I am not a people person. Despite being a YouTuber and now a “professor”, I would much rather be away from people as much as possible. Of course, that’s not very healthy, so I try to put myself out there as much as I’m comfortable with.

But each time I have interactions with someone else, I get very anxious beforehand. I deal with it because I must, but it’s something I’ve felt basically my entire life.

I’m in a bit of a reading slump and have been for almost a month. It’s not unusual, I’ve talked about it a few times before, as I do tend to go through these from time to time.

This time I seem to be conducting a little self reflection experiment. As I find myself less and less interested in reading, I find myself spending more time taking in shortform content on TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Obviously, this is horrible. Replacing reading with mind-numbing, mind-rotting, TikTok is not conducive to good mental health or productivity.

I’m a man of habit. I do the same things every day, I eat the same things every week, I wear the same three colors all the time. I also have bad habits, like everyone does, and my bad habits are just as entrenched into my lifestyle as the good ones. I definitely get caught up in my habits. I tend to get very grumpy if things don’t go my way.

I have talked about AI before on my podcast and on my YouTube channel, but my primary use case is using AI for tech support. Right now I’m trying Emacs again, and that means I’m having to do a lot of new things. AI, in my case, is a very chatty version of Google. I ask it how I can set a keybinding for dashboard and it tells me how to do it. I copy the code, put it in my init.el and move on with my day.

I know a lot of you follow me over on The Linux Cast, but for those of you who don’t, it’s probably odd to hear me say that I’ve hopped to a different distro. What’s a distro? What’s Linux?

Well, that’s fine if you don’t know what those are, it’s really not the point of today’s ramble. Instead, I want to discuss change and how hard that can be.

I have used the same distro for the last two years. This was a challenge I set myself in 2023, hoping to curb my distro-hopping addiction. And it worked spectacularly well. I love openSUSE.

I don’t vibe code. I’m pretty proud of that fact. I like to create my own code, even though I’m painfully aware of how bad at it I am. I’m not a developer and I never will be. I can put out the simplest of things and be happy about that. It’s more than some people can do, so there’s no real need to feel bad about it.

Because I’m not a great coder, I have to constantly look things up online. I’m a long time user of the Google-it-always method of coding. The issue is, I’m doing that less and less and going to AI instead. And it is a serious problem. I can feel myself getting dumber every time I use “AI” for some menial task or question. Things I would usually go figure out myself by reading through other’s solutions on random forum 133, I now copy and paste from ChatGPT. Sure the AI bot will tell me what the code does and how it should work, but I don’t read that shit. I just take the code and if it works, GREAT! If it doesn’t work, I go back to AI, tell it that it didn’t work and ask it to try again.

Back in college and a little after, I worked the third shift stocking shelves at Kroger. I did that for about 10 years. It was a good job, and allowed me to make friends and be able to go to school during the day. I stopped working there in 2012. That’s 13 years ago, which just makes me wonder where the time has gone.

But what really gets me, is that even after all that time, my sleeping schedule still has not recovered. I’m still a work until 5AM kind of guy. If you’re on my Discord, you’ll often find me there chatting until the wee hours of the morning. And often times, I don’t get up and about until 10 or 11 in the morning, sometimes later.