Ahh to be honest, this site is something I do to remind myself that coding can be fun and creative! Without worrying about best practice all the time. I can bring my other hobbies into it, and just have fun with it. I wanted a place to represent myself, so I built it in a way that represents me, to suit my preferences. Aspects of my site that weren't that fun to maintain have been abandoned until I feel like doing them. There's a lot of stuff that I didn't get around to (or didn't get around to yet). I guess all I can say is just go for it, and if there's anything you want to practice, then practice it! Oh, also, I use Neocities for this, but if you want to replicate current corporate development, Neocities or other web 1.0 revival sites are not a great place to do it, since you generally only have processing from the webpage, you can't load the pages from the backend or anything like that. Which is fine for me working from a more nostalgia based approach, but there's been times when I wished i'd picked something a bit more involved to begin with, so i'd have more flexibility now. I really prefer working with React for proper web development, which is a bit impossible on here. But the most important thing is to just make a start, I think. Anything else can be done later as a learning experience.

Hi Noel, not sure whether you'll see this, but I wanted to give you a proper answer. To be honest, I don’t think it’s as simple as "support" or "don’t support" for something as vast as generative AI, and as you'll know from reading my journal I've done multiple posts which cover different aspects, but my opinion is regularly changing as I do my own investigation and hear the opinions of others. I’ve followed AI research since long before ChatGPT and public image generation models became mainstream, and I do think there are beneficial applications. There are some areas where it fits really well with improving the world - like accessibility tools, specialised healthcare and research tools, automation for high-volume specialised tasks, and smaller-scale open research - but not everything needs genAI, whereas currently it's being forced into unsuitable and wasteful usages. Nowadays, I use AI generated subtitles when in video calls because I struggle with understanding speech sometimes, and it's something that has significantly improved my day-to-day life at work. I also have a strong appreciation for how GenAI coding tools have made programming more accessible to a wider range of people - even though I’m concerned about the security and workplace implications, and the wider issues around how these tools are trained and used. I don’t think the technology itself is inherently evil. What I don’t support is the current direction GenAI has taken: mass training on data that was not created or shared for that purpose, image and video generation (except for personal experimentation using data from one’s own images or material they have clear rights to use), corporate attempts to replace workers rather than improve working conditions, careless data-centre expansion, web trawling (for the intention of extracting data without consent), military use, and the general rush to turn everything into a product regardless of the social cost. A rush which also seems to currently be creating a fragile economic bubble. So the answer I can give is: although most of my friends are fully anti-GenAI, and I agree with most of their concerns, I’m not personally anti-GenAI as a concept, I am instead very unhappy with mainstream GenAI as it currently exists. I was much more comfortable with it when it was done with models built from smaller and more carefully sourced datasets, that could be run locally or transparently, rather than mainly being ran through cloud-based data-gathering systems owned by companies whose incentives are not aligned with ordinary people, artists, workers, or the environment. Unexpectedly, one of the more nuanced public reflections I’ve seen on AI came from Pope Leo XIV. One thing he said was that "technology has the power to heal, connect, educate and protect our common home; but it can also divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice." This is kind of where I sit: AI (even generative AI) should help human beings, not replace, exploit, or diminish them, or make their lives worse. My more recent journal entry may have come across as pro-GenAI on the surface level, but it was intended more as a case study criticising the common pattern of brain drain from European countries into US companies - rather than an endorsement of the industry as a whole. I don't have a lot of opportunity to speak on these topics with people in my day to day life, so i feel the journal can be a good outlet for this.

i am also the queen of ravens stubbed my toe x