I’ve come to realize that it’s just as hard to sit down and write code as it is to write text. There’s a romantic aura around coding. When you think about it, you picture yourself sitting there, solving problems with ease and style. But when you’re actually doing it, you struggle. Small, simple things like naming variables or deciding how to structure the code become tough calls to make, at least when working on personal projects.

Lately, there have been multiple supply chain attacks targeting the npm ecosystem. I know that these types of attacks have happened in the past, but when two occur within a fairly short period of time, you have to start thinking about the viability of this way of handling dependencies.

The first attack — I don’t know if it ever got a name — but in the beginning of September (2025), Kevin Beaumont posted on Mastodon about a supply chain attack currently in the wild. The infected packages had weekly download numbers in the billions. One affected package, color-name, alone had close to 200 million downloads a week. At least 18 packages were infected with a cryptocurrency wallet drainer. npm worked hard and was able to remove the infected packages.

A few days ago I found out about something called the IndieWeb. It is, I would say, a loosely connected internet movement built on a social web. Not a social platform, but a network of websites that are able to communicate with each other.

This is nothing new. It is actually something that has existed for a while. In mid-2014 the W3C started The Social Web Working Group that grew ideas into standards such as ActivityPub, which is used in the Fediverse and Mastodon, and Webmention, to mention a few. The latter being a cornerstone for the IndieWeb’s take on the Social Web. Sometimes I’m just late to the party. You may also have heard about the Pingback protocol that was popular when blogging was hot; webmentions is an improvement on that.

The dry Italian landscape rushes by outside the train window — hills, small houses, tunnels, and power lines. We are traveling from Rome to Lake Garda. Over the last few days, we have explored the capital and all its sights: the vast museums of the Vatican, the hidden squares in the old town, and the burning sun in the Roman Forum.

I’m a fairly normal person, living a fairly normal life, doing fairly normal work. And, like many others, I think a lot about AI — how it is working and how it might potentially change our world. I am in no way an AI propagator selling the promise of effortless work, nor a doomsday skeptic who only sees problems with it. This post is in no way an attempt to sway anyone in any direction. It is merely a way for me to process some recent thoughts on the topic, and I expect to change my footing many times before we know how this ends.