josm's posts

moving to zola

2026-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

So recently I re-made my site with my own theme using hugo, which was a great learning process but I did find myself getting super confused with how it was actually generating lists of posts, etc with its templating. I stumbled across zola again and (typically) spend all night migrating my old hugo site to zola, which I have got to say is a lot simplier for some reason. I get where all the files are. It's possible I was doing something wrong with hugo to make it as "complex" as it was but idk it just clicked in zola for me. It's made in rust too which is cool, not that hugo was slow by any means.

A thing that I found really easy in zola because it's in the tutorial was having a list of posts by newest first, which in hugo I had to do in a very weird way. In zola it's just this and it did it for me:

{% for page in section.pages %}
html links for posts here
{% endfor %}

Where as in hugo I had to do the following, maybe I was doing something wrong but:

{{ define "main" }}
{{ .Content }}
{{ range .Pages.ByDate.Reverse }}
  html links for posts here
{{ end }}
{{ end }}

To me that's just needlessly complex. The syntax is fine it's just the amount of shortcodes. Again I could have been be doing something wrong.

I've read multiple posts about people having similar problems with hugo and making the switch as well.

The documentation for zola is extremely good too and I did find that hugo's documentation was way too verbose. Maybe that's a me problem.

Anyway there is a link to zola in my footer, but here it is anyway: getzola.org

my thoughts on ai

2026-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

My feelings about AI are weird. On the one hand I really do not like the amount of slop it generates (such as in creative spaces, videos) and enables and on the other I can see it's geniune usefulness as a tool. "What's this error mean?" "Parse this log for me and get the data I need", etc. I see the usefulness in that.

Part of the reason I don't like it is the amount of bullshit it generates in terms on traffic on the internet. I see it every day at my job, normal peoples sites being scraped and hit just so the AI crawler can do whatever it wants and ignore robots.txt. It makes people that normally wouldn't have to deal with things like cloudflare and makes them use it just to get their blog working. To me that's very stupid.

I think what AI needs is oversight. We need to stop over building datacenters just to give it more power and we should be working on making it more efficient. I don't really know how much we have left to give in terms of computing power due to moore's law, so unless recent research becomes mainstream (diamonds transitiors) I don't know that it's going to get much better so I think we probably need to just accept it's as good as it's going to get. I am probably very wrong on this.

I have seen people that normally would think for themselves and just verbatim accept what AI says as fact. Can we not do this? AI needs to be reviewed constantly on it's output.

Linus Torvalds recently spoke about it's use in the linux kernel and I do agree with him somewhat. There is no way that any maintainer would let slop into the kernel, that's just not going to happen. Fork it if you don't want AI in it (I do kind of want someone to do that) but it's existance in the kernel isn't the end of the world, it's objectively going to be fine, linux isn't just going to get awful now.

I dont know, I'd say overall I don't particually like ai and kind of wish it never existed, but we're here now and have opened pandoras box so it's probably pointless to not at least use it as a tool.

hello!

2026-07-16T00:00:00+00:00

I changed my site around a little for some reason. Didn't really like using someone else's theme to be honest.

Not exactly "pretty" or anything like that, but I find myself always leaning towards more functional sites. It works well enough on mobile as well.