Another half year or so has gone by, so I thought it'd make sense for me to talk about about what's in store for my future and the future of my projects.
As soon as school let out, I continued my internship full-time and got some really great work done. I learned so much while working there! However, with only a limited amount of time left before graduate school starts, I felt like it made sense to leave and have a bit of a summer break before starting on that journey.
Sunsetting @gptupaguy (again)
It's hard for me to believe that @gptupaguy has been running now for a year and a half! That being said, as time has gone on, I've found it more and more difficult to get fun, interesting output from training GPT-2 models. While I'd love to be able to give GPT-3 a go, OpenAI's rules on the use of GPT-3 sound like they'd forbid it. Given how time-consuming it is to properly filter the AI output, much less hand-pick good posts, for now the automated posts on @gptupaguy will be ending on August 11.
If you enjoy the bizarre nature of AI-generated guys, I suggest you give @madeupguythinks a follow! They put guys from the original @makeupaguy into GPT-3 in order to hear what they have to say.
Current project: BeepoVac!
In my spare time, I've been slowly chipping away at a small video game project, based on a game I developed with some classmates in 2021 for a class. In the game, you play as a cute little robot vaccum named BeepoVac whose job it is to clean a house as quickly as possible. I've been posting progress videos to a playlist on YouTube. My main goal with this project is to make something small that I can complete and publish. Perhaps in the future I'll pick it back up and try to add more to it, but right now I'm finding that even getting this seemingly small-scope project to completion is taking a lot more work than I'd expected.
Vibrato for Haptics
While working on the BeepoVac game, I realized I missed the vibration effects from Nintendo Switch games, and wanted to see how well I could replicate them in my own projects. Unfortunately, the API that Unity provides for haptics is... basic, to say the least. To address this issue I've started working on my own higher-level wrapper that makes haptics work more like traditional audio in Unity. The wrapper is called Vibrato, and while it's not quite ready for prime time, I'm quite happy with how it's working so far! (If you really want to give it a try, the repository is public, but there's little-to-no documentation on how to use it yet.)