#personal-experience — Public Fediverse posts

Colorado Newsline: I helped write Colorado’s first AI chatbot bill. Here’s what I learned about state action.. “I’ve had a front row seat to the work happening in the states on the front lines of the effort to learn the mistakes of the social media era that are now coming home to roost. And I can tell you with confidence, what’s coalescing isn’t a patchwork of regulations, it’s a […]

Jim Nielsen: I Tried Vibing an RSS Reader and My Dreams Did Not Come True. “…vibe coding kinda left me with that feeling I get after indulging in social media, like ‘What just happened? Two hours have passed and what did I even spend my time doing? Just mindlessly chasing novelty?’ It’s fun and easy to mindlessly chasing your whims. But part of me thinks the next best step for this is to […]

Web Informant: Moving day. “Back in 1993, I took the radical (at the time) step of requesting a new domain, strom.com. I say request because back then there wasn’t any actual ‘purchase’ – the internet was still relatively new to the general public, and all it took to become master of your domain was a simple email request, which was satisfied within minutes. Let us pause to remember and […]

Brad Frost: My 8-year-old vibe-coded a video game about playing music with Michael McDonald. “We’re in a place where we can think of ideas, articulate them, and then seconds/minutes later be interacting with those ideas, seeing them come to life before our very eyes. It’s truly stunning, and unlocks all sorts of big opportunities and challenges. But setting all of that aside, I’m just so […]

Mike Kentz: AI Creep Is Real. “A year ago, I had one ChatGPT window open and I was giving it my full attention. I remember hearing about people who ran multiple custom bots simultaneously — rotating through them, orchestrating conversations between agents — and thinking they were out of their minds. Eight months later I had three Claude Projects open at once.”

Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder: Meta Deleted Me. I Still Don’t Know Why. And neither will you.. “Was my account hacked by a nefarious actor who posted some offensive and obscene material? I can’t rule it in or out, as I don’t have access to my account to perform a forensic analysis of any logins from suspicious devices or the like. That, and I ‘cannot request another review of this […]

Pinch of Intelligence: Two months as a vibe coder. “The last two months my work completely changed. My job changed from thinking long and hard about problems and coming up with the best few code to solve this, to full-on talking in English to my computer begging it to produce better code. In this blog I am sharing my observations and feelings in this brave new world.”

MauveRANT: Self-Hosting Pixelfed: Federated Instagram Without the Algorithm. “Pixelfed is the fediverse answer to Instagram. It’s an ActivityPub-powered photo sharing platform with no algorithmic timeline, no ads, no engagement-optimized dark patterns, and no company deciding what you see based on what makes them money. I’d been using pixelfed.social for a while, but there’s something about […]

Shellsharks: Setting off on a self-hosting journey. “I want to self-host a bunch of things. Why? Let’s see here… techno-fascism, privacy disasters, tech companies randomly sunsetting things, enshittification spirals, etc… I’m tired of it. I want to run some stuff myself, own the data, and be happy with my tech.”

Blake Watson: I used Claude Code and GSD to build the accessibility tool I’ve always wanted. “I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to learn enough Swift and native macOS programming to do it on my own. I’d considered hiring other developers to make assistive tech software for me before, but it never went anywhere, usually because of lack of interest. This seemed like a small enough project […]

Techdirt: How Close Can AI Get To Writing A Techdirt Post?. “I still have no intention of letting AI write for me, but as the underlying technology has continued to level up, every so often I’ll run a test to see if it could write a better Techdirt post than I can. I don’t think it’s there (and I’m still not convinced it will ever get there), but I figured I can share the process with […]

Ars Technica: I spent two days gigging at RentAHuman and didn’t make a single cent. “I never ended up hanging any posters or making any cash on RentAHuman during my two days of fruitless attempts. In the past, I’ve done gig work that sucked, but at least I was hired by a human to do actual tasks. At its core, RentAHuman is an extension of the circular AI hype machine, an ouroboros of […]

Mashable: My awkward first date with an AI companion . “EVA AI gave me the perfect opportunity at the app’s ‘EVA AI cafe,’ a pop-up nestled in a Manhattan wine bar where participants can go on ‘dates’ with AI personas. So, I signed up, and reader, it was one word: awkward.”

ZDNet: I tried a Claude Code alternative that’s local, open source, and completely free – how it works. “This is the first of three articles that will discuss the integration of Goose (the agent framework), Ollama (an LLM server), and Qwen3-coder (the LLM). In this article, I’ll show you how to get everything working. In the next article, I’ll give you a more in-depth understanding of the roles […]

Evolving Web: Designing a digital archive in partnership with an Indigenous community. “At Evolving Web, we recently collaborated with the University of Denver on the Our Stories, Our Medicine Archive (OSOMA), a community-owned digital archive that centres traditional Indigenous knowledge related to health, wellness, culture, and identity. Built in close collaboration with community partners, […]

Nature: When two years of academic work vanished with a single click. “…in August, I temporarily disabled the ‘data consent’ option because I wanted to see whether I would still have access to all of the model’s functions if I did not provide OpenAI with my data. At that moment, all of my chats were permanently deleted and the project folders were emptied — two years of carefully […]

Ars Technica: 10 things I learned from burning myself out with AI coding agents. “Since November, I have used Claude Code and Claude Opus 4.5 through a personal Claude Max account to extensively experiment with AI-assisted software development (I have also used OpenAI’s Codex in a similar way, though not as frequently). Fifty projects later, I’ll be frank: I have not had this much fun with […]

Garbage Day: Am I too stupid to vibe code?. “Vibe coding, like every new trend coming out of Silicon Valley, turns this process — the entire act of creativity, itself — into a slot machine. One more pull on the AI and maybe it will figure it out for you. You won’t understand how any of it works, of course, or feel particularly proud of what you’ve done, but maybe you’ll have […]

Perishable Press: Google Broke My Heart. “Recently, I asked Google to remove a pirated copy of my book from their search index. As usual, I filled out the obligatory DMCA report and sent it in, hopeful that it was just a matter of time before the copyright infringement was dealt with by the trustworthy and very capable Google search team. Unfortunately, that is not what happened. Instead of […]

Engadget: In 2025, quitting social media felt easier than ever. “I remember losing focus, spending long hours on YouTube Shorts and IG. I’d look up bleary-eyed and shame-faced after hours scrolling TikTok’s For You Page. Now, after a few minutes, a bored ickiness sets in. I feel like I’m trapped in a carnival of bots hawking shampoo at me and I just want to go home.”

Tyler Gaw: Failing at Using a Local LLM for Vinyl Record Color Extraction. “As the title suggests, I tried to switch a project from the OpenAI API to a local LLM running in Ollama, but wasn’t able to make it work due to slowness. It was a fun exercise though. This is what I tried and what I learned.” A useful, interesting read.

Rick Carlino: My first meshtastic network. “Working with Meshtastic has been fun. It’s impressive how a few inexpensive devices can form a communications network covering many miles. The system is limited, but within those constraints it feels magical to send a message into the ether and have it hop across a county line to a stranger. Meshtastic isn’t very useful alone, but as more people join, […]

Marek Jancovic: Vibe-Coding for Historians: How I Digitized 21.000 Archival Documents Without Coding Skills. “The following is a case report on how I’ve managed to turn all of these images into accurate text data, group them into document clusters and automatically date them, label them with meaningful topics and entities, and embed them in a database that allows me to search and talk to the […]

Alex Chan: Hard problems in social media archiving. “Institutional archiving has different constraints to individual collections – institutions serve a much wider audience, so their decisions need consistency and boundaries. My own scrapbook is tiny and personal, and comparing it alongside institutional efforts really highlights the differences and difficulties. It’s why I usually call it a […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/12/15/alex-chan-hard-problems-in-social-media-archiving/

Lifehacker: Here’s What Happened When I Gave ‘Vibe Coding’ a Try. “According to a lot of AI enthusiasts I see on X, vibe coding means ‘it’s over’ (whatever ‘it’ is), and people are ‘one-shotting’ all kinds of projects (as in, using a single prompt to create something). To investigate further, I tried to create a little project of my own using ChatGPT and Gemini. Here’s how it went.”

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/11/27/lifehacker-heres-what-happened-when-i-gave-vibe-coding-a-try/

Terence Eden: Now witness the power of this fully operational Fediverse!. “Until fairly recently, the Mastodon social network didn’t send referer details. I thought that reduced the visibility of the network and lobbied for it to change. As various Mastodon servers upgrade, and admins opt-in, it is becoming more apparent just how much traffic originates from the Fediverse.”

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/11/25/terence-eden-now-witness-the-power-of-this-fully-operational-fediverse/

TidBITS: ChatGPT Atlas Digitized Book Tables That Stymied Other OCR Tools. “I got sucked down another geeky rabbit hole. While I doubt that wanting to perform optical character recognition on large tables in a book is a common desire, it was enough of a learning experience with modern AI tools that I can’t resist sharing.”

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/11/24/tidbits-chatgpt-atlas-digitized-book-tables-that-stymied-other-ocr-tools/

If like me, you suddenly feel sleepy right around 11:30 AM, take a nap instead of going wild on caffeinated drinks. When you take this nap, the rest of the day you will be energetic and ready to tackle everything. You can enjoy your coffee/tea after this sleeping session. This way, you'll see that you won't even crash that hard when the caffeine levels drop. Its truly amazing!
This has been my own personal experience; I hope it helps someone increase their productivity.
#PersonalExperience #LifeProTips #Sleep

Android Authority: I built my smart home with Google; here’s how it fell apart. “That was 2019 or so. We’re in 2025, and boy, what a difference six years make! I’ve moved countries, bought a new house, and expanded my smart home setup to several dozen items interspersed in a dozen or so apps. I tried to stick with Google Home for the longest time as the one link between it all, but it all […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/11/17/android-authority-i-built-my-smart-home-with-google-heres-how-it-fell-apart/

BBC: Strangers mocked me in my wheelchair for ‘tongue out’ trend on TikTok. Nobody intervened. “I’d become the latest victim of the ‘tongue-out’ TikTok prank, where people stick their tongue out at strangers while pulling a face, and film their reaction – but this time twisted to mock me for my disability.”

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/11/16/bbc-strangers-mocked-me-in-my-wheelchair-for-tongue-out-trend-on-tiktok-nobody-intervened/