This week I finally launched my blog! Part of this is because I had a revelation about how much I enjoy using RSS.
A couple of months ago, I rediscovered RSS. I say rediscovered because, despite knowing of its existence I always thought this was a technology of the past. Even my friends still laugh at me when I tell them about RSS. They will say things like: wait, let me follow you on MySpace, or Tumblr, or let me text you on Messenger. But how wrong they are and how wrong I was for thinking like this!
The revelation came this week, when after a while using RSS to follow blogs written by people I have found interesting: There was just genuine content. Unbelievable, right? I found myself reading personal opinions or updates from people I follow. No one was using flashy thumbnails to catch my attention, or using an unusual tone to keep me reading/watching their content, or selling me anything. In contrast with this experience, I hopped onto youtube to watch a quick video and the experience was horrible: on a ~12min video I get 3 ads. Yeah, no thank you.
I also found very insightful this post from Bradley Taunt. For a long time I wanted to have a blog to share the things that I discover with people. Up until now, all the things I learn, build or do I would only share with my really close ones, if anyone. My girlfriend was constantly telling me: you have to share this with people. But I always thought: what do I really have to tell people about this or that?. Like, who am I to consider myself an expert. And also, as you may have already guessed from the intro of this post, I am not a great fan of social media.
But Bradley’s post and all the blogs I have been following changed my opinion. It is not needed to make a super technical detailed post about something to share your experiences on a blog. Some times that’s exactly what is the most valuable: knowing about the experiences of other people, finding out that they sometimes make mistakes too… All that makes me feel more connected and appeal more to me than posed pictures or impersonal content.
I would also like to share with you another post I really enjoyed about a contradiction that has been sitting with me for as long as LLMs have existed. In her post, Adële puts to words very nicely something that I have been struggling to reconcile: the smolweb/indieweb community and the use of LLMs. I completely subscribe to her approach to LLMs use and how they fit into this community. As she puts it:
“I am a smolweb advocate who uses LLMs. Not to generate fluff, not to avoid thinking, not as an oracle. As a tool, fast, sometimes very useful, always verified, occasionally wrong.”
On other news, I keep recovering from my A4 pulley. I feel hopeful about my rehab protocol, pain has diminished and now I am going to progress to the next phase where I will start slowly incorporating exercises to add controlled load to it. I am roughly following Hopper’s Beta guidelines to recover from this kind of injuries.
Sorry if this post feels a bit too rambly, I am still adjusting the style of my publications and getting used to write. Till next week!