Ramblin' & Amblin' (2026-10-18): All right, this one's going to be a
Ramblin' & Amblin' Field Notes with Mike Hall (Staff Software Engineer) Recorded on the move: engineering observations, systems architecture, and software craftsmanship reflections.
The Interviewer
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
All right, this one's going to be a little bit more about
some of the technical stuff I've been doing lately here in
preparation for the interview series. So, like, I want to do, eventually, live streams. I want to
be able to do a live stream and share some code and work on
features to have conversations
with people, you know, myself or other people in the
community, but I have almost no time. And I don't mean that in the, oh, I'm too busy watching TV
time.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
I just mean that the space is so vast and, you know,
I've got job search right now
and things like that that take quite a bit of time, you
know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And, uh, but right now I'm doing a push using, uh, mostly
the anti-gravity Gemini, Gemini. Um, and through this, I've been able to build out OBS
templates, which I had to do a little research. I was like, hey, tool, I'm looking for what is, maybe I
used ChatGPT, but I don't remember.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
Um, but, uh, some search for, you know, one or standard
tools for open source streaming. Um, and, uh, you know, it sold me OBS. And then I said,
okay, I already learned that I could just kind of, I've
kind of got my shell set up to use, um, um, local llama CPV
. Again, I'm not trying to get into the imposter syndrome
stuff.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
It really works. It does the thing that it says it
does. But, you know, is it the best and brightest? I don't know.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
It's, it works and it does stuff for me. Um, so anyway, I, using my local, uh, setup, I'm, I, uh, I,
I, in, in my just3ws.github.io repo, uh, where I have kind
of a, my own personal, I call it my career OS. Um, uh, there is, it's kind of my knowledge base for, for
this, this, uh, archive recovery project. So I go in there and I say, okay, set up an OBS project
based on the theme in my website and, and this, uh, context
from, from my, uh, interview series.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
I want to be rewatching, um, a set of interviews and I need
to be able to, uh, stream it and you'll see, um, what it
was able to generate. And here's the thing. This is that borrowed competence
thing that I'm talking about. This is why I was on such a tip on that about, uh, DHUM,
which I'll eventually get back to.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
Um, I'm not done with that. That's going to be, uh, episode
zero. Um, and it's going to be this topic. It's going to be that the borrowed competence is that, okay
, as I've described before, when I started Hugetastic, I did
all of the, um, production.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
Let's say, uh, that's the other thing is what gets you with
imposter syndrome is sometimes you don't know the word. And I've seen that used against people who were from like a
previous generation. They just didn't know the updated word. And I'm not talking
about political woke or any of that stuff.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
I'm talking about just straight up undermining somebody in
a meeting and mocking them because like they all use the
old term for, uh, some gigaw. And, uh, and, uh, well, if you only knew that's a blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, uh, you know, and then the person who said gigaw, who
's a proud, experienced engineer is now fumbling because now
they're trying to, uh, adopt this term, which added no
value, none, no value. Uh, and, uh, and, uh, and, uh, they're undermined.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
Therefore, the person who has the wisdom and the knowledge
about how this stuff works is out. And the person who knew that the fancy marketing term is in
, if you want to know why I'm ever getting salty. That didn't happen to me, but I've, you know, been around
and, uh, um, so I'm, I'm sensitive about, uh, competence
and, uh, an awareness of when you're not like, I'm not a
competent, uh, fricking, um, AC person. Um, you know, um, you know, I, I can, I can check for, uh,
uh, uh, a leap, you know, or if something's wrong, but I'm
not going to fix that thing.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
You know, you got to know your limits. Um, you know, it's a complex society, but some people will
use the appearance of being, uh, AC, uh, expert to trick
somebody who just doesn't quite have as much context. Now, I don't, it's not even conscious. Some people, I have a shallow understanding of stuff, so
they, uh, they actually do think they know it.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
And they think that that, um, it's almost like somebody
once said, who knew that medical system, health care
systems would be so complicated? Um, yeah, no shit. And, uh, yeah, everybody, um, not everybody, we've learned
that lesson. And that's ultimately the great lesson for the anti-imp
oster cylinder, the lesson I'm trying to holler through here
, is that I, I know that I have just enough knowledge to
know about tools like FFMPEG, and that, you know, a decade
and a half ago, I had done a bunch of work.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
Usually, on the train, the Metro Union Pacific Northwest
Line, Crystal Lake to Chicago, uh, OTC, uh, the, uh, Ogilvy
Transportation Center, that was my usual working shift on
these projects as well. So, I would get on the train, lock in, and then as soon as
the train hit the station, flat, flat, flat, disembarked
last from the, from the car. Um, I optimized my time. Um, so I do know that I have that level of experience.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
I was able to power through and figure out how to cobble
together, uh, a pipeline. And I do mean that not in a, uh, self, uh, self-effacing
way of cobbling. I mean that I was working through Stack Overflow articles
and, um, and reading how a lot of people, like, did stuff. I can't remember everything right now, but I know it wasn't
that I sat down and I studied the, uh, the 10 million, um,
uh, flags and, and, and parameters you could pass to the FF
MPEG, uh, CLI.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
Um, I, it's there, it's been there in production on Vimeo
for 15 years or whatever. And, um, yeah, 15 years. Um, so I, I know that I have that level of experience with
familiarity, let's see. Um, kind of like somebody asked me if I'd done some WebRTC,
and I'm like, yeah, 15 years ago.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
Um, no, that was too long ago. I'm like, seriously? Um, the, uh. Um, I think some people just can't come miles under their
feet.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
Um, the, uh, back to OBS. Okay, so, I know enough to tell the AI that I need to be
able to start streaming about my environment. Um, it was good news that I had actually gotten upgraded to
the Golden Gate Mac OS because it had the, uh, whatever. Um, like, I had just enough awareness to know I'd have to
do some kind of loopback module to be able to record audio
from my own device.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
But, unfortunately, uh, Apple's fixed that. What I saw in the latest release when I was using the AI
tool to do this research and then go read the, uh, web page
. And then, again, again, much like the Imposter Syndrome
stuff, these things are real and they're out there. And, uh, with a few, relatively, a few short turns of, uh,
the AI tool, I was able to generate a, uh, a full, like,
streamer setup and configuration.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
And have that committed into my source code repository so
that way you can then build out and generate new episodes,
templates. And I have multiple modes and, uh, the color scheme and the
layout. I like the amount of cognitive load it took off. Again, that's the, the challenge.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
I don't know if that's good or bad is, is the loss for one
set, maybe. Um, the, uh, the thing is, it's real and I've used it. And I've used it to record audio and it worked. And then, uh, when I made a mistake, um, in a configuration
and I wasn't sure what I did wrong, I was able to explain
to me what I, I, I didn't record the audio.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
Audio from the browser. It's one of the, um, preview videos that I put out. I was, I, I was putting that one out because I was either,
I put it out or I'm never going to do this. Um, I have to accept that I'm going to look bad, um, in my
mind and it's not going to be my best performance.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
I'm not going to be as articulate. I'm going to be stressed out. And I'm going to feel it, you know, F it. Let's do it live in production.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
Um, but it made it real. It's an, an undeniably. When you look at that, um, preview video, I forget what I
called it. Again, even the whole frigging pipeline for deploying it
and managing the, uh, descriptions and titles and playlist
is, um, handled, uh, programmatically.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
And I built that harness using, um, uh, AI tools and, uh,
largely, you know, been building it up since February. But it's, it's, it's taken a lot of focus to get to this
point, building out first the, uh, transcription pipeline
system that when you go and look at the, uh, videos that I
have, excuse me, the videos I have, um, from the recovered
interviews, um, aggregating those, building out the tools
for, uh, a transcription pipeline. Um, because of work I did on Fluffle, uh, which was another
, uh, experimental work where when Whisperer came out, I, uh
, I wanted to know whether or not I'd be able to use these
tools to get far enough with my transcriptions that I could
finally have these videos transferred. Like I wanted to from the very beginning when I was going
on Fiverr and I was paying people for interviews and I was
looking at these transcription services and like, like it
being so much money.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
I don't remember. I would have had, I have a spreadsheet somewhere, but I
have a spreadsheet somewhere that says it'd be like
thousands of dollars to get all of these, um, interviews
transcribed. Uh, so the point is here is that I want to differentiate
how I approached building this from borrowed competence
because there was actual applied, um, experience. That was either I was able to leverage as part of the AI
tools.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
I had my Z shell, um, Z dots. I had my Github, uh, uh, uh, I mean my, uh, just three W's
like github.io that goes back 17 years, I think. Um, I had, um, dub dub dub work. Uh, the only thing that I didn't have a precursor to that I
could lean on for the work I built out through these AI
tools was Phelix Duel, but I'm going to do a whole lot of
episodes on that one because that is a game that I built
from scratch based off of a physical card game, but an
actual state machine that I drew out.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
And a reference implementation for the rules that I had
done on Ruby, but I just didn't quite have the time or
energy or willpower, whatever you want to call it, uh, to
write the game, um, by hand. I took a few cracks at it, but it was just having to learn
Godot or having to learn, uh, unreal engine or deciding
which one it was just, I already got. And then it was like, Oh yeah, you can use C sharp. Cool.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
Um, I'm on a Mac. Great. Um, um, you know, and Godot is, Oh great. I get to learn a new language while I'm also learning Lua
for Neo Vim.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
So I can convert that over, which I also use the AI tools
to convert that. Um, so like I'm not starting from zero here when I'm using
these tools and the tools have a seed. They're not totally, um, whole cloth from somebody's
imagination. So I don't know what the experience has been like for some
people using these tools and they're not having, um, a
positive outcome.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
And I, what I mean by positive, I mean, is that you have
some thing that you take away from it. Like you put some effort in and then you have a product
here and it's, you know, um, it's, it's permanent. Um, you know, for whatever purpose that it would have. Um, but you have an artifact and it, you got the thing.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
Um, and I also know that I'm not doing something like some
of the crazy guys, uh, that on YouTube that seem to be
doing. Um, I guess that whole lot of trillionaires running around,
um, cause they're all on YouTube telling everybody how to
become a trillionaire. Um, so I don't know what the reality is. Um, but I do know what I've been able to do.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
So when I hear about, um, when I, when I, when I think
about this in the context of that, um, borrowed competence
or, or, or, I, I'm coming at this from a point where I've
got enough familiarity where I've done in production and I
can prove it. And, um, cause it's out there. It's permanent. It's, it's, my record is there.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
So I didn't start from zero and I was able to take these
tools, at least what it felt like for me. Um, not even doing, uh, Ralphie loops or anything like that
. But, um, um, I did experiment with that a little bit, but I
liked, um, a pairing style, which is again, this is where I
come back to. I come back to the, the, the, the sound above.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
It's like where, where, what inspired me and, um, what was
I listening to that I was able to have at least the
experience I had. There's something making noise. Maybe it's Bigfoot. Oh, that's a deer.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
I think the deer wants me to leave. Because it's making noise. I never hear deers making noise. Oh no, it's rubbing its butt on the log.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
It's rubbing its butt on the log. It's rubbing its butt on the log. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
I'm sorry. Please. Please. Please.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
Oh no. It's rubbing its butt on the log. It's rubbing its butt on the log. I'm sorry.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Please. Please.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
Continue. No. Ah. I always make it awkward.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
Yeah. So, like. Okay. Now, here's where I bring it back in.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
Is that, that dehum thing. It was a time where I can talk about it. I can see that, you know, I've had some engagements where I
felt this, but I really don't feel comfortable
talking about the actual experience it's solved for that
organization because it's too much inside information. But this, in particular, is an isolated incident where I
saw something.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
I saw something where I was aware that there had been a
product. I knew these tools could do stuff, but I also knew they
could lie to you. So, when I got to the point where I was doing the sound
correction, and it was just out of annoyance. And it did something.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
I'm like. But I don't understand it. I don't. I know enough about FFmpeg and FFrobe to know how complex
the tool is and how sophisticated those settings could be.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
Yet, also that the model that builds the code is not the
model that generates the text. And that one doesn't necessitate the other's accuracy or
truthfulness. It's just generating text. And I've seen, talking to Gemini just yesterday, how I
asked for a passage from Blindsight by Peter Watts.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
And it repeatedly just made stuff up whole cloth and told
me which page it was from. It gave me chapters. It gave me citations. I have the transcript still.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
I'll figure out how to share it. But maybe I make a blog out of this or something. I don't know. Oh yeah.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
And I've also been trying to be transparent about when the
pros is AI generated versus even if it's human led marking
with provenance. But again, also leaning on the AI to be able to tell me
what configurations I need to have to be able to do this. So I know these tools are real. But how much of it was me and how much of it was the AI in
building this?
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
Did I just bring intent? Because I know what I got maps to reality. And it's real and it works. So I'll go.
Mike Hall
Host, ramblin-amblin
▶ Speaking
All right. Next episode. All right.