Category: Technology

On finally finding a use for generative AI

Forgive me father, for I have slopped.

I have very dim thoughts of generative AI for things like art and other creative elements. It’s why I was smiling when Sora shut down. It’s still coming for coders, but so far I’ve been okay.

A consequence of AI I’ve noticed is that people are beginning to ask questions to AI to get answers, and then prompting me to say “this is what ChatGPT thinks, why do you disagree?”. Obviously, when I suggest things that ChatGPT don’t consider – like budget.

AI can be wrong, and despite this, I’ve had a few times where people have insisted that AI is right, and I’m wrong.

For those who say that who are based in the UK, I’ve started to reply by sending an infographic I generated after a couple of Guinness Zeros. This was my prompt:-

Create an infographic for all the words used in the UK for a dinner roll, sorted by location. 16 locales based on geographic area.

This was what was generated.

Obviously, when sent to them, if they know how contentious dinner roll naming is in the UK, they accept that AI can be hallucinogenic.

Feel free to use and copy and send to people.

As an aside, I’ve seen more and more of these on Facebook in particular. A list of WWE champions that have images of Harry Kane for Kane, or the worst one: a “Darts Heroes of England” that had a picture of West Indian cricketer Clive Lloyd instead of Colin Lloyd.

Of course, I’m going to enjoy people saying “I can’t prompt”. To which I say, you go to Derbyshire and ask for a Chip Becky, and see what you get back….

Syrric – The YouTube Channel I didn’t know I need

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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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk7Nx0xpmj8

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!

Update 23rd March 2026: Welp! That didn’t last long. Seems like the channel was deleted. Checking the comment on the German channel, it appears as though the French (and therefore, probably the English) channel were flagged as spam. I don’t know the exact reason, but it kinda sucks as other YouTubers I follow have had run ins with the YouTube nodding donkey that seems to arbitrarily kill things off for being too much fun. Should stick to those AI videos generated from Reddit threads over the top of Minecraft footage, lads.

Update 27th March 2026: Seems like it is back!

On the “This Week in WordPress” (Episode 365)

This week I was on the WP Builds “This Week in WordPress” podcast episode 365. The main focus on my discussion was this blog post by Elliot Richmond which I love about where he publishes his content. It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot of, on where I publish my work.

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 Marc Benzakein too!

Listen to the Episode

Watch the Episode

Ross on personal apps

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Ross Wintle snuck out a great post late on Sunday – “Trust me: You don’t want to make little personal apps… especially not like that!“, and I had a quiet weekend with a couple of code projects that made Ross’ post resonate with me!

Problem solving in code

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.