A blog at last

Being a long time subscriber of a large collection of personal blogs it’s not so difficult to fall in this trap. Typing stuff on the keyboard to see it on someone else’s screen and being able to customize how it looks (modulo MSIE Chrome) is enjoyable, for some humans at least.

The bigger thing is the content actually shared. Right, this one is a meta post, so don’t expect much value of it (matching the other meta, ha!). So, I, for one, see a blog as, among other things, a student’s (or lab, if you prefer) notebook with public read­‑only (mostly) access. One notes problems encountered, thoughts, and possibly the solutions – or at least one of these. Hopefully they’ll remember at least the very fact of posting something to be able to return there upon facing the same problem again.

Since such a lab notebook is public, its knowledge might be useful for other Internet­‑connected folks. This way I’ve learnt a ton of useful stuff, let’s try to be another example in fostering this kind of activities… especially in this day and age.

The powers that be are doing their best to keep the population safe in their walled gardens. They’ve got social networks, instant messengers, shopping platforms and flying cars; as well as censorship, false privacy, and broken safety mechanisms. These are huge topics for another post; here and now let’s – quickly – focus on one thing: traditional Web, as understood by decentralized services built on open standards, appears to be visited more and more rarely by less advanced computer users. And, you know, being able to chat with most of one’s relatives only in a specific commercial silo has some influence on those more conscious users too.

It’s 2026, so… it’s enough to start a sentence like this to trigger discourteous whispers about AI, thankyouverymuch, and that’s precisely this paragraph’s purpose (meta stuff again). LLMs in Big Tech’s service are copyright­‑laundering machines. That’s a truly valid reason to not put anything valuable online, unless you’ve got good mechanisms to fend off their content scappers; with no room for mistakes, a stolen post is stolen forever.

Unless, you know, there’s this very idea that copyright is a temporary mechanism to satisfy our egos and pockets, here and now. This very post is shared under a specific license – that’s because I and most humans I’ve met were raised in regimes where copyright laws exist and so we build our sharing culture, copyleft included, on this law’s foundations. Yet law is unlike math and physics, it’s just a temporary convention, and it’s wrong in a number of aspects.

Sharing one’s thoughts, notes, or more ambitious work might help short or long term fame and budget, but author’s signature is just a piece of metadata. What matters is the work, the content produced. If it’s useful, it will be there long after the author passes away. The metadata will be erased by those who not value it, LLMs do not change existing habits, just make them easier in some ways.

I would like to thank DorotaC for an insightful discussion on the above topics. I recommend reading her upcoming recent post as a primarily much broader and also more scientifical look on contemporary Web issues.