Kære Computer

Kære Computer,



The sun is out, finally. I survived the toughest winter of my life (again?) and its the loveliest morning in a hundred years and I'm alive. I feel like I have done nothing but be stuck in survival mode all winter. But that's not quite true. Here are some of the things I wanted to share that I made / taught / thought about / pushed to Github recently:



I switched jobs last year, and have been a lecturer at the Computer Science degree at KEA - Copenhagen School of Design and Technology ever since. It has mainly been difficult because I have two two-year-olds. I love teaching, and feel like it makes me grow skills that are both 'soft' and 'hard', i.e. I am constantly having to become both a better person and programmer, because I teach.




I talked about Elon Musk (again?) with AK and Maia in Cybernormer podcast (in Danish). It's a nasty topic, but at least we had a lot of fun while rounding up the absurdities and compiling an insane amount of footnotes on all the evil shit.



Until recently my personal website was over-engineered to the Nth degree. I had somehow cornered myself into creating a site using Next, Express, React and deploying to AWS via Github Actions. The project built static HTML pages from Markdown files, that were then sent on every commit to an s3 bucket in a kind of scrappy and much too complicated CD pipeline. I had been dead set on hosting this thing on AWS, because I wanted to improve my skills there and so it didn't matter to me that the whole thing was overkill. The point of it all was to learn!

But early this year, I felt the need for a change and started questioning if the site really needed to exist inside this huge, heavy ecosystem. I talked to Benjamin about it and he repeated advice back to me that I had completely forgotten I gave to him years ago: do the simplest thing. Don't overdo it on the tech stack. If it can be solved with a static site, don't add any more bells and whistles just because you want it to impress technically. So I separated out all the parts of the project that were just the personal site pages and built a motherfucking website for myself with not much in it, except pretty colors, text and links. A site that gets an impressive 99 point on Googles PageSpeed Insights (it's a tool for looking up a how fast a site is to load). It looks like I only lost 1 point because the SEO of the site is not great. Dear reader, I care not about SEO.



Something I do care about are GIFs! a lot it turns out. I don't know how I'll turn it into a project just yet, but for now I just really enjoy collecting all the best ones I stumble across on the internet. Like a kid filling their pockets with stones and seachells they find the beach.



A fault line through a lot of my work, thoughts and conversations with friends have been the trouble with generative AI, as it keeps inserting itself into every facet of our digital lives without asking us for permission. I contributed to an article and made a podcast with Cybernauterne about it a while ago(also in Danish). I was by far the most AI-optimistic person in the room, which I'm really not used to. Usually I am seeing overall enthusiasm and very little critique among programming colleagues in the field. I tend to think that writing code is one of the least problematic things you may use it for, and I do use it for that sometimes.

I find the chat to be a manipulative, ego-flattering liar much of the time. But even if the chat often won't help me and instead will confidently serve the up the same wrong answer ad infinitum, it still manages to help me pull myself up by my own volition often enough. It can simulate just enough of a human conversation so as to function as a rubber ducky. It forces me to describe my issue with a level of detail, that more often than not will make me think of a direction to go that ends up putting me on the right track to fixing the thing. That is to say, I use it to talk about my technical problems. Yikes that sounds sad when I commit it to writing. But I am thankful for the way it, as a tool, can force me to think about my problem.



Generative AI is causing all sorts of issues for me in my role as a teacher. I feel much more unambivalently unenthusiastic about the whole thing within the field of education. It is my responsability to provide the best possible setting for learning how to code to a class of fresh-faced 1st semester students. ChatGPT is basically a homework cheating machine, and is known to make us dumber. I feel bad for the younger generation, whose brains have been deepfried by the dopamine hits of Social media since they were babes, are not used to reading paper books, poorly skills for analog anything and have all these easy options to cheat themselves out of learning the hard way. Or learning anything at all. It gets dark real quick when I start thinking about all the ramifications of AI, and I haven't even mentioned environmental impact or political consequences of it.

This month I made my attempt at broaching these things with positivity and curiosity, at the course module I co-taught called 'Social Software'. I made a site for it that is nothing but text, but she's pretty. The course is about both looking at the terrible ways our social lives online are being entshittified rapidly by all the for-profit corps that own them. But also a hopeful and curious look at open source solutions and decentral social media alternatives.

Lastly, but most definitely not least: I finally finished the guestbook. Please sign, please! I would be so delighted if you would prove my faith in humanity by leaving a cute message.

Happy spring!

♡ Nynne