https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts Short thoughts, observations, and moments from Adrian Raudaschl. en-gb Mon, 11 May 2026 21:29:12 GMT https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2026-05-11-212725 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2026-05-11-212725 Mon, 11 May 2026 21:27:25 GMT Got a nice little surprise in the mail today. The original inks and pencils from a page in the uk Sonic the Comic issue 4 1993. Bigger than I expected and so strange to be looking at the original art work of something I poured my little escapist head into during my formative years. Shout out to the original artist Ed Hillyer (Ilya) https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2026-05-10-140000 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2026-05-10-140000 Sun, 10 May 2026 14:00:00 GMT Got the Angel Island map from Sonic Adventure (1998) running natively in the Sonic R (1997) engine this weekend. Same minimap, same leaderboard, completely different terrain. You can race the loop. Texture remapping was a nightmare, and there's still some clipping where the falloff fights the mesh segmentation, but it's racing. Had to rework the engine's per-track memory limits to swallow the higher-poly Sonic Adventure assets, which was its own little adventure. A Sonic Adventure import turned out to be roughly 80% of the same problem as authoring a track from scratch. Which means the from-scratch goal is closer than I thought. Full writeup over on the Sonic R Mod Maxxing page. https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2026-04-25-213450 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2026-04-25-213450 Sat, 25 Apr 2026 21:34:50 GMT Spent a few hours mucking about with one of my favourite games, Sonic R, with Claude Code as a co-pilot. Genuinely amazing how far you can get reverse-engineering this thing: swapping textures, tweaking the course layout, messing with character behaviour, even hacking together a fast-load straight into a stage so I could test changes without sitting through the menus every time. Changing the lighting was the bit that surprised me most. Felt like proper dark magic. Makes me wonder what becomes possible when LLMs get pointed at proper old codebases and binaries. There's a long tail of half-forgotten games and software that's suddenly within reach for tinkering. https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2026-03-31-202933 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2026-03-31-202933 Tue, 31 Mar 2026 20:29:33 GMT Full moon ceremony coming up. https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2026-03-08-103634 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2026-03-08-103634 Sun, 08 Mar 2026 10:36:34 GMT Just captured this cycling to the gym and thought the city is looking nice, intimidating, welcoming, mysterious yet beckoning. Happy Sunday all. https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2026-02-21-104136 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2026-02-21-104136 Sat, 21 Feb 2026 10:41:36 GMT Pretty proud moment for me. It’s a fair and balanced review all in all. Good is places I’m happy about and work needed in others. Overall really excited it seems to resonate overall. https://www.science.org/content/article/journal-giant-elsevier-unveiled-ai-tool-scans-millions-paywalled-papers-it-worth-it https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2026-01-17-134403 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2026-01-17-134403 Sat, 17 Jan 2026 13:44:03 GMT For every power has its double: one that lifts and one that breaks, And the line between them thins with every promise that he makes. Listen here: https://suno.com/s/Cw2XE2hMNCJTavEU https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2026-01-09-195611 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2026-01-09-195611 Fri, 09 Jan 2026 19:56:11 GMT Tech for good. https://quack.sdan.io/ https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2026-01-01-201944 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2026-01-01-201944 Thu, 01 Jan 2026 20:19:44 GMT Absolutely loving the snowy weather for new year. Makes the long nights much more bearable and the Christmas market this year was just so delightful. Wishing you all a great new year! https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2025-12-30-184140 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2025-12-30-184140 Tue, 30 Dec 2025 18:41:40 GMT Really cool expose from the Japanese Casa BRUTUS magazine celebrating 40 years of Mario. Its got behind the scenes archival dev material and information on how the original game was made and even an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto. I don't think there is an English translation yet, but tried my best. My fav thing - fun as a system: > "Continuing to think about the mechanisms by which people think, ‘This is interesting.’" Fun is not inspiration or taste, but a mechanism that can be studied is a cool concept. Key takeaways: The entire game fit in 40 kilobytes — less data than a single modern image file. Developers used graph paper to plot every course before writing a line of code. Clouds and bushes are the same sprite, recoloured to save memory. Early ideas for enemies included flying shells and ground-attacking walls that never shipped. Mario’s hat and moustache were added because animating hair and mouths was impossible with so few pixels. Every sound and motion was meant to feel alive - “You can almost hear the ‘ding’ of a block when you just look at it.” Best Quotes: “What we valued most was that he would be fun to move." “We kept asking, what makes people think, ‘This is interesting!’?” “If you draw it with your hands, you can feel whether it’s fun or not.” “With only 40K, you have to be inventive — not by adding, but by re-using.” “If nothing happens, people quickly become bored. But if too many things happen, people become tired.” “We valued the interval that makes players think, ‘Something might happen next.’” * "Technology advances, but the human sense of what feels ‘interesting’ does not change that much.” So great! https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2025-12-28-122508 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2025-12-28-122508 Sun, 28 Dec 2025 12:25:08 GMT Visited the amazing Super Tomaato in Cardiff this holiday and found this gem. A copy of the fashion magazine Brutus which was completely taken over by an expose on the making of the original Mario with never before seen sketches and notebooks. Just awesome! https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2025-12-23-092733 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2025-12-23-092733 Tue, 23 Dec 2025 09:26:00 GMT Enjoying some cosy cabin vibes while hanging out the fam this holiday! Hope everyone is doing well. https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2025-12-13-220157 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2025-12-13-220157 Sat, 13 Dec 2025 22:01:00 GMT This is the most 2025 thing i've seen. Thanks Wired Magazine. https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2025-11-29-222829 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2025-11-29-222829 Sat, 29 Nov 2025 22:27:00 GMT Generated this background for my zoom calls using Ice Cap Zone assets and Nano Banana then created a looping animation in Veo 3. Just wild! I love this. https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2025-11-29-203725 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2025-11-29-203725 Sat, 29 Nov 2025 20:35:00 GMT Google's new Nano Banana Pro model is just so incredible. With just a few reference images from Sonic 3 I was able to get it to produce new levels, bosses and even this sick cover with 32x branding. This image model is so good, people are going to have so much fun with it. https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2024-11-29-120000 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2024-11-29-120000 Sat, 29 Nov 2025 19:43:00 GMT Testing out my new Good Thoughts section. The idea is simple: a place to share quick observations, links, and ideas without the pressure of writing a full article. Think of it as Twitter, but on my own terms. No algorithms, no engagement metrics, just thoughts worth sharing. https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2025-03-08-195721 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2025-03-08-195721 Sat, 08 Mar 2025 19:57:21 GMT Model context protocol (MCP) is going to become as essential as APIs for services and websites in an AI Agent first internet. Originally posted on Twitter. https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2025-02-14-235515 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2025-02-14-235515 Fri, 14 Feb 2025 23:55:15 GMT Recursive intelligence has arrived. And nobody noticed. Originally posted on Twitter. https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2025-02-02-133600 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2025-02-02-133600 Sun, 02 Feb 2025 13:36:00 GMT I found the Sonic 2 development sketches on the new Game History Library and just keep finding these developmental gems that never made the final cut of the game. And with the power of AI I decided to bring one to life in 3D. What a time to be alive! As someone who filled childhood notebooks with Sonic character designs, stumbling across the actual development art that shaped the game feels like finding buried treasure. These sketches show a mechanical beetle-type badnik that was designed but never shipped. The craftsmanship in the original pencil and marker work is remarkable; you can see the designer working out how the segments connect, where the lights sit, how the character would animate. Using AI to extrapolate a 3D model from a 1991 concept sketch feels like the kind of thing my eight-year-old self would have dreamt about. Originally posted on Instagram. https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2024-07-06-152649 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2024-07-06-152649 Sat, 06 Jul 2024 15:26:49 GMT I reckon the true AI revolution will not come when machines can think like humans, but when we humans realise we've always thought like machines. Originally posted on Twitter. https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2024-04-05-081147 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2024-04-05-081147 Fri, 05 Apr 2024 08:11:47 GMT Reaffirms my concern that LLMs always risk being more persuasive than truthful. Originally posted on Twitter. https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2023-12-22-152206 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2023-12-22-152206 Fri, 22 Dec 2023 15:22:06 GMT It's the holidays and you know what that means. Time to play with new AI stuff. Repurposed that "make a fake influencer" tech to turn myself into a Schiaparelli model. Mixture of Stable Diffusion and pose estimation models. Finally, my moment on the runway has arrived. Originally posted on Twitter. https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2023-12-02-122154 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2023-12-02-122154 Sat, 02 Dec 2023 12:21:54 GMT I'm not so sure we should be in a rush to remove hallucinations from LLMs. For all we know it might be the most valuable part for pushing the boundaries of creativity. Originally posted on Twitter. https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2023-10-13-133127 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2023-10-13-133127 Fri, 13 Oct 2023 13:31:27 GMT The REAL value of LLMs in academia is that of being "ontological mediators," translating complex jargon between vastly different academic fields. Those ideas guided the development of Scopus AI. It's the start of exciting things. Originally posted on Twitter. https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2023-10-07-230750 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2023-10-07-230750 Sat, 07 Oct 2023 23:07:50 GMT As great as RAG is for search retrieval I believe we will all be using some form of RAG-Fusion in future search technology. Originally posted on Twitter. https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2023-09-23-100527 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2023-09-23-100527 Sat, 23 Sep 2023 10:05:27 GMT We are reaching diminishing returns on smaller dimension sentence level vector models. I'm almost convinced the scores on the HuggingFace leaderboard are being rigged by fine tuning using the test sets. More creative solutions for retrieval are needed. Originally posted on Twitter. https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2023-09-10-094126 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2023-09-10-094126 Sun, 10 Sep 2023 09:41:26 GMT Found this in my old notes. I miss the days when VR was weird, nausea-inducing and fun. Wandering around London with a special case for my Oculus Dev Kit, demoing at different meetups. That welcome letter from Oculus still gives me chills: "This is Day Zero for virtual reality; the seminal point where it all begins." Originally posted on Twitter. https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2023-05-06-214249 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2023-05-06-214249 Sat, 06 May 2023 21:42:49 GMT Combining the Wes Anderson, GPT-4 and Midjourney trends into one to make my Sonic the Hedgehog fever dreams come true. I think the results speak for themselves. Originally posted on Twitter. https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2023-04-15-123000 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2023-04-15-123000 Sat, 15 Apr 2023 12:30:00 GMT I just tried my hand at making hot cross buns and they turned out amazing! ChatGPT was like my personal sous-chef, suggesting some cool twists to the recipe, like a lemon milk drizzle topping and adding bread improver. This was one of the first times I properly used an LLM for something outside of work. Not summarising papers or generating code, just making better buns. The suggestions were genuinely creative: the lemon milk drizzle was something I wouldn't have thought of, and the bread improver tip showed the kind of practical knowledge that's buried in forums and recipe books but surfaces naturally in conversation. It changed how I thought about these tools. They're not just for "serious" tasks; they're at their best when they're collaborating with you on whatever you actually care about in the moment. Originally posted on Instagram. https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2022-09-11-100126 https://adrianraudaschl.com/thoughts/2022-09-11-100126 Sun, 11 Sep 2022 10:01:26 GMT Sundays are best for cultivating a beginner's mindset. There is a Zen Buddhist concept called "shoshin," which is the idea of letting go of your preconceptions to develop an open mind like a beginner would have. Originally posted on Twitter.