You can now hide posts by keyword 🙈 Recently Brennan wrote about [four months of using Bubbles](https://brennan.day/bubbles-town-four-months-later/), thanks Brennan! He wrote: > I'd love the ability to filter out genAI posts rather than all tech posts Which I think is a good idea. Switching Tech off in the Filter menu costs you the Linux posts, the e-ink readers and the Photoshop rants along with the AI takes, and lots of the AI writing on Bubbles is listed under Culture, Life or Politics…

Meet SadBot :) The crappiest chatbot you'll talk to in 2026, but the most authentic one. I built him in 2020 when I was 10 years old, back when AI chatbots were even crappier than the automated ones on government websites.

Blog post: https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1169/xppen-artist-12-3rd-review-on-gnulinux

Am I scrolling too fiercely or I've had relatively mixed luck with computer mice over the years. I bought a Cyborg Rat 7 when I was competitively playing Starcraft 2 during the beta, so like early-mid 2010 and I didn't need to replace it until 2021. Because I'm a weirdo who had already changed both my midi controller and my mechanical keyboard to a white color scheme, I found a white Rat 8 available once my 7 was dying and snatched it up. Changing of the guard, 2021 The black Rat 7 was a…

My gym locker requires me to have a small lock, that I carry in my backpack. After (presumably) leaving the lock unlocked in my backpack and it shuffling around, it is now closed with a different combination that the one I had previously set it up with. Since it's only 3 digits, I manually tried 000-130 and 970-999 until I gave up. Having wanted to learn lock picking for a while, I just youtube'd how to open a 3-digit lock and it was surprisingly easy. Just start with the top dial and rotate it…

We recently came across your site — the personal website of a real human being. That’s exactly the kind of real-human personal blog we built ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ for — an AI content team that keeps creating for you. Tell it what to make — newsletters, videos, podcasts, or articles — and how often; it researches fresh sources, picks what matters, and produces editable content on schedule, so posts arrive with drafts ready. Talk about emails with threatening auras. If an actual person had written this email,…

This website is, in some sense, an open call for everyone out there: “this is what I think and this is what I do, let’s connect!” This requires setting up pathways for people to reach out to me, and people want interacting to be as frictionless as possible. Here’s a list of ways to interact with my blog posts, in order of preference: Reply via email Each of my posts has a link that opens your preferred email client to send a reply via email. This is my most preferred option, because: I will get…

Here is a dialog from the movie Office Space — and just to be clear; Michael Bolton in the movie are talking about Michael Bolton the singer. Michael Bolton: Yeah, well, at least your name isn’t Michael Bolton. Samir: You know, there’s nothing wrong with that name. Michael Bolton: There *was* nothing wrong with it… until I was about twelve years old and that no-talent ass clown became famous and started winning Grammys. Samir: Hmm… well, why don’t you just go by Mike instead of Michael? Michael…

It was near the end of April when I interviewed the creator of Bubbles.town, Benjamin Behnke, and I feel as though I've been using the platform for enough time to give a more long-term review of it now. Here are some of my thoughts, and if you disagree with any please drop a comment! The Good I want to start with the positive, which is that I've discovered and continue to find new blogs on a wide variety of interesting topics thanks to Bubbles. Blogs about family genealogy, wonderful…

Part of the User Manual Series where I give some brief overviews of the media, experiences and thoughts that help make me...me. Released hourly on my 32nd birthday. Jurassic Park Dinosaurs are cool. The original released not long before I was born and has always been connected with my parents who went to see it at the time. They shared it with me when I was slightly more appropriately aged. I was terrified of the scene where the T-Rex is chasing down the jeep. I would leave the room for a…

A lot of the educators I admire in the frontend web space seem to be either bowing out or dialing back their efforts: Axel Rauschmayer, Salma Alam-Naylor, Josh W. Comeau, to name a few. Other well-known luminaries like Kent C. Dodds, Addy Osmani, Rachel Nabors, and Lydia Hallie have pivoted from talking about frontend development to talking about… well, take a wild guess. I never made a living from talking about web dev, but I do have this blog, and I’ve done conference talks and podcasts about…

Yesterday, I posted a couple toots sharing some rather heated exchanges I had with anonymous blogger Unstory, who I previously failed to interview properly. But don't worry, this was just a mere lover's spat you see, and I— Hey, wait a minute. What did Unstory write to me in his most recent email? "There is nothing better than what is it. You can't change anything. It has no meaning. Love is nonsense, it does not exist in a way that people romanticizing it. It's fake story. It's romanticized…

Stop reading now if you aren’t interested in a nuanced take on both of them Photo and text by the author I’m not usually into the would you rather game, but this one on Mastodon caught my attention. We were asked to choose which we preferred: an AI generated poster, or a poster made by hand but set in Comic Sans. Unsurprisingly (given the type of people I follow) 98% of 677 respondents opted for Comic Sans! Some reported that it was a close call. Other comments: I miss the days where Comic Sans…

I was just attending a virtual academic conference, where, frustratingly and annoyingly, 9 out of 10 sessions were about AI. But then, in one of the sessions that discussed human writing vs AI writing, I saw this slide: Human Writing (good) Machine Writing (or bad human writing) Idiosyncratic Cliched Circumlocutory Direct (in an obvious way) “Messy” Smooth and superficial Subtle (e.g. flip-flops mentioned once, in passing) Predictable Surprising Literal (“MUST WRITE ABOUT FLIP FLOPS”) Effortful…

I daily drove KDE Linux for almost a year and I liked it, but I'm also switching back to Fedora KDE. Here's my ramblings about it all. KDE Linux is the hot new Linux distro from KDE themselves. At the moment it uses Arch Linux as it's base but with heavy modifications and changes. You can read more about it on the site, but to sum up: It's an atomic/"immutable" distro that does not have any kind of package management outside of installing flatpaks. (Do note that they're epxerimenting on using…

What I write is not 100% human-written anymore. I started using LLMs to help me write better and they do wonders.

I like building things: it makes me happy. Learning and discovering things is a close second, but building is more satisfactory. Since I’m not that good at actually, you know, building things, the thrill of “building”, in my case, has mostly come from writing software. Software is one of the easiest ways to create something satisfyingly useful out of nothing. For a long time I’ve known, at some level, how much joy building gives me. [1] But it really sunk in while working on two recent hobby…

Also here's a cool unrelated photo of a chipmunk Look at this little guy. They don't know what an AI model is and they're so much better off It’s nothing short of an indictment of our society at large that Aaron Swartz, one of the co-creators of the RSS protocol (among many other things) was effectively assasinated by our legal system for “illegally” downloading about 70 gigabytes of academic articles from JSTOR - charged so excessively to be made an example of (we're talking 35 years in…

I’ve long liked Federico Viticci’s MacStories, although I’ve drifted away from it as it’s gotten more focused on AI lately. (Note: this is what writers call “foreshadowing”.) I’ve been listening to the Connected podcast he co-hosts since before it was called Connected. Federico is a man of strong opinions and, from all appearances, strong principles. In 2024, for instance, he and MacStories managing editor John Voorhees strongly called for AI regulation, writing, The trouble with the companies…

Guys this is crazy. On Monday, I dreamt that I searched up the healthiest food on google, and there it was.

Reading about HTML Day and thinking about the olden days. I know marquee is an accessibility abomination. Still fun though. The above is actually marqueeing for me, on Firefox. It might not be for you. But blink is gone. Blink however is not working. Unless the above is blinking for you. Just as well, another abomination. Everyone hates them. Imagine if, rather than using emojis to lend tone to our text, we wrapped it in tags? That seems like it could be an easy alternate universe. Like the /s…

I haven't seen an AD on YouTube in at least a decade with various forms of ad-block, most recently Adguard on my router and uBlock Origin on all of my devices.So why do people pay for YouTube premium when all of its features can be achieved for free? I acknowledge uBlock Origin has been limited on non-Firefox browsers in recent time but it isn't a challenge for those that try. On IOS, my work around is to not use the app and use the Adguard extension to block ads in browser—this option might…

So there I was, standing in the paper goods aisle of the Piggly Wiggly at 8:45 on a Tuesday evening, having a full-blown crisis over two ply versus three ply. Now, when you’re seven, you think adulthood is going to be magnificent. You imagine staying up until midnight, eating chocolate cake for breakfast, and buying whatever cool stuff you want. Getting yourself a pony, 15 cats, and a mongoose named Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. Standard kid dreams. Nobody tells you that 80% of actual adulthood is just…

It finally happened - I lost access to my stupid Microsoft account and have now lost access to all my One Drive files too. It was my fault. Well, mine and the chaotic digital mess of usernames and passwords and emails we have to keep track of in the 21st century. I won't even bother to go into the stupid details. After going through the recovery process many times and even raising a ticket, they've just said nope, and have locked the account entirely - going against their terms of service,…

Finding a better way to waste time.

This is my 8th blog post for the Blaugust 2026 community blogging project. Join me all this month for more blogging. Today I am celebrating the one-year anniversary of the next chapter of my life: retirement. I am having a great retirement. In the years approaching, I gave it a lot of thought and was prepared for it. The way I see it, I am no longer employed, but I have a job: be retired. I had an experience back around 2009 that showed me what a bad retirement could look like. It scared me,…

A day does not go by without “doom porn” about unaffordability, AI, or other issues. Just having asocial media account and following some popular accounts means you will be exposed to it, either in the feed directly, retweeted, or via “suggested/recommended content”. One can of course choose to abstain from social media, but it’s not just limited to Twitter or Facebook. This is because, as mentioned in “How the Mainstream Media Came to Sound like Zero Hedge/Info Wars,” the mainstream media has…

Sony took away digital movies that people paid for. Streaming services keep raising rates. Amazon bricked old Kindles. Sounds like the LA Clippers broke salary cap rules. Sports teams use tax payer money to build stadiums. Billionaires and VC just bought the Lakers, I guess. See also, The American Sports Plutocracy Is Bullshit. People will start turning their backs on all this. Back to buying books, borrowing movies from the library, going to local sporting events. I can see movie rental places…

I’ve been thinking lately about what happens to my online writing and photographs after I die. To be clear, at my current age I expect to last at least another 20 years. But I’ve entered the time of life where my death isn’t an abstract someday — I can see it from here. I’m not kidding myself that my work is so important that it must go into the National Archives or the Library of Congress. But my children and grandchildren might enjoy a connection to me through my work. And I have done some…