I did it!

Wednesday. April 09, 2025 - 2 mins

I did it.

It’s the one thing that web devs the world over have struggled with for all eternity.

🗑️ I let a domain name expire! 🎉

It was a cool project. A site born out of the early days of LLMs.

I’d sit down with a general topic and a quote from a Stoic philosopher. Using prompts crafted for each Stoic, I’d ask them to reply. This was structured as a question from a student to the master, giving each of them their own personal Arrian.

Yes. . . the site has disappeared into the ether, leaving only a collection of commits behind as evidence of it’s existence.

But it served its purpose. It provided an opportunity to:

Fact check the content. . . because extra quotes and context were asked for.
Fulfill a daily “do something stoic” goal
Explore a new SSG (Hugo is awesome)
Learn how to fine tune LLM output from a prompt
Base a lightning talk on the experience
Keep my domain name addiction going 🤪

Alas.

The monthly notifications from Google Analytics turned into a guilt trip that something more should be done with the site. Visitor numbers reached into the thousands a week at the end, but it felt icky to be putting generated content posing as genuine onto the web.

And, as a wise man once said:

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
— Marcus Aurelius

Distress revoked.

The daily Stoic practice has continued, but moved a tiny bit further away from the computer.

The prompts written have been rolled into a local RAG based setup that can be used to chat with the Stoics without the need for a cloud service. Importantly, instead of having random and generic quotes served up, accurate references from the books I own emerge. This allows a deeper exploration of the topic at hand, and provides an opportunity to sit in the garden and thumb through something physical.

Whilst the project might be dead, there’s a dose of Stoic wisdom coming via the upcoming HalfStack Vienna conference. Maros Kutschy has an intriguing sounding talk exploring at how you can apply a stoic mindset to your automated QAtesting.

Can’t wait for that session in September!

In the meantime, what domain have you been sitting on that’s giving you that familiar drip. . . drip. . . drip of minor distress?

Can you revoke it?

Originally featured on LinkedIn.