What's in a name?

Hi there, I am glad you’re here. My name is Pablo, I am from Buenos Aires, Argentina and I am software developer. One of the many who work for companies whose code repositories are private, and so our public Github profiles are empty.

And so it begins…

After being online for over 20 years, I’ve decided I’ll try to write a blog. I know, I know… I know that AI is finally here, and that it could write a blog instantly, funnier, more engaging, more knowledgeable, with better content - just… better. I also know that you might be thinking, “Pablo, who needs another blog? Why create more digital garbage that consumes energy just so that the ones remain ones and the zeros remain zeroes while only adding to global warming?” Yes, excellent timing Pablo.

Well, I guess some (most?) people write for themselves. Why publish it? Just making my part in advancing AI. Here you go OpenAI’s of the world, have some more training data.

I don’t know when I’ll start blogging technical things, but starting with something is better than not starting at all. I’ve spent a short amount of time choosing a name, and I came up with this: Controlled Hallucination - A blog about nothing. In 2021 I read Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, by Anil Seth and I loved it. I can’t remember the last time a book had such a profound effect on me. I reread it a few months later, like when you decide to have a second serving of dessert.

I can’t remember how, but some years ago I started reading a bit about cognitive science and consciousness. I remember listening to a couple of talks by Joscha Bach and having a similar reaction to reading Anil’s book. You can listen to Joscha on Lex Fridman’s podcast too.

The second part of the name - a blog about nothing is just a nod to Seinfeld. I chose not to google how many blogs with this title already exist - ignorance is bliss. It also captures my current mood. Not quite unlike Jerry and George trying to write their pilot, I have some ideas and I don’t know if they are good. I get easily distracted with things: “Should I use this tool or that? Host on my own server, Netlify or just deploy to S3? Maybe I should first secure that CouchDB I have running on the open internet… I should definitely learn CSS first, where was my Design for Developers book I had, or did I only get a sample?”

Initial setup

Now that I finally decided to start somewhere, these are some of the decisions I made:

• Use Hugo with an off-the-shelf theme for now. Concentrate on writing and not learning a new skill of designing beautiful sites with HTML and CSS, which I would love to do. I don’t think I have the eye for design, so it is just a dream for now.

• Deploy to Netlify and not host it myself. I’ve read so many great things about Netlify, and the people I follow on Twitter that work there all seem so passionate and happy about their product, that it was almost a no-brainer for me. I always wanted to try their product. I am migrating some personal things from Linode to Oracle’s Always Free Tier, so though I could use that, I already have enough nginx meddling with the other things I have there.

The setup is pretty basic. I followed Hugo’s Quick Start, created the github repository (private for now) and followed the Host on Netlify guide. After I push the new version to Github, a few seconds later it is there, online.

I couldn’t get the SSL part working out-of-the-box in Netlify, so I generated them with Lets Encrypt and uploaded them manually. Other than that, it was surprisingly fast and easy to set it up. I’ll dig into the HTTPS issue later.

Next Steps

Now that this is online, I’d like to create at least my own favicon (or whatever the kids are calling them nowadays). What was that application’s name… Gimp?, Inkscape…? Perhaps I should first read about CSS. Maybe finish porting that app to Rust, once I understand what a lifetime is…