i personally haven't used chatGPT or really any AI assistant yet, mostly because registering an account has been the barrier - i just don't feel like doing it.

but i will say that I think AI would have helped me a lot in school. There are so many classes that I wasted my time in because the professors couldn't communicate ideas in a way that I could wrap my head around. Mostly programming classes. I didn't have any background and the professors were so far removed from being a beginner that their teaching style didn't work. Especially when they made us write code with fucking pen and paper on some caveman shit.

So i mostly picked up programming after college, but i guarantee if I was able to ask a bot in plain english to explain concepts, I would have gotten a lot more experience in school and probably could have earned a bit more money out of college.

As far as writing essays for general education classes, like Philosophy and Public Speaking, etc. Yeah ChatGPT is probably making those classes more pointless, but there's such a small amount of people who find those classes interesting, so it's probably good that we're making them easier to manage. They really shouldn't be required in the first place.

i wrote about front-end development on my blog: https://basementcommunity.bearblog.dev/stop-doing-this-with-react/

i don't want to pigeon-hole myself into only writing about this stuff, but this is definitely what i know and seems to be picking up interest and is getting people to visit the site 😭

i've been joining some webrings on the webrings page, so i wrote about them here:

https://basementcommunity.bearblog.dev/what-are-webrings/

i did see that! i need to not be lazy and make a banner for it though since you need to submit one with your request to join.

onionring is pretty good. i think if I were ever to add a webring here it would probably do something similar to the retronaut ring where you submit a link after you've added the webring code, the form scrapes your site to see the links exist, then adds you automatically to the webring.

the only issue with webrings is how clunky it is to join some of them

making a huge change to my lifting, diet, and cardio, so i wrote about it:

https://basementcommunity.bearblog.dev/fixing-my-diet-and-lifting/

i wrote about one of my fav musicians right now, Rosie Tucker:

https://basementcommunity.bearblog.dev/rosie-tucker/

literally have had her on repeat since being locked in the house. her music is nuts

i think the coolest thing about joining webrings familiar faces/sites in these different communities you mentioned. there's people who own neighboring sites in webrings basement community is apart of that i've seen on other message boards like melonland and 32bit.cafe. i really enjoy https://32bit.cafe also. their discord is really cool and the site design is top notch

i'm pretty confident that the way things are going, we're still a ways off from being replaced!

and welcome to the forum!

that's true - i think it ideally should be a tool for that industry, but art is definitely taking the largest beating right now. And I guess the writers' strike means that industry is clearly very threatened too.

it's a shame honestly. you'd hope people would want to pay the money for hand-drawn art, but i think business needs are going to make that a lot less in demand.

congrats on starting! i've read so many blogs on https://bearblog.dev when i'm trying to fall asleep at night, and the common advice I see is that you just need to get started and not worry about the actual content you're writing. Glad you came to the same conclusion!

I like all the references too - some of those other blogs were fun to read as well.

i feel the same way about writing too personally. I want to be as anonymous as possible, but sometimes I feel like personal writing is more interesting to read.

i enjoyed reading this! I also had a childhood friend who was inching into this territory but instead we grew apart because of how much I was cringing at him.

i wonder how alonso is doing now

php still being the most optimal choice here really is nuts. i feel like if this feature was implemented in HTML, people would reach for JS frameworks a lot less because re-usability of components is still a problem that hasn't really been solved yet, and that's what these frameworks do really well.

not saying react is easier than writing a simple php include for example, but i feel like server-side code scares people, so they'd rather just do it with JS

or even iframes. i see a lot of neocities sites abuse the hell out of iframes

html has some crazy shit these days. two that I learned about recently are <output /> and <progress />

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/output

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/progress

would anyone in this thread have any interest in participating in a community blog collection. Something like agoraroad is doing on their site:

https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/agora-road-travelogue-november.6189/

Now that the 1 year anniversary of the site is coming up, I think it might be cool to highlight some of the content being posted on this site, give members some signal boost, and perhaps do it as part of some kind of competition/giveaway. Maybe a giftcard or something similar. The tricky part is I don't want to blatantly copy what agoraroad is doing, so maybe center the blogs around some kind of very vague theme and have posters write about that.

any thoughts?

i guess i was thinking more along the lines of writing on your own respective sites, mentioning somewhere in the post your writing as part of the basement community writing month or whatever, then perhaps I would compile a list of snippets from each post and link back off to the participating sites.

So not necessarily writing for this site, just having snippets from your stuff quoted and linked back to.

have i got a thread for you!

glad you had fun at the concert tho! i definitely miss my early 20s, when I was excited to push to the front and get nuts at concerts. definitely go to as many concerts as you possibly can.

also TIL young people are into kiss wow

my blog is hosting the indieweb carnival for the month of march, and while my official entry to this is still in draft mode, I wrote another blog about 4 things you can do to make your website accessible:

https://blog.basementcommunity.com/4-overlooked-web-accessibility-issues/

my indieweb carnival topic is about "accessibility on the personal web", but I wanted to get this blog out as a sibling article because it's something i feel strongly about.

i would make fun of these kids but i was just as angsty when I was in my teens

the not wanting to doxx yourself is totally a valid argument for having separate sites (even though you said you're fine with people finding out your name), but I think for separating out content, I would definitely lean towards a unified experience as well.

I obviously don't speak for everyone, but a big way I like to consume blog content is through bearblog's discover page because I get to see a lot of different stuff and skip over the posts that I have no interest in. I see a lot of people write blogs about this issue from a writing perspective, but as a reader, I'd rather have the option to skip over a post, rather than just never see it because I'm not visiting someone's alt site.

I also just read this post

https://starbreaker.org/blog/links/web-bloat-slow-hardware/index.html

Posts like this are so interesting to me and there really needs to be more of a spotlight on them. Over the past few companies I've worked at, it seems like the thinking within the front-end development space is that if you're building a site behind an auth wall, then there's really no need to try and optimize your JS-framwork-based website. It's really fucking frustrating.

This site is powered by a NodeJS runtime on the server and uses React, but most pages tend to be 1.1-1.3 MB (which obviously could still be smaller but I think is pretty good). This is to say that even if you want to use React/Vue/whatever JS framework, we now have ways to move all that computation onto the server to make your site snappy and require less of the user's device. This isn't 2016 anymore, there's really no reason you should be writing bloated JS-only websites.

I think the problem is the natural progression of the average person working at a company today which is:

1. Graduate from college or a bootcamp or be self-taught

2. Start poking around job boards, look up some advice on Reddit/wherever and realize that the best path is to learn React/Vue/SomeFramework

3. Learn the basics of creating a client-side rendered website in one of these frameworks

   • do no research into the tradeoffs in writing a purely JS-based website

4. Apply for a million jobs, then finally get a gig

5. Proceed to contribute the shittest code ever

6. Spend N years learning best practices and MAYBE learn the drawbacks on JS-based websites

And even then, you still have to overcome the hurdle of coordinating a team of people to subscribe to your way of thinking (which I have not been successful at yet). I know all this information now, but it's still a herculean effort to get a team of 10+ people onboard with writing a server-side rendered website. And it's probably going to be a losing battle for at least another 5-10 years until people start learning how to make websites more efficiently

This is why the web is bloated. People are learning skills that are making themselves hirable, with absolutely no regard to how usable their product is.

after getting way too addicted to the videos youtube was recommending me, I felt like I had to set some boundaries with the homepage and just block all the content from loading, so I would be forced to only see videos from my subscriptions page.

Chromium browsers have a content filtering section where you can block content from loading in, so I use it to block all HTML on the homepage and the /shorts page:

which makes the page look like this:

edit

just wrote this guide on everything I personally do when spinning up a new server. Looking for some feedback on it to see if I missed anything important:

https://blog.basementcommunity.com/everything-i-do-when-hosting-a-website/

this is in support of my 2024 goals for creating some more guides coming from this website:

https://basementcommunity.com/threads/245

nice thanks for that. I knew about WSL but never messed around it enough to speak intelligently on it in a post like this, but I'll add that disclaimer.

And yeah. It's not super clear but I use Debian. I had a note towards the top of the blog about apt-get:

but I should probably add a top-level note about that fact that the commands might need to be tweaked for a different distro