busybee fluffy rambles

In every corner of my life right now I cannot seem to escape the increasing fervor of the ongoing debate regarding AI and machine learning in general, where on one side you have people who are completely anti-AI and others who are completely pro-AI, and any point made in opposition to either of these things is seen as a hardline stance that is an attack or something to be corrected.

As with basically everything there is nuance, and a lot of conflicting things that tend to be collapsed down into single talking points, and I am getting caught in the middle. Over the last few days this has reached a fever pitch, and it’s gotten to the point that I feel like I’m constantly on the defense and on the edge of a panic attack.

I’m also very tired, and I want to just write this thing in my own little space where I can get some complete thoughts out before someone jumps down my throat in the middle of a series of posts. I’m not sure that this will have any real positive effect, but maybe a public rumination will help me work through the latest panic attack that woke me up after a particularly emotionally-draining day.

These days I have quite a lot of ambition but not enough energy to execute on it. I’m trying, though.

It’s okay to not feel okay, especially when your hormones have been out of whack for months and healthcare is slow to try to help you with it.

It’s been nearly a week since I removed Cloudflare from my sites. As a quick followup, I did get a slight surge in traffic that lasted for a day or so after a bunch of bots' DNS caches expired, but they seem to have all given up after the Cloudflare “managed challenge” interstitial turned into an HTTP 401 error for them.

About a year ago I set up Cloudflare as a fronting CDN for this site and my music site because it was the most expedient way of dealing with an AI bot onslaught. It helped a bit but the bots very quickly figured out how to get around all that and while Cloudflare gave me some slightly-better management tools for some stuff, I figured out better approaches to the bot mitigation.

Cloudflare was also super aggressive about caching some stuff that I didn’t want to be cached, and of course, there are many, many political and ideological reasons to not want to use Cloudflare. So my plan was always to switch back to not being under Cloudflare, but the longer I waited the harder it seemed like it would be, due to how SSL certificates work. In particular, I use wildcard Let’s Encrypt certificates, which require DNS to be current, and a big thing that Cloudflare does is… take over your DNS.

But tonight I got a hair up my butt and switched back to my own termination, and it wasn’t too hard to do, with just a little bit of DNS and TLS juggling, and I wanted to minimize my website downtime.

Ughhhh, this has been a heck of a week.

As usual I’ve been full of pain. And my brief surge of enthusiasm for working on music got cut kind of short because of it. But I’m hoping that tomorrow feels better and I can go back to the studio.

I’m also not sure where I stand with my fatigue. The last few days I’ve had to run quick errands by car and those felt fine. But I’m not feeling courageous enough to drive further just yet, especially with how any escape from White Center means following curvy roads which are especially triggering to me.

I worry about where things are and how I’ll be affected by it. I feel like the dominoes are starting to fall.

Wellp, today I got yet another denial from social security, which tells me this ain’t gonna change any time soon.

The previous denial came with a whole bunch of transphobia and also a claim that I am able to work, doing jobs which simply aren’t available and not reflective of the reality of my situation.

I haven’t received the formal denial yet, just the notification that my appeal was denied, so I suppose in a couple weeks I’ll be getting another giant packet from SSA to fume over.

Wellp, I didn’t get a whole lot done on the TODO list but at least I Tried™. (I did call about the sleep study but they never returned my call and it slipped my mind to try calling again. Oh well, next week.)

Back in the day, independent social media enthusiasts were building their own social spaces on RSS/Atom and self-hosted publishing. There was a huge ecosystem of feed readers and publishing software, where anyone could use their own choice of tools to interact with the space, and it was super cool.

Then Google got into it and made Google Reader, which was a really good feed reader, but they couldn’t figure out how to make it profitable and wanted to shove everyone over to Google+, so they shut Google Reader down, and then the tech press breathlessly claimed that RSS was now dead as a result, and because RSS was (in their eyes) dead, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nowadays, RSS is seen as an obsolete thing only used by diehards, and corporate social media has become the norm, with a relatively tiny faction of people settling on ActivityPub instead, despite it being a poor match for the kinds of things that people used RSS for.