After spending way too long faffing with individual category template files and customizations for various parts of my site, I’ve finally said “fuck it”.
I’m back to just the standard archive and single page templates and going to try and just concentrate on writing more.
Less developer faff — more writing anything I want.
(Yes I use em-dashes. I’ve used them for ages. Probably in the wrong context — but I dont care. 🙂 )
I think the UK government’s ban on social media for under-16s is a good thing.
In writing.
However, there’s more to this as I think more about it.
I had a back and forth on Mastodon on my alt account which made me have a bit more of a think.
I still think it’s a good thing — I made the comment of it needing to be treated like any other “class a drug”. Possibly an over the top comparison, but I truly do believe that algorythmic social media is largely a terrible thing that is harmful to people — especially children.
On balance, more harm than good.
But when it comes to enforcing the age-restricted ban, ofcourse the way it’ll happen is by having to prove age — and identity — online.
Submitting ID to use online services is fucking dreadful too, so I just don’t know what to think.
Ofcourse kids will get around this with VPNs –free, insecure ones, of course.
Which in turn could then lead to a ban / ID restrictions on VPNs. This too is nightmare fuel.
In the ideal world, and a method I will be using with my own, is to just parent children to the best of my ability; to be active in their lives; to not dismiss any little worries they have as “not that important in the grand scheme of things”; and to be as aware as I can be of what they are going through.
My kids have never been given a phone or tablet to play with to “keep them quiet” — and I don’t intend to ever do that.
I dunno, this is a bit of a “thinking out loud” exercise for me and I’ll probably edit it later on.
But my point stands.
Okay I’m going to finally write my #Introduction.
I’m a programmer who mainly works with PHP in my day to day job. I work for a UK-based bed manufacturer in their in-house development team.
I have a wife, two children, a dog, a cat and a tortoise…
…and I still have time to run Arch Linux, BTW, on my only computer.
I enjoy sharing gaming photography taken on PlayStation 5 and have kept a personal website and blog since about 2014.
I created the human-made webring at https://human-made.site and enjoy visiting people’s personal webaites.
In the fire and the flames
I’m super proud of this one.
Taken at the village in the north of the map – I’ll update the post when I find out the name again.
The fire used to save progress was used to almost show her walking through the flames.
I got sucked into using Gemini ai to help restructure my website and I’m ashamed of myself.
I have not generated any writing or images for it – just advice on the structure of categories and noindexing certain things.
For a brief moment of time I thought I could make parts of my website really popular (The Junji Ito manga reviews specifically).
But why.
I’m asking myself that right now.
I wanted to be open and honest as I am outspoken about AI and how much I detest generative ai.
How I got sucked in to asking it for advice I just don’t know.
I am not using it now or going forwards.
And everything on my site is, was, and will continue to be, human made.
Fuck gen ai.
Fuck it to hell.
#AI #GenAI
I’ve been making some alterations to my website today.
Not the design or anything like that — things like adding a footer and “noindexing” short text pages.
Gonna be redoing my virtual photography pages too. I will still post single shots now and again, but I’m also starting to create some curated galleries too.
Here’s to progress.