Howdy! I'm writing a blog article after years, and let me be upfront - I don't think I remember how to write good prose anymore - it's been long since someone explained that micro-blogging was a thing now. I signed up on Twttr in August 2006, one of the 3,000 something users of the sms based service at the time. It was novel - I did not have to wait until I got home and then let the modem scream at me when I tried to get online - to share some thought I had in the day. I could simply send an international text message that cost as much as a cuppa chai, and have the brainfart be broadcast into the ether! Good times. I used Twitter for years and then one guy let the sink in and turned it into a public Xitter.
The Fediverse has been a good place for me for nearly three years, there's a lot of kind people who remind me of the early years of social media, when sharing a photato of your breakfast was not cringe, but a genuinely welcome act of defying the seriousness of the established rules of The Blogosphere.
However, I do miss having my own little corner on the 'Net where I could infodump as catharsis and share my curiosities with no expectation of instant gratification. I grew up making web pages by hand, not sites - individual pages, each typed out in a plain text editor, that I would upload via FTP or SCP to a folder. I remember when <marquee> was a valid tag. When tiny animated GIFs were little treasures you stashed in a folder to use some day.
Somewhere along the years, much of that was lost and we traded in the wacky personalities our homepages had to the homogenised walls and timelines that offered convenience so that more of our friends could join us online. That was well over two decades ago.
I'm older, hopefully better informed and definitey tired of the general direction everything I loved is going today. I refuse to goto hell, especially in a handbasket. I am the Hiway, whether my destination is hell, or beyond, remains to be seen. But in the meanwhile, join along for the ride? I promise the scenery will be good, while it lasts.
As you may have guessed by now, there is no grand purpose to this prose. It's a rant with a --verbose flag; as it sometimes needs to be.
This blog will probably be more of the same but with varying degrees of focus on things in technology that I feel strongly about - enough to spend my attention on writing a few hundred words on the topic. I do promise myself, and you, dear reader - I will make the effort to publish something worth your time. I refuse to accept the Dead Internet Hypothesis; I know you're out there - another human, equally tired of the shit that's always flying over our heads as we retreat in the hastily dug foxholes, hoping this will end soon.
However, I must give you a heads-up on the fact that I am using LLMs for writing the code I will be publishing here. It is merely a tool I am willing to weild - to cut through the bullshit that people call stacks these days. It is a useful tool that can turn a wall of docs and specs into well-tested, working code - once you understand the boundaries and how to work within the constraints of the system. I will be sharing my learnings on this topic as well, always written by these very hands that were deep in a pile of half-done compost minutes ago.
For the record, we're not getting AGI, let alone ASI any time soon. Simulacrum, illusion and fallible fools falling for the fuckery, sure - it's already here. Roko's Basilisk can bite my resident wild boar's hairy ass, and get rightly gored for the hubris.
This blog will remain in its entirety, my mistake, and responsibility.
Peas!