Successful reset, full steam ahead

My personal reset has been a success. I’m back on track with my training, my contract is going well, and my web presence refresh is making good progress.

Surprisingly, for once I am liking a Microsoft product. Specifically Power BI is a very easy to use and handy tool. There may be competing products but I am not aware of them (and only tried Power BI because a useful amount of it can be used with just a plain Microsoft 365 for Business license, which was a goal for the current contract with a local non-profit).

I am, however, not so happy with Microsoft’s deal with OpenAI and the attempts to force ChatGPT on customers. For my own use, therefore, I am moving away from Microsoft products where possible (and in the process discovered MX Linux, which is a pretty awesome Linux distribution based on Debian and is a combination of AntiX Linux and MEPIS Linux). I am also shifting my open source repository hosting again, back to GitLab, because GitHub is a Microsoft property, and in my opinion has lost sight of the core of what the ‘GitHub’ product is, which is hosting service to enable collaborative software development using Git, and in so doing is impeding the core functionality.

In addition, I am not a fan of providing LLM training data via my GitHub repositories.

So, unexpectedly, part of my reset is a return to (but in an improved way) to open source and Linux, where possible. In many ways, this makes me much more comfortable in my own skin, and is forking my a away from the ’ensh*tification’ of tech that has been the topic of a few bloggers and LinkedIn commentary.

I am fond of the indie tech and indie web communities and hope to be more involved with them in coming months and years. The real trick is learn how to do this and still make a good income (though I have no need to achieve the excessive wealth that seems to be the goal of many, especially in the business world).

So, full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes!