Tech Over Tea - Bring Back Exciting Website Design | Vale

Episode Date: April 4, 2025

A little while back I covered an article on how you should structure your URL and today I have the author of that post on the show, not at all to talk about the post but other things I found interesting on there blog.==========Support The Channel==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson==========Guest Links==========Website: https://vale.rocks/==========Support The Show==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson=========Video Platforms==========🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg=========Audio Release=========🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw==🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea==========Social Media==========🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345==========Credits==========🎨 Channel Art:All my art has was created by Supercozmanhttps://twitter.com/Supercozmanhttps://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. Welcome back to the show. Today we have the author of that URL post I talked about on my channel about a week or so ago. I just wanted to reach out because that post was interesting. I thought some of the other posts were interesting. So now you're here, how about you introduce yourself and we can go from there.

Hello, I'm Declan Chidlow. I usually go by Veil Online. I'm a front-end developer, a bit of a writer. In fact, I've been doing more writing than development recently, but they pair very well together, especially when talking about AI and writing about development and such. So that's kind of what I've been doing.

That's kind of who I am, writing, developing, stuff to that nature. I, the, uh, it says on your website, also designer. And I've, I noticed that very quickly. As soon as I move my cursor around on your website, like it's a, I don't know why you've done this, but I like it. It's really cool for anyone, for anyone just listening, as you move the cursor around, it sort of creates like a explosion of characters out from where your cursor position is.

It's cool. I like it. Yeah. Years and years ago, I founded our own GitHub. Someone had put together kind of a little proof concept one, but unfortunately it wasn't quite there performance wise. So I went through and I cleaned it up a little bit and made it not send people's mobiles into a molten puddle of slush. And yeah, it's been pretty good.

And lots of people do like playing with it. And I found myself just moving my cursor around, just playing with it, just creating puddles and things. Good fun. I think a problem a lot of people have with websites is they over-design things, right? Especially when people want to, especially when people do consider themselves a designer in a sense.

There's a lot of people who they put a lot of cool things in the site, but it ends up being just super cluttered. And even though you do have this and some of the like nice little things here and there, it's, it's still a very clean site where you can actually navigate and not drive yourself insane. Yeah, I wrote a really interesting thing at one point about like how you can kind of display information with it slowly getting more granular, the more people that are interacting with it.

So in my case, I've got things on my website where they only appear on hover and when you're actually trying to achieve a task. So it's not overwhelming a user. It's not showing them everything at once. It's just showing the little bit that they want when they're doing things. If they're hovering over the sidebar on my site, it'll show the heading items, for example. And otherwise it's just completely out there, Wayne, it isn't bothering them at all. Yeah, I didn't even realize that was there until I went back to the site last night. Oh, I only added that in the other day. It was only... I was reading something and had that really cool effect on it. And I went, oh, I want that now.

No, it is super cool. I do like it. and I know This is probably awful content for people who are just listening But I recommend going to veil dot rocks it is a really really nice website I am NOT a designer for anyone who's seen my website of it's not great It exists and it's very outdated and I probably should do something with it, but I haven't No, all the best websites are outdated. The best ones look like they're straight out the 90s Building a front page or something. That's a bit different. Like if even a Zion that looks like it's from the 90s, that's fine It's the content on the website that's outdated Nah, nah, no matter how you put together a website is a website and a website is fantastic.

That's fair. That's fair. Well, while we're on the topic, when did you sort of get interested in development and why did you decide to start doing like front end stuff? Oh, I don't know. I've always liked computers back in primary school years and years ago. I was, I think I replaced the tech guy there. I've always liked computers back in primary school years and years ago. I was, I think I replaced the tech guy there.

I was running around classrooms and providing support and that to all the teachers. So I've always had a big love for tech and like hacking things together, especially like bodging things last minute. It's always been fun. And I think I've done a lot of design stuff as well. So I think I kind of gravitated towards front end development in terms of a collaboration between sort of like design things and development things, kind of smushing them together into a amalgamation of being able to make something and share it with people, especially, you know, building for the internet, being able to build something, share it with people and, you know, people being able to read it and access it and see it.

It's really fantastic. And it's something that kind of development allows you to do. So, you know, I think that's kind of how I got into it, how I kind of found it as a thing I wanted to do. So you like having a very sort of visual result of the program you do, right? Like there's a lot of people who really enjoy the idea of getting something to work. You'll see people who do this like low end, back end development where it's like, I, you know, you're reverse engineering drivers, right?

And you're like, I like the idea of being able to control a device that I couldn't control before. But at least from the way that you're saying it, it's more like you like seeing something happen like visually through your programming. Absolutely. I can never do backend. I've done backend bits before, but I am a terrible backend dev because I have to create like a sizeable amount of something before I can tell that it's worked. Whereas I can start up a HTML file and start writing things down and I've got something and I can add CSS and that's something else and then JavaScript and that's something else on top of that. And I can just keep building up on it and layering it. But with backend dev you need to have at least created something to start

as a general rule. And I can't do that. I'm just terrible in terms of not having something kind of materializing in front of me as I'm ideating and building on. I totally get that as well. Like I know I've always had. I don't really think I've ever had a main thing I've focused on. For a while I was very interested in doing web stuff, but I sort of gravitated around it. Right now I'm not really doing as much development stuff as I would like to be doing.

Right now pretty much the only stuff I'm doing is, hey, I need some script to do a thing, throw something together in Python. I really need to get back into doing development work because I, I really did enjoy it and I really enjoyed just messing around with like new pieces of tech. And that's something which I dunno, I do in a different way. Now I sort of approach it from the use perspective where I'm messing around with new pieces of software, but I really did enjoy trying out different frameworks, trying out different libraries, and just seeing what is out there and what you can do, and just trying out new languages as well.

Yeah, especially experimenting with the cutting edge. I mean, there is the tendency for front-end development to over-complify. Complify? We won't question my choice of language or my making up of language for that matter. People know that I can't speak English as well, it's just a normal Australian thing. Yeah, yeah. But you know, just increasing complexity and building things up, especially as fancy new things come out and I to play with them, wanting to experiment. You do have to kind of restrain yourself in some respect there. And no, no, I must do the thing I must do rather than play with the new thing. But yeah.

Oh, well. Yeah. That's always been a problem. Maybe not always, but at least ever since I got into web development, it was always the, the, the, the, the layer upon layer upon layer upon layer, and there's always some new exciting framework that people are talking about. I have no idea what like the current exciting thing is, but I was getting into stuff when React was popular, and then people were talking about this other framework, and this other framework, like if you're trying to keep up with the latest thing in the web space things just move way too quickly and

frankly The I think this is the reality a lot of people in that space don't really want to admit most of the work Is it the exciting new frameworks most of the work is hey you want to maintain some? 15 year old jQuery website, you know, it's not crazy exciting stuff. It's, you know, we have a thing, make it keep working. Yeah, I think I think you've got that sort of a rock star dev mentality that's kind of come around, especially in recent years and people always chasing the new thing and showing off and being fancy. But yeah, a lot of development is just slog work and horrific abominations that

you have to create to achieve some asinine goal. But I mean, I, I've had a lot of fun recently, uh, dealing with a, uh, I mean, I've had a lot of fun recently dealing with a language called Web Origami, which is very new. It's kind of emerging. And I don't think it's ever going to become like the way to create websites. But in terms of creating static sites, it's awesome. It's building on your base building blocks of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and just getting those and putting them together and creating essentially your own

static site generator based around your site. And you can also, you know, because it's just building with like core technologies, you can build like E pubs for electronic books, and RSS feeds and I built a podcast feed for my grandmother the other day using Web Origami. It's literally just putting together files and iterating over files and getting values and putting them in templates. And it's really simple, especially if you've got a little bit of JavaScript experience, but it's a really awesome language and it's just really fantastic to use. I can see that being a way that development goes as people get more and more disenfranchised

with these complex behemoths and just get sick of dealing with them as people already are based on what people are writing about people writing about how they fed up with react and they spend more time dealing with the react and they do actually building websites so you know I think coming back around to those kind of core web ideals but with a kind of fresh twist is how I see things going and kind of what could be, you know, next couple of years. Just sort of re, I guess, like reviving that, how would I say it? Like reviving that more simple way to build a site, I guess.

Yeah, I think we've seen kind of like IndieWeb sort of ideals, like especially like decentralized social networks and things. And certain people, not everyone, in fact, a very niche collection of people, I think we've seen people kind of come back around to the idea of having your own site, owning your own content. And I think maybe not in the corporate world, but certainly in like just the web, just people using the internet, we're going to see more and more people building like their own little things and creating them and sharing them. And I think that's going to be a wonderful web to get back to as people do it more and more.

So I think I can see that. I think it's very exciting. I was just, I think that is one of the things that I do find really neat about how Blue Sky does this verification system. that I do find really neat about how Blue Sky does its verification system. That it's not like, uh, it- like in the old Twitter it was this exclusive club, you had to like have 20 Wikipedia articles made about you, 20 news stories, and then maybe they would accept you. And now it's you pay some X amount of money. But the way Blue Sky does it is, you have a a website and you link your website to your account and that you verify that you're that person.

Like this is a great system and encourages people to actually have a domain and have a site and have them like have their own personal web presence that isn't controlled by you know by Facebook, by Google, by any of these other major corporations, which is the way that we've seen the web go over the past, you know, 20 or so years. Yeah. And beyond the verification aspect of that, you've also got just the aspect of people going out and buying domains or other renting domains for the purpose just of having a cool domain for their blue sky handle. And then people, I've seen people who have purchased the domain for their blue

sky and then go on, Oh, I've got a domain. I may as well build a website now. And they've got a website and that's awesome. That's, that's fantastic. You know, getting people to actually build their own sites and inspiring them to do that just by having them create a social media account and then linking it back. And yeah, that that's fantastic. That's my favorite bit of the blue sky domain verification. I think I've seen. Well, regarding domains, a topic that I often bring up and often does get discussed is just how many TLDs exist now.

I don't even know what the number is. It's some. Oh, it'd be huge. Yeah. I've got.rocks. I don't know what.rocks is. I just have an ego. Let's find out.

Uh, TLD rocks. Uh, it is. I think it's just one of those like a generic just created to be a TLD. Yeah, it was created to provide greater expression on the internet. That's literally it. That's what it says. Yeah. So for people like me who have a huge ego and obviously want to, you know, broadcast broadcast everyone they're really cool and they rock yeah

perfect fantastic but a criticism that i'll often see with just how many clds exist now is yes it's cool to have things like rocks but there's just so many of them that exist, it kind of feels like some of them are just made solely for the purpose of selling more domains. It's not like any of these spaces are overly crowded, like a lot of these people don't even frankly know exist. But every couple of months you'll see some new TLDs that get created, and some of them certainly do have value, and some of them do have purpose But then you have TLDs that are created, you know

reserved for a specific company and I I don't know. I do think it's it's good that we've moved past just the core set because especially dot-com Dot-coms have gotten very expensive and they've been expensive for a long time. Dotnets have been expensive for a long time. So we needed more than just that. But I don't know. There's just so, so many now. I can understand some of the criticisms that do exist there. Yeah, I mean, if I ever got half a million dollars, I think I'd register Vale as a TLD.

You know, that'll be the first thing I'd do. No stuff, anything else. That'd be it. And obviously companies are doing that. You've got.google. I think.amazon is one as well. Audible is one as well, which I didn't realise you just now. .audible.

But the thing with all these like, I'm going to call them Neo TLDs. all these like, I'm going to call them Neo TLDs. But you know, I don't think there's kind of a group word used to describe the new ones. But in terms of these new ones, people don't understand them. Like I gave some of my email, which is Vale at Vale dot rocks, and they sent me an email to Vale at Vale.Rocks.com. And that's where the issue lies in terms of these fancy new TLDs, because people are used to.com or.net or.org. They're not used to all these fancy new ones. And I think that also plays an issue with phishing scams and things like that. So I do love all the new TLDs that we've got and, you know, the increased expression and the driving down of costs as well, to an extent, like I don't have to go try get Vale.com, which I believe is owned by a giant mining company.

Yeah. It's a full, even if it was available, it's a four letter domain. It would be minimum $50,000 a year. Yeah. Speaking of that though, I was reading a interesting essay the other day about like three letter acronyms and how not every three letter acronym is owned by business. Okay.

Like there isn't a business that represents each three little three letter acronym. I think it was on a Guerm. I think it was one of Guerm Branwen's writings. But yeah, I wonder, I don't know if that touched on domains, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are three letter domains, which haven't been registered at all ever. The prices would still probably be high because they're three level domains, three level domains. But yeah, that there might not be the demand that almost you would expect

there just because businesses using don't exist. I actually thought about that. I, I, yeah, I, I'd assumed just because of how I know I Considering just how expensive they would be Maybe there would be someone like domain squatting on them, but I don't know some of them I don't know if all of them would have value though that once you start getting to the four and five What if you like grab common words? Yeah, but if it's just a random assortment of letters, huh.

Yeah, because is there inclination to domain squat on it? If there's a, if no one's ever used it before and there exists no Wikipedia article with a business that uses that name? there exists no Wikipedia article with a business that uses that name. I'm sure this would be a very easy problem to resolve. Um, like you could probably just write a Python script and answer this question about five minutes. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, it might've already been covered in the original, uh, article I was

referencing, but I read it a few months ago and I can't recall it completely now. But I have been working on a little bit of a business venture. I won't jump into details or anything, but for that I made sure to get a dot com domain, simply because dot com domain has a certain thing that people understand and trust dot com domains a lot more than they do anything else. Yeah, especially when you start seeing domains, which are a lot of the country TLDs, they're operating in this weird space where a lot of the country TLDs aren't actually used by the country. I believe is, yeah, AI, AI is any of the two little ones, um, uh, for a country.

I don't know which country it was. Um, uh, right. The British overseas territory in the Caribbean. Anguilla. Yeah. And there's a, there's one to these, which some of these smaller nations have these really, really valuable TLDs and like Doc Coe has one. I think that's Columbia, if I remember correctly. But there's some

countries which have these TLDs and a good portion of their economy is actually tied up in the use of the TLD. Yeah. I know there are some islands that do and IO is a famous case at the moment. And I must admit I haven't researched as much as I'd like to, but I believe there's a bit of a dispute going on there about who gets to use it and yeah. Yeah, I believe that was because it was a territory owned by Britain, but then the territory is being handed back to the original nation. So it's like, who holds the ownership there? And do you change the name and then the TLD goes away? Like what needs to be done there? Yeah, I'd be interested to have a look if that sort of has happened to other TLDs before.

I actually has. Um, yeah, the USSR. They had, they had a, uh, TLD that was, uh, prior to the collapse. Right. And, and websites using that TLD, uh, is that domain just completely invalid now? Is that, I believe that if just completely invalid now? Is that? I believe that if I remember correctly, I believe they were supposed to give it up, but they were like, nah. Yeah. Like it's officially deprecated, but it's still in use. If I recall correctly. Yeah. That's the thing. Cause you think about like linker,

Yeah, that's the thing. Because you think about LinkRop. Imagine if.com was like, someone repossessed.com was like, oh, sorry, I'm shutting down all the.com domains. You're not allowed them anymore. Obviously, hopefully that would not ever happen. But that would be terrible. The amount of madness. And I.O. is a really popular one and that could be a big issue. Think of all the small SaaS startups.

Yeah. Terrible. I do think that you were mentioning before about scams and that is an area where things do get a little bit weird where you can use the TLD to get a website which otherwise would not be available. Google, they've sensibly bought up every possible thing you could ever ever get, but there are companies where they don't have the resources to do so, or they have, they've missed something and people managed to grab, let's imagine, you know, a PayPal, for example, PayPal dot, I picked something, there's millions of TOT out there. But yeah, it creates problems.

It does, especially for these big companies which are going to have users which are being targeted. Yeah and there isn't really a easy fix to any of that, it's just educating people. But so many people think they understand phishing attacks and then you show them a domain which is slightly funny like that or an email that's been spoofed, and they immediately fall for it. So it's definitely a big issue. And yeah, something that isn't really easy to solve

other than just educating people. Unfortunately. On the topic of phishing, did you see the recent GitHub phishing attack? Yes, I did have a very brief look at it. I assume you're referring to the one... There was an email one that went around and there was also

a separate one, not fishing, but there was a breaching of that repository or someone bought it or something. And it was using a lot of GitHub actions, but I didn't recognize that one. Okay. That was another, uh, not phishing, but attack that I saw and didn't look too deeply into. No, the one that I'm talking about is, uh, where people were abusing the way the issue tracker sends out emails. Um, yeah, right.

So for anyone who's not aware of that, basically what people were doing, I don't know if it was one person or a group of people, basically what happened is people created a fake security alert and posted it as an issue on thousands of people's GitHub issue trackers on like their repos. Now if you see it on the repo, it's obviously, you know, it's obviously an issue It's not a security alert But when an issue is made on your repo GitHub will send you an email about the issue made and it would say

notification from notifications at github.com because it's coming directly from github Like all the cc the subscribe stuff would look perfectly fine if you paid attention You would see it say oh this was an issue created But the rest of it if you if you skip that one line the rest of it looks like a security notice Coming directly from github. It's from the github URL looks like a security notice coming directly from GitHub. It's from the GitHub URL. Everything pretty much checks out. But if you clicked on the links,

it would get you to authorize an OAuth app that would basically give them complete access to your account, your repos, everything on it. Pretty much they could do everything except change your password. Yeah. It's not the first time that something like that's happened. I, if memory serves, that's happened a couple of times so far.

Yeah, it might have happened before, but... Yeah, I seem to remember something maybe about mid last year. But yeah, user generated content and doing funny things with emails like that has always been an issue as long as people have been uploading news generated content to silos on the internet. One of the things I was told very early on, and I think it's something more people should be told, is assume that every user is malicious.

Never trust the user. Yeah. Although, you do kind of trap yourself into thinking negatively if you do take that approach. There is definitely a happy medium to be found there. In terms of, yeah. Because some people are trying to do the right thing, they're just really bad at it.

Right, that's fair. Because some people are trying to do the right thing. They're just really bad at it. Right. Especially when, especially when you have, uh, people who are joining GitHub specifically to open an issue. Um, like if they've been told to provide feedback on a product on GitHub and they go into GitHub and they open their first issue, that can look incredibly suspicious. Sure. Yeah. Um, but like the, the, the main, like the, the main gist of what incredibly suspicious. Sure, yeah. But like the main, like the main gist of what I'm getting at there is never, it's never trust what the user inputs, right? It's always validate, always ensure, like if you ever see special characters, make sure you're either

stripping them or you're escaping them because things are gonna be weird This is why I on YouTube you actually can't enter What are they called angle brackets is that it the the one for HTML is angle bracket Yeah, I always forget the name of it But yeah, you can't enter them in your description at all. It's, nope. They've almost certainly had some sort of attack in the past. Right, that's interesting. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if they had like an eye frame in bed or something like that,

and people were doing some sort of attack with that. Yeah, eye frames are always messy. Although they tend to be pretty good from a security perspective, just because you can't do anything with them. Like even if you want to do something with them, they're annoying to do things with, but yeah, iframes are fun. So one of the things you brought up before is sort of, I guess, the complexity

of the web and one of the, one of the posts you had previously written about was well, you got two posts that I read about AI. You got the loss of AI history and the technical bias of AI models. I do want to talk about those as well, but I'm sure you've come across the term vibe coding by now. I pretty much everyone in this space has. Yup, I've come across it. And I think it's dumb, but I also understand how it comes about. Especially a lot of it seems to be in front end web development. I see a lot less of it in languages like Go or Rust, things like that. There is a lot when it comes to front end development.

And I think a part of that is just the fact that the web has gotten so complicated. There are so many frameworks out there. There are so many really cool things you can do on the web, like the thing you've got on your website. do on the web, like the thing you've got on your website, but it's difficult, right? It's difficult and it's difficult to know where to look for what pieces are going to be the best way to approach it. Yeah. Well, I think front-end development gets a specific targeting because you

can sort of just jump into it. You don't necessarily have an entire build process or anything unless you are going down that path. You can just start building things for the web. And for the same reason I like it and that I get immediate feedback and I can see what I'm doing and it's something sort of tangible. You get the same if you're doing it with AI. you know, if you ask Claude to do something and it spits out a little artifact, it's going to give you a little window into the application it's created that you can immediately start playing around with. It's sort of that instant reward. And, you know, it's very, very plain and very easy for someone to do that.

It's, it's when you start adding complexity on the things where you run into issues. And that's been the case with AI language models since they came about, you know, context windows and being able to actually build something complex, spanning over multiple files. Of course they are getting better and context windows are getting larger, but they're still very much is the case of people vibe coding, a vibe coding a thing, a little item. But if I need to bodge together a script, I can chuck it into a claw and say, I don't

want to do it with Redjects, don't make me. And it'll put something together. But doing that as part of a bigger project, that's where it falls apart. So I think vibe coding, people are acting like it's a, like sort of, in some cases, people acting like it's the end of development, like AI is gonna replace everything immediately,

because I can create a really simple to-do list app in prompts and it does exactly what I want and looks how I want. But I'm not sure if that's going to be the case, at least in the immediate future. Cause I think the people doing that are also lacking technical expertise in deployments and actually using that code. But some of the longest times I spent figuring things out when I was, you know, new to development was figuring out how to get website from computer onto internet, like trying to figure out hosting and things like that. And I think that's where people are going to come unstuck because yeah,

figuring out caddy isn't fun. Yeah. And I don't know, I'm sure there's certainly some attempts for it, but I don't know of any AI models that just like throw everything out there to get a single site page on a on a VPS and it It works, but going any further from that. I'm not aware of There being much in the way of good information Yeah, I mean I I've written plenty of guides before on how to host platforms and things with Docker. And people struggle with that. And I've gone through and I've explained each and every step and I've explained why doing this step and what's involved. But if you don't know the Linux command

line, being told Linux command still doesn't really matter all that much to you. It's doesn't really matter all that much to you. It's gonna be a sticking point. Well, it works as long as it works, but the second it doesn't work, and now you have to go and debug something, try to read documentation, anything like that, that's where things immediately fall apart. And I don't know how many of these posts I've been seeing are real,

because, you know, Pete, it's a trend now, people want to just shitpost about it. But I've been seeing these real because you know Pete it's a trend now people want to just shitpost about it But I've been seeing these posts like oh, I made some big SAS application with vibe coding And then all of a sudden people now that I mentioned it's vibe coding people are attacking the servers They're finding vulnerabilities, and I'm sure some of these are real But I don't have any of them are actually is entirely fake But this is the problem right like as soon as you start seeing problems This is where vibe coding entirely falls apart. It's like okay. I want the div to be

X amount over here, and if it does it it works But if it doesn't now you have to explain why it's not doing it correctly and in a lot of cases It takes longer to explain it than it does to just fix the problem yourself. Yeah it was specifically with that example you mentioned of people attacking a certain sat app that some put together. I think I saw that twitter thread but uh yeah that was hilarious. But I remember back in like the days of like GPT-3 and like the open a plate open AI playground like pre chat GPT release like it would hallucinate so badly and like you would tell it to do something and it would just do something that kind of looks somewhat like something that you might have maybe envisioned somewhat maybe and

It just makes something up and then you tell it and that isn't what I wanted and then doubles down on it and then when chat GPT launched it still did that but a little bit lesser and then you know we got kind of GPT for and cheap and such and you know it got a little bit better and it keeps getting a little bit better and a little bit better and a little bit better but I think anyone who's been using AI for a long while still recognizes those little like giveaways that it's still making things up. Well, it is making things up. But the way it is just coming up, it's got human language and it's been fed the internet and it's just regurgitating that all over your

computer and all over your code. So when it doesn't know something and when humans don't know something they tend to lie and that's that's bled through to AI models and I think it's gonna be an issue however long AI models in this current state and this current architecture stay around. Yeah. I think you made, you made good point there about, um, things having improved. And I have my issues with obviously the open IP theft that these models have basically operate in, which is always funny when I see these big companies which for so long were very particular

about IP theft which are now like all in on AI. It's very very very amusing to me. Think about the children. Like I'll be like these stock photo websites right like the stock photo websites that generate AI images for stock photos right like how do You know There's a very clear hypocrisy here now that it's a good way to make money but anyway the point I was gonna get out here is you mentioned AI models improving and You know you'll still see people especially with art right? Oh

Let two left feet four fingers, things like this. And yeah, some of those tools are there, but the way things are right now is the worst it is ever going to be. And the way it was six months ago is much worse than it was now. But a lot of people see problems and they think, oh, there hasn't been any improvement. I guess if you're looking at it from the outside and haven't really been

paying much attention to this space, it can look like things are sort of just, you know, stuck in place, just not really making it. Just churning. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. But I think a lot of people forget that by the time things have hit, you know, social media and specifically by the time they actually end up on things like Facebook, which is where, you know, the general population of seeing things, they're not going on, you know, obscure web forums and having a look at the cutting edge and they're not reading, you know, papers and things they're going on and they're loading up Twitter and they're saying, oh, look, it's an AI video. I think there's definitely a huge delay between when something actually hits social media and

when something's actually on the cutting edge. And even videos, which are a little bit out of date and being marketed as, oh, it's a cutting edge of AI, because it's only just hitting kind of the hands of people who can use it. But AI as I see it now, especially image generation, like I can't distinguish it from real photos. Like, I know there are people on Reddit who will tell you, oh, I know an AI video when I see it. An AI video, I suppose you might. But AI photos, they're one to one. Like, they're insane. You've got to...

If you like zoom in on the image and you look at, you know, specific parts, but you can... If you really analyze it, you still can tell. Even that is, you know. It's gotten really hard. Yeah, like, unless it's something like fur or hair or, um, something like really specific where it does really struggle, like it can be nigh on impossible to like actually identify it. It can be nigh on impossible to actually identify it.

And I don't think people realize that. And we only know when we're seeing AI generate things because of those giveaways, we don't notice all the times we're seeing AI generate things. And there is no giveaway that we've noticed and no one's pointed out. It's the exact same complaint people have with CGI in movies. You only notice it when it's bad. If it's good, it's just there. Yeah, but with CGI in movies, you're expecting CGI in movies. When you're scrolling through your... Fair. the What's NBN stand for? National Broadband Network, that's it.

Do you have a Fiber at your place? I have Fiber here now, which is slightly better than it was before. Yep, using Fiber. I got a fancy modem, really wonderful, next to the modem, really lovely. Yeah, I think my laptop's the only device really out putting anything on the internet right now. And yeah, drops out. Wonderful. Really good. Thank you, Australian government. We really appreciate it. Yeah. Top notch. Anyway, you're saying that as you're scrolling through your social media feed, you don't really expect to see AI as opposed to movies where you're sort of tuned to expect it.

Yeah, absolutely. Like, you're sort of tuned to expect it. Yeah, absolutely. Like, you're only going to critique, you're only going to critique something if you know you're set to critique it. Like if you're reading something and like the amount of times I've ended up on like websites trying to search up some weird web thing and I've gone to a post and I've read through it and then only after a little bit I've gone hmm something seems a little bit off, but when I'm not primed to expect something I'm not gonna expect it. That's you know how it works Yeah, and yeah, oh no, I'll let you continue

I was gonna say a lot of people when they talk about the quality of AOA images, they still point to, you know, these obvious, the obvious like, scam posts you see on Facebook, right? It's like, oh, I, look, look at what this, you know, you'll see these ones like, oh, this poor African child built this amazing sculpture, and it's like, obviously not real, or it's like, oh, look at this cat, it's looking after, it's like obviously not real or it's like oh look at this cat It's looking after it's looking after a puppy. It's like No, that's not real. No, I need the shrimp Jesus. Shrimp. Jesus is my favorite It's rings a bell but it's black I'm blanking on it no shrimp Jesus but it's blank. I'm blanking on it.

No, Shrimp Jesus is doing the rounds on Facebook. Yeah, truly wonderful. Oh, that's beautiful. But I think a lot of people also use chat GPT. Chat GPT is AI to a lot of people. And the tells of chat GPT, it has a certain way of speaking and it has a certain stylized look to the images it generates. And I think people are tuned to that. So when they see something output differently, like when they see like a

steal from a Sora video or whatever, people don't pick up on it because it isn't the AI imagery that they're used to seeing. It's not what they're tuned to. AI imagery that they're used to seeing. It's not what they're tuned to. Yeah. If we'd be, if you stare at Sora video for long enough, yeah, I guess you will start to notice different tells. Hmm.

And this is a really big problem that does exist in art communities. Art communities are really bad for this. There are, so if you're accused of using AI in an art community, you're basically Satan. And people will- even if there's no evidence, people will harass you, they will send you hate mail, they'll send you death threats. And I've seen so many times where people think it's AI because it's a common style. They didn't use AI at all. Like they have full history. They even might live stream their

artwork. But because it has that like AI style, I think people forget this, right? The AI models are trained on existing pieces. So if you have a common style, you're going to look similar to the high end models.

Yeah. I've got the curse of writing formally on the internet, which is a terrible thing to have because every second person looks at something you've written, which uses proper punctuation and usually proper spelling and goes, hmm, are you a robot? Yeah, I don't have that issue. Right. But yeah, definitely in my style of writing, I've, I've got a very analytical, I suppose, style.

And that's similar to how AI models were. I think they've moved a little bit more conversational now, but certainly back in 2023, I was accused of using AI to write things a lot. So yeah, it's a bit sticky. I read what's on your site. I don't see that at all, but I guess... If you compare that to like a GPT 3.5 turbo output from, you know, 2023, you will see more similarities.

And that's the way it is. Not much I can really do about that. And... Stronger than random emojis. Yeah. But then I'll look more like the newer models. Um, but I would like, like to be able to go back and compare my writing to like GPT-3. But as I mentioned in my like, we're losing AI history post, that isn't something I can

necessarily do. I can't go back and have a look at those older models. They're proprietary and they were only hosted by OpenAI. They were only available in that capacity. And sure, it's a small thing for me. I'm just a random person on the internet. But in terms of like AI research and such, you might be able to contact OpenAI and say,

hey, I really need this to complete some research. But on the by and large, that's gone. That isn't available for looking back at and evaluating, you know, um, with the hindsight of 2025. So I think that's a shame. No, I think it makes you a really good argument here that. I don't know that When you have these big companies which are fully in control of the AI, like, you're just... It's the same thing that happens in the

video game world, right? Where you have these big live service games where at some point they're going to be shut down and you're going to lose that entire history that was there, the entire user base that was there. And people can't look back at the way it was. And I think that also does sort of lead into why people don't really notice as much of a difference. Cause if you're surrounded by AI content on social media, you're surrounded by the current AI content. But by not being able to go back to these earlier models,

you can't really easily compare it without, you know, doing a complicated search. Oh, I want to find posts within this specific period, and then there'll be more likely to be some older model. So I think that does feed into why people think that things are kind of just like turning in place and nothing's really improving. Yeah, and I also think it's the fact that people are negative about AI. Like there are obviously certain people who are like AI hype men and are crazy about AI and want AI to rule the world and want to take their job. But I think a lot of people just don't care and don't really have an interest.

And most people don't ever use AI platforms. And if they do, they're not aware they're using it. Like it's a little live agent in some random website. So when you have people who actually do care about AI, they care about it and they overhype it. And when you have people who don't care about AI, they, you know, really take away from it and, you know, undemphasize it. And I think there's kind of lacking a bit of nuance where it's AI is good at this,

but terrible at this, and it can do this well, but it can't do this well. And it's bad in that it's taking all this information from people. And it's bad in that we're losing the history of all this information that has been taken from people and it's being used. Why don't we get anything back from it? And there are a whole ton of different angles. And I think people, as it tends to happen, tend to lump either into the it's bad or it's good side. So I think nuance is somewhat lost in that regard. I think that can be said about a lot of things. Yeah, maybe everything.

It's a lot easier to sort of just, especially for someone who is not very interested in this space, but you still want to have an opinion, which is what a lot of people kind of are. It's a lot easier to lump yourself into a group of, I like AI, I don't like AI, and then just agree with everything that people say in that group. So you can have an opinion on it, but you don't need to form an opinion. Yeah. And especially once you start ending up in one of those little echo chambers on

the internet, obviously it's an echo chamber. So your opinions are more and more like that. And obviously that's an influence on politics, but I won't jump into that. Um, but yeah, like what, what, what, once you're on one of those sides, the chances are that you're going to stay on one of those sides, like you're either going to be pro or against and everything you see through social media is either going to be pro if you're pro or against if you're against. And that's one of the iffy things that no social media algorithms and it to a certain extent, it will also show you

things which are pro AI if you're against it, but that make terrible arguments or that rile you up because it's been proven that that keeps you on the platforms for longer. So I think it just is fueling a discourse. I think it'd be wonderful if people kind of looked at it a bit more objectively and went, yeah, this part's bad, this part's good, but obviously that's a fever dream on the internet. Yeah I don't know, at least from my stance, I can certainly see a lot of value in this tooling right? Like one example is, I know in medical fields it's being used to analyze x-rays and it's

spotting things far, far earlier than a doctor is going to spot it and spotting things that are far far smaller than the doctor is going to spot. That's a great use for. I don't think there's a single person that could possibly argue against that or as a way to interpret um like blood test results. If you're someone who wants to get a blood test done and you don't really know, okay, well, my, my levels are at this whatever. That's, you know, that, that being able to interpret that as just a regular person, that's also great. Now, some people go too far with that and diagnose themselves with cancer when they

just read something on the internet. So people can take that too far, but just having that ability there to even just provide... I did see a story the other day where someone went to their doctor, the doctor couldn't diagnose the kid with whatever issue they had. They put the symptoms into, I don't know if it was chat GPT or anything else, I don't remember what the model was, but that gave them a different answer. They took it to another doctor and that other doctor agreed like, okay, yeah, this is actually what the kid has that, like the other doctor wasn't able to diagnose it.

Like things like that are great. Or one of the things that I use for my videos is I use are great. Or one of the things that I use for my videos is I use Whisper, which lets me generate subtitles for my videos so I don't have to manually go and transcribe everything, which is really time consuming. And yeah, it has issues and I need to go through and manually edit it, but it saves me so much time being able to do that. And then you have the other side where... This is something I saw the other day also viral post going around where it's Google's what is Google's model cool? I don't remember Gemini Gemini that one. Thank you. It can just remove watermarks, which is Yeah

Totally not gonna get you sued if you use that in a commercial context. My favorite part of that is that they beat, well, they didn't beat Photoshop to the punch, but they somewhat did. Like Photoshop and Adobe have been pushing AI and all of their things and just no one cared. And then Google like, well, here's a model and people realize that they can do the thing with it. And now everyone just does the thing with it. And that's hilarious to me. I just like Adobe. They never work. Their products suck. Well, you know, I think, I don't think you're going to find many people who defend Adobe at this point. Oh, no, there are a fair few. Yeah? Okay. I mean, it's industry standard and everyone uses it but I don't think anyone goes, I'm

so hyped to sit down today and use an Adobe product. It's going to work great and it's not going to crash once. It's an expectation that it's not going to be a great experience but it's going to do what you need and there's nothing better. So yeah, the wonders of Adobe, but going back to what you mentioned about, um, like pattern recognition and like it being able to have a look at medical scans, that is the bread and butter of AI. And you know, it's a, it's a big thing and it's entire makeup and its entire

goal is to match patterns and go, oh, this word usually appears after this word in this context and figures that out. And I think that is the greatest use of AI, but I think it's perhaps just an underused used use of AI. And I was reading something the other day, I cannot remember who from it was a news publication, but they were talking about using AI and a lot of large language models to sift through just huge amounts of data, because they're trying to get through like, just a huge amount of information to write a story. But it's not, it's not realistic to have someone crawl through, you know, terabytes of data or however much it was. So using a large language model to somewhat get a bit of a gist of what the

general idea is, and then following it up with humans, double checking that is, is a, is a great use. And that's how it should be used at the moment, at the very least, using it as a tool, not as a replacement. And then following up on that tool with extra skill and extra work. Like you would use a hammer. You, you don't just get a hammer to do your work. You use the hammer, you hit in the nail, but you have to know how to hit in the nail, what nail to use, what would you going into, all those details.

And I think people forget that about AI. They're just co AI it's replacing me. It can do the thing I want it to do rather than I'm going to use it in this way to achieve the thing like this. And I'm going to follow it up with my knowledge and coerce it into doing what I need. And I think that's kind of where people are going

a little bit wrong with usage. But, oh well. No, I agree. But the issue you have is there are definitely companies who are trying to push that. I'm sure you've heard a meta. They want to replace some, like 30, 50% of their workforce by 2030 or something with, uh, LLMs. Um, there, I know there are marketing firms that are basically just not hiring forced by 2030 or something with LLMs. I know there are marketing firms that are basically just not hiring people because

at least they believe that they can generate the same work or better using these models. And even if it's not the best way to approach it, that's what people are certainly trying to do right now. And vibe coding, going back to that, is a prime example of this, where you're seeing people with zero engineering skills, trying to build complex applications, and then it works fine until it doesn't. And it's everything. And it's everything. But, um, yeah, I think you've also got to keep in mind that

meta are in the AI game. They've got something to gain from saying, oh yeah, we're going to replace everything with our models and it's going to be fantastic and the world's going to be utopia and everyone's going to walk around with meta ray bands. But I don't think that's realistic. And companies keep making the claims, they're replacing so many employees with AI. And then they keep walking back and skirting away from that claim. There's so much just hype out there, which is just completely unjustified and never comes to fruition. And I do think that adds to that slimy feel of the current AI sector and the current AI scene.

So one thing I can say they're not lying about without pushing AI is website support. Oh, yeah. I really wish they were lying about that and actually started hiring people again. Because there are so many websites where it's like, oh, talk to this AI thing. It's like, it doesn't, it doesn't even understand the context of the site it's trying to be trying to deal with. It, they're just as useless as they were when they were just, um, like

recognizing like key phrases. I would say more useless in some cases. Well, at least in some cases they give you like nice words and they speak somewhat all right, but I was trying to delete a Paramount Plus account the other day, um, from years and years ago and I logged in and I couldn't find delete button. So I tried to use a chat bot thing. And I don't think it was AI.

I think it was pre AI, because it was just a, every time I hit, I said delete, it just sent me to a website where I could contact the chat bot again. And that's useless because I'm already at the chat. Anyway, I think as long as businesses can make money by having less people, they will make money by having less people and they will strive towards that no matter...

Number go up, number go up, they need number go up, number doesn't go up, bad thing happen. So... Yeah, I think the absolute worst I saw saw like the support chatbots one thing I saw a website replace their it was like a clothing website. They replaced their search bar with a chatbot Oh, no. Oh my it was yeah thankfully, they had like a like a category selector on the side so I could completely ignore it, but don't do that.

One thing I would really like to try at some point is set up like a AI trained on the content available at Rocks, like fine tuned to. Or we'd like some RIG system. So I can chat with my virtual self and my virtual writings and identify things because having a search function on my site has been so handy. I implemented it several months ago and it's just been really fantastic because I can go, Oh, what is that thing? I said that one time, like a year ago in an offhand little post I did on some social media platform and I can search

it and I can bring it up and I can just, you know, link to it straight away. And that is fantastic. And I imagine messing around with some sort of AI system in that regard, where I've got an AI me that handles things and I can ask questions would be really good because something I'm trying to do is kind of have my website is my brain away from brain. And I've been somewhat writing about that. I haven't published anything yet, but having my site as a place I can put information and then leave it there and then I don't need it in my brain brain, my organic fleshy one. I can just have the thoughts I have and the things I need to know written down.

I can retrieve it really quickly, really easily, but it's separate and I, it's not taking up brain space and I don't need to go out of my way to keep it going and keep it going, and keep it up to date and keep doing it. I can just dump everything there and continuously come back and refine and tweak and that, and have really strong and well-formed things over on my side that is just freeing me up from that mental capacity and also making it so that I don't need

to try remember things that I'm forgetting. It's essentially a notebook, but in public, digital garden style. But as much stuff as I can put on there. I do want to, I definitely do want to get into that. We'll talk about that in just a sec. Before we, um, before we leave the AI stuff, one of the things I see a lot of people doing now is using these LLMs, whether it be ChatGT or anything else, as a replacement to a search engine, a replacement to research skills. And in some cases cases this works fine.

Like if you're like, hey, tell me good local pizza shops. Like that, sure, whatever. But I'm seeing people ask actual complicated questions to these models. And in a lot of cases, they either have biases towards certain results or they're going to have a limited set of knowledge. And I'm sort of worried what's going to happen with because we're already seeing this generation of people growing up with AI, like right now, like people who are, you know, people who are five right now, they're going to go through their entire schooling, having access to this AI tooling from the beginning of their schooling. And I'm sort of worried what that's going to do to people's ability to actually find

information online without the reliance of these tools. Yeah. I mean, Google foo has been the term that's been used for, you know, being able to use Google to achieve your goals and actually figure things out. But the amount of people who can't even who aren't even aware of using quotes around strings in a search to like only include things including that thing. But I can see AI being good in that it's natural language and it's answering questions that way and it can pull information from a lot of different things. But in the same way, AI hallucinates and that is an issue that's fixed yet. And I don't think it's an issue that will ever be fixed because there is knowledge that is wrong. We don't know everything and people make things up and they post on the internet and that makes it into training data. So we're not going to be able

to fix that. And there were rumors of Google making a AI only search engine. I think they had done like the very briefest of tests or something to that effect. But I can't see it being a great thing in general. I can't see it solving more problems than it's creating, especially if it contains that same system of AI making things up, even if it doesn't know it. If I go over to a website, I can kind of get a gist from the website. If the person maybe knows that stuff, I can click around and get a vibe. AI search engines just spitting back a little bit of text and saying, Oh yeah, this is how the thing is. I, I've got no way to verify that without doing further searches, possibly

through the AI search engine. And I know how not to ask leading questions on a search engine. I'm not sure everyone else does. Yeah, this is a big problem with it, especially... It really depends on the topic, but there are definitely some topics where if you structure it in a certain way, it will just tell you what you want to hear, right? Like, you know, let's go with a fun one, right? Like if you want to ask about the the UFO thing that happened in the US not that long ago where everyone was convinced that UFOs were over their houses.

You can structure that in a way where it's gonna tell you the aliens are in your backyard and it's gonna be very sure of that. But UFOs are real and coming from my house. Yes Yeah You can always ask leading questions and that isn't something that search engine that doesn't happen with search engines either but AI will manipulate its answer to fit your question. And yeah, I can't see AI search, at least not with the current sort of AI systems you have at the moment, completely replacing traditional search systems. And especially because you need people to write things for the information to be up to date. And if you're no longer

funneling people to websites where they can make money or get absents or get donations or whatever, then people are going to stop writing. People are going to stop publishing other than the few people who are doing it just out of interest and just out of love for doing it. So you're doomed to, you know, extend essentially the training cutoff and have the cutoff be whenever AI search engines become the main thing. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I saw this article from TechRadar the other day. Oh. Oh, did I just someone just Wait am I not the one disconnecting today, well, this is new Oh, okay, um, I've already cut this section. Ooh, I love internet. Internet wonderful.

Good internet. Am I back? We are back, yes. I think my pitch is all wiped out. Yeah, no, that's dead. What's this? Should be using... Usually I'm the one disconnecting. This is fun and new. I like this. Oh, a double Australian. This is fun and new. I like this. Oh, a double Australian. We just found it happen. Okay, there we go.

Now let me just reload real quick. Hey, there we go. Oh, I should be back. Yeah, wonderful. And my little pitch has changed, so your continuity is all ruined. That's all good. I didn't stop the recording. I'll just cut this section out. So if you're good to get back to it, then I am as well. Yeah, excellent. Okay. So what I was saying before we died there is TechRadar put out this article the other day

called ChatGPT is the ultimate gaming tool. Here's four ways you can use AI to help you with your next playthrough. And basically it's TechRadar going over how to get ChatGPT to write a gamer guide for you. And this is fine, right like obviously it's kind of weird that a Tech outlet whose entire reason for existing is people writing God like articles and guides Is is arguing to do this but like this works as long as people are writing guides

But if you then have this generation of people who grew up using these AI-generated guides, at some point, somebody needs to actually write the thing. Because the AI is not going to play the game for you and work out how the game works. And we're not getting game guides written by the game developers anymore. So somebody needs to write the guide. Yeah, well, you mentioned the AI not playing the game for you.

Well, I know where you're going with this. Yeah. Yeah, this speaks of Microsoft and Co. Doing exactly that and having AI play your games, which kind of defeats the purpose of playing games. But anyway, have you been watching like Claude plays Pokemon? I'm aware of it. I've not been watching like, Claude plays Pokemon? I'm aware of it. I've not been watching it though. I'm not a big Pokemon fan, player or watcher, but it's been stuck horrifically. It gets into a position, it gets stuck and walks around in circles and keeps trying to do things and then runs out of context and stuffs itself up. Where are we right now? We are currently stuck in a menu.

Yeah. So, so it struggles. It usually gets there in the end just through a bit of dumb luck and, you know, random chance, but it gets stuck. Right now for anyone just listening, But it gets stuck. Right now for anyone just listening, it is currently in the party menu spamming cut with nothing to cut. Yes, beautiful, incredible. Yeah. So when they say AI writing game guides for video games, I do have to question that a little bit. Obviously, it's not playing the game in quite a sense at core blows. Pay Claude plays Pokemon is so you haven't got that issue of it, you know, getting confused as it, as it goes and backing itself into a corner. But if it hallucinates and then you end up running around in circles, then

that would just suck. That wouldn't be fun. Yeah. And also if you're using like an AI generated guide, you're missing out on all the really fun game FAQs, little ASCII arts. You know, so bit of a trade off there really. Yeah, well, look, you don't really get the game FAQ ASCII. Game FAQ isn't as popular as it used to be. I do miss that

though. I do remember looking up a guide for, I don't know, Jack two and seeing the ASCII out there, it was very nice to see. Um, yeah, yeah, it's a way to go. All monospace, all laid out proper. It's like a man page. Yup. Yup. Yeah.

People, people don't know how good they have it now with guides where there's like images all over the place and it like gives you nice layout Plain text document no formatting. Maybe the most formatting you're gonna get is some tabs. Maybe some centered text If you're lucky you'll get a line of hyphens of hyphens. But yeah, I mean, that's part of the internet that you kind of lose when you do everything through AI, like you lose those fun little bits and fun little things and little flares and fandangly bits and a bit of the pizzazz of the web. So that bit's

a bit of a shame to lose really in a sense. We've kind of been losing this anyway, right because look at a Look at YouTube YouTube's a great example of this How long have you been using YouTube for were you aware of like when it first started or? Did you know I? Been using YouTube since 2012 I want to say. Okay, okay, so I Pretty much have been using YouTube since like

2006 ish so I've seen pretty much everything happen on the site. I remember when You could say right now you have like a channel banner It's like the thing at the top. You could have a whole channel theme. So the banner, the sidebar, you could, it was, it's kind of like how on Tumblr you could like completely customize your profile. Like that is what you could do on YouTube. And over the years, it's kind of been simplified and simplified. It's been more streamlined and modernized and like Myspace was another good example of that where you could do a lot of stuff and again Tumblr like when people were using Tumblr a lot People I know a lot of people who their first experience writing front-end code was doing CSS on Tumblr and yes

CSS on Tumblr and Neopets as well is another popular one but you're seeing in favor of like streamlined design, a lot of the flare of the Internet on these big sites going away anyway. Like you look at. You look at a site from the nineties and just how, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't good UX. It wasn't good UI. It was chaotic.

It was a mess. You might have a custom cursor on the website but it was fun. Oh yeah absolutely but I mean there are still sites that are doing fun things like that, especially personal ones and you know there are some really fun like SaaS apps out there that are really good websites. I've not bought any of their products, but they've got really nice websites with cool 3d things and that, but you don't get that if you come to the internet, just for information and you're just coming to ask a chat bot, Hey, I want to know what the best app to do this is.

And then it just tells you, and then it gives you a download link or, or, or sends you straight to a dashboard or whatever You do lose that sort of flair. If you're using an AI model to essentially mediate the web for you. So that's a translation layer between everything. Yeah. You're basically, you're taking away, you're taking away the design and you're just streaming information into your brain. Yeah, absolutely.

And not, not just that, but you're not even really thinking about it. You're taking away that little bit of thought where it's, oh, how exactly would I be doing this? Does this exactly mean that? You're kind of limiting yourself to only taking away what the AI gives you. Mm-mm. So, yeah, I think it's a bit of a shame for the web, but I'm sure there'll be different ways that things add bent and things will adapt.

We're only a few years into this modern AI craze and I'm sure we'll see things change a lot as time goes on as they already have been. Yeah. I'm kind of curious to see if, I don't think it's going to be as bad as the dot com bubble and burst, but I'm kind of curious to see if we do... I guess you kind of already saw a little bit of that with DeepSeat coming out, but I'm curious to see if we're going to hit a point where companies... If we do hit some sort of wall again, right?

Because that's sort of the reason why AI died down for so long, where a wall was hit in the 80s, where there just wasn't the tech available to make anything people wanted to make. The theory was there, but the the performance wasn't there yet. And I do wonder if we're gonna hit a wall with the current approaches we have, and companies realize like the goals they have with it are not possible with the current approach. I mean, that's been the question ever since, you know, like, OpenAI started releasing their

models live, like people wondering, okay, this is great. It's not perfect and it's got a long way to go. And so far the answer that's been, yeah, kind of just more, more compute, better model, more data, better model, just keep throwing things at it. And it improves. Yeah. We're at the point now where a lot of these companies are like, Hey, we just, like, can we just build a power station at our data center? Yeah, that's it. Now, now it's happening.

It's happening. It's happening. It's happening. It's happening. It's happening. It's happening. It's happening. It's happening. It's happening. It's happening. It's happening. It's happening. It's happening. It's happening. Yeah, we're at the point now where a lot of these companies are like, Hey, we just like, can we just build a power station at our data center?

Yeah, that's it now. Now it's how much compute can we get? How much compute? Like we need compute give us compute and I don't know how far that will scale. No one does. Um, but if it keeps going on the rate it's going, it stands to reason that it's going to be a big thing and that it's going to keep going. But obviously no one can tell that and you're not going to get measured responses from any of the AI companies. They're not going to say, sorry guys, we've hit the limit. Stop investing in this now. I think the only like theoretical limit we have right now is, well, what happens when you have all of the data? Like you theoretically have all of the data on the internet. Like what do you-

You synthesize it. But then you've got the issues of, you know, like model collapse where it's just eating itself. But, yes, synthesizing data is potentially an option and something that's definitely being explored by those companies. But I don't think it's been done on a huge scale yet. I might be very wrong there, but I know some of the smaller models have done it. I'm not sure if it's been done with any of the really big ones yet. So, you know, that's consideration. Make the data. A room full of monkeys on the typewriters.

Yeah. You know, that's, that's actually where we go. Yeah. Just start throwing stuff at it. Just make stuff up random generated data. Sure. What, what could go wrong? Yeah.

What could go wrong? So you mentioned before that you were sort of using the website, using the blog as sort of a of a knowledge base of, like a brain outside your brain, a knowledge base to extract things, or to insert things into and extract things out of. Like, why did you start blogging in the first place? Because obviously that's sort of how you're looking at it now, but I can't imagine that's how you did it from the start.

I think I started writing just because I had ideas and I wanted to share ideas. Fair. And I've had a website for years and years and years, but never really published huge amounts on it. And it's been these past few years, I've sort of been publishing things and writing things and I've realized I've got things to say and I would like to say them and I'd like to share them. But if I'm to publish it on somewhere like a Blue Sky thread or a Fetibus thread or whatever, then it's very limited. It's rich.

It'll be out there and it'll exist, but then the silo might close down or whatever, and then it will disappear and go away over time. And I think being able to write and publish on your own site and being able to refine it over time and kind of build your ideas. Because when you, when you're thinking with your brain, you've got lots of little tangential little threads or reaching out like some squid tentacle

sort of things and being able to kind of bring them together and bring them into one cohesive mass, especially when you have to think linear, like you do them into one cohesive mass, especially when you have to think linear like you do with writing. You have to write in a single long cohesive stream, or at least attempt to. I think that that's kind of why I write, being able to have ideas, put them out there, and also forcing myself to think in a certain way, and being able to put my own thoughts into a cohesive string um for my own self-benefit for my own self-thought because yeah yeah to a certain extent you're not really thinking unless you're writing and there's some quote about that somewhere,

but not in my brain. I've not heard that one before. But yeah, writing just forces you to think about things in a certain way. And I think that that's the biggest draw for me and being able to have ideas and form them outside my brain and not just getting tucked away in my head.

Yeah. Yeah. I think writing is an interesting one, right? Cause a lot of people, like most communication is done through voice, right? Like, like, or if you're doing like video content online, but writing is something that's kind of... It's kind of a kind of a dying art form like... I don't know. Hold up. Let me just check something. American population literacy rate. Oh, no, no no don't look at that um

20 Jesus Christ uh 21 percent of adults in the US are illiterate 54 percent are below a sixth grade level oh my god i didn't really i'm going to assume that's English illiteracy. Ah, presumably. Yeah, because you definitely have people who can read and write other languages, especially in somewhere like America. I can't imagine it being completely that low and being able to, you know, communicate is an important part of being human. being human. But there are a lot of people who can read but don't and choose not to. And certainly is a... Well, like the extent to what they'll read is like social media posts.

Yeah. Although that isn't necessarily a terrible thing. People should read what they want to and be informed how they wish to an extent. Don't go reading some crazy, far out madness and base your entire idea on it. Read around, get an idea of things. But yeah, I think writing isn't necessarily a dying art form, but it's certainly a less emphasized thing in this age of social media, where lots of things are posted just as one-off little throwaway thoughts in little like Twitter threads or whatever, and then disappear after that. One big thing that I try to do whenever I write is write for the future.

Not, not just write for the time I'm writing, but right for the future and being able to update things. You'll see any post on my website will have a date of initial publication and a date of last significant modification. I'm always updating things that I have new thoughts and I have new ideas and writing is one of the only real ways to achieve that. You certainly can't do it with video content because you're not going to re-record something every time you have different ideas about it. It's not practical. But yeah, I think writing is important in being able to convey thought and share thought in accessible form.

Because you can also very easily translate writing, especially with like new AI models and things. If it's got enough context about what it's doing, you can generally do a pretty decent job as far as I've seen. So yeah, writing's great and important. I think a lot of people are just... Well, the thing with writing is it's less exciting for the consumer in a lot of cases, right? And this is why you see there's been a shift away from blogging content. Because if you go back in, you know, the earlier days of the internet,

before video became such a widespread thing you could do, and you could easily do, blogging was the primary form of, you know, long form idea distribution. But now you've seen a shift of that into video content. you know, long form idea distribution. But now you've seen a shift of that into video content. Video content, you can make a lot more visually stimulating, a lot more visually exciting. And obviously there is like the, like there is the throw away social media posts, there

are the throw away videos as well, where it's just, you know, it's, you've seen countless kids content or anything like that. It's just sort of mindless content for the sake of consuming. But I do wish there was, I do wish there was more emphasis put on written content. It's just, people seem less interested in actually going to that content. It's just people seem less interested in actually going to that content. I think part of why blogging was so big in the early days of the internet is that the internet was just hypertext. It was just text. As video became viable. Yeah. As video became viable, especially with like YouTube, where you can publish it and

this big huge company will host it for you, because video isn't viable to host on individual scale really, unless you have the finances for it. But I think that skewed towards video has been, oh, you can do video now. And then following up with people like watching video and They don't have to think when they're watching video You can you can put on a video in the background and just consume the video and it works You if you're reading something, you've got to be consciously engaged and reading it the entire time. I Can very easily sit down and watch a YouTube video, but when I'm reading some like technical paper or whatever

easily sit down and watch a YouTube video. But when I'm reading some technical paper or whatever, my brain will turn off after a certain point and I cannot read anymore. The words glaze across my eyes, but they do not hit my brain and they aren't comprehended, whereas I can quite happily watch video and even pass that point. So I think that's part of the appeal of video and part of why it's such a big thing on the internet at the moment. On that note, what are your thoughts on audio books as opposed to whether it be physical or an ebook, because I treat them in a similar way.

People who are book nerds are going to argue whether one or the other is better. But I think we can say listening to a book versus actually reading it. Because I think that's sort of the same, the same group there. Yeah, well, I'm I think audio books are fantastic. In terms of getting reading and the ears, I almost said hands, of more people. Yeah, audio books, great. They're a way to consume content and a way to consume media. That is just excellent. Not everyone has the time to sit down and read an extensive book, or has the ability to sit down and read an extensive book. But most people have some means of consuming audio books and can find some time to do so. I'm not personally a huge audio book consumer. I'm not personally a huge audiobook consumer. I was when I was very young and I'll get them on cassette and CD. But yeah, audiobooks are a fantastic way for people to consume media. And I can completely understand why some people's preference is well over reading. Yeah. But at the same time, it does sort of have that same problem where you

can just put an audiobook on in the background and it's sort of just there as background noise as opposed to you actually understanding the information being provided, right? Like if it's some, you know, you've got an audiobook about the biography of a footballer, like it's some, you know, you're, you've got an audio book about the biography of a footballer. Like it's not, it's not exactly complicated information, but if we're talking some more technical piece, some book on philosophy, I can see you going through that with an audio form and not retaining a lot of that information. Well, you could say the same about reading when your eyes glaze over and you're not actually comprehending what you're reading. I think people, I think, maybe perhaps consume too much content

and thus disemphasize what they are and actually when they are actually consciously trying to consume something, it's a little bit disincentivized. But yeah, I think no matter how you publish something, people are gonna ignore it, and people are gonna have it on the background, or people are gonna just glance over it or whatever.

But I think audio books and video, it's certainly a way to get information out there. It's just, you do probably have a lesser chance of people consciously paying attention the whole time, but that doesn't make it any lesser of a medium. My only real gripe with video and why I don't tend to publish video is that it's hard to edit video After you've published it, especially on YouTube. You'd have to read upload entire video. So it makes it a little bit difficult to Do things like I do where I'm consciously going through and Upgrading and tweaking and changing things over time. It makes it very difficult to you know do that in a video form. No I I agree um I yeah no that's

fair and I think it's just a different way of approaching getting your ideas out there if you want like some topics it's a lot easier to Explain your idea especially when you're really taking advantage of The video medium like a great channel Three blue one brown where you really take advantage of I have video I can demonstrate mathematical concepts in a form that makes them very consumable, in a way that people can actually understand rather than just formulas written down on a page or image demonstrations. Yeah, absolutely.

And that's a fantastic example of using video as a medium to enhance the point rather than just making a point and using video. Yeah, playing to the advantages of your medium is excellent. And it'd be great if everyone did that, but obviously not everything can take advantage of how it's being presented and not everyone is presenting things as they, as they will. But yeah, I think that's a fantastic example of using video to the advantage of the content being created and being published.

Well, this is kind of a complete segue into a whole different topic. But I saw this post on your site and I, when I, when I read through it, I kind of had, I had to bring it up. It's the one on biohacking. I, I Do you want it, I kind of had, I had to bring it up. It's the one on biohacking. I want to see the magnet. Sorry? Do you want to see the magnet? Uh, sure. Yeah.

I figured, I figured you would, I figured you'd bring it up. So I did make sure I was, uh, prepared. All right. We should have transitioned over to this. Is the video frozen? Yes, it is frozen. Give me a second. That's the wonders of... Okay. Let's see if we can get this working.

Wonderful. You're just getting a nice crotch shot at the moment, aren't you? I know I'm seeing, I'm just seeing nothing at this point. Oh, all right. Let me just disconnect really quick and I'll pop back in. I wonder if this is going to work. Hey, it's working. And you can see me. Yep.

Yeah. So, this is my hand. It's a very exciting hand because it's got a little something implanted within it. So use a really quite big needle to do so. And you can see a tiny little scar there. Yep. Yeah. So if I grab a magnet like so, and to all the audio listeners, I'm very sorry, but what

you're seeing is my hand and there's a tiny little scar. And it's on the blade of my hand, so the side by the pinky. And if I grab a magnet, there you are. You can see the skin being pulled. Are you sliding on outside the frame? There you go. There we are. The skin being pulled and distorted by the magnet. I'm sorry if this gets you demonetized. Yeah. Uh, magnet, uh, attaches on the hand.

And yeah, it's really fantastic. And you might be able to see that little bump there and it pulls the skin. So it's tiny little capsule, uh, coated in a bio glass just under under my skin there Real funky and uh, don't even see it once like that So, um I Where do we even go? Where do we start with this one? Because I feel like there's a space that people

I didn't have any knowledge about I didn't even know this is a thing that people did. But I read through the entire post and like this was the one where like, you know, sometimes they get distracted when I'm reading something. I was reading through this like, I just have to keep going. I have to see what this is about. Yeah, so the main purposes are either sensing or lifting. So being able to lift things, obviously, it's a magnet, magnets attract other magnets and other certain things. So you can lift things, pick them up by bottle caps and paper clips and all sorts using the

magnet, which is fantastic and a great party trick. And you can pick up the spoon and you can stir your tea with it. And very good. Um, and then the other benefit is being able to sense things. So being able to feel a magnetic fields, um, and like, it's like a sixth sense, almost like an extra sense that you can feel and being able to detect things that really rad Yeah, it's weird it's very weird what made you decide to do that?

I found out about it years and years ago, and I went oh, that's really cool and then Eventually, I decided oh yeah, actually that is really cool. I would like one of those. And then last year I finally put the bullet and got one and I got it implanted by a professional. It's the Dangerous Things XG3 V2. The V1 had a little bit of a flaw to it with the cap popping off and some very rare cases so the V2 is just a little like cylinder. I think it's three millimeters by 15 millimeters. I don't know what that is in American units

But Yeah, it's your job Americans But it just sits inside my hand. It's got a little magnetic core with a bit of glass around it, so it's bio safe. And it also means that my fleshy skin bits and fleshy muscle and whatever won't attach to it. So to get it out, I can just make a small incision,

then use a bigger magnet, and it would go, and get attach to it. So to get it out, I can just make a small incision, then use a bigger magnet and it would go and get sucked right out. So yeah, it's a bit odd, bit weird, but incredibly cool, incredibly fun and incredibly interesting to feel magnetic fields and be able to detect them and identify them and stuff of that nature. Does having that ever cause any issues with like metal detectors or if actually there's that one and also if you ever go near like you know in the rare situation you're near a big electromagnet could that be a concern?

If I have a magnet near me like those little magnets that you saw pulling my skin there. Um, if I leave that on for too long, it will pinch and it will start to hurt. It's essentially like someone pinching your skin. Um, but from the inside, which is a horrific thing to say. Um, so with, um, like, uh, MRIs and things, it can be an issue. So obviously big spinny magnet. So there have been people who've gone through MRIs at like a low Tesla with a magnet implant and have been fine, maybe a little bit of discomfort.

I wouldn't wanna go through one personally. So I get it removed or look for something alternative in that situation. And as for airport metal detectors, I haven't had an opportunity to test one yet, but I have got a international flight coming up in a couple of months, I think. So I'll be able to test it then and I'll be able to let you know. But people have generally said that, no, it is an issue. It's such a small little thing. It's not even really detected.

Right. Cause I know my, um, my, uh, my stepdad, he has a fake hip, right? Like something like that is going to be detected, um, going through this, but. Yeah. That's an easier one to explain than, uh explain than why you have a magnet in your hand. Yeah. Cause it was cool. Mr airport security, man.

It was incredibly cool. And I really wanted one. And, uh, yeah. Um, the one thing I, uh, read about was that people are experiencing like they're, um, magnetic sense in like dreams like like dreaming and experiencing the magnet Like the sense of it and that would be really cool. I don't dream often I only dream every couple of months so I would really like to have a dream where I feel like magnetic fields But I don't know

So besides obviously, you know, being a party trick, which you know is neat, like what can you actually do with it? Well, the other day, well, actually, just one thing that I do quite frequently, even my laptop's off and I want to tell how much charge it has without having to turn it on and go through all the process, I just put my hand near its power brick and feel the field. And then if it's like so, so I can feel a field, it's essentially like a fluttering. Think of someone like blowing on your hand, but you feel that sensation slightly under your skin. It's it's not exactly something that's easy to explain. But essentially that

sensation. And when my computer is really low, I can put my hand near my computer's power brick and really feel it like it's really fluttering and I can really tell it's going. And as it charges up, that sensation goes away. So I can vaguely gauge how much power it's got without having turned my computer on. So that's a really handy one. Um, that is really good.

Um, picking up paper clips off the floor when I'm trying to be cool, uh, is a good one because I've got lots of paper clips around cause paper clips are so much fun to play with. Um, so that that's another one. Oh, I diagnosed a microwave the other day. OK. Assuming the microwave isn't shielded fantastically well, I can feel the sensations in the microwave when it's on.

So I used that to help diagnose a broken one a little while ago. That feels mildly concerning. No, no, it's fine. Fine. All microwaves you can get a bit of a feel from. But some are stronger than others, which is the mildly concerning part. But yeah, just lots of day-to-day uses and day-to-day sensing things around you that you wouldn't necessarily

expect otherwise and just picking up on things and going, oh, that's interesting or, oh, that's magnetic. And, well, I didn't, I didn't know that that was magnetic or I didn't know that would give off a signal or anything like that. It's really cool in that regard. Well, how strong is the magnet? Cause you mentioned like picking up paper clips, And it's really cool in that regard. Well, how strong is the magnet? Cause you mentioned like picking up paper clips, but like if you would have have a chain of them, how many would you be able to pick up? I did count this at one point. Uh, and then promptly forgot.

I think I had about 14 going. And then I ran out of the paper clips. Um, but yeah, you can get quite a bit going together, but it does fluctuate a little bit in strength. So when I first got it in, it wasn't super strong, but past couple of months, that past month especially, it seems to have gotten stronger again, so I can feel things better and I can lift things better.

So that's something to consider. Um, Oh, and another use that just popped into my mind is when I want to discreetly turn off my computer, I just put my hand over the lid switch and, uh, cause it's got a magnet in it and it has a magnet lid switch. It just turns it off. It's fantastic. I need to place it very specifically, but when I do, it just. Logs off real good.

Great. When someone's looking over your shoulder and you don't want to be like conspicuous by reaching out for the power button, just magic. So a magnet's obviously, it's just a magnet, but like what do other people do? I, again, I don't really know much about this space. Like what are, what are other things people might do in this space? Uh, so there's a whole scene in this sort of, uh, like transhumanism sort of thing. So lots of people get like a RFID or NFC chips so they can unlock like office doors or have links to their websites in their hand.

I do remember someone, I think was in Sydney, did this with whatever their like, um, train card system is called. And I think the card ended up like being denied at some point. Oh, yes. Yes. I did read about that one. Yeah, because you, I think he got in trouble because his card wasn't, he didn't have the actual physical card. He had taken all the bits out of it, like just the antenna and gotten that implanted. So it wasn't valid as a card. That's part of that term, the service that when you're using a card, you have the card,

but his was in his hand or wherever. So that was why he was denied in that case. But I believe that his implant was fine in that regard. So it's certainly something you can do. I'm not sure if it was actually he got the card implanted or if he just cloned it onto something. Yeah, I'm not, I don't fully remember the details. I, it's a long time ago when I read the story. Yeah, nor do I, but that's certainly something you can do. And you can do that with our credit cards as well.

Australian credit cards and debit cards and that. You can't have them in like implants because of certain things about wearables and that. There are only certain permitted things. You could a few years ago, but you can't at the moment to my knowledge. So if you want to get your card implanted into you, you can send off your card and get the little chip in it, assuming it's the right type of card, separated from its plastic shell and then bundled up and coated in a bio safe material and then sent back to you to get someone to implant it for you.

And then you can have your card implanted in your hand and you can just tap and pay with your hand or your arm or your elbow or wherever you want to get it implanted. So that's certainly a cool use. But other people get Blinkies. So Blinkies are little chips like my magnet, about same size, and they have little LEDs in them so they can light up. So lots and lots of funky things people are doing. But yeah, the magnet was the one I wanted and I found the most kind of use cases for. Just being able to do things with magnets is sick. Do you have any concerns with having it in there? MRIs, because MRIs, big magnet, small magnet.

Sure. I mean, like, just like general, like general health concerns for having that implanted. Uh, no, not really. It's coated in a completely bio-safe glass material. So it's, it's not going to leach into my body or anything unless it was was really damaged. If it was damaged, I'd be able to tell because my hand would be funny. And also, I would know if it's damaged because if it's damaged, my hand sustained some sort of pain. So I'd be able to tell fairly quick. And I got it implanted in such a place in my hand that it's really quite a fleshy bit. That side of your hand is really quite fleshy. So it's going to absorb any shock really.

So I've not really got any health concerns about it. Someone feared that it might attract all of the iron in my blood into that specific location and then would block my bloodstream and I'd die. Don't know about that one. Yeah, no, if that was the case, I think MRIs would be killing people pretty quickly. Yeah, well, that would be a bad way to go, wouldn't it? But yeah, not really any health concerns other than in an urgent situation, MRIs, someone coming up to me with a giant electromagnet for giggles and ripping it out of my hand, or it being damaged, but it being damaged would be such a... I'd have a lot bigger issues, we'll say that. Right, because I was going to say, like, I would be concerned with, like, knocking that part of my hand.

Right, because I was going to say, like, I would be concerned with, like, knocking that part of my hand. But during healing, definitely have to be careful. But like, right now I can smash it against things and I don't even notice it's there unless I feel a magnetic field like the ones in my laptop chassis. So, yeah, it's not really an issue from a taking damage perspective. There was, I think the previous iteration of the magnet I have now, there was a failure when someone, I think, got their hand stepped on by a horse or something to that effect. Well, I think you're going to have more concerns if you get stepped on by a horse. Yeah, I believe that was the failure method for one of them.

Don't quote me on it. But yeah, that's obviously a point of failure. Right, yeah. If you do enough damage to break your hand. Yeah. Then, yeah. You've got bigger issues. You've got a broken hand as well.

Yeah. Same thing with it hitting like a curie temp and the magnet becoming useless. Someone cited that to me. They were like, but if it gets super hot, then it will, you know, like it won't work as a magnet if my hand gets hot enough for the magnet to hit the curie temp, I've got so many more issues. I don't know what that number is.

Rather high. Uh, from memory, I think it was 200 degrees. Yeah, okay. Is that right? Ah, I think it's for the. Oh, no. Okay. Oh, yeah. Okay. About 300. So again, if that's an issue for me, I've got much bigger issues. But yeah, it's generally pretty safe and people have had magnets for a long time. It's not an entirely new thing and it's manufactured by a reputable company. Dangerous things are fantastic and their support's really good. So yeah, completely happy with it. And my installer was fantastic as well.

So I haven't got really too many stresses there. Okay. Yeah, I was just kind of curious about it. As I said, I wasn't got really too many stressors there. Okay, yeah, I was just kind of curious about it. As I said, I wasn't really that... Again, the only thing I'd known about this space was the one person with the train card. That's pretty much all I heard about it. I feel like I'd heard someone maybe doing this in the past, but I didn't really know what exactly people were doing.

Yeah, it's a really exciting space. And there are some people on the really cutting edge, who are doing really insane things, like putting in huge implants and like stretching the skin around it and doing it themselves and just going at their hand with scalpels and things, not quite my style, but, uh, certainly, certainly I'm appreciative of them putting their bodies in the line so I can get crazy stuff that is done. Um, I guess, I guess the last thing I want to get to, uh, again, complete segue to a whole different thing.

Um, the, the piece you put out on,, because I grew up playing Minecraft as well, and I didn't start with, you mentioned you started with the Pocket Edition, I started on Java Edition very early beta. I was Java Edition from the very start. Yeah, right. I think my first exposure would have been It's probably a few years before I really got like the game myself. Just what watching youtubers play it and

Being being able to see people play minecraft and that kind of got me wanting to get it but I Haven't didn't really have a great gaming computer at the time. Don't have a great gaming computer now. Don't really have. Yeah. So very exciting to be able to play the game I remember that years and years ago and then leveling up to the better editions later on. Yeah. Every so often I get recommended Minecraft content and a lot of the stuff, like there's

this niche of people who don't want to play the modern editions where they want to play only alpha, like very early alpha or very early beta because they feel like the game, there's just too much to it now and it's lost a lot of that early charm. Yeah, I'm somewhat like that. I very much love the legacy console editions. If I'm playing Minecraft, I'll go for the legacy console editions because there was just so much care put into those versions and some quality of life things. And they're just really lovely versions to play.

Um, I did see that someone or a group of people working on a decompiling legacy console edition. Yeah, I saw that on GitHub, so that'll be exciting if that happens, but of course there's also a lot of work being done in compatibility layers for the Xbox 360 at the moment as well. So I think the Xbox 360 edition is getting a little bit of support going around. And there is the PS4 emulator. I'm not sure how well that runs the game. But yeah, I'm very excited for all of that and all that work's been put in the Minecraft and keeping those legacy console editions around. Well considering there was all that work done on Sonic Unleashed,

doing the recompilation of that, getting it running on PC, Minecraft makes sense as something people would go to as like a something to mess around with. I never played the console editions myself, as I said I was like doing Java at the Um, I never had a good PC at the time. I was just playing the game at, you know, 15 FPS, 20 FPS, whatever, whatever it was run at, uh, lower my render distance as far as possible. Um, but I don't know, like there's, I feel like a lot of it is simply just nostalgia. You know, you hear, you hear like C for 18 Sweden and it just does something in your brain. Yeah, so much of Minecraft to me is just nostalgia. And I think that's why people gravitate towards those older editions.

It's trying to recapture that time or time period where things were a bit different. And you could play Minecraft and you could, you could play Minecraft and you could sit down just trying to recapture that. But yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of games like that. Some of the games still hold up, right? But there's some games where I, I know that if I ever go back to it, it's, it's

not going to be the same experience. And I, I just, I just don't back to it, it's not gonna be the same experience and I just... I just don't want to change the memory I have. I played... I played six years of RuneScape. I know I could go play like old school RuneScape. I just know it's not gonna be that same feeling and I don't want to... I like the nostalgia being there. I don't want to ruin that. Yeah, it's like I haven't replayed Portal. It's one of my favorite games, but I haven't replayed it. But there's a certain magic that I captured with playing that. And I don't think I could recapture it again.

I don't want to spoil that previous memory. So I don't. Yeah, it's like a number of things, right? You know, you have a job now. I don't want to spoil that previous memory. So I don't. Yeah. It's, it's like a number of things, right? You know, you, you have a job now, you have responsibilities, you know, when, when you're, you know, you're like, I've gone back and played games like kingdom hearts again and Jack and Daxter, but like, you know, when, when you're 10, you're playing a game like this, you boot up the PS2, it's just, you can, if it's the school holidays, you can just play the game all day.

Like you don't have any, you don't, you like, you're, someone's going to bring you food at some point and- Responsibilities? What are those? Yeah. Yeah. Like a lot of people try to, try to recapture that. And it's just, it's never going to be the same. And I don't know.

I think it's better to try to have new experiences than try to recapture what you had when you were a kid. Cause it's never going to be like what it was when you were a kid. Yeah. There are people who very much live in the past and, you know, that's how they go. Oh, let's see. Wait, he's fully gone. Um.

Where did he go? I don't know if he's gonna come back? I assume he will? I don't know what's happening here Oh Like I'm connected to the server it's not even my connection this time. I don't think so No, I reload is still not Um, i'll give it i'll give a sec, see if he shows back. Oh, there you are.

The wonders of internet. Internet wonderful. Well, you know. I think my last words might have been, and that's how they go. And then I... Yeah. Yeah, yeah, something like that. Anyway, we're pretty much at the point where I'd want to start signing the episode off anyway.

So I guess if people want to check out your stuff, anything like that, where can they go over to HTTPS colon slash slash veil dot rocks that that would be the place to go sweet um why did I close that what why did I close my browser window okay Okay, well give me one sec. And there it is. Now people can see it. Yes, go to Vale Rocks. There are blog posts over there and you can read them and they're very interesting. Thank you. No, seriously, I do really like the biohacking one. I thought that one was very interesting. If you're going to read none of them except one, go read that one. It's a very interesting post and you're gonna learn something that you probably had no idea about. Yeah, do just be careful about the slightly bloody image in it, but it's blurred so you'll be aware.

Yeah, you also have your blue sky on also Vale Rocks is yeah always at veil dot rocks and then I'm on the Feddyverse as at veil at Feddy dot veil dot rocks if you go to veil dot rocks you'll find veil dot rocks things and there are lots of veil dot rocks things yeah they're linked down the bottom here yeah um yeah this was fun I enjoyed this yeah absolutely it was thank you very much for having me on Yeah, no Lovely to chat

Yeah, if you ever want to come back on do another one. I'm more than happy to chat. Yeah, I really enjoyed this and Yeah, yeah Excellent. Okay as my outro, um, I Do Linux videos six-ish days a week over on a Brody Robertson occasion I talk about things and not Linux go check out the video on the URL post that was a fun one I like that one um I've got the gaming channel Brody on games right now I'm probably actually you know what I don't know any stream because by the time this comes out I might have finished the games I've been doing so go over there and you'll see games. Yeah

If you're listening to the audio version of this you can find the video version on YouTube at tech over tea If you're watching the video you can find the audio pretty much every audio podcast platform. It's on Spotify It's on Apple whatever it's called on Spotify. We have video which is cool if you like that Yeah, anyway, um, I'll give you the final word. What do you want to say? What do I want to say final word? I never tell people they're doing this always fun. Oh Oh, I know I know Bloviate Bloviates my final word. There you go.

Most people don't give a single final word, but sure that works. Final word? Nah, nah, I gotta get one word in. Bloviate. There you are. Perfect.