As I’ve mentioned before, we now live in a world where creative people have to prove they created the thing they created. Sit with that for a second, because it’s genuinely deranged. I have been writing fiction since 2014 — unpublished, because getting published is the hard part and I am bad at the hard part — and the thing that keeps me up at night isn’t the rejection. It’s that some stranger is going to read my perfectly normal writing tics, feel that they’re AI, and torpedo the whole dream…
I'm so sorry for blogging about blogging, you can skip this one but there IS a good cat photo at the end lmao As usual, there will be unrelated photos sprinkled about my post because I'm highly visual; enjoy some birds on a power line from the photo backlog! I’ve mentioned before that I've gone full hog into RSS and things like Bubbles.town with the intent of reading more blogs which, on the whole has been great! But there's been a steady increase in that space of bloggers being...how to put…
It's now been around 18 months since I ditched Chrome as my daily web browser, both on desktop and mobile. Not once have I missed it. Chrome has for a while been a joke when it comes to performance and that was a part of what led me to moving away from it. At the time I was still using my old Dell XPS which - according to Microsoft - was coming to end of life (EoL). Even though I do still use that laptop, but with Linux (Bazzite for now) Chrome was really starting to chug a bit on that machine.…
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…
Being honest, last week was a mostly uneventful one. I continued reading "The Last Continent" by Terry Pratchett. This is one I've been looking forward to for a long time and it hasn't let me down. Strewth, the parody of Australia is absolutely spot on! I played a little bit more of Firewatch on PC, but mostly got distracted with a re-implementation of my time tracking solution. Out with terminal based python scripts, in with a shiny flask interface! The goal is to completely replace Toggl with…
When you see the same ol' "happy birthday" butchered day after day, you learn to cherish the cakes that break the mold and say something truly unique. Whoah, thought that said something a little off-color for a sec!(Who else saw "Jerk?") Anyway, I've been collecting some of the better examples for ages now, and as I started scrolling through them today I realized they told a kind of story.It helps if you imagine them as a conversation between two people.And also if you're a little drunk.BEGIN!…
I occasionally come across people who call themselves “almost vegan” “practically vegan” “99% vegan” and similar descriptions. The reasons for that are usually casual in nature: They still want to enjoy grandma’s great cake, they don’t wanna cause a ruckus at the company barbecue, and when it’s pizza night, they can’t say no to a good cheese. But other than that - plantbased. And they quickly want to convey that to someone. I still want to urge others to be precise with language. We have words…
Often, when leading a singing workshop, singers will start putting chairs out or standing in a circle. It’s maybe not the way I’d planned, but I’ll usually go with it. It turns out my singers are often more capable than they realise. I’m rarely fixed on how to arrange the singers. Sometimes we’ll work in a circle, sometimes we’ll face a wall so I can put large lyric sheets up. Sometimes we’ll stand, other times we’ll sit in rows. It depends on the songs I’m teaching, the layout of the space,…
There may not have been any new art from me in the month of July, but at least I’m starting off strong in August. This one really should have been wrapped up a little bit earlier, but between enjoying my vacation and really struggling to wrap up the last 10% it took a few days extra to get it done.In the end there are still some part here and there that could have used a bit more polish, but I was getting close to the point where I really did not want to spend more time on this thing so I gave…
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…
Of course, for my first post of Blaugust, what would I be writing about other than blogging? In all seriousness though, this is far more about UI/UX and accessibility, and I think it touches on something both important and neglected by the IndieWeb community. In some webweaving circles, you'll see websites created that only work properly on a desktop screen. Sometimes this is due to coding difficulties—I've been there many times myself, media queries in CSS can be a difficult beast to tame! But…
Wombat sent me the above picture: A physical ad by Apple on a big canvas. Pictured is a person hiding their face with their iPhone, but therefore actually pointing the camera at the people seeing the ad. It says: "Safari. A browser that's actually private." and "Privacy. That's iPhone." It's accidentally perfectly demonstrating the limitations in current popular privacy discourse and movement: The fact that devices or software may claim to keep the users private, but not people in general,…
It's the final day of July, and I'm in a contemplative mood. Tomorrow begins Blaugust 2026, a fun event where bloggers are challenged to write 31 blog posts in 31 days. Will I participate? Well, every month has been Blaugust for me since November 2025, as I've written at least 23 posts every month since then. Although I haven't yet had a month where I've successfully blogged every single day, so maybe I will. What I want to talk about, though, is not blogging. At the start of the month, Dan Q.…
After Iceland, we traveled to Oslo, Norway. Summers can be hot in Atlanta, so we wanted to visit another country with cooler temps. Norway is amazing! So much natural beauty and quiet. We took a tour of the islands in Oslofjord (and learned it’s not technically a fjord because it was created via tectonic plate separation rather than glaciers). Here we learned about cabin culture in Norway: I think it’s around 80% of people either own or have access to a cabin. July is the main month for folks…
A non-exhaustive list of principles I aim to follow with my use of AI:Don't Slop Grenade. With AI it's trivial to generate multiple (even hundreds) pages of content that support literally any idea. Doing so is roughly the equivalent of a gish gallop, where you give so much (mediocre-to-bad-to-sometimes-okay) content that it's impossible for someone to effectively respond. For most things, shorter is better.Own what you produce and share. Don't make any arguments you don't understand. This is…
🤖 This post includes some LLM-derived content 🤖 I've been recently thinking about how Open Source maintenance seems to be becoming a little more a slog recently - largely with the increased amount of contributions possible with AI agents - and how it impacts being a maintainer. I'm very fortunate that my literal job is to be an Open Source project maintainer (among other things) and that it's a privilege not many others have. That being said, it still doesn't mean that undoes the amount of work…
Some books are heavy. Others have weight in them. I just finished a book of the second kind, a book I’d been meaning to read for a long time, a book I waited to buy a copy of even though my college library had it so that I could mark it freely with my pencil, a book I’d started reading yesterday. Even before I’d turned to the last page, I’d started feeling the weight of it settle into my chest, my head, my heart. Coming back to the real world to drink the evening tea, to have dinner, was…
A weird coincidence.Read more
*except that in this job market I can’t afford to be picky. I’m finally on the last week of my contract, and I wish it was over already. Why? Because my boss is a MORON! We just spent the last nine weeks building a “”””cybersecurity tool”””” that Was designed by AI Is based on a project plan that makes less sense the longer you spend reading it (because it was written by AI and my boss did not read or edit it) Already exists and only costs $800!! That last point wouldn’t be a huge deal, except…
(image courtesy of unknown artist) i miss being human. i miss the feeling of words carrying more than weight, expectations, obligations, overload. i miss the sanctity of crafting them for others back when meaning was deliberate, messy, raw, intentional, full of... itself. when it took days, weeks to sculpt thousands of words into a form in which others could share, engage, learn, and discover themselves within. by unpacking the inherently messy humanity within their creation. instead of the…
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…
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…
In the last post, I wrote about Forever Goals, which are outcomes I will always want. It’s something I can approach or maintain, not achieve. They are not SMART goals (i.e. Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound). For example, a SMART goal is phrased like this: “losing 5 pounds by the end of the year by doing 4 hours of cardio per week and tracking calories.” A Forever Goal is more like “be fit.” A Forever Goal could have a logo. It should make a good tattoo. I think a SMART…
A smart thermostat was one of the first connected devices I purchased when I started building our smart home. I wanted automatic presence detection so the thermostat could set an away mode when we leave and "we're home" mode without us having to do anything. Never mind the fact that Rachelle and I both work from home and are both homebodies. On the rare occasion that we're both away from home, the house knows it, automatically! ;) Throughout the year, I'd find myself fiddling with the set…
✨ In This Edition ✨ 📟 Short-Form Content: On the genie 🧞, its biases, and going rogue; Fake imagery for both birds and satellites. 🌞 Good News!: The EU & AI content marking; Australia & data centre energy. Edited & glitched version of an image by Fethi Benattallah on Unsplash. 📟 Short-Form ContentChatbots ("AI") You've probably heard that one of OpenAI's models went "rogue" and hacked things outside of the sandbox it was supposed to be contained in. This is somewhere between "Look at all the…
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…
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…
In 2023 I published a blog post The myth and reality of Mac OS X Snow Leopard that included links to the release notes of some Mac OS X updates. Well, let's look at the release notes for the 10.6.1 update: […] It looks like the so-called "bug fix update" itself needed a number of bug fixes. How about the 10.6.2 update? […] We're not done. Here's 10.6.3: […] And 10.6.4: Sadly, the links above now result in Page Not Found on Apple’s website. The Wayback Machine last successfully archived these…
Sponsored: This article is made possible by Pockets of Heaven, supporting quality and engaging Catholic content. What is the meaning of life? Is lasting peace possible? How can we overcome division? What should I do when I have no idea what comes next? Human beings have asked questions like these for centuries. As a fan … Continue reading Why the Teachings of Jesus Still Change the World The post Why the Teachings of Jesus Still Change the World first appeared on The Simple Catholic. The post…
I thought this was poison ivy because I'm a west coast idiot at heart We moved to our New England place in the fall of '21 so it wasn't until the following spring that these vine plants with three leaves in the pattern I'd thought was a shoe-in for poison ivy danger (which I'd never seen before, coming from the west coast) started growing in the yard...but that's when I learned that despite having oil that will fuck me up, poison ivy will never have thorns. I idly wondered what this thing was,…