2026-11-05

spring (autumn...?) cleaning...

i love 2 tidy...

ai disclaimer: all prose here written solely by me

I. hi

i tided this up a little bit...! it's been a while...

i decided to write in a more colloquial style... LLMs have kinda co-opted formal styles, so it's now a bit of a negative signal to be too formal in your writing. so i'll just write in my normal conversational style, i think...

etooooooooo. basically. i decided i wanna try writing here again, so i rewrote my site in claude. it was rly fun. the workflow i used was to get him to spin up a little http server w/ the magic bits that let you autorefresh the page when the file changes. and then tell him to change things & gently remind him to keep things simple. together we designed a little js templating engine that interprets custom tags, so e.g. posts are defined with <post> tags, etc.

II. test harness

makefile, nix flake, he wanted to drag in chromium, etc

III. templating

i went with fabrice bellard's quickjs cuz it makes things super simple. the entire engine is about 300 lines of javascript & the js interpreter is 150k lines of mostly dependency-free c (as opposed to whatever node is). it's just templated js, no markdown. it does pull in tree-sitter for syntax highlighting but that was the least worst build-time dependency i could have used for that i think.

1$ nix-store --query --tree $(nix build --no-link --print-out-paths 'nixpkgs#quickjs') | sed -E 's|/nix/store/[a-z0-9]{32}-||' | grep -vF '[...]'
2quickjs-2026-06-04
3├───glibc-2.44-57
4│   ├───libidn2-2.3.8
5│   │   ├───libunistring-1.4.2
6│   ├───xgcc-16.2.0-libgcc

quickjs runtime dependency tree. none of those r real libraries they're basically free

the old one was some stupid giant templating engine on top of a mountain of other crap that you're supposed to run in docker or something^{*it was hugo, i think} & eventually i forgot how to even compile it & idk the whole thing was stupid!! this one feels. um. like maybe a little bit more love was put into it... "does anybody else drink water" kind of thought but i kind of hate dealing with systems i don't understand. there's the normal friction but also i tend to just lose interest & forget how to operate even the parts i know. this is much nicer & easier to keep in my mind, i think...

IV. web design

y did i make it look like "big walk"...

this uses the color scheme from my emacs theme, which i stole from xemacs. also i made claude write the whole site basically. the workflow was basically just: let's start with a blank page, now add this, now add that, now show me every combination of these 3 variables & i'll tell you which of the 16 combinations i like best, etc. it was very fun.

anyway, for reasons i will explain shortly, here are six levels of subsectiosn:

V. do ♪

v.i re

v.i.a mi

v.i.a.i fa

v.i.a.i.a so ♫

v.i.a.i.a.i la

v.i.a.i.b so

v.i.a.ii fa

v.i.b mi ♪♫♪〜

v.ii re

VI. web design

asdf headingcurvectl gehennactl

vi.i how much of this is mine...?

well. the palette i ripped off of xemacs. it's a considerable part of the aesthetic, so even for the design, i can't take complete credit. claude wrote 100% of the code, although the basic idea for the template engine as "javascript that interprets html/xml with custom tags & renders them with js functions". i don't even know javascript, nor do i particularly want to. he came up with some of the proportions as well, the widths of the sidebar & post view, as well as the header format, with the date at the top, then title, subheading, tags. i came up with the box design (with the color square under it), the font choices, the sidebar composition, the concept for the wireframe background + starfield (i wouldn't say he had any input here other than implementing it), ...
...does it really matter...? ah, i don't know... i feel like this "belongs" to me, even though i didn't write any actual code, because it looks the way i wanted it to look & i mostly knew what i wanted before i started working on it.
something that

vi.i.a but if you had just asked, "make this for me", & it had given you exactly what you see here with no further refinement, how would you feel?

ah... i think i wouldn't have liked that at all, even though it would be identical to this.

so i guess the context does matter, even though it feels like it shouldn't. maybe it's only how the context relates to me personally that makes it matter. i have a hard time imagining being in someone else's shoes... maybe it's related to that...

i also enjoyed the process, even though a lot of it was just telling claude to make laundry lists of minor changes. that, too, was fun, and seeing what looked "best" was an active process. i wouldn't be as satisfied with the resulting work if i hadn't gone through.

vi.i.a.i would you have, if you didn't have to?

i think i would still, actually...

you know, while i "knew" how to program long before LLMs came around, i never really did much programming. i just didn't have the patience for it. most of the details under consideration while programming unassisted are simply not interesting to me. a lot of it is, literally, in the class of problems that even people studying the mathematical or formal properties of programming languages (who can be assumed to be intimately interested in details), completely disregard as beneath consideration - most treatments of lambda calculus, for example, simply hand-wave the semantics of how substitution works with named binders as "modulo alpha equivalence".

but a lot of programming work literally is nothing more than moving names around. so an incredible proportion of programming-work, then, is FUCKING BORING!! it's a complete waste of your god-given brain to fill it up with garbage like that. i think. i don't know javascript. i don't know what everything is called. i do not want to know. i want to think about more interesting things. like whether section headers look better with a square around the numeral or with a plain underline. i went with the underline, because the square was a bit much. but i have barely looked at how most of this is implemented & do not really care beyond that it's not hideous.

vi.i.a.i.a didn't you want this to be a certain way, though?

i did. i do have a personal sense of aesthetics when it comes to code itself, i suppose. i wanted a template engine, i wanted to be able to write complex markup using xml tags, i wanted the runtime closure to be as small as possible. i don't wanna know what's inside the box. but i also do & sense deeply whether it offends me or not. it's both at once. i contain multitudes, & so on

i still don't want to know about javascript, though.

VII. deployment & hosting

i like cloudflare cuz they probably have edge servers on the moon^{†my final verdict is "probably not" but if it turned out that they had actually put a satellite in orbit that responds to HTTP requests over some medium as a sort of "get your fingers in as many pies as possible" thing that large corporations often engage in, it wouldn't particularly surprise me either. i haven't checked, my imagination of the truth is probably more interesting than the reality}. i haven't tested how fast their cdn is compared to everyone else but it's probably the best (make sure?)

everyone is complaining about AI scrapers... i don't really mind at all if they hammer this site although it's designed specifically to be as fast & light as possible too. it's all completely static & hosted in cloudflare pages, uses no dependencies (even vendored ones), and has one font.

VIII. but how are you, really...?

um i've been okay i had a rough couple of years i got stuck in a time-loop for about 53 years but luckily i was able to escape eventually after i found the Key.