From the Folder to the Web

For a very long time I have had a folder on my Mac sitting full of writing. Some of it looked like actual blog posts, some of it rants, some of it just a handful of sentences denoting the start of an idea. This blog is my small attempt to move beyond just writing for the folder to writing for the web, (or at least the AI scrapers who I suspect will probably be my only readers!). Hello to you all! Hello World if I may!

I will do my best to write to this blog, but realistically it will probably be sporadic. I set it up using Hugo, and it’s not as frictionless as I had hoped (for example I had to write a script to push to GitHub to post, and images are kind of a nightmare to embed). That said it was kind of illuminating making it, and Hugo isn’t particularly challenging to get your head around.

It’s especially easy with my AI helpers: one of the most remarkable parts of the modern world is just how easy it has become to build things for the web! Even without the LLMs, the web is full of publishing tools, software and components that make what used to be a fairly abstruse process much more accessible. In his classic Turing Award lecture “Reflections on Trusting Trust” (published in Communications of the ACM, August 1984), Ken Thompson wrote

“You can’t trust code that you did not totally create yourself. … No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code.” Ken Thompson ¹

It’s funny, I am not really a developer – my day job is being a chef! – and taking his words at face value the rise of ‘vibe coding’ probably does in a literal sense flood the world with software whose authors, (let alone their users), don’t understand even if it’s easier than ever to compile. In another sense, though, I think something more interesting is happening.

In 1984, let alone 2008 when I got my first Mac, the idea that an ordinary user might compile and examine the code running on their machine was a complete abstraction. You used what you were given and you trusted it because you had no choice. Now, for the first time, I feel genuinely closer to that possibility – and it’s precisely thanks to AI. Not as a passive consumer of prompt outputs, but as someone using these tools to learn, to understand, and to participate proactively in the software I run. This website has no tracking (other than anything I might embed), unlike virtually every other site or application I might use in my day-to-day life. I have found the last few weeks of building things liberating and deeply meaningful on a personal level.

Nearly 20 years ago my mother purchased me my first Macintosh – a black polycarbonate “MacBook” circa mid-2008. I had had hand-me-down Windows computers that my dad had given/set up for me, but this was truly the first device I owned that was a personal computer. It was a tool, yes, but it was also a window into the world that profoundly transformed how I lived my life, my views and understanding of the world. A bicycle for the mind indeed! ²

With this machine, unlike the earlier PCs, I was free to use it in whatever way I liked (especially, from my mother’s perspective, to do homework). I often struggle to communicate to people what a extraordinary experience it was to encounter Mac OS X at the time. The colourful icons, the slick interface, the beauty and simplicity of UNIX – it was a tremendous contrast to Windows which I had always used because I had to, and had never really understood intuitively the way I ended up understanding Mac OS.

It was through Mac OS Leopard and the bundled iWeb application that I first experimented with publishing a website. iWeb allowed users to create and design simple websites and blogs without coding and included a number of Apple-designed themes, each of which had several page templates which you could then use to publish to MobileMe, a now long gone precursor online suite to iCloud. I can’t remember exactly what my first site was supposed to be (maybe some kind of class election or vote? It has been a long, long time!), but I thought I would mention it as an artefact of that bygone world. It strikes me how enticing the idea then (as now!) was to just get on the web. I remember living my life feeling like nothing was really real, and consequently making a site felt like becoming more real somehow.

I don’t think I am a particular amazing writer, but then again how could I expect to be? Writing, though to a certain degree a form of thinking, is very much a skill that comes with practice. That folder that has sat on my Mac for these last 18 years has long been my attempt to get better at thinking about things, but always privately, always for myself. Similar to coding, or making a website you never get better or good at the things you never attempt. Publishing, even to an audience of scrapers, will hopefully push me to try and making something more of my thoughts.

If nothing else it means a lot to me that I can sit here and try and make real what was previously stuck in a folder, waiting to become real.