About Time, and Time Again

I started this a week before my first surgery experience, now it’s more than four weeks gone from there. It’s also almost 8 months on from the last post. Too much has happened to have granularity on all the events, except to say I’ve accepted my AI overlords… are not well represented by the current utilities preceding them.

Actually, OpenAI’s child processes and some competing models have provided an excellent reference and suggested code tool across all the languages and shells I work with. Even with the checking and verifying I have to do, I’ve gotten much further with them than in the ages of being cast down upon in the various source and app stack overflow or reddit, so I return to searching Google and YouTube for the wrong solutions. Image generation, modification, or movie and asset creation are much less focused on as yet for me.

So my site is still doing experimental things I’ve dreamt into being, and is, conceptually, probably running far too fast when it should be jogging at a good clip with everything working how my easily distracted mind had conceived years ago.

So, ChatGPT helped me leapfrog my limitations. Let’s see:

• Helping with fast-tracking the new “Hogwarts Legacy” map, it’s not as clean as I’d expect, but I also have so many minutiae I wanted to point at, and I’m so “late to the market” with it, it does nearly all I wanted and does so from add-ons for it and the objects and tools to manage the items in the world, though they’re manually added. If only I could figure out succinctly and be able to sniff items from the game to help publish them accurately and completely from the game’s Unreal codebase, that would be a dream. Additionally, I manually built and populated all the submaps for dungeons, except for the un-submapped trial regions. An extension to auto-build a thumb map was planned, confused the GPT sessions I worked on the code with, and tabled until I can focus on it again.
• The desire to track items in the game as they are collected, as well as the experience gained, formed the HL Tracker with the GPT’s aid. I should refactor it as an add-on, and all the tracker pages I have published could be updated to persist locally for everyone. Also, I thank a deleted response session on Reddit and the one named “Grausam” who corrected my error in experience log accounting, helping me make it more correct than before.
• One of the easy checks for finding if you collected all the Revelio pages in the game is the Revelio Collection page in your guide, which is always sorted in the same order. Anything missing in the collection will be missing from its position in the tiles. I used GPT’s help to set up the interactivity and formatting of the page, which used to be just images of the Revelio pages, into an interactive, descriptive, map-linked tool.
• After making several of these leaps, I took time out to work with my home network system management and toys. Management involved setting up several secure systems to monitor and manage the whole thing, as well as individual live systems, remotely. Toys involved a few things. One was a few translations of data from the defunct wiki I made that became a dead-stick site because I couldn’t update and forward the database myself. I ported some data out into my WordPress, though it’s still not ready for prime time. The other main toy was a pair of MUDs, yes… text-based Multi-User-Dungeons. Not open ones, but test ones based on newer codebases running under a couple of concepts less than a decade old. It was time-intensive, but it hearkened back to working with some guys back in college on their public MUDs and my own private experiences learning and testing these multi-session games.
• When getting back to working on the site, with so much traffic attention on the checklists for Revelio pages in Hogwarts, Hogsmeade, and the Highlands, I developed some custom block devices to decorate and format the pages, and finally updated the map images to the completed map. Though the GPT helped with a few settings, styles, and tests, it was much more peripheral in this part. Most of my comments are people trying to sell gambling sites. Without any likes or actual comments, the site traffic shows people visit those pages more than the map, the Revelio key, the tracker, or any other page or article I’ve published, so I hope it’s useful.

Now there are so many more special projects I’m focusing on. As I heal and exercise, I’m working through a deluge of my Lego projects. I’ve been disassembling GBCs I assembled years ago and never got back to optimizing or validating just how bad some off-brand bricks I purchased were in a couple of test cases, while also buying plans from various sites, including Rebrickable and Akiyuki’s site. I’m staging dozens of sets I haven’t built from Ideas, Technic, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and other themes in storage bins rather than their original boxes. Also, dozens of maker projects, materials, and specialized tools need storage love with a mind to keep things handy. Then there’s improving my homespace, my workstation (moving away from its thrice-damned Runescape configuration, may Jagex’s banality of evil bureaucracy burn for their stupid heartless obliteration of my enjoyment and connection with friends therein and destruction of an account I only wanted to secure), my hardware space in the garage, and more.

And as I finish this with news of famine and death, wars and rumors of war, liars, cheaters, and thieves in ascendance, and aliens, perhaps none of this matters in the long run, for the SMOD, the Solar Armageddon, the aforementioned AI Overlords, or simple random chance will make all of this moot.

I’m going to keep trying to do better, be better, to improve things, to keep looking beyond to a possible better future that’s worth fighting for.

Thanks for reading if you’ve made it this far, and have a better one!