travel, timepass and being in the trenches

guess who’s in Mumbai

hello, I’m sima Prithvi from Mumbai. If you get the reference then you must really be into drama.

I’m visiting for a work thingy + just exploring the city.

as mainstream as it gets

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Work (fixing the overcorrection)

I scraped a bunch of websites and paired them with the scattered resources I had collected while working with major mobile game publishers over the years to train my own custom GPT.

Now I have a well trained knowledge buddy to bounce ideas off of, it’s great for speeding up decision making.

despite that, finding a direction to focus on for my game has been challenging. or rather, not being distracted by shinier opportunities has been challenging. There has been so much rapid development in AI, that I can’t help but feel like I’m losing out on getting on the trend, given that it is truly the dot-com boom of our generation. That being said, I also don’t want to work on a solution in search of a problem, so we keep our head down and go along this path.

Update on Skive

I struggled a lot regarding the direction of skive - I mentioned in my last update that I’m going to use machine learning for the bots in the game to make it more realistic simulations. Well, I might have been avoiding getting stuff done by just learning about AI/ML because I wasn’t entirely clear with my vision for the game.

There are very few, maybe no mobile games that are successful that use machine learning models to simulate enemy AI - this is probably because the novelty and randomisation that comes with the intricacies of human behaviour is simply much more engaging. Kind of like the slot machine effect, you never know when your game is going to be extra enjoyable just because of the imperfections of humans. This paired with the social element of multiplayer games makes it very definite that AI will never be the end-all for games, maybe ever. I know it sounds obvious, but sometimes you gotta take a couple of steps in the wrong direction to actually realise where you need to go.

Now since I know that I want this to be a multiplayer game anyway, focusing on machine learning right now is just a shortsighted decision. For the sake of brevity, I’m going to skip the fluff and technical jargon, but let’s just say there’s a major remodelling going on for skive, and the next update should be much more engaging.

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Every month I try to do 1 new thing consistently. Let’s see what it was this time..

I meditated for 30 days, here’s how it went

Let me start off by saying I hated the idea of meditating. Like you’re just supposed to sit there and do nothing? or worse, chant some random thing you don’t even understand. Feels like a joke.

But at the same time, doing nothing for an extended period of time is actually much harder than it seems. The voice and thoughts in your head are almost impossible to silence. In the process of trying to silence it, this voice will just self-observe attempts at silencing itself with additional commentary on top of it regarding this silencing. It’s hard to articulate, but if you’ve ever tried meditating then ukwim. It’s funny how your inner monologue works.

There’s always a gap between intellectually understanding something vs experientially understanding something. And with access to infinite sources of information, this gap only gets wider. If it ways to overcome it either through experience, or through trust.

meditation is something I’ve always intellectually understood, but haven’t trusted these sources of information enough to internalize it. I just had to do it myself in order to fully grasp what it actually is.

If you’re open to trusting me as a source of experiential wisdom
here’s what I learned after doing it everyday

1. It’s a great way to train your thinking.

   whether it’s meditation, in decision making or just in life - there’s so much thinking that needs to go into the things that you choose to not think about. If you’re focusing on not thinking, you have to in-turn train yourself to think about not thinking. I believe this is truly a muscle, and can only be developed with repetition.

2. It’s relaxing.
   maybe not at first, it takes a couple of minutes. but just having dedicated time to just do nothing on some level is quite relaxing. we live a life in the fast lane, and just giving yourself permission to take some time off and let your mind catch a breath is sometimes exactly what you need.
   

3. Redirection
   if I’m meditating, and I keep getting the same recurring thought, then that’s an indication of either an area that I need to focus on, or something that is bothering me. If I’m yawning and falling a sleep when meditating, that just means my body needs to rest, so maybe I should take a nap.

thanks for reading. I shall catch you on dec 31.