knownothing.dev - blog

knownothing.dev - blog - Hey

knownothing.dev - blog - Hey ↑

HeyAuthor: Sigilis Published: 2024-11-23 18:22 EST I always wanted to have a site that works like an old fashioned terminal. You know, little more than a screen connected to the mainframe computer at a university through some very, very slow modem. But alas, I'm not old enough to have had to do that. I grew up with the internet and pretty capable computers with GUIs from the get go. Sure, there was DOS under the hood, but Windows 3.1 was how I learned to read and ancient MacOS is how I practiced math.Everything had an icon, but sometimes if things got bad enough or weird enough I'd fall though the looking glass and find myself in a place made of words. In that place my words meant something. Getting things wrong generally didn't do anything bad, you just got told that you didn't write your request exactly correctly. Sometimes, there was even help in figuring out how to fix it. I found myself spending more and more time there, in that world of words.I learned to write scripts, then programs.Before long I had left the shell behind me, like a hermit crab moving on to take residence in a gaudy plastic bottle. People wanted to use GUIs and I wanted money, so I made graphical programs.But always the command line lay in wait. It was how I did things on computers that were not in front of me. It was how I did work that really mattered to me. It was the place where I could affect the actual structure of the environment everyone else just played around in.I had friends and colleagues that shared my enthusiasm. We would work together to make what looked like magic happen.Today I work with a few people to write software for the web. It's rewarding work but because we want to simulate actual real world things and have people use it it's written in an arcane framework that takes me as far from my friend the shell as I could go. I still plug into a bunch of computers using SSH whenever I can for work and play. I use LLMs through the command line, which feels more honest when I am talking to a computer. But I wanted to make something.This.A little window on a world I never saw.A fun place where I can write my thoughts.If you're reading this and are not me, I hope you get a kick out of this thing I made.

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