From thoughts to text

The thoughts and text on this blog is mine, and mine alone.

  • Grand Theft Auto

    It’s hard to imagine that the most anticipated — and expensive — video game of all time, GTA VI, started out as a top-down game where you stole cars, drove around and killed people.

    And except for the top-down part, I’ve just described every GTA game in the series. So, in addition to top-down, let’s add that the first game had crude graphics and an annoying collision detection.

    Start of the first level in Grand Theft Auto in all its 4:3 aspect ratio glory. The view zooms out when you are driving fast so you can actually see the car (or any other object) you inevitably are going to crash into.

    But for some reason, it was fun. A lot of fun. And smooth. At least if you had a 3Dfx card. The effect it had on the game was huge.

    So, the first game was top-down. The expansion pack was, obviously, top-down. GTA 2 was, once again, a top-down. All with the same game mechanics, more or less. And then came GTA III…

    With GTA III, everything changed — except for the stealing, driving and killing; that was the same. But it was no longer hard to imagine that this game could go places.

    GTA III introduced proper storyline, a protagonist, roman numerals, and — best of all — a full 3D, third-person, open world. You could roam around in a sprawling environment.

    One year later they followed up with GTA: Vice City. Which might be my favorite in the series by the soundtrack alone.

    So, in November, GTA VI will be released. And it will be big. It will be 3D. And the soundtrack will probably be epic. And a lot of people will call in sick just to play the game.

    It’s amazing when looking back at the first game. How much has changed, and how much has stayed the same.

    Playing the original

    If you want to try the original game today, I would recommend using dgVoodoo2. There is a guide on Steam on how to use it. Rockstar did give this game away for free at one point in time, so it should be possible to find it online.

    One tip: Set aspect ratio to 4:3 in dgVoodoo2, otherwise you will not see everything you need for the game to make sense.

    Fitting a city into 32 MB of memory

    And if you are interested in the more technical side of things, I found this video fascinating. It’s about how Rockstar fit an entire city (GTA III) into the memory of PlayStation 2.

  • Om Malik has died

    The world of tech is in mourning after learning that Om Malik has died at 59.

    I remember reading GigaOm, along with other tech blogs, back when I was young and hopeful.

    Rest in peace.

  • M-series Macs are Amazing

    I am blown away by this Apple M-series. And by blown away, I mean the complete opposite, because there are no fans. Nothing blows!

    And it seems like I bought it just at the right time. The new prices Apple announced today has made my MacBook Air 3000 NOK (around $300) more expensive in Norway.

    The price change did not come as a surprise. Tim Cook did give a warning last week that prices would have to increase due to high cost on memory and storage chips. The same chips AI eats for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

    I have not yet put the Mac through its paces. But in my experience, most laptops get a heatstroke just by playing a YouTube video these days.

  • (A)I made a WordPress Widget

    What I made is not important — it’s a list of kayak courses and available spots.

    I already had created the logic — no AI needed for logical thinking1. So I already had the authentication, the API calls, the custom filtering and the presentation layer.

    But since I didn’t have any experience with WordPress plugins/widgets, I hosted it on a separate domain and embedded it onto the web site. This has worked for years.

    However, there were a few drawbacks. Mainly that it was dependent on my private website to be up in order to work. On the positive side; when things broke, I could easily debug it on my own server. Like the time the API stopped working, and it turned out I had been using an internal API endpoint, and not the one in the documentation. Whoops.

    So, with AI being all over the place, and Microsoft pushing CoPilot on everything that can be displayed on a screen, I decided it could not hurt to ask it to make a simple Widget that I could plug my logic into.

    I asked CoPilot to create a basic Widget. I asked it to display a placeholder text for now, but that I needed a settings interface to enter username and password for the API authentication.

    When I tried this crude plugin, nothing worked. I wrote to CoPilot: “it doesn’t work”, to which it basically replied “Your code is wrong”, and then continued to present the right way to do it.

    And this is what surprised me the most. Several times, CoPilot presented some code, just to lament me about it later.

    Yes, I know there are other models2 out there that are a lot better for programming. But I only needed to make a simple template for a WordPress widget, not make an E-commerce system from scratch.

    But part of me wonder; do these models behave this way just to make people spend as many tokens as possible?

    Credit where credit is due

    But I have to give CoPilot some credit as well. First, it did eventually present a workable Widget that I could put my logic into. Secondly, it created new token manager for me. My previous solution was to use Curl to get the API token bearer and store in a file. Hardly best practice.

    I also learned a little bit more about WordPress.

    1. I know some people automatically thinks text with em dash is written by an AI, but everything I publish I write myself. ↩︎
    2. I am not a programmer. I do this for fun. If I have used the wrong tool for the job, so be it. ↩︎

  • Where did UX go wrong?

    Warning: If you click on any of the links below, you will be amused — then you will be annoyed to discover that the UI you use every day is shit.

    I wanted to complain about how bad User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) has become the last decade, or two. Then I found out that people already to this — so I don’t have to.

    But I still want to complain. Because UX,for the most part, is horribly broken. But again, most examples are already covered by the mentioned website, so go there, see for yourself.

    Like, what happened to borders and contrast? I can’t see where one window ends and another begin. There is no border, and the titlebar — the one with the text “File Explorer” in it — is white, just like the background of the window behind it.

    Where does one window end and another begin?

    Contrast used to be a thing. But at least it is “on brand” for Windows.

    And while we are on the topic, what about some dark patterns? It’s when developers actively try to mislead you into something. Like this: Ryanair dark UX patterns.