Optimization Note
I realized that instrumentation and monitoring of a basic sort is pretty trivial these days, so I told the bots to monitor Ftrain.com. I've received a few automated midnight emails since then, telling me about servers that were down (but later came back up). I asked it to investigate and it found slow queries plus bots running in parallel, causing everything to screech to a halt and eat up all my memory.
So I logged in and I asked it to fix the slow queries, and it did. I also need to remind it to import newsletters, podcasts, and Bluesky posts. I could automate that but I like doing it by hand for now, since I know a lot is broken. I'm still building out the archive, looking for bad imports. I don't want to automate anything broken.
But I wonder how long before I say: “Run the monitoring tool every five minutes. When a system goes down, check out the root cause, and fix it. Add tests. Inform me of what you change. If it costs more than 10 minutes of your time stop and alert me.”
And how much longer before I say, “Keep an eye on logs, look for slow spots or breakage, fix and optimize as necessary.”
I have extremely limited interest in automating my own writing in any way—although indexing, search, spell-checking, grammar fixes, etc., those all seem fine. It's not some high-minded principle. I just don't like the bargain. I'm happy to give up configuring a web server. That's not useful friction.
I was blocked writing an article for a big pub the other day and I tried voice transcription. It was useful in that it got me stating some ideas, putting them into the world, but then I couldn't read them. My eyes glazed over them like they were anti-thought. I just have to write by hand, slowly, or type quickly in a box.