Blog 

I am expressing renewed interest in this site, having not posted here in a while, I feel a desire to go back to blogging and re-own my own content.

I haven't had anything of interest to write about for a while now, but I've started to accumulate a healthy collection of nonsensical topics to write about in the future, but good quality writing takes time, as I have learnt from my experience.

I felt like I've spent the majority of 2023 complaining, but we are on the cuffs of an AI revolution, the likes of which will ensure that a drudgery of constant shit posting, and engagement bate will be ever present on my social media news feeds, don't get me wrong, AI can do good for the world, but when there are large sums of money to be made what is the value of ethics?

When there is saturation, the value of a piece of writing goes down. - Spend your time wisely and be sure to read something meaningful, not AI generated click-bait crap.

For AI image generators, the value in a piece of art is tied to the amount of man hours used to create it, an image generated by AI I see no value in. - there's no story behind it, it's a commodity. - yes, it liberates the art field for "those who can't paint", or don't want to spend the time learning.

All that is to say, I'm not going to be making use of AI tools, at least for the foreseeable future, I just don't see any value in what it creates.

Maybe there is value in an AI game master, or bots to keep old online multiplayer games alive, but that's about all I see it good for at the moment, things like fractal tree generation I can still see being done through and algorithm, (not the same thing), perhaps AI can help with NPC dialogue in games, to help with immersion, but at what point does the player go off the beaten track? I think for NPC character generation, again, an algorithm would be the way to go.

In summary, AI isn't bad, but there are people out there who are willing to disregard ethics in favour of profit driven motivations, and I think time will demonstrate a large company or organization being called out for unethical practices resulting from its none disclosed use, just you wait.

Another part of the argument is that it's a fad word, something I've started to notice in the last couple of years, we've had fad words like blockchain, crypto, metaverse etc, and I think it all started in the early days of cloud computing, the word AI has unfortunately become a victim of this trend.

Keeping on topic, for images used in my blog, I am planning to make use of 2x stock digital cameras, one over 10 years old, and another over 20 years old. - main reason, for the most part, I take pictures on my smart phone, at the moment a Samsung Galaxy s21, and the image size it produces are rather large and require extra processing to be sizable enough for posting, I also don't like the recent revelation that their cameras use artificial processing to add details that's not there, like the moon.

The old digital cameras also create a sense of nostalgia, and genuine authenticity. - I do have a DLSR camera, and I will also be making use of that should the article require high resolution photos. - I *may* still have to use my smart phone if it's all I have\had on hand.

The "Housekeeping" part of this post

Over the last couple of weeks, I've gone through and reviewed previous posts made over the years, I have gone through legacy links that no longer work and redirected them to archive.org, providing context to the reader, links that use HTTP will now be changed to use HTTPS by default.

I have done my best to clean up some of the swearing, but I do feel that it has added to my characters development overtime, moving forward I'll try and use less profanity, unless deemed absolutely necessary.

I have also updated some of the formatting and removed HTML elements that are deprecated, I recently resurrected this website's old theme for my GitHub user page: https://deviousmalcontent.github.io/

While I still like my Devious Malcontent branding, I feel it's time to move on, this is what made me nostalgic for my old theme.

You may have noticed over the years that the Internet is slowly gradually getting worse and worse, and it's becoming harder to find things. - the reason why I built out my GitHub user page, to provide a simple straight to the point reference for most of the materials that I have learned over the years and some if not most of my notes taken over university. - sites like this now that just get straight to the point are becoming a rare breed, for the most part it feels like you'll get immediately slapped with a cookies notification or asked to provide an email address when accessing even the surface level of information, as a result of this I noticed I don't tend to read the news or even read articles online anymore. - yes, reader mode is helpful but shouldn't be absolutely necessary in order to navigate a sites content, and I have encountered active hostilities with some sites trying to block access to this feature.

Moving forward, I want to embrace more video formatted content, I had good success with my tile map editor project video released back in April of this year, the downside to this is that there is a fair amount more work that goes into producing these videos, so the outcome of this maybe to expect higher quality content at a lower rate. - I also feel there's a need to do a write up, although I didn't do this with my previous video, I want to do it with other videos moving forward.

As I've conducted my review I've also gone ahead and added editor notes to some of my previous posts, one post that stood out to me in particular was post number 32, it's funny looking back on as I had not yet made the connection between HTTP sockets and Asynchronous JavaScript, but I like to look at it as all part of the journey, it's OK to not know things, for reference my answer is the following, an is based on my experience: Selenium, PhantomJS, AbotX, it may also be possible to hack Postman, or use invoke web request in PowerShell in a recursive loop.

I want to rehash some of my favourite posts on here and share them with a broader audience, that's why I've created a medium.com account.

I know this was a little bit nonsensical, but I guess you would call it a combined update.

Anyway, thanks for reading.