Life is short and I like creating things. AI is not part of how I write, or code, or make pixel art, or compose. It's very important to me that whatever I make represents some sort of creative impulse or want, and is reflective of me as a person and my life and experiences to that point.
If other people want to hit enter, watch as reams of text are generated, and then slap their name on it, I can't stop them. But deep inside they know their creative lives are shallow and I'll never know the same.
That’s super cool, and I hope you are right and that I am wrong and artists/creators like you will still have a place in the future. My fear is that your work turns into some kind of artesanal fringe activity that is only accessible to 1% of people, like Ming vases or whatever.
That's true art, I love people like you. Technology can do a lot of things but it cannot give people or society principles, and without principles society fails.
I remember we had an Epson colour printer that we got just after we got married: it was able to print photos, and this was a great feature, except that this would run through ink like nothing else, and ink, well, you know.
When it eventually died I got a wired Brother B&W laser printer, and it's been incredible. We've put many thousands of pages through it, easily, changed the toner twice, and it just keeps on working. It is a simple, boring, wonderful piece of tech.
In addition to being a software developer (my day job), I also write and publish poetry, reviews, and non-fiction. These pay very little, if anything; I find that US literary publications pay almost nothing, while Canadian ones are usually able to pay a little. I think this is due to Canada Council rules around funding, but may be wrong.
Regardless, it's a field where it's very difficult to make money, and most of the people I know who manage this full-time do some combination of traditional teaching at colleges/universities or via online courses, manuscript editing services, that sort of thing.
As much as I'd like to be able to spend more time on my artistic pursuits, I'm grateful that my day job allows me to do things like pay my mortgage, and eat, and so likely the arts will stay a side thing with me forever.
That was how I did it, too. Monthly, I'd archive posts, to allow archive perusal by months. I wasn't tied to any particular software. I got hosting with friends who set up their own blogs at their own domains. All of us were in or just out of high school, no real plans for the future, lots of free time to post and talk over AIM/MSN.
In retrospect it was primitive, and it worked. There was a huge scene around all this - everyone had their blogs, and those with an eye for colour and design were doing cutting-edge presetation in idiosyncratic ways. I really miss this when taken against today's single-page, "FOL.IO IS A PLATFORM FOR MANAGING WORMS" type of web.
mc's online journal was what drew me into all of this. It's been offline for probably 20 years now, but it was deeply personal and intense, and wonderfully written.
I've had to get up very early to deal with production issues at work (sometimes between 2-3 a.m.), and I actually find those hours very peaceful - just the hum of the heating/AC and my dogs' snoring.
Speaking as a sysadmin, I find something like launchd/upstart/systemd a ridiculously superior alternative to init scripts, in every way. So this is a good thing. (For various values of "systemd-like".)
Also speaking as a sysadmin, I've found "every way" to be inaccurate. Initscripts have their limitations, but the most glaring issues with them (lots of boilerplate, hard to write, etc.) have been resolved in BSD Land for quite a while, thanks to things like rc.subr.
systemd does have some nice features that I've come to appreciate on my GNU/Linux boxen, but I'm still not exactly sold when my OpenBSD boxen have a mostly-sane rc system not subject to most of the problems the systemd crowd claims are inherent to initscript-based systems.
true, I'm talking about fairly generic Ubuntu VMs out in the fog. But basically, the facilities available cover my common use cases very nicely on the occasions I actually have to write a startup script - I'm finding an upstart config vastly preferable to cobbling together an init shell script, and have yet (out of about 5-10 cases) had to resort to a shell script.
That's not a problem. Even a good thing and the BSDs will build one properly.
The problem is how systemd came to be (through political games indeed of merit) and that it's not just an init replacement but that it gets its grubby fingers everywhere in the OS and that it's turning Linux into a Windows-like binary blob mess.
There's a difference between discussion regarding /a/ more in-depth system framework and discussion regarding a specific system framework. One of the constant things written about in these threads though is that they /don't/ want something "systemd-like" because it is such an intrusive, obstinate framework. I see some good ideas coming from the systemd framework, however, its consistent choice of poor defaults and byzantine structure leave me desiring something of a bit more lucid vision.
They are? That's interesting. Please provide details. What systemd-like systems are (to start with) the OpenBSD, DragonFly BSD, MirOS BSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD/PC-BSD, and Debian kFreeBSD people actively working on?
Uh, the entire presentation is about the need for a systemd-like system, and how the existing init system is not sufficient.
Did you listen to the presentation?
Look, snark aside, nobody can sanely suggest the existing init systems are sufficient in 2015+. New ideas present in systemd and launchd are exactly what people have desired for a long time. Maybe systemd doesn't float your particular boat, but that doesn't mean the old init system is superior.
If other people want to hit enter, watch as reams of text are generated, and then slap their name on it, I can't stop them. But deep inside they know their creative lives are shallow and I'll never know the same.