Nostalgia
03:17
Sleeping is hard lately. It could be the usual suspects; work, love. I used to be a habitual sleeptime worrier before trading that for just being chronically anxious and depressed at some point.
It could be the avoidance thing. Late nights filled with loud noises and substance use interleaved with early sleep taken out of an unwillingness to be concious more than anything else.
Maybe it's the fact that after years of AI being a buzzword the recent leaps forward around LLMs make it feel like we're finally at the dawn of genuine consciousness or an existential threat. I promise this is not going to be about GPT. Goddess knows we don't need more noise about that.
03:21
I'm reminded of the exact physical rooms where I first learned to program. Writing the lines in a pristine Notepad++ is a very distinct memory. The first file, `<html><head>test</head><body>hello world</body></html>` makes my browser do as instructed. Cory Doctorrows words come to mind in retrospect, I must've read Little Brother around the same time:
If you've never programmed a computer, you should. There's nothing like it in the whole world. When you program a computer, it does exactly what you tell it to do. It's like designing a machine — any machine, like a car, like a faucet, like a gas-hinge for a door — using math and instructions. It's awesome in the truest sense: it can fill you with awe.
The PHP scripts to run text based adventures and mazes are not a year later, wildly inefficient both in terms of volume of poorly copy/pasted code and space-time complexity. Collaboration is painstakingly done by editing files directly on a server over unsecured FTP with FileZilla, occassionally leading to losing progress due to overwriting files or bedroom computers being turned off midd-process overnight. Perfeclty acceptable for 2010 schoolwork, perfectly acceptable five years later at my first few real software job. I briefly ponder if we didn't overcomplicate things since git and Docker.
03:43
The birds are waking up. Audio messages of loved ones on a night out roll in. I'm reminded of XKCD 313, the madness can't be that far away now. I realise I'm surrounded by people picking up skills in a world that simultaneously has improved the process of self-learning beyond recognition and has massively expanded the things to be learned before one is useful. I'm not sure I'd be able to make the journey for the first time if it were today.
04:12
We post to tumblr in absence of a personal online space to put this. For all my years of computer I'm still to have a proper personal website. Maybe revisit that bespoke artisan blog engine again soon.
