Hey! I'm Harshad, also known as Hiway around some corners of the Internet.
I currently spend most of my time tending to soil, microbes, plants and a bunch of animals on a small farm in the hills around Kodaikanal, India. I moved here a few years ago after realising that I probably would lose my marbles if I continued to live in cities.
Before this, I found joy in building software - and then that became a source of frustration as the complexity of software development toolchains grew to fit the large teams and organizations developing them.
However, it is difficult to kill curiosity when you've been feeding and nurturing it for your entire life. It becomes its own thing, like a large dog who now takes you for a walk rather than the other way around.
Something changed in the last year (2024) that brought some of that joy of tinkering back for me - LLMs that can generate code got good enough for my hobby projects! Now, while I eagerly wait for clever mathematicians and code hackers to optimize these systems and make them run on commodity hardware, I'm begrudingly using the corporate tools that are yet to be fully enshittified, to build tools for myself - things I have been ruminating on for years, but rarely found the time to try and build each one to see if it was worth the effort.
I'm not a fan of "AI" as it is currently being hyped by the same people who were hawking shitcoins a little while ago. Younger me was interested in the field of AI when A.L.I.C.E. bot was still a thing, even tried my hand at crafting a DTD to add simulation of emotional response to the way one interacted with the chatbot. Good ol' naive me. Now, I don't care about the chatbot aspect outside of it being an alternative interface to writing code. It's only one more layer of abstraction, surely it'll be alright. breathes so...
What I do care about, is that even with the limited capabilities of today's frontier models, they're useful for certain tasks where it is straightforward to verify the correctness - such as testing and compiling code.
I've been using GitHub Copilot in VCode (oh the horrors! I hear some of you mutter in the back), and found that having a running chat that documents what I'm working on is really good at maintaining context for me - as I switch between working on my farm, breaking up fights between some of my cats, playing with my dogs, responding to sudden weather changes (hill weather is something else!)... and letting life take precedence over my plans - because the plan in moving here was to let life happen.
Why even bother writing code when I'm in a good place now? Because I'm tired of the software written by people who would rather be doing something else! Have you even looked at the state of the art today? Oof! If a pile of shit sprouted butts and started squirting poop out, you'd get today's design sensibilities and user experiences. People feel proud of building these things? No, honestly, they're just looking at the paycheck - keeps their pricey lifestyles going until the next layoff. It is sad, but it is what we have. Okay, we're just getting started with talking about poop, turns out shit is good actually, and the picture I painted to crap on current UI/UX is going to decompose in the next paragraphs. It won't improve the interfaces designed for masses though, they'll continue to stink.
Scratch that, it is what we had, today almost anybody can whisper a software prototype to reality - and I say almost, because it takes a hint of madness and a healthy supply of grit to sift through the garbage that these probabilistic algorithms also tend to produce.
And why would I want anything to do with garbage? My little farm is fed by compost - y'know - mostly the stuff that many gardeners throw out after cleaning their precious veggie and flower beds. I seek that out - I love deep-rooted weeds that extract minerals from the soil and make it available on surface - which I gladly compost and feed my microbes and soil critters, then I take their poop and feed my plants! Nature is of course far, far more complex than our tiny reductive brains can comprehend, but after a point, handling copious amounts of dung to make even better compost becomes a part of the process. I'm literally eating the fruits of my willingness to deal with certain kinds of shit X-) Sounds gross until you get punched in your taste buds with flavours only your grandma would recognize.
Anyway, where were we? Yeah, AI as it is being hyped today is not real, most of generated tokens are a waste of resources and those blinded by the greed are willingly making climate change worse in the hope of more profit while laying off the humans who got them there. It's the luddites against the loom all over again. I am with the people who see this technology being used to justify shitty behaviour by those in power. I am also the person these same people never will acknowledge because I don't spend time in doing their dances to show how committed I am to the current whims of their 'community'.
I want none of that.
I'm just a tired human who wants to get shit done, and who has found sparing use of technology to be an enabler. There is no further agenda - I make tools that work for my exhausted brain - because if my tools don't work for me on my worst days, are they even my tools? Hence the banner Xostd, you can read it as "exhausted" or "hugs and kisses are standard" - for dealing with exhausted brains - whatever makes more sense to you.
Peas!
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Thank you for your attention so far! Feed links are in the footer if you wish to check in on my mis/adventures every now and then.