if you're here looking for my "nix flakes and their guix equivalents" post, it's gone. i deleted it.

this isn't a hate letter to andrew or anything like that. i'm writing this because i want to make sure nobody thinks i deleted the post after getting "caught" for "using an llm".

i wrote that post because i was curious about something and wanted to understand it better. i researched it a lot — clearly not enough, but still. i was proud of it. i shared it with my friends because i thought it was cool and they might think so too.

just before eeping, i posted it in a few matrix chats. i woke up, and it was apparently on the front page of lobste.rs!! i had never ever imagined any of my blog posts would get more than three interested users let alone the attention it had garnered now. ludovic courtès — the literal founder of guix — made a toot about it that got twelve boosts!!! i was so excited meoww!!

and then it turned out a last-minute javascript change i'd made had broken the site on mobile, and people couldn't even read it. i fixed it as soon as it was brought to my attention. but by then people were already frustrated, and i can't blame them.

the next day, i come back from work, and a friend shares a link: andrew tropin wrote a review of my post. andrew tropin. someone whose work i really respect. i opened it so excited. and three paragraphs in, he says he suspects i wrote it with an llm.

to be clear: i'm not upset about being critiqued. i actually welcome that, especially from someone as knowledgeable as andrew. what broke me was the accusation that i didn't write my own words. and it's the very first thing he says — before any of the technical points, before any of the corrections, the very first thing i read is that i'm suspected of being fake.

if anyone is here expecting a response to the technical points of andrew's post, then i'm sorry but this isn't it. i was too devastated to really process them. i'm sure his criticisms are valid and correct, but i'm not really in the mood to engage right now.

what i can tell you is how that accusation made me feel.

i put a lot of effort into the infrastructure of this site. i made ​ox-atom​ to power its feed. i made ​neocities.el​ to talk to neocities. i wrote the css and javascript by hand. there's a cat in the background pattern. the section headers have little sparkles. the postamble says ~ meow ~.

so after all that work, being told that arguably the most important part of my blog — the text, the part that's supposed to be me — sounds like it came from a fancier markov chain, was destroying.

i didn't use an llm. but i cant prove a negative, and am anyways too tired to try.

so im taking the post down mraow :c