Tag: application

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Severus does the magic

It is not too long after I told you that I was too cheap to pay $10 a month for github copilot and I came up with the idea for Severus, my own AI pair programmer. It was something that went boom. My blog usually doesn’t have more than 20 or 30 viewers a day (at its best) and for almost a week, I had more than 200 views per day. Since people showed interest in yet another AI pair programmer, I have decided to continue working on severus, more seriously.

Severus code generation
Severus is now capable of being accessed as an API

My plans for Severus

So in this article, I may discuss a bunch of problems I may face in the long path of creating Severus and making it available as an end-user software. There are some serious concerns, for example when I talked about the idea of Severus with one of my colleagues, he told me he is concerned about the confidential codes he has written.

Almost all of your concerns are valid (except the one who thinks this whole process is handled by the Illuminati) and those are my concerns as well. The next problem I may face is for the scaling, so I perhaps need to hire a well-educated DevOps engineer.

In this section, I explain all of my serious concerns and needs, and I expect some help from you, the kind readers of the article.

The Community

Creating a community around something which is honestly a weekend project, doesn’t seem like a good idea. You may say this thing happened for the Linux kernel as well. You’re right, but this is a little bit different. There are tons of tools which may work much better than Severus.

Also, it is important to know the place for creating the community. A subreddit? A discord server? A room on Matrix? An internet forum? I have no idea honestly.

So this is the biggest concern for me. The community!

Performance and text-generation glitches

The performance is good, thanks to huggingface inference API. Actually, knowing the fact that huggingface API exists, helped me with the implementation. But I still have some concerns here.

My main concern is that BLOOM starts generating some text which is not or cannot be classified as code. I tried different ways to get better results, but I still need some ways to verify the generated result is code and it’s not a text which includes the code. And this is really the hard part I guess.

For this purpose, I may need some help. Validation must be done on the results in order to get a good AI pair programmer, otherwise it’ll become more like an annoying colleague or an intern who knows something, but can’t gather his/her mind.

The Product

And final concern/plan is the product. For current use, I only have a simple application which runs on port 5000 on my laptop. Nothing more. There is no authentication and no user validation system, no monitoring, no scaling, no infrastructure. Basically a MacBook Pro which runs tons of programs daily and severus is currently one of them.

I had a VS Code extension in mind, also I thought of a web app as the MVP, when you can easily copy your code and then use it in your very own projects (and of course it won’t be the best choice for a confidential piece of code).

Although I have ideas in mind, I still need more brainstorming about how this project should be delivered to you as a product.

Conclusion

I still have a lot to do with this project. There might be some language detection to detect if the generated output is the code or not, and also there might be some more code validation to avoid mixing different programming languages.

Overall, this is one of the most difficult and at the same time the funnest projects I’ve ever done. I won’t give up on this, even if it seems like a painful and expensive hobby to people around me 🙂

 

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How to make video games like movies!

It was a long time that I did not write any thing in this blog. Now, I decided to write a topic about “video games” (as I wrote in my Persian blog). I was member of a game development team for about three months and I learned a lot. At least, I know the way they were doing the job was “How to not make a video game”. So, When I left the team, I decided to research about game development process. In this topic, I explain everything I found (experience and research result!)

When I was in the team…

It was in October (2017), a person sent me a message in Telegram, and the message was like this :

Mr. Haghiri, we need a musical composer for our game, we did a search and we found you. Please come here Wednesday 4:00 PM to talk about the project and your role.

Wednesday, I went to their office. That guy greeted me so nicely and started talking to me, about their project. I found the game is a horror game (horror games are popular in Iran, but there’s no “good” horror game “made in Iran”.) and it made me happy! Because it was the first time I heard about an indie team decided to make such a great game. They let me two weeks to research about “Sound and Music” in Unity Engine and I did it. I composed two pieces and also I tried to learn some tools for mixing and mastering sounds in the game (But it wasn’t actually my role, I just did that as a sample!).

After two and half months, they said “Mr. Haghiri, you don’t do what we wanted you to do”, anyway, they haven’t paid me even a “rial” in those days and expected me do great music composition, and they also wanted me to do what wasn’t my actual role. And this was not a good experience actually. But in those two months, I learned Unity game engine and I also met other “game developers”.  And, I decided to publish my experience on my blog.

Why movies?

Recently, I read a book called Making Short Films : Complete Guide from Script to Screen, by Clifford Thurlow. In the book, I found great names like “Salvador Dali” or “Charlie Chaplin”, and also great movies and books also mentioned in the book, like “One Flew Over Cuckoo’s Nest”. Everything was perfect, In I think about process of making a video game! It’s so similar to process of making a movie!

But I realize game and movie have lots of differences. The biggest difference is that games are interactive and players interact with the environment or other characters, but movies are not. Anyway, the main procedure – I mean “writing” – is %90 the same! So, I decided to mention some movies I watched, then tell you how I make a video game like them!

Great movies gave me ideas!

An Andalusian Dog

Movie is written by Louis Bunuel and Salvador Dali. I think these names are enough. But, after I watched the movie (it’s now available on YouTube and other video-sharing platforms, you can easily find and watch it), I discovered “product of a melancholic and depressed mind”. And both “Melancholia” and “Depression” are good subjects for a story or game.

Phantom of The Opera (Musical)

The book is about a musician, in a better word, a “genius” and smart person who hided himself. Andrew Lloyd Webber, just made that sad and creepy story to a romantic story by his music! First time I watched the movie, I could not understand it well. Because it’s not following the book’s story, and I’m not a native English speaker! I watched that movie 4 times. I watched the live performance 2 or 3 times and finally, I got the concept.

It has “Misanthropy” and “Romance” at once. I think these two things are also good for people who want to make video games (Please go and check “INSIDE” by Playdead! It’s the Misanthropy! Pure Misanthropy!)

School of Rock

It’s a bit different, School of Rock is comedy, and it’s also attractive for children. Because the topic is about a guy who teaches a bunch of 4th grade children to ROCK! Yes, he teaches them how to play electric guitars, bass, drums and keys. I think the concept of “Music” can be a good idea, too! Specially if you plan for a game like “Guitar Hero”.

Only Lovers Left Alive

If you like Vampires, please watch this movie. This movie has no “teenager” content, but it still tells stories about two vampires who married for centuries. Movie is directed by Jim Jarmusch and he also made music for his movie, in his rock trio SQRL. This movie has two things for game developers. It’s and independent movie and it can be a good idea bank for indie developers and also, it has “Romance” and “Fear” and “History”. All of these three factors can make a game great!

Ok, I talked a lot about movies! Let’s find “how can I make a game like a movie?”

Finally, let’s make a game like a movie!

The most basic thing you must have for a movie is “plot”. Plot is the main idea, it’s developed and tells people your concept, but it’s not a completed “script”. Writing plot in both games and movies is the same. To write a good plot, you need to study and read books, scripts and other plots. I prefer printed (and Persian) books in this case.

You will need research on the topic you want to write a plot about. For example, if you want to write about a middle eastern civilization (for example : Sassanid Empire or Ottoman Empire), you have to read history of Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. If you want to write a plot about Satan, you have to search about Satan’s role in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and find which belief is closer to what you want. So, you need to have a background.

After you wrote the plot, you have to write the script. But, writing script is different here, you have to clarify where and when the scene is interactive and when and where is not. The best example, is “Bioshock Infinite”. You know why? Because when you’re not interacting with the environment, you still can move camera and see what happens around you. I’m not a good script writer (But I try to be!) and I will write a post about how to write script from plot, when I manage to do that.

After you wrote the script, you have to make your basic ideas in the engine. Please! Please! Please! Call an experienced game developer before doing that, because the experienced one can help you find experienced character/concept and environment artist and game-play designer. After that, I can say you’re ready to start making your game! With a good team, you can make a good game!

Finally, I wrote this article but it wouldn’t be the last article about games in my English blog. I try to continue this, because I even couldn’t find good articles about being “game script writer” or “game director” even in English! I hope you like my post 🙂

 

 

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Importance of IoT

For the last 25 years, a ghost is flying over our world, it’s the ghost of “Internet”. From 80’s, internet became one of the most used tools for international communications, such as knowledge sharing. So, a lot of people started using internet to share knowledge, to do research or even to have fun. We can use internet in many different ways and this is why internet is important. You know, humans can’t live without air and water, but actually, electricity and internet are as important as them!

In 1982, a truck connected to the internet, it was the first attempt to connect non-digital things to the internet. Years after that, someone asked people of the world to call “connecting non-digital things to the internet”, Internet of Things or IoT for short. Actually a computer or a mobile phone is designed to be connected to internet, so we can’t call that IoT. But a wheelchair, a cigarette lighter, a coffee maker or even an oven are not designed to be connected to internet, so if we connect them to the internet, it’s IoT!

Concepts and Applications

The concept of IoT is to make everything around us online. You can control your coffee maker from work, and when you arrive home, you can have a cup of warm coffee. But, This is not the only concepts. It comes to make our lives safe, it comes to make our things accessible from everywhere. And about applications? As I told, the online-coffee maker is one of the best examples of IoT applications.

The main application of IoT is controlling everything remotely. Before IoT, remote controls used infrared to control lamps, outlets, TV’s, etc. But today, thanks to IoT, we can do that from longer distances, using the internet. For example, your home is in Iran, and you are in a vacation in Armenia, but you can control everything from Armenia! Everything you need is a reliable internet connection.

The importance

Now, let’s talk about the importance. Why IoT is important? is it anything except connecting devices like ovens and coffee makers to the internet? of course it is! It is actually the future of the hardware engineering and even the online world. Hardware engineers like me should learn IoT, because in near future, every single home accessory will become online, every streets of cities will be online, all farms will be online!

So, we need to learn IoT, but how? learning IoT is easy. You only need to know how to program microcontrollers, how to setup a development board (at all, hardware engineering), how to connect your board to the network and how to implement remote controls and connections. For example, you can use a NodeMCU board and a bunch of LED’s to make a bedside lamp, it’s even easier than writing a simple computer program for daily accounting.

Communication with other fields of computer science

IoT can’t be a complete knowledge/technology alone. All IoT experts have to know about one of fields of computer science. For example, a person who designed a system for traffic control, needs to store data from traffic lights or cameras, and then he/she needs to do data mining on that. Because this thing can be helpful in predictions about traffic. Or, if you design that simple bedside lamp, you have to write at least a good single-page interface for it. These are not basic things, and you can’t do all of them alone. To be honest, an IoT team is made up of some professionals/experts. What they do is cooperating about these issues.

Good Luck 🙂

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How to make a computer program

This is a cliché in IT and computer related blogs. You can find at least one topic on How to make a computer program in every blog written by a computer expert (scientist, engineer or experimental expert). So, I also decided to write about it. In this topic, I’m going to explain how your idea can be a program.

I’m not a startup or business person, and I hate when someone wants to teach other people how to have an idea so I consider you already have an idea, and you want to implement your idea as a computer program. Let’s start!

Choose your target hardware

Unfortunately, a lot of programmers ignore this important step, but if you consider a special hardware to develop and implement your ideas, you will have two points :

  1. You learn a new hardware architecture (and maybe organization)
  2. You help someone who wants a specific application on that hardware.

Sometimes, you realize that writing a calculator is pretty stupid. Of course it is when you write a calculator for Windows or macOS. But, when you write a calculator for Arduino, which can interact with a keypad and displays, it’s not.

Write Algorithm

Actually, algorithm is explaining the way we solve the problems. So, we need to write the steps of our solution and test it. Sometimes, when we write a simple algorithm, it’s not efficient at all, and needs a lot of improvements. Imagine this (This algorithm makes all even numbers lesser than 100:

while( a < 100){
 if(a%2 == 0){
  puts(a);
 }
 a++;
}

This is a piece of larger code. But wait,  how can we improve that? That if there can make this piece of code slower. But, if we consider a = 0, we can write something like this :

for(int a = 0; a < 100; a + 2){
 puts(a);
}

You know, I wrote a shorter code here. Also, this short code has a better structure of making all even numbers lesser than 100.  But I think both of these codes have the same time complexity, so there is no difference. If we had two nested loops, and the inner loop’s condition had effects on the outer loop’s condition, we had to spend time on calculating time complexity and optimizing it.

Finally, you will realize there are some “classic” algorithms, which are already optimized, and you can just use them, and model your idea with them.

Choose the language

This step is also one of the most important ones. Imagine if you want to program an AVR chip, of course JavaScript is not the best choice. There are tools which allow you to write programs for those chips in JS, but the language is not made for communication with AVR! But, when you want to program a website, specially when you’re dealing with front-end stuff, C is not your best choice! But wait, if the program we want to make is a general purpose desktop program or a school/university project, we are actually free to choose the language!

Imagine we want to write a simple program, which does Addition with bitwise operations. We can write our program in C/C++ like this :

#include <stdio.h>

int bitwiseAdd(int x, int y){
 while(y != 0) {
  int carry = x & y;
  x = x ^ y;
  y = carry << 1; 
 }
 return x;
}

int main(){
 printf("%d\n", bitwiseAdd(10 , 5));
 return 0;
}

And you can write it in Ruby like this :

def bitwiseAdd(x, y)
 while y != 0
  carry = x & y
  x = x ^ y
  y = carry << 1
 end
 return x
end

puts bitwiseAdd(10, 15)

But, when you want to directly communicate with hardware, you’ll need a low-level language. C/C++ are actually mid-level languages. They can help you communicate with hardware (like this piece of AVR code) :

while(1){
 PORTC.1 = 0;
 delay_ms(1000);
 PORTC.1 = 1;
 delay_ms(1000);
}

or like that bitwiseAdd(x, y) function , they can help us write normal programs. But Assembly language is a really low-level language. We can use it when we need to talk to our hardware directly.

You see, all programming languages can help us, but depending on the conditions, we can use different languages.

And …?

And now, you probably know how a computer program is made. But, if you really want to become a developer, you have to study about paradigms, methodologies, etc. I tried to keep it simple in this article, but later, I’ll write about those topics more.