Note: this article contains anime-style AI generated illustrations. If that bothers you… feel free to stop reading (although you might miss out… or not?).
Leave of absence? #
Soo… the last post here was approximately four (or was it five?) years ago. What the heck happened?
I could start with a list of more or less plausible justifications:
- Life (who hasn’t used this as a catch-all for everything?)
- “I’ve been busy” (who hasn’t?)
- “Stuff happened” (spoiler: it happens all the time)
Although some stuff did indeed happen, there are some real reasons on why this blog hasn’t been updated for a long time:
- Laziness. There, I said it. Writing short or long-form text requires patience and dedication, and I couldn’t be arsed to sit down and do that, despite having a lot of things I wanted to write about (and I still do)
- Theming. At the time I used Ananke, for the site, that, boy, had many issues. So many that I forked half of the theme to fix it. And guess what it happened? It was so fragile, I was afraid to even build the site
- A certain interest of mine, uh, got me a little carried away.
So, why now!? #
Good question. The honest answer is that “Because I wanted to”. Or at least, that’s what when I started writing this draft, at this point quite a while ago. It felt like a waste to let my main site (yes, it’s been really online since 1999) go to waste, even though the domain references something that is long gone.
In addition, given the recent developments, I thought it’d be nice to give alternative points of view from a FOSS drive-by contributor with a less prevalent background than the ones which are dominating the field.
In addition, talk about whatever I feel like talking (not much, probably?), using my established, extraordinary (don’t mention my modesty!) writing style.
Enough! Just tell us what has changed! #
There was a lot of cruft accumulated over the years, including when this blog was still made using Jekyll: in fact I think there were broken links for almost a decade or so (!). In addition, there were topics I did not want to cover anymore, or that they felt a little too out of scope. Therefore, the changes have been pretty invasive.
- Removed all references to my work: posts marked as science will remain, but I don’t want to blog about that on personal space anymore (and I’m no longer a scientist anyway)
- Cleaned a bit the about section and the various pages
- Removed references to old software and what not (it’s not going to get updated anymore, anyway)
- Removed comments: there’s no point in having them, honestly
- Fixed all broken image links (except two, which I think I have lost along the way in 2006-ish).
In addition I switched to the wonderful Blowfish theme, which is greatly customizable and works like I wanted to. Care was made to ensure that existing links didn’t break (I had a LLM pass through them: you may think all that you want, but that boring work is perfect for a brainless agent). In fact, this brainless LLM work is what enabled a migration that would’ve taken weeks to take just a few minutes (plus more weeks to get the motivation, heh…). Finally also thanks to Blowfish the site should finally be readable on mobile.
Last but not least, I wanted to give this page a closer touch to my own interests, so I added plenty of generative-model-made illustrations, of a certain group of characters I helped someone with in the past two decades. Like this I’m closer as I wanted originally dennogumi.org to be.
But… #
I’m expecting that not everyone will like the new look (possibly the content?). I can see at least a number of criticisms going my way:
- It’s not professional! — You’re browsing a site whose name (電脳組) translated literally from Japanese is electric brain group. What did you expect, a slick portal for a Fortune 500 company? Besides, this is my personal site: my only obligations are towards the hoster’s terms of service. I could fill it with dumps of ancient Sanskrit manuscripts and it would still be OK.
- You’re using AI!!!!1111 — Yes. It’s written also in the footer. All these images were generated locally on my GPU. If you change your moral judgment depending on whether someone uses or not “AI”… well, I’d suggest a re-evaluation of your priorities. Characters are also partially mine, and the other co-creator gave me permission to use them. All other moral judgments are only fit for a dust bin.
- Why anime? — I like it. And have since about 40 years ago. For any unwanted judgment on the characters (which are entirely fictional, but I don’t understand why this needs to be stressed these days) or on myself, the dust bin is that way.
- But you are a dictator/vegetable eater/polo wearer! — Please. Make yourself at home in the dust bin.
Wrapping up #
Not that kind of wrapping, Yumiko.
The 5 cent question is always the same: will this be a single post, lost in the thread of time, or will I get around to writing more? I would rather not say “Only time will tell”, because of course that would mean never. I do have ideas for a few posts though:
- My thoughts as a former scientist on the use of coding agents;
- About the forgotten freedom of software, Freedom 0;
- A description of my current “homelab” setup.
Three ideas for a blog don’t seem much, but it’s still a number greater than zero. And the moment I’m writing them, something else may come to mind (hopefully).
But enough rambling for now. Enjoy the new look(?) and until next time (within this geological era!)!