Skip to content

Do I Really Need AI for Automatic Dependency Updates?

Dependency updates are one of those areas where AI is often presented as an obvious win. But when you look closely, the value proposition can be surprisingly thin.

Every few months I find myself looking at a piece of automation I wrote and asking a dangerous question:

“If I deleted this today, would I miss it?”

Recently that question came up while looking at some code that uses AI to assist with commit messages for automatic dependency updates.

It’s undeniably cool. And if we’re being honest, “cool” has probably justified more engineering decisions than we’d like to admit. ✨ Somewhere, a developer is about to spend three days adding AI to a workflow that already takes five seconds, and nobody is stopping them.

When a bot updates a dependency, AI can inspect the diff, generate a polished commit message, summarize release notes, estimate risk, and even draft a pull request description. Give it another six months and it’ll probably offer unsolicited opinions about my coding style, too. Beep-boop-beep-beep. 🤖

But do I actually need any of that?
For dependency updates specifically, I’m not convinced.

The Diff Already Explains Everything

Most dependency update pull requests are boring.
That’s not a criticism. Boring is good. In fact, “boring” is one of my favorite qualities in infrastructure. Right up there with “predictable”, “consistent”, and “unlikely to trigger a sensory response.” 😌

A typical update looks like this:

- Newtonsoft.Json 13.0.2
+ Newtonsoft.Json 13.0.3

Or:

- actions/checkout@v3
+ actions/checkout@v4

The dependency changed. The version changed. The automated tests passed.
What more needs to be said?

An AI-generated commit message such as:

Update Newtonsoft.Json from 13.0.2 to 13.0.3 to incorporate the latest improvements and fixes.

is objectively more polished than:

chore: update thing

and considerably less polished than the commit messages written by developers who own more than one ergonomic keyboard. ⌨️

But it doesn’t add information.
It’s merely a longer version of the diff.

The Cost of Automating the Obvious

AI systems are not free.

Even when the direct cost is negligible, there is still operational complexity:

  • Prompt engineering
  • API keys
  • Rate limiting
  • Error handling
  • Monitoring
  • Dependency on external services
  • Additional maintenance burden

For a feature whose main purpose is generating text that developers may never read, that’s a surprisingly long list.

The irony is hard to ignore.
I’m adding dependencies to manage dependency updates.

Once an Xzibit meme accurately describes your architecture, it’s probably time for a design review. 😅
Or at least a moment of honest self-reflection and perhaps a nice cup of tea. ☕

Most Dependency Updates Require Validation, Not Summarization

The real value in dependency management isn’t explaining what changed.
It’s determining whether the change is safe.

Questions such as:

  • Did tests pass?
  • Are there breaking changes?
  • Did security vulnerabilities disappear?
  • Has runtime behavior changed?
  • Should this be rolled out gradually?

Those are useful questions.
An automatically generated paragraph of prose is not.

If I had to choose between:

  • AI-generated release summaries
  • Better test coverage

I’d take better tests every time.

Where AI Actually Helps

To be clear, I’m not arguing that AI is useless in dependency management.
There are situations where it genuinely provides value.

For example:

Large Version Jumps

Updating from:

React 17 -> React 19

is not the same as:

React 19.1.0 -> 19.1.1

That’s the difference between “let’s merge this before lunch” and “let’s spend the next three hours reading documentation for fun.” 😅

The first update may involve deprecations, migration guides, and behavioral changes spread across hundreds of pages of documentation.
Having AI summarize those changes can save time.

Dependency Investigation

When a vulnerability appears in a transitive dependency, AI can help answer questions like:

  • Why do I have this package?
  • Which component pulls it in?
  • What are my upgrade options?

That’s actual analysis.

Pull Request Triage

In environments processing hundreds of updates per week, AI can prioritize and categorize changes:

  • Security-related
  • Major version updates
  • Low-risk patch releases
  • Updates requiring manual review

Again, this is valuable because it’s helping people make decisions.

The “Because We Can” Trap

One of the easiest mistakes in engineering is automating something because it is technically possible. AI makes this temptation even stronger.

You add a model call.
The output looks impressive.
Everyone nods.
Nobody wants to ask whether the feature is genuinely useful. Which is ironic, because asking uncomfortable questions is usually how I ended up adding the feature in the first place. 😅

Six months later nobody reads the generated text, nobody remembers why it exists, and the system is carrying around a feature whose primary function is making demos more interesting.

That’s usually the moment when the dangerous question returns:

“What would happen if I deleted this?”

If the answer is “nothing,” deletion should be a serious option.

Simplicity Is a Feature

The software industry currently has a tendency to ask:

“How can we add AI to this?”

A more useful question is:

“What problem exists that AI uniquely solves?”

For routine dependency updates, I’m not sure there is much of a problem to solve.

  • A dependency bot opens a pull request.
  • The diff shows the change.
  • CI validates the result.
  • Humans review anything important.

That’s already a remarkably effective system.

The AI-generated commit message may be neat. It may even spark a ten-minute discussion about style, consistency, and aesthetics that is somehow completely unrelated to dependency management. But aesthetically pleasing is not the same thing as necessity.

And sometimes the best engineering decision is not building something new.
Sometimes it’s deleting code and discovering that nothing got worse.

Maybe Open Source Instead of Delete?

Just because I’m questioning a feature’s place in my workflow doesn’t mean the code itself has no value.

What started as an experiment in AI-generated commit messages evolved into a working GitHub Action. It takes a diff, calls an LLM, and produces a commit message that is often more polished than what most developers would write themselves.

The question isn’t whether it works. The question is whether it solves a problem I still have. For routine dependency updates, I increasingly think the answer is “not really.”

For routine dependency updates, the diff already tells the story. The generated explanation rarely influences whether I merge a change. Most of my confidence still comes from test results, release notes, and experience with the dependency itself.

But that doesn’t mean the idea is universally useless.

Some teams maintain hundreds of repositories. Some want consistent commit messages. Some value automated summaries and release notes. Others simply enjoy experimenting with AI-assisted workflows.

So rather than keeping an optional AI component embedded in a critical workflow, I have extracted it into its own repository and made it public on GitHub:

https://github.com/amedee/ai-commit-message

That has a few benefits:

  • My dependency update process stays simple.
  • The action remains available for anyone who finds it useful.
  • Future development can happen independently.
  • The project can stand on its own merits. Or fail gloriously on its own merits. Open source is wonderfully impartial that way. Besides, releasing a side project to the public is significantly cheaper than buying another keyboard, graphics card, or suspiciously expensive cardigan. 😅

In a way, open-sourcing it feels like a more honest outcome than quietly keeping it around forever. If the idea is genuinely useful, people will adopt it. If not, that’s valuable feedback too. I’ve spent enough time collecting niche interests to know that “a surprisingly specific audience of twelve people” can still be a community. 🌈

Sometimes publishing a project is the fastest way to discover whether you’ve built a product, a feature, or simply an interesting experiment.

Not because I’m convinced AI-generated commit messages are essential, but because software doesn’t have to be essential to be useful. Sometimes an experiment is worth sharing even after you’ve decided not to keep it in production.

Worst case, it becomes a small open-source artifact of a particular moment in the industry’s AI enthusiasm.

Best case, somebody finds a use for it that I never did.

A Note on How This Post Was Written

Some honest truth: was this blog post (co-)written by AI?

Yes.

I gave Copilot (don’t shoot me! I also use other Large Language Models) an abstract, a rough outline of the argument I wanted to make, and the source code of the GitHub Action discussed in this article. It generated an initial draft. Which, to be fair, is also how I approach many hobbies: start with an overwhelming amount of information and then spend hours reorganizing it until it feels right. 😅

After that, though, the process looked a lot like editing any other piece of writing. I rewrote sections, changed wording, moved paragraphs around, added examples, removed points that didn’t fit, and generally shaped the article into something that reflects my own opinion. In other words, the AI produced a draft and I spent the rest of the time refining presentation details until they felt correct. If that process sounds familiar, no further questions. ✨

I can’t escape the irony of using AI to help write a blog post that questions whether AI is needed for a particular problem.

That irony is intentional.
In fact, it reinforces the point I’m trying to make.

The problem was never “AI bad” versus “AI good”. The question is whether AI adds enough value to justify its complexity. For writing, brainstorming, editing, and turning rough ideas into a first draft, I often find that it does. For generating commit messages for routine dependency updates, I’m much less convinced.

AI helped me write this post faster.
I’m not sure it helped me review dependency updates any better.

And that distinction is precisely why this blog post exists.

Neurotypical Spectrum Disorder (NTSD)

Proposed diagnostic construct. Not recognized by any legitimate diagnostic body, though widely reinforced by social institutions.

Diagnostic Criteria

A. Persistent pattern of cognitive, emotional, and social functioning characterized by a strong preference for normative coherence, rapid closure of uncertainty, and limited tolerance for sustained depth—intellectual, experiential, or emotional—beginning in early socialization and present across multiple contexts (e.g. interpersonal relationships, workplace environments, family systems, cultural participation).

B. The pattern manifests through three (or more) of the following symptoms:

  1. Normative Rigidity
    Marked discomfort when encountering deviations from customary practices, beliefs, or emotional expressions, even when such deviations are demonstratively non-harmful or adaptive. Often expressed as “But why?” followed by silence rather than curiosity.
  2. Contextual Literalism
    Difficulty interpreting meaning, identity, or emotional communication outside their most common cultural framing; metaphor and subtext are tolerated primarily when socially standardized.
  3. Consensus-Seeking Reflex
    Habitual alignment with majority opinion, authority, or prevailing emotional norms when forming judgments, often prior to personal reflection or affective attunement.
  4. Change Aversion with Rationalization
    Resistance to novel ideas or emotional complexity, accompanied by post-hoc justifications framed as realism, pragmatism, or emotional maturity, rather than acknowledged emotional discomfort.
  5. Social Script Dependence
    Reliance on rehearsed conversational and emotional scripts (weather, productivity, polite outrage), and visible distress when interactions require unscripted vulnerability, prolonged emotional presence, or exploratory dialogue.
  6. Hierarchy Calibration Preoccupation
    Excessive attention to formal roles, relational labels, and status markers, such as job titles, relationship escalators, age-based authority, or institutional validation, with difficulty engaging others outside these frameworks as emotionally or epistemically equal.
  7. Ambiguity Intolerance
    A pronounced need to resolve uncertainty quickly—cognitively and emotionally, even at the cost of nuance. Mixed feelings, ambivalence, or unresolved emotional states may be experienced as distressing or unproductive. Questions with multiple valid answers may be experienced as irritating rather than interesting.
  8. Pathologizing the Outlier
    Tendency to interpret uncommon preferences, communication styles, atypical cognitive styles, emotional expressions, relational structures, or life choices as problems needing explanation, containment, or optimization.
  9. Empathy via Projection
    Assumption that others experience emotions in similar ways and intensities, leading to misattuned reassurance, premature advice, or minimization of divergent affective experiences, resulting in advice that begins with “If it were me…” and ends with confusion when it is, in fact, not them.
  10. Depth Avoidance in Sustained Inquiry
    Marked difficulty engaging in prolonged, high-resolution discussion of topics that extend beyond surface facts, sanctioned opinions, or immediately actionable conclusions. Deep exploration of systems, first principles, or existential implications is often curtailed.
  11. Diffuse Interest Profile
    A pattern of broad but shallow interests, with engagement driven primarily by social relevance or utility rather than intrinsic fascination. Mastery is rare; familiarity is common.
  12. Expertise Anxiety
    Discomfort in the presence of deep intellectual or emotional proficiency—either in oneself or others—leading to minimization, deflection, or reframing depth as excessive, obsessive, or impractical.
  13. Instrumental Curiosity
    Curiosity activated mainly when a topic yields immediate benefit. Curiosity pursued for its own sake may be regarded as indulgent, inefficient, or emotionally suspect.
  14. Affective Flattening in Non-Crisis Contexts
    A restricted range or shallowness of emotional experience outside socially sanctioned peaks (e.g. celebrations, emergencies). Subtle, slow-building, or internally complex emotional states may be under-recognized, quickly translated into simpler labels, or bypassed through distraction.
  15. Emotional Resolution Urgency
    A strong drive to “process,” “move on,” or “feel better” rapidly, often resulting in premature emotional closure. Emotional depth is equated with rumination rather than information.
  16. Vulnerability Time-Limiting
    Tolerance for emotional exposure is constrained by implicit time or intensity limits. Extended emotional presence—grief without deadlines, joy without justification, love without clear structure—may provoke discomfort or withdrawal.

C. Symptoms cause clinically significant impairment in adaptive curiosity, cross-cultural understanding, deep relational intimacy, sustained emotional attunement, and the capacity to remain present with complex internal states—both one’s own and others’, or collaboration with neurodivergent individuals, particularly in rapidly changing environments or in relationships requiring long-term emotional nuance.

D. The presentation is not better explained by acute stress, lack of exposure, trauma-related emotional numbing, cultural display rules alone, or temporary social conformity for situational survival (e.g. customer service roles, family holidays).

Specifiers

  • With Strong Institutional Reinforcement (e.g. corporate culture, rigid schooling)
  • With Moral Certainty Features
  • Masked Presentation (appears emotionally open but only within safe, scripted bounds)
  • Late-Onset (often following promotion to middle management)

Course and Prognosis

NTSD is typically stable across adulthood. Improvement correlates with sustained exposure to emotional complexity without forced resolution, relationships that reward presence over performance, and practices that cultivate interoceptive awareness rather than emotional efficiency. Partial remission has been observed following prolonged engagement with artists, immigrants, queer communities, altered states, long-form grief, open-source software, or toddlers asking “why” without stopping.

Differential Diagnosis

Must be distinguished from:

  • Willful ignorance (which involves effort)
  • Malice (which involves intent)
  • Burnout (which improves with rest)
  • Actual lack of information (which improves with learning)

NTSD persists despite information.

sort -u vs sort | uniq: a tiny Linux fork in the road

I recently fell into one of those algorithmic rabbit holes that only the internet can provide. The spark was a YouTube Short by @TechWithHazem: a rapid-fire terminal demo showing a neat little text-processing trick built entirely out of classic Linux tools. No frameworks, no dependencies, just pipes, filters, and decades of accumulated wisdom compressed into under two minutes.

That’s the modern paradox of Unix & Linux culture: tools older than many of us are being rediscovered through vertical videos and autoplay feeds. A generation raised on Shorts and Reels is bumping into sort, uniq, and friends, often for the first time, and asking very reasonable questions like: wait, why are there two ways to do this?

So let’s talk about one of those deceptively small choices.

The question

What’s better?

sort -u

or

sort | uniq

At first glance, they seem equivalent. Both give you sorted, unique lines of text. Both appear in scripts, blog posts, and Stack Overflow answers. Both are “correct”.

But Linux has opinions, and those opinions are usually encoded in flags.

The short answer

sort -u is almost always better.

The longer answer is where the interesting bits live.

What actually happens

sort -u tells sort to do two things at once:

  • sort the input
  • suppress duplicate lines

That’s one program, one job, one set of buffers, and one round of temporary files. Fewer processes, less data sloshing around, and fewer opportunities for your CPU to sigh quietly.

By contrast, sort | uniq is a two-step relay race. sort does the sorting, then hands everything to uniq, which removes duplicates — but only if they’re adjacent. That adjacency requirement is why the sort is mandatory in the first place.

This pipeline works because Linux tools compose beautifully. But composition has a cost: an extra process, an extra pipe, and extra I/O.

On small inputs, you’ll never notice. On large ones, sort -u usually wins on performance and simplicity.

Clarity matters too

There’s also a human factor.

When you see sort -u, the intent is explicit: “I want sorted, unique output.”
When you see sort | uniq, you have to mentally remember a historical detail: uniq only removes adjacent duplicates.

That knowledge is common among Linux people, but it’s not obvious. sort -u encodes the idea directly into the command.

When uniq still earns its keep

All that said, uniq is not obsolete. It just has a narrower, sharper purpose.

Use sort | uniq when you want things that sort -u cannot do, such as:

  • counting duplicates (uniq -c)
  • showing only duplicated lines (uniq -d)
  • showing only lines that occur once (uniq -u)

In those cases, uniq isn’t redundant — it’s the point.

A small philosophical note

This is one of those Linux moments that looks trivial but teaches a bigger lesson. Linux tools evolve. Sometimes functionality migrates inward, from pipelines into flags, because common patterns deserve first-class support.

sort -u is not “less Linuxy” than sort | uniq. It’s Linux noticing a habit and formalizing it.

The shell still lets you build LEGO castles out of pipes. It just also hands you pre-molded bricks when the shape is obvious.

The takeaway

If you just want unique, sorted lines:

sort -u

If you want insight about duplication:

sort | uniq …

Same ecosystem, different intentions.

And yes, it’s mildly delightful that a 1’30” YouTube Short can still provoke a discussion about tools designed in the 1970s. The terminal endures. The format changes. The ideas keep resurfacing — sorted, deduplicated, and ready for reuse.

25 Years of amedee.be – A Quarter Century Online 🎉

Today marks exactly 25 years since I registered amedee.be. On 12 December 2000, at 17:15 CET, my own domain officially entered the world. It feels like a different era: an internet of static pages, squealing dial-up modems, and websites you assembled yourself with HTML, stubbornness, and whatever tools you could scrape together. 🧑‍💻📟

I had websites before that—my first one must have been around 1996, hosted on university servers or one of those free hosting platforms that have long since disappeared. There is no trace of those early experiments, and that’s probably for the best. Frames, animated GIFs, questionable colour schemes… it was all part of the charm. 💾✨

But amedee.be was the moment I claimed a place on the internet that was truly mine. And not just a website: from the very beginning, I also used the domain for email, which added a level of permanence and identity that those free services never could. 📬

Over the past 25 years, I have used more content management systems than I can easily list. I started with plain static HTML. Then came a parade of platforms that now feel almost archaeological: self-written Perl scripts, TikiWiki, XOOPS, Drupal… and eventually WordPress, where the site still lives today. I’m probably forgetting a few—experience tends to blur after a quarter century online. 🗂️🕸️

Not all of that content survived. I’ve lost plenty along the way: server crashes, rushed or ill-planned CMS migrations, and the occasional period of heroic under-backing-up. I hope I’ve learned something from each of those episodes. Fortunately, parts of the site’s history can still be explored through the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive—a kind of external memory for the things I didn’t manage to preserve myself. 📉🧠📚

The hosting story is just as varied. The site spent many years at Hetzner, had a period on AWS, and has been running on DigitalOcean for about a year now. I’m sure there were other stops in between—ones I may have forgotten for good reasons. ☁️🔧

What has remained constant is this: amedee.be is my space to write, tinker, and occasionally publish something that turns out useful for someone else. A digital layer of 25 years is nothing to take lightly. It feels a bit like personal archaeology—still growing with each passing year. 🏺📝

Here’s to the next 25 years. I’m curious which tools, platforms, ideas, and inevitable mishaps I’ll encounter along the way. One thing is certain: as long as the internet exists, I’ll be here somewhere. 🚀

A Field Guide to Dance Communities

Or How I Discovered That Fusion Is… Fine, I Guess 🕺

Last night I did something new: I went fusion dancing for the first time.
Yes, fusion — that mysterious realm where dancers claim to “just feel the music,” which is usually code for nobody knows what we’re doing but we vibe anyway.
The setting: a church in Ghent.
The vibe: incense-free, spiritually confusing. ⛪

Spoiler: it was okay.
Nice to try once. Probably not my new religion.

Before anyone sharpens their pitchforks:
Lene (Kula Dance) did an absolutely brilliant job organizing this.
It was the first fusion event in Ghent, she put her whole heart into it, the vibe was warm and welcoming, and this is not a criticism of her or the atmosphere she created.
This post is purely about my personal dance preferences, which are… highly specific, let’s call it that.

But let’s zoom out. Because at this point I’ve sampled enough dance styles to write my own David Attenborough documentary, except with more sweat and fewer migratory birds. 🐦

Below: my completely subjective, highly scientific taxonomy of partner dance communities, observed in their natural habitats.

🎻 Balfolk – Home Sweet Home

Balfolk is where I grew up as a dancer — the motherland of flow, warmth, and dancing like you’re collectively auditioning for a Scandinavian fairy tale.

There’s connection, community, live music, soft embraces, swirling mazurkas, and just the right amount of emotional intimacy without anyone pretending to unlock your chakras.

Balfolk people: friendly, grounded, slightly nerdy, and dangerously good at hugs.

Verdict: My natural habitat. My comfort food. My baseline for judging all other styles. ❤️

💫 Fusion: A Beautiful Thing That Might Not Be My Thing

Fusion isn’t a dance style — it’s a philosophical suggestion.

“Take everything you’ve ever learned and… improvise.”

Fusion dancers will tell you fusion is everything.
Which, suspiciously, also means it is nothing.

It’s not a style; it’s a choose-your-own-adventure.
You take whatever dance language you know and try to merge it with someone else’s dance language, and pray the resulting dialect is mutually intelligible.

I had a fun evening, truly. It was lovely to see familiar faces, and again: Lene absolutely nailed the organization. Also a big thanks to Corentin for the music!
But for me personally, fusion sometimes has:

  • a bit too much freedom
  • a bit too little structure
  • and a wildly varying “shared vocabulary” depending on who you’re holding

One dance feels like tango in slow motion, the next like zouk without the hair flips, the next like someone attempts tai chi with interpretative enthusiasm. Mostly an exercise in guessing whether your partner is leading, following, improvising, or attempting contemporary contact improv for the first time.

Beautiful when it works. Less so when it doesn’t.
And all of that randomly in a church in Ghent on a weeknight.

Verdict: Fun to try once, but I’m not currently planning my life around it. 😅

🤸 Contact Improvisation: Gravity’s Favorite Dance Style

Contact improv deserves its own category because it’s fusion’s feral cousin.

It’s the dance style where everyone pretends it’s totally normal to roll on the floor with strangers while discussing weight sharing and listening with your skin.

Contact improv can be magical — bold, creative, playful, curious, physical, surprising, expressive.
It can also be:

  • accidentally elbowing someone in the ribs
  • getting pinned under a “creative lift” gone wrong
  • wondering why everyone else looks blissful while you’re trying not to faceplant
  • ending up in a cuddle pile you did not sign up for

It can exactly be the moment where my brain goes:

“Ah. So this is where my comfort zone ends.”

It’s partnered physics homework.
Sometimes beautiful, sometimes confusing, sometimes suspiciously close to a yoga class that escaped supervision.

I absolutely respect the dancers who dive into weight-sharing, rolling, lifting, sliding, and all that sculptural body-physics magic.
But my personal dance style is:

  • musical
  • playful
  • partner-oriented
  • rhythm-based
  • and preferably done without accidentally mounting someone like a confused koala 🐨

Verdict: Fascinating to try, excellent for body awareness, fascinating to observe, but not my go-to when I just want to dance and not reenact two otters experimenting with buoyancy. 🦦 Probably not something I’ll ever do weekly.

🪕 Contra: The Holy Grail of Joyful Chaos

Contra is basically balfolk after three coffees.
People line up, the caller shouts things, everyone spins, nobody knows who they’re dancing with and nobody cares. It’s wholesome, joyful, fast, structured, musical, social, and somehow everyone becomes instantly attractive while doing it.

Verdict: YES. Inject directly into my bloodstream. 💉

🍻 Ceilidh: Same Energy, More Shouting

Ceilidh is what you get when Contra and Guinness have a love child.
It’s rowdy, chaotic, and absolutely nobody takes themselves seriously — not even the guy wearing a kilt with questionable underwear decisions. It’s more shouting, more laughter, more giggling at your own mistakes, and occasionally someone yeeting themselves across the room.

Verdict: Also YES. My natural ecosystem.

🇧🇷 Forró: Balfolk, but Warmer

If mazurka went on Erasmus in Brazil and came back with stories of sunshine and hip movement, you’d get Forró.

Close embrace? Check.
Playfulness? Check.
Techniques that look easy until you attempt them and fall over? Check.
I’m convinced I would adore forró.

Verdict: Where are the damn lessons in Ghent? Brussel if we really have to. Asking for a friend. (The friend is me.) 😉

🕺 Lindy Hop & West Coast Swing: Fun… But the Vibe?

Both look amazing — great music, athletic energy, dynamic, cool moves, full of personality.
But sometimes the community feels a tiny bit like:

“If you’re not wearing vintage shoes and triple-stepping since birth, who even are you?”

It’s not that the dancers are bad — they’re great.
It’s just… the pretentie.

Verdict: Lovely to watch, less lovely to join.
Still looking for a group without the subtle “audition for fame-school jazz ensemble” energy.

🌊 Zouk: The Idea Pot

Zouk dancers move like water. Or like very bendy cats.
It’s sexy, flowy, and full of body isolations that make you reconsider your spine’s architecture.

I’m not planning to become a zouk person, but I am planning to steal their ideas.
Chest isolations?
Head rolls?
Wavy body movements?
Yes please. For flavour. Not for full conversion.

Verdict: Excellent expansion pack, questionable main quest.

💃 Salsa, Bachata & Friends: Respectfully… No

I tried. I really did.
I know people love them.
But the Latin socials generally radiate too much:

  • machismo
  • perfume
  • nightclub energy
  • “look at my hips” nationalism
  • and questionable gender-role nostalgia

If you love it, great.
If you’re me: no, no, absolutely not, thank you.

Verdict: iew iew nééé. 🪳
Fantastic for others. Not for me.

🍷 Tango: The Forbidden Fruit

Tango is elegant, intimate, dramatic… and the community is a whole ecosystem on its own.

There are scenes where people dance with poetic tenderness, and scenes where people glare across the room using century-old codified eyebrow signals that might accidentally summon a demon. 👀

I like tango a lot — I just need to find a community that doesn’t feel like I’m intruding on someone’s ancestral mating ritual. And where nobody hisses if your embrace is 3 mm off the sacred norm.

Verdict: Promising, if I find the right humans.

🎩 Ballroom: Elegance With a Rulebook Thicker Than a Bible

Ballroom dancers glide across the floor like aristocrats at a diplomatic gala — smooth, flawless, elegant, and somehow always looking like they can hear a string quartet even when Beyoncé is playing.

It’s beautiful. Truly.
Also: terrifying.

Ballroom is the only dance style where I’m convinced the shoes judge you.

Everything is codified — posture, frame, foot angle, when to breathe, how much you’re allowed to look at your partner before the gods of Standard strike you down with a minus-10 penalty.

The dancers?
Immaculate. Shiny. Laser-focused.
Half angel, half geometry teacher.

I admire Ballroom deeply… from a safe distance.

My internal monologue when watching it:
“Gorgeous! Stunning! Very impressive!”
My internal monologue imagining myself doing it:
“Nope. My spine wasn’t built for this. I slouch like a relaxed accordion.”

Verdict: Respect, awe, and zero practical intention of joining.
I love dancing — but I’m not ready to pledge allegiance to the International Order of Perfect Posture. 🕴️

🧘‍♂️ Ecstatic Dance / 5 Rhythms / Biodanza / Tantric Whatever

Look.
I’m trying to be polite.
But if I wanted to flail around barefoot while being spiritually judged by someone named Moonfeather, I’d just do yoga in the wrong class.

I appreciate the concept of moving freely.
I do not appreciate:

  • uninvited aura readings
  • unclear boundaries
  • workshops that smell like kombucha
  • communities where “I feel called to share” takes 20 minutes

And also: what are we doing? Therapy? Dance? Summoning a forest deity? 🧚

Verdict: Too much floaty spirituality, not enough actual dancing.
Hard pass. ✨

📝 Conclusion

I’m a simple dancer.
Give me clear structure (contra), playful chaos (ceilidh), heartfelt connection (balfolk), or Brazilian sunshine vibes (forró).

Fusion was fun to try, and I’m genuinely grateful it exists — and grateful to the people like Lene who pour time and energy into creating new dance spaces in Ghent. 🙌

But for me personally?
Fusion can stay in the category of “fun experiment,” but I won’t be selling all my worldly possessions to follow the Church of Expressive Improvisation any time soon.
I’ll stay in my natural habitat: balfolk, contra, ceilidh, and anything that combines playfulness, partnership, and structure.

If you see me in a dance hall, assume I’m there for the joy, the flow, and preferably fewer incense-burning hippies. 🕯️

Still: I’m glad I went.
Trying new things is half the adventure.
Knowing what you like is the other half.

And I’m getting pretty damn good at that. 💛

Amen.
(Fitting, since I wrote this after dancing in a church.)

🏡 Spreadsheets, Photos, and the Art of Moving Out

When you move out of a cohousing, you don’t just pack your boxes — you pack your shared life.
And in our case, that meant making an inventory of everything that lived in the house at Van Ooteghem:
Who takes what, what gets sold, and what’s destined for the containerpark.

To keep things organised (and avoid the classic “wait, whose toaster was that again?” discussion), we split the task — each person took care of one room.
I was assigned to the living room.

I made photos of every item, uploaded them to our shared Dropbox folder, and listed them neatly in a Google spreadsheet:
one column for the Dropbox URL, another for the photo itself using the IMAGE() function, like this:

=IMAGE(A2)

📸 When Dropbox meets Google Sheets

Of course, it didn’t work immediately — because Dropbox links don’t point directly to the image.
They point to a webpage that shows a preview. Google Sheets looked at that and shrugged.

A typical Dropbox link looks like this:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/abcd1234efgh5678/photo.jpg?dl=0

So I used a small trick: in my IMAGE() formula, I replaced ?dl=0 with ?raw=1, forcing Dropbox to serve the actual image file.

=IMAGE(SUBSTITUTE(A2, "?dl=0", "?raw=1"))

And suddenly, there they were — tidy little thumbnails, each safely contained within its cell.

🧩 Making it fit just right

You can fine-tune how your image appears using the optional second argument of the IMAGE() function:

=IMAGE("https://example.com/image.jpg", mode)

Where:

  • 1 – fit to cell (default)
  • 2 – stretch (fill the entire cell, may distort)
  • 3 – keep original size
  • 4 – custom size, e.g. =IMAGE("https://example.com/image.jpg", 4, 50, 50) (sets width and height in pixels)

💡 Resize the row or column if needed to make it look right.

That flexibility means you can keep your spreadsheet clean and consistent — even if your photos come in all sorts of shapes and sizes.

🧍‍♀️ The others tried it too…

My housemates loved the idea and started adding their own photos to the spreadsheet.
Except… they just pasted them in.
It looked great at first — until someone resized a row.
Then the layout turned into an abstract art project, with floating chairs and migrating coffee machines.

The moral of the story: IMAGE() behaves like cell content, while pasted images are wild creatures that roam free across your grid.

🧮 Bonus: The Excel version

If you’re more of an Excel person, there’s good news.
Recent versions of Excel 365 also support the IMAGE() function — almost identical to Google Sheets:

=IMAGE("https://www.dropbox.com/s/abcd1234efgh5678/photo.jpg?raw=1", "Fit")

If you’re still using an older version, you’ll need to insert pictures manually and set them to Move and size with cells.
Not quite as elegant, but it gets the job done.

🧹 Organised chaos, visual edition

So that’s how our farewell to Van Ooteghem turned into a tech experiment:
a spreadsheet full of URLs, formulas, furniture, and shared memories.

It’s oddly satisfying to scroll through — half practical inventory, half digital scrapbook.
Because even when you’re dismantling a home, there’s still beauty in a good system.

Phew, We Actually Moved! 🎉

After days of boxes, labels, and that one mysterious piece of furniture that no one remembers what it belongs to, we can finally say it: we’ve moved! And yes, mostly without casualties (except for a few missing screws).

The most nerve-wracking moment? Without a doubt, moving the piano. It got more attention than any other piece of furniture — and rightfully so. With a mix of brute strength, precision, and a few prayers to the gods of gravity, it’s now proudly standing in the living room.

We’ve also been officially added to the street WhatsApp group — the digital equivalent of the village well, but with emojis. It feels good to get those first friendly waves and “welcome to the neighborhood!” messages.

The house itself is slowly coming together. My IKEA PAX wardrobe is fully assembled, but the BRIMNES bed still exists mostly in theory. For now, I’m camping in style — mattress on the floor. My goal is to build one piece of furniture per day, though that might be slightly ambitious. Help is always welcome — not so much for heavy lifting, but for some body doubling and co-regulation. Just someone to sit nearby, hold a plank, and occasionally say “you’re doing great!”

There are still plenty of (banana) boxes left to unpack, but that’s part of the process. My personal mission: downsizing. Especially the books. But they won’t just be dumped at a thrift store — books are friends, and friends deserve a loving new home. 📚💚

Technically, things are running quite smoothly already: we’ve got fiber internet from Mobile Vikings, and I set up some Wi-Fi extenders and powerline adapters. Tomorrow, the electrician’s coming to service the air-conditioning units — and while he’s here, I’ll ask him to attach RJ45 connectors to the loose UTP cables that end in the fuse box. That means wired internet soon too — because nothing says “settled adult” like a stable ping.

And then there’s the garden. 🌿 Not just a tiny patch of green, but a real garden with ancient fruit trees and even a fig tree! We had a garden at the previous house too, but this one definitely feels like the deluxe upgrade. Every day I discover something new that grows, blossoms, or sneakily stings.

Ideas for cozy gatherings are already brewing. One of the first plans: living room concerts — small, warm afternoons or evenings filled with music, tea (one of us has British roots, so yes: milk included, coffee machine not required), and lovely people.

The first one will likely feature Hilde Van Belle, a (bal)folk friend who currently has a Kickstarter running for her first solo album:
👉 Hilde Van Belle – First Solo Album

I already heard her songs at the CaDansa Balfolk Festival, and I could really feel the personal emotions in her music — honest, raw, and full of heart.
You should definitely support her! 💛

The album artwork is created by another (bal)folk friend, Verena, which makes the whole project feel even more connected and personal.

Hilde (left) and Verena (right) at CaDansa
📸 Valentina Anzani

So yes: the piano’s in place, the Wi-Fi works, the garden thrives, the boxes wait patiently, and the teapot is steaming.
We’ve arrived.
Phew. We actually moved. ☕🌳📦🎶

👾 GRUB Invaders: Because Bootloaders Deserve to Have Fun Too

You know how you can make your bootloader sing a little tune?
Well… what if instead of music, you could make it play Space Invaders?

Yes, that’s a real thing.
It’s called GRUB Invaders, and it runs before your operating system even wakes up.
Because who needs Linux when you can blast aliens straight from your BIOS screen? 🚀

🎶 From Tunes to Lasers

In a previous post — “Resurrecting My Windows Partition After 4 Years 🖥️🎮” —
I fell down a delightful rabbit hole while editing my GRUB configuration.
That’s where I discovered GRUB_INIT_TUNE, spent hours turning my PC speaker into an 80s arcade machine, and learned far more about bootloader acoustics than anyone should. 😅

So naturally, the next logical step was obvious:
if GRUB can play music, surely it can play games too.
Enter: GRUB Invaders. 👾💥

🧩 What the Heck Is GRUB Invaders?

grub-invaders is a multiboot-compliant kernel game — basically, a program that GRUB can launch like it’s an OS.
Except it’s not Linux, not BSD, not anything remotely useful…
it’s a tiny Space Invaders clone that runs on bare metal.

To install it (on Ubuntu or Debian derivatives):

sudo apt install grub-invaders

Then, in GRUB’s boot menu, it’ll show up as GRUB Invaders.
Pick it, hit Enter, and bam! — no kernel, no systemd, just pew-pew-pew.
Your CPU becomes a glorified arcade cabinet. 🕹️

Image: https://libregamewiki.org/GRUB_Invaders

🛠️ How It Works

Under the hood, GRUB Invaders is a multiboot kernel image (yep, same format as Linux).
That means GRUB can load it into memory, set up registers, and jump straight into its entry point.

There’s no OS, no drivers — just BIOS interrupts, VGA mode, and a lot of clever 8-bit trickery.
Basically: the game runs in real mode, paints directly to video memory, and uses the keyboard interrupt for controls.
It’s a beautiful reminder that once upon a time, you could build a whole game in a few kilobytes.

🧮 Technical Nostalgia

Installed size?

Installed-Size: 30
Size: 8726 bytes

Yes, you read that right: under 9 KB.
That’s less than one PNG icon on your desktop.
Yet it’s fully playable — proof that programmers in the ’80s had sorcery we’ve since forgotten. 🧙‍♂️

The package is ancient but still maintained enough to live in the Ubuntu repositories:

Homepage: http://www.erikyyy.de/invaders/
Maintainer: Debian Games Team
Enhances: grub2-common

So you can still apt install it in 2025, and it just works.

🧠 Why Bother?

Because you can.

Because sometimes it’s nice to remember that your bootloader isn’t just a boring chunk of C code parsing configs.
It’s a tiny virtual machine, capable of loading kernels, playing music, and — if you’re feeling chaotic — defending the Earth from pixelated aliens before breakfast. ☕

It’s also a wonderful conversation starter at tech meetups:

“Oh, my GRUB doesn’t just boot Linux. It plays Space Invaders. What does yours do?”

⚙️ A Note on Shenanigans

Don’t worry — GRUB Invaders doesn’t modify your boot process or mess with your partitions.
It’s launched manually, like any other GRUB entry.
When you’re done, reboot, and you’re back to your normal OS.
Totally safe. (Mostly. Unless you lose track of time blasting aliens.)

🏁 TL;DR

  • grub-invaders lets you play Space Invaders in GRUB.
  • It’s under 9 KB, runs without an OS, and is somehow still in Ubuntu repos.
  • Totally useless. Totally delightful.
  • Perfect for when you want to flex your inner 8-bit gremlin.

Verhuisdag Part 1: Dozen, Dégage en Deeg! 🍕🚐📦

We hebben de sleutels nog niet, maar ik plan toch al een verhuisdag op woensdag 29 oktober. (To be confirmed, maar het komt dichterbij!)

Waar ik hulp bij kan gebruiken 💪

  • Bananendozen verhuizen — ik zorg dat het meeste op voorhand is ingepakt.
    Ruwe schatting: zo’n 30 dozen (ik heb ze niet geteld, ik leef graag gevaarlijk).
  • Demonteren en verhuizen van meubels:
    • Boekenrek (IKEA KALLAX 5×5)
    • Kleerkast
    • Bed
    • Bureau
  • Diepvries verhuizen (van de keuken op het gelijkvloers naar de kelder in het nieuwe huis).

De dozen en meubels staan nu op de 2de verdieping. Ik probeer vooraf al wat dozen naar beneden te sleuren — want trappen, ja.

Assembleren van meubels op het nieuwe adres doen we een andere dag.
Doel van de dag: niet overprikkeld geraken.

Wat ik zelf regel 🚐

Ik voorzie een kleine bestelwagen via Dégage autodelen.

Wat ik nog nodig heb 🧰❤️

  • Een elektrische schroevendraaier (voor het IKEA-spul).
  • Handige, stressbestendige mensen met een vleugje organisatietalent.
  • Enkele auto’s die over en weer kunnen rijden — zelfs al is het maar voor een paar dozen.
  • Emotionele support crew die op tijd kunnen zeggen: “Hey, pauze.”

Praktisch 📍

  • Oud adres: Ledeberg
  • Nieuw adres: tussen station Gent-Sint-Pieters en de Sterre
  • Afstand: ongeveer 4 km
    (Exacte adressen deel ik met de helpers.)

Ik maak een WhatsApp-groep voor coördinatie.

Afsluiter 🍕

Verhuisdag Part 1 eindigt met gratis pizza’s.
Want eerlijk: dozen sleuren is zwaar, maar pizza maakt alles beter.

Wil je komen helpen (met spierkracht, auto, gereedschap of goeie vibes)?
Laat iets weten — hoe meer handen, hoe minder stress!

🎵 The Secret Soundtrack of GRUB: Making Your Bootloader Sing

So, you know that feeling when you’re editing GRUB for the thousandth time, because dual-booting is apparently a lifestyle choice?
In a previous post — Resurrecting My Windows Partition After 4 Years 🖥️🎮 — I was neck-deep in grub.cfg, poking at boot entries, fixing UUIDs, and generally performing a ritual worthy of system resurrection.

While I was at it, I decided to take a closer look at all those mysterious variables lurking in /etc/default/grub.
That’s when I stumbled upon something… magical. ✨

🎶 GRUB_INIT_TUNE — Your Bootloader Has a Voice

Hidden among all the serious-sounding options like GRUB_TIMEOUT and GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT sits this gem:

# Uncomment to get a beep at grub start
#GRUB_INIT_TUNE="480 440 1"

Wait, what? GRUB can beep?
Oh, not just beep. GRUB can play a tune. 🎺

Here’s how it actually works (per the GRUB manpage):

Format:

tempo freq duration [freq duration freq duration ...]
  • tempo — The base time for all note durations, in beats per minute.
    • 60 BPM → 1 second per beat
    • 120 BPM → 0.5 seconds per beat
  • freq — The note frequency in hertz.
    • 262 = Middle C, 0 = silence
  • duration — Measured in “bars” relative to the tempo.
    • With tempo 60, 1 = 1 second, 2 = 2 seconds, etc.

So 480 440 1 is basically GRUB saying “Hello, world!” through your motherboard speaker: 0.25 seconds at 440 Hz, which is A4 in standard concert pitch as defined by ISO 16:1975.
And yes, this works even before your sound card drivers have loaded — pure, raw, BIOS-level nostalgia.

🧠 From Beep to Bop

Naturally, I couldn’t resist. One line turned into a small Python experiment, which turned into an audio preview tool, which turned into… let’s say, “bootloader performance art.”

Want to make GRUB play a polska when your system starts?
You can. It’s just a matter of string length — and a little bit of mischief. 😏

There’s technically no fixed “maximum size” for GRUB_INIT_TUNE, but remember: the bootloader runs in a very limited environment. Push it too far, and your majestic overture becomes a segmentation fault sonata.

So maybe keep it under a few kilobytes unless you enjoy debugging hex dumps at 2 AM.

🎼 How to Write a Tune That Won’t Make Your Laptop Cry

Practical rules of thumb (don’t be that person):

  • Keep the inline tune under a few kilobytes if you want it to behave predictably.
  • Hundreds to a few thousands of notes is usually fine; tens of thousands is pushing luck.
  • Each numeric value (pitch or duration) must be ≤ 65535.
  • Very long tunes simply delay the menu — that’s obnoxious for you and terrifying for anyone asking you for help.
    Keep tunes short and tasteful (or obnoxious on purpose).

🎵 Little Musical Grammar: Notes, Durations and Chords (Fake Ones)

Write notes as frequency numbers (Hz). Example: A4 = 440.

Prefer readable helpers: write a tiny script that converts D4 F#4 A4 into the numbers.

Example minimal tune:

GRUB_INIT_TUNE="480 294 1 370 1 440 1 370 1 392 1 494 1 294 1"

That’ll give you a jaunty, bouncy opener — suitable for mild neighbour complaints. 💃🎻

Chords? GRUB can’t play them simultaneously — but you can fake them by rapid time-multiplexing (cycling the chord notes quickly).
It sounds like a buzzing organ, not a symphony, but it’s delightful in small doses.

Fun fact 💾: this time-multiplexing trick isn’t new — it’s straight out of the 8-bit video game era.
Old sound chips (like those in the Commodore 64 and NES) used the same sleight of hand to make
a single channel pretend to play multiple notes at once.
If you’ve ever heard a chiptune shimmer with impossible harmonies, that’s the same magic. ✨🎮

🧰 Tools I Like (and That You Secretly Want)

If you’re not into manually counting numbers, do this:

Use a small composer script (I wrote one) that:

  • Accepts melodic notation like D4 F#4 A4 or C4+E4+G4 (chord syntax).
  • Can preview via your system audio (so you don’t have to reboot to hear it).
  • Can install the result into /etc/default/grub and run update-grub (only as sudo).

Preview before you install. Always.
Your ears will tell you if your “ode to systemd” is charming or actually offensive.

For chords, the script time-multiplexes: e.g. for a 500 ms chord and 15 ms slices,
it cycles the chord notes quickly so the ear blends them.
It’s not true polyphony, but it’s a fun trick.

(If you want the full script I iterated on: drop me a comment. But it’s more fun to leave as an exercise to the reader.)

🧮 Limits, Memory, and “How Big Before It Breaks?”

Yes, my Red Team colleague will love this paragraph — and no, I’m not going to hand over a checklist for breaking things.

Short answer: GRUB doesn’t advertise a single fixed limit for GRUB_INIT_TUNE length.

Longer answer, responsibly phrased:

  • Numeric limits: per note pitch/duration ≤ 65535 (uint16_t).
  • Tempo: can go up to uint32_t.
  • Parser & memory: the tune is tokenized at boot, so parsing buffers and allocators impose practical limits.
    Expect a few kilobytes to be safe; hundreds of kilobytes is where things get flaky.
  • Usability: if your tune is measured in minutes, you’ve already lost. Don’t be that.

If you want to test where the parser chokes, do it in a disposable VM, never on production hardware.
If you’re feeling brave, you can even audit the GRUB source for buffer sizes in your specific version. 🧩

⚙️ How to Make It Sing

Edit /etc/default/grub and add a line like this:

GRUB_INIT_TUNE="480 440 1 494 1 523 1  587 1  659 3"

Then rebuild your config:

sudo update-grub

Reboot, and bask in the glory of your new startup sound.
Your BIOS will literally play you in. 🎶

💡 Final Thoughts

GRUB_INIT_TUNE is the operating-system equivalent of a ringtone for your toaster:
ridiculously low fidelity, disproportionately satisfying,
and a perfect tiny place to inject personality into an otherwise beige boot.

Use it for a smile, not for sabotage.

And just when I thought I’d been all clever reverse-engineering GRUB beeps myself…
I discovered that someone already built a web-based GRUB tune tester!
👉 https://breadmaker.github.io/grub-tune-tester/

Yes, you can compose and preview tunes right in your browser —
no need to sacrifice your system to the gods of early boot audio.
It’s surprisingly slick.

Even better, there’s a small but lively community posting their GRUB masterpieces on Reddit and other forums.
From Mario theme beeps to Doom startup riffs, there’s something both geeky and glorious about it.
You’ll find everything from tasteful minimalist dings to full-on “someone please stop them” anthems. 🎮🎶

Boot loud, boot proud — but please boot considerate. 😄🎻💻