After years of neglect (i.e. no time for this) I decided to update my main site (https://www.vleij.com) and this blog site. And reading back my few scribbles here, about setting up some P1 monitor or self hosted statistics it hit me how fast we’ve moved forward from that “old thinking”.
Back when I was building this blog, or implementing small stuff at home I’d have to Google stuff. Find out if someone else in the world actually did more or less the same as I did. I’d have to use my brain and translate what I find into my own situation. Because that’s rather hard, I’d write a blog post to help others, the whole point of this site! It’d take time to figure out, remember what I did and then write it down. Plus find a stock image (or my own image) to make it a bit more interesting. That’s different with today, VERY different. And it’s only a few years back the reality was like above, not like decades.
Today I’m running a three node Proxmox cluster at home, running my containers as LXCs, with a really cool backup system (Proxmox Backup Server). It took some time, but nothing like during the “old days” of a few years back. Also, instead of reading a lot of (annoying) messages in various WhatsApp groups (you know what I mean :-), I have my OpenClaw assistant summarize them in the evening and proposing calendar entries. I’ve built a great automated e-mail / whatsapp reply assistant for the guys at my son’s motor racing club, to offload the owners so they can focus on the core business. OpenClaw was slightly steep to setup, but then again I had professional help with Grok, Gemini and Claude. And when stuff doesn’t work, or I have to figure out dependency “hell”, scripting or configuration I just type “Claude” in my shell and have Claude figure it out (including git, APIs, testing, etc etc). It took me literally 5 minutes to update my blog and main site from a really old stack to a completely new setup, including testing and verification using both the GitHub repo behind this and the Netlify MCP services to control the deployments. What a time to be alive!
I’m not afraid of what AI can do, this is great. But I’m afraid that we stop being able to think, a bit like kids don’t understand why something shows up on their computer where we had to program ourselves in BASIC and start at line 10: with a program (yes I’m old). Or that you kind of “forget” how to read a paper map. And also, if a lot of content today is AI created, doesn’t that mean humanity as a whole kind of stopped thinking for themselves in 2025 more or less? If nobody is writing stuff in StackOverflow and GitHub is only AI generated code, then AI is only “learning” from itself from now on, right?
Anyway, here’s a cute fluffy AI thing flying through the air, took me 3 seconds to make. :)
