Morning Folks! Yesterday Wilhelm Arcturus aka The Ancient Gaming Noob aka TAGN ran a bit of a thought experiment on his blog. He asked the three most common Large Language Models for Chat who he was, and got some less-than-stellar results. However, eventually, Microsoft CoPilot managed to get the correct answer at which point it led to a whole series of questions asked… some of which were given reasonable answers. This of course made me curious what my results would look like, and within minutes I was looking up the pages for the models from Microsoft, Open AI, and Google and asking it a simple question.
Who Is Belghast?
Open AI / Chat GPT
I figured we would start with the most mature of the three, ChatGPT by Open AI. It was simple enough to get into the tool through a web browser and type my simple query. For the most part, it nailed it in one. It indicated that I wrote a blog called Tales of the Aggronaut that is focused on MMORPGs… but that is essentially something you could get from the short description of my website. The bit about the significant following through that feels like freestyle and not exactly something I would agree with considering my dwindling readership over the years. It got a little less on the nose as I asked it additional questions like what games I play… which admittedly it did specifically call out World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV. However given that the model is using data from 2022… it is completely missing my obsession over Path of Exile, Last Epoch, New World, Guild Wars 2, or even Diablo IV.
All in all, it was a good effort: B+
Microsoft CoPilot
Since this is the service that Microsoft desperately wants me to give access to my computer… I figured I would turn next to CoPilot. The key difference between CoPolit versus ChatGPT is that Microsoft has decided to give its AI monster direct access to the internet. So when I ran this query again this morning it specifically called out my weekend podcast where I talked about the New World Aeternum debacle. All in all, I like the summary thought and it specifically name-drops Blaugust with a short explanation of what it is. The Twitch bit is a little off the mark because while I technically do have a channel there it has been three or four years since I last streamed to it. The thing I like the most about this is that it specifically links a bunch of relevant things including Aggronaut main page, the Blaugust Announcement from last year, AggroChat and my Twitch page. Where it fell apart was on follow-up questions where it essentially regurgitated back the above paragraph when I asked it what games I played.
Another pretty solid effort thought, but I am giving it a B+ only because I liked its formatting and mentioning Blaugust. The follow-through needs some work. What is weird is that CoPilot seemed to work the best for Wilhelm but it absolutely did not for me.
Google Gemini/Bard
Next up we try Google Gemini which I believe until recently was referred to as Bard. This is the thing that is gobbling up all of our content and serving it up to web browsers without ever sending readers to our websites. The first strike against this is that I could not run it in an anonymous browser session, and had to log in with a Google account… which gave it a headstart in knowing this information. I am apparently a “multi-faceted online personality” and honestly I am not sure how I feel about that. It goes on to break down the things I do… which again everyone seems to be leaning hard into Streaming when I did it enough to get Twitch Affiliate while Elder Scrolls Online was launching and then basically never did it again with any regularity. The weird text formatting is I believe Grammarly complaining about something because it only happened the first time I tried to use it. When I dug down a bit further about what games I play, it gave me some pretty generic answers: MMO Gamer, Variety Gamer, and RPGs.
I think this is the one that I liked the least of the three so I am giving it a straight-up B or maybe even a C+.
Personality and Branding
I was curious about something. I know that I am way more widely known as “Belghast” than I am as the title of my blog “Tales of the Aggronaut”, and as such I think the Large Language Models had a bit easier time honing in on who exactly I was given that I use the same name on pretty much every platform and said the name is not exactly commonplace. While I know Wilhelm by the name Wilhelm Arcturus, I only do so because I have read his content for years. If I were going to tell someone about something he wrote I would probably use TAGN or The Ancient Gaming Noob instead because that is the “brand” that I associate most strongly with him. So Chat GPT was one of the LLMs that struck out horrifically and I decided to give it a test run by asking it who “The Ancient Gaming Noob” is.
Sure enough, it nailed it on the first attempt, because LLMs are ultimately just search engines. They are way more complicated search engines, but at the end of the day, all they are doing is sifting through harvested data and then trying to extrapolate something that looks like an answer based on that data. When you search “Wilhelm Arcturus” you don’t get the blog until the fourth link down. However when you search “The Ancient Gaming Noob” you land on the WordPress blog in one hit. With me, if you search for my name or my blog title you get essentially the same results every time. This is not necessarily an intended effect or something that I spent years of SEO nonsense trying to accomplish, but just something that happened over time. I just figure Wilhelm would have had better results had he started with TAGN rather than his pen name.
Anyways! It was a fun experiment and I figure at some point Wilhelm will read this post so thanks for the idea. It was definitely an interesting journey.
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Good Morning Friends! This post will go in some directions… so fair warning it might be a weird ride. The abandoning of Twitter and adopting Mastodon/Fediverse as my primal social network has triggered many changes in how I look at the services I use. Essentially I’ve come to realize that I had become solely dependent upon the corporatized internet for my day-to-day functions. This was a weird realization given that I come from the very early days of the web, an era when I very clearly had to host anything that I wanted to use and pretty regularly became that guy that hosted a forum or a website for every friend that needed one. For years I had an entire infrastructure running out of my house that I maintained. However, the migration to Cable for internet access brought with it a loss of the ability to actually use any standard ports for anything… so I started leaning more and more heavily on hosted or corporate services.
Essentially I’ve been on this journey of evaluating the things that I use on a day-to-day basis. Some of these things are attached to my workplace, and I have no direct control over them. Other things however I use on a personal level… and I could migrate to something that I had more direct control over. I’ve started making subtle shifts, most recently I stopped using Google as a search engine entirely and made the move so many have over to the less invasive DuckDuckGo. A few years ago I made a similar migration away from Chrome as my primary browser (though I still have to use it for work purposes) and moved everything over to Firefox on both desktop and mobile. When I needed to rebuild the second machine that I use for various sundry purposes, I did so as a Linux Desktop instead of building yet another Windows machine. I am still uncertain if I can really move my primary machine away from Windows, but so far the Linux Desktop experience has been pretty freaking solid.
One of the services that I have targeted recently is the music streaming service that I use. Honestly, I migrated to Tidal out of spite a couple of years ago when Spotify doubled down on supporting Joe Rogan. I loved using Spotify… it was a universally enjoyable experience. Tidal… while technically higher quality just sucks as a user experience and the discovery engine is tuned for someone who is very much “not me”. So after leaving Spotify… it became very easy for me to consider moving away from Tidal because my buy-in was not nearly as solid. Essentially I am looking to move away from corporate streaming audio entirely. For years I maintained my own library of music, and then with the release of Google Music I just sort of decided it was not worth the hassle. I got lazy and it became too easy to pay a single fee and get access to whatever I wanted. Google killed its music offering by turning to YouTube Music… which led me to migrate to Amazon for a while, before finally landing on Spotify. Each step… I felt like I actually listened to music less often… that is until I started my Mixtape Mondays nonsense a few years back.
We are going to jump around a bit and talk about Plex. Effectively Plex is a self-hosted home media streaming solution, and I’ve been using this for well over a decade now as a way of watching any sort of movie or television series. Before the existence of Plex, I used Windows Media Center to fill the same role on my network and used an Xbox 360 as a streaming client. Essentially I hate the tedium of dealing with physical media. Growing up I loved the Nintendo Entertainment System kiosk that allowed you to play one of many different games with the push of a button, and that led me mentally down the path of wanting to jukebox-ize all of my media. It was because of this that I became an early adopter of digital distribution first with Direct2Drive and later Steam… and of course, I used to rip every single CD and DVD that I got access to. For MP3s I had one of those early Creative Nomad players as my primary consumption means, and for Video, I eventually landed on Plex and what is now 12 TB of shared storage that has upgraded like a hermit crab over the years as I have needed more space.
I have no clue WHY it took me this long… but I had this mental separation between video solutions and audio solutions… when in truth Plex is not just a great video streaming option. Earlier this year I started a project that I have dubbed “Fauxtify” where I am collecting all of my audio in one coherent library and trying to wean myself off of streaming audio as I acquire things I was missing from my collection. This has honestly been really fun as I have started scouring the local thrift stores looking for bits of music that I remember fondly over the years and then ripping it to my local server when I get home. I still hate the storage of physical media, and eventually, I will have to come up with a better solution to that than just cramming it in the closet in my office.
I think what I love so much about Plex as a solution is that with a premium account, I have access to all of my media through their mobile and web apps regardless of where I am currently. The server sitting on my network effectively brokers a secure connection between the mobile device and my server without directly opening up a port on my firewall. Which has led me down a path of pining for more solutions that worked like this. What I really need now is Office 365/Google Apps… but in the Plex model where I can host a local instance of it but access it remotely through apps that broker a connection back home.
All web searches seem to point me toward NextCloud… but it seems to be more of a true self-hosted system where you need to run it over standard ports and expose them through traditional means to the internet. That is not exactly what I want, but I have contemplated setting this up and running it internally just for document storage purposes. This is where I open up a request to my readers. I know many of you also have a penchant for doing dumb things with technology. Is there a solution I am overlooking? What I really want is something that works somewhat like Plex, but for “office” functionality. I could in theory just put NextCloud on the web host that I keep the rest of my public-facing infrastructure on and that may be the road I go down next. At least there I would still have control over it, but I would rather honestly have something on my local network that gets accessed brokered to it from a more hybrid cloud model.
I guess the takeaway is… Mastodon changed how I view my complacency with using the corporatized internet. Another takeaway is “Fauxtify” is working beautifully, and once I flex out my library a bit more I will likely be killing access to Tidal entirely. Now to chip away at my reliance on Google apps.
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