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Gnus is amazing

decipaliz@disroot.org (decipaliz) — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 02:28:00 +0300

My journey in learning to use and appreciate the Gnus Newsreader.

Gnus is a newsreader built-in into Emacs. To be completely honest, it has always terrified me - it has this aura of some eldritch alien technology, probably because it was first designed for NNTP, which is the news protocol for Usenet. But Gnus actually has a lot of nice functionality to offer besides NNTP, and three that are of most interest to me are Email, RSS and Atom.

I am realizing that I am turning into the stereotypical Emacs wizard that doesn't ever exit Emacs. Indeed, there are good Mail clients, and there are good feed readers. But I already use Emacs for IRC and IMs (via BitlBee - if you're interested in that, let me know via mail or XMPP and I will write a post about it!). I also use Emacs for text editing, managing files, managing Guix and writing mail. The idea of also having all my news reading inside Emacs is too enticing to ignore.

Gnus has quite a lot of features. In this post I will focus only on Email, RSS and Atom, how I use them and some other Gnus settings I think are vital to my workflow.

AI is bad, actually

decipaliz@disroot.org (decipaliz) — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 02:53:00 +0300

Who would've thought?

This should come as no surprise, really.

I work in web development (I know, surprising, considering how visually minimal this site is), and it is unfortunately getting sloppified. It's unsurprising itself really - speed of development is always valued above quality in this field. What is surprising to me is how involved everyone around me is at getting more things sloppified. Put AI here, shove AI there. Not only does AI write code for them, but now it's also at the core of several automation pipelines - ones that could've been adequately automated using appropriate tools. And I'm also getting funny looks whenever I put my finger up. "Ah, Deci, the guy who hates AI". Well, at least I'm not getting fired for not using it yet. Seems like I'm being kept as some sort of devil's advocate, or something.

More frustratingly, degenerative AI is taking over creative jobs. It is now completely normal to see slop in video thumbnails, in videos themselves, in writing (yes there are clear signs of AI writing), in art, in music, on product covers, in advertisement, in memes. Things that should always have been human-first are now a part of the mindless conveyor belt. Why it exists - I can get, it's easy money. But I feel carnal disgust every time I interact with any piece of AI "art". Do most consumers of art really not care about that? I have to hope not.

Hello, World!

decipaliz@disroot.org (decipaliz) — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:25:00 +0300

Who I am and what this is about.

Hi! I'm Deci, and this is the start of my blog and personal web page.

I've always felt warmly about personal blogs. I think long-form textual content is much preferable to short texts on platforms such as Twitter or Bluesky, and especially prefferable to short-form video content, as it allows for a more thought-out expression of one's ideas and beliefs. Long-form video content requires skill and a lot of time, and I unfortunately don't always possess time and wilingness to commit to expressing myself in that way.

Moreover, reading other people's blog posts has always felt more personal to me than watching videos or reading tweets. I'm not sure if this is something subjective, or if there's some substance behind this.