Celebrating Ten Years of gpfault.net

published on Dec 13 2024

This blog has officially been online for 10 years! On December 13th, 2014, I had published the very first post here, Ripping Sprites From Super Cyborg.

A New Coat of Paint (On the Inside)

Well, happy birthday, gpfault.net! As a present, I rewrote your generator script from some old crusty horrible node.js garbage to Lua. The reason is, I'd like to continue writing here for a while. For that, I need simple, stable tools that allow reconstituting this website's HTML from the data sitting on my disk quickly and easily. No installing crap from npm, or navigating new vs. old package version incompatibilities. Now, alongside the source of the blog, there is a frozen-in-time copy of Lua 5.4.7 (a few hundred kilobytes), which can be built in seconds, even if a future version of the language breaks something. I was also mulling migrating from hosting on S3 to the actual PC sitting on my desk, but ultimately decided that I don't want to deal with figuring out how to make that set-up work with a CDN just yet.

A Bit of History

This is by far the longest-running personal blog/website that I have ever maintained, though it is by no means the first. I put together a "homepage" pretty much as soon as I got access to my own PC, which was around 2003-2004, and used it to host my dumb little games made in Delphi and Visual Basic. Sadly, the content of that site has been lost to the sands of time.

Later, starting from about 2007, I used LiveJournal a lot. Back then, it was huge among the russian-speaking segment of the internet. Lots of my university friends were on there, but there was also a great degree of serendipity. You could easily become friends with someone online, and later see them irl at a meetup or something.

Eventually though, things started shifting over to Facebook, and LiveJournal kind of died. While I did enjoy early Facebook in a manner similar to LiveJournal, even back then it had a walled garden vibe (I think LiveJournal didn't come across that way to me because of the large degree of customization that it afforded).

I also wanted to talk about tech and programming, topics that no one on facebook really wanted to discuss. That's why around 2011 I decided to try my hand at blogging in English, this time using my own Wordpress-powered website. I figured English would reach a wide audience. It was a moderate success, a couple posts even hit the front page of the orange website. But between the move to the US, grinding for interviews, and dealing with what in retrospect was very obviously depression, it kind of fell by the wayside and I let the domain expire.

Some time later, I felt ready to try blogging again and that's when gpfault.net came into existence. It was fun writing posts, but always a toss-up whether a post would pick up any steam on HN or reddit. I decided to sign up to twitter, to post links to my blog there as well. It turned out that twitter had a fairly large tech, and specifically computer graphics - oriented community, so I got sucked in. I mean, really sucked in. At the time of this writing, compared to the twenty-odd posts here, I've got about sixteen thousand on twitter. Not all of them as detailed or informative though: the most "liked" piece of internet communication I've made (13K) is a tweet with some dumb passing comment about zuck. It stings a bit that my excellent assembly tutorial isn't as popular :-)

Old Man Yells at Cloud

Twitter was fun for a while, but just like LiveJournal and Facebook, it has succumbed to platform rot. Obviously, people associate that with the elon buy-out, but I think the trajectory was there all along.

It's not really possible to build a business out of facilitating random people talking to each other, with the business being simultaneously free for the users, pleasant to engage with, and sustainable. Something's got to give. And so, Facebook became absolutely unbearable to be on, constantly stuffing your feed with insipid crap you never signed up for. Twitter did the double whammy of monetization and feed enshittification.

While Facebook's inane feed was merely annoying (and sometimes accidentally amusing) slop, Twitter turned into something worse - for the past year or so, a huge portion of the posts I see there seem precision-made to trigger a negative emotion and desire to respond. But the worst part is - unlike facebook slop, that stuff is not completely irrelevant to me, it's both toxic and adjacent to my interests. That latter part keeps pulling you back, creating a cycle of self-abuse. I don't think the number of my tweets will be rising much higher than the existing 16k.

Bluesky is the new hotness, and some of the interesting people who I used to follow on twitter are active there. At the time of this writing, I spend less time on bluesky per day than I ever did on twitter, but it's much more pleasant. I am sure that it won't last though. I no longer believe in the possibility of a pleasant-to-use social media platform that also makes money for its owners.

And that's why I'm going to keep writing this blog. It's my fuck you to corporate social media. Here's to another ten years.

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