2025-09-16 08:00:00
I work in the field of software development. Recently I helped a colleague with a problem that he's been trying to solve all day but he couldn't really seem make progress. No big deal, it happens. Sometimes you need a second pair of eyes to look over what's going on, because they might see something you've missed and that's why you're stuck. Happens to me too.
This particular colleague is very fond of using ChatGPT for basically everything, and watching him work is nothing short of horrifying. I've seen code that he produced and often I could refactor it to be about half the number of lines of code within a couple of minutes, because he just copy/pastes whatever ChatGPT produces into his IDE and if it works, then that's it, nothing more to do here.
This time it turned out that he hadn't even understood the problem in the first place. He just helplessly pasted error messages into ChatGPT and then tried implementing whatever "solution" it spit back at him, also without trying to understand what was suggested and if that was even the right thing to do or not. Unsurprisingly, he failed to make progress with this approach. He also had about 100 tabs open in his browser and frequently got lost in them, which didn't help.
It took me about 15 minutes of listening to him and reading the code and looking at what he's been doing to figure out where the problem was. Mind you, I didn't have a solution right of the top off my head ready either, but at least I understood what was happening. So I explained to him what was wrong in my opinion, which took a while because I needed to break through several layers of "but ChatGPT said this" first, but eventually he got it. Then however he immediately turned back to ChatGPT, essentially typed my explanation into it in the form of a question, looked over the answer and said to me "yeah, he's saying the same thing, so this means we're on the right track now at least".
I went home very frustrated that day.
I'm not saying this to dump on my colleague. But I read a number of stories like these over the past couple of months over on Mastodon and in other blog posts. I also see more and more articles and studies like this one recently: MIT Study Finds Artificial Intelligence Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline.
So there's a lot of anecdotal evidence floating around that using ChatGPT essentially trains people out of thinking for themselves, and now there's more and more scientific evidence coming in that says the same thing. If you turn to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and so on every time you run into a problem that you can't immediately solve by yourself, pretty soon you will have lost the ability to do so in the first place.
Think of it this way: The brain is like a muscle, it needs constant exercise in order to stay strong and healthy. If you've ever broken your leg and you weren't able to walk for a few weeks, you'll remember that by the time the cast came off, your leg muscles had atrophied to the point of being almost non-existent and you essentially had to re-learn how to walk. And you'll remember what a painful and tedious process that was.
If you use ChatGPT for everything, the same thing happens to your brain. And once you lost the ability to focus and think hard about a problem, it will be very difficult to get it back.
If we fast forward a few years from now, I'm very worried about where this will lead, especially in fields like engineering which is essentially about thinking hard and solving problem after problem, day after day.
But I'm also wondering if there's an opportunity in there for people who keep their minds sharp to become really valuable on the job market in the not-too-distant future when everybody else has turned their brain into the equivalent of an atrophied and useless leg due to solving every single problem they encountered by immediately turning to AI to provide an answer.
I guess time will tell. But just in case, I'll keep my use of AI tools to a minimum and continue using my brain as much as possible. At the end of the day every problem solved, every post written, every book read is a workout for the mind.
2025-09-12 08:00:00
There was some great news about Apple this week! What? No, not the iPhone thing. They made a phone that's only 5,5mm thin! Well except for the part of the phone which isn't 5,5mm thin of course. Let's not look at that part. But no, I'm talking about another device. Apparently there were games made and sold for the clickwheel iPod. They haven't been available for a long time, and because they are all DRM protected restoring them was and is a royal pain... but somebody managed to do it and now all of these games are available again. And somehow I find this much more interesting and exciting than the latest iPhones with all their islands and plateaus and whatnot.
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2025-09-05 08:00:00
September has begun, and this means summer is pretty much over and autumn is around the corner (though some people dispute this ;)). To those who love summer autumn feels like the world is dying, but for me it's always been my favourite time of the year. The heat is gone, the morning air is crisp and cool, the leaves are starting to fall, you can collect chestnuts in the park, make apple pie and pumpkin soup... what's not to love! Despite nature shutting down, autumn always feels like the time for a new beginning to me - the school year used to start in autumn, the university year too, and I think this autumn it's time for me to make some changes. But we'll talk about that some other time, for now, here's the links for this week.
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2025-08-29 08:00:00
I've been staring at an empty coffee cup for the last 10 minutes, and I can't think of a clever intro to write today. Is this the universe trying to tell me that I should have another coffee? It probably is. No, it definitely is. What else could it be! You know, blogging is a really inexpensive hobby when you just look at the cost of web hosting and owning the domain, but if I factor in the amount of coffee that is needed to get the gears in my head turning? Better not think about it too much and just enjoy the experience :)
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2025-08-28 08:00:00
I recently heard the word 'Techtember' for the first time. I had to look it up to see what it means. Here's an explanation:
Techtember refers to the annual period when many companies unveil their latest products and services.
In other words, it's that time of the year when large corporations desperately try to convince us to buy their latest and greatest thing which is essentially the same as last year's thing, but with more AI, more megapixels, a bigger camera bump and in four new and exciting very muted colours that will make your face fall asleep. Now that all big smartphone manufacturers have locked themselves into an arms race where they have to bring out a new device every single year or get left behind in the dust, we also get these events every single year in or around September.
I think we should make use of 'Techtember', but instead of getting some new crap we don't need, take the opportunity to go over our existing tech stack and get rid of some stuff that has accumulated over the years which we no longer need, and maybe slim down the amount of tech that we use in the first place.
Because, I don't know about you, but I just have way too much stuff.
20 years ago I had a laptop, a cellphone, a Discman, an mp3 player and a tiny 14 inch TV set. That was it, and I was happy with that.
Today, if I started writing down all the tech that I have accumulated since then and that I have lying around, I would probably have a mental breakdown. And I'm not even a person who runs out every time something new is advertised, but still... lifestyle creep is absolutely a thing.
Here's just one example: I started out with that one laptop with a 15 inch screen. A couple of years later I bought a desktop PC and a 22 inch monitor. Then a few more years later I got a 24 inch. Then a 27 inch. Now I have a 34 inch ultrawide monitor that's almost as wide as my desk.
But do I really need this huge ass monitor on my desk? Am I happier than I was with the one 15 inch screen? More productive? No. What I am is a good consumer, because I bought a bunch of stuff I didn't really need because (embarrassingly) I saw these things in some tech Youtuber's videos, thought they looked cool and wanted to have them. Hedonic desire, simple as that. Oh, and I still have all the other monitors sitting around too of course, collecting dust.
Maybe it's time to get rid of the big monitor and go back to a smaller one again. One that doesn't scream "I am the most important item in this room", but one that's just enough for what I need. And do that for some other things as well that are sitting around unused, or that are way too overblown for my actual needs.
So that's going to be my 'Techtember'. Thinking about what I really need, getting rid of things that are just gathering dust and going back to a simpler solution when that's enough.
2025-08-24 08:00:00
I used to be a Windows user, but I was always interested in Linux and I played around with various Linux distros since the late 90s, and I finally made the switch to using Linux as my main OS in 2007, because I needed Linux for a University project. The distro I chose back then was Ubuntu 7.04. The old Ubuntu versions from the 2000s were all vaguely "Africa-themed", because Ubuntu's founder Mark Shuttleworth is South African. So the colour palette was always a lot of yellow, brown and orange tones, which I quite liked. Mac OS X at the time was blue Aqua themed, while Windows Vista had a green-ish nature theme going, and Ubuntu's desert themes looked equally good in my opinion.
In 2010 Ubuntu switched to a more purple colour scheme (and it's still purple to this day), but I always liked the yellow Africa themes better and I feel quite nostalgic for them.
Recently I installed the latest Debian "Trixie" on my Eee PC. I chose the Mate desktop variant as that's supposed to be quite light weight, which is important for an underpowered Netbook from 2010. It runs... okay. Not great, but it's usable. The default theme looks clean and modern, but also a bit... bland and uninspired in my opinion. But since Mate is essentially Gnome 2 which the old Ubuntu versions used as well, using it felt quite nostalgic for me, and I started wondering if it was possible to style it to look like Ubuntu from the past?
Here's what Debian Trixie with Mate looks like out of the box:
Nothing wrong with it at all, but like I said, I find it a little boring.
Here's what Ubuntu 7.04 looked like:
Probably not to everyone's taste, but I like it. Especially back in the day after staring at Windows XP for 6 years, it was a breath of fresh air. (Of course today I'm nostalgic for Windows XP, but back then it started to look quite dated)
So, can I make modern Debian look a little more like oldschool Ubuntu?
No. The End.
Ok, kidding. Yes, of course. Here's how.
This is the easiest part, I went to this site, downloaded the wallpaper for 7.04, set it as a wallpaper in Debian and that's it. Quick and easy.
The old Ubuntu themes are called "Human", and thankfully someone has created updated versions for modern desktop environments (guess I'm not the only one nostalgic for the old look) here. I installed it according to the instructions in the github repo with these commands (I had to install wget first for this to work):
sudo wget -O /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/luigifab.gpg https://www.luigifab.fr/apt.gpg
echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/luigifab/packages/ubuntu questing main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install human-theme-gtk
I didn't bother installing gtk3-classic, gtk4-classic and pango like they're recommending because I wanted to see if I could do without. I went into the Mate settings under System -> Preferences -> Look and Feel -> Appearance and selected "Human Orange" from the Themes tab.
Next I changed the fonts to "Sans" and "Monospace" and reduced the size to 10px:
And lastly I wanted the old icons back, but that was a little trickier. There is an icon pack from old Ubuntu, but it's from a later version where the icons already have the later purple theme. Maybe I could have searched a little more, but since I already had a VM with Ubuntu 7.04 running (to get the screenshot above and to see what it originally looked like), I ended up copying the icon theme from the folder /usr/share/icons out of the VM and into the ~/.icons folder on my Debian installation. (I compressed the folder with tar, copied it to my Raspi jumphost with scp, and pulled it from there into the debian installation with scp as well)
Then I could go back into the Themes tab, select the Human theme and I had the old icons back.
And that's it. Here's the final result:
Compared to the original Ubuntu 7.04 from above:
It's not a perfect recreation of the original, because (cue existential crisis) nothing ever is, but it's close. My biggest gripe is that the orange of the title bar is a bit too bright, but you only really notice in a direct comparison. Aside from that, it actually feels like a slightly updated and modernised variation of the old theme, because well, that's exactly what it is. In any case, it succeeds in satisfying my nostalgia, and I prefer it over the modern look, at least for a while.
But now, to answer the most important question: Isn't this completely pointless?
Why yes, it is! But it's fun, and that's why I did it :)