https://scottbanwart.com2026-02-11blog/2026/journal-194.html2026-02-11

I’m surprised more people aren’t talking about AI platform decay. Much like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and several other online platforms, eventually the AI companies will have to stop subsidizing the price of their services with investment dollars. When that happens AI platofrms will need to increase their prices sharply to cover their actual costs of doing business. Will consumers and businesses continue to pay for these services, or will they cost more than they provide in value? Or be drowned in a deluge of ads and associated garbage?

blog/2026/journal-193.html2026-02-01

This probably of interest only to myself, but I have noticed my media consumption habits have changed over the last year. I used to read lots of blogs and online articles, and ebooks.I found that for getting cutting-edge information on programming and technology, digital written content struck the right balance between timely delivery and technical depth. For the past several months now, I find myself reading more paper books and watching technical videos on YouTube, and my digital reading has kind of dropped off a cliff. I still review my RSS feeds on a regular basis, and I capture blogs and articles of interest, but I don’t go back to read them all that often.

blog/2026/journal-192.html2026-01-25

Steve Yegge is a brilliant madman. He’s building an AI orchestration system called Gas Town. I’m not sure I fully understand it, but it’s a set of agents, each with a different role, that will take your design specifications, hand the off to Claude Code, and work through them until it meets the definition of done. The code is open source and available on GitHub. Gas Town, Beads (Also check out Maggie Appleton’s take for another view.)

blog/2026/journal-191.html2026-01-17

This is quick thought to start out the new year. Since I really don’t do weekly posts any longer, I’ve shortened the title from “Weekly Journal” to just “Journal”.

blog/2025/2025-favorite-books.html2025-12-24

This year felt like it went by in a rush. I’m having a hard time believing it’s Christmas again, and the New Year starts next week. It’s like I blinked and missed it. This wasn’t my best year for reading, but I managed to read a few good books. (Unfortunately, I also managed to read a few not so good books too.)

blog/2025/weekly-journal-190.html2025-11-29

So far, adapting to the Helix keyboard has proven more difficult than expected. Despite using it as my primary editor for several weeks now, I still find myself trying to type in Vim commands by default. I’m going to keep trying for another week or two, but I think I may throw in the towel and switch back to Neovim. It’s been more of a distraction than a help between having to look up Helix commands and discovering that something I can do in Neovim doesn’t exist in Helix.

blog/2025/weekly-journal-189.html2025-11-09

I’m slowly getting used to using Helix as my primary editor. It’s going take some time for me to relearn all of the command mode motions, but I’m starting to feel more comfortable with it. I’m trying to force myself to use it more, and I think the next step will be to set it as my default editor in my environment.

blog/2025/weekly-journal-188.html2025-10-15

The older I get the less I’m interested in fiddling around with building custom configurations for things like my editor. As much as I like using Neovim, getting a usable programming environment requires a fair bit of work to create and maintain. As an alternative, I’ve been playing around with Helix, and I’m starting to really enjoy using it.

blog/2025/weekly-journal-187.html2025-08-23

Despite my best efforts, I haven’t been able to get Emanote installed in a Devbox environment. Instead I have managed to build a flake.nix that will install Emanote and some additional utilities into a Nix shell. That took a lot more work than it should have, but I now have a working environment with the latest release of Emanote. I didn’t really want to convert everything to yet another static site generator, so I think I will stick with Emanote for the time being. Maybe I’ll explore Zola more in the future, depending on how long I stick with using Nix.

blog/2025/weekly-journal-186.html2025-07-26

I’ve been running Emanote for some time now, but I’ve been disappointed that the latest release was over two years ago. It looks like there is still active development, but the Nix package is currently unmaintained, so there isn’t any impetus around releasing a new package. In order to run a current version of Emanote, I will need to add a github: reference to my Devbox project. My fear is that the current version hosted in GitHub is going to be wildly different from the (unmaintained) Nix package version and it will require significant work to update my site. On the other hand, it does give me an opportunity to learn more about Nix, so it might be worth the risk.

blog/2025/weekly-journal-185.html2025-06-28

This year so far has not gone as planned. In some ways that has been good, and in other ways it’s been really frustrating. The mid-year mark seems like a good place to adjust and start again. Hopefully I can do better the second half of the year.

blog/2025/weekly-journal-184.html2025-04-26

Note taking is harder than it looks. The purpose of taking notes is to support my project work. The notes are a means to an end, not the end itself. However, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of taking notes for the sake of taking notes and feeling like you have accomplished something.

blog/2025/weekly-journal-183.html2025-03-22

I’ve started building a new tool in Python that will grab my highlights and notes from Readwise and turn them into zk note files. Manually exporting data from Readwise and copying it into zk note files is a bit tedious and repetitive, and seems like an excellent case for automation. Unfortunately, I’ve discovered that I am a bit rusty and my general programming skills have atrophied a bit. (My primary job is managing developers/engineers) Mostly there are a lot of new tools in the Python ecosystem that I need/want to learn how to use. So far I’ve set up the basic project with uv, ruff, and pre-commit, and I have built a prototype module for accessing the Readwise API. I’m also using this project in an attempt to really learn and use test-driven development (TDD) as a methodology. I’ve been a supporter of having automated test suites, but I have struggled to write the tests first. For some reason I have always had trouble visualizing the tests before I written at least some of the code. For this project I really want to see if I can make TDD work for me.

blog/2025/weekly-journal-182.html2025-02-28

I purchased two additional LilyGo LoRa devices, giving me a total of three. I bought another TS S3 and a T-Deck. All three have been flashed with the Meshtastic firmware, and I have managed to successfully send test messages between them. I may have inadvertently sent those test messages to everyone on the Meshtastic network in my area, so my next goal is to figure out how to send messages directly to my own devices.

blog/2025/weekly-journal-181.html2025-02-02

I’ve had a slow start to 2025, and January ended up being a lot busier than expected. Both work and personal obligations consumed my time this past month and left me without much time or energy for much else. Things are finally starting to settle down a bit and I should have more time available to spend on hobbies and writing.

blog/2024/2024-favorite-books.html2024-12-30

Another year has come and gone. This wasn’t a good year for reading for me, but I did read a few books that I think are worth mentioning.

blog/2024/weekly-journal-180.html2024-12-23

I haven’t had much to write about this past month or so, but I wanted to document an Apple MacOS command that I recently learned about in case I need it again. MacOS ships with a CLI tool called caffeinate. It’s a simple tool that you run from a terminal, and it keeps your laptop from going to sleep. This is useful if you have a background task running unattended and you don’t want your laptop going to sleep and interrupting the task. In my case, I was copying large files back and forth to cloud storage. It took several hours to complete the copies, and I didn’t want to sit there bumping my mouse every so often to keep the laptop from going to sleep and cancelling the copy task. When the copy job was finished, all I had to do was hit Ctrl-C in the terminal window where caffeinate was running and my laptop resumed it’s normal sleep schedule. Not earth-shattering by any means, but I still thought it was kind of neat.

blog/2024/weekly-journal-179.html2024-11-27

I’m a little late with this, but I was able to attend OLF 2024 this year in Columbus, Ohio. As usual, it was a great event with some very interesting talks. My three favorites were “Keynote – Lessons Learned from Reporting 100+ FOSS Bugs”, “Embracing Patterns: Automation by Design”, and “Loving the Leap: From Engineering to Management”. I also really enjoyed the hallway track and getting a chance to chat with other Linux users. The only thing that was disappointing is the realization that this wonderful conference seems to be getting smaller each year. I figure part of that is still fallout from the pandemic in 2020, and part of that is the realization that Linux has “won” and has become a “boring” technology.

blog/2024/weekly-journal-178.html2024-11-01

This week Omnivore announced that they are shutting down their read it later service at the end of November. (Originally they announced it would shut down on November 15th, but a few days later the deadline was extended to the end of the month) Apparently the team behind Omnivore has been acquihired by a company called ElevenLabs, and as a part of the acquisition they are closing down Omnivore. Omnivore is an open source application and the code will remain available to the community.

blog/2024/weekly-journal-177.html2024-10-19

The internet has become a noisy, overly complicated mess full of sites pushing cryptocurrency scams, optimizing for AI generated drivel and ad delivery, and intrusive tracking and profiling. The big social media sites like X, LinkedIn, Medium, and Facebook punish users who post links to things outside of their walled garden networks and promote content that is authored directly on their sites. Maybe this is a case of “old man yelling at cloud”. but most of what made the web interesting and special in the early days has been lost.

blog/2024/weekly-journal-176.html2024-10-13

I have finally found a note taking tool that I feel like is working with me and not creating more friction. I have tried most of the popular notes apps out there, but none of them have really clicked for me. I have tried several of the popular notes apps, but none of them really clicked for me. Logseq was interesting, but is now moving in a new direction focused on collaborative learning and a database backend, Obsidian has a problematic license, and most other notes apps are cloud hosted. I don’t want my notes locked up in proprietary storage formats, governed by proprietary licenses, or data-mined to train somebodies AI model.

blog/2024/weekly-journal-175.html2024-10-04

Welcome to my new blog. I have been blogging for nearly 20 years, and I decided it’s time for a fresh start. I have been working on replacing the tool, Hexo, that I have been using to manage my blog for several months. After trying several different tools, I finally settled on Emanote as the source for this blog. I have also been involved in a large amount of yak shaving, which has culminated not just replacing the tooling, but replacing my hosting providers too. Maybe I’ll write a post about that whole journey in the future.