20-year vet. I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment. Runelite has greatly lowered the bar for bot makers. Client injection and computer vision would've only taken them so far. I personally don't see a way out for Jagex. They could take back the reins, but at this point, the carriage is irreparably damaged. How do you combat a botting community that grew with your product? How do you combat literal decades of suicide account creation? I've known botters who said their accounts average less than an hour of play outside of tutorial island. They just maintain a list of thousands of accounts. Multiboxing bots that complete the stronghold of security and suicide in the wildy with eachother.

I know this is a little rambly, but obviously RS is a big part of my life. No matter what jagex does at this point, botters will have an answer. Not to say jagex shouldnt try. It just feels like a lost battle at this point. To a degree, I think bots in a declining community provide some value. RS3 inflation of the raw material space makes this self evident. Normal Logs passed 1k ea. Obscene and inexcusable.

If OP is the author, please consider setting up RSS! These are the exact kind of blogs I'm looking for to add to my feed.

This is a project that's always on my mind that I never take the time to flesh out. I can't put my finger on the scope. I don't know if I want a full, Johnny Decimaled PKM platform for my entire life, or topical, dense information about things that interest me.

I wish I could convince my friends online to fall back on email. So many times the "watering holes" have changed, and I've lost some valuable contacts in the shuffle.

The writing has been on the wall for a while. I moved off of Discord about a year and a half ago, after they started gating long-time free features behind Nitro. Then later, I find out that nothing is encrypted in transit on their application. I haven't had much luck moving friends off of the platform and on to things like Matrix, or Signal yet... but I'm trying all the time.

I know it's mostly nostalgia, but this was the best time online for me. I was just a teen exploring GeoCities, tripod, and dot.tk directories. I found a lot of good friends in that time.

I miss the Glitch/GameShark crews that were around. =Bi0= was one of the best ones around.

Thanks for the insightful comment. And thanks for taking a minute to read my words. I agree with you. I can be my own harshest critic sometimes. I'll do some reflecting on this over the long holiday weekend. Happy new year!

Insightful for someone just starting to publish content! Thanks.

As an aside, personally, as a former RE for retro games, I called creating cheat codes for games "coding". I saw it as distinct from programming.

One of us! That site is dope. Super useful for creating b-roll footage for videos.

There's also https://old.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/1lof9k2/creators... to animate scenes in-game.

I'm working on building out a microservice ecosystem on OCI. I'm not formally educated so I just sort of stack things up and tear them down. I hardened my server and I am running dockerized services. I'm also running a web server that hosts the very start of my long-term personal site. It's been pretty challenging, illuminating, and down right fun. I've been putting down the controller for a terminal!

Seriously, I'm very proud of myself for the little I've accomplished so far. I don't have friends in tech so I don't get to talk about it or bounce ideas off people.

Thanks for letting me get that out!

Sounds cool, I tried kubernetes out on a few rpi4 devices as a small build farm, but that didn't quite work out, too resource hungry for the small PIs. Getting sth like that going with less RAM, infrastructure would be cool!