Introduction Going to make a bet that you didn’t know that I was gone, and really, you don’t give a bleep. And you know what? That is perfectly fine. In fact, I’m happy if no one missed me. Want to know where I went? No? Well, okay… But I’m going to talk about it anyway. I was in the process of migrating web hosts. Oh, so now you are interested? Okay, so, I think it’s fair that we talk about hosted blogs for a bit. But not just any hosted blogs, ones that are specifically more Fediverse native…
I'm bullish on AI, but I also feel this pull to leave tech behind entirely, and I've been struggling to figure out why. This is my attempt to crystallize my feelings.
IBM training manual from 1979 When LLMs were really hitting their stride I started experimenting with them, like many others, to see where they could help me. I wanted to see how I could leverage them at work and in my free time. I’ve learned a lot since then, but I especially remember something I started doing, and that I’ve seen other people do as well: push responsibility onto the LLM. I would say things like “here’s some research Claude did” or “the agent added this function”. Also…
From the Wired story More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI ‘Literary Counterculture’: Across journalism, criticism, creative writing, and especially among compulsive LinkedIn posters, writers are converging on a set of choices that implicitly resist the trappings of AI-generated prose. The style mostly takes shape through negation, often of the obvious AI tells, like lists of three, passive voice, not x but y, and em dashes. But it also prizes idiosyncrasy as its…
I want to leave the internet. This site, reddit, my banking app, the cloud service, Youtube, my music streaming app, my email, Whatsapp, iNaturalist, pornsites, Google Maps, OSMAnd, the local DOT app. I want to forget about VPN and DNS providers. Microsoft Teams, Outlook for work. I don't want to leave the internet. Wikipedia, the learning side of Youtube, this site, informative websites, OSMAnd, iNaturalist. I want to stop spending my life in this hologram, even more now that it feels so fake…
early july i spent a couple of hours browsing top-level domains (TLDs) in search for my own “meme” domain, as some of my friends have had theirs which i always envied. for example stortissvatnet.no by @polsevev, which basically is norwegian for BigDickLake.no lol. reading up on the different TLDs i noticed how not all TLDs are easy to buy. one of the domains i was maybe thinking of getting was fe.tt, which is basically a way of saying “co.ol” in norwegian. here i learned that the .tt-domains…
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.
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…
Ankur Sethi argues that manually retyping LLM-generated code is a practical way to avoid cognitive debt. It slows you down, but helps you understand the code, catch bad suggestions, and keep a strong mental model of your codebase. Read more
In 2023, Bloomberg Businessweek asked TikTok for comment as it reported out a story about users who were recommended videos about self-harm and suicide, particularly teenagers like Chase Nasca. It is a difficult read. As a result of this press outreach, TikTok analyzed Nasca’s account and why he was given so much of this material that it likely played a role when he took his own life at just sixteen years old. Olivia Carville, of Bloomberg Businessweek, recently obtained that internal report:…
I was just randomly looking through some medieval books, as one does, when I discovered that a bunch of these French books for some reason had lots of pictures of bridges with people going over them.They’re so funny and fascinating to me, the art seems to depict regular, common people during their daily activities.No heroes, no royals, no adventures, just another tuesday in the past.So many details, so much to see.I became obsessed, so I made a thread of it on social media and now I turn that…
Andreas posted some interesting thoughts, wondering if maybe we are too paranoid when it comes to AI slop. Please, go read his words first, I only intend to add to the conversation here, not to put him in an uncomfortable position or something, we are friends and everything after all—even if he barely mentions my posts on his Link Dumps… 😭 As someone who posts to the internet and exposes a fair chunk of my thoughts out in the open for everyone to read. It is undeniable that, as free as we are,…
Yesterday, Coyote wrote about the problems with Bubbles.town and more generally, feed aggregators that sort by popular vote. Coyote uses the metaphor of nature here—Bubbles being a “bioindicator for the local ecosystem” and its “popularity [telling] us about the state of things in its region of the blogosphere?” Coyote isn't the first to reach for the natural world to describe how we read and write online. A decade earlier, Mike Caulfield described two competing modes of the web as the garden…
After visiting the National Crafts Museum, we also stopped off at Kanazawa’s Kenroku-en garden. I’m kind of a bird person, so I was more on the lookout for some new birds. Although luck wasn’t really on my side, I did spot a couple flitting about! The first was what I think is a varied tit - It seems the last time I saw it at the Shinjuku Gyoen I only got a photo of its butt, so it’s harder than expected to get a good photo of it. The other was the Japanese tit which is a fairly common guy. At…
I believe the worst thing we've ever been told as creatives is that we have to 'pick a niche'. You have to optimise and focus on that one group of people... Your group of people, like there's this magical circle of people waiting for your creativity to welcome you into their exclusive club. Visibility is important. I understand that and you want people to care about your work, I understand that too. But picking a lane is the most disgusting advice to have ever come into the creative space. And…
There is currently a number from Statcounter making the rounds that Linux has surpassed 10% market share in North America. I would not necessarily believe that number – and yet I think there are some really good signs for Linux on the desktop becoming more and more relevant. Now, I am not saying to not trust Statcounter... well, that is actually exactly what I am saying. They are known for having abysmal reporting (such as the macOS and OSX market share shown in one of the graphs). But even…
"Thank you for using RSS." "I love RSS." A badge in the footer. A little heart, a blogroll. Community. Belonging. I love TCP/IP. I love HTTP 1.1. I love DNS resolution. Where is my badge. Where is my directory. Nobody forms a tribe around plumbing. You use it. You don't announce it. You don't put a sticker in your footer that says "I love packet switching." RSS is plumbing. A transport format. XML with angle brackets and escaped HTML and a version attribute and the CDATA hack. You don't love…
The Town Square Gazette has completed its first census and assembled the results into several charts. The clerks insist that all 65,289 recorded visits were counted individually, by hand, using three very small pencils, all now exhausted. They report sore wrists and a growing suspicion that spreadsheets were invented for a reason. Management has declined to correct them while they recover. This was TownSquare's first full calendar month in the world. June had been a blur of launch day, Hacker…
On AI and an all-encompassing role in modern web development.
Why does no one ever read the end of the story? Or if they do, why don’t they pay attention? Ever since Mary Shelley gave us Frankenstein, laying out a moral of a story proving that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should, there seems to be a preponderance of ignorance running alongside the obvious capabilities our current day Dr. Frankensteins possess. It feels like the story is playing on an endless Youtube Short or TikTok or Reel without ever reaching the end and the story’s point. The…
This is a Blaugust 2026 blog post. I’m now in my third term of music theory. Back in the first term, I created a handy reference sheet for major and minor scales. I just added a new ref sheet for what’s called applied (or secondary) chords. A Bit of Music Theory (If you know basic music theory, go ahead and skip this part.) First, listen to this music snippet: Here is the music score for what you just heard: If you enumerate the C major scale – C-D-E-F-G-A-B – you see that C is the first note.…
My son turns 5 in October. He starts school in a couple of weeks. He has a tablet — Amazon Fire for Kids — and knows how to flick around the Photos app on my phone. Yet I’m already thinking about what the internet will look like when he’s old enough to be online without me hovering nearby. Will it be a place he can explore, or a place locked away behind layers of verification and proof? He is growing up with technology that, at times, still feels fantastically magical to me. I remember having…
Ethan Gach, Kotaku: It’s been almost a month since Sony announced the end of PlayStation discs for new games starting in 2028, and a loud contingent of angry fans has continued to criticize the company for going all-digital. Asked about the ongoing backlash during its latest earnings call, Sony said it understands why people have strong feelings about physical games, but it’s still going to move forward with getting rid of them. “There are various reasons we made this decision, the biggest…
Whenever someone asks what your favorite quote is, they’re setting a trap. There’s invisible pressure in that question. You’re supposed to say something profound. Something in Latin, or from a guy with a beard in the 1800s that proves you’ve spent serious time reflecting on the human condition. You’re supposed to sound like a person who hikes up mountains just to think. I don’t have one of those. My favorite quote is: “Life is short. Eat dessert first.” – often attributed to Jacques Torres.…
First, to recap The newsstand cover of Loadstar #1. Way back in 1984, having had success with their first product Softdisk, the nascent Softdisk Publishing released the first issue of Loadstar, a “magazine-on-disk” for Commodore 64 microcomputers. Softdisk is mostly known these days as being the former workplace of several people who would go on to found Id Software, creators of Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake. Softdisk published, as the Id guys’ last work for the company,…
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I love reading. I caught the bug as a middle-schooler when I got caught skipping school, and as punishment, I had to read The Chronicles of Amber and do a book report about it. Even today, opening a book and fanning the pages to get the paper smell activates very fond memories and emotions. I remember a time before e-readers came out. I always thought reading on one seemed very futuristic. In military sci-fi books, characters are reading on their data pads, and reading on an e-reader makes me…
In “Why Sheep Need Pigs in Sheepdog’s Clothing,” Robin Hanson asked three LLMs to score how much status, social skills, and judgment matter for influence across five domains. Judgment came back higher than his argument wanted. So he asked again. The second prompt told the models to focus on “who is selected or is influential in the short run,” and — read this twice — to “consider if they have any concrete basis for seeing judgment as mattering more re intellectuals and innovation.” Judgment…
My Mom, Daisy Schwartz Burk (1919-1981), was born a few minutes after her twin sister, Dorothy Schwartz (1919-2001). Their mother made most of their clothes and usually dressed them alike, as shown in this photo taken at their elementary school in the Bronx, New York. Dorothy is on the left, slightly taller and bigger than Daisy, standing on the right.The girls were told they were fraternal twins, but they sure looked a lot--a lot!--alike.Fast-forward to my Mom's first-born children, me and my…
While I mainly used the PDF reader integrated into Firefox on Android to view PDFs on my phone so far, I now have a new favorite PDF reader. What bugged me about the reader in Firefox was especially the performance when viewing big PDFs like newspapers. It always took a second or so to rerender when zooming or going fast between pages. Not so with MJ PDF. The app, which isn’t available on the Play Store but is available using some alternative download methods and is fully open-source, is…
