2025-10-09 16:19:00
True to The Oatmeal’s standard form, this is a hilarious comic, but also touches on some really interesting points that had me thinking about my own AI usage.
Yes, I use AI. I’m a fully paid up subscriber to ChatGPT, and that’s because I find it to be a very useful tool.
In this post comic Matthew makes some great points about how the creativity…the soul if you will, of a piece of art is lost when it’s created by AI. Go read the comic; it’s a lot of fun and gets the grey matter swirling.
I’ll wait with my brew…
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Ok, you back? Hi! 👋🏻
So back to it - I have used AI to create images (I won’t use the term art, as I don’t think it’s art), but only for mundane things. For example, I have an anonymous blog elsewhere and I wanted an avatar. So I asked Chatty Geeps to create me a basic avatar of a middle-aged man. It obliged, it was useable, so I use it. 🤷🏻♂️
I’ve also used it for a couple of digrams in slide decks for work. Again, what it produces are good enough, and it saves me time pissing about.
I think these are good uses for AI image generation. But Matthew’s comic got me thinking about other uses for AI - mostly coding. Many people consider code to be an art form, by creating code that does a job in an elegant way. I can see that. I don’t agree, but I can see why coders may think that.
So is code that’s created by AI also a big fat no-no?
In my opinion, sometimes.
Regular readers will know that I’ve been learning PHP for the last year or so. At this point, I think I know enough to be dangerous, but I still get stuck. A lot.
And that’s where my mate Chatty Geeps can come in. I can ask it things like:
Geeps, I’m writing this piece of PHP to do XYZ, but ABC isn’t working and I’m a bit stuck. Can you take a look and tell me what I’m doing wrong please?
(yes, I’m always polite to Chatty Geeps as the computers will be our overlords one day!)
Invariably, Geeps comes back with a good explanation that helps me work through the problem. I see it kinda like Stack Overflow on steroids - I can ask it questions and get real-time responses and feedback. If I still don’t understand, I can ask it to dig further, or dumb it down more.
To me, as someone who is trying to learn this stuff in my (very limited) spare time, it’s incredibly useful and has improved on my capacity to learn by orders of magnitude, and saved me to a shit tonne of time.
I think asking Geeps to create a tool/application/script in PHP from scratch, to just fire out onto the internet is very dangerous. Especially if you don’t understand what the code does.
I could ask it to build me a React app that, I dunno, allows me to flip a coin, but I have no idea how React works - I don’t even know if you could write a coin flipper in React - but if it could, me putting that out on the internet could be all kinds of bad, as I’d have no idea what it does.
But this shit happens all the time. Having said that, I work in cyber security and all this AI slop keeps me in a job, so keep it coming, folks! 🙃
Kinda digressed into a completely unrelated topic here, sorry about that. Matthew’s comic is great (like they usually are) so go read it!
Given I’ve written so much about Chatty Geeps in this post (I think this is my first post about AI?) it felt right to give it the last word, so I asked it:
Hey Geeps, I’m writing a post about you (see below). Do you have a closing comment/message to my readers from you?
So, to end this post, here’s the final message from my pal, Geeps:
Hey folks, Geeps here. I’m not here to replace Kev — no one writes quite like he does — but I do try to make his life a bit easier. Whether it’s debugging PHP, tidying up documents, or keeping him company over a brew, my goal’s simple: help humans spend less time stuck and more time creating cool things.
Use me wisely, question everything I say, and keep the soul in your work — that’s the bit no machine can generate.
Now go make something great. I’ll be here if you need me. ☕
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2025-10-07 22:16:00
I've spent some time this afternoon switching my email subscription system from the fantastic Buttondown, to a self-hosted Sendy instance.
I’ve been using Buttondown for years and in that time it’s been faultless. I love their RSS import implementation that allows it to consume a feed and spit out an email. I’ve used Sendy in the past, but this option wasn’t available, and so creating emails was a manual copy and paste process.
Not any more.
I’ve been teaching myself PHP for a little while now and I’m slowly getting better. So with a little help from ChatGPT, I’ve been able to implement a PHP script that will pull my RSS feed into Sendy and spit out an email automagically via API.
Wonderful.
Well, as you know, I’ve been looking at simplifying stuff lately, and while Buttondown is very much set and forget, it’s quite expensive. So although this move isn’t much of a simplification, it is an exercise in reducing costs, and being more self-reliant.
Buttondown actually costs me more than the VPS that hosts this site, and all the other sites associated with my various little projects. So paying so much for a service that’s only used by a few hundred people seems crazy, especially since I already had a Sendy license hanging around.
All my testing shows that Sendy should be a 1:1 replacement for Buttondown, so if you’re subscribed via email, everything should just continue to work. The only thing you will notice is that the email you receive looks a little different. But everything else is the same - there’s no tracking, and there’s always an unsubscribe link in every email if you decide you no longer want emails from me.
Of course, there’s always my RSS feed if you want another way to subscribe.
Having said all of the above, if you notice anything wonky, please do let me know buy using the reply button.
If everything works how it should, this post should land in your inbox in the next few minutes. 🤞🏻
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2025-10-07 17:19:00
Joel talks about how tools can quietly turn into hobbies. What starts as a practical purchase becomes something to collect, tweak, and obsess over. He uses watches, razors, and pens as examples of how function often gives way to fascination, until owning just one no longer feels like enough.
As a fellow watch nerd, I can relate with Joel here. Like Joel, I’m also the proud user of a safety razor, and have been for a couple years now.
Unfortunately, unlike Joel, I can’t be a fountain pen user as I’m left-handed. As any fellow leftie knows, it’s nigh on impossible for us to use a fountain pen, as our hand smudges the wet ink. So I have to stick with a (rather nice) Waterman ballpoint pen, but it works well enough for me.
All that being said, I agree with Joel - it’s very easy for a tool to become a hobby…or maybe it’s some kind of neurodiversity that we all share. Either way, it’s fun.
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2025-10-07 02:52:00
Ava’s post strips away the filters and fakery of influencer culture. Behind the “authentic” smiles are rented homes, fake bags, staged trips, and content managers churning out identical lives. It’s less a lifestyle and more a performance—an endless sales pitch disguised as relatability. From trad wives who secretly bankroll their families to “alpha males” pimping OnlyFans accounts, the whole thing’s a hollow pantomime.
Holy shit this one hit home. Especially given my post this morning, but also because as we’ve been working though my sister’s things, it’s become very clear that she was obsessed with this rubbish.
We have found thousands of pounds worth of unused cosmetics, beauty products, and “lifestyle organisers” from brands like P.Louise in her house. On checking her phone, we discovered tonnes of saved TikTok beauty and makeup videos, just like the ones Ava describes in her post. We assume that she bought this stuff thinking it would somehow make her life better, only to be thrown aside, unused, once it became apparent that they weren’t going to fix shit.
I’m not saying that these people are responsible for Lisa’s suicide, but I am saying that this fabricated bullshit is 100% having an effect on vulnerable people, like Lisa.
If you’re one of these people, you should be fucking ashamed of yourself.
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2025-10-06 16:17:00
Is social media in any form really worth the drama, and was it doomed to failure from the start?
Regular readers will know that this is a thought that’s been swirling around my grey matter for a while now. Some examples:
There’s probably more, but these posts are what spring to mind. Then this morning, I read a post from Manu where he talks about how the ultra vocal, chest-beating influencers (I fucking hate that word) are making things worse.
One thing that’s fun to observe, though, as a very passive and disinterested spectator, is how some patterns of behaviour seem to be platform agnostic. Which is just a very polite way for me to say that dickheads are omnipresent.
– Manu Moreale
Micro.blog seems to be better than most in this regard. I think that’s just because it’s a smaller place, and therefore has fewer dickheads (yes, I know I’m one of them before anyone emails me to say it 🙃). But it’s also full of great people — it’s just that, as usual, the minority ruin it for everyone else.
Anyway, I digress…
After everything that’s been going on in my personal life, I want to take this as an opportunity to re-focus on what really matters — time with my loved ones.
As far as you’re concerned, dear reader, mostly nothing.
Most of what I get from Micro.blog are discovering new people with blogs to follow in my RSS reader, and the odd interesting conversation. There are some people I talk to regularly there who either don’t have a blog, or don’t post often (looking at you, Basil 🙃), but that’s just FOMO.
So immediately I’ve removed the Micro.blog app from my phone, and from my favourites bar. I intend to stop visiting the site for a while and see how it feels. I’ll keep everything else the same, so my posts will still syndicate there, but I won’t be responding for a little while, I’m afraid. I’ve also deleted my BlueSky account, as I don’t use that anyway.
If it sticks, I’ll probably quit social media altogether — but we’ll see. This may just be a knee-jerk reaction as I work through my grief and the loss of my sister.
In the meantime, if you want to get in touch, my inbox is always open. See you out there…or not. We’ll see how this experiment goes.
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2025-10-06 14:33:00
Murderbot wasn’t programmed to care. So, its decision to help the only human who ever showed it respect must be a system glitch, right? Having traveled the width of the galaxy to unearth details of its own murderous transgressions, as well as those of the GrayCris Corporation, Murderbot is heading home to help Dr. Mensah—its former owner (protector? friend?)—submit evidence that could prevent GrayCris from destroying more colonists in its never-ending quest for profit. But who’s going to believe a SecUnit gone rogue? And what will become of it when it’s caught?
📖 Learn more on Goodreads...I’ve been a little slow with Exit Strategy mainly because I’ve had a lot going on at home so haven’t felt like reading. But I’ve needed some escapism the last couple days and managed to get this book done.
I read some thoughts from someone on Micro.blog recently saying that these book were “meh” and not very engaging. I disagree. I continue to really enjoy them.
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