State of the Dickion

Hello friends! Before I get into what else I've been doing, here's a big dump of my thoughts on why AI as it's being sold to America is a lie and why the American companies behind the push are terrible:

https://richwhitehouse.com/index.php?postid=78

I can't fault you if you don't want to burn the 15 minutes reading through it, but I do recommend it no matter where you fall in the range of pro/anti/neutral-AI. I think I have as much sociology secretly stuffed into my brain as I do engineering at this point, so every once in a while I manage to have useful thoughts, and even less often I decide to dump them all out even though I know that few to no people will want to read them!

My own AI usage stance hasn't really changed since my last post on it here, it's still not good enough to do original work to my standard, and babysitting it function-to-function is more depressing than productive. For stuff that doesn't really matter, I'm strongly against using AI in such a way that it provides a private company (OpenAI/Anthropic/etc.) with any direct financial or data-oriented benefits. I do highly encourage any use which might poison the well.

When it comes to offline models, I see it as a situation very much like "what do I do with this obviously lost or stolen laptop that I found laying on the sidewalk?" Writing articles like the above is my way of knocking on doors nearby and reporting to the nearest lost and found. I've done my due diligence. If no one claims the thing, at some point it doesn't make a difference to anyone whether I use it or not. The theft has done its damage.

As for what I'm currently doing, I'm in the middle of adding a whole bunch of scripting functionality including a new script-driven rendering interface. I have some initial games in mind that are going to benefit from this, and if all goes to plan, Jaguar fans should be pleased. Reverse engineering is definitely an area where I would speed up from using AI (and would frequently get irritated by its hallucinations), but even ethics aside, I don't really want to lose that muscle. It's a muscle the rest of these slop-fiends don't even have! So for the time being I'm still doing all of the work by hand, digging through disassembly in Ghidra with no AI assistance like some kind of LUDDITE. (this is a joke, because digging through disassembly is a very non-luddite thing to do, and certain mutant breeds of 4chan troll would still be eager to call me a luddite for my stance on AI/Open Source/etc., the joke is even funnier now that I've explained it)

I am moving pretty slowly at the moment, so apologies for the lack of exciting news or releases otherwise. It's hard to keep up motivation these days, I'm still a little burned out from my last big contract and trying to let myself recover without diving too hard into anything.

I also started learning Japanese the other month. This doesn't have much to do with my work here, other than to say I am eventually planning to do my own Japanese localization treatments without any AI assistance. Because hell, why not? That's not why I started learning the language, obviously. It was in part because going to Japan is cheap as hell at the moment thanks to the exchange rate (their suffering is the world's gain, hooray), and in part because much of my youth was spent enjoying Japanese culture. No, not anime, I keep any joy I've ever experienced from anime secret and buried in shame. I'm more of a Dir en grey type, no one anywhere else in the world really expresses the disdain so many of us feel for our own society like those fine young men. I guess they're fine old men now. Anyway, now seemed as good a time as any to pick up a new set of knowledge that fewer people are about to start bothering to pick up thanks to LLM's, and I'm hoping to take a trip over sometime next year.

I'm also going to Ireland on November 4th, more business than pleasure, it's a recon trip to do and find all of the things I can't do/find remotely in preparation to move there next year. Hopefully-saner healthcare system, here my daughter and I come! Still booking up the time, but the plan is for it to basically be a non-stop fact-finding mission. But if anyone in that area wants to meet up while I'm over there, feel free to poke me!

I don't want to promise myself into a date for delivering on the stuff I'm working on at the moment, because I feel like it would reset my de-burning-out progress, but... hopefully soonish! Realistically, probably sometime after returning from the land of ire. Patreon support has fallen off pretty significantly lately, which I can't complain about. I've been pretty inactive, and it's a terrible time for a lot of people economically. If you feel bad for not being able to throw money at me, please don't! That contract was a stressful bastard, but it paid well, so I'm good for the time being. That's not to say I don't (highly) value the Patreon-related income, and I do still see it as a possible path to being able to do what I really want to do full-time if I can reverse the trend and start growing it again. Although I also expect the entire product-facing landscape of things that I love (namely, emulation and retro enhancements) to be fully saturated by clueless Claude users in the near future, so it's hard to imagine a financially sustainable future doing projects like that now. Oh well, for now let's pretend people will still care about quality and integrity in a few years.

It's a pretty shitty and upsetting time in the world altogether, lots of threats to human health and happiness coming together. So stay safe, whether you're able to throw money at me or not, if you're supporting me in whatever way you can then you have my love and gratitude. And for any of you that have been around in the years since I started this thing, if you ever need a hand or an ear (or another body part) because of a personal hardship of some sort, please do reach out to me.