pages/src/routes/blog/2026/0402.md

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fuck i'm so sick of this shit. i need to incoherently ramble about this

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bluesky is vibe-coded

I was scrolling Bluesky earlier today; something I do maybe once every two weeks when I'm really bored. I only follow a few people (such as Technology Connections, f4mi, and Freya Holmér), so there's never a lot of content on my feed. It's why I sometimes go over to, Orvus forbid, the Discover feed.

What do I see? The Bluesky team is using AI. No, the Bluesky team is embracing AI. Actually, the Bluesky CIO Jay Graber is openly admitting to pretty much vibe-coding the website while also working on an AI bot that has, as of a few days ago, been pre-emptively blocked by over a hundred thousand people. Hear this, Bluesky team: PEOPLE DO NOT WANT THIS.

Apparently, this bot is meant to create custom feeds. It's a task so simple, Jay Graber felt the need to defend it:

I find it terrifying how tech CEOs (or CIOs, whatever) continually press on to actively encourage media illiteracy. Building a feed is trivial, not to mention a very personal thing to do – what's a 'personal' AI generated feed but someone else's feed? Not counting the waste of our limited land and resources, the overconsumption of our drinking water, the pollution of our air, and everything else associated with running an AI model for a job as trivial (and yet computationally maximally expensive) as this, of course.

As someone who's studying to become a teacher, this really grinds my gears. It's like, opposing education. To give some background on my perspective: the state I live in has a severe problem with children scoring low and not being able to acquire the knowledge and skills that are expected of them. Children in primary school barely know how to read anymore. Youths leaving middle school are barely fit for the job market and their apprenticeship applications get rejected because of it, literally leading them into a life of unemployment and poverty right out of the gate. All this while we're suffering from a massive teacher shortage, with some schools either ending school days early or completely cancelling school on some days of the week. Of course, the gymnasiums, where the more fortunate children (not always but often literally from wealthier households) are being taught, struggle less with this, while elementary schools and middle schools for special needs children are hit the hardest. There are a lot of factors at play here, but logically it would make sense to work on fixing them while not introducing new issues, right?

Imagine my fucking frustration when the department of education department decided to provide an AI chatbot to all students. What. The. Fuck. They could provide more funding to improve the schools – this includes hiring more staff, but also renovating the dilapidated school buildings, some of which are in such poor condition, one of my internship schools had a fence around one of its buildings because there was a danger of roof tiles falling and striking children. Instead, they choose to reduce one of the few aspects that school is still good at: enabling children to establish and practice social relationships in a safe environment!

For a while, I tried going into meetings with higher-up people to explain the consequences of this for our children, but these people are so insanely pro-AI, it's like they've been indoctrinated by venture capitalist firms.

To bring this back to the topic at hand: this is one of the reasons why I hate AI integration so much. It discourages trying new skills, failing, learning from your mistakes, allowing yourself to grow. All of this is taken away in lieu of... some averaged-out garbage Silicon Valley is trying to convince you is just as good as the real product.

...when it's not even about the end product!!! I couldn't care less about some of the projects I made in the past – what's much more important to me are the experiences and skills I gained from making them!

I may delete my Bluesky account over this. It would be a bit of a shame because it means I'll be further disconnected from some of the people whose works I'm interested in, although realistically I barely use the site anyway. It's like when I deleted Instagram; I feared I'd be disconnected from the people around me, only to realise that I already was and that deleting my account didn't make a difference.

horny men and conservatives are pathetic

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In Germany, the name Collien Fernandes has been making its rounds in the media. It's about Fernandes' ex spreading pornographic material of her on the internet. This has led to a discussion about deepfake pornography on the internet.

And wouldn't you believe it, just this week there were reports on the christian conservative party (CDU), whose members have created a WhatsApp group exclusively made up of men that shared deepfake pornography of their colleagues. The news is highlighting (just to be clear: not showing!) a video of a woman in a bikini, dancing, with the face of a female party colleague superimposed on that woman. This apparently happened back in January, and of course no action had been taken until the incident reached the public. In fact, a politician named Adrian Mohr running for mayor's office in the town of Dörverden in Lower Saxony has directed his peers to "keep quiet" about the situation (the article is in German and behind a paywall, but you can circumvent the paywall by disabling JavaScript).

I've said it before, and here it is in writing: I despise conservatives. Hypocritical, spineless shits that will do anything to save their own hides while actively harming the lives of everyone except themselves, in every regard: accessibility, public transport, taxes, women's rights... just think of anything and conservatives will try to ruin it.

It really makes me wonder why people like Wiebke Winter are proud and public members of the CDU, a party that clearly shows it views people like her as nothing more than sexual objects to be used and abused.

protecting my server from AI using... AI?

Since finding out that an insane amount of bots is trying to steal data off my server at all times, I began thinking more about server security. I set up fail2ban for instance, which IP-bans connecting clients after a few failed attempts. I also found a tool named Anubis.

It looked really cool. A protective layer against AI bots scraping my website? Made by a queer person? A cute hand-drawn mascot? Sign me up!, I thought. I struggled for a long time trying to set it up, as the documentation isn't fantastic, but I found a blog post that helped me finally get it up and running.

One thing kept nagging me, however: the developer. Now, I don't want to speak too ill of Xe, it seems to me that they're a good person overall. But browsing their Bluesky profile, their blog, or even just their company's website techaro.lol reveals positivity towards AI that feels extremely hypocritical. How could I take someone's anti-AI scraper tool seriously if their company literally offers consulting on AI?

I've taken down my Anubis instance for now. This doesn't mean I won't ever use it in the future, but right now, the developer's hypocritical use of AI makes me feel too conflicted to be comfortable using Anubis.

Another thing that perplexed me was that the mascot for Anubis was initially AI generated. I hate when people claim their AI use is justified when they use it as "placeholder art". Gamedevs keep doing that more and more lately and it's infuriating. Speaking of which...

shovelware in 2026

Lately, whenever I'm looking for new games on Steam, one of the first things I do is scroll down to see whether there's an "AI Generated Content Disclosure". I'm actually quite happy Valve implemented this, as it allows me to very quickly identify games that are not worth my time. Thing is though, I can't decide whether the blubs that these "developers" keep writing are hilarious or pathetic.

Take this blurb by the team behind the title "I Am Jesus Christ" (weird. not linking it):

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]} />

This, when dissected, is saying:

• AI was used to replace creative human work
• The developers do not want their use of AI to be viewed as replacing creative human work
• They view their use of AI justified by the fact they are a small team

The way they instantly defend their AI usage shows they clearly know using generative AI is terrible and frowned upon. They play it off as if they had no choice but to use AI to develop the game! The quality would have suffered otherwise!

And using the small size of your team as a justification for not putting effort into your game? It screams cash grab. Get everyone on board, shove out something that can pass as a 'game' as quickly as possible, and then cash in. Fantastic games were produced by small teams, or even solo devs. Do I even need to mention people like Toby Fox?

I wish I could name more people here, but I'm admittedly not as tapped into games as I used to be.

After all this though, you may ask yourself: is the AI generated voice acting of "I Am Jesus Christ" at least any good?

No. Of course it isn't. It's shit.

flash memory is too damn expensive

On perhaps a somewhat lighter note...

With my recent efforts in working on my remote Hetzner server to self-host services such as Gitea, copyparty, and of course this website, I felt I wanted to do a little more. Host some other cool services. It's just that they require more storage and don't really feel at home on a remote server. I wanted a home server.

What I had in mind was a small micro PC, the ones businesses keep chucking out, to run things such as Immich, Jellyfin, paperless-ngx, and a local Gitea mirror. They don't use a lot of power, so they'd be perfect. I even found some on Ebay, except that they all came without RAM and storage...

Oh yeah. This is about the flash memory crisis. This stuff has gotten CRAZY EXPENSIVE lately. Why? AI.

For instance, I bought a 1 TB Samsung 970 Evo NVMe SSD at the end of 2020 for 140€. The technology was fairly new at this point, so it was understandably expensive back then. Then, when I built my PC in 2023, I bought a second one for less than 70€. Right now, this very SSD – one that's several PCIe generations behind – is going for 220€! How is that even possible?? Not to mention the RAM situation, where 32 GB kits are being sold for upwards of 400€...

Now, I'm quite fortunate in the fact that I got an old school PC from my job that I can use. In fact, it's what's running my home server applications right now, and quite well too! The CPU is pretty weak (it's some kind of Intel Pentium from a decade ago) but it's got 16 GB of memory and has been performing good enough. I also replaced the hard drive with a cheap (back when I bought it) 480 GB Crucial SATA SSD I originally used to run a custom firmware on my PS3. It was totally overkill for the job, considering the PS3 doesn't even support SATA III, and since my PS3 is kind of on its last legs, I'm using my PC to emulate PS3 games anyway, on the odd day I feel the desire to play those games.

I do worry about the power consumption though, and I would prefer a micro PC with a power-efficient CPU over my current setup. I wish the companies working on AI, or even just the people using these AI products, would reflect on the amounts of power wasted through their actions...