/blog

I've been typing so many backslashes over the past couple of days – escaping characters in seemingly endless regex queries.

It got to the point that I had a brain fart last night expecting italicised text to be slanting to the left.

Hmmm.

What if you could do exactly that?

A quick search found the same question on Stack Overflow with an ingenious solution.

I've modified it slightly so that I can apply it to i tags (with a class) such that they will be slanting to the left on the site but remain normal italicised text when viewed elsewhere (e.g. via the RSS feed).

This is a test of 'left slanting' text.

This is normal italicised text for a comparison.

Pretty cool.

Update I've added the custom markup _$..$_ to indicate left slanting italics.

I make no secret of using ChatGPT and, increasingly, Bard for coding queries, fine tuning a lot of regex queries has meant I've leant on them quite a bit recently and I'll never try to pass up a lot of the results as original work.

In that light, Jim Neilsen's post Knowledge Laundering (a play on money laundering) seemed quite apt. Quoting him quoting Baldur Bjarnason:

Why give somebody credit for the lines of code you've adapted for your own project when you can get a language model to whitewash it and let you claim it as your own?

It is the nature of things to re-use and remix ideas and code, and that's long been the case, but LLMs that don't give attribution to sources take this a step further.

While we all know that LLMs are trained on large chunks of the web their responses, being attribution free, make it all too easy to interpret them as 'original' and repurposed as such.

Looking back at posts from a couple of years ago, I was worried about feature creep on the site.

My goal with (b)log-In was to have a simple posting experience and my concern was that all the bells and whistles would detract from that simplicity.

I still want a simple experience (and I still have a simple posting experience) but things have changed in the past two and a half years. Yes, it's been that long!

The site is no longer just a blog, it is now my 'X' – my site for almost everything. Blog, notes, journal, feed reader, it's all in one place, all under my control. That has, obviously, necessitated an amount of expansion.

I'll admit, there are some more frivolous features (like custom markup, the file editor, and Markdown preview for custom pages) but they don't get in the way if I choose not to use them. The base experience is still as simple as it always was: tap a little '+' icon, type, and hit 'Post'. Nothing more complicated than that and no backend to navigate.

I suppose that's the beauty of building your own tools: you can make them work exactly how you want. And what I want (and have) is something that quickly and easily lets me put words on the web.