My voice

The purpose of this blog is to practice writing.  I like to write, just not enough to be a writer for a living.  That's a tough gig!  An earlier purpose of the blog was to vent mostly about the economy, but I'm generally over that now.

I mention this because AI has come to this blog - not to write, as that doesn't help me practice writing, but for maintenance.  I should probably also use it as an editor but nah.

Down below are the main stats after two weeks of co-editing with Grok Bot.  This was also my first experience "multi-botting" if that's a term.  I had one bot scanning for blog errors, which we would then discuss how to fix.  I had another bot that rebuilt my Picasa slide shows (check 'slideshow' in the word cloud).  Many of the references here go to my homepage and assorted links at https://above-the-garage.com, so I fired up a bot to clean that up.  It found errors I didn't even know I had!  These bots had to work together to clean things up.  I had another bot that added some features to 'spwnn' which required working with the homepage bot.

I bring all this up because I want to assure you the point of the blog is still for me to practice writing and developing my own voice.  No AI slop here!  Unless it is maintenance related.  If I post something from an AI I'll call it out (like Maya, Don't Crash on Me).  

I suspect if I did a calendar showing how often I blog it would be an accurate representation of how unbusy I am at work, meaning I have time to write.  Except now.  I'm super busy at work!  But this AI stuff is kind of addicting.  The power that flows through my fingers!  Holy moly.  I have other bots going - one to rebuild my personal Raspberry Pi mini-datacenter.  One to unsubscribe from tons of cruft on Twitter/X (1300 follows!  That's what impulse following gets you.). There are a few more I can't remember right now.  I'm using Claude, Muse and Grok.  

The rate of change in AI is off the charts.  It was about a year ago when I complained that Claude was a not-very-good junior programmer.  Now, for my own projects, I don't even look at the code!  I do instruct it, if it doesn't do it on its own, to reconcile and test a lot.

Now it's time for me to go pay my bills.  Oh, the temptation to have a bot pay my bills!  There are people that do this!  Probably a safer bet would be to turn on autopay.  But I'm resisting both.  Financial access is pretty low (high?) on the risk ladder for me.

Anyway, some stats, written by two of the bots:

Grok's blog voice, pretending to be me, and we did collaborate a lot on this:

1. I touched 1,110 of the blog's 1,391 posts, about 80%, in two weeks.
2. Old Flash video players are gone: 69 posts had them, and now none do. 27 of those videos play again in modern YouTube players.
3. Picasa albums came back: 104 of my original photos are in 10 posts again, 8 of them with a new slideshow.
4. About 825 broken links were fixed across 604 posts, and 614 of them now point to the Wayback Machine.
5. All 42 links whose domains had been taken over by spam, gambling or "domain for sale" pages are fixed.
6. 69 posts that only pointed at things long gone are unpublished. None were deleted. The uninteresting book-promo footer is also gone from 354 posts.
7. Every post now has at least one tag. 663 posts had none before.

Grok's homepage voice, talking in the first person about what the bot did:

1. Homepage: I added a link that opens a random blog post, the azurik archive under Work, and three spwnn links in the middle Other column (your reading list, the EC2 version and the Lambda version). 
2. Waterpic: I ported the old Java water-ripple applet to JavaScript, so /waterpic/ works again (see https://above-the-garage.com/waterpic/).
3. One address: www.above-the-garage.com now redirects to plain above-the-garage.com, and spwnn.above-the-garage.com redirects to /spwnn. The homepage tells Google which address is the real one, and there's a 16-page sitemap.  This required updating Let's Encrypt rules.
4. Archive: I moved 236 unlinked items (about 240 MB) to an archive, outside the web folder, with a list of what moved and a one-step undo. 
5. Logs: your site now has its own nginx log folder, rotated daily and kept for a year. The previous 10 days of logs were copied into it too.
6. Stats: I built [meaning downloaded and compiled and installed - SCW] GoAccess, an open-source log viewer, for your private viewing.

Me again:  all of these tasks are things I would not have bothered with in the past - the time to research how to do them made them not worth my time.  Now the cost in "cost/benefit" is very different plus this is all new so it's fun.

We'll see where this all is in a year!   Will the bubble have popped!?  We have to wait and see.