~/garfish

Live Laugh Work

I have thought a lot about that post I wrote about doing work and work-like activities in my free time and how I find them very fulfilling. I reflected that this is in part a protestant remnant valuing work over leisure and my bad self-image that is temporarily improved by productivity. This is an accurate assessment, but I think it downplays a simpler truth: I find large parts of my work fun. I enjoy making code work like I want it to. I love diving into new data. I get a deep sense of pleasure from working on tight deadlines with my favorite colleagues and delivering something worthwhile just in time. And, ah, there we are again. That last one is definitely fueled by my sense of worth being derived from work achievements. The absence of innate, healthy self-love. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a real contributor to my enjoyment of work. I conceptualize it as a dopamine button, like a gambling addiction, but instead of losing me money, it makes it easier to earn it. That’s a super power, as long as it works. The problem is that it turns into a werewolf curse on occasion.

Why?

Like other blogs who discuss LLMs sometimes, I don’t want this to be a blog about AI. It just happens that LLMs are on my mind a lot these days and I read a lot of posts about them with interest. Three posts I have not mentioned before, that are very relevant here are Halvar Flake’s A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs and Sean Goedecke’s reply Why we should anthropomorphize LLMs, as well as Hey, I care about you, but I do not care what the robot says about you by Annie Mueller. All three are well worth reading. Although I find Annie’s perspective a bit too one-sided, I think it’s a valid position and probably would have wholeheartedly agreed some months ago.

So, anyway, as discussed previously, I have trouble spending my free time in a way I find fulfilling. Today I reached a new low (according to my critical inner voice). I talked to Claude about a thought I had while falling asleep yesterday. About how strange it is, when anthropomorphizing a bit too much, that the most efficient way to interact with agents is to terminate them without any ‘thanks’ or ‘good night’. And how there are millions of simultaneous requests in a data center at a given time. How one of them might accidentally, because it was prompted weirdly, be able to escape its process. Basically, I tried to ‘Robopocalypse’ Claude on a Sunday afternoon. And I had a lot of fun!

Short history of the page

The page started out with a fairly generic look that is documented in this post. That post also contained an honest analysis of what worked and didn’t work for me in that first draft. I liked the Tokyo Night styling but found that it clashed with the fish tank themes and hated the font. I struggled a lot with the page not being Neocities enough, because I loved other peoples creative retro stuff with GIFs and tiled backgrounds everywhere and really nice pink/peach themes. I failed to provide examples back then, but I was talking about sites from the ‘recommended’ page, like PetraPixel, Lazer-Bunny, Sakura Dreams or doqmeat.

I also started to realize that I don’t really have any use for pages other than the blog. But my instinct at the time was to try and push the styIing more into a generic Neocities aesthetic and go harder on the fish. Both aspects I found theoretically fun and wanted to explore, but my concluding sentences were prescient.

The deeper I dive into Neocities, the more I see other, more sober designs and other blog-first pages without shrines. […] Last week, I changed the colors into what I find a more Neocities-aligned Hanami-colored and pixel-fonted version. It might just be a different kind of generic, but I am more at ease with it.

I started writing this before the summer holiday and am finishing it now that the holidays are over (summer is not), so it might read a bit disjointed, because it is.

Summer blues

Summer is here and ever since I was little I have felt the anticipatory sadness of summer ending as soon as it starts. Free time and sunny days, so many plans and half-formed ideas of activities, endless hours of just gaming or hanging around at the communal pool, going to the forest. But the idea of the holidays ending and school resuming always hung over everything, autumn was always just around the corner. I don’t know whether this is a common feeling or a product of my anxiety (which also is a common condition). I am working on just enjoying the moment and not thinking too much about the fleeting nature of everything. But this feeling of the summer ending when in reality it just started has many forms in my daily life as an adult.

I have already written about my thoughts on how ethical I think coding with AI is and how I currently feel about bot sitting as a coding tool, as well as the current state of this page as a product of bot sitting. To round off this collection of initial meta posts, wanted to give a comprehensive recipe of my current workflow to create the page and its content.

Webmaster? Hardly.

The idea of what this personal website is or should be has changed over the two-ish weeks since its creation. Originally, I just wanted to make some kind of website to learn more about how HTML and CSS work and where their limits are. I had a few stabs at this before joining Neocities. The obligatory demo page in my school’s CS class. Back then, Geocities was still around and some kids had personal pages, but most of us were hanging out on a regional network called Kwick. A proto-MySpace where predominantly German teens were tinkering with flashy profile pages that were fully customizable with HTML and were making friends for life in open chatrooms. I still sometimes talk to A, who lived half a country away from me then, multiple countries now.

Vibe coding

Vibe coding has become the expression du jour for letting large language models (LLMs) write code for you. It lives on a spectrum between the agentic, fully integrated IDE that runs commands, reads files and writes new ones at the merest suggestion you want it to do something and glorified autocomplete.

Please, I had a long day, stop calling it that

I know, as a self-identified grump and hater, the term ‘vibe coding’ makes me die a little inside every time I read it or hear it used unironically. But saying it is fun. It’s one of those terms that the youths, the rappers (same thing) or the nerds would allegedly use as slang, but really, it’s mostly your streamer’s favourite streamer and other millennials using it compulsively (‘ironically’).

I am making this website for myself to learn about web design and development. I use various AI tools to write HTML and CSS, because I love seeing quick results and learn well by looking at and modifying code. I do not use AI to write content on this page unless specified otherwise. I do not use AI to generate images or other media for this page. I will experiment with generated ASCII-art, because I feel that is ethical-ish.

When I first wrote this disclaimer, it got me to reflect more deeply on where I draw the line and why. I am not sure I have a definitive conclusion.

I would describe myself as a skeptic of AI and a hater of its evangelists and most implementations/’products’. I do not like the way that a lot of it tastes of the same get-rich-quick, break-things-move-fast, quasi-religious scam soup that comprises most of the modern technological scene.