\u201cHow do I disable all WordPress widgets without using plugins?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat are Theodor Adorno\u2019s major works \u2014 and where should I start reading them?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat is the best meditation routine for deep sleep?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHow do I delete a Docker container from the command line?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAre vinegar and baking soda a good combination for household cleaning?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the US, what is the average number of viewers per movie released in a given year? Use a recent year.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat does a screen with NCVM IPS technology mean?\u201d<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
Sorry for the random questions. These are some I asked the AI (Duck.ai and Claude) recently. All were answered by the free models offered by the two companies, with varying levels of satisfaction. At the very least, they pointed me toward promising avenues to delve deeper into research, conduct tests, and ultimately solve my problem. (Except for the one about movie box office in the US; it seems data is missing for lower-grossing films.)<\/p>\n
In the recent past, I would have turned to a web search engine \u2014 DuckDuckGo, which I use by default for more than a decade. They wouldn\u2019t really be questions, because I never got into the habit of \u201cchatting\u201d with the search engine\u2019s text field. Today, I\u2019ve been going straight to commercial chatbots, based on large language models (LLMs). I just ask, the way I would ask a person, though I don\u2019t confuse the two.<\/p>\n
And why do searches the old-fashioned way? No matter which search engine you use, the results are similar \u2014 if not the same \u2014 and almost always poor. Generic, misleading pages with answers buried in wordy texts that are that way \u201cbecause Google likes it\u201d and because ad revenue takes priority. Content becomes a supporting act \u2014 or, as the old saying goes, the tail (ads) wags the dog. Most of the web has gone to rot. Search engines merely reflect this.<\/p>\n
For direct answers, an AI returns the summary \u2014 that paragraph that would be lost among tons of rambling text and invasive ads on the fifth or sixth link I tried from the search results page.<\/p>\n
There are valid concerns about AI as a business. This does not mean, however, that the technology should be discarded. The problem isn\u2019t the technology. It\u2019s the companies and their delusional rhetoric; the business model, the bubble yet to pop; the use of AI as a scapegoat for layoffs and other misguided corporate decisions; the rush to build data centers without considering the side effects, which in many cases are extremely harmful.<\/p>\n
Treating AI as a normal technology<\/a> is an approach that I and others (such as Cory Doctorow<\/a>) sympathize with. In my case, I came to sympathize with it because its usefulness is undeniable. <\/p>\n AI, on its own, will not end the world nor lead us to the nirvana of the human experience. These apocalyptic or utopian outcomes stem from the business world. It is in the interest of companies in the sector to paint a normal technology as exceptional and bet everything on the idea that AI solves all problems, even if it costs our future and that of the planet. It doesn\u2019t have to be this way.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n My use of AI\/LLMs is limited to trivial questions or those related to my professional activity, and to generating some simple code that I wouldn\u2019t be able to write myself, but at least partially understand what it means.<\/p>\n To date, I\u2019ve completed two major projects with the help of the free version of Claude.<\/p>\n The first was the sliding comments panel on Manual<\/strong>‘s pt_BR edition. It worked, but in the end it felt out of place with the reliable simplicity that characterizes this website.<\/p>\n Earlier this week, out of the blue, I remembered an old goal: to convert my personal blog<\/a> from Jekyll to Hugo. Both are static site generators, except one is written in Ruby and the other in Go. (These are programming languages.)<\/p>\n I converted it from WordPress to Jekyll in 2017. At the time, I picked a default Jekyll theme and customized it so much that it bore no resemblance to the original. I didn\u2019t really know what I was doing. I only managed it through a lot of trial and error and by reading scattered tutorials on the web. Over time, I became familiar with the code, understood Jekyll better, and learned how to make the edits I wanted.<\/p>\n I never got along with Hugo. The syntax and logic are different from Jekyll\u2019s, harder for my head to wrap around.<\/p>\n Migrating from Jekyll to Hugo was far from a priority. I lacked the time, the desire to learn how another CMS works, and there were absolutely no advantages that justified the effort. Jekyll works fine. I dislike its dependency system (\u201cgems\u201d), the opposite of Hugo, which is just a binary, and\u2026 well, that\u2019s it. <\/p>\n Since my blog is one of the simplest and has a well-defined (and limited) scope, I decided to try my luck with AI. I pointed the Jekyll version\u2019s repository to Claude and asked:<\/p>\n I have this blog, built with Jekyll. I\u2019d like to convert it to Hugo \u2014 a perfect conversion that preserves the categories (notes, images, texts, etc.) and the layout. In the end, generate a compressed archive containing all the necessary files<\/p><\/blockquote>\n We struggled with the filters by post type<\/a>. After some back-and-forth, it worked. Another step I had to take was asking the AI to give me the Python script to convert the posts themselves from the Jekyll standard (the front-matter) to Hugo\u2019s. Claude was trying to do it itself \u2014 that is, on Anthropic\u2019s servers \u2014 and kept failing. Locally, all I had to do was call it in the terminal with the command You can read our conversation<\/a> (pt_BR).<\/p>\n With the site up and running, I turned to search engines to learn how to host it on Cloudflare, which, since I uploaded my last site, has removed the simpler \u201cPages\u201d service to focus everything on \u201cWorkers,\u201d which requires some execution code that I had no idea how to create. Hugo\u2019s own website has the recipe<\/a>.<\/p>\n I haven\u2019t looked closely at the generated code yet. It\u2019s very likely there are areas for improvement. Right off the bat, I noticed that one of the layout files, Otherwise, it worked. And as expected. I base this statement on the time it takes to compile the static site, which dropped by ~77% in the Hugo version. Not surprising (Hugo is faster than Jekyll), but if the reduction hadn\u2019t been so dramatic, it would have been a sign that something was wrong.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n It\u2019s fair to say that my new site is the result of the collective work of thousands of programmers who have published their work in Jekyll and asked and answered questions on StackOverflow over the years.<\/p>\n The perspective of those troubled by generative AI \u2014 developers, publishers, newspapers, and myself, for quite some time \u2014 differs from what I believe and strive to practice. My issue isn\u2019t with the violation of intellectual property. It\u2019s with the way these companies have siphoned off humanity\u2019s knowledge to resell it; it\u2019s with the commodification of common knowledge for purely commercial purposes.<\/p>\n If there were an AI made by Wikipedia or Archive.org (public, free, and universally accessible) or if commercial companies didn\u2019t charge for access \u2014 to give back the content they\u2019ve amassed from all over the world without authorization or any compensation \u2014 I would have zero problem contributing my content to the training of that AI. (Actually, I\u2019ve stopped caring about this\u2026 those who visit this blog don\u2019t do so for the same reasons that lead someone to use an AI chatbot.)<\/p>\n Intellectual property and copyright are barriers to knowledge and the intellectual development of each of us, imposed and defended by those with the potential to generate revenue. They create castes and breed inequality. They are pernicious. No wonder it\u2019s a cause championed (when it suits them) by big corporations and, consequently, by people who need to defend themselves against those big corps to survive by doing what they know and love. People who produce intellectual work do need a return, yes, but stop and realize that those who usually enforce property rights are Disney, media conglomerates, and major publishers.<\/p>\n In practical terms, however, intellectual property and vampire-like companies \u2014 such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic \u2014 do exist, which justifies attempts to block their leech-like bots and the multimillion-dollar lawsuits that other massive companies file against them. For my part, in my insignificance, I\u2019ve chosen to give in.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\npython3 convert_posts.py<\/code> and watch all 364 posts get converted in less than a second.<\/p>\nlist.html<\/code>, was duplicated in two directories. I asked if I could delete one of them. I could.<\/p>\n