So. About that...

Ok, so I feel I do owe an explanation here.

The short and sweet answer is that I think I burnt out on programming for a while there. It got weirdly hard to keep motivated by it after some developments in my personal life, and it didn't put me in a good place to do the sort of lazy walks around conceptual space that real experimentation calls for. I'm not here to wallow in self-pity, by the way, it's less that programming got harder/less rewarding and more that some other stuff I got into got a lot more interesting and started to take time away from other pursuits. And I think this causal chain is why it took so long for me to notice the burnout.

I can't guarantee I'm back, obviously, but about a week ago, I did the first programming for pleasure I'd done in about two years. I also can't really stay away from the machine; I did a lot of programming in anger, frustration, and obligation in the meantime, but none of it had any kind of spark in it. And then I started wanting to play around with GPT for a bit.

You'll see what I'm doing with that shortly; I plan a few commits to my github before too long. If I end up going into detail about what happened while I was out walking the world, it'll be over in the just-for-drafts folder in case anyone cares. This place is for things that at least tangentially relate to the pursuit of computer science for fun.

This piece is just here to let you know I'm doing ok, and to acknowledge my absence along with a few other small changes.

So.

• I've been away. It might happen again, but I doubt it'll be soon.
• The authentication and comment system has been scrapped. I decided that if I really need to talk to people about what's in my brain, I'll do it in slack or discord or email rather than the wastelands of the public internet.
• I've sunset a bunch of applications that used to run on this server in addition to the blog. Including trurl, kicktracker and pronounce, all of which you're more than welcome to run yourself. Even as I wrote that sentence, I got a pang of "I should get those back up and running", so no guarantee that I won't again in the future, but for now, their subdomains all lead to HTTP error responses.
• The SSL certificates, and therefore https of this site is now back thanks to certbot. It turns out it isn't complete garbage unless you want a wildcard certificate. If you're fine with specific domains and nginx, it's extremely straightforward but still recommends the installation of snapd for some reason.
• The new script in the repo has been replaced with a scratch Clojure module
• Clojure is still very probably my favorite LISP, and probably the functional language I'll be spending most of my time in for the next while. Although Haskell and ML are still extremely tempting in a weirdly hypnotic way.
• Also, Python and Javascript are probably the languages I spend most wall-clock time dealing with these days.
• The blogosphere is pretty dead, or at least moved onto substack et al, but I've been blogging since before Facebook, and I'll probably be doing it in some form and subject well after it ceases to be a good idea.

I wrote this in a park as the sun was setting behind a row of houses in the distance. I did it for the sense of meditation and re-centering it gave me. Being out here is one of the ways I'm planning on keeping myself motivated enough to keep my head on straight. So, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to get back to enjoying it for a bit.