Endgame Viable

Contents

Morning!

This is going to be an easy one, because it’s just links to other Blaugust posts I’ve been collecting.

I’m off to a brain MRI appointment this morning and then throwing away a mattress and sofa, which was supposed to be yesterday but plans changed, and then somehow squeezing in time for the day job.

Blaugust Reading

You may or may not be aware that it’s almost impossible to actually read the posts blasting by at a thousand miles an hour during Blaugust, let alone interact with them in any way. I’m struggling with this again, as usual.

However I’ve been randomly clicking on titles in my RSS reader for the last five days, and I noted posts that resonated in some way. Perhaps this will help those blogs somehow.

Almost all of these blogs are of the post-WordPress IndieWeb style, and many of them are developers. A lot of them don’t have comment sections.

I don’t normally follow or hang out with developers, even though I am one. I find that, since the beginning of the Internet, the kind of developer who blogs and talks a lot is often a very opinionated and ideological developer, the kind who proudly deletes all their big tech accounts and runs all their web sites off of a solar-powered Raspberry Pi and looks with disdain on anyone who doesn’t follow their lead. (I exaggerate. Slightly.) I’m much more in the pragmatic category of old developer mostly looking for ways to optimize the day job. But it’s fun to check in on that other world from time to time.

The Links

• MogBlog
  • What to play when you’re trapped in the hospital. I find myself hanging around hospitals more and more so this was greatly appreciated.
• Anarchaepteryx
  • re: AI use in communities. Reactions to AI are always interesting or amusing. Though admittedly I tend to prefer the “how to use AI better” kind of reaction over the “I hate AI now and forever and so should you” reaction.
• Tabitha
  • Auto-Fitting Text with CSS Only, No JavaScript. I liked the old desktop-emulation style of the blog layout.
• Fyr
  • Garden Food 2026. I’ve had a weird desire to figure out how to grow tomatoes for many years, but never pulled the trigger. Also, there’s a rotating tagline at the bottom and the one I saw was something like “commercialized social media is the worst thing that’s ever happened to the internet” and I thought hell yeah it is and wondered where that thought came from and if that’s a common thought among younger generational bloggers and if it is, maybe there’s hope for the future.
• Littlelum
  • Remember to Eat Food. First time I can ever remember seeing someone other than me talk about forgetting to eat. Apparently a lot of people do this.
• 82MHz
  • Are we becoming too paranoid about AI slop?. Before AI, there was a vast amount of human slop on the Internet. I’d estimate as much as 90% of the Internet was slop before AI came along. So yeah, I’m not too bothered by AI slop. Use the same rules to avoid AI slop as to avoid human slop, i.e. “don’t click on things.”
  • Why a Raspberry Pi shouldn’t be powered through it’s GPIO pins Back in the early 90s I was more familiar with the electrical workings of computer components and sometimes tinkered with hardware (my first hard drive was a DIY build kit), and Raspberry Pi talk reminds me of that, so this post was a bit of a blast from the past.
• Joelchrono
  • Not paranoid, but respectful “AI steals artwork” I went over this in 2024. “Training” is not stealing. Training on legally obtained copyrighted material is not stealing. If the training material was obtained illegally (and it can be proven in court), that’s a different story and the copyright owner has a case. Regardless, there are few legal precedents yet. Laws still haven’t caught up. New laws need to be written. They won’t be, because politicians.
• MATT’S BLOG
  • I Fixed Music Discovery Interesting. I had largely given up on music discovery after 15 years of tepid pop music and this new age of AI-generated music.
  • There Is An Annual Blaugust Controversy I mean there isn’t, but everybody keeps talking about it like there is. I’ve seen exactly one respectful comment about the AI policy, then a lot of blog posts talking about a raging controversy. Shrug. And there’s that term “small web” again.
• Jak2k
  • Fuck Open Source! A ban on AI code in Codeberg? Codeberg is what?
  • Abandoning GitHub Oh that’s what Codeberg is. I haven’t been keeping track of github ownership and whatnot. I only use it occasionally, but my company uses the enterprise version extensively.
• BurgeonLab
  • Costs: Price of a Personal Site on the Smallweb What’s a “Smallweb”? Why are there always new terms for things? I personally wouldn’t count electricity or Internet connectivity as a cost of blogging.
• Nyman
  • Licenses suggestions for your vibe-projects Funny. I have actually wondered which license to use on my github repos from time to time. This is a blog that looks like a Windows 95 email client, which is a crazy inventive design choice.
• Aywren’s Nook | Gaming & Geek Blog
  • What I’ve Learned About Making Better YouTube Videos. Video production: A fascinating topic. Though Aywren is describing how to make better “algorithm-worthy” videos… whereas I’m more interested in the technical aspects of video and audio and not much into building a community. There was a time when I wondered how much money I could make from YouTube but as soon as they changed the monetization threshold to 1000 subscribers that went out the window. The modern success pattern seems to be buying subscribers and a content sweat shop work ethic.
• Vanderwal
  • The Guideline of Two Things Not to Discuss Is Now Three More confirmation that yes, AI is, in fact, a controversial subject.
• Notes by JCProbably
  • Ocean of Grief Yeah, losing a pet sucks. I held onto Bella’s dog stuff for many years before I finally threw them away. I even kept a bag of dry dog food in a cabinet for years. And I still have a dog bed sitting by the front window.
• JAG’s Workshop
  • OpenAI Defends Itself Against Apple’s Lawsuit in the Court of Public Opinion A blog with surprising difficulty finding links to posts, as all of their article links go to external sites and not their own blog (even the RSS link). Anyway, the AI wars continue. There doesn’t seem to be much about this case to advance AI copyright precedent though.
• Heart Soul Machine
  • The Politics of Care I always appreciate a political post that isn’t a food fight, and muses about an actual policy topic. It’s a rarity in today’s world.
• Noisy Deadlines
  • A few strong opinions about AI I would hardly call these “strong” opinions. “I don’t consider AI-generated artwork to be art” is about as mainstream of an opinion as you can get, imo. Here’s a strong opinion: I don’t consider it “art” to put a header image on a blog post. It’s “work” but “necessary” because of “the algorithm” and “human nature.”
• blog//x2600.cc
  • Write.as/Blaugust response to: NoisyDeadlines More on AI in Blaugust, because there definitely needs to be more said about that.
• michaelharley.net
  • How I make my blog posts more resilient A fellow Richmond, Virginia blogger? Amazing! Found this one in the fediverse. I have also gone through importing old posts into the blog. I never think to write down any lessons learned though.
  • Why I switched from Firefox to Vivaldi for browsing I abandoned Firefox so many years ago I can’t even remember why, but at the time Chrome was the hot new thing. I think I’ve tried Vivaldi before, don’t remember why it didn’t stick. Reminds me I should try again to unstick myself from Chrome.
• Kelly’s World
  • Debugging comments: Nope, its Dam Spam I know this is no consolation but the best thing that everyone can do to mitigate spam is to leave WordPress. The entire world’s army of spammers are working day and night to penetrate WordPress, while largely ignoring everything else. At least, that’s my experience.
• A late entry: crosenthal.com | Courtney Rosenthal
  • Applied Chords Ref Sheet. I haven’t studied music theory in a million years but it’s cool stuff. My mom was a piano teacher and she had an old weathered book about music theory that I remember devouring when I was much younger.