The Sasko Archive lets you search through Paweł Sasko’s Sunday stream vods from 2021 through 2023. These streams are a wealth of knowledge about game design, storytelling, Cyberpunk 2077, and The Witcher. This is a fan project and is not affiliated with CD Projekt Red or Paweł Sasko.
Frontend is ReactJS. Backend is FastAPI with a PostgresSQL db. There are over 797,000 transcript segments in the archive. Around 300 hours in total.
Testing improvements to my AI chatbot. Using Open Hermes 2.5 + VLLM + XTTS + Whisper. Added some basic long-term memory with a vector DB as well, but still working on that. Oh and a nice retro Web UI for fun.
After getting comfortable with 3D modeling in Blender I decided to put those skill to use and create a VR world. I started with a base model of a room in Blender. I also created a staircase from scratch. This process taught me that working with meshes is something that should be done in small steps with a lot of planning. Both of which I did not do. I spent the majority of time fixing issues. But the final result came up pretty well.
Next, I imported the base into Unity. The ability to export FBX from Blender and import into Unity is the part of the process that seemed to work smoothest. It was easy to move between Blender and Unity whenever I need add something or change the mesh. Here’s an early version in Unity:
I then started setting up all the lights correctly and baking them. This was extremely tedious. For my next world I’ll try using Bakery instead of the built in Unity light baking tools. Last I added some music, toggles, and a mirror. After uploading, version one looked like this:
The room felt large and empty. I added a large column to middle of the room. I also lowered all the lights, making the room feel cozier and creating a greater sense of discovery as you move through it. In addition, I used a complementary color scheme of blue and yellow. Here’s the result:
I made a few more tweaks after this and went through the process of creating a quest version of the world. This involved a lot more tweaking of the light mapping and using VRCToolKit and EasyQuestSwitch to get everything working. The final world is available now in VRC Community Labs.
Like many people you may be aware of the terrifying concept of an omniscient Algorithm that controls what you see on the internet. And like many people you may think that you’ll never actually understand it, let alone defeat it. It’s too complex.
It’s not. It’s actually incredibly simple and once you understand one basic concept you’ll have all you need to start releasing its control over you.
That concept is: Tailored Content vs. Curated Content.
Curated content is when someone/something is deciding what to show you based on what it likes/thinks is popular.
Tailored content is when content is presented to you based on what you actually like/want to see.
Content on the internet used to be almost entirely tailored. If you wanted to find out about obscure occult books you’d subscribe to alt.books.occult If someone jumped into your tailored content stream with generalized or popular content it was marked as SPAM and ignored.
Now everything presented to us is heavily mixed with content unrelated to what we actually want to see. Try to get YouTube to just show you videos about obscure occult books. You can’t. It will show some related content for a bit and then start showing you completely unrelated popular videos. Why? The goal of the curation engine on YouTube (the Great and Powerful Algorithm) is simply to take whatever you search for and funnel you from there to popular monetized content. The key is monetized. The more popular a video, the more money it makes, the more it will be presented to you.
Taking control back requires a change in perspective. Consider that there are two major models of education: The Generalist and The Specialist. The Generalist believes that a good education must be well rounded. We must seek to learn as much as we can about as many things as we can. The Specialist believes that a good education focuses on one thing completely. We must learn as much as we can about than one thing, and become an expert.
Does The Specialist end up knowing less about the world than The Generalist? No. The more you learn about a single thing, the more you’ll find it connected to all other things. The more you learn about Chess the more you realize how Chess relates to math, psychology, history, and art.
The people who tell you that you must learn a little bit about everything have exactly the same goal as the YouTube Algorithm. They are trying to funnel you to the most popular and most expensive ways of thinking. They are training you to become a consumer of knowledge, not a producer of it.
You need to become The Specialist. Focus on one thing that really interests you. Learn as much as you can about it. Find all the corners of the internet where others who share that interest gather: chat rooms, forums, email lists, blogs. When the fear of missing out comes creeping into your mind, know that is a residual echo of the bad programming you were given by the consumer algorithm. Know that you are doing the work to rewrite that programming.
The last step is to become a producer of content. Take everything you are learning and add to the conversation. Post on the forums, create a blog, support the community in any way you can. This is how you reprogram your relationship to content and in doing so inoculate your mind against the algorithms that seek to control it.
Created By M57C
