On September 7th, 2026, I published stegofacts.net, a project I've been thinking about for a long time and decided to finally take the plunge on. It started (as most things do for me) as a bad pun. I loved that steganography and stegosaurus shared a prefix. That got me thinking about all the funny things I could do by smashing the two things together. The idea of a website solely dedicated to publishing facts about stegosaurus which itself used steganography to hide some additional information was pretty natural.
Then 2023 rolled around, the project idea was still in my head gathering dust alongside everything else I've ever wanted to do, and the whole world lost its damn mind about this hot new chatbot, ChatGPT. Honestly, it's felt sort of like a fever dream ever since. I suppose part of the fever dream for me in particular could be attributed to moving to San Jose, getting engaged and then married, and buying a house. Pro tip, don't do those last two in the span of a month if you value peace of mind. Also in November 2024 that thing happened. That really didn't help me feel grounded in reality.
I have plenty more to say on my philosophy toward genAI which I'll probably get around to publishing... someday. Suffice it to say for now, I'm neither a doomer nor an advocate. I use genAI and I think as a tool it has caused (and will continue to cause) significant harm. Regardless, I have one clear thought that has quite consistently resonated loudly in my thoughts since this all started. It's a very simple thought too:
"Make good things"
I won't go so far as to say this is a universal philosophy for me, and I'm bothered by its adjacency to "make profitable things" (the line between those two feels painfully blury far more often than I'd care to admit). Nonetheless, my mind has been settled for a while now, and as such, I present (what I hope to be) a modestly "good" thing.
But Aaron, you've said so much so far and you haven't even said what it is!
Well, that's kind of because I don't even really know what it is yet. I know some things I want to do with it, like explore novel (and possibly even silly) methods of steganography, ramble on about philosophy, and expound on the dysfunction of the software industry at large. But none of that is there yet.
What is there is pretty straightforward. It's meant to be a fully 1999-browser-compatible static HTML website with the matching aesthetic for the time. The construction and content (including all "blog posts" viewable as plain text from the site proper) is 100% genAI. This is by design. Frankly, it's slop, but my intent is that it be slop with a purpose. The purpose is what lies beneath, in the steganography. To wit, this entire blog post you are reading right now (the full HTML document, rendered as of writing this post) is embedded in an image in one of the posts on the site. I leave it to you to figure out which one. It's not particularly groundbreaking as a first stab. Most off-the-shelf steganography detection tools will be able to tell you pretty quickly which one it is.
And as of writing this post, that's really all there is to it. Do I intend to do more? Absolutely! Do I know when I'll get around to it? Ehhhh...... What I can tell you is that simply the act of making the site and writing this post has done the job of resonating with that "make good things" thought. Is it really, actually good? Who knows! But it feels like something real, tangible, and possibly even enjoyable. Maybe for now, that's all it takes.