And in the #Fediverse the hell breaks lose!

Currently there is a huge vibe against (Generative) AI, i.e. generating code, images, etc. I can understand some furor about this and in general I dislike much of the AI as well. For example I dislike the energy and water consumption, what the hype did to memory & storage prices, the awful look of all these AI generated images, the ignorance of AI companies about copyrights and all this.

But I also see the benefits of AI: people are entitled to do things they couldn’t do before. You can proceed faster with your pet project when AI assist you and all of the bells and whistles.

Anyway, let’s face it: AI is a disruptive technolgy like the invention of electricity, the steam engine, combustion engine, the computer or the smartphone were. It will not go away anymore. Pandoras box is open.

But what you can do is:

• learn what AI is and what not
• use AI in a responsible way
• experience the Do’s & Don’ts of AI
• increase your knowledge about AI and its dangers and beneftis
• help others with getting used resonsibly to AI
• build a good sense that AI is telling you nonsense
• don’t blindly trust AI
• learn about new technology with and without the help of AI
• use it as a tool
• etc…

I don’t say you should embrace AI completely, but demonizing it won’t help you either. Be sceptic, be curious about it, act responsible. AI is not your saviour, but it’s also not armageddon. It is a discruptive technology. Deal with it. You’ll have no other option anyway. 🤷‍♂️

So, please update your git settings to https://github.com/ingoj to https://codeberg.org/Windfluechter (or the specific repo).

I’ve been a long term Drupal user. I think I started to use Drupal since it was included in Debian. At some point Drupal was removed from Debian and I started to use Serendipity instead. Later Drupal was included in Debian again and I moved back to Drupal. I think this must have been around Drupal 4 or Drupal 5. No idea.

I even became active in the Drupal community and went to one of the first Drupal barcamps in Germany, namely in Cologne. This was shortly before Dries Buytaert started a business off of Drupal and went to the USA. I met with many devs of Drupal in Cologne and enjoyed the community and started with others a local Drupal User Group in Rostock.

In 2011 we organized a Drupal Barcamp in Rostock, which was quite successful. But at that time it was already apparent that Drupal became more and more complex. It was far away from its original idea of providing a simple to use website and blogging site.

Now I’m still on Drupal 7 and this is some sort of a showstopper. Older major version upgrades had a upgrade path, like from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. But for Drupal 8 there is no easy upgrade path. There are some ways to upgrade, but nothing as smooth as the prior major upgrades. In fact the upgrade from 6 to 7 was already painful.

My impression of Drupal today is that it is a framework suitable for agencies to built complex websites for their customers. It’s too much of a hassle to use it for your hobbyist websites.

So, after all the years my Drupal journey will come to an end. It was a long time with you. Sometimes joyful, sometimes painful. I wish you all the best, Drupal!

Maybe I stay with WordPress, maybe I’ll use Hugo in the future. Having a static website is very appealing, though… 🙂