# Dirk Primbs Unprompted > Personal thoughts, essays, and notes. Written by Dirk Primbs, in the language 'en'. AI Transparency Label: EP-SN-IH-TN. Everything ideated and originally written by yours truly, LLM used for engine development and text refinement. (Label explained at https://have-a-look.at/aitags.) Every link below is a plain Markdown copy of a page; the HTML page readers see has the same URL ending in '.html' instead of '.md'. Lists are newest first. ## Posts - [Markdown Web - Yes, you read that right.](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/engine-update-markdown.md): 2026-10-16 - Dave Winer asked for a web of Markdown, Andrew Shell built a browser for it, and my engine now publishes an llms.txt and a Markdown twin of every page. - [COSMIC on Linux Mint](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/cosmic-on-linux-mint.md): 2026-10-03 - I run System76's COSMIC desktop on Linux Mint because it tiles when I want it to and floats when I don't - here is what it is, why I like it, and how to install and keep it updated on a distro that doesn't ship it. - [I Ducking Hate This!](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/i-ducking-hate-this.md): 2026-09-19 - My car, the e-scooter down the road, and my phone keyboard have all decided they know better than I do, and the swear filter is the part that finally got me writing. - [Why DevRel teams reorg every single year](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/why-devrel-teams-reorg-every-single-year.md): 2026-09-19 - Eighteen years in developer relations and not one year without an org change. The themes repeat though, and once you can name the four models the swings run between, you can usually see the next one coming. - [The glass ceiling of 1:many (and how communities break it)](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/the-glass-ceiling-of-1-many-and-how-communities-break-it.md): 2026-09-13 - Marketing scales close to infinitely. Relationships don't, and the arithmetic of why is what decides how many people your DevRel team actually needs. - [Your community isn't built from events (you've got cause and effect backwards)](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/your-community-isnt-built-from-events.md): 2026-09-12 - Active communities run a lot of events, so people assume running events creates communities. That's cause and effect backwards, and it's why so many 'communities' dry up the moment the budget stops. - [Three things made me cry in the last 24 hours](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/three-things-made-me-cry-in-the-last-24-hours.md): 2026-09-12 - An octopus, a crime novel's afterword, and a woman in Newfoundland with a box of letters - turns out it is always the kindness of strangers that takes me apart. - ["Mittäterschaft"](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/mittaeterschaft.md): 2026-09-07 - Germany voted a confirmed far-right party into power. The explanations people reach for - protest votes, media manipulation, politicians who didn't listen - turn accomplices back into victims. - [A firewall made of German](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/a-firewall-made-of-german.md): 2026-09-02 - AI-flavoured sameness makes me tune out before I have really read anything, so my personal posts now start as a draft written in German - a language my prompts never touch. - [July/August reading](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/july-august-reading.md): 2026-09-02 - Three books across July and August, all of them Canadian, two of them excellent, and one a bit all over the place. - [My blog engine now publishes podcasts](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/engine-update-podcasts.md): 2026-08-29 - The engine grew a podcast feed, a player and a migration path, because I had four shows sitting on a WordPress install I no longer wanted to maintain. - [They expected her to stay longer](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/they-expected-her-to-stay-longer.md): 2026-08-29 - Being discharged right away felt weirdly fast and frankly, we were expecting much more hand-holding than Toronto's medical system was willing to give us. - [The one test that tells you if you actually need DevRel](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/the-one-test-that-tells-you-if-you-actually-need-devrel.md): 2026-08-14 - There's a single question that separates companies that need developer relations from companies that just think they do: can developers extend your product, or only use it? - [The problem is always us](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/the-problem-is-always-us.md): 2026-08-14 - People are focused on who needs to watermark their AI content when the real problem is that we haven't learned how to validate claims on the internet. AI or not. - [Knowing Better Doesn't Help](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/knowing-better-doesnt-help.md): 2026-08-05 - Treating an AI agent like a person stops you checking its work, and that would still be a problem even if these systems turn out to have an inner life - which I get at by way of our vacuum robot, a colleague's AI intern, and an engineer who says you should never test your agents. - [My blog engine now speaks Bluesky too](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/engine-update-bluesky.md): 2026-08-04 - I taught the engine to blend Mastodon and Bluesky replies into one comment thread, and picked up local search, lighter images, and dark mode on the way. - [I Wish It Had Been 30% Shorter](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/i-wish-it-had-been-30-percent-shorter.md): 2026-07-30 - Seven books finished across June and July, three of them excellent, and the same complaint about every one that missed - it went on too long. - [DevRel is about what's good for them](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/devrel-is-about-whats-good-for-them.md): 2026-07-30 - DevRel isn't really about selling anything - it's about building a whole ecosystem so big that we can barely measure its growth because a rising tide lifts all boats. - [Isn't That Pretty](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/isn-t-that-pretty.md): 2026-07-30 - It's funny how I got so bored of taking pictures that were just 'pretty,' forcing me to learn how to make the camera show things - like light, or movement, or multiple viewpoints - that nobody could actually see. - [Where the Picture Finishes](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/where-the-picture-finishes.md): 2026-07-22 - The meaning of a photograph gets made by whoever is looking, and never quite where you would have bet. For a while that felt like being written out of my own pictures. It turns out to be the whole job: you build the occasion as well as you can and hand it over, and making it for yourself is the only way to make it worth receiving. - [The Shadow and the Refraction](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/the-shadow-and-the-refraction.md): 2026-07-21 - The argument about whether AI photography counts is old and boring; the question worth having is where a photograph gets its meaning - and whether a machine that can make meaning too quietly writes the photographer out of the conversation. The same tool points two ways, and what settles which is whether you had something to say before you opened the box. - [The Missing Screen](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/the-missing-screen.md): 2026-07-20 - Every story the camera industry tells is a claim about the picture, and most of them fall apart when you check. The gear that has actually changed anything for me changed how I behave instead, which is the part no product page can show you. - [Everything I See Is a Habit](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/everything-i-see-is-a-habit.md): 2026-07-19 - Almost everything we believe about photography arrived without ever being examined: the good light, the sharp frame, the lens that supposedly sees the way we do. What is left when you stop accepting the defaults, and why the shape of a photograph belongs to whoever is making it. - [What Are We Actually Doing Here](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/what-are-we-actually-doing-here.md): 2026-07-18 - A year of #fotogedanken, distilled into one piece: photography is a practice you do for yourself, in a world that keeps insisting it is for an audience, a platform, or a purchase. - [RAW Development Deep Dive](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/raw-development-deep-dive.md): 2026-07-17 - If you shoot anything outside of standard visible light - like deep infrared or UV - you need to know which demosaicing algorithm is actually going to save your image from turning into a colorful mess of artifacts. - [Infrared Photography, Notes for the Slightly Obsessed](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/Infrared.md): 2026-07-16 - Honestly, you can't just click through tutorials for this stuff because everything - from setting the white balance to choosing a demosaicing algorithm - requires manually overriding what the software thinks is right, which means abandoning your favorite easy-to-use program entirely. - [How AI edits my texts (or not)](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/polish-model-bakeoff-insights.md): 2026-07-16 - I ran a full comparison of nine different models - from remote giants to my local setup - and found that how finished your draft is matters way more than which model you pick, especially when privacy and speed are non-negotiable. - [My blog engine is now privacy-first](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/engine-update.md): 2026-07-15 - I rebuilt my blog engine to make sure that everything you see here is transparent, private, and free from third-party tracking. - [This smoke situation is genuinely terrifying](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/ScaryNewWorld.md): 2026-07-15 - We woke up to Ontario buried in wildfire smoke again - and all I can really do is watch it become normal and be frustrated that leaders won't act. - [Nutritional labels for the stuff you write with AI](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/aicare.md): 2026-07-14 - A small toolkit of habits for using AI honestly - tagging what it touched, owning what you ship, and setting the tool up to poke holes in your thinking instead of flattering it. - [My new tech setup actually feels like freedom](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/smartphonefree.md): 2026-07-14 - I experimented with ditching the all-in-one smartphone for specialized gadgets like smartwatches and e-ink readers to maintain modern convenience while reclaiming personal focus and time autonomy. - [From Goal Goals to Ink Stains](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/kicking-ink.md): 2026-07-13 - Soccer stars use their skin as a permanent canvas, adorning themselves with tattoos that chronicle personal milestones, legendary status, and athletic rivalries. - [Back to Static: Why I Built My Own Blog Engine (Again)](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/posts/hello_world.md): 2026-07-12 - A look at why I built a minimalist local-first static site generator powered by simple Python scripts, AI, and Markdown. ## Pages - [About](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/about.md): Who Dirk Primbs is, and what this blog is for: technology, AI ethics, philosophy, and modern living, written by a human and polished by a machine. ## Optional - [Front page](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/index.md): the newest first, page by page; every Markdown copy links back to it - [RSS feed](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/feed.xml): the 15 newest posts, full text - [Sitemap](https://unprompted.dirkprimbs.de/sitemap.xml): every HTML page