Bookmarks #5
An alarmingly concise and very hinged summary of what it was like to build this site from scratch
Moving to a static site that I hand code myself instilled some inherent limitations that I needed to figure out how to work around. It helped me build a foundation for the future. I can keep building upon this as I learn and get inspired to try new things. In the meantime, I have a much simpler website that feels a little bit rougher, a writing and publishing process that is a bit more manual, a level of ownership I haven't felt in a long, long time.
Keenan has written a veritable tome on their journey from Squarespace to a self-hosted static site. It’s a tale of frustration and joy that will be familiar to any developer and, frankly, to any creative person.
To make a personal website is a creative act, not unlike writing a book or an album. It’s making deliberate choices within a set of constraints (technical or otherwise) in what to present to the world and how. It’s a beautiful mess. Unlike with other creative pursuits, you’re not only publishing the thing you made (the website as rendered by your browser of choice) but, also, its blueprint and a glimpse into the process (the source code and, sometimes, the version history). That makes it an uniquely open and vulnerable form of self-expression.
This post also reminded me of Joan Westenberg’s awesome article on the creator economy trap, which has been ringing in my head ever since I read it. It’s heartening to see folks like Keenan seizing the tools of the Web and making their own sites, doubly so when they discover that the barrier of entry isn’t as high as it might appear. It’s easy to look at something like john.design and think you’ll never in a million years make something as good as that. But guess what? You don’t need to. Make something simple. Tinker with it when you feel like it. You’ll be surprised at what it could look like in a few years.
There is still the need for a better Goodreads alternative
There is room for a platform that not only allows people to track their reading progress and books, but also connect with fellow readers. At the same time, I would like to take one step further and state that the very same platform could allow readers to connect with authors, and allow authors through unique social features to interact with their readers. And to go another step further, why not use the same platform to highlight independent book stores in the regions of the users whenever they discover a new book, and therefore encourage users to shop new books locally rather than supporting Amazon, which clearly does not care about those independent book shops and indie authors at all.
I’m so happy to have come across this post by Philipp. We chatted on Mastodon recently after I related my woes with Literal.club, a Goodreads alternative that appears to be in a kind of existential limbo. It’s clear by now going up against Goodreads is a monumental task: they are too firmly established, rooted in the Amazon infrastructure through which people buy and read books. There are a few spots where they’re weak, but all the competitors seem to stumble and fall along the way. For now, I’m giving Sequel a chance, enjoying it for its simplicity.
A question of power
“AI uses too much energy” cannot be the central thrust of the discussion. It’s a shallow take that distracts from the real, underlying crisis. The problem isn’t that AI is using “too much” power from our current grid; it’s that our current grid still overwhelmingly runs on fossil fuels in the first place. Until that changes, we’re just rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic.
Another one by Joan that took hold of my brain and shook out all my half-baked notions about what I thought I, erm, thought, about AI. A couple of articles on AI’s energy consumption made the rounds this week and they got me all fired up, mad as hell at the companies trading the future of the planet for their quarterly profit margins. I wanted to write something about it, but my feelings on AI remain hugely conflicted.
As much as I loathe the way LLMs are trained on public data and that their derivative and often hallucinatory bullshit output is then sold to the same people that were ripped off in the first place... I find myself using AI. “Turning the tables on AI” is lucid and overflowing with calculated hope for ways in which AI can be used not to replace human output but to help shape it. GitHub Copilot really makes my life easier, but I also wonder if, at this point, I would be at a disadvantage if I stopped using it.
To turn the focus away from AI and into the larger systemic issue takes the kind of mental fortitude that I’ve come to expect of Joan. It hasn’t helped crystallize my thoughts on AI, but it has made me see it for a tree instead of the proverbial forest.
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