Superficial & Deranged

Tag: writing

  • Just a little Robot Chicken Nugget shooting bad guys out of the sky

    Just a little Robot Chicken Nugget shooting bad guys out of the sky

    It is no secret that I don’t like AI. AI is going to permanently screw the planet, destroy society and turn us all into mindless button pressing drones.

    Our kids won’t get jobs. But that’s fine because there wont be an environment for them to live in anyway. Our grey matter will waste away, and corporations will monetise thought.

    So why the hell am I starting to use it? I’m on maternity leave and currently the most fundamental change in computers since Microsoft Excel was invented is happening. When my mum was on maternity leave with me Excel actually was invented, she had to go to Unitec to upskill before she returned to the workforce.

    I do not want to be outpaced while I’m on maternity leave. And thankfully with AI you don’t need a uni course so much as you just need to jump in feet first. So, know your enemy is my new watchword. I’m doing a series of projects to learn about all these AI tools. Because until I know the capabilities of this damn thing, I am not going to know where and when it can effectively be used. I think much like the internet or screentime for kids, it is how you use it that is all important.

    If you were going to learn about AI with the very serious cause of advancing your career where would you start? A robot chicken nugget game? Yes, perfect.

    My almost 4 year old is obsessed with calling people a robot chicken nugget. Why? No idea. You’ll have to ask him – he will get distracted and ask to sing ‘I just can’t wait to be King’ and you will never find the actual answer. In the realm of two birds and one stone, I figured I would learn AI while making my little dude a letter recognition robot chicken nugget computer game.

    Do I know anything about game design? No. Can I code? No. Can I do any sort of art? Also no. Actually, that’s a lie. I can do abstract art, which is more about throwing paint on a canvas and expressing emotions than accurately representing a robot chicken nugget out of pixels.

    Ironically the first place I started on my AI journey was by talking to a human, I had a chat to an incredibly helpful colleague to get the low down on what tools I should be using. Which before even starting on this adventure shows an aspect that AI will never be able to replicate – trust & respect.

    The tool I started with was Claude which seems to be the favourite at the moment for cody type stuff. And the first step was both simple and effective – I told Claude I wanted a robot chicken nugget that shoots bag guy letters out of the sky…and within 15 seconds Claude had told me that it was a great idea and created it.

    Side note: I desperately need someone to invent an AI that is not a sycophant, not every idea is a good idea… in fact I think the majority of ideas and questions directed at AI are objectively bad ideas. Maybe AI needs an eye roll feature?

    Wow, before my tea had cooled I had a fully cooked computer game that I can play. AI is pretty impressive. But then I tried to get it to tweak the nugget character. Claude really sucked at it. I tried to get it to tweak a couple of other things. It did okay on some, not on others – the more visual the change the harder Claude found it. Then life (aka small humans) got in the way.

    When I came back to Claude, I said, great, can you pull up that computer game that we were building? And Claude had no idea what I was on about. Talk about robot gas lighting, it tried to convince me we had never created a game at all. I know I am low on sleep, but I think it would be hard to hallucinate a robot chicken nugget shooting letters out of the sky. Or maybe that is easy to hallucinate if you are an AI.

    So I asked Claude to create the game again from scratch. And the new one that it created? The gameplay was fine, but all of the design was very very lame. I went through 100 loops trying to get it to remember what it had done earlier, and it couldn’t remember no matter what tricks I tried.

    Of the new markedly worse version I tried to get it to tweak the art design, and it tried, and it tried, and it tried, and it just was consistently terrible. So eventually I asked it, why are you sucking so hard? And with a beautiful lack of ego Claude said “because Chat GPT is better at creating art”.

    Enter Chat GPT stage left. Robot nuggets created first try. So back to Claude with my new nuggets, and a whole new level of frustration as Claude could not add my new nugget in like I asked. Once again I asked ‘why are you sucking at this’? At which point Claude was like, sorry, I’m the wrong tool. You should be using Claude Code.

    Now, what’s Claude Code? It’s basically like having a developer in your computer aka what you’d see a hacker use in a James Bond movie. I didn’t have the time or energy to faff round, so I asked Claude to create a game design doc based off our conversation (at least what it could remember, yes I am still salty about the forgotten game) and fed that into Claude Code.

    Finally I had the right tools, the right art and a clearer direction of what I wanted in my head. The rest was pretty damn easy, Claude Code read my design doc and created the game. Then it was just tweaks and bug fixes.

    We did go through a few iterations of the character selector page. My expectations were just too high for the time (or knowledge) I was willing to put in. My original concept was for a full character selector where you could choose your body, arms and hat – but AI has its limitations. It’s not, I repeat, it is not a replacement for a human who can just understand things. If I had wanted to go back to the drawing board with my character design and make it so the heads and arms all started at the same place it would have been entierly doable, but I had better things to do.

    So, I simplified it to just being able to pick between 4 characters, which I put together in PhotoPea using the ChatGPTs designs.

    And there we have it, a working Robot Chicken Nugget game. Designed while front packing a baby by someone with no history of code. In some ways amazing, in many ways not – but those thoughts will have to wait for another post.

  • Parenting from a messy desk

    Parenting from a messy desk

    Anyone creative knows the dream; a clean desk to inspire writing, an empty kitchen to bake, quiet blank canvases to discover the true you. And then you have kids. Which somewhat ruins the dream.

    Not only do clean surfaces disappear like asbestos laced sand through your fingers, but your free time does to. You end up faced with bizarre non-comparable choices; do I shower or write, do I clean the kitchen or prepare a Miss Rachel level craft.

    Before children there was a logic to events, you got yourself ready, did your chores, made an ideal aesthetic space, and then creativity blossomed (or not). But now, you ignore the desk and write a blog post. You choose to make the mess in the kitchen worse to enable lunch, knowing the pile of dishes you hid in the sink will haunt you at the end of the day.

    It’s the old LinkedIn trope of normally a middle aged CEO talking about his success, which generally involves getting up early, either running or meditation and then working without distractions – and only later do we discover that they have a wife and/or a staff at home taking care of anything resembling domesticity. If only we all had a secret helper in the background taking care of all the mundanity of life. The endless washing, the food, the cleaning, the admin and the tiny humans who make and break our hearts on an hourly basis.

    On a serious note, I don’t think there is a single time I have washed clothes without contemplating becoming a nudist. It must cut down on the chores significantly.

    But I do have to wonder, what is more effective … focus or breath of human experience and space to inspire. There is no doubt that Steve Jobs and Michael Jordan, kings of focus, have achieved absolute perfection in their respective careers. But who knows, if they had space to grow, change and be challenged in other ways, less controlled ways, what they would have achieved. As we know from almost every dance movie from the early 2000’s, its when you add in different previously undiscovered styles that you win the competition/man.

    So here I am, writing from a messy desk, taking inspiration from imperfection. I don’t think I am any more productive than I used to be when I was in a wolf pack of one. But I guess my waffle and procrastination has been replaced with toddler crafts, cleaning white chairs (not my choice of furniture with small children), cooking and once in a while remembering to shower.

    Maybe I should pick up that book that I half wrote a million years ago, the messy desk might be the perfect accomplice to written nonsense.

  • In my bones

    In my bones

    I am tired, bone tired. The kind of tired where sleep doesn’t touch the sides and energy can only be gathered in 4 minute bursts. After which, the waves of tired in my bones lap at the shore once more.

    Broken sleep is for sure to blame. Although this baby is to be honest an absolute dream, most often going 4-5 hour stretches at night. Which compared to my first who rocked the ‘every hour’ wakeup schedule is life changing. But still, disrupted sleep is not used as a torture technique for nothing.

    Or maybe it’s my recovering body and flowing hormones that are to blame. 9 months of growing a human and now somewhat inexplicably feeding said human from my body. If I was to write a story where we converted blood into food for babies it would be seen at a step too far. But somehow that is what I am casually doing multiple times a day, without even knowing how. Fun fact, apparently Alien (the movie) is an allegory for birth. My C-section was slightly more chill than that, but I do see where they are coming from.

    How about the relentlessness of parenting? Even in the most delightful, wholesome day where the birds are singing and the parents look at each other so grateful for their polite and funny offspring – is filled with 1,000 negotiations and the sort of manic energy that you see in a cruise director as you swap from activity to activity all the while trying to remember to feed everyone. No matter how much you try to ‘put on your mask’ first, there is no way that the energy put in can touch the sides of the energy expended.

    Things can be magical, life enhancing and everything you always wanted while still being fucking tiring and just a bit too much.

    And all of that is without looking outside my front door, at the society that is seemingly crumbling to the ground. I always thought I would read the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, apparently I can just live it instead. Humans never did do well at being decent, but it has genuinely blown my mind how we can turn killing children into a debatable topic.

    To feel at odds with the world, with my own family just because I think that caring is a good thing – exhausting.

    To be so happy with life, to be living the dream, while tiredness holds your bones to the ground. Hoping that coffee or a 20 minute doom scroll will somehow fix everything – only to be surprised yet again that it did nothing.

    But maybe that is the ultimate lie of adulthood, there is no real winner in the tiredness Olympics. You don’t have to have kids to be tired. You don’t have to work 24/7 to be tired. Tiredness is just a marker to show that life was lived. Only children escape it, and not because they don’t feel it, but because it explodes out of them in tantrums and screams – they are not yet wise enough to know that the grumpy itch in their head and the concrete in their bones is what we like to call ‘a bit tired’.