I'm Back!

After six short years, I’m back baby!

histre took up all my time and attention. Between the last post and now, I also put in an intense two and a half years at Walmart, traveled to many countries, went on several backpacking trips, took care of family, found a way to stop stressing so much about my startups, got better at snowboarding, and also read several books.

I lost interest in writing primarily because while I was doing it for fun, some friends from previous life were often commenting as if I was showing off. And there were the people who were experts at jumping to the worst possible interpretation of whatever I wrote.

Their opinions probably haven’t changed, but my perspective certainly has. I’m just creating ink blots and they will see what they want to see.

Now I look at those old comments that rankled me so much at that time, and they are just funny now. So are my posts.

It’s probably not entirely fair to place all the blame there, as I’m sure my inherent laziness played a non-trivial role.

While I’ve managed to archive those old Blogger comments here in my website, I don’t have comments turned on anymore. This is not because I don’t want them, but because it isn’t as easy to set up as it was with Blogger back in the day. If I were to use a hosted solution, I could still do that, but then they’ll shut down at some point, and I’ll have to spend days exporting the data. I do hope to bring it back at some point, but it wouldn’t be open to the whole internet. Those innocent days are gone, and I don’t have the patience to moderate the deluge of spam that is par for the course for open forms these days.

The next steps for this website are:

• Fix the subscription form
• Update the bookshelf with the last six years of books read. GoodReads broke their API so my old automation doesn’t work anymore. At some point I’ll automate this with histre.
  • 2019: 33
  • 2020: 17
  • 2021: 16
  • 2022: 08
  • 2023: 14
  • 2024: 15
  • 2025: 06 so far
• Send email alerts to subscribers

The world has really changed!

• Covid19
• AI: Large language and diffusion models
• End of ZIRP
• Massive political shifts and wars

Without the AI tools, specifically ChatGPT v5, and Claude 4 Sonnet via Cursor, I wouldn’t have been able to get this website going again yet. I was able to set up reproducible builds with docker, using the exact version of Hugo I had used before, and created tools to do side-by-side comparisons of prod vs local, both for rendered web pages, as well as for the html source of the same files. I would’ve never had the time to manually code up those tools, and I would’ve waited to be really sure that I was not breaking anything. Who knows how many more years that would’ve taken! It would’ve remained the tenth priority for a very long time.