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grimOS v1.1.70
(c) 19XX Elsewhere Co.

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aria.dne@grel:~/$ cat welcome.html█

Welcome

My name is Aria.DNE (she/her), and this is my personal website.

I am a professional software developer by trade. My major interest and work experience is in 3D simulation and testing automation in the robotics industry. I’ve worked extensively with Robot Operating System (ROS) as well as various 3D rendering engines including Gazebo, Unity, and to a lesser extent Unreal Engine. I’ve also designed, implemented, and maintained highly-configurable testing infrastructure and automation for robotics in 3D environments, including a suite of stressor plugins to throw wrenches into the works and see how the system recovers.

Beyond that, I’ve done my fair share of web development. I started playing around with web dev way back in the 90s in Notepad. I’ve done the whole framework dance, learned and relearned Angular, Node, Django, some React, all to end up doing good old-fashioned HTML+CSS. This website is built using the Bash Static Site Generator to use zero back-end JS, and minimal front-end JS. Just styling and markup, the way it was always meant to be. It loads fast and uses standardised specifications that are widely supported across all major browsers.

I am a strong proponent of free open-source software (FOSS) development, and believe strongly in providing good quality, openly scrutinizable software to everybody. As a result of its success, FOSS makes up the backbone of the modern economic and technological reality. As such, the labour of FOSS developers is often used by billion-dollar corporations to make even more money. If corporations and for-profit entities want to make money off of the hard work of the FOSS community, they have an obligation to pay for support when they need it. I also am an advocate for individual privacy, online and in meatspace. I don’t have anything to hide, but I also have a right to my own story and experiences. And that extends to everybody else as well.

As an autistic elder millenial, I have a strong interest in technology and software. This includes a special intellectual interest in understanding the nature of machine learning, genetic algorithms, neural networks, and (unfortunately) modern corporate “AI”, more accurately described as generative AI. This includes stable diffusion for image, video, and audio creation, as well as large language models being used to produce authentic looking and believable text. I spend a lot of time reading about and understanding what they are, how they work (or don’t work), and who is behind the tech.

I will state that I am distinctly against the global adoption of generative AI in just about any form that is being touted as revolutionary by the global rent-seeking class. They are speed-running the climate catastrophe of the entire planet in an attempt to turn personal computing and independent thought into an always-on cloud-based paid subscription service. They are doctoring their books, lobbying governments, artificially inflating the global economy, all while proselytising about an as-yet unrealised new Utopic AI God-slave that will fix all of our problems at the expense of all life but the richest and greediest. AI is trash, and I will have no part in it. This is a well-educated stance and I have no interest in debate with people who don’t know what they are talking about.

Okay, what about crafties! Creating and making in meatspace is also something I enjoy, whether it’s writing, hand-sewing, 3D printing, or basic electronics. Stay tuned to learn about some of my crafty projects. They keep me grounded in reality. I love learning new things!