Fluffy Brain

Fluffy Brain

Hi!

Some thoughts of the last few days

Website launch

I finally launched this blog after months of procrastination and writing offline!
I chose not to bring over the last 10 years of posts,
since it feels better if my 30s gets a fresh set of posts.
Maybe I'll do a full reset when I turn 40!

"Software in the Era of AI"

Today I watched one of those Silicon Prarie tech talks, this one by Andrej Karpathy.
What stood out to me was the suggestion that platforms should reform themselves to become easier to digest by AI.

One of the proposed methods was implementing a llm.txt, similar to robots.txt, but for AI to be able to easily access the sites contents.

This was ironic in two ways to me,
One, it reminded me of two historical features the web used to emphasize -

• Sitemaps or RSS feeds: These were easily digestible plaintext lists that people don't really use anymore, but was incredibly helpful in mapping out the content for the human users
• "Static versions" of JS-heavy websites: Back when AngularJS and such first came out, one huge problem was that bots (like Google, indexing your site) couldn't read the website since they don't wait for the stupid JS to load - so the solution was to create an entirely separate copy of the website which is static, and readable to bots. This was insane!!! I'm not sure how it's managed these days with React and Vue.

Two, the entire idea that the web "needs to be easier for agents" is such a self-unaware sentiment (not by Karpathy specifically, but the IT industry in general) towards how unusable the web has become - for humans especially, and for humans who use screen-readers double-especially!!

Do you know what would make your little AI agents work a lot better? If we went back to static websites that didn't need 30MB of Javascript to load the front page.

Sell Thou Craft

Lately, Franky has been encouraging the thought of making money from my creations.
At the moment, all my income is from my software development work.
He'd always speak so positively about everything I make, and express that people would be willing to support me!

It's very kind, but like most "artists" (the fact that I feel the need to put it in quotes already says a lot), I find it hard to step past the line of entitlement, that my creative output is of tangible value in the real world.

So with that feedback priming my daydreams, I had a very entry-level easy idea for me, which was to sell my teppy layouts as a ZIP file.
The way the layouts are available now are on a DIY-basis, as in, you kind of have to know what you're doing to copy the layouts over.
For those who don't want to spend the time duplicating it, or for those who want to support me, maybe they could buy the ZIP folder off Gumroad!

Content Creators

And so with the above thoughts in mind, I revisited some videos,
of some women artists with their own business.

One was Uncomfy, a super hustle young clay modeler who makes those anxiety-inducing "$13,000 a month!!" kind of YouTube videos. She was full of energy and performance, and was very motivational in some ways.
I looked back today and it turns out she burnt herself to the ground and can't do it anymore, and she looks a lot more tired and sad now, since she can't put on the "performance" either.
Another young soul grinded up by hustle culture

The video I was trying to get to and found eventually was leechuts, who makes calm relaxed vlogs - the opposite vibe of pushing high output and high income

But all in all, as usual, I felt bad having gone through the "social media" that is personal YouTube accounts. All the pressure these people feel, the breakdowns, the burnouts, trying to keep up performance for the millions of mouths, forever hungry, always on the edge of tearing you apart.

Social media is the devil!
Social media is the devil!
Social media is the devil!