It's been a busy couple of months as I worked on my Bachelor thesis, Perseus. With that now out of the way my time in university is coming to an end. Exciting times ahead as I'm about to start my job search.

But that's not the only thing to be excited about. I recently started reading Wait But Why which provides in-depth explanations of various topics. A particularly exciting one? Artificial Intelligence. As technology progresses at a rapid pace it seems likely that artificial human-level intelligence will be reached; and quite possibly during my life time. From there a quick exponential increase is possible, at which point such an AI could solve all our problems - by killing us, if we're unlucky/muck it up, but if done properly this could mean a sudden giant leap in technology beyond imagination. So that's exciting. And even failing that there are bound to be some cool things to come.

Something else I spent a lot of time with for a month was Netflix. Turns out I'm quite into watching series if I can do so at my own pace without ads. I quite enjoyed Sherlock, Daredevil and the first season of Elementary; and Bojack Horseman is surprisingly deep, I'm looking forward to watching the second season later. I stopped at the end of the trial though, since it required too much of my time that I needed for university.

So yeah, I tend to procrastinate a bit on uni work. It gets done in the end, but it's not ideal. Still, good things can come from it when I use the time to work on private projects instead. Take early June: On a whim I decided to write a crawler for jediknight3.filefront.com to create a backup of the mods uploaded there. The page has had technical problems for quite a while and was obviously slowly dying, so I figured I should try to preserve it. Turns out I was just in time: In July it went offline. I quickly uploaded the backup to this server and yesterday, after I finished my thesis, I got around to creating a website for the files.

So evidently I still care about Jedi Academy. I even became a moderator on JKHub recently; I'm hoping to help them with web development, improving the website. And I have a multiple other Jedi Academy related projects on my mind. Two of these projects were already mentioned in my project plans: The GhoulKit and Map Forge have basically evolved into a plan for a single monolithic Jedi Academy editor, similar to the Unreal Editor or CryEngine's Sandbox; and I still plan to finish Spirits of the Sith eventually.

But those are large projects that need a lot of work before any useful results are available. I've decided I should also help out with OpenJK, which is already playable but would greatly benefit from improvements; and there are hardly any active developers right now. I need to figure out how exactly I'm going to split my time between those projects, but I suppose OpenJK should get most of it for now.

My browser project on the other hand may have to wait a little; but I can make do with Firefox a while longer, and it's supposed to get a nice update in the coming weeks. And then there's the whole matter of the Windows 10 upgrade. I'll want to do that soon, and I'll use the opportunity to clean up my PC, consolidating partitions and improving my directory structure. Lots to do, aside from the whole "get a job" thing.

Exciting times ahead!

Willi

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