Hi. I'm what you call. one of the olds.

[cottenwess]

Introduce yourself

Hi.
I'm one of the elderly millennials who seem to find themselves at a crossroads. I have spent the last twenty something years of my career life as a graphic designer, and now I'm not. I don't know what I am. I am in school, going back to become a degreed biologist. I intend on becoming a high school teacher who teaches teenagers, without an attention span, how life does its thing. And while I am in the middle of this transition, the world itself is in another great acceleration.

It accelerated a few times before. I grew up before the internet was in homes, and now it's in our hands. The evolution of the digital age has been getting faster and faster, and now we're at a point where AI is going to disrupt the structure of how society functions.

I am old, I am cynical, and I'm still aware of what Tim Berners-Lee intended the World Wide Web to be: free and open. I am tired of the endless assault on the digital commons by corporate interests and the ever increasing attempt to commodify every second of our attention.

I've been working with an ai project for a few months now on an idea I had about a dead drop message protocol; and it just kinda kept growing. so here's the ELI5:

Picture a magic wall of mailboxes run by a blindfolded grown-up who can't remember anything. You drop a locked box in someone's cubby, they pick it up with a secret handshake, and the blindfolded guy never learns who left it or who grabbed it. Every single note gets its own brand-new key, and the old key gets burned the moment you're done, so a thief who grabs today's key can't read yesterday's mail. If you want people to be able to find you, you can pin your mailbox address to your Bluesky profile, but that part's your choice. The whole point is that you could hand a snoop the entire mailroom and they'd still walk away with nothing, not because anyone promised to behave, but because there's nothing in there to find.

if you're curious, [GhostBox] if not, Hi. I'm here. I'm making other stuff too.

Links (optional)

coryottenwess.com
bluesky

Where are you in your GitHub journey?

Building my first project

And where are you going next on GitHub?

maybe making an app out of this thing?

What technical skills or projects are you working on?

heh.. I learned how to write basic in grade school, HTML and CSS in high school, and then you all went and made the internet complicated.

Got a question for us? (optional)

How many gallons of jello can you fit in a mens XL wetsuit and still fit a L man inside?