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dendon Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

I am working on a reverse-engineered SDK for Stream Deck devices, called DeckSurf:

The SDK is open-source and on GitHub:

It's a hobby project, but one that I love working on because it unlocks some _really_ great hardware to be open to do anything I want it to be rather than be constrained by out-of-the-box client software that asks me to sign in with an account to get an extension installed.

dendon BlogScroll – An open directory of personal sites and blogs

I amended the description to better reflect the work. Thank you for the feedback, I appreciate the pointers to the IndieWeb and Maggie's sites.

dendon Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

Shockingly, they do! Quite a few folks that I've talked to recently expressed that they are subscribed to more than one email newsletter and read them fairly consistently.

dendon Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

Yeah, unfortunately, c'est la vie. Renting a domain is still better than not having it.

dendon BlogScroll – An open directory of personal sites and blogs

Fair feedback. In my eyes, I treat any personal site as a digital garden - I am not really sticking to the "pure" definition. If you are putting an effort to curate and grow your own site, is that not a digital garden? I think it is, but that's my own take on it.

I intentionally try to avoid sites that are in any shape _not_ personal or otherwise representative of an individual trying to stake their little corner of the internet.

dendon Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

Hah! Well that certainly is a good directional guess! I am of Eastern European descent.

Also, big fan of Krtek - grew up on that cartoon, was quite an educational experience at that age.

dendon Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

It's true, and yet it's still a better alternative to not having your own domain at all (at least IMO).

dendon Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

I generally agree with the sentiment (and yes, internet should be treated as an utility). However, the reality is that the vast majority of people will not be able to self-host on their own hardware for a myriad of reasons (lack of skill, lack of money, lack of interest, etc.) That's not a reason to gatekeep them from having their own corner and claim it as theirs.

If you have a domain and your own site, even hosted on a colocated rack or in the cloud, you're already miles ahead of those that don't. And if you have a domain and can manage DNS records, then in the future that doesn't preclude you from "graduating" to your own hardware, if you so desire. The goal here is more or less self-sufficiency with web properties rather than a pure interpretation of "rent" vs. "own." Because at some point you have to rent something from someone (say, you're not running your own domain registry and registrar).

dendon Digital gardens people maintain outside the "Big Tech" walled gardens

Yeah, I am still thinking how to evolve this into a useful, yet minimalist design as it grows. I am quite inspired by high-density websites (things that were de-facto in the late 90s), so will have to see how to incorporate that.

That being said, the meta-point about at-scale discovery is astute - it's largely unsolved for personal sites/digital gardens. And I certainly don't want to be the bottleneck long-term. Will have to think through a solution as more content gets added.

dendon BlogScroll – An open directory of personal sites and blogs

Fair point - I will add a note to the top that if you don't want to contribute via GitHub, you can send me a note to hi@den.dev. I will make the change myself.

dendon BlogScroll – An open directory of personal sites and blogs

Great job on building a delightful experience! I really like the design.

For OPML, tracking the enhancement here: https://github.com/blogscroll/blogscroll/issues/198

dendon Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

Fair point - I will add that as a clarification, thank you for calling it out.

dendon BlogScroll – An open directory of personal sites and blogs

https://github.com/blogscroll/blogscroll/issues/198

Opened an issue to track and implement. Thank you for the suggestion!

dendon BlogScroll – An open directory of personal sites and blogs

The beauty of this site is that it's just HTML with minimal styling and JavaScript. If the current walled garden doesn't fit my needs at some point in the future, throwing it on another host takes less than 10 minutes, plus whatever the delay will be from DNS propagation. That's a built-in future resiliency, IMO.

dendon BlogScroll – An open directory of personal sites and blogs

Look at the front page of HN - see my project randomly. Thank you for sharing! The goal with this site is precisely that, share people's digital gardens.

If you have a site to add, please open a GitHub issue: https://github.com/blogscroll/blogscroll/issues/new?assignee...

If your site is self-hosted (that is, not on medium.com or Substack or the likes, or if it is - has a custom domain), I'd be happy to add it. My goal for this year is to massively grow the list.

dendon Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

Oh, 100%. I mentioned this in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42582518) - I've dealt with a fair share of stolen content (thankfully nothing too important, just a random blog post here and there), and it definitely stings. The difference is that this is now done at a massive scale.

But again - this doesn't stop me from continuing to write and publish in the open. I am writing for other people reading my content, and as a bouncing board for myself. There will always be some shape or form of actors that try to piggyback off of that effort, but that's the trade-off of the open web. I am certainly not planning to lock all my writing behind a paywall to stop that.

dendon Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

It offers significantly more flexibility and freedom compared to any social network. If your data is "hijacked" (not sure that that means in this context, but let's assume the host terminated your account), you can spin up another hosting account on one of the many hosting providers and point your domain to it. That's it (not to say that it's that trivial for large sites, but that's the gist of it).

If your account on a major social network is terminated, if you had a large community there, you have quite literally no way to access them unless you had some kind of parallel presence somewhere else.

dendon Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

In the grand scheme of things and at this point, it probably doesn't matter. I know for me it certainly is not in any shape a discouragement to continue writing on my blog and contributing code to open source communities (my own and others).

But if we're going to dig into this a bit, one person reading my code, internalizing it, processing it themselves, tweaking it and experimenting with it, and then shipping something transformative means that I've enhanced the knowledge of some individual with my work. It's a win. They got my content for free, as I intended it to be, and their life got a tiny bit better because of it (I hope).

The opposite of that is some massively funded company taking my content, training a model off of it, and then reaping profits while the authors don't even get as much as an acknowledgement. You could theoretically argue that in the long-run, a LLM would likely help other people through my content that it trained on, but ethically this is most definitely a more-than-gray area.

The (good/bad) news is that this ship has sailed and we now need to adjust to this new mode of operation.

dendon Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

I think that's an overly reductive way of looking at it. Artists, are by their definition, creators of art. AI-generated "art" (it's not art at all in my eyes) is effectively a machine-based reproduction of actual art, but doesn't take the same skill level, time, and passion for the craft for a user to be able to generate an output, and certainly generates large profits for those that created the models.

So, imagine the scenario where you, an artist, trained for years to develop a specific technique and style, only for a massively funded company to swoop in, train a model on your art, make bank off of your skill while you get nothing, and now some rando can also create look-alikes (and also potentially profit from them - I've seen AI-generated images for sale at physical print stores and Etsy that mimic art styles of modern artists), potentially destroying your livelihood. Very little to be happy about here, to be frank.

It's less about competition and more about the ethical way to do it. If another artist would learn the same techniques and then managed to produce similar art, do you think there would be just as visceral of a reaction to them publishing their art? Likely not, because it still required skill to achieve what they did. Someone with a model and a prompt is nowhere near that same skill level, yet they now get to reap the benefits of the artist's developed craft. Is this "gatekeeping what's art"? I don't think so. Is this fair in any capacity? I don't think so either. Because we're comparing apples to pinecones.

All that being said, I do agree that the ship has sailed - the models are there, the trend of training on art AND written content shared openly will continue, and we're yet to see what the consequences of that will be. Their presence certainly won't stop me from continuously writing, perfecting my craft, and sharing it with the world. My job is to help others with it.

My hunch is that in the near-term we'll see a major devaluing of both written and image material, while a premium will be put on exceptional human skill. That is, would you pay to read a blog post written and thoroughly researched by Molly White (https://mastodon.social/@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io) or Cory Doctorow (https://pluralistic.net/), or some AI slop generated by an automated aggregator? My hunch is you'd pick the former. I know I would. As an anecdotal data point, and speaking just for myself, if I see now that someone uses AI-generated images in their blog post or site, I almost instantly close the tab. Same applies to videos on YouTube that have an AI-generated thumbnail or static art. It somehow carries a very negative connotation to me.

dendon Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

That's the strategy I have with this blog. Instead of sitting and lamenting over the state of the internet, it's better to spread the word and encourage action. There are actual things we can do to reclaim parts of the web that died down. It doesn't need to be at the same scale as all the social networks out there, but even if it serves a small niche, that's a fantastic achievement.

dendon Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

My content is still MY content, and I'd prefer that if an entity is going to make money off of it directly (i.e., it's not a person learning how to code from something I wrote but rather a well-funded company pulling my content for their gain), that I at least have some semblance of consent to it.

That being said, I think there is no longer a point of crying over spilled milk. The LLM technology is out of the bag, and for every company that attempts to ethically manage content (are there any?) there will be ten that will disregard any kind of license/copyright notices and pull that content to train their models anyway.

I write because I want to be a better writer, and I enjoy sharing my knowledge with others. That's the motivation. If it helps at least one person, that's a win in my book, especially in the modern internet where there's so much junk scattered around.

dendon Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

Honestly, while I put this together, I know that the ideas on this are not unique to me by any stretch. It's just another arrow in the bunch.

I added a few extra reading materials/references at the bottom of the article.

dendon Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

I can relate to the sentiment. For what it's worth, I also know that if someone's personal site/repos/pictures are used to train AI, they have no recourse short of said person having TONS of money to go and fight the legal battles similar to how media companies do.

But you know what, I grew up in a family of educators whose whole life mission was to help others by sharing their knowledge. That's what I am doing through my blog. I learned something? Blog about it. I built a reverse-engineered wrapper over some API? Share it openly. For every AI ingress job over this content there will be a few people that will read my code or blog post and either learn from it, be inspired, ignore it, or unblock themselves from a problem that they tried to solve. I think that makes the effort worth it to me.

For what it's worth, even before AI emerged, I've seen sites that would shamelessly rip off my content and re-publish it on their own domains under a different author. One even tried charging people for it. On several occasions I fought it and won with the help of Google/Bing. Other times, nothing happened. And that's fine. Such is the fate of online content. If my content helped at least one person, it was worth sharing it in the open.

dendon Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

Not impossible, but the likelihood of a domain being taken away on a whim compared to a social network deciding to "shadowban" or just disable an account on their network is significantly lower. Also, with a domain you might have a legal recourse to pursue with the registrar/registry. With a social network account? You're on someone else's turf, and they can do what they want.

dendon Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

Nothing to disagree in this statement, for sure. If it's on the open internet, it will almost surely be used for AI training, consent be damned. But it feels like even at a rudimentary level, if I post a picture on my site that is then used by a large publisher for ads, I would (at least in theory) have some recourse to pursue the matter and prevent them from using my content.

In contrast, if I uploaded something to a social media site like Instagram, and then Meta "sublicensed" my image to someone else, I wouldn't have much to say there.

Would love someone with actual legal knowledge to chime in here.

dendon Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

That's a fair call-out, but that's why in the post I mention this:

> Most people are perfectly content with everything living inside their Facebook account because it’s convenient and their family and friends are already there. Telling everyone to learn how git and GitHub Pages work to host their blog is not an effective way to drive change. But that’s also not the point. As I mentioned earlier, the goal is to start with a small niche community of people who are comfortable with building their own digital corners.

Not everyone needs to have their website. Not everybody wants to have their website. And that's fine. They can use the social platforms as-is. But for those that have the means and interest in building their own corners (say, they want to bootstrap a business), they should not limit themselves to the social networks as the only place for their community. There is a better way than be a sharecropper on someone else's land.

dendon Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

Absolutely. I am a big fan of supporting independent software and bootstrapped services.

dendon Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

On (1), yes that is true to an extent - the domain discoverability is indeed mostly at the mercy of Google, and the whole "AI overview" is a garbage experience. However, looking at my own search console data (both Google and Bing), there are still quite a few folks landing on my pages through search, often for some obscure terms that I somehow documented, so it's still possible to get traffic that way. But again - the goal is less about "drive traffic ASAP" but rather point people from other networks to something you personally own.

On (2), they can, but if you use a more established provider like Buttondown or Mailchimp, and you are not actually sending spam, a lot of folks have quite a bit of success building an audience that way. I've used Buttondown (not affiliated with them in any capacity) personally before and haven't had subscribers complain about deliverability. I am planning on rebooting that this year to see how it goes. I've heard most deliverability issues arise when folks trying to roll out their own email server.

dendon Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

You do. That's why I wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless they absolutely know what they're doing. Can't tell you how many friends I had to have a talk with who had plain vanilla port forwarding done on their home router, exposing their entire home network to the web.

Nowadays, I recommend them use Tailscale as an out-of-the-box Wireguard-based VPN to safely connect to their home servers from remote locations.

dendon Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

Exactly this. At some point, you need to delegate. Make it portable, don't get locked into a proprietary architecture, and you'll be good. Not everyone will be able (or has any desire) to run their own rack.