Replacing Medium for my blog

This is a post in the series about my data ownership and me becoming independent of big tech.

Becoming independent of big tech

2026 is the year that I will move out of big tech (as much as possible). It will also be the year that I gain more control of my data.
This has been on my mind for a long time, but as a European, recent political events have made it a bigger focus for me this year.

From zero to self-learning Dragster bot

This post will cover a little journey of mine involving a game from 1980. The game is incredibly short, and the best players in the world will finish it in slightly more than 5.5 seconds. And as you might have guessed, this is the Dragster game for Atari 2600.
Dragster is interesting because it is has a unique place in the history of computer games and especially in speed-running. The best time ever was supposedly 5.51 seconds, and this held the Guinness world record for being the longest-standing record in any video game (a record for having a record is really quite meta). I say “supposedly” because the claim was not that well-supported, and the best time that anyone else could get was 5.57 seconds, which was done by multiple people, but no-one else ever did 5.51 or 5.54 (the time can have the values 5.51, 5.54 and 5.57, other times are impossible due to time tracking mechanics that I’ll explain later). This brought on a massive hunt for understanding how the record was set, and after serious looking through code and piles of evidence mounting up, 5.51 seconds was deemed impossible, and the record was rejected.