On creating a blog
Hey, yall! I've decided that I'm going to try this whole "weekly blog post" thing that a lot of people seem to do. In the past, I've avoided writing blog posts because I always get super long-winded whenever I write. So, I've decided that I'm going to start a small-ish blog, and going forward, write about what I did during the past week and any interesting things I've come across.
Sometimes, these blog posts are going to be un-interesting but I'm OK with that in a way since it's a way to get me to write more, but also keep it brief. At the bare minimum, I plan to share 3 different things without trying to make the post "perfect" in any way (Something I struggle with when writing blog posts about projects I work on). I'm also going to throw in one song that I like!
I hope you stick around! Since I don't want to collect emails or anything else, you can either subscribe to the RSS feed on the page above this or Follow me on Mastodon where I'll post updates! That being said, let's get into what I've been up to this week!
ChatGPT blows my mind
At this point I don't think people really care about AI like ChatGPT unless they're using it casually. I don't really care either, since it's become such a commodity that's always wrong. But nonetheless, I still use it from time to time to make code that I really only need to run exactly once and never release to the public. Well it was during one of those uses that I noticed something I apparently haven't before: ChatGPT has an option to upload photos.
So I decided to upload an image that I had taken before. It's just a picture of my car, nothing special.
I also decided to ask ChatGPT "What is this?" figuring that it would just say "It's a car, there's a tree in the background" or something similar. Man, I was totally wrong!
It was able to totally get it right, and my mind was completely blown! Not only did it correctly identify that it was a car, but it also got the exact make, model, and generation.
So I decided to upload one more photo.
Once again, it got it right, and it was even pointing out specific buildings that are shown in the city skyline! Of course, this is something that AI models have been able to do for the better part of a decade, but in this moment, it sorta broke my brain. I was wondering how it was so accurate on these novel photos, or even how I missed this feature being a part of ChatGPT in the first place. Man, these AI models really have come a long way since they were first introduced!
Space Engineers server hosting woes
If you've never heard of it before, Space Engineers is an open-world game where the goal is to just build custom space ships and vehicles of any sort. There's a PVP aspect to the game when playing on certain public servers, but that's secondary to the fact that the majority of your time in-game is spent dealing with a semi-realistic physics engine named "Clang" that constantly glitches out. But despite the weirdness that's associated with the physics engine, the game is really fun if you're interested in automation, resource management, and building things.
Well, it's no surprise that some of my friends are into this game in the same way that I am. I mean, we're all a bunch of nerds that enjoy this sort of stuff. Being the sysadmin of the group that has a server rack in my apartment, I was tasked with setting up the server for all of us to play. "Not a big deal", I thought. Boy, was I wrong!
First, the Space Engineers server only runs on Windows which was a bit of an issue for me since all of my servers run Linux. This includes my game server, which runs a game server management application on top of Linux. For most games, this isn't an issue (even if the game server only runs on Windows) since the management application that I use will containerize the server software in Docker using Wine. Great, but this didn't really work with Space Engineers due to a long-standing bug in the game server management software. OK, so, Windows Server 2019 it is!
This is when the issues started.
To put it bluntly, the Space Engineers dedicated server SUCKS. It's full of bugs, the UI lags like hell, mod support is problematic, and the ability to set config options is hampered by the laggy UI and the fact that the config files sometimes just don't save. So I did some digging and found that there's a FOSS wrapper for the SE server software called Torch that fixes most of these issues. In my experience, Torch works... fine, I guess. It's got its own issues, but it did let me put the server up and let us play!
But then issues started appearing. The main complaint from everyone was that the server was laggy and awful to play on. This was not great when in Space Engineers, one wrong move can set you up for a disastrous date with "Clang" that will result in a ship, a base, or both getting destroyed. Well this was sorta figured out after a while and it turns out that CPU clock speed doesn't mean anything.
Given the official documentation on the Space Engineers dedicated server setup guide, the server needs a processor with at least a 3.2GHz processor. No minimum generation or anything, just clock speed. This is a problem, since the server boxes I have are either 2.5GHz or 2.2GHz. Considering that the game is a bit old, I figured that it was better to follow their guidance and use the box with the 2.5GHz clock speed. It's a bit of an older box but still holds up. It's a pair of 2012-era Xeons that still absolutely rip so it should've been OK, right? No.
After around a week of dealing with the glitchy server, I moved the VM over to one of my newer boxes from 2021. I thought this might increase the performance a bit since it was jumping to a newer processor and a bit faster RAM. The newer box has faster SSDs that are also backed with an NVMe cache, so maybe we'd stop having huge lag spikes when an automatic save was triggered every 5 minutes. That... was it! No more lag! Server runs great now! Maybe I'll share some of our builds or our mod list in the next blog post if we do anything super interesting.
An old myth, and a real answer
When I was in school, we had a few "incidents" in which a small group of troublemakers would pull the fire alarms as a sort of prank. The suddenness of the fire alarms always made me jump, and it was always weird having to go outside in a single-file line and then get into alphabetical order so the teacher could easily account for all of us. All while standing silently in a line next to other classes where your friends were, but you couldn't talk because that would "make things harder".
Well after fire alarms were pulled near-daily for about a month, they had gathered all of us for an assembly where they said to everyone "We have replaced the fire alarms with ones that spray ink on your hands, so the next time someone pulls the fire alarm as a joke, we can find you". Being like, 10 years old, I believed it, because of course that makes sense as something that could exist.
Many years later, small YouTube creator "FireAlarmDude5967" answers the question that we always had about whether that was true or not. Not to click-bait, but the answer might legitimately surprise you!
Song of the week
This week's song is a classic, but a good one nonetheless!
Give A Little Bit - Supertramp
That's all from me for now! Have a great week!