Hello again, Hive!!!!
Its been quite some time. My last real post here was... mid 2024 something? Maybe earlier honestly. Time flies when you're deep in code and not paying attention to calendars ;-)
So what happened. I kept coding, kept experimenting, kept reading posts here and there. Been in touch with a bunch of you via Discord and Twitter DMs. But the actual writing part, sitting down and putting together a proper tech post? That fell off. And I want to be honest about why.
what pushed me away: AI slop
When the whole AI hype wave hit in 2023, I went from being initially enthusiastic about it to angry to genuinely depressed. Every platform got flooded with AI-generated slop. Low-effort "tutorials" obviously copy-pasted from ChatGPT. Vibe-coded projects with zero understanding behind them. People calling themselves developers who couldn't explain what their own code does. Medium, YouTube, Twitter, even here on Hive — everywhere.
And it made me question wether there was still a point to carefully crafting educational content. Do real human coders even exist anymore? I think they do, buried under tons of fake AIs and wannabe vibe coders. But still. Why spend a weekend writing a proper tutorial with tested code examples and real insight, when someone can prompt-generate a superficial version in 30 seconds and most people can't tell the difference?
That genuinely depressed me. Not just as a writer but as someone whos been passionate about teaching tech since way before Hive even existed. Felt like the thing I loved doing was being made irrelevant by a firehose of mediocrity.
So I stepped back....
what brought me back
... and felt even more anger from seeing AI take over WHAT IS MINE
After watching this AI slop tsunami for over two years now though, I realized something. The world actually needs real tech teachers more than ever. Not prompt-jockeys. Not vibe-coders. Not people who paste AI output and call it a tutorial. People who actually understand what they're teaching, who can explain the why behind the code, who've built things from scratch and know where the sharp edges are.
To put it blunt, but honest like you know I am: I AM NEEDED
I missed it. Teaching forces you to truly understand what you're doing (you can't properly teach something you don't fully understand yourself), and thats a feedback loop I want back in my life.
what I've been working on
Been exploring quite a lot since we last spoke:
- Zig — it is fast as fuck. Posted a brief intro tutorial a while back. Systems-level programming without the C/C++ baggage
- Rust — been writing quite a bit of it actually. The borrow checker is brutal but once it clicks you get why people are rewriting everything in it. Mozilla, Linux kernel, tons of crypto infra
- Go — super productive to write in, although the simplicity gets a bit repetitive and boring at times but the results are there. Still yields pretty fast production code and the cross platform ecosystem & tooling are gold
- Odin — I really love this one. Flew under most peoples radar but I think its honestly the best designed language syntax and idioms I've ever seen. Handmade-style, no hidden allocations, beautiful to write. My one gripe: the creator (Ginger Bill) refuses to ever support an official package manager. He thinks it creates vulnerabilities and dependency on C libs, which ok I get, but it also kills standing on the shoulders of giants and forces people to reinvent the wheel for every module. If you dont want external dependencies why create a new language at all? Still, the language itself is gorgeous
- Python — never stopped. Tons of data science stuff, Python still rules for that obviously. Became the de facto #1 for AI R&D, training, deep learning / ML — not the vibe coding slop but the actual science behind it which I love. And the ecosystem just keeps getting better,
httpx, type hints everywhere,uvreplacing pip. Theres a lot to talk about - Blockchain dev — obviously ;-) Some of you remember @steem-ua and the User Authority algorithm I built. That whole experience of building an intelligent on-chain service that thousands of people actually used and delegated to... I've been thinking a lot about what a next-generation version of that could look like. The ecosystem has changed, the tools have changed, and I think theres room to take it even further now
- Low-level graphics programming — been tinkering with WebGL and shader stuff. Nothing publishable yet but its been fun getting closer to the metal again
- Gaming & Hive — been looking into online gaming that interacts with Hive and sidechains. I have multiple ideas for projects I'm thinking about deploying on / with Hive. Cant say too much yet but theres quite some overlap between game mechanics, token economies and what Hive's infrastructure already provides. Stay tuned on this one ;-)
whats coming
Not going to make grand promises about posting schedules. You know me better than that ;-) But I am planning to revive the Learn Python Series with new episodes covering modern Python, and theres some new territory I want to get into:
- Modern API development (
httpx, async patterns, real-world integrations) - Testing properly (
pytest, mocking — things I barely touched in the original series) - CLI tools with
ClickandRich - Data pipelines & async workflows
- Maybe some Hive-specific dev tutorials. We'll see
Stepping away didnt make the slop problem better. It got worse. And if people who actually care about teaching this stuff properly stay silent, the slop wins by default.
So here I am.
to the OGs
If you've been following me since the Steem days, since the early Learn Python episodes, since the @steem-ua days — thank you. Seriously. Some of you are still here, still posting, still building. That means something.
And to anyone new: welcome. Pull up a chair, we've got things to build.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments!
Thanks for your time! En met de groeten uit Maaskantje, kut.
Welcome back man! I feel the same way about AI and how everything has been going. I feel like we are in a very strange transitional point in human history with no idea where we will end up.
Looking forward to seeing your posts.
Hey Rick! Thanks so much for the warm welcome back, really appreciate it man :-)
The way AI has developed over the past few years, for the longest time it seemed to me like it was heading for a plateau — where most people would basically just use generative AI as a chatbot in the ChatGPT web interface, and additionally for generating AI-slop images. And to be fair, that image side of things has developed quite impressively: from hands with seven fingers and women with three breasts, to something that's actually correct, all the way to genuinely unbelievable realistic video and voice imitation like in this video: WOW, just... WOW — absolutely insane.
But the past few weeks — and I mean literally weeks — I'm seeing developments especially on the Agentic AI front, and now we're looking through a very technical lens here (also from a data science background), that make me think the world is absolutely not ready for what's coming. And probably never will be, to be quite honest.
I'm genuinely concerned about things that are going to happen for which no real solutions exist. Things that will cause serious, real-world harm to people. Think for example about hyperrealistic facial simulation of real people, with fabricated bodies attached underneath that are indistinguishable from real footage — created purely to humiliate, bully, and destroy people. I think we're going to see some absolutely devastating consequences from this. People who end up deeply, severely traumatized... or worse. And beyond that, there are all sorts of security implications that practically nobody is thinking about, and that I won't even begin to type out here in a comment...
In short: "interesting times" ahead. And I don't mean that in a comfortable way ;-)
PS: Check your Discord more often! I want to schedule a call / online meeting with you, about this and other stuff.
PS2: Yup, I will continue to post often from here on! Will you too? ;-)
<3
I have been playing around with Cursor. Extremely handy. But you really gotta be careful with it. The AI agents can wreak havoc on your code. Gotta make sure you are using git. lol!
We are in a place where I am literally questioning what it means to be sentient being. Kurzweil was right about the singularity, but I think it is approaching sooner rather than later. We are truly in an age where we can no longer predict the future, even a little bit; and what is beyond the event horizon is a complete black box.
It is both extremely terrifying and exhilarating.... In a "let's jump into a lake full of crocodiles and see what happens" kind of way.
I will try! I have been so busy with our company lately it leaves little time for anything else. I am about to start another stop motion project that may be quite intense. I might have to hire some extra animators and prop builders, but we'll see.
You know, people keep saying "Yeah but it will never be perfect, or x, y z etc" I say just wait a couple of months... or a few weeks. One think the video generators can't seem to get right yet (because they don't get enough training on the individual) is the way their teeth look and the way the muscles work in an individual's mouth. The mouths always look wrong. I wouldn't put it past the AI to soon be able to look at the skin of the face and be able to calculate all of the loose and tight muscles. We are truly in a weird time.
Yep. We are truly screwed in the near future. It may end up being a transitional time leading to a true "Star Trek" style utopia where people spend their lives pursuing happiness. But how will the super rich and greedy deal psychologically with not having more than the rest of us. They will go down fighting tooth and nail.
Okidoki, I sent you a (lengthy) DM on Discord, please have a look Rick! ;-)
Welcome back @scipio
Thanks! <3
Wow 😲 go to have you back,you have a lot under your sleeve Pal, though I am still learning the ropes,but would be really a good thing to have veterans like back on hive and learn from you.Once again welcome back 🙏.
well it would help you if you'd actually check back in on my posts, I have now already published 2 new Learn Python tutorial episodes since you posted this comment! And I'll have plenty more posts coming too!
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