/notes

The darkest of nights passes and the sun is reborn.

There are no heroes.

That was a reaction I had to some news. Meditating on this phrase for just a moment I take the meaning to be: men are faliable and flawed and are not to be worshiped. We should look elsewhere for inspiration and guidance in our lives.

While we shouldn’t perform any hero worship to these flawed people, we should aspire towards the idealized hero myth. Those myths exist for a reason. We see the potential for greatness in ourselves.

We should aspire to be like Hercules.

everyone wants a dollar, goddamn.

My favorite way to play a soulslike is to become hilariously over-leveled and steamroll through every boss.

I’ve been using firefox for probably 20 years now and have not really questioned the choice. Now I am. The Mozilla news has me reflecting on my choice. See also is mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

• What even is a “web browser” today?
• What does AI powered mean for a “web browser”?
• What sort of interface do I require to the internet?
• Is a pi-hole enough in my home network to mitigate malicious ads and trackers?
• If I opt to use a “more supported” browser such as Google Chrome (or Chromium I suppose) should I run it inside a VM, isolated from my main machine?
• Should I run Firefox in a VM once it is “ai powered”?
• Is Waterfox a good fork of Firefox?
• Is this a battle I really want to fight?
• If the internet is just tv and ads are paying the bills, does it really matter since I can choose to not engage with it at all?

The message I am receiving from reflecting on the state of, things, is that I no longer want to engage with the corporate web. It does not enrich me, or improve my life in any way, or bring me any joy. In fact, it is quite the opposite.

Mozilla directing Firefox down a path that seems counter to what the kind of people that use Firefox actually want from a browser is a clear signal that I have no fucking idea what is going on XD Best to just, walk away, and focus on the things that actually bring me joy in this world.

You Should Never Build a CMS, a response to Coding Agents & Complexity Budgets

“Man who owns company says you need their product and not the other guys product.”

Joking aside, the sanity blog post is pretty good. As is Lee Robs. And as a sales pitch of the Cursor product, Lee did a great job of migrating their site off Sanity. In true vibe coding fashion the green field project was pretty good. Let’s check in in 6 months and see how things are holding up. Considering that what Lee Rob at Cursor did when he “migrated cursor.com from a CMS to raw code and Markdown”, is he built a fucking CMS. Just one without any of the features that will inevevitably be requested of him as the site grows and he left behind at Sanity.

Sanity makes some good arguments for a CMS instead of a single file = single page model. Content publishing is usually not as simple as creating a new markdown file in your git repository. There may be approval workflows, legal and compliance considerations, internationalization and localization work. Actually managing your content in a way that is not relying entirely on grep such that you can find all references to a specific product, or are dealing with esoteric content siloing rules dictated by a search performance team.

Neither are bullet proof solutions to building a website. Depending on your scale, your goals, your audience, and so many other factors, you may ONLY need a flat file static site that is managed by your team of coders, or you may need a structured content storage to emit and generate web pages and content across a variety of devices and screens.

The Curse of Knowing How, or; Fixing Everything.

Like Camus’ Sisyphus, we are condemned to push the boulder of our own systems uphill—one fix, one refactor, one script at a time. But unlike the story of Sisyphus, the curse is not placed onto you by some god. We built the boulder ourselves. And we keep polishing it on the way up.

I want to quote the entire post. This may be the best thing I have read this year.

The author quotes Marcus Aurelius to frame an argument that this boulder we have created and are cursed to push uphill has a deeper emotional core.

You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

Programming lures us into believing that we can control outside events. We self-soothe by building. We need the small victories that building a new tool or writing a script bestow. We refactor that tool we built, not because it is messy, but because our lives are messy. This technical work becomes emotional regulation.

Reflecting on the past and taking inventory of the projects started, tools rebuilt, systems tinkered with, and the times in which I did those things, the authors reality become my own reality. His truths become mine. The burnout he warns of is only a few steps behind me. I do use programming as emotional regulation. I too want to defy what is real. I want to assert control when things are out of control.

Nietzsche warned of gazing too long into the abyss. But he did not warn what happens when the abyss is a Makefile or a 30k line of code Typescript project.

lmao.

There is a light at the end. Recognition of the patterns is a good step to changing them. The author also calls for learning to let go as we are not responsible to fix all the things. I agree.

I often forget that macos is a unix and that many of the underlying tools are just bsd tools. auto_master for example, to configure auto mounting various network shares and disks.

I also forget that i can use apropos to figure out where to learn about a tool and of course use the man pages.

so i guess, friendly reminder (to myself) that macos is a unix.

Gem.coop is a new server for sourcing Ruby gems. It's easy to switch.

I switched because Ruby Central's actions left me feeling uncomfortable. Supporting the folk who are doing the work rather than, whatever Ruby Central does, feels better and better aligns with my values.

  -source "https://rubygems.org"
  +source "https://gem.coop"

We aim for fast, simple hosting, that is compatible with Bundler but optimized for the next generation. It’s built for the community by the former maintainers and operators of RubyGems.org.

A website is a garden to tend to, and the IndieWeb is a guide for how to grow a garden that yields higher quality. Or something like that. Anyway, lots of updates here.

• Templates have been tidied up. The website structure has revealed itself to me and struturally I am quite happy with it.
• Microformats have been added where appropriate.
• Webmentions are now being fetched and displayed.
• HTML comments have been added to the source code to help not only me remember what I am doing, but to help others who are learning how to build websites.
• Tailwind CSS has been removed

There is now a page where I document some of the tools and processes I am developing to support my participation in the indieweb.