The Siren Song of the Black Box

Miriam

yapping (ft. the feminist server manifesto) 02/13/2025

... reject generalized definitions of efficiency, efficacy, ease-of-use, transparency, scalability, accessibility, inclusion, optimization and immediacy because they are often traps.

working in c*rporate t*ch, the goal is generally… basically all the things that the feminist server rejects. my conditioning tells me to create something big, that can be experienced and felt by a large group of people, that i can post the code for on my github and point to as a technical project on my resume. my team at work is releasing a new early access product tomorrow (feb 14. because happy fucking valentines day, here's a new corporate strategy planning tool, i guess.) i had to redo a bug fix the other day because apparently my solution was o(n) time complexity and there was a way to do it in constant time (even though n would never be above like. 50.) i'm tired <3

... do not serve every body; they continuously re-negotiate what counts as accessible. They respond to the fluctuating abilities, embodied knowledges and genealogies of their care-takers and users.

despite my conditioning, a big project for a big community isn't even accessible for me right now because, frankly, i don't have a community. a year and a half ago, i moved to a city where i had 1 (one) friend and i fear that friend and i… i don't really know what's going on there, but we haven't spoken in a month and a half <3 (and i mean, to be clear/not sound too pathetic, i've made other friends but i'm a little awkward and a lot nervous about trusting people, so those relationships still have a ways to go before i'd really consider them community that rely on me/i rely on). there are communities i engage with or identify with, and communities or relationships that i want to deepen my commitment to, but i wouldn't really say i have people to turn to in an emergency. i believe i'm building community here and making valuable connections, it's just slow as hell.

... carefully scale up or down, and alternate processing speeds whenever conditions require.

with this project, i want to challenge myself to resist the internalized capitalist urge toward efficiency and immediacy, to embrace a lack of scale and speed as intentional design choices. i want to create infrastructure that embraces the small and the slow, that slowly expands as it's ready and resourced (a metaphor for the processes of healing, liberation, and community). perhaps, at first, my server is just for me. perhaps in a few months, i'll be ready to build it out into something to be shared with a close friend or two. maybe, with time, it'll grow to support a small community or network, either locally or distributed globally. i want this to be an ongoing project that expands with me and my community as we grow.

less articulate idea dump

connecting the physical/analog and the digital — would love to integrate my physical art practice into this somehow: painting, drawing, ceramics, drawing and scanning graphics for a website ?? also a physical way for user(s) to interact with the server: nfc chips, buttons to press, things to touch or taste or smell or hear. textures that aren't just metal and plastic.

something something organic internet, organic network, growing something organic with deep roots takes time

thinking about making a personal server or something for me and my friends to bring us closer together ?? digital space/tool for my selves /or my friends to get closer to each other? building interdependence within community without reliance on an external Big Tech mediator, personalized to our needs/desires.

inspired by olivia's locally-hosted LLM "pet" idea: locally-hosted LLM server ?? LLMs replicate their training data (including their biases), so what if i created a small LLM trained on my own data, only for my own use? basically an echo chamber for me to yap to myself but like. externalized/mediated through a machine.

  • could digitize my journals + export my notion (which is a nightmare to export but whatever) as training data ? maybe eventually i can offer something similar for the people in my life as a resource

non LLM (?) idea tieing in another personal project i'm working on: soooo a concept that i've worked with in :sparkles:trauma therapy:sparkles: is the idea of an imaginary "container" to put distressing thoughts/feelings/sensations/memories in between therapy sessions or other suitable times to process them. i suck at this. i'm also very literal and am taking a beginner ceramics class. i'd already decided that one of my goals for that class is to create a physical container to have somewhere i could literally either write down the things i want to revisit and then put them away for safekeeping until i can process them, or even just energetically place in a physical container. technically the container could be a server inside a physical handmade vessel??? or an interplay of the vessel and a server??? i used to journal a lot on google docs/definitely have like. detailed accounts of very private parts of my life on google drive lol. now i have a physical journal practice and i'm generally pretty happy with that, but sometimes there are things that either feel too charged to write down or the only way i can "write" them is to type them because (for me) it's a less embodied experience

… are these the same idea ?? idk.

software engineer attempts to set up hardware. 02/22/2025

i've done IoT and other physical computing projects in the past, but i'm primarily a UI/frontend engineering person. i like being able to see and interact with my code and my technical projects. sometimes it's kind of like that saying about a watched pot that never boils, but we'll deal with my control issues another day. all that is to say that i totally could've set my server (a raspberry pi 4b) up headless (without a way to directly interface with it—no mouse, keyboard, or screen), but i wanted to watch it for my own peace of mind. turns out that i had… literally none of the required cables to connect my server to my peripherals or to my home wifi network. the last time i worked on a physical computing project, i was still using a windows PC (whose hard drive has since corrupted lol RIP), and now my main (non-work-issued) computer is a macbook air that only has two usbc ports and nothing else. rasberry pi's have no usbc ports. long story short:\n

^ that happened, along with a panicked best buy trip where i bought a WHOLE DAMN DOCKING STATION because i couldn't get my hands on any other way to port my pi's sd card into my computer to flash yunohost onto it. whoops. there was probably a better way to get ahold of these materials, but unfortunately my divestment from big corporations is still a work in progress.

thankfully though, once i actually got all my materials, the actual yunohost setup process was very straightforward. knowing yunohost is somewhere between an OS and a tool built on top of the open source OS debian, i was expecting to spend some time in the command line figuring out the server's ip and getting everything configured at the very least, but yunohost makes things incredibly easy. they've got a UI of their own that you can use to interface with your server through a domain it exposes. now to figure out how to get my own UI onto this thing…

the feminine urge to create-react-app (03/02/2025)

let's do a little mathematical exercise, shall we?

i started my post-grad software engineering job july 17, 2023, so just about 85 weeks ago. while i'm technically a full-stack engineer, i'd say i spend an average of 75% of my coding time each week working on the frontend. of course, coding isn't all that i do at work (and I get distracted a lot), so let's ballpark the amount of time spent coding to maybe 25 hours a week. if i've spent 85 weeks working 75% of 25 hours each week on frontend development in react, that's 1593.75 hours. and don't forget the brief frontend internship that i had in college and the various side projects/hackathons where i've used react. let's say that's maybe another 400 hours or so. in other words, i've spent somewhere around 2000 hours using react to build out websites.

meanwhile, i took an online coursera class to learn the basics of html/css during a really boring winter break in college, one of my professors spent one lecture going over it as a crash course… aaaaaand then we've never talked about it again.

this to say, i've spent around a hundred times longer working with fancy web frameworks to build a website than the html/css that underlies it. yeesh.

as part of this project, i want to give myself permission to make things understated and uncomplicated, and to divest from Big Tech. (and, despite technically being open-source, a lot of the most common web frameworks and tools like react are maintained predominately by companies like meta). here, i'm uncovering some nuance to the word "uncomplicated." the whole reason web frameworks and libraries exist is to make our lives a little easier as developers creating responsive websites. instead of writing our own html, we write jsx or tsx that libraries like react translate into html for us. in some ways, it feels simpler that way, not having to remember all the proper css properties and make sure every html tag is in the right place myself. at the same time, adding a new layer of abstraction by bringing in one of these frameworks inherently makes the website more complicated. ultimately, part of me is just lazy enough to be tempted by the siren song of the black box.

(spoiler alert: i was in fact tempted by the siren song of the black box)