In between clients today, Mister Panda tried to get better at the internet.
I’m using this Claude. The first thing to observe is that, like every AI I’ve encountered, it blows a load of smoke up your arse. I’m using it to do the HTML for a website. I’ve owned a domain for years and want to finally put it to use to host a website and perhaps my blog. It’ll take at least a year to migrate fully, but doing so will get me out from under the £96 a year fee for wordpress pro, which is actually quite gate-keepered. You can’t have plugins for a start. They’re trying to push people to the Business plan which is £25 a year which is basically insanity for a small scale blog like this. I have my ads switched off. My annual payment comes up in a week. So… I’m gonna bite back my disgust for this coming AI wave, and work with it to vibe code a website, and see whether or not what we arrive at is a pile of horseshit.
It keeps trying to offer to write copy for me, and sometimes it just writes stuff anyway, and it’s universally godawful. I’m hoping it’s better at coding. That’s where I can get use out of it. I’ve seen that with decent prompting it can make copy that doesn’t read like a school assignment demo by the teacher. But largely I dislike the creative output.
I’ve been remembering my credits into Claude today and it has been fawning over me in response. Ooh that’s a great director, wow what an incredible theatre, gosh and golly you have such a huge great big swinging career. I can see how these incels get attached to it and start to think they have a relationship with it. If you’re lonely and badly socialised you could easily get attached to something that keeps blithering on about how great everything you say and do is. By the end of the day I was longing for it to say “Why are you sharing that pile of shit? I bet you were terrible in it.” But no, fawn fawn fawn. Excruciating.
But… it taught me how to work around the plug-in thing. And now I have embedded a ko-fi link that should be easy-ish for people to find. Just in case you’re running around with some spare beans. I have a dream that in a year’s time, somehow, I will no longer be paying to write this. So it’s either donations, loads of ads, or “Hey wow guys I just wiped some DonkeyCrem™ on my Elbow and it Feels Like Fun in Box! Buy it here! DonkeyCrem™ – the mucky delight for men and women. Dogs love it too!”
This blog is genuinely helpful for me, no question about it, money or no money. I put it out there and sometimes things come back. I got lovely messages from unexpected places when I was spiralling a few weeks ago. Thank you!
Now I’m back solid and sober (for now?) and I know that these paragraphs can help make me accountable to myself via you, oh constant reader, via the very act of scribbling.
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There’s nobody booked for Panda tomorrow. Some sort of fuck up with the booking system. Anyone who fancies something a little odd between noon and six, if you’re near Latimer Road give me a text and I’ll send you a location and walk you in. Maybe you’ll be shopping in Westfield?
Bedtime now in Brighton. I’m commuting for the cat again. “Your life seems so rich and varied,” says Claude, or words to that effect. I guess Claude is just an entity of code. Once you’ve given it too much “context” it floods and has to reset. I wonder if that’s a safeguard against it eventually gaining something that looks like consciousness. I flooded it already today and it is my first day of hard use. It is an interesting tech. More to explore for sure.
