There are few tools that feel like a permanent uphill battle like OpenPGP, at least to me. It is a critical specification in FOSS and even so I frequently find myself banging my head against it in use cases that one would argue are basic or should work more easily. It isn’t just GnuPG, which has become a monstruous behemoth, as I will touch below, but also the whole of OpenPGP regardless of implementation used. It’s frustrating to use, to a level I would equate to the frustration of using XMPP (to this day!), but the difference being, as I said above, that OpenPGP is a critical specification that we depend on for the integrity and security of our systems.

This is a small piece of writing that will show the many trades I’m a jack of. Rather unfortunately, though, because I wish I never had to write. The Generative AI-based assistants situation isn’t about technology, resources consumption, or copyright anymore. It’s about who we think we are as a human species, what we think we deserve from ourselves, and a battle for keeping our collective and individual mental health in good shape.

So, this is my n-th attempt in writing a blog. Over the years I’ve been all over the place: I had a long streak blogging about FOSS-related topics, then I switched to more personal matters, bouncing from English to Spanish multiple times, and also trying my hand in more philosophical topics. Also, I had my ups and downs as an amateur programmer over the years, but some (two?) years ago I made the mistake of quitting everything related to development, even deleting all my repositories, because…