GROINK.NET

The Internet is dead to me.

I don’t mean this in some sort of huffy, blustering way like it betrayed me by eating the last piece of pizza or if I was Catholic and my son married Protestant.

Do you remember The Langoliers by Stephen King? It is more like that. Just a big empty. I suppose part of it is the enshittification that Cory Doctorow keeps going on about. Most of my interaction with the Internet is no longer rooted in discovery, but in drudgery. It is a way to get to work. There are maybe a few YouTube channels that I like. I look at Mastodon and see what my computer pocket friends are doing, and give them a “favorite” or a “boost”. Less often, I’ll scroll Lemmy and be sad. Dare I read a news site? Just more sad there. Other than that, there’s nothing else for me.

I didn’t know how to write a succinct title that conveys “I hate traveling for work for the ostensible reason of team building but really it is just an excuse to make people use the office so that the managers look like they are doing something”. Surely there is a German word for this.

I’ll be flying the not-quite-as-friendly-skies-anymore to enjoin in such activities as “information sharing” and “breakout sessions” with bouts of “watercooler chat” in between. Then I’ll have pre-selected lunch and dinner with the same people whose various emanations I’ve been inhaling while sequestered in conference rooms. Afterwards, perhaps catching the last half of an episode of “Monk” in my hotel room before I fall asleep fitfully.

There are a lot of opinions about AI.

I have a lot of opinions in general, so consequently I have opinions about AI.

We were thrown into the deep end at work – the use of “deep end” seems particularly apt. Everyone in the company was given access to the agentic AI that we’ve subscribed to. Like, I mean: EVERYONE. Dear God. People are using it to submit tickets. Now instead of a brief request lacking detail and context, we receive walls of text that also lack the required detail and context needed to carry out the requested task. The only recourse is to point our own agent at the ticket to eke some sort of meaning out of it. I can hear you now: “GOD FORBID YOU ACTUALLY READ IT”. Fuck that! Ain’t nobody got time for that shit.

Today is the kind of day where you want to curl up in bed with a book and not leave until your bladder gives you no other option but to rise and giveth back what was taken from the Earth. But no, instead I will eat sour cream and onion chips at my desk, and pretend to do work.

When I was a kid, I used to think “Wouldn’t it be awesome [it was the 80’s] if I could work with computers all the time?” Be careful what you wish for.

It doesn’t feel like almost a year since my last update, but it appears it is so.

More website redesign! I decided to try Hugo to generate this site versus running WordPress. I think it works pretty well and the theme I used and modified keeps in the spirit of the previous version. I’ve grown attached to my CGA graphics style blog. I was not growing attached to the bloat that WordPress incurs. Besides, I’ve got little need for a dynamic website when all I do is bitch once or twice a year, right? I did get rid of the “Other Notable Groinks” section because…fuck ’em! I’m the only Groink that matters.