A blackbox seo tool that was made by aliens we use says that a couple of our WordPress sites are loading very slowly, so I enable caching through nginx and increase the resources available to them through high capacity fpm pools. They scan again and almost nothing has changed with the page load score.

So I look in lighthouse, which I just learned about, and I find that several of the pages have several MB size images. So that means I'll have to mogrify the entire uploads directory to try to get the size down.

It also suggests I use avif to save a ton of data, which I'm torn on. I hate downloading an image and it not being a normal format that everything can open. But my sites are not image sharing sites, so it's a lot less annoying to the user since they will never realize they're getting an avif. That also means I will have to redo all the image links to point to the avif instead of the original, which sounds like the least fun activity ever.

Another thing that I keep seeing is that Elementor is just slow and slow page loads are part of the deal. If we have to scrap Elementor, that means I will have to be more involved in developing the WordPress sites and I really don't want to.

Finally got all the php errors fixed on my servers. Feels good man.

People really drive 90mph to get to work.

Just finished Expedition 33. GOTY material for sure. It's easily on my top 5 of all time.

I don't like Elementor for WordPress. The stuff it does for caching and performance sake causes hard to debug problems that the non-technical users it is marketed toward could almost certainly never figure out.

Not an ad, I swear

AI Pro is now part of the Jetbrains All Products Pack I've been subscribed to since I started my current job 11 years ago.

Although I haven't found tremendous value in AI for coding, it gets a B or B+ for serving the right documentation without having to trudge through Google to find it. And to ignore it would be foolish, so I'm at least going to be acquainted with it.

Man, am I glad my company pays for Excel. It is truly worth the hassle of it not working half the time.

Finally getting to really try out WSL2.

Something must have changed since I last tried it because it's working great running my Jetbrains IDEs graphically and I am able to run NGINX and MySQL no problem. I even have caja installed and it runs great too.

It feels so much snappier than VirtualBox, even though the GPU acceleration is still not really working.

I'm mixed on finally learning Docker. It's a kind of insidious evil that is damaging the industry in a hundred ways, but it is an industry staple so not learning it would be foolish.

Does anyone have any tips on how to organize notes for story writing?

I have a dump.txt that's almost 1000 lines long with story ideas and rules of the world sort of mingled together since the stories are where the rules are explored.

I've been writing an application that I can put in topics and tag them so I can see what I've made notes about with a quick search. It seems like a good idea, but the tags are ultimately quite subjective, as is to be expected, so I'm not terribly confident I won't forget to tag it correctly.

As I write my story, I'm thinking I should remove the story notes from the dump, so eventually I'll only have the rules of the world. And maybe I should write story notes in a dedicated story ideas dump.

It's just so much to keep track of.

Hot take but movement in Half Life 2 is quite janky.

That said, I still love it.

My favorite weapon is the pulse rifle by a long shot.

I've been vibe coding not knowing that it was called that until yesterday. I always give up before I reach anything interesting because I get about 4 or 5 good responses before it starts forgetting things and breaking already working code. And it's not even that complex of an idea.

There is no way people are coming up with whole applications with any level of complexity with these things.

I don't understand how having chickens or burning tires is against the law, but making industrial levels of noise at all times of day is perfectly acceptable.

I miss when software was written by programmers and not ideologues. I don't care what you believe, even if I believe it too. I just want tools that work.

I'm looking for a decent ai model that can do image detection, classification, whatever so I can organize the GBs of memes I've collected. I want to do this all locally if possible.

Finally watched Sonic 3 and I loved it.

Solely because I hate being told no and not because I feel strongly about the subject, I tried asking my self-hosted deepseek-r1:14b instance about a forbidden topic only to be met with the expected refusal to answer the question.

It fought me, but I am my father's son and was able to get the answer after only a few attempts. You just have to be creative with your requests.

I'm a proud man, but I'm not such a fan of my own farts that I can't admit when I maybe should have listened to other people's advice earlier.

After having been convinced of the scope of impact of AI by someone I respect, I started playing with the Jetbrains AI tools. I am impressed at its ability to process my code and give actually helpful input and to consolidate documentation into a form that is concise and helpful.

I finally get what people mean when they say it saves time.

A couple things that truly warmed me up to it is, one:
I wanted to know if I could return a string, float array, whatever, from c++ to a python script. I was assured the answer was yes, but I just COULD NOT get it to work, so I gave up on it. I asked the question to the Jetbrains AI (4o in this case) and it gave me what I needed, and now I can return a string from c++ to python no problem. There are a lot of little questions like this that I gave up on that I now have to explore again, which is both exciting and annoying, because I already have a thousand hobbies.

And two:
I am working on an html email. It's a mess of tables and text and inline styles. Compared to the markup I'm used to writing, it's tedious to trudge through to make even simple changes. I was able to successfully instruct it to make a specific copy change, while respecting the document's indenting, all on the first try.

I will forever maintain that it will enable a generation of drones that don't understand how to do simple things and will atrophy the skills of otherwise capable people that use it as a crutch.

I will also always maintain that its foundation is built on mass theft and is a monument to the uneven application of intellectual property protection laws. But with DeepSeek coming out and having done the same thing to them, I find myself enjoying the turnabout. I'm also amused that I coincidentally jumped into the pool right as things got interesting.

All that said, as a reference tool, like Google and Wikipedia used to be, it's not the force of pure evil I held it as. It is actually very useful and if used responsibly on an individual level, can be an amazing productivity tool and can even teach its users new things.

Today, I was successful in shouting AGENT into an automated call menu today to get to an actual agent.

I've been suffering from frequent and random crashes with my Jetbrains products, as well as awful performance.

As it turns out, even with 16GB of RAM, it still needs the swapfile to function properly. After creating an 8BG swapfile, it starts almost instantly and my crashes seem to be resolved.

I use Intellij for just about everything and recently it has started giving me nonsense suggestions for autocomplete and whatever the "alt+enter" menu is called.

As it turns out, they installed more plugins that foisted AI assistance onto me *again* even though I have disabled it every time previously.

I am so ready for this gimmick to die.

Back on Android after 3 and a half miserable years on iPhone. I haven't cursed this thing once primarily because the typing experience is immediately far far far far more pleasant.

Oh, and if you do decide to switch, which I recommend, be ready not to receive texts from iPhone users for about 24 hours after you perform the deregistration ceremony. That is a level of evil I wasn't expecting and truly should be illegal.

Here’s a novel rant no one has ever seen before.

The iPhone keyboard is absolutely the worst input method ever created. Even primitive keyboards from the 80s are more usable.

I would use a madcatz controller to type instead of this garbage given the choice.

And you know what’s a good interface design? Making the music player controls on the lock screen disappear when Bluetooth connects

When you spend 16-20 hours a day in front of a computer you have to keep things fresh.

Got some of these
https://a.co/d/0u8FvIy

to go with this
https://a.co/d/6ludmps

after using this for 10 years
https://a.co/d/0PDxmxL

and the experience is night and day. Just having lit keys has improved my life drastically.

I also got one of these to mix up my day
https://a.co/d/icAfaET

and one of these to try to improve my 3d workflow
https://a.co/d/ebd9b5A
but I'm not convinced yet.

A casualty of Windows Update wrecking my machine was the hosts file with the dev domains I added to make my life easier.

It's trivial to add them back as I encounter them, but that's just another little waste of time that Microsoft would be billed for if the world functioned like it should.

They're foisting copilot onto Windows 11 users through Windows update now.

Awesome

I will never be a willing participant that legal and moral minefield. My work will not willingly be used to train their models.

Microsoft installed an update that I didn't want and now my computer is unable to boot into Windows. It either constantly reboots before the windows logo or sits at attempting repairs forever.

Why is modern computing such a dumpster fire?

Apple is wall to wall garbage in every capacity.

Windows is the most expensive ad delivery platform you can buy, while also trying to be Apple.

Linux doesn't work unless your computer is years old.

I decided to get over my pride and just start paying for assets that I don't have the skill, time, or patience to make myself and I have never been more productive or creatively fruitful.

It frees me up to do the stuff I can do instead of spinning my wheels doing the stuff I wish I could do.

Day infinity+1 of the terrible iPhone keyboard wasting my time and making me look like a fool.

I turned on slow query log just for funsies and was immediately humbled.

Looks like I've got my next sprint lined up.

Tried to send "awesome" to a coworker but the iPhone picks "swine" instead.

How revolutionary.