Inkie Beard

I worry there isn't words to describe the depth of my feelings. One four letter word isn't enough. It feels too small, too fragile, to contain such an ache. A strand that cuts through to the very core of my soul and anchors me to you. The breadth of comfort with you, the depth of my entwinement cannot be limited to such a word. Sitting at the center of my life, you ground me when the rigors of everyday life threaten to throw me asunder to the void. I am yours always, you are my forever.

The hottest topic currently is fake news and the proliferation of disinformation. Though it would be counter to the wishes of corporations more interested in profits than human collective good, a system is sorely required to analyse text content that is shared as & undistinguishable from facts. Small statements with no backing and linking to articles written based on pure emotion rather than concrete evidence, backed by nothing aside from straw man arguments or espousing opiníon and rhetoric as law or common decree. An outline for a model that would generate a small visual graph which would allow for a glance into the substance of the content before consumption: Emotive language ratio to detailing of findings and reason based "disprove first" approach Inference of subtext and agenda of the content Links + source references count & meta score of their own merit Ratio of steel man or straw man arguments Count of balacing statements and justification/testing of hypothesi...

Moving an arm and thinking about moving an arm are two vastly different things. Even thinking about thinking about moving an arm is a natural thing to do even if reading it is very odd. Now the hard part, how to you design thinking ? The deliberate process of simulating scenarios to either logical or illogical ends would seem like a great fit for computers that can do millions of calculations a second. The slow an deliberate winding down a thought path seems to be the missing link to truely intelligent machines. We are very good at making machines. Even more so machines that actually produce things and have purpose. Since the earliest primitive forms of man, our tools are defined by their use. Or more aptly by the end result they achieve. So what is the end result of smart machines? To drive our cars, build our structures, do the heavy lifting and manage our lives? To do all that the ability to compute and apply action is needed but not actual thought. Most business tools and modern ap...

When Galliventurer was first conceived in the bowels of my brain it was during a particularly good session of playing No Man's Sky. I had just traversed several different planets finding old ruins and exploring as I went. The exhilaration I felt zipping around in space and then landing to explore - it was this feeling and the want to continue that on my phone, which persisted for days & weeks, was the main reason I even considered starting development on Galliventurer. No Man's Sky is possibly one of the most ambitious, fully realised games in history - yes it took them a while to get there, but I don't see Star Citizen releasing anytime soon - so it goes without saying Galliventurer will not be anywhere near that ambitious. A small glimmer of space flight amongst the stars with endless exploration. But then what? Subin Kim's freighter concept This has been a constant thorn in my frontal lobe since my first flight through the current build of the game. Sure you ca...

Never more true than today, knowledge is power. Or more aptly in today's world the ability to provide & control the flow of knowledge is power. Recently there's been several large course corrections occur, several years too late but hey, better late than never as the saying goes. This highlights one of the biggest and most major flaws with the way we consume information on the internet. Social media, for good and for ill, is now a major source of information and "news" for millions of people across the planet. There are countless examples of the way that misinformation & even disinformation is created, spread and broadcast across the web. None more prevalent & far reaching than social media. Social media disarms in a way that in person discussion & social interaction previously couldn't. If you heard a story in person that even one or two people could corroborate it would be easy to accept as true, or just as easily refuted by the same small number...

Do what you're told, follow the rules, don't over step your bounds, stay in your lane. The true cornerstone of modern enslavement to work. "We can't all live our dreams", why is that? Because then we'd have to change, to collectively actually think and enact a way all people could realistically achieve a base standard of living & contentment. Allowing people's mind free reign on real questions rather than worrying where the next meal is coming from & keeping the lights on.  Bee animation by  Joe le Sale While I have no answers to life's great mysteries, I do know this about the meaning of life - it definitely isn't to toil & labour day in and day out to fill the wallet of our bosses or investors. So how is it that we find ourselves with that holding such a giant sway over our lives? This of course is rhetorical, we all know the answer, you don't bite the hand that feeds you. Which brings the problem in to sharp focus, we no longer ...

The premise is pretty simple, what if we could press the undo button for DNA related aflictions. It's a sound theory but whether it would actually work or not is questionable. The possibilities! This particular train of thought was mostly born from thinking about cancerous cells, which grow out of control due to a minute mutation in the DNA of a cell. The immune system doesn't identify the cancerous cells as something that is dangerous because they're near identical to any other healthy cell. The same could be said with aging, cells slowly mutating & loss of elasticity cause degradation in copying the genetic information to new cells. CRISPR gene editing theoretically allows us to alter DNA in a live organism. With this technique the ability to alter a DNA sequence needs only the desired information payload to be spliced in. This obviously raises rather large ethical concerns of being able to wildly alter people's DNA and fundamentally change the human genome. Whi...

I haven't written here for a while, not for the lack of will or giving at least a genuine if feeble effort. I've become stuck posting anything by the trap of it "being worth sharing". Which is exactly the opposite of the reason for this blog!  This is space exists solely to allow my personal shower thoughts and half baked brain worms to be written on the napkin of the virtual world, strung up on twine in the cafe window for any meandering passerby to glimpse, muse over, critique or laugh at as they trip through the derelict off ramps & dirt tracks of the information super highway. Thank you for any time you spend within the enclave of this blog, just know that by making it this far, yours is the interest and support I cherish!

After several months of near constant stressing about work deadlines & topsy-turvy project schedules, I finally came to terms with the fact that I had burnout.  Recently I've had a growing sense of apathy & general disinterest towards work. A deep feeling that I can only describe as a feeling of treading water, with no hope of forward momentum or progression any time soon. The tasks I've been managing & proceeding through are important but feel very much in the auditing, administrative & policy driven arena; rather than the outcomes focused problem solving I'm more accustomed to.  It's odd however, until I recently took some much needed time away from work that I realised I was also in the grips of the complete antithesis state of full blown obsession/worry over messages, deadlines & not blocking other people's progress by them waiting on something from me. Subconsciously I think this last stems from having a burning need for this process to fina...

It's the not so secret, dirty secret of our modern lives. We live in a golden  age of free services that make our lives interconnected on levels that our ancestors couldn't even fathom. Instantaneous realtime interactive updates and vision of someone on the other side of the planet. For free!! We really do live the utopian lifestyle, or do we?  We are being monetized. The really insidious thing is, we like it. We crave it. Likes, follows, subscribers, retweets, pins, shares, the list goes on. We're subsumed in a culture of instant gratification and constant engagement. These "free services" have hijacked the way we think and live, all while making copious amounts of money from the personal data we all but throw at them.  Whilst there is an innate understanding in all of us about the nature of how insidious and conniving these services are. We still gobble up every morsel of social media's bright lights and flashy features, mostly without a single thought of wh...

With everyone working from home a lot more these days, especially in the face of a global pandemic with self isolation in effect in most place still, it becomes tricky to make good on that old "buy you a coffee" promise to your friends &/or coworkers. My Shout is the idea for a service to send things to people by alias only. The service would leverage home delivery services such as Menu Log, Favour, etc. but aimed at sending things to other people rather than ordering for yourself, though that would be an obvious function of the service. The address and location details of the person are only known to the service and hidden from others, it would be a breeze to then be able to gift things to your friends, coworkers, or even favourite creator, etc. that is halfway across the country or even the world without knowing their address.  Once a "gift" has been sent the recipient gets a notification and can schedule when to get the gift, or even exchange to an equal valu...

It's been a hot minute since I've had a chance to update regarding Galliventurer. After playing around a fair bit with backends and trying a number of different nosql databases, one of which has been running pretty solidly with the existing discovered universe of a few hundred (470+ presently) stars and their 24k+ satellite bodies. Things are humming along quite nicely and there is even the beginning implementations of some actual game functionality, such as flying the (placeholder) ship through the universe in a soon to be released build! However there are several things that I hope to address in the very near future: 1. Procedural Universe Whilst the universe is cool and all at the moment, it's very rudimentary and no where near close to the level of detail I'm after. From researching a bit, I've found everything that currently takes up space in the database can actually reside solely in an algorithm and follow the whole procedural generation a lot more faithfully...

Artificial intelligence is often touted as the future demise of the human race. We've all heard it, the robots will either wipe us out or rule us with an iron fist, the last being quite literal. Call me a niave optimist, but truly intelligent artificial sentience won't be like us. Our species is a by-product of several hundred thousand years of evolution, a near constant fight for survival every minute of everyday just so we can eek out one more day to further the human race. Our whole being is hard wired to abhore the idea we have an expiration. That would be very counter intuitive for a species that needs to survive and dominate in order to produce off spring and continue on. Artificial life & sentience doesn't have that issue - with a decent power source & a decently sturdy casing and it's all set. Truly sentient intelligent robots won't have anywhere near the same goals as us, and we can only hope, none of the same hang ups. Here's where I explain my...

* muttering accompanied by beeps/electric signal noise * "Huh, how'd you get here? Just when I've finally resigned myself to floating aimlessly through the endless void of spa- woah hold up, you're old. Positively ancient, in point of fact. When are you from?! The early 21st century or something? I didn't realise soul travel*   was discovered or even possible that far back , will need to run a diagnostic on my historical cores...  Anyway, let me transfer you into something more familiar. It will take me a while to construct a complete new vessel for you. Thankfully the adventure droids are great for gallivanting around in. And it's relatively safe, for short periods of time at least." OMICRON 17 - December 7, 2011 deviantart @angelitoon Introducing the main narrative device, Galliventurer the neural duplicant bound to the ship. This character will provide the plot points & instructions on gameplay mechanics, etc. for the initial part (and possibly en...

It's alive!! Well the very infantile functional proof of concept for the idea that is the procedural generation for the universe of Galliventurer is alive. Above is the result of a single generation run at the time of writing (hopefully I remember to save a copy of that function and update the call as it will soon be changing). It's quite rudimental at the moment. A random selection from a few different lists without any inter-relational weights or even the possibility of child entities. At the moment (again time of writing) the objects "discovered" aren't even saved! 😱 In the very near future however, the procedural generation will have a few steps. The beginning being a random selection of an entity type. This very top level will consist of: System Stars dwarfs giants neutron Planets Asteroids Comets Junk/debris Substellar object (brown dwarf) Moons Nebula From this first there will be a series of inner lists for each type. Certain types ...

Something I've been battling with recently when contemplating the procedural universe generation for Galliventurer. How realistic should the properties of celestial objects be? In the real world/universe, star's are visible colours because of their size & temperature, which in turn is based on: their age, elemental composition, and the type of fusion happening within. But should the universe of Galliventurer be limited to these factors? There will already be the stretching of realism with faster than light travel, more attractive and habitable planets than you can shake a laser at, not to mention alien races that you'll be able to understand, communicate & trade with. star forming nebula When playing a game about flying through the great vast emptiness of space, the idea is there shouldn't actually be too much emptiness. Emptiness is boring. Nothing happens in the empty, nothing good anyway. The fine line will be in finding the balance between not...

n. Galliventurer - one who adventures whilst gallivanting. We have a name. A compound of the words gallivanter & adventurer it fits the game quite nicely. It will also be the name of the player's ship (though, you may be able to have many ships throughout the game). Also trying something a little different for this project, practicing what I preach as it were. I'm actually going to plan this out a little bit before I ever actually write any code. Oddly I feel that most of my hair brain schemes of previous years have had a fast paced "rush to market before someone else thinks of this" attitude. So obviously there was no time to stop and take a moment to put any thought in before code went into editor. None of those projects ever made it out of the proof of concept phase oddly enough, no prizes for working out why. In the spirit of all this, things are different this time around. Having given it even two minutes of thought there are several issues....

While I do want the Galliventurer universe to be procedurally & randomly generated, I don't want it to be truly random. There needs to be a modicum of probability involved. Some weighting so that some things are rarer than others. After all we can have too many diamond covered planets or uranium based suns - as you can see I haven't actually started thinking too much about the composition of the planets, stars, etc. Keeping this probability based random selection in mind, I'm going to be using a dynamically weighted series of arrays to randomly select properties for entities in the Galliventurer universe. Using something very similar to (or based on) this article by Michael Czechowski https://observablehq.com/@nextlevelshit/rejection-sampling-in-javascript . The main bit of complexity here will be the values of a randomly selected property will affect the weights of the next selection. For example the size of a star will greatly change the weight of the probabi...

This is a public shaming. No quarter will be given, no merciful anonymity or private repo's will suffice to hide my transgressions. I wrote a large complex recursive piece of functionality that was all but absent of documentation! At the time everything seemed so simple, so straight forward. I thought anyone on my team could open up the code, read a few small lines and instantly understand what was happening, even first thing on a Monday morning before coffee. Or so I thought.  Now fast forward to me on hump day last week, several months after writing that functionality. "That thing I wrote a few months back, it'll be perfect! Might need one or two miniature tweaks, should be simple", what an idiot. Should be simple - never utter those words! For all that you hold dear will turn to ash. Code that is as tight as the vaults of Fort Knox will turn to spaghetti riddled with bugs, like a scrap of peanut butter & jam sandwich consumed ants at a picnic. So much as whisp...

I've been thinking about, tinkering with and procrastinating over making a game for years. I have untold gigs worth of Unity projects clogging up, not only my desktop & laptop hard drives, but also our network storage drives! I sat down to do some serious thinking at the start of this decade and realised, the main reason I so often don't follow through (or get anywhere near even alpha stage) is because there is no actual story or driving idea behind my projects. Every few months I sit down to make a game. Once my prototype goes beyond the most bare bones mechanic, I eject like a boulder from a trebuchet. That or I spend several great night's working on getting a level designed, only to realise I have absolutely no clue what I'm going to do with it! This time it's different! This time, I have an idea. An idea based on a game that has already been made and works really well. Yes that's right, I want to make a game very similar to and inspired by one that a...