In recent years, some new insights and research about the brain and mind have been making their way around the Internet and words like 'aphantasia' have started being discussed on social media and elsewhere. 

 Apparently, not every human mind is the same in the way that we experience our inner worlds, and people from both ends of these spectrums have been surprised in recent years to…
About a decade ago, I wrote a blog post titled 'SmarterChild and Other AIM Bots' where I talked about some nostalgic memories from my early days with software development when I programmed my own chatbots that ran on AOL Instant Messenger. 

 I said on that post that I would follow it with a blog about MSN Messenger chatbots, but I never ended up getting around to doing so! So let me get…
These silly random holidays always have a way of sneaking up on me when I least expect it, and today (July 14) is apparently National Nude Day ! 

 I don't widely publicize it, on this blog especially, but one of the 'two main pillars' of my life (in terms of how much time I spent invested in it, and the things I am the most well-known for in some circles online) -- besides for example my…
In the tech industry, a 'Full Stack Software Engineer' is somebody who is single-handedly capable of writing all of the source code needed for an application (especially in the context of web applications). That is, they are able to develop both the 'Back End' code (the part that runs on the server side, which handles your business logic, databases, authentication & security, API, etc.) as well as…
I've been a software engineer for basically my whole life, at least ever since I first taught myself to write HTML code when I was 12 years old, and in the modern era when Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models are commonplace, I of course have adapted with the times, as I had done before whenever a new paradigm shift in the engineering landscape had come about. 

 In this…
Over the past couple of weeks, I decided I would get serious again about learning how to program in Rust and I have ported my chatbot scripting language, RiveScript over to Rust. 

 You can check it out on GitHub at https://github.com/aichaos/rivescript-rs 

 The Rust port is fully 'feature complete' to a similar extent that the JavaScript and Go ports are, including some optional…
Somebody had asked me about this recently, and I thought I must have already written a blog post about it before, but apparently I had not! 

 If you (or someone you know) has been curious about how to break in to software engineering as a career (or a career change), then this post is for you. A proper college degree is NOT even necessary for most software jobs! 

 The basic steps…
This may be a hot take, but in 2025 my favorite web browser is still (and has been for decades) Mozilla Firefox and I'll tell you why. 

 
 Mozilla is the least abusive of the browser vendors we have today. They don't work in the ad business and so don't have the incentive to harvest all your private data in the way that Google (especially) and Microsoft do. 
 As evidence to that,…
I had originally written this post on my NSFW blog back around May of this year. With the recent surge of interest in Bluesky, I thought I would copy it over here to my tech blog to give it some wider visibility. 

 Bluesky is a very interesting app, and it is different in some important ways to Twitter and the others that came before it. 

 Bluesky will not enshittify over time…
A while back (February 2023) I built an open source webcam chat room for one of my side project websites. 

 It was very much designed to resemble those classic, old school Adobe Flash based webcam chat rooms: where it is first and foremost a text based chat (with public channels and private messages), and where some people could go on webcam and they could be watched by other people in…
I frequently have pretty vivid, detailed and crazy dreams and when I have a particularly interesting one, I write it down in my dream journal. The one I awoke from this morning left such a strong impression on me that I also feel like sharing it here on my blog! 

 It involves artificial intelligence, humanoid robots and morally bankrupt billionaire corporations. I like to think I can tell…

 Anonymous asks: 

 What is your favorite memory of Bot-Depot? 
 

 Oh, that's a name I haven't heard in a long time! I have many fond memories of Bot-Depot but one immediately jumped to mind which I'll write about below. 

 For some context for others: Bot-Depot was a forum site about chatbots that was most active somewhere in the range of the year 2002-08 or so,…
A discussion thread I got pulled into on Mastodon had me suddenly nostalgic for something we once had on the Internet, and which was really nice while it lasted: the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol , or XMPP , or sometimes referred to by its original name, Jabber. 

 What kicked off the discussion was somebody asking about a more modern 'decentralized chat platform' known as…
One of the many things I get really interested in is the nature of 'reality' or at least the conscious parts of it (e.g. my perception of reality). The mind is such a curious and powerful thing -- like how none of us has ever actually 'seen' Objective Reality, because our brains are trapped in our dark skulls and all we really get are electrical signals sent by our eyes and other sensors. The…
So I haven't posted a good rant on my blog in quite some time - I had chilled out a lot in my older years, but I just have to tell this story about Safari and my struggles in getting it to work with my chat room I had built recently. 

 My chat room is a fairly basic app - it's open source and written 'from scratch' using WebSockets to handle the client/server communication and they pass…

 Cardell asks: 

 So this is related to The Breath of the Wild save hacking . I play on the Yuzu emulator now. I just want the Mster Cycle earlyish and fresh vanilla game.
Have found a save file editor but it doesn't let you add runes so I can't get the cycle.
How did you add it to your save files on the blog?
I'm sorry to bother you with something so insignificant but…
I'm announcing my latest open source project: a WebRTC chat room with asynchronous video support that I'm calling BareRTC . It is very much styled after the classic old-school Flash -based chat rooms that were popular in the early 2000's. 

 I have a demo of it available here: https://chat.kirsle.net/ . I can't guarantee I'll be lurking in that room at any given time but you can test it…
I have just released a new toy program on my website: Error Message Generator 2.0 , or ErrorGen for short. 

 ErrorGen is a simple program that lets a user configure customized error dialog pop-ups, with a custom icon, message and buttons, to prank their friends with or to put to good use by shell scripts if you want to ask the user a quick question from your external program. 

…

 Is Zenmsg a virus? asks: 

 It only opened a command box, and nothing else happened. Is this a virus? 
 

 No, it's not. 😊 ZenMsg is a command-line program (so it opens your DOS prompt if double-clicked on), but it requires command-line options to tell it what to do. When run without any options, it prints its usage information to the terminal and then exits; so when…

 NNN asks: 

 What kind of music do you listen to? 
 

 I listen to all sorts of things but most frequently are the following: 

 I generally like a lot of indie & electronic music in recent years. I have a Spotify playlist of several artists I like. Depending on my mood, some of my top go-to artists are Plantrae or Dirtwire if I just want some cool music with…