Personal chit chat #233
Replies: 4 comments 10 replies
-
|
Thanks for caring, I wouldn't be a developer if I wasn't extremely curious myself 😄
These weren't deliberate decisions, it just happened because I'm fascinated by the technology and hate restrictions! There will always be stupid people abusing inventions for unethical or immoral things but restricting usage for the hopefully sane majority is just wrong and hinders progress/creativity, IMHO.
You can't close pandora's box again. I also don't like the idea of big companies using data mining etc. to gain profit and mass influence big parts of humanity. Instead of boycotting however I like to see behind the curtains and try to break free.
Back to my repos, a year ago I coded a image viewer, organizer, restoration tool in C# for myself, where I also incorporated some AI stuff like face similarity and image colorization. I quickly got to realize the limitations for machine learning in C# and decided to learn python by improving on another project (since I only need to learn the languages specifics). This was Bark, which did very cool stuff but lacked the UI to make it interesting for the casual user like me. After that I stumbled upon roop, where I was wondering why it doesn't supports selecting specific faces when the data is present and finally gpt4free. Again because there wasn't a handy UI. You're concerns about gpt4free are valid of course but I'm really more interested in other lesser known models like Llama, Falcon and Bard. I'm pretty sure there will be lots more over time (Google Gemini soon?) so this is a cool way to switch between them in seconds. You see, I'm curious like you and get hooked fairly easy. I then can't stop working on it until I'm satisfied. This point is reached with Bark & roop and I will take it easier from now on. I still want to replace CLIP2Seg with FastSAM though and of course will add other improvements over time. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Awesome :D. Yeah that's the group, not mine, I just was in it for a little while, Iron Cat was the main guy. He did some awesome music too for both C64 / Amiga. Maybe Intro no 4 I did the logo, but who knows... it's been so long. I see a JSH, and my nickname at one point was Joshua, so that tracks :D. (update: Iron Cat confirmed, so at least this logo I made in that list / Intro 4) I'm pretty sure Iron Cat/Wolfen (we're still very good friends) released way more cracks than this list but it's so cool that there are so many on that site, I'll share it with him, if he doesn't know the existence of this page, he'll get a kick out of it. I remember being kicked out of the group cause I told Iron Cat to let me talk on the phone (wired) with Skywolf who had called him at home from somewhere in Scandinavia. Skywolf made most of the logos back then, and he got mad (Iron Cat) cause I told him to shut up since I couldn't hear the guy on the phone, and since it was his place, he told me to leave :D and that was it for a while... we fought for stupid things back then, mind you in 1990 I was 15. We rekindled the friendship years later. So yeah it was around 1989-90 that I did that "game", Iron Cat made the music for it, using the French version of the intro song as template. And since I was quite good with a pencil back then, I had made custom sleeves for the few copies that were made. Oh yes, vectorballs were all the rage back then. Thank you for the trip down memory lane :D. Do you remember that awesome demo that released on PC a few years after... I was friends with a member of that group too (or had connections with them), it had a guy's face on the cover of the CD (which I still own somewhere, I wonder if it's worth anything lol), I can't for the life of me remember the name atm, but this one was EPIC. The music was awesome, especially if you owned a Gravis Ultrasound card (which I did). I found it one day on day on youtube. And I found it again within 30 seconds. Second Reality by Future Crew... boy this one really kicked my butt when I saw it for the first time. The melody at the 1:58 mark I never forgot, it's burn into my synapses forever :D And yes Alcatraz was an awesome group. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
What are you talking about... demo shame??? No freaking way: TSB ruled! I remember your intros/demos were some of the best, Wolfen, as much fun as it was to be part of that C64 history, were pretty basic. Though Iron Cat made some sweet tunes in many of them. I even remember Iron Cat praising TSB intros and telling me to look at them for inspiration. We actually worked together for a while on that Retaliate project of mine, and another game project we wanted to create... not long ago he told me I still have 2-3 tunes I made for that game idea of yours that we did absolutely nothing about. Well, I'm rebooting one of my books soon, and I'll probably use the name of the game for the book, since it's current name didn't seem to be to anyone's liking (my only book "series" (hard to call one book a series lol) that didn't make money in fact) My friend had an Amiga, I made that C64 last forever, until I played Wing Commander on my brother (RIP) PC XT with an EGA screen... I fell in love with that game, in fact the first scene in my first book is a hat tip to Wing Commander. To this day this and Eye of the Beholder were my fav games of the time (which is why I LOVED The Legend of Grimrock games when it got release about a decade ago, I wish they continued making them). So one day my bro bought a 386SX16, and dropped his old PC (8086 XT) on my desk in my room, and said, have fun. I knew nothing about PC, he didn't show me how to make it work, but I learned fast :D. But finishing WC on it was a struggle, I think I must have been under 5 fps in some parts :D. I became the defacto helpdesk for the entire block, when config.sys and autoexec.bat (right?) tweaking was required. Boy that brings me back. Wing Commander 2 motivated me to work a summer job, so I could buy a proper PC, a 486 33 or 25mhz, I remember upgrading to a DX2 66Mhz at one point. Then my first proper job was to assemble PCs in a store, and I spent all my cash building 4 machines to play Doom parties in my room, boy my dad (RIP also, they both left in 2022) HATED it when I brought 3 friends home to play. And then that friend who know Future Crew, brought me to LAN parties at one of his friends, he became the CEO of Infomaniak (Boris), they're now a major Hosting company with really great products. But I've known them since their humble beginnings, as a single local PC store in Geneva (not the one I worked at). 7-8 years ago (maybe) Boris invited me to their opening party for their new datacenter, an awesome evening, during which I loved reconnecting with many old buddies I had lost touch with. But the one thing I remember above all, was the food, they pulled all the stops, probably hiring some of the best caterers in the region. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
(I started answering this some days ago with a huge wall of text but closed the tab by mistake while googling for other stuff, grmpf) Man, I seem to trigger your nostalgia a lot 😄 The first Demos/Intros are also the reason I started coding as a teen. I always liked the raw, weird sounds of the C64 soundchip and saw some demos where they ripped the music out of the games. That way you didn't need to boot a huge game to just listen to a tune. So I started to extract music myself and over time learned to create interrupt functions etc. of course this was 6510 assembler back then. stay tuned for part 2 👀 |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Yeah I hate when that happens, when you write a ton of text and lose it by accident. Microshit Word once made me lose 2 chapters of the last book in one of my series, I've never EVER used that POS for drafts ever again after that (using Scrivener now, never lost a single word). It had been a marathon session of over 18h of writing too, it was 7-8am, I was wiped... but I didn't go to sleep until I rewrote the 2 chapters while they were in my head. If I hadn't taken the good habit of incrementing the file version every 1-2 chapters, it would have killed my ENTIRE Book... I probably would have destroyed the computer if that had happened lol, or fall into depression for a year, I dunno. But in this case I soldiered on, rewrote the last two chapters, and then slept all day. I'm still forced to use Word though... for the back and forth with copyeditors and proofreaders. And it runs SO BADLY and slow on MacOS, even with an M1 Max chip. it's not even funny. Any action has like a 1-2 second delay. So I tend to switch to Winblows to edit. I have no memory of that particular Amiga demo, it feels like an indie movie, especially in the beginning. I'm gonna assume that the raytraced toilet is a video? Or is it really calculated in real-time? I could see it be the inspiration for Second Reality though. I know Amiga could do raytracing, but I wonder about realtime. I know Babylon 5 SFX were made with Amiga computers after all, but rendered one, obviously. Since it's a demo though, maybe it was real time, and not just a bunch of the rendered images like a gif. There are some great musical moments in that Amiga demo and some not so great too... he he. Some parts make ears complain, but others really hit home! Iron cat did some really cool tunes back then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz_ps4wkjR8 He obviously was the musician for that game that never saw the light of day. I'm attaching the "official" poster/box artwork from 2002. I was still pretty much a newbie Photoshop-wise compared to today.
I may have leveled-up a bit since then (then again this is mostly renders, the previous one, the characters are made by hand):
Retaliate would probably also have flopped cause it was 2D, however... the coder was a Genius... he managed to do things I didn't think were possible. Before it became standard on games, his fog of war was a progressive alpha mask, not big black squares or round around the unit. Then he added weather elements, rain, snow, and the best trick was shadows of clouds on the terrain, that was the first time I saw something so cool in a RTS. Mind you he is a bit autistic (probably Asperger seing how smart he is), and all I needed to do to trigger an idea in him was to brainstorm with him. I had some assembly basics from school, so I was just throwing ideas at him (like what if you used a shift function, or reduce the mathematical formula to an estimation... I didn't know enough to be of help, but it would always spark an idea in him) when he was telling me "this is impossible". Then the next day he had made the impossible possible :D. He wrote a well-known app on Android, can't remember the name atm but allows you to backup all your data beyond what Google saves (needed rooting though). Titanium backup or something, maybe you heard of it. I'll be waiting for part 2 when you have the time ;). PS: Not sure if it's okay to post images, if not, feel free to remove them. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
I wonder if it shows that I love DBZ... no need to answer, that was rhetorical lol |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Wow, thx for that reply. I absolutely get it and I think we have a similar mindset on lots of things. But yeah, back to your repos 😄 |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Absolutely agree, those are my thoughts as well and I can't fully grasp why it is that way. In my opinion covid-19 could have been seen as a chance for humanity, to realize we're all on the same planet and we are all alike and need to work together to better things. Instead people globally either got stressed out, panicked, got confused and some still are hiding in their shells, much too paranoid to trust anyone, not even themselves! Despite the wokeness (or because of that) I have a feeling that people are a lot more conservative again, trying to go back to their roots because they somehow lost their ideals and life goals and need to believe in something. I just don't get it...same with the internet. I'm an old grumpy man, probably older than most of you and I'm from the last generation which grew up without "home computers" as a kid. Back when I started programming in the 80s, you had to either buy very expensive books to teach you things or you would have to find out yourself. This changed radically with the internet and even more now with the help of chatgpt and relatives. You can't turn back the clock and I surely wouldn't want it but I somewhat pity the youth of today, because if you don't need to work hard for something, I doubt it will have much value for you. Mostly everything you imagine was already done by someone and is just a few clicks or chatgpt prompts away. In my opinion this can't be good for mental health. There was this trash movie Idiocracy back then, not a good movie mind, but over time this is becoming very real and could be almost a documentary by now 😮
I'm no expert, are those the ones some chinese company invented some weeks ago? Yes, this could be great advancement but I'm suspecting politics will get in the way. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
Yes I think that's a big part of the problem. Takes away a lot of creativity too for most people. And Idiocracy is really almost a documentary now 😆 But honestly, I wouldn't know how to solve this issue either. Maybe that's the reason why a lot of people are going back to conservative values, because they have no other solution. But it's like the other extreme, there's no balance in that :/ I'm no expert either (especially chemistry was never my strong suit), but it's fascinating stuff. The latest improvement and step towards daily use came from the chinese academy of sciences, but I think almost the whole is in that race now. Silicon Valley, the germans with Theion and the Frauenhofer Institute, the koreans, brits etc. And they should: More energy density, more charge cycles, less problematic materials.. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
sorry for the off-topic @C0untFloyd, but you know me a bit now: I'm a curious fella 😆
the first part about feeling burnt out and taking a step back, I get better than you could imagine. but taking that break to invest the still charging energy in a new project? sounds like feeling burnt out won't go away (or is it your "zen-project"? 😃), and neither project will really advance. but most important - it was my first thought actually: won't you get in trouble for your other project? I'm boycotting chatgpt4 (not even used / tried once) for idealistic / personal reasons, so I actually have no clue and did a quick search. and there it was: legal problems for the original repo-creator: https://winfuture.de/news,135984.html
take your break man, you deserve it. just stay healthy and safe 😉 and as always: thank you for your great work!
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
All reactions