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I made myself a micro app to track and follow up my on newbiz as a freelancer. With vibecoding.

I know some of you hate vibecoding and AI in general. You have all sorts of convincing reasons. Most of which I agree with.

But here's the thing: My little dumb app doesn't need to be stable. It will never be used by anyone else. It's in a private repo, so nobody will even see it by accident. It uses a little SQL database that I rclone to backup regularly so I can get all the data out even in case of catastrophic failure.

You could make a better one, you say? In just a day or two? I absolutely believe you. But you weren't here, chances are you couldn't just drop everything just for a dumb side-project, and you wouldn't make it for me just because I asked you to.

It's called “Business 2000” and it has already given me several new leads and meetings. And no, fellow freelancers, I will not give it to you. Unless a developer rebuilds it first. You would inevitably want me to make little changes, and you would hold me accountable if it crashed. It's just human nature.

Pretty soon, we will have vibecoding that isn't as evil and big tech-y as now as well. Get with it. We will need developers, and we will need more of them. But we will be using AI to vibecode as well.

And if you are a developer. Do you really, I mean really want to spend time optimising SEO for a brand of crappy dildo lube? Or automatically deleting accidental alias files in my temp folders? I didn't think so.

I love Business 2000, and I will use it until someone makes a good CMS app. I have used all the CMS apps, tracing back to 2008, and they all suck.

//A

These are random thoughts. For more thought-through content, check https://journal.lindegard.xyz

You know you do it, make notes into seemingly useful paragraphs of text. You feel very clever, having saved minutes, maybe hours. You know you're spending compute somewhere, and that someone is paying – usually bank consumers, the environment, and democracy, but productivity is the source of a healthy economy, right? It's probably worth it.

But what happens when you distribute the report, or whatever it is, to a bunch of readers? They, of course, do what you would have done: shove it into an LLM, pretty likely the same one you used to write it. Out comes a summary, and if the initial creation prompt was good, very similar to the note initially written.

What we have now is a situation where you generated a bunch of text that nobody wrote, and nobody read.

This effect is even more notable with email. Two email clients, either side, with Ai write and read functionality will do this automatically. The stuff that gets sent is virtually invisible to humans. Just a series of unnecessary characters, bloated by the sender, summarised by the receiver.

“But I summarise before I send”

Ok sure, you never bloat, only condense. Let's say that's true. The way corporate uses AI is still 99%+ redundant and useless, and here's why:

The useless content generation paradox

Let's put content on a sliding scale: Useful to useless. Useless content is useless anyway, so if it's generated by AI, it is, by definition, unnecessary use of resources. Useful content is reshared, recondensed, rebloated, recondensed again, because people share it more and use it more.

This is the useless content generation paradox. The more useful the content, the more times it will be shoved through a bloating and condensing cycle. The more useless it is, well, the more useless the content is to begin with. Anywhere in between: a mix of both.

Just write the damn thing yourself

If you know what you want to convey, just write it. Enable spell checking instead of using generative AI to check you grammar. It's faster anyway.

If you don't your ability to convey knowledge will erode. Not just in writing, but in speech as well. Oh, and you don't make yourself dependent on a technology that can inject whatever it want between the lines to influence whatever Musk, Zuck and let's not forget Trump, Putin, Jinping wants to inject. While building increasingly large data centres on consumer-secured loans, running on diesel, and enriching the oligarchs.

Oh, and you'll end up there anyway, since it's faster, so may as well go back to writing what you mean to a human, instead of mangling it through a machine for no reason at all. That is, if you had anything to say to begin with.

//A

These are random thoughts. For more thought-through content, check https://journal.lindegard.xyz

–“I need to cave a strategy for high school cleaning of a quiz database. Manhole.”

I was trying to say... something very different, and I was constantly cut off mid sentence.

On the plus side, I doesn't go on and on like ChatGPT does, where even the smallest request leads to a slop monologue that nobody needs.

🏅 The rest though! 🏅

The first thing I noticed is that it is way slower (pro, not max). But in practice, it's faster, because the output is so much better than that of GPT – and that's comparing 5.3 to Sonnet, not Opus.

Turns out, there are not only moral reasons to make the switch, but also practical ones.

Then there are the issues of Anthropic stealing like a pirate like all the other ones. But when it comes to code, one can imagine it mostly trained on MIT-license, which is fine with me.... Blah blah blah, the issues with AI basically being the epitome of “yOU wOuldnT stEal A...!!!” is a topic for another post.

P.S. Huge difference is that ChatGPT/Codex feels “unlimited”, because it kind of is. Claude will have a hard limit of use, with a window of 5h for the included tokens. Don't worry though, if you're in the middle of something important, you can just pay as you go, for the same price as API.

/🐥

These are random thoughts. For more thought-through content, check https://journal.lindegard.xyz

Better than Figma!

I have only used Penpot (open source Figmaesque tool) for a few hours. But bloody hell is it good. So far, I'm tempted to say it's faster, better, harder, stronger than Figma.

No AI though. Which is a huge plus. (It may be possible to add some AI somehow, but.. why?)

Setting it up as self hosted was an absolute breeze. Like, I don't really understand what happened. Bish bash bosh and I was suddenly using it. This led to a bit of a scary issue: In all the excitement, I forgot to set up backups, which is hugely important when n00bs like me self host. Suddenly we rm -rf / and need to start over. No biggie for docker containers, very much an issue for actual work files.

I also forgot to set up SMTP for invitations, because everything worked so smoothly out of the box, I forgot to think about it.

Even memory handling seems to be set up smarter than I could ever set it up manually anyway.

So, yeah. This should probably be a long form article over on my newsletter but I'm sick so here we are.

So long, Figma!

These are random thoughts. For more thought-through content, check https://journal.lindegard.xyz

I am Michelangelo!

It's interesting how it's almost exclusively people who have never written a line of code that claim programmers are doomed. And people who haven't even written even a short story since secondary school who claim the same about authors.

I hear the echoes of “there will be no photographers post smart phones”. Those who claimed “we don't need drummers anymore” when the drum machine was invented.

AI, or as we constantly have to remind people: large language models, are only barely generative. A semi-impressive copier, a Xerox machine with smoke and mirrors.

Some tasks are disappearing fast, yes, but LLMs can replace humans like robots have replaced humans in car factories in the past 30 years. Replacing many manual tasks, never ideating, never inventing new models and designs.

It amazes me how many people believe coding, or making music for that matter, is just the tedious task of pushing buttons in the right order. I think it's because those who use them for things they don't know how, feel like they have actually made the results themselves, and they want their “work” to be as valuable as that of the real makers.

It makes them look dumb. Grown ass humans claiming to be Michelangelo after half-assedly doing some colour-by-numbers, and then have the moronity to claim those who actually make shit will be redundant because of their little colour-by-numbers machine.

These are random thoughts. For more thought-through content, check https://journal.lindegard.xyz

Federated “MTV”!?

The Indie Beat just launched music television, or linear stream, or whatever you'd call it.

This is pretty cool. And inspiring... I kinda feel like finishing one of my old track ideas, make a video of some sort and launching it with a commons license.

This is exactly the kind of things we need to convert more people to the fediverse!

https://tv.theindiebeat.fm/

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

These are random thoughts. For more thought-through content, check https://journal.lindegard.xyz

Got myself an onion site because...

Well I guess just because I can. And it feels even more free from the grasp of big tech and the Democratic Republic of America and their Supreme leader.

Visit my onion site at http://aron64wsod7yuwu4cnqihfmotrle5cypmjrf56nf2zmnupclayhmuuid.onion using a tor browser.

I even host a mirror of the blog there so you can read it in complete privacy if you want!

These are random thoughts. For more thought-through content, check https://journal.lindegard.xyz

Pomodoro Granola

Yeah, nah it's not the latest fermentation hype from Brooklyn. I just found out that one of my productivity hacks (“pomodoro”) fits very well with the cooking of granola (15min, turn it over a bit, repeat).

No now longer an annoying part of home office multitasking, but a quite satisfying productivity method. Maybe I should write a New York Times Bestseller about it.

Looking for investors to buy me the #1 spot. I'll provide 40k half-assed words, 50 misquotations and up to ten graphs. I think it's only about $150k to get to the top.

A change of perspective just improved my life, at least for about 1 hour a month.

And possibly made me a millionaire.

These are random thoughts. For more thought-through content, check https://journal.lindegard.xyz

Alcohol makes my brain slow for DAYS!

As a quite recent non-drinker (six months-ish) who has tried to drink a couple of times in a “sober body” since, I am surprised how sluggish it makes me, far beyond the hangover effect.

For three-four day AT LEAST, my focus, follow-through and cognitive tolerance suffers. My appetite goes from routine to sudden hunger-bursts. My social battery is drained.

I'm no scientist, but as alcohol screws up you sleep (even if you don't notice it because you're “sedated”), I'm guessing sleep quality is the main culprit. But there has to be more to it. Some psychological effects or GABA, dopamine, serotonin, immune system something something. Or all of the above.

You know those ads from the 00s where they talked about weed making you “slow for days”? Turns out that's true for alcohol as well.

These are random thoughts. For more thought-through content, check https://journal.lindegard.xyz

My English is good. My English is pretty bad.

As I started writing more “seriously”, as in actually publishing a newsletter etc., I discovered that my above average English (for a Scandi) does not apply to clarity and rhythm.

When re-reading my supposedly well thought through articles (such as my recent “Californication” article), I realise it's pretty hard to follow. My breadcrumbs and beats and questions don't come through very well.

Well, the only thing I can do is practice, so if you're a reader you'll just have to live with it for a while until I get better. Fortunately, I'm usually a fast learner.

These are random thoughts. For more thought-through content, check https://journal.lindegard.xyz