The old Postville Courthouse in Lincoln, Illinois, via The Library of Congress. Abraham Lincoln practiced law there from 1847 to 1859. Well, as a surprise to me, my silly little Gravatar article was posted to Hacker News. This has called a lot of attention to the post, and made for some interesting comments. The most interesting of this is the claim that I have “cognitive dissonance”: We live in a world with cognitive dissonance. We have to because if you don't you'd go insane. This article is…
Saying “Hey, watch this video that was uploaded to Facebook / Instagram / TikTok” to someone without an account on Facebook / Instagram / Tiktok is just as bad as a paywall after two sentences.
Yes, I’m still playing Wordle in 2026. According to Wordle, I’ve played 1,559 games, I win 99% of the time, my current streak is 107 days and my longest is 278. Four numbers, and they’re mostly correct. What I don’t get is anything behind them, no per-game history, no way to compare a Tuesday to a Sunday, no sense of whether I’ve actually got better at this over four years. Each day I’ve played, I’ve also shared the result to WhatsApp (a habit, not a data strategy), and it turns out that habit…
I never liked biopics movies, and for a while I couldn't quite put my finger on why. Sure, I've nitpicked about inacuracies in the few I saw that were about a topic I thought I knew something about, and I've complained about how they always focus way too much on the glamour and the drama. But I could feel there was something deeper that bothered me about them. Part of it is simply that a movie is not the same thing as a documentary. The latter is mostly concerned with facts, while the later is…
There are currently thousands of repositories on GitHub that are spreading viruses. Any of you can find these repositories, and you don’t need any special knowledge to do so. All you have to do is use the standard search function on the GitHub website.These repositories have been around for two years. GitHub has billions of dollars, a security team, and artificial intelligence. Why haven’t they solved this problem in two years?First, we’ll look at the repositories we’ve already found, identify…
The basic, free, verification badge, differs from the more familiar, paid for, Meta Verified blue badge. To qualify, applicants need to satisfy a number of requirements, including having a Facebook (FB) account that is in “good standing”. They will need to record a short video, which will be compared to selfies previously posted on their page. I don’t use FB much, but did encounter a number of people using pictures of their pet, say a cat or a dog, as an avatar. Will we then see animals with…
“Analog Maximalism” is another way to say “Digital Minimalism.” The point is to focus more on what you’re doing and less on what you’re trying to not be doing. It’s like minding the positive over the negative. The benefits of an analog lifestyle are easier to obtain this way, while avoiding a relapse to a digital lifestyle and its detriments. This idea was recently reiterated for me by an article at The Analog Family, “Fix Your Analog Life First.” The author, Katherine Martinko, talks about…
I'm fueled by my spite to write this incoherent rambling of a madman. This is highly related to my previous post, but I can't stop thinking about this so I'll make a new post. My blog anyways. Over the many past years I have just been rather tired of tech. It overrides our wants and needs to serve the corporate overlords. Sounds like bad cyberpunk writing, but sadly it's true. And it's likely going to get worse. Unless you just.. Refuse to play. This does not mean "i will sell my computer, buy…
We all learned in science class that water freezes at 0 °C or 32 °F at atmospheric pressure. But what water, exactly? Even after you distill out all the dissolved salts and minerals to get pure H2O, not all H2O is created equal – and for the most precise temperature measurements, the differences really matter. Here’s the problem: hydrogen and oxygen atoms aren’t all identical. All atoms of a single element have the same number of protons by definition, but they can have different numbers of…
So... I wanted to describe a situation I came across on the BR side of Bear, but some men here are, for lack of a better term, weirdos. This is a topic that women will likely understand, since we pick up on these things more easily, but maybe some men notice it too (and maybe choose to ignore it). Years ago, when my blog was primarily in portuguese and I used Komments on my posts, there was this guy who used to reply to me. I got curious and checked his blog, and well... if I could have blocked…
I woke early — it has been warm lately. It is strange how you can find a burst of energy at 5am, but today it came, for I decided to organise my bookshelves, sorting what books I am ready to donate to the local charity shop.I picked up books — stories — and thought about the good memories I had with them. I also thought honestly about some books that have been on my shelf for a while. Did I read this? Will I read this? Do I still want to hold onto this? In some cases the answer is yes. There…
(July)replying to the Absurd Pirate's post. The Absurd Pirate writes: I think of a friend who moves away, and that you only talk to online anymore. By all intents and purposes, they're now mostly an "online" friend. But does that really change the bond you made with that person? Is the fact that person is now on a screen for all of your communication make your friendship any less valuable? I had never thought of it that way and it makes sense. In fact, my closest friends are online friends. A…
Life Notes A two hour cycle (a very long lunch) on Wednesday, ostensibly to go and pick up our dog’s medication from the vet, but also an excuse to get out on my bike in the sunshine. Zwift (indoor) is fine but nothing beats moving! Dropped car off at the garage on Thursday morning to get a ‘clunk’ fixed. They replaced a corroded plate but they are baffled. It’s not affecting the driving, and they’ve said it’s safe so, we wait and see what happens. The Cairngorm wildfire still burns, two weeks…
Poop 1While waiting to cross an intersection today, I noticed people on the far side of the road were staring at something to my right.I looked over my shoulder and saw a man standing in the middle of the crosswalk holding a leash, with four lanes of traffic stopped either side of him, waiting for an enormous and belligerent squatting dog to poop.It was a Bernese Mountain Dog or similar, and looked like it weighed at least 50 kg. Its deposits were huge too.The light turned green. I happily…
Today I want to provide a project update on Greppr and all of the recent optimizations I have made.
The article “A Taxonomy of Omnicidal Futures Involving Artificial Intelligence” went viral. It was co-authored by Jacob Tsimerman, who, as the media has made abundantly clear, is the 2026 Fields Medal recipient–as if that somehow adds credibility to the article or grants him immunity from criticism. Despite being published on arXiv, which has a focus on more technical content, it basically reads like a LessWrong post, and I’m not sure how it got past the moderators. It shows that name…
The first time I saw Michelangelo’s David in person, I wept. Never in my life have I witnessed a more beautiful piece of content. I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Museum patrons all around me were looking up from their phones to admire David as well. Despite it being legacy content, David was so scrollstoppingly captivating that it generated stronger engagement than TikTok and Instagram combined, despite those platforms offering fresher, more personally relevant content.
Saw this on HN this morning: Em dashes are fucking amazing. Excerpt: I don’t give a shit what the “oh yeah let’s examine this piece of writing with a magnifying glass for any signs of AI” crowd thinks. I don’t give a shit that AI figured out how to produce em dashes before these online troglodytes did. Typing em dashes is not an AGI-complete problem. It’s not that difficult to produce an organic, artisanal, hand-crafted em dash — on Mac, for example, it’s simply Option + Shift + Hyphen. I…
Just saw Rei’s post bars/pubs/clubs on the recent tab and it made me chuckle. I’m almost 46, so those heady teenage days are long behind me. Here in the UK, we have a reputation when it comes to booze. We stereotypically binge drink and then bad behaviour usually follows - if any type of sport is happening at the same time (largely football!), then multiply that by 10. Over in mainland Europe, they have a more mature attitude to alcohol, along with more refined tastes. Wine instead of beer.…
On this day two years ago, either my wife or I took a photo of some tally marks so we wouldn't forget the number: What were we counting? We forgot.
I just came across the Done by Humans “movement,” which appears to similar to not by AI: both offer badges to display proudly on your human-made website after some kind of vetting process. I don’t understand the appeal of sites like these or what they offer, and I think it’s possible they represent a new way to mislead people about AI use on the web. There are three main reasons I am wary of these efforts. 1. They’re unnecessary I don’t use AI on my website: I’ve coded it all by hand and I…
Bubbles is a website built by Ben, who lives in Mülheim, Germany. It automatically collects or aggregates a list from a whole pile on independent websites. Sites built by ordinary people posting about things that interest them. Subscribers to Bubbles can then vote on individual posts causing them to ‘bubble up’ to the top of the list. Rather than explaining, let me just show you. Here is the current list.You can browse down the list and check out any of the posts that might be of interest. And…
Almost everybody In my first AMA asked the same thing: What helped you overcome burnout? The answer is simple: Bring back a sense of joy to your life. Tim Denning wrote about it in You’re born to f*cking create: If you feel stuck, the easiest way I know how is to start writing publicly. If you’ve got other creative goals, then do those. But make sure every day you are creating things and putting them out into the world to see what comes back. Make creativity your #1 priority. Burnout is…
Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place.While you’re here, a few things I’ve built: Kerouac, a writing app | Post Through It, a solo microblogging tool | Distributism.ai, my MCP platform | Laterware, all the AI news you need | Studio Self, a thought leadership agency for founders x VCs.You can buy my book Permissionless…
My greatest professional achievement is never having created a LinkedIn account.
weather: ☀️ slimy but hospitable critters: little blue damselfly, several swallowtails, many sulphurs and cabbages my birthday was over a month ago but, uh, better late than never. here's my presidential platform (besides universal healthcare debt forgiveness affordable housing public transit public education parks funding monopoly busting &c. &c., which every sane candidate will promote anyway). my vice president, should she accept, will be angelyne anyone using those LED retinal hazards some…
This spring E took down her WordPress blog and replaced it with a static website. In the past weeks she did the same for her business website (and added her own sales channel to it, with just the payment provider as third party element). Now I have static website envy. Until 2002 I had static websites, hand coded in a text editor. Still the easiest way for simple websites, I’m amazed to say. Then from 2003 I used a CMS for my blog, first Movable Type for about a decade and then WordPress from…
I'm supposed to be on a LinkedIn hiatus but I shamefully visited it yesterday to pimp a blog post (a largely pointless exercise, as it turns out). While I was on there, I couldn't help but notice the post from a founder I know well. I'm definitely curious about his new venture, so I decided to read the post despite it being much too long, but after several sentences it seemed obvious that this was AI slop. It didn't feel in any way personal, literally every sentence was load bearing, there were…
Why is this an “app”? This summer, the kids’ performing arts school are singing and dancing in a show at Disneyland. We’re all very excited, but my excitement, at least, was muted a little when I was told to install the “Travelbound” app in order to get access to the itinerary, travel arrangements, and accommodation details. Fuck that noise. This should have been a webpage. Why do you want me to install a(nother) shitty app just to tell me something that could have been a (smaller, faster, more…
