The Cowardice Snowball

I Miss My Hometown

March 2026

March felt like a sluggish month, but turns out I achieved a lot.

But What About AI?

The Setup Just to manage expectations: This is not yet another hot take about “AI”. I don’t have one. This is my attempt to find my own voice in a cacophony of noise and maybe, just maybe, attaining some amount of clarity on the subject. Also I do not claim to be an expert about any of this and some of my assumptions may be plain wrong. First of all: I dislike the term “AI” because, in my humble opinion, it’s just a merketing gag and has little to do with intelligence as we humans tend to understand the word. So let’s just call them large language models (LLMs), shall we?

Moving to Infrastructure as Code — A Work in Progress

As alluded to before, the number of servers I manage recently outgrew my ability or rather willingness to maintain all of them manually so, naturally, the desire to introduce automation arose. I’ve worked with Ansible before and, also as mentioned before, I went and ported my setup into Ansible playbooks to manage everything. The thing with Ansible is that it’s horribly complex. There are at least a dozen ways to accomplish any given task and there’s always ways to simplify, abstract or improve the playbooks you have so it hardly ever feels like you’re actually done. But what I found much more annoying is how opaque playbook runs are by default.

Chirp Chirp Chirping My Desktop

My desktop is flapping and chirping.

Apollo v1.0 - The Launch

T-0s, we have lift off.

The Farmer's Station Wagon: A Parable

A New Hope (where Hope == e-reader)

Since I like reading and shelf space is precious where I live I own an ebook reader. I’ve had this one for a few years now and bought it used back in the day but by now it has accumulated a sufficient amount of quirks that I needed a replacemnt. Another recent development is that I started to get more serious about ebook management (I lost quite a few over the years because I never backed them up) and now run a booklore server. It does more than I need but it’s a cool piece of software, I think (and very pretty!).

Why Do I Write?

I suspect all people who write anything down for a purpose that is not related to work or bare survival come across this question sooner or later. I know I did and, while I don’t have a definitive answer as of now, I do know that the answer changed over time. I have always enjoyed writing of sorts. Deep down I’ve had the fantasy of being an actual writer for a very long time now. You know, the romantic version of this dream, the one without the precarious circumstances, the writer’s block, the unemployment, the difficulty to make a living, the existential angst. Just me writing compelling thoughts and amazing stories to my heart’s content. Of course that would necessitate actually coming up with something worth writing, devising a story, thinking up characters or so.