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So it's been a month, huh?

2023-07-18

About time for an update...

Oh wow, it has been a month since I posted here. Seems like old habbits got the better of me again and I stopped writing. Not because nothing happened, but because that is what I do sometimes.

So what has happened...

Let's start with the Garden.

The Tomatos are just now turning ripe. They're very small — a bit bigger than cherry tomatos — which wasn't expected but they're tasty. Need to do better research what kind of tomato seed to buy. Oops.

I've already harvested two batches of gherkins and pickled them. All in all around half a kilo of them. This is surprisingly little considering it is seven plants. It's too early to tell how the pickling turned out, they're still in the basement fermenting or whatever you call this :).

The potatos will soon be ripe I think, so will the chillis and the onions.

The dill only did kind-of work. Enough for the pickling and some recipes but I believe the pot is too small / low for the plant. Will try a bigger pot next year.

Salad didn't work at all. Our balcony is too hot I believe, I'll have to think of something next time. The ginger never grew either.

I might have written about this already but me and the wife finally managed to go pluck strawberries on a field this year. We plucked a total of six kilos of the stuff and spend the rest of the weekend processing it into jam (I'm extremely happy how that turned out!), drying it for my musli, and other things. A good haul, next time we need more :)

My de-clouding project

(this is the ongoing process of me reducing my presence in the cloud)

I have managed to move a few websites from a very old server of mine to a newer, smaller one and shut down the old one. This marks the end of an era, that thing was online for 8 years or so. Two associated domains were also cancelled. This in combination will save me a bit of money.

The only downside of this is that I've lost my Vaultwarden for work and have to make do with what the company offers. Oh well, I'll live.

Gadget use

I'm using my smartphone less than one hour per day on average for the last couple of weeks. Pretty happy with that. Before recently I was using it a little over 2 hours on average.

To be honest I'm not entirely sure what I changed. Oh, yeah… Reddit have become greedy and killed their third party apps. That'll be a good chunk of the hour of my life I got back.

Game development

My c++ project is slowly chugging along. I'm quite happy to report that I'm not causing a null-pointer exception or other creative means of segfaulting every single time. Seems like I'm learning something… yay.

It is still too early for any details of the game here but every now and then I'm thinking whether or not I should add a devlog section to this capsule to keep track of what is happening and to keep myself motivated. Then again I'm thinking I'd rather code than write about what I coded.

Disillusion

I've gotten really tired with what is happening in the real world and with the internet giants lately. So tired that I can't be asked to read about it anymore. Hmm come to think of it this is probably another reason why I stopped writing here.

Reddit effectively killing their third party apps and alienating their mods is one thing.

Microsoft having concrete plans to make Windows itself a cloud system is a new low for them in their struggle to bind their customer base to them.

I never cared for Twitter, but the fact that Meta isn't launching Threads in the EU because they already know they're violating some gatekeeping regulation due to their account-tie-in with Instagram briefly caught my attention.

I did read an interesting article about how the problem with AI-generate text isn't that we can't tell whether or not that text is fake. The problem is that the existance of those texts erode the trust in what is authentic in general. So the problem isn't that we trust AI to generate true statements when they're hallucination (although that is a problem) — the real problem is that there's a good chance that we will stop trusting anything at all.

Add to that a study where large language models trained on the output of large language models show a deteriorating quality. Think about this. AI generated texts are out there and they're not going away.

AI experts writing an open letter about the dangers of their work. Here's a thought: Walk out.

I'll stop myself here.

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