Blogging Again

Have you ever searched for the solution to a problem and found the answer on your own blog? I have, but it’s been awhile.

I took my previous blog down because most of the technical information on it had gotten stale and wasn’t particularly relevant. The most popular post was about JVM tuning for PerSize and MaxPermSize - settings that had been deprecated in JDK 8, years prior.

AI Fodder & Saving the World

So here I am again about to post technical content on a blog. I’m not certain that I’ll find my own post via a search this time around. I’m betting it’s much more likely that my posts will be vacuumed up along with millions of other technical articles and fed into artificial intelligence models. Then who knows - those models may eventually regurgitate some portion of my technical content combined with tens or hundreds or thousands of other technical articles. The AI will fill in information I skipped, correct minor errors that I may make from time to time in my posts, and maybe add a new error or two (as they tend to do) just to keep me on my toes.

After all, AI models only know what they consume. They don’t come up with their own novel concepts. Instead, they are effectively “Super Google”. Combining what otherwise could have been the top 100 or 1000 search results into a usually good (but sometimes not) answer. If authors aren’t out there writing fresh content, AI models are effectively just generating content for each other, blasting out automated content for corporate blogs, and reinforcing a feedback loop.

Who knows - maybe there’s a science fiction narrative out there somewhere being written about how AI eventually stops learning new information because we’re all depending on it too much and not thinking for ourselves. In this fictional world, our collective knowledge would become frozen in time based on Reddit content and blog posts from somewhere in the mid 2020s. Artificial intelligence bots would be the only ones writing blog posts and commenting on each other’s posts in discussion forums. It would be a world where AI would be talking to other AI. All new learning would stop and eventually Brawndo would be what plants crave.

So by blogging… am I… saving the world?

Probably not. But I’m going to do it anyway.

Building on VitePress

Edit: I’ve since rebuilt on Astro instead.

This is a very bare bones VitePress blog to start. There some things missing that I’ll be adding and blogging about as I go.

New features I’d like to add include:

• A proper index page
• Minor Vitepress theme customizations
• Comment support
• Tagging support

All of these things have been solved by others in a variety of ways already. So this work is mostly evaluating various approaches, applying them here, and posting about them.

Projen Presentation

Lastly, I’ll be giving a talk on Projen (which this site also uses as a configuration management and build tool) to the Atlanta Javascript Meetup on August 27th called Node Project Configuration Management at Scale, and I plan to post about Projen a good bit while I’m developing material for this presentation.