Five months after my last post announcing the revival of my notes blog under a new title, I re-revive it with a new goal: a commonplace book, kept by and for me, but readable by the public. This is what can differentiate notes here from posts on Fogknife. To this end I’ve added a tags page, and will start tagging my ’Twas This posts as of right now.

That lack of demarcation was half the reason I didn’t write here. The other half was technical: various Linuxy bits and pieces had stopped working on the ancient server that runs jmac.org. I had a long conversation with an AI chatbot about this, across two calendar days. In the end, I finally understood and fixed the problem. (It was all about 32-bit versus 64-bit computing architectures, confusingly commingled.)

This might be the tidiest experience I’ve had of approaching a chatbot with a complex problem that had a simple goal, and succeeding—and, crucially, coming away feeling like I understood why I succeeded. And it made me want to share the fact in a space that feels more appropriate than the extremely AI-skeptical lands of Mastodon or Bluesky, and it brought to mind a recent epistolary post from Merlin Mann:

Given how much even my dearest friends can barely conceal their free-form anxiety slash unbridled gamer rage about how Computers Do A New Thing Now, I’ve started to feel fully ashamed about how relentlessly my low-friction interactions with a weird robot in the sky have been improving my life in improbably wholesome ways.

Much as Mann’s post is actually about finding sources of grace in an unbalanced and combative world, let ’Twas This be my own safe space for exploring my own evolving thoughts about generative AI, as well as whatever other purposes I might bend this blog towards.