While visiting my grandson this morning, I finished a roll of expired Portra 400 in the Rolleiflex. When I got home, I didn't feel like developing the roll. C-41 processing is a whole thing. It's not hard, but I don't love it. Still, I'm usually excited to at least see what's on the roll. Today, I wasn't. Not a great sign.
There are things I want to talk about, but I don't feel like writing any of it.
Mike Hall: There's an addressable market of 1.
What finally made it "work," if our definition of "work" is "make code that does what I want with about as many obvious bugs or issues as if I'd devoted months to this project starting from scratch..."
You see, that's what LLMs are good for. They may not be smart enough to write production-level, professional code, but goddamn if they're not great for helping normal people whip up things that would have been next to impossible for them just a year ago. I do it all the time.
LLMs today are like desktop publishing software in the late 1980s. Using Claude feels like when I first got hold of an Apple LaserWriter and PageMaker. Suddenly, I could make things, all by myself. Didn't matter whether I was "qualified" or not.
As of Sunday, June 1, 2025 at 10:00 AM, all of my sites (including this one) are being served using Caddy on a FreeBSD server from Vultr.
Yesterday everything was on an Ubuntu server at Hetzner. I would have prefered to stay at Hetzner, but they don't seem to offer FreeBSD.
Why have I done this? I don't really know. Many years ago (early 2000s), I ran FreeBSD for all our client's servers. We only moved to Linux because "that's where everyone was headed" at the time. I'd always liked FreeBSD, so I wanted to try it again.
So far, it's as simple as I remember. Everything feels tight, if that makes sense.
Anyway, it was a good excuse to learn something new.
Looks like I accidentally took a photo of a hole in the universe.
(Either that, or there's a problem with the film negative.)
I can't explain why I like listening to my old cassettes so much. All I can say is that I'm having a blast.
Now Playing: Rush, "Roll the Bones"
In 2010 I would walk around with the Hasselblad and a roll of Tri-X and take photos of just about anything. This is a spring from a train car. I like how it turned out.
I've been going through my Lightroom library and noticed a couple things. First, I used to just walk around with a camera and take pictures of things. Some of them are pretty good. Second, my Lightroom catalog has everything and I'm wondering if abandoning it was a good idea.
My mates at lunch today are all in with AI. One works at a startup, the other for a large manufacturer. Both manage development and product teams. Both claim to be "10 times more productive since using AI." One said, "I get things done now that I'd never even attempted before AI."
A counterpoint to all the "AI is useless and stupid!" discourse out there, I guess.
One of the reasons for my Ghost/ActivityPub experiment was to try to better integrate both short and long posts. Since that didn't pan out, I started thinking about how I might manage it with Hugo.
It turned out to be relatively easy. I added a /content/notes folder. Then I made a tweaked Hugo list template that doesn't render a title and instead displays the entire post content rather than just a summary. And finally, I added a custom RSS feed just for notes.
To create new notes I use a small Emacs lisp function I wrote which creates the proper folders and Markdown file and populates the YAML front matter. This makes posting quick notes quick and easy.
Here's the Notes page. /notes.
Everything that goes in /notes is cross-posted to Mastodon using EchoFeed. All in all, I like how it works.
I spent hours yesterday watching YouTube videos about photographers. Ernst Haas, Winogrand, Helen Levitt, Irving Penn, Tish Murtha, etc. I loved it, but so help me if I don't get out and make some of my own pictures soon what am I even doing?
Now that I've added a /notes section to the blog, where does that leave these daily notes? I think I'll keep them. It gives me a place to record some notes throughout the day, but without spewing everything out to social media seventeen times. Just the once :). Then again, isn't that what the wiki is for?
We've turned each consumer interaction into a moral audit. An app download requires community consensus. Every platform choice needs ethical clearance.
...
I’m exhausted. I'm tired of everything being a moral decision. Tactical retreat has turned into a life strategy, and the world won't improve based on the number of doors I close.
I think we're all exhausted.
What happens if a YouTube thumbnail doesn't include someone making a stupid face and pointing? I assume there's a fine involved.
In Junior High, I asked a girl I had a crush on to sign my yearbook. She wrote, "You're weird, but sweet!" I was a teeny bit offended at the time, but I like to think I've stayed true to her summary ever since. It now feels like a compliment.
Flickr is still the best place to host and share images, I don't care what anyone else says.
After migrating content from Hugo to Ghost (and back again) this past week, I'm reminded of the mess I've made over the years. I'm leaning toward letting Flickr host my blog's images.
You might be thinking, "But Jack, that's a third-party dependency! What if Flickr goes away?" Fair question, and one that has prevented me from going with Flickr on my blogs. For more than 20 years. And you know what? If I'd have been using Flickr all this time, I'd have 20 years of working links instead of the broken mess I've made by changing platforms and hosts and whatnot all the time.
Mike Hall made a handy Raycast script for grabbing the image URL while visiting the photo page in a browser. It works a treat. I've tweaked it so that clipboard includes a link to the image so that folks can link through for the big version. (And who knows, maybe it'll inspire one or two of you to get back into Flickr, where we belong.)
The Lindy Effect is real and I may start taking advantage of it.
Note: The "featured image" in this post is coming from Flickr. If you can't see it, I was wrong :).
I tinker with moving to Ghost every few months because I get bored, and Ghost is a nice change of pace. It's the best experience out of the box of all the CMSes I've used. The idea of using Ghost for blogging and also having ActivityPub features baked in is pretty compelling. Once Magic Pages supported it, I dove right in, but it's too early.
Having a Fediverse handle of @jack@baty.net is terrific. It's what triggered this whole thing. I thought I'd snuggle into my little CMS control panel and still participate in the wider web. It's still a good idea, but there are a couple of things I need before it feels right.
First, I would like to migrate followers from Mastodon. I thought it would be fine to start fresh and mention the move on my Mastodon account. That wasn't working. Very few people followed me over and I felt dirty begging for followers.
Second, the "notes" need to be better integrated into the blog proper. This is on the road map, but as it is today it feels like I'm working in a feature-poor, buggy Mastodon client embedded in my blog's CMS. They're basically separate things.
Every time I've moved to Ghost, I've backed out in weeks or months. (Or, in this latest instance, days). What made me try again was the ActivityPub stuff. What made me stop, in addition to the above, was that I got twitchy knowing that my Fediverse identity and my blog platform would be completely and forever entangled. I'd need to get over that.
Jannis from Magic Pages was a huge help getting things running for me. I feel guilty backing out of it now, but there's a strong chance I'll be back once Ghost 6.0 hits.
So, I'm back using Hugo for now.
This note was added via my new jab/hugo-new-note function in Emacs.
It's been great having the MP back from DAG. Sometimes I feel like it's too much camera ($$$-wise), but then I use it and realize it's the exactly right amount of camera.
Hello, this is the first "Note" post I've added to my Hugo blog. The idea is for these to be short, title-less posts, syndicated to social media.
I've stopped being able to think for myself. I need you all to get out of my head for a minute.
I often joke that my entire personality is based on the latest YouTube video or blog post I've "consumed". It's funny, because it's true.
It feels as though everything in my brain has been influenced by something I watched or scrolled past in the last 8 hours. I never watch a movie without first reading the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. I visit Goodreads before choosing a book to read.
Recently, I needed to replace a broken kitchen tool, so I went to Amazon to see what was "recommended". After twenty minutes reading reviews, I finally felt secure enough in my research that I ordered the goddamned spatula.
Social media is funny and fascinating. I learn so much from it and it can be wildly entertaining. Except that too much of the time it's telling me what I'm allowed to enjoy and what I need to condemn because reasons. I'm bombarded by hot takes and uninformed opinions about everything and everyone. I'm susceptible to those opinions and it's not good for me. You're not the boss of me, internet!
Part of my move to Ghost and ActivityPub in Ghost was an attempt to narrow the scope of my social media inputs.
Anyway, I'm going to spend some time outside or in a book or both. Maybe I'll take some photos or doodle in my notebook. Anything is better for me right now than piping The Scroll into my brain.
baty.net