Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Is AI capable of reversing social media’s attention destruction?

Posted on March 4, 2026

This evening I spent some time talking to the latest version of Claude about investment decisions, and the rationale behind various stock price movements. I also spent a bit of time browsing a bunch of of discord channels on servers I sometimes hang out on. I found the difference in information delivery to be extremely jarring.

I also, for some reason, occasionally spend time on the reddit ‘wallstbets’. It’s 95% bullshit, and 5% actual insight and analysis. As a result, I’m used to seeing a lot of typical 2026 one-liners, memes, in-jokes and random emojis and pop culture references, inter-spaersed with the odd bit of insightful financial analysis and modelling.

I do generally find most internet forums, reddits, social media threads and discords to be… kinda dumb and juvenile. Sometimes its what I want. An endless stream of star trek memes is exactly what I need sometimes, but in general I am more interested in in-depth analysis, and specifically, for analysis that presumes I am a) an adult and b) have an attention span. Any website that ‘warns’ me how many minutes it takes to read an article is an instant red flag for me. I am not a child, and am capable of sometimes reading entire books! Your article can be multiple pages. I will not expire out of frustration.

Enter AI

AI is perfect for me. I can ask claude a question about cocoa prices and it will respond with analysis. There will be no jokes, zingers, one-liners, memes or attempts to entertain me. If I then want information about the Strait of Hormuz and its impact on Korean financial firms, then it will provide me with detailed analysis of that too. If I want to dig deeper on the valuation model for specific Korean firms, it will do so. If I have supplementary questions about the leadership structure of that firm, it will research I and answer. If I ask for a comparison table of that firm with western firms in the same industry, or historical comparisons, it can do that too. In fact, if I want to spend the next 48 hours doing nothing but detailed research into the Korean banking industry, then Claude will provide, in as much depth as I can possibly stand.

The contrast with social media is staggering. On social media, you have maybe 128 characters to provide content. Thats trivial. On video sharing sites, you basically have a few seconds. It’s entertainment for the chronically distracted. A constant stream of unrelated trivial bullshit for people who have regressed to the point where even this paragraph would be considered an essay.

Until AI came along, I found the web just frustrating, distressing, pointless and deteriorating. It does not matter how many times you click on ‘show less of this’ on youtube shorts or facebook reels. Your opinion is not important. The social media giants have decreed that all media is SHORT, and if your attention span is longer than ‘BLAM’, then you are obviously a freak and your opinion does not count.

But now, people who actually want to read, or research have a new best friend. LLMs have no adverts (yet), no distractions, no memes, no emojis, no jokes, no one-liners, no clickbait headlines, no bullshit. It’s like wikipedia in human form. You can become as informed as you like, on any topic, in huge depth, any time, for a trivial subscription cost.

When I talk to Claude about investing, it’s MASSIVELY better than reading ANY financial news or analysis sites. Even the premium ones you pay subscriptions for. I ignore absolutely all ‘news’ articles about stocks, and go straight to Claude. I can actually ask questions and seek clarifications, and I get them, without a shit-ton of ‘editorial opinion’ or sponsored links. Its amazing. And as a result, my effectiveness as an investor is way higher.

Duplicate this to absolutely any field. You have people who it seems to me have just frankly ‘given up’ and regressed into the child-like dopamine hits of nothing but social media doom-scrolling (or happy-scrolling, just ingesting a thousand feel-good videos of cute animals is equally brain-rotting), and you have other people who are able to reject that and dig deep into whatever it is they want to know about.

We seem to be becoming a society straight out of science fiction, split into factions. Some people are leveraging AI to become hyper-informed and hyper-aware. Others are stuck on social media become hyper-desensitized and hyper-distracted. Essentially we have one technology that makes people super productive, and another making them super-useless. In some cases, the same companies provide both services.

Social Media, in it’s currently ‘blipvert’ form, feels to me like a damaging disease. It’s handing out tiny droplets of dopamine in return for selling us stuff and pretending its free. But the side-effect of this is an entire generation of people with a crumbling attention span, and frankly what also appears to be crumbling IQs. I firmly believe we need hard limits on social media. The ‘endless scrolling’ mechanic is like a marketing nuclear weapon, and the privacy destroying algorithms happy to feed us endless bullshit as long as we just click-click-click until we pass out make it worse. It’s insane we let this happen. There is an alternate universe where we went direct from wikipedia to modern LLMs, without all the hate-speech-disinformation-timewasting-bullshit that is twitter and instagram. A direct line from widespread information availability to a supercharged interactive teacher.

Granted, AI can make mistakes. Hallucinations are a thing (although in my experience, way less common in premium models), but anybody who thinks the content available in general on social media and the many news websites can be entirely relied upon is deluding themselves. I personally find AI to provide way more accurate information than reddit, social media, or any news site.

I massively support efforts in the EU to force social media algorithms to change. We have an opportunity here to ‘reset’ online life so it makes us smarter, not more stupid. Lets seize it. And lets also be more willing to embrace the positives of AI. All I ever hear is the negatives, but for people who are genuinely curious about the world, AI has the potential to be an expert teacher and research team on every topic, for everyone. That sounds awesome to me.

Unexpected Solar-Powered Borehole Update!

Posted on February 24, 2026

I did not expect to be typing this so soon, but pretty soon after we agreed to fund a solar-powered borehole for fresh clean water in Cameroon… I got an update on construction with pictures today! Very welcome as I expected this to take many more months. Here is what I received today:

“Anyway, the situation in Bagham was pretty desperate because it is currently the height of the dry season in that part of the West region and SHUMAS staff reported that there wasn’t a drop of water in the village. Fortunately, the drilling rig was available and was located quite close by so work could start straight away. I am attaching a photo of the drilling rig in place and others of the work which has been started on the construction of the tower for the tank. I am sure that this project will progress quickly”

How cool is that? Here are the pics:

Digging foundations for the water tower
Making the reinforced framework for the tower
Drilling Rig
Making framework for the tower

Its very uplifting for me to see progress on stuff like this! And if you buy any of my games, you are helping me fund stuff like this, which means you are awesome :D. Especially excited to see the eventual solar panels go in etc :D.

Ridiculous Space Battles Progress

Posted on February 15, 2026

Ok so, I know this is probably not a big deal, or a new thing… but I have spent so long with this blog casually embedding youtube video links, that it took until today in 2026, and my desire to do what I can to de-couple my life as much as possible from US tech companies for me to discover that you can just natively embed an mp4 in wordpress! So anyway… I present the new race-selection screen animation effect in Ridiculous Space Battles!

and yes… before you comment, I know there is a bug with a texture changing wrongly when I scroll to the left. I’ll fix that tomorrow! I am however, pretty happy with this code, and this look. Coding stuff like this is harder than it looks, because to have everything seem smooth and crisp, you have to basically render all of those windows to an offscreen copy (with alpha) and then copy them as scaled sprites to the screen. That sounds simple, but its a lot of management, as you keep swapping render targets, and have to very smoothly transition from ‘offscreen pre-rendered sprite’ to proper rendered and full featured window.

Trust me, its a pain. It took a whole weekend. Well… it took all the hours I worked this weekend (which was not a lot TBH…). Anyway, that is one new thing that is in Ridiculous Space Battles. Another change was the re-colouring and some adjusting of the deployment screen to make it more user-friendly and less BRIGHT COLORS:

This definitely looks better. You can also see that the range indicators from my last blog post are in there with less angry colors too. The next big thing on my list is to balance the various weapons, and in fact before that, I need to code systems that really quickly run a lot of battles super-fast for me to gather stats. That will be a whole rabbit hole of code, but should be fun.

So to recap, the things left to do before early access or alpha-testing are to balance the modules, to put together the campaign fleets, to test the campaign, and to implement and test online challenges. No doubt lots of bug fixes and optimisation to do too, but I love the optimisation bit :D.

Deployment Range UI for Ridiculous Space Battles

Posted on February 7, 2026

I have been a bit quiet on the blog front, but in case you were wondering, yes I am definitely still working on Ridiculous Space Battles! Right now I am thinking about the ship and fleet design for the campaign game, and this is forcing me to think more about the usability of the deployment screen.

For a bit of a history lesson, here is the deployment screen from the original Gratuitous Space Battles:

There are so many things wrong with both the style and the layout I do not know where to begin, but given GSB was the first auto-battler, there was both no competition, and no other examples to be inspired by. Anyway, one of the many bad things about this UI is those circles around every turret on every ship that were supposed to show the player the weapon ranges, but in fact just look like a confused mess. Here is my current version of the same screen in Ridiculous Space Battles:

I think its so much better… but specifically I am working on the range and fire arc overlays. They only show for ship(s) that you have selected, and one of the changes I have made is to color code them as red for short range weapons, white for mid range, and green for long range. Like *anything* in game UI design, there is no perfect answer here. Red for short and green for long feels right, as long range is generally good (assuming everything else is equal). Making mid-range yellow might be a step too far in mirroring those order strips to the right, so I decided to go with white…argghh…who knows!

The problems arise a bit once you have a bigger battle and with multiple ships selected:

Now the red is showing the combined overlay of the short range fire arcs for all selected ship weapons. Be aware a ship might have 7 different weapons, and could be in a 4-ship or 25-ship squad… Its a complex thing to visualise, but its getting better!

In addition to fiddling with this overlay UI, I have also been improving the ‘ship role descriptions’ that are shown as tooltips for a ship design. I’m basically approaching the problem in 3 different directions. Select a ship…and the overlay should show you its weapon ranges on the map. Select a ship-type at the top-left, and then hover over a weapon name, and you get that big tooltip (see the one for ‘Plasma Stream’ above), which lists everything, including range. If the range is especially low or high, it gets a colour (red/green) highlight. Thats true for shield and armour penetration too…

The thirds method is the mouse-over tooltip for the ship types in the top left ‘ship-picker’. The game analyses all ship types and gives them various descriptive tags (I call them Roles in code). Those might be ‘Mixed Range Weapons’ or ‘Anti-Armor’ or ‘SuperWeapon’, or a bunch more.

My goal is to be able to help the player remember which ship design is which, so they are not just blindly spamming down a bunch of ships and hoping for the best. Ideally you have some short range ships serving as tanks at the front, absorbing enemy fire and shooting down incoming projectiles, then deeper ranks are mid-range and long range, or ships with shield support beams. Choosing the right formation and deployment should be a big part of the game.

Anyway, thats what I’m working on right now. The list of stuff to do before Early Access release does keep getting shorter (I think). Anyway, don’t forget you can wish-list the game at https://store.steampowered.com/app/3607230/Ridiculous_Space_Battles/

Positech is funding a solar-powered borehole in cameroon!

Posted on January 22, 2026

Long time readers of this blog will know that in the past we have funded two schools being built in Cameroon through the charity ‘Building schools for Africa‘. To cut a long story sort, I wanted to do something charitable, that was efficient and effective, and frankly you get a real good ROI when you do something like this, rather than donate to a charity in a relatively rich country like my own. £15-20k spent on a UK school gets you not much, but it builds a whole school in Cameroon, so to me the choice is obvious. FWIW I have no connection to Cameroon, I’ve never been there, but its a poor country that could really do with some help.

I did actually do one local school thing here, We paid for solar panels to be put on the roof of a local primary school. If you are wondering what this solar obsession is all about, I started a solar-farm company and built one in the UK. Its a loooong story :D. Oh and we donated a bunch of money to War Child in the past too, which is a super worthy charity for refugees.

But anyway, we are doing it again! After a long gap in charity giving while I got stressed about the spiraling cost of the solar farm, I can finally do stuff like this again. I had contacted Building Schools For Africa a while ago saying if they have any more solar-powered borehole projects, I would love to fund one, and they recently got in touch with just that. They send you a big government study on the problems, the impact a borehole would have, a cost spreadsheet and feasibility report etc. In this case, I was sent the one for the school (which was paid for by another donor) at the location where they need a borehole and it made very depressing reading. The borehole will be in bagam, shown here:

If you read that report, you would NEVER complain about your school again. Its unlikely your school has insufficient textbooks, or a dirt floor that floods in the rainy season. Its unlikely that the roof leaks so badly that the (shared) schoolbooks get destroyed. Its very unlikely the lack of a door means stray animals wander in and do animal things in the classroom. And its super unlikely that all the kids arrive late, and tired because they have been sent miles before school to fetch water.

Luckily, a proper engineered borehole solves a lot of problems. Its mostly one of time. We take fresh, clean, drinkable water for granted, but we should not, because its not universal. If you have a long walk to fetch water every day, thats a huge economic impact. Less time to attend school, less time to work, and it has serious economic implications. Being able to access clean reliable drinking water right next to a school will be a fantastic thing!

The cost is about £20k. Here is some detail from the charity:

The project provides for a solar-powered pump, to take water from the borehole to a large storage tank and pipework to take it on to 3 stand taps at central locations in the community, as well as training in the maintenance of all aspects of the facility.  This project is expected to totally transform the community and allow it to thrive: it is also seen as a peace-building initiative in a part of Cameroon that has been struggling for the past ten years due to additional pressures caused by the anglophone crisis.

And from the feasibility report:

Due to the topography the environment and that of the school. We came up with the various considerations

The overhead storage tank can be constructed at the school where the borehole will be drilled. The water storage tank will have to be constructed high enough to overcome the steep nature of the environment to be able to supply water up to the market.

The borehole can be drilled at the market where it is higher than the surface of the school. The storage tank will be constructed just few meters above ground. With this height difference, with the help of gravity, water can easily flow down slope to the market, the priority consumers which is the school, the palace and nearby residents.

TBH I think ‘palace’ might be a mis-translation, as looking at the location, I do not see anything I would call a ‘palace’. Anyway, I am excited about the project, because I love solar power, and remote communities in Africa is EXACTLY the best use case for distributed solar generation. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing updates on the project. And of course solar powered means super-convenient, and no work for people collecting water. Plus I think its awesome that for a lot of those kids, they will start to associate electricity with solar power by default, which makes sense.

Anyway, this is my ‘feel-good’ project for the year!