed on the game exiting that caused a crash. The solution? Change the error message to “Thank you for playing Wing Commander!”. Problem solved.
I feel these sort of bugs at the moment can only really be fixed with experience.
Ongoing Support
The second thing Ross mentioned was ongoing support. This is true – I’ve noticed this with Revive to Sky. I pushed an update that ticked the plugin over to 10+ Active installations in WordPress this week. That has meant I get a few more support requests over the weekend. When these occur, it can take a bit of debugging. I curiously asked an LLM for a solution for one of these, surprise surprise they were wrong.
Of course, this can lead to a period of of debugging and a back and forth. That does take skill. You can use LLMs for this – asking what an error means. But often a search on the internet throws up a solution quicker and easier. That’s a skill.
Anyway, I just wanted to highlight Ross’ post and add my 2 cents. Make a brew (it’s Brew Monday!) and go and read it.
Is My Blue Your Blue is a website I found through Cloudhiker and one thing I’ve learned about me recently (along with the fact I’m cross dominant), has been I perceive greens a lot more than blues.
Not sure what to make of it, but it was nice to learn.
I saw a post by Ben Daubney that brought back suppressed memories – a screensaver called MOPy, that was controversial due to it’s way you would feed and nurture your virtual pet.
As Ben stated on his post:-
To make your MOPy goldfish happy, you had to buy accessories and food using points generated by making Multiple Original Prints on your (ideally HP) printer. For a while, every kid was spending every lunchtime printing out a single character on a sheet of A4 over and over again just to get enough points to give their virtual fish some virtual bubbles, and hundreds if not thousands of pages were tossed into the bin.
13 year old me didn’t have a printer, so I seemed to remember if the fish went without food, water or their environment enriched by printing out waste of paper, the fish would die. It was incredibly distressing seeing a fish on the surface of the screensaver.
Anyway, there’s a gallows humour joke to be made how a virtual fish ate resources, so ChatGPT could boil the oceans. I’ve not had enough coffee to make it, however.
