I listened to an episode by Nicolas Cole on his “Coffee With Cole” podcast titled “The AI Writing Trend No One Is Talking About”. Here’s the YouTube version: The AI Writing Trend No One Is Talking About The thesis of the episode is that non-fiction writers should stop publishing books and instead use the material as prompts/context in ChatGPT wrapper apps to help the target audience achieve a desired outcome. ...
I have written a novella for my youngest son (e.g. targets age 6 to 12). It’s about him and his brother visiting their favourite holiday destination. The title is: “The Bali Coin” Here’s the cover: Here’s the blurb: One mysterious coin. Two brothers. The adventure of a lifetime. When seven-year-old Jon and his teenage brother Alex arrive in Bali for a sun-filled family vacation, they anticipate lazy pool days, towering sandcastles, and endless breakfast buffets. But everything changes when Jon discovers a peculiar, ancient coin hidden in the sand, sparking an unforgettable adventure. Adorned with mysterious symbols, the relic points to secrets scattered across the island. ...
I was digging more into old q3test bots and I found one of my old websites. The site was called “chopper land”. I remember it started as an experiment on in my student account on an RMIT server in early 1999 (I believe Minyos or minyos.its.rmit.edu.au). Found it, here: http://minyos.its.rmit.edu.au/~s9966394 (archived, Dec 2000) I then migrated to GeoCities. I believe the focus was initially on bots in the q3test (circa June 1999) then moved to all gaming stuff. ...
I was thinking a lot about the q3test bots written about yesterday. Nostalgia. What test versions were released when? IHV Leak The IHV leaked perhaps late February or early March 1999. Quake III Arena IHV Test Leaked, Mar 01, 1999 Q3Test Mac (v1.01?) In late April a Mac version of the Q3Test was released: Mac Q3ATest Released, Apr 24, 1999. Including: MacQ3Test.bin Q3Test v1.03 An updated Mac version was released along with a linux version and a win32 server: ...
Before Quake3 was released there were public test versions. And before that there was a leaked IHV version. I acquired and played all of them. I remember spending a lot of time trying to get bots working with one of these releases. It may have been the q3test v1.05. We had to run a program that modified the game, then we could use commands in-game to spawn bots. The fun was figuring out what all the bot commands did. ...
A piece of fruit after dinner is a delight. I look forward to it. This is a reminder that if you’re trying to slim down, drop the fruit. I’ve been eating a piece or two after dinner for the last two weeks and my weight has plateaued for that time. Even though calories are low, e.g. deficit. It’s probably water retention, but still. Stop. Fruit undoes all the good work. ...
I took a break from novella work to dip back into my Quake bot archive work. I spend the morning digging into the release history for the Terminator client-side Quake bot by Olivier Montanuy and documenting it here: Terminator Bot It’s so much fun. I don’t know how this work can be made valuable to others, but if I could justify doing a deep-dive into the research history for every bot in the archive, I would. ...
I get that food/calories don’t have the same effect on everyone. For me, its a lot easier to gain than to lose weight. It’s very easy to overeat. In fact, I suspect the energy partition hypothesis is correct and even small amounts of simple carbohydrates make me gain weight fast. Nothing new here. But I was thinking: What is the relationship between gaining and losing weight? What is the ratio? Linear to sublinear or worse. Is it 1:0.8 or 1:0.5, probably. ...
ChaptGPT 4o can generate images natively. For example: Introducing 4o Image Generation I’ve been using this feature, almost daily since launch a month and a half ago. It’s really really good. Especially compared to Dall-e and Grok3 and even Gemini, other image generation models that I’ve used a lot. But also limited. I’ve used it for photos of invented scenes, which has been really great. Almost faultless. I’ve also used it for artistic impressions of fantastical things, also pretty solid. ...
I’ve been writing novellas for my kids for the past few months. They are probably objectively terrible. Why bother? It helps to turn this question around. What if someone else was writing novellas and asked what I thought? What if one my kids was writing novellas and asked? I would think it was awesome, and to keep going! You’re practising how to conceive, execute and deliver, on project. You’re practising how to develop a compelling story by trial and error. You’re practising how to collaborate with LLMs for prose, descriptions, images, proofreading, copyediting, etc. You must iterate in order to get good. Make 100 and make each one 1% better than the one before it. Repeat. ...