I am addicted to technology since I can remember.

But my parents had a lot of care to protect me against vices and harmful things, in early age, my contact with technology was short and measured. I had my first own computer with around 13 years old, and my first smartphone only around 16. I feel highly grateful for this care.

Unfortunately my issue was games. The whole day in the computer, exiting only because of the hungry, sleepiness or headache… And doing nothing useful.

I was aware of that idiotic behavior but it was hard to solve.

Then around my 15 years old, I heard the pressure, advises and incentives from my father, and I started to do something useful, I initiated my journey on Linux and programming through a expensive yet shallow course about pentesting.
It made me realize that I like the area, but without programming, I would never get rid of the label of "script kiddie".
So after some a minimal comfort at Kali Linux by following the course, I saw a opportunity to get rid of my vice.

I abandoned Kali Linux from my VMWare and installed a pure Debian with dual boot on my notebook, previously with Windows 8.1.

After it, this became my new game.

Some time later, more than a year I removed Windows, and sticked on Debian for a long time. Got relieved, and games was no longer a problem!

Warping time back to now.

One of my values is to avoid distractions. Distractions are hard to handle, pleasing to the moment and has a high potential for damage. When the guard is low, the shit happens. xclip: Error: There is no owner for the PRIMARY selection

What I see from LLMs is convenience.

Convenience a complex thing. A convenient thing generally don't requires much effort, and when you outsource even your intellectual effort, … well, I think something is wrong.

I know it's not like that, and reality is often a mix of the both sides, but the second part is worse: privacy.

LLM is only useful with the needed context, and this is like a intentional spyware in your computer. You want to send to it all you know about that context to make it work close to what you do.

I am writing this because I got too much on it, started to get lazy and avoid reading the codebase in order to understand and reason. This is not the right way to use a tool.

It's hard to get rid of it. I am telling this words after using it a lot to deliver a full refactor on a legacy React web app while learning to use the framework in a little more than 3 months at work. But LLM helped me, so the satisfaction wasn't as I expected.

So now, until I get the enough computation power to run a conversational LLM locally, I want to use the same strategy I use for Google, YouTube, social media and these threats for my time and privacy: Sacrifice the convenience.

Considering the few situations where LLM really help, and it doesn't messes the codebase (like code generation instead editing), I still rather spend some extra minutes reading documentation and learning normally as I always did: Facing frustrations, getting stuck and then relieved and proud after getting through.

This is the process I love, and I rather should depend on no online service, so I can continue working normally without internet.

And for sure, this is a prerequisite for my airgapped environment.

For now, under my current circumstances and mindset, I rather get overwhelmed with problems, search at Kiwix snapshots for solutions and run ripgrep on cloned repos for keywords that solves my problems.

This is what worked for now, and this doesn't requires me to have a computer which is more expensive than all I spend in two years living in this world (despite wanting that for someday).