Democracy and Data

Over time I’ve heard a lot of pushback to the idea that you need to protect your personal information and privacy, “I don’t mind personalised ads”, “so what if they have it, they’re not going to do anything with it”, etc. To those people (and for my own entertainment and enjoyment) I present this (admittedly probably not unique) argument.

Imagine the government had access to everything about you. What you wrote, what you watched, what you said, what you questioned, what you believed, what you thought you understood, and more. Now, assuming you live in a half decent democracy, you probably have some control over what happens to this information, government can’t share it, can’t do much with it, can’t leak it, so on. Most people would say this isn’t great. They would call it authoritarian, totalitarian, distopian and other buzzwords for bad governments. Now imagine this scenario, but this information is held by a random person, all you know about them is their name, they have all the same information, but you have no control over them, they are not beholden to you through any means, they can do what they wish with the data. All that’s limiting them is a slap on the wrist from someone you picked out, whenever they do something wrong.

This is basically what is happening, right now.

While some would argue that this is a strawmaned version of the system in place, I maintain that you can still clearly see the inherent problem, authoritarian organisations having near complete control over the entire populations personal information. This is why people say don’t tell corporations your real birth date, don’t tell them your name, and why we get so worried when Facebook starts forcing people to put in their real name.

You wouldn’t get into a white van, don’t sign up for Facebook.

Thanks for reading.

Tuesday October 8, 2024

Games

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Computer Science

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Today I learned

Flappy Bird and learning something new

So a few days ago in class we have finally started learning some basic python, nothing much, just variable types and functions. Anyway I’m talking about this because in that class I began goofing off and started to tinker with making a simple game in pygame while everyone else was making a calculator. I eventually ended on flappy bird because it fit well into the skills that I had with pygame at that point. Didn’t get far in that short class but after school I came back and actually kept working on it because it was a lot of fun.

I found it fun to work on something outside a traditional game engine. I’ve tried before but never really got far but idk, it was different this time. I ended up enjoying working on it so much that I kept working on it, polishing and making interesting things like looping backgrounds, showing text, messing with sprites and collisions.

All of this to say that working outside a game engine and learning something new was really refreshing (who knew…) and I hope I can do more of this kinda thing from now on, just doing something different and fun.

Thursday April 18, 2024

Games

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Computer Science

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Today I learned

Hole in one… Year!

Today I continued my now habbit of switching projects daily by finishing what I wanted to do with the mining game (infinite world and saving/loading) before I was reminded of a game me and a friend made a while ago for a game jam that we wanted to keep working on. Long story short today I added multiplayer to this: Hole in one… Year!.

We are also working on adding cosmetics that show up both in single and multiplayer (Bread, the friend I’m working with has made some amazing cosmetic items that I can’t wait to implement into the game). Because of our plans for the game we havent yet released the multiplayer (and all the other tweaks we have made since the game jam) onto itch. We are waiting to finish cosmetics + some other things before we do that. We havent even let most of our other friends know we are working on it again (shows them for not reading my blog).

Anyway I’m actually really proud of myself for finishing an update like this in a single day to such a high standard and I can’t wait to impress the 1 person (my Dad) that reads my blog when it releases.

Or I loose interest in the project again and it never ends up seeing the light of day but on this side of the internet we try to stay positive so lets hope that never happens 👍

Monday February 5, 2024

Games

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Computer Science

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Today I learned

Procedural Generation Mayhem

So ages and ages ago I had a really early build of a kind of terraria/minecraft inspired 2d side scrolling procedural generation simulator. It was mostly built of of copied code and I had no idea how the procedural generation part of it worked but I was really proud of it and even managed to get a working chunk streaming and save and load system. So today I thought I would open it and just fuck around adding stuff that I felt like, but on opening it, it was so unstable that it wouldn’t actually run for me so I ended up saying ‘fuck it’ and making a new branch of the repo to re-write it and hopefully get some experience making an actual procedural game myself.

I knew the basics of Perlin noise and heighmaps and all that jazz but I decided now was to time to see if I had what it takes to make it myself from scratch and so far I think I’ve done pretty well.

I kept a bunch of the player code (no reason re-making that when I already have a perfectly fine bean running around) and sprites but all of the terrain, chunking, and block systems are now gone. As of writing I have gotten a basic setup for chunks (so in future I can work on infinite terrain) and some VERY basic Perlin noise based procedural generation. I’ve got a lot of numbers I can fuck around with and I’ve made something that looks promising (See image below).

If you are interested in the code I’ve gotten so far its on the GitHub Repository here: Mining Game Re-Write

The values I am using for the generation can also be seen in the attached images

Sunday February 4, 2024