Posts in Writing (20 found)
Michael Lynch Yesterday

Refactoring English: Month 19

Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and founder of small, indie tech businesses. I’m currently working on a book called Refactoring English: Effective Writing for Software Developers . Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my book and my professional life overall. At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: I improved the website a bit, but it could use more polish. I adapted my chapter on design docs to a free excerpt . It did well on Lobsters and Reddit , but it flopped on Hacker News. I was surprised at how positive the reaction was to the design docs chapter. Generally, when I talk to developers about design docs, their main reaction is that they hate design docs and everything about them. The comments on my post were refreshingly supportive of design docs in general and my recommendations in particular. I got stuck for a while on the great AI blockade , but I pushed through by thinking more critically about splitting up large features and being less precious about code quality. In this case, done is better than perfect. June was the best month of book revenue since the initial crowdfunding launch. The increase in visitors was because of my excerpt about design docs . For the last few months, the Refactoring English website has listed my book as almost complete in early access. I was curious to see what the sales impact would be of going from an almost complete book to a fully complete book, so I looked at weekly sales: Marking the book as complete didn’t have an obvious impact on weekly sales, but what if I look at the daily averages? Okay, so there was a slight increase after I marked the book as complete. I was also curious whether Americans, in particular, bought at higher rates after I finished the book. I get email notifications every time someone purchases the book, and it seemed like more of my sales were from customers paying the US price, but I hadn’t measured carefully. I checked the data to see if that was true: Interesting! Completing the book had no impact on sales for customers purchasing with regional pricing, but customers purchasing in USD purchased at a 20% higher rate in the three weeks after the book was complete. I didn’t include sales after I published my latest excerpt because that obviously changes the numbers a lot, so let me treat that as its own category: But that’s always a little skewed because Americans make up the largest share of my readers. What if I normalize revenue per visitor? Oh, that’s a switcheroo. By normalizing per visitor, it flips the story. Now, it’s the Americans that buy at the same rate for a finished vs. unfinished book. The readers outside the US are the ones spending about 20% more per visitor on the completed book. I’m not sure how to use this information, but it did satisfy my curiosity. I’ve asked readers for feedback about my book in the past, and some readers gave enthusiastic feedback, but they were a small minority. I thought it would be fun and helpful to make a web-based feedback app that allows readers to leave notes as they read the book. It seemed like something I could knock out in a week or two. And now, two short… months later, I’ve got it up and running! A demo of my book feedback tool, where readers can leave me feedback directly in the book, and I can reply. My feedback tool has only been live for a few days, but it does seem to encourage readers to give more feedback. One reader just finished the book and cited the feedback app as one of his favorite parts of the experience, so that was neat. About once a year, I ask myself: where does all my time go? This question comes up for me whenever I’m focused on a project, but it’s not progressing as quickly as I expect. Here’s me asking myself this question a few times over the years: This time, I thought, “Maybe I should use a time tracking tool.” About 15 years ago, I tried a time tracking tool called RescueTime. I didn’t find it that useful, but I thought maybe I’d keep at it for a few weeks and see what happened. Then, I realized I was letting a random company collect data about every window that appeared on my screen, and I promptly uninstalled RescueTime. I was wishing for an open-source version of RescueTime, when I thought, “Wait, there probably is one.” And there is. It’s called ActivityWatch . It’s open-source and privacy-first. It records all your window and browsing activity, but the data all stays local to your machine. The problem is that ActivityWatch is way less polished than RescueTime. I couldn’t understand at all what the timeline was trying to show me: I couldn’t understand the timeline in the official ActivityWatch web interface. You’re supposed to assign rules to tell ActivityWatch how to categorize your activities, but I found that UI difficult to use as well: I found the categorization in the official ActivityWatch web UI difficult to use. I was about to give up on ActivityWatch, and then I thought, “Well, the data collection part probably works. What if I vibecode my own frontend?” So, I did , and it was pretty easy. I’m starting with a command-line tool, but I plan to expand it to a web app. To use my custom ActivityWatch frontend, I create a config file to categorize activities based on app name, window title, and/or URL: And then the output looks like this: So far, the data is interesting, but the biggest challenge is that it’s hard to categorize all of my activities automatically. For example, I can add a category for browsing Wikipedia, but am I doing it as part of legitimate work on my book? Or did I just go down a rabbit hole, and I’m suddenly reading about inventors killed by their own inventions ? Refactoring English had its second-best month of sales. I examine my sales numbers to see whether people are more likely to purchase a complete book as opposed to an almost-complete draft. I completed my book feedback tool. I’m trying a new tool to track my time. Result : Spent about three hours improving the website Result : Got 17.5k unique readers. Result : The tool is up and running. Finished the Refactoring English feedback tool. Made fixes to the Refactoring English ebook for consistency and EPUB compatibility. Made a demo video for Little Moments . I’m quite proud of the silly photos in this. Customers don’t care as much as I’d expect about the difference between a 100% complete book and an almost-complete book. Readers do purchase the finished book at higher rates, but the effect is pretty small when you control for number of website visitors. Pitch to 5 podcasts to talk about Refactoring English . Attract 30k unique readers to the Refactoring English website. Wrap up early access, and declare the 1.0 release of my book.

books Books writing Writing business Business
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Manuel Moreale 2 days ago

On planting seeds

Matt asked me a question recently about the end of my People and Blogs run. The question was if I always thought I was going to hand it over at some point, and it’s an interesting question worth expanding on, which is why I told him I was going to write a post about it, rather than simply answering via email. I started and ended more online projects than I can remember at this point. I bought a dozen domain names, coded way too many sites, only to have them all inevitably bite the dust, sometimes months later, sometimes years later. But I don’t think I ever started a project with a set deadline in mind. All the projects were open-ended, always. Back in September 2021, I posted about the shutting down of my thegallery.io , a site I ran for almost 7 years, and in that post, I wrote Once the passion is gone, it is gone. There's no point in dragging things until you reach some random date in the future. When I started People and Blogs, the plan was to run it for a single year: 52 interviews, that was the plan. But then the end arrived, and people enjoyed the series, so I kept going. But at some point, I crossed the imaginary line that separates doing something because I enjoy it, and doing something because other people enjoy it. If you do something long enough, you almost always end up inevitably crossing that line. There are exceptions—there are always exceptions—but that’s what my experience taught me. And it’s weird how the process of realising that something is done works. Because at first I was simply carried forward by the momentum, by the established routines. I was sending emails, posting updates, and scheduling interviews. But the moment I considered the possibility of stopping, it was almost as if a seed got planted in the depths of my brain. This process kinda reminds me of the plot of the movie Inception. And once that seed was planted, it’s incredibly hard to eliminate. And it’s almost as if deep down I already knew the right thing to do but was too busy dealing with the routine to realise it. So to answer the original question, no, I didn’t know from the get go I was going to pass the series to someone else. But a part of me enjoys this process of seeing projects changing hands. I was happy to receive blogroll.org from Ray , and I was equally as happy to hand over peopleandblogs.com to Zach . It’s one of the many good qualities of this corner of the web I love to inhabit. The lesson I learned this time around is that projects need an endpoint! I’ll keep that in mind for the next time I inevitably start something new in a few years from now. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Connect via email :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month

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Kev Quirk 4 days ago

📝 2026-07-12 10:08: It's a beautiful morning here in North Wales. My wife has taken our youngest to...

It's a beautiful morning here in North Wales. My wife has taken our youngest to his cricket match, and our oldest is upstairs playing with his Lego out of the heat. Me? I'm sitting in the sunroom, listening to the goats and chickens, with a coffee and book. Perfect Sunday morning. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment .

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Manuel Moreale 6 days ago

Downsizing

With the 150th interview of People and Blogs now live, it’s officially time to downsize my online presence again. My digital life follows a somewhat regular rhythm and I alternate through phases of expansion, where I buy domain names, ship new projects, start newsletters, and chase a million ideas, and phases of contraction, where everything happens in reverse: domains are left to expire, projects are archived, newsletters are deleted, services are cancelled. And my recent decoupling from the web was the beginning of one of these downsizing phases. The Dealgorithmed newsletter has been deleted; the domain is not going to be renewed, and it will expire later in the year. My From the Summit newsletter and my personal newsletter have been merged into a single new newsletter called “ Thoughts and Walks ”. If you were already subscribed to one of my newsletters, you can manage your preferences from the Buttondown’s Portal and decide what type of content you want to receive. I'll write a more in depth post about my plans for the newsletter. The only project that has survived the cut—aside from this blog—is blogroll.org, and that is not going anywhere anytime soon because there are things I want to add to that site. But more on that at a later time. Decluttering is fun! It's a nice mental exercise to delete stuff and become lighter again. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

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Kev Quirk 6 days ago

📝 2026-07-10 09:19: I have just eaten a GIANT bowl of granola, fresh fruit, Greek yoghurt, and home...

I have just eaten a GIANT bowl of granola, fresh fruit, Greek yoghurt, and home grown honey (by one of our neighbours). I have zero regrets, but I may skip lunch today. 🤣 Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment .

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neilzone 1 weeks ago

Holiday reading, mostly from Standard eBooks

Sandra and I have had this week off, and one of the things I wanted to do was to catch up on my reading. All bar one so far has been from Standard eBooks . From Kobo , I enjoyed this account of someone who claims to have worked for MI5 (I’ve no reason to doubt this, but, well, who knows) carrying out operational (i.e. on street / in car) human surveillance. How much is true, how much is hyperbole, I don’t know, but it made for an interesting, often challenging, read. I finished the book - perhaps as the author had intended - with a question mark as to his suitability for the role. A classic, which I last read many years ago, “The Call of the Wild” is a pretty brutal book about the life of (fictional?) dog in north America during the gold rush. I suspect that there are various parallels with humankind, in terms of the way in which different people treat the dog, and the dog’s move from bored domestic comfort to a wild animal, but frankly - animal abuse aside - it was just a good, fun, and short book. I have read “Jurassic Park” before (better than the film, IMHO, and I think that the film is superb), but for some reason, I had not read “The Lost World” before. The story is, in essence, about some privileged white men exploring a dinosaur-laden plateau. The frankly appalling treatment by white men of the indigenous population seems to be a theme of the books I’ve been reading this week, perhaps because of the prevalent attitudes of the time in which they were written. If you ever wanted to read “Jurassic Park” in somewhat older English - which, I must admit, I find a joy to read - this is worth a look. I jumped in at book two of the series - Allan Quatermain Stories - rather than with “King Solomon’s Mines” . I should probably rectify that. The book is, in essence, a series of stories reifying a hunter, Allan Quatermain, and his adventures in “unexplored” Africa. Basically, he shoots a lot of animals, supported by a cast of indigenous servants. My goodness, I found “The Last of the Mohicans” incredibly tedious and long-winded. I should probably stick with it, as I like the sound of the precis, but still, the 20 or so pages that I read were just hard work.

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A Working Library 1 weeks ago

Hungrier than before

Near the end of The Tombs of Atuan, the wizard Ged is in the desert with a young woman, Tenar. They have escaped a great evil and are tired, footsore, hungry. They have no food and little water and are a day’s walk from either. Tenar, having seen some of Ged’s magic, asks if he can do something about their predicament: “Can you find food for us?” she asked, rather vaguely and timidly. “Hunting takes time, and weapons.” “I meant, with, you know, spells.” “I can call a rabbit,” he said, poking the fire with a twisted stick of juniper. “The rabbits are coming out of their holes all around us, now. Evening’s their time. I could call one by name, and he’d come. But would you catch and skin and broil a rabbit that you’d called to you thus? Perhaps if you were starving. But it would be a breaking of trust, I think.” “Yes. I thought, perhaps you could just…” “Summon up a supper,” he said. “Oh, I could. On golden plates, if you like. But that’s illusion, and when you eat illusions you end up hungrier than before.” Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan , page 155 Is this not precisely what it’s like to read or watch or listen to slop? What you read isn’t really writing or drawing or art—it isn’t the creation of a mind reaching for the world—but illusion. And it’s not only AI, of course. A good deal of commercial content is more or less the same, books and movies and music created by marketing teams with quantified audience strategies but no fucking soul to speak of. AI accelerates that production process, makes it slicker and smoother, makes the illusion seem more real. Makes ever more of it, at greater and greater scale, until you come to believe there is nothing else out there. But it remains a deception. You think you’ve had your full but all the while you’re starving. View this post on the web , reply via email , or become a supporter .

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Sean Goedecke 1 weeks ago

Blog about things you don't understand yet

Every post I publish represents at least two things I’ve learned: the thing that prompted me to write the post, and the thing I learned in the course of writing it. If I don’t learn anything new while I’m writing, it’s not interesting enough to publish. Typically I learn way more than two things. For instance, in my o3 geoguessr post, I started out with the idea that most AI prompts probably don’t work, and I ended up learning that newer OpenAI models have lost o3’s ability to geolocate. That’s interesting! In my most recent post on C2PA , I started out with the idea that C2PA requires near-universal adoption, but I learned a ton of things about PKI, managing private keys on local devices, how C2PA actually works, and so on. In my post on the Luddites , I started out with the idea that the Luddite movement was fundamentally decentralized, but ended up fascinated by Luddite culture (which was far more elitist, misogynist, and violent than the pop-Luddism books describe). I could do this for every single post on the blog. I think the core reason this works is that every single one of my blog posts argues a point . I never publish a post that just gives some scattered thoughts on a topic, or a post that only says “yes, I agree with this other article”. If I write a draft that nobody sensible could disagree with, I scrap the draft. Making sure that everything I write is at least minimally controversial is a forcing function: it forces me to think about what the most interesting part of my position is, and it forces me to do enough research to defend it against the obvious criticisms. This is contrary to a lot of advice I read about blogging, which encourages the aspiring blogger to treat their posts as a form of unstructured self-expression. If unstructured self-expression is what you want to do, that’s cool. The point of having a blog is that you get to write what you want. However, this advice isn’t as helpful as it sounds. Before I was in tech, I was a philosophy grad student. But before that , I was a poet. One thing you learn when you try to write poetry is that it is way easier to write to a restrictive structure than it is to simply “write what you feel”. This should be obvious when you actually think about it. The task of a poet is to repeatedly choose the next word. Writing to a structure (typically rhyme or meter) narrows that choice to a small set of words, instead of the entire English language. It’s the same with blogging. Forcing yourself to write about specific, potentially-controversial points makes consistently writing easier, not harder. Writing is the best way to think clearly about a topic. It’s easy to believe you understand something when you’re just turning it over in your head. When you have to condense that down into words, you find out exactly how much you do or don’t understand. I am constantly having moments where I type something, stop myself, and think “wait, that can’t actually be right”, or “is that really true?” By the time I write my way to the end of the post, I’m usually thinking so much more clearly about the topic that my conclusion paragraph is way better than my introduction. In fact, I’ve picked up the habit of going back and immediately rewriting the first paragraph as part of my first-draft process, because I know I’m going to end up doing it anyway. I also change my mind a lot while I write. Here are a bunch of examples of posts where I began writing them with the opposite opinion to the one that eventually made it into the post. I think this is a good sign, and I hope I never stop doing it. You should be researching and thinking about every post you write, and that means you should frequently learn new things that change your mind. Because of all this, I deliberately choose to write blog posts about things I don’t yet quite understand but would like to, like LLM steering, Stripe’s Tempo blockchain, C2PA and watermarking , space cooling , interaction models , LLM inference internals , and so on. This is great for me, because I learn a lot. Is it great for my readers? I sometimes worry that I should only be writing about areas I already know very well, like tech company dynamics or working in large codebases , rather than presenting myself as an authority on fields I’m actually still learning. Should I let historians of the Luddites write about Luddism, Web3 engineers write about blockchains, and so on? I think this is acceptable for three reasons. First, it’s sometimes easier for a beginner to write an introduction to a field than for an expert. Experts routinely overestimate the knowledge of the general public, and have often internalized the reasons why their field is important so deeply that they struggle to express them. I think my explainer posts are valuable because I always spend the first chunk of the post talking about what the original problem is before I get into the technical solution. Second, sometimes the public consensus on a topic is just plain wrong, to the point where even a little bit of research is enough to demonstrate why. Many of my posts I’m proudest of have been along these lines: arguing that the “500ml per prompt” water usage figure for LLMs was ludicrous , or that the popular Apple “Illusion of Thinking” paper was tracking persistence, not reasoning , that GPUs live longer than three years and the AI companies have large profit margins on inference, and so on. Third, I try to make it clear on my blog who I am and what my credentials actually are. Even if it’s not explicitly described in the post, I have my real name and resume available on my /about page, so I don’t think a careful reader could be easily fooled into thinking I’m an expert on 19th-century England or space physics or LLM economics or anything like that. Even if nobody reads what you write, writing is still a good discipline for getting your thoughts in order. But another big reason why writing is a great learning tool is that you can get feedback . I think it’s obvious why this is useful, but I do want to make two points about feedback. First, if you do make your posts public, you need to have a pretty thick skin. People on the internet often fall over themselves to come up with the most cutting criticism or the harshest dunk. This goes double if you take my previous advice and try to write posts that make a clear, controversial point about a subject you’re learning. If you’re the kind of person whose whole day is ruined when a stranger is cruel to them, you might want to keep your blogging private or only share it among friends. Second, even if your blogging is private, you can get feedback from LLMs . Like humans, LLMs will often give junk feedback. In my experience, OpenAI models will always tell me to moderate my claims or add caveats and hedges until I’m not saying anything at all. Sometimes their criticism will be straight-up wrong. But — particularly about technical topics — LLMs are great at pointing out areas you’ve genuinely misunderstood, and they’re far kinder than the average Lobsters or Hacker News commenter. I’m pleased and grateful that people enjoy reading my posts, but even when nobody did, I still got a lot of value out of blogging. I write as a method of thinking more clearly, as an excuse to do research on topics I want to learn about, and as a way of getting feedback. If you’d like to try it yourself, I suggest watching for these two things. First, you should be changing your mind a lot as you write. If not, you probably aren’t doing enough research. Second, your first draft’s conclusion should be much tighter and more expressive than its introduction. If not, you probably haven’t learned anything from the writing process, which means the draft can be scrapped. I strongly recommend this practice to anyone with an interest in writing. You will see the benefits even if you don’t publish any of your writing on the internet, particularly now that you can get good technical feedback by pasting your post into a LLM 1 . For what it’s worth, I’ve fiddled with careful “review prompts” and it’s basically as good to just write “review, please:” and paste your article. For what it’s worth, I’ve fiddled with careful “review prompts” and it’s basically as good to just write “review, please:” and paste your article. ↩

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Unsung 1 weeks ago

The great release notes of BBEdit

I have to admit that when a reader wrote to me and said… Every point release of BBEdit delights me. I live in BBEdit. It’s one of the few packages for which I read through the release notes every time (they often have spots of hilarity). …I got a bit concerned. One thing that I hate more than wasted release notes (“Bug fixes and performance improvements”) is perhaps funny release notes – the ones where instead of actually conveying what changed, the text field is used for something, erm, “creative.” (Perhaps most infamously, Medium had had a spell of “fun” release notes about 10 years ago, to a mix of amusement and blowback ). But I needn’t have worried. The release notes of BBEdit are just plain old solid good work, with only a sprinkle of humor: It’s been a while since we looked at release notes , and these are a great example of something that can help you understand not just what an application is, but what it will become . For example, I saw this fly by… …and even though I have never used BBEdit, I immediately started nodding. It made sense; greeking is helpful for letters, but I can see how it can do more damage than good for punctuation that has a pretty specific visual signature. BBEdit’s author knows what they’re doing. Another person (whom you might recognize ) chimed in to say : Nothing in BBEdit is “abandoned.” Everything is on the table for possible improvements. Also remember that this is an app that was originally written for classic Mac OS! This made me think about what separates apps that you’re excited to keep growing from the apps you’d rather see frozen in time . The release notes of BBEdit made me trust it so, so quickly. Not just the pace of change and clarity of communication, but also indeed this certain feeling that the product is “alive” in all the right ways. Even if I don’t know or use the features, I quickly get a sense that the changes are for me, or at least other people like me, rather than serving unspecified corporate needs, chasing fashionable trends, or pursuing unnecessary pivots. Hell, even the ratio of changes – new features vs. quality-of-life fixes vs. performance improvements – seems good. On top of all that, it’s fun to read good release notes, because you can learn something new. These, to me, were fascinating: Determinism ! #maintenance #release notes #software evolution #writing The “Zoom” command makes a triumphant return to the Window menu. Fixed crash which would occur when displaying completions from language servers which violate the published specification and provide something other than a string for the details field of a returned completion item. (glares at Solargraph) SNUCK IN A SPECIAL FEATURE FOR CRAIG NO NOT HIM THE OTHER ONE I HOPE HE LIKES IT Made a change in the minimap so that punctuation isn’t greeked, which helps improve visualization. “Entab” and “Detab” have had their names changed to “Convert Spaces to Tabs” and “Convert Tabs to Spaces”, respectively. This is more verbose but less abstruse. There is a new setting in the Keyboard preferences: “Enable macOS “Help” key”. This is off by default, so that pressing the “Insert” key which is present on some PC-style keyboards doesn’t open the in-application help. (This frequently happens accidentally.) If an FTP browser window is active and disconnected, “Open from FTP/SFTP Server” will start its connection sheet, rather than doing nothing.

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Kev Quirk 1 weeks ago

This blog is written in en-GB

by Terence Eden Terrence talks about some of the wonderful idiosyncrasies of the British language and that, no, he won't be making his writing more global. Read post ➡ I really enjoyed this post and like that Terrance could have said "year sure, I'll try and be more inclusive for you non-Brits" , but he didn't. Instead he said: Here's the thing. No. [...] There's a reason for that. It is more than the language I speak; it is the culture I live in, the way that I think, and the accent I use. Love this, and I appreciate Terrance holding firm on our wonderful British culture - just like everyone should do on their blog. That's part of the fun - to learn about the idiosyncrasies of difference languages and cultures. It still surprises me that someone had the gall to leave a comment effectively saying "can you change the way you write to be more inclusive, because I don't understand some of the references, and I can't be bothered to learn." Some people... Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment .

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マリウス 1 weeks ago

Making My Content More Easily Digestible

Over the past few months a recurring theme has emerged in my inbox, as well as within the community channel , and it is one that I have been chewing on for a while now. Several of you have, kindly and very politely, told me more or less the same thing, which is that even though the topics I write about are interesting enough, the posts themselves have grown so long and so dense that actually getting through one of them has turned into something of a commitment rather than the casual read it probably ought to be. I cannot really argue with that, because it is true. Whenever I sit down to write about something like Bureaucracy is Eating the World , or A Word on Omarchy , or Doubting Your Favorite Web Search Engine , I find myself pulled in two directions at once. On the one hand I want to be accurate and diligent, which in practice means citing my sources, anticipating the counter-arguments, and walking through the reasoning (and in many cases evidence) step by step instead of asking the reader to simply take my word for it. On the other hand I am painfully aware that the result of all that diligence is, more often than not, a wall of text that runs to several thousand words. In those posts in particular I clearly landed on the wrong side of that trade-off, and the feedback was entirely fair. The information is, I think, worth having, but the packaging asks a lot of the reader, and not everyone who might benefit from the content has the hour or so of uninterrupted attention that getting through it properly demands. Note: Yes, I am perfectly aware of the irony of writing a not-exactly-short post about how my posts have become too long, but bear with me here for a moment. What the feedback really did, though, was hand me an idea. Rather than butchering the original write-ups down to a length at which they would lose the very nuance that justified writing them in the first place, I figured I could instead try to produce a second, more compact version of my most detailed pieces. One that lives alongside the original rather than replacing it. I decided to start with Bureaucracy is Eating the World simply because it is one of the longest, and densest, and newest write-ups. And when you ask yourself what tends to be more digestible than a multi-thousand-word essay, the answer that most people arrive at almost immediately is video and audio , both of which you can consume while doing the dishes, commuting, or otherwise not staring at a screen full of paragraphs. So I started fiddling around with a whole handful of different programs and apps, trying to work out a reasonable pipeline for turning the written text into something more compact and considerably easier to consume, and it turned into a much deeper rabbit hole than I had naively assumed it would be when I started. The first piece of the puzzle was the narration, and here I worked my way through a zoo of “AI” text-to-speech services before ultimately settling on a service called ElevenLabs to generate the spoken version of the existing post, mostly because the quality of the output was, to my ears at least, the least robotic and the easiest to listen to for any extended stretch of time. Now, the obvious question, is why I would hand my own words over to a machine to read out loud rather than simply recording myself, which would arguably be more authentic and would certainly have involved less fiddling. The answer, predictably for anyone who has read more than a post or two on here, is privacy . Your voice is not merely a sound, it is a biometric identifier, just as much as your fingerprint or the geometry of your face, and the moment you put a sufficiently long, clean recording of it onto the public internet you have effectively handed anyone who cares to grab it the raw material they need to clone it. Voice cloning has, over the past couple of years, gone from an expensive novelty to something that runs on consumer hardware off a few seconds of reference audio, and it is already being used in the wild to defraud people, whether that takes the shape of the classic “grandchild in trouble, please wire money” phone call, or the more targeted corporate variety in which an employee approves a transfer because the “CEO” apparently rang and asked them to. On top of the outright fraud there is the machinery of surveillance capitalism, which will happily fold a voiceprint into the (shadow-)profile it is already busy assembling on every single one of us, cross-reference it against the recordings collected by smart speakers, call centres, telecommunication companies, and who knows what else, and then use it as yet another durable identifier that follows you around regardless of which account you happen to be logged into or not. I am simply not willing to surrender my right to my own voice, along with a measurable chunk of my privacy, in exchange for the modest convenience of having a blog post read aloud, especially not when a machine can today do that very job equally well and at a quality that is, for this particular purpose, entirely sufficient. With the audio sorted, I needed something for the viewer to actually look at, and this is where the project spiralled into something far more involved than I had anticipated. My initial plan was to do everything in Blender , which is the obvious, powerful, free and open-source choice, but the learning curve on Blender is famously steep, and after a few evenings of mostly fumbling around I had to be honest with myself about the fact that I was spending far more time fighting the software than producing anything watchable. I therefore ended up reaching instead for Source Filmmaker , or SFM , the slightly ancient animation tool that Valve built on top of the Source engine, purely because its learning curve is so much gentler than Blender ’s and because it let me get the job done without first having to become a 3D animation expert. Where things became tedious, however, was the animation itself. My first instinct was to take the lazy route and let motion capture ( “mocap” ) do the heavy lifting, so I gave Rokoko ’s video-to-mocap tool a try, hoping that I could simply feed it some footage and get usable animation data back out, but it failed pretty miserably, probably because I didn’t have the space nor the equipment (multiple cameras) to set it up properly. I then went looking for alternatives, and discovered that you can, for instance, pair an old Xbox Kinect with various bits of software (the likes of Brekel ) that are able to spit out FBX files, which in turn can be used to drive the characters. The catch is that the pipeline of exporting the SFM animation, importing it into Blender , and then using Rokoko ’s retargeting plugin to map the captured motion onto the SFM model is a fiddly, multi-step affair, and the end result, no matter how patiently you tweak it, will never come close to what you would get out of Rokoko ’s actual motion-capture suit and gloves, which I do not own and was not about to buy for a single experimental video. So I abandoned the shortcuts altogether and animated every sequence by hand instead, and even though the individual sequences are fairly simple and relatively short, doing it this way still took a considerable amount of time and not a small amount of patience. SFM is, after all, a fairly old piece of software that carries a noticeable amount of quirks, and the StarBook that I happened to be running this entire experiment on was, to put it generously, never the right tool for 3D animation work in the first place. To make matters slightly worse, I was unable to coax SFM into exporting anything above 720p, no matter how I adjusted its startup parameters, because anything beyond that resolution would come out glitchy and unusable, so 720p is, for this first attempt at least, simply what we are working with. All of this rather long-winded preamble is simply to say that what follows below is a first experimental attempt at presenting one of my denser posts in a format that some might find easier to digest than the original wall of text, in the hope that it piques the interest to dive deeper into the topic. The whole point of this is to find out whether the slice of my readership that feels buried under several thousand words actually prefers something like this, or whether the effort is better spent elsewhere. Keep in mind that the video is nevertheless a compressed version of the original post, that does not include every little detail, as it would have otherwise, too, grow out of proportion. You can find the result here , or, if you happen to have JavaScript enabled despite my warnings , below: If the response is positive, then I might well turn these into a more regular thing. If it is not, then at the very least I will have learned a fair bit about text-to-speech, Source Filmmaker , and the dark art of motion capture along the way, which is hardly the worst outcome. Either way, I would very much appreciate your honest feedback on this, so please do let me know what you think, whether this format could work, whether the pacing and the visuals help or hinder, and whether this is something you would like to see more of going forward. As always, you know where to find me .

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Manuel Moreale 1 weeks ago

Andy Baio

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Andy Baio, whose blog can be found at waxy.org . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Hi, my name’s Andy Baio. I’m a writer and coder living in Portland, Oregon. You might know me from my blog, Waxy.org , where I’ve written for 25 years about the internet. If you’ve never heard of it, I rounded up some of the highlights from my first decade of blogging in 2012, and the second decade in 2022. You may also know me from some of my other projects? I ran the XOXO festival in Portland for 12 years from 2012 to 2024, launched (and relaunched) the events community Upcoming.org , and I helped build Kickstarter as a long-time advisor and their first CTO. Along the way, I coined the term “ supercut ,” produced a chiptune tribute to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, and got threatened with lawsuits a bunch of times. (I did some other stuff , too.) These days, I’m mostly helping my wife Ami with her game design studio, Pink Tiger Games . We’ve self-published seven conversational party games since 2017, with three more slated for later this year. Before I started Waxy.org, I mostly sent links via instant messenger to my friends who had blogs. I knew I was good at finding things online, and after the umpteenth friend told me to start my own blog, I finally did. I wanted a place of my own online, somewhere to experiment and write about weird corners of internet culture, online community, and copyright, as well as a sandbox for new experimental projects of my own. By the time I launched Waxy in April 2002, I felt like I was late to the blogging trend, which in hindsight, seems ridiculous. I was still pretty early, as it turns out. Within a year, I’d been interviewed by the New York Times and other major papers dozens of times for news stories I’d either broken or somehow found myself tangled up in. The name, Waxy.org, came from a Perl script I’d written the year before to search for available .com, .org, and .net domains using every dictionary word in the English language. (I also picked up Meaty.org, which I never ended up using, and Upcoming.org, which I did.) “Waxy” didn’t really mean anything, but I’d been using “waxpancake” as my alias for years so it seemed like a good fit. I added a linkblog, Waxy Links , to the sidebar about 18 months after launch, which became a good outlet for quick links that didn’t warrant full posts. I redesigned the site in 2008 with a cleaner design and better mobile support. After 14 years of blogging, I switched from Movable Type to WordPress in 2016, with a new redesign that I slowly improved in the years since. I recently added redesigned archives and search , which I’m pretty happy with. It’s always under construction, a work in progress — like me, you, and the rest of the internet. I used to do much more investigative journalism, but these days, Waxy is primarily a linkblog where I point to fun or interesting things I find online. Unless I stumble on a story too compelling to ignore, forcing me to pull the string and see where it leads. Those story ideas and links can come from anywhere. I’m a voracious consumer of information online, and I’ve always joked that Waxy is the natural byproduct of endlessly procrastinating from doing other things by looking at the internet. I subscribe to around 450 feeds in Inoreader, my RSS reader, and skim it all nearly every day. I follow another 1,000 or so people each on Bluesky and Mastodon, with custom lists for each so I don’t miss particular people. I’m in dozens of Discords, many with people sharing their work or pointing out good stuff they find online, and nearly 100 mostly-niche subreddits covering many of my interests. I use tools like Sill and Scour to find signal in the noise, and even built a link aggregator of my own that I used for years to find good links on Twitter, until Elon shut down the API. My frequency of posting has waned over the years, first cannibalized by social media and then by larger life and work stuff. I’ve recently found myself drawn back to it, posting more regularly, trying to wake those atrophied writing muscles. Even if I’ve slowed down, it’s hard to ever imagine stopping entirely. I used to be able to work from anywhere, typically a coffeehouse or library, and tune out the rest of the world on my laptop with a good pair of earbuds. As my eyesight’s worsened, I find that working on a large monitor is more of a necessity than a luxury for any serious length of time, especially if I’m coding. I also used to love working around others, but these days, I tend to like retreating to the quiet of my basement office. No music, no sound. Just a quiet hum of my computer and the sounds of my keyboard. I use WordPress with my own custom-written theme, using the Advanced Custom Fields plugin to handle all the special fields necessary for my linkblog. I use a custom bot to cross-post my links to Bluesky, and a plugin called Share on Mastodon to post things there. (I stopped automatically cross-posting to X/Twitter years ago, for obvious reasons.) Everything’s hosted on a DigitalOcean droplet along with a bunch of other side projects, with Cloudflare managing the domain and DNS. I would have started collecting email addresses from the very beginning. I’ve never really liked reading newsletters by email, and I read almost every newsletter I subscribe to through my feedreader, which gives me so much control over my attention. But I never considered that people would start to shift their attention away from the web, or that feedreaders would largely go away, so I never tried to build a mailing list for my own projects. The ability to directly reach the people who care most about your work, outside of the capricious nature of social media algorithms, is essential. It’s my one big regret, and I hope to change that soon. My blog has never cost much to run, and never made much money. I used to have a dedicated server that cost $150/month, but these days, it’s running around $50/month on a shared instance with some other projects of mine. The visibility and reach from writing on Waxy opened a lot of doors for me, though. I met so many amazing creative people through blogging, and it gave me a platform for launching projects that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. I met most of my friends, directly or indirectly, through the writing I did on Waxy.org. I did run ads on my blog for a few years, experimenting with Google ads from 2004 to 2005 and, in 2006, joining as one of the first members of The Deck , Jim Coudal’s pioneering unobtrusive, privacy-centric boutique ad network that helped support sites like Daring Fireball, Kottke.org , Ze Frank, The Morning News, A List Apart, and many others. It paid me a reliable $1,000/month for ten years, until shortly before it wound down in 2017. I haven’t made any direct income from my blog since then. I think anything that supports independent writers/bloggers, artists, or other creators on their own terms is a good thing, whether it’s through Kickstarter, Patreon, or more commonly, through paid subscription newsletters. I have major issues with Substack’s management, but I credit them for normalizing the idea of directly paying bloggers a recurring monthly fee. But please use Ghost or Buttondown instead. Oh, god, too many to list. Off the top of my head, Marcin Wichary’s Unsung is probably my favorite new blog, constantly updated with new insights about user interfaces and design. Nobody notices things the way that Marcin notices things. Matt Muir’s Web Curios is like a month’s worth of good links crammed into a single post every Friday. I don’t know how he’s done it so well for so long. Depths of Wikipedia’s Annie Rauwerda isn’t a traditional blogger, but spreads her curatorial eye between two Bluesky accounts , two Instagram accounts , TikTok , a newsletter , a touring live stage show , and a very good personal website . She’s just so funny and weird and good. I wish she had an RSS feed that combined it all. Maybe I’ll make one for her. I think David Friedman’s Ironic Sans is incredibly underrated, moving from a traditional blog to more of a newsletter format, with weird little side projects and games along the way. He’s been continuously great for 20 years. I’d love to see Jason Kottke interviewed. More than anyone I can think of, he’s carved out a Kottke-shaped hole for himself on the web, growing it into a sustainable living through direct reader support over nearly 30 years. Even now, he continues to refine and adapt and evolve his site in surprising ways. The last project I worked on was the permanent archive for XOXO that launched in April, collecting everything we did related to the festival. The site was a huge undertaking, bringing together every lineup, schedule, recap video, conference talk, and standalone website that we ever made into a single permanent archive, filled with little photos and ephemera from the festival. XOXO was a huge part of my life for 12 years, easily the most creatively rewarding and emotionally exhausting work of my career, and I’m really proud of how the archive came out. At the very least, go poke through the video archives. The featured tag highlights some of our favorites, like Cabel Sasser’s wonderful talk from our final year. Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed . If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 148 interviews . People and Blogs is possible because kind people support it.

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A Working Library 2 weeks ago

The Eye of the Heron

On the planet Victoria, the people of Shantih Town live alongside the people of the City. When a group of townspeople scout and find a good place for a new settlement, they tell the City of their plans to send some of their people north. But the councillors of the City—the bosses—refuse to let them go. Luz, a daughter of one of the bosses, gets wind of the council’s plans, and becomes angry: at her father for refusing to see reason, at the handsome but entitled man he expects her to marry, at the passive old townswoman who advises her to stop and think. But Luz isn’t thinking, she’s walking, towards her own freedom, and theirs. View this post on the web , reply via email , or become a supporter .

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fLaMEd fury 2 weeks ago

Link Dump: June 2026

What’s going on, Internet? A few good links about blogging from this month. Enjoy. For more, check out the bookmarks archive, and subscribe to the feeds if you want these as they happen. Hey, thanks for reading this post in your feed reader! Want to chat? Reply by email or add me on XMPP , or send a webmention . Check out the posts archive on the website. People and Blogs - fLaMEd 🔥 My People and Blogs chat on web ownership, 25 years of fLaMEd fury, and why I’m still here. Wander Console Network Wander is a small, decentralised, self-hosted web console that lets visitors explore websites and pages recommended by a community of independent personal site owners. Like webrings reborn, self-hosted consoles recommending each other instead of letting an algorithm decide what you find. The Boring Internet - Terry Godier The open internet isn’t dying, just the commercial crust glued on top of it. Bloggers, can we make better titles for our posts? - Michael Harley Fair point that vague titles like “Recent Thoughts” sink in a feed when nobody can tell what they’re about. re: Bloggers, can we make better titles for our posts? - An Almost Anonymous Blog Good pushback on the title advice: weekly recaps and the like are easy to skip, and a decent way to find new bloggers. Newsonaut: Turning inner space into outer space Linking out is the cheapest way to keep the indie web alive. Blogger Archetype Quiz A cheeky wee quiz that sorts you into a blogging archetype. I came out as a link curator. What’d you get?

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The Jolly Teapot 2 weeks ago

Unfinished, part deux

Two years ago, I published a post entitled Unfinished . It was a way for me to share some thoughts without having to work on them as much as I do on regular posts. As I wasn’t sure if these “lesser thoughts” were worth my efforts and my time, I compiled them in a different post format, inspired by a song: This post is inspired by the excellent track entitled Lamb’s Garbage (Unfinished) , from the classic album and one of my favourites, Mr Oizo’s Lambs Anger . The concept of the song, as its title suggests, is to regroup bits of songs that were never completed to be full tracks. Well, here we are again. The text file where I jot down all my ideas, quick thoughts, and potential topics for blog articles is starting to get a bit too long for my liking, so I think it’s time for a little clean-up. What you will see below is what was saved from the big flush, and what I don’t share on social media since I am no longer participating . Think of this as a list of intros, tweets, and blurbs of what was going on in my head recently. I believe some of these themes can be used later for a full post; in the meantime, feel free to use them for your own blog. And if you don’t have a blog, please, start a blog . I love spreadsheets. This is something I find a bit difficult to admit, but I do like working in spreadsheets. I even firmly believe that Google Sheets is their best product. I already like lists, but a spreadsheet is on another level. I like to make my spreadsheets look pretty, I like to plan how they will look, I like to build, I like to make them functional, legible, easy to read. For me, it’s a very pleasing and interesting thing to do at work: there are so many possibilities. When I create a spreadsheet, I feel like an app developer. I feel like I’m a graphic designer. I had a co-worker once whose job included the creation and design of very complex spreadsheets for other teams, using Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Power BI, and such. The resulting spreadsheets were glorious: fully featured and interactive dashboards, gathering data from different sources in real-time. Works of art. Are answers from A.I. chatbots recycled for other users asking the exact same thing, or are answers always generated from scratch? Wouldn’t it be cheaper and more energy-efficient ? If I ask “ explain the difference between irony and happenstance ”, will the A.I. chatbot just paste an existing, perfectly fine answer (one that received positive feedback in previous chats), or will it work to generate a brand new answer? Why do so many people keep saying “Samsung charger” or “iPhone charger” instead of USB-C, USB Type C, or just USB? I mean, despite these cables and connectors being ubiquitous in our lives, I see a lot of people completely ignoring what they are called. I wonder why. Don't brag so much about using A.I. It’s great that you used A.I. to do this thing you’re presenting. I can see how it has been useful and how much faster it helped you reach your goals. I understand that without A.I. you could never have pulled this off. I know it’s a way to show how you are part of the A.I. revolution, that you’re not left behind. No shame in that. I work with A.I. a lot too, I’m not judging you for that. But please, don’t present your use of A.I. as a skill. It’s just a tool. Your skills are elsewhere. Having access to tokens is a weird flex. The tools you use and how you use them may interest a few of your peers, but what you create with these tools is what truly matters. Do you know what type of video cameras were used in your favourite film? Do you care? By the way, the same piece of advice applies to air fryers. If we work so hard on automating our current tasks and projects with A.I. agents, how will we tell which ones are worth doing at all? Does everything need to be A.I.-enabled and optimised? Are we reproducing the same mistake that we made with social media, shoving it everywhere we could? On that topic, I highly recommend this excellent article on The Verge . Efficiency is not the ultimate goal for most people: efficiency for what? For whom? Besides, friction is not always a problem : sometimes friction is how new ideas spark to life. If you are like me, an avid consumer of Techmeme , you will have noticed that A.I. companies get a huge part of the coverage these days. I don’t know if it’s an editorial choice of Techmeme or if it’s just a reflection of the public reception of said news, but my gosh it seems that Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude gets an incremental update every day, and they float on top of the site’s homepage seemingly forever. I wouldn’t mind a new site just for A.I. news, just like Mediagazer does what Techmeme does but for everything media-related. I’d call it Datacenter and it would make Techmeme a bit more interesting. I recently discovered that something I immensely dislike has a name: the Rae Dunn style for household items. Billionaires cannot stand the idea of a democracy where their individual vote is, technically, worth exactly as much as the vote from the person who takes care of their laundry. They hate that. So what do they do? They buy media or social media companies to try to influence thousands to vote like them. Side note on the ridiculous LinkedIn habit that consists of putting a link in the comments of a post, and writing in the post “Link in the comments”. Just put the link in the post, as you’re supposed to, so we can have a nice preview of the post, and we don’t have to look at the even more ridiculous comments of every LinkedIn post. How messed up is that? I know it’s for better “reach” and to trick the algorithm, but you just look thirsty for likes. Isn’t that link the thing you wanted to share? Do you prefer a click or a like? What’s a like good for if nobody visits your link? Thankfully, I don’t have a LinkedIn account, and I can ignore this nonsense most of the time, but I do check on a few LinkedIn posts for work and this is making me both sad and angry. On Instagram, the whole “Link in bio” was necessary because that was the only way to share links back then. But LinkedIn? No excuse. Yes, it sucks that their algorithm prefers posts that won’t send users out of their precious, shitty platform. I’m with you. But you don’t have to play their silly little game. You’re better than this.

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ava's blog 2 weeks ago

the first six months of 2026

First half of the year has passed, only half of the year left. 2026 is a difficult year for me so far. At the end of 2025, I wished for more rest this year. I didn’t do that yet. I pushed harder in different ways and I just can’t keep doing that. For 1.5 years now, I have been going extra hard in everything I do - I asked for more work at work, I created new opportunities and roles for me there, I blogged longer informative posts that took a lot of my knowledge and research, I completed more exams in my part time degree than ever before, I started and finished the certificate to be a data protection consultant, I attended conferences, I started volunteering, I went harder on my fitness, and so on. I do that to make up for my severe illness in 2024 and because of how a chronic illness turns everything into a pressing matter (fear of relapse, fear of no longer getting to do something, urge to maximize good times etc); and I can no longer keep it up. I need a longer break where I can just exist. I need to allow myself to do less in my part time degree and accept that it will postpone my graduation, I need to stop doing court case summaries for a month for noyb, I need to stop blogging for a while so I am not always working on some big essays and reading sources and running to keep up with articles and papers, and so I don’t always have a full inbox with like 50 emails to answer. I need to stop reading my web reader (RSS) and the Discover page. I can’t scale back work, so it has to be everything else. I want to enjoy life for a while and not always feel like I got something to prove, something to chase, something to keep up, something to get back to as soon as possible. And the thing is, I had so much fun stuff planned the first half of this year. I didn’t build those experiences up in my head and I didn’t have unrealistic standards, yet all of them kinda left a bad taste in my mouth when they happened. Travels, courses, conferences, restaurants, whatever. Everything I looked forward to had something difficult and disappointing about it, or had this Monkey’s Paw thing I mentioned in my other post. So I no longer feel like even planning nice things for myself and my wife. I’d rather save the energy, time and money. And that's sad, so I need to take some time to change that. It adds to the general burnout. I notice my impatience is worse, I get snappier, less forgiving, feeling more like someone’s fault or error is done in malice rather than accidental or born out of cluelessness/obliviousness. I no longer want to explain anything, elaborate, or help people, because I feel like I have to conserve my energy and efforts, as most interactions with others have a severe imbalance where I do most of the work. This would be the opposite if I wasn’t feeling burnt out. I react more defensively than usual if you point out small, irrelevant, inconsequential mistakes or make small requests for things I don’t care about changing. I retreat, I wanna be alone more, I wanna focus even more on personal projects that only involve me in isolation (and no other people, location, etc.) because those don’t let me down. I crave social interaction, yet listening to people or reading what they write is like nails on a chalk board. It’s a confusing time to be in, because I more or less get everything I want with some exceptions, but in a warped way where it doesn’t make me happy and is always accompanied with some annoying twist or extra price (figuratively). Nothing just flows. I have to micromanage everything and deal with ridiculous hurdles. I have stress “dreams” where I am half asleep, having hypnagogic hallucinations how it’s my turn in something (usually a board or card game happening on my bed) and I can’t figure out what people want me to do and they get impatient and urge me to finally hurry up, so I flee (sleepwalk around the apartment) before waking up and walking back to bed. In other such dreams, I am convinced I forgot to do something I promised I would do in a different reality/parallel world (?), but I can’t quite understand what I owe and how to do that thing, it’s incredibly vague and confusing, and I walk away from the bed to avoid the harassment by these dream people about it until I wake up and walk back as well. Those two repeat so often. Probably once a week. The feelings don’t leave me after I wake up, like I genuinely feel guilty and stressed even when awake and my brain still tries to decipher what I forgot to do and what I owe and that I’m running out of time? I haven’t bored myself purposefully nearly as much as I want to, need to and used to. There is always a blog post I want to write or continue; an article, book, blog post or paper to read; a video to watch; something to study; work; gym. I notice I'm desperately craving to do these things, and do them, yet also feel like I have to force myself through it. Like it takes an intense amount of energy and focus. I need a lot more time to do them, lots of micro breaks and distractions, and it all feels so difficult internally. I feel exhausted. Even when stuff is very easy and I want to do it. It’s like my brain is full, nauseous, sick. It screams at me to stop. My memory/retention is so shit, too. I have never said " I don't remember that. " ever as much in my life as I did this month. What adds to me not being able to stop is that it all feels mundane and harmless. Just one more thing. And they’re all things I do all the time, and things I am expecting myself to do, that are standard function, default. I understand when others burn out because bad timing of horrific events, like their house burned down while the pet is sick and grandma died and they just lost your job or something. Or: Insanely stressful high stakes job working 50-70 hours a week. But none of that applies to me. I just do normal things. And I don’t wanna be someone who does less. I want to do it all. My chronic illnesses play into it. You can be chronically ill, but you are supposed to work and act like everyone else and achieve things and work on yourself. You cannot be visibly ill, you cannot do markedly less, you cannot struggle with a basic task or workload. You cannot let yourself go. You cannot waste yourself. Otherwise you are giving in, you’re a lost cause, you do nothing to help yourself, you make your illness your personality, you use your illness as an excuse. You’re not an inspiration, and that’s kinda all you’re good for if you are forever sick. You are supposed to reassure everyone that chronic illness doesn’t alter life much and that life can go on unchanged and you can totally achieve everything you would have if you weren’t sick. If you cannot be used for this cause, you are discarded by society. There is a pressure to not let that happen to me, especially when my wife depends on me. Anyway, before I end up in the kind of burnout that makes you completely unable to work a job for most of your life, I have to change things. Just putting some self care things on my todo list doesn’t help, as it is just another obligation and doesn’t make me feel better. I just put it on the list because it is supposed to be good for me and a productive way to deal with stress. Like, what sounds better in our current society: That you slept all day to rest and watched some Simpsons, or that you did some yoga and then had a bath with 5 products to make you prettier and then journaled and then went on a walk? But I actually need to do the former for once. Which is what I have been doing a lot the past week. Lounging around, letting my mind wander, napping, just existing and breathing, like a cat sprawled on the sofa. I need to do things freely, and not do straining things all day, and let myself not do things that you can be measurably good or bad at. No care about consistency. I feel like I arrived at small versions of this burnout every now and then over the years, did something to help it for a while, and then experienced it again. And every time, it took a shorter while to relapse, and it felt worse, and it felt like I needed more rest and relaxation than I could realistically give. I only ever gave enough to function again, to make it work, to take the edge off, delay the worst. Like a day here and there doing little to nothing. Nothing more, no changed behavior moving forward. Something has to change permanently so I don't always run into this same issue over and over again, risking my mental health and my ability to do my hobbies and work. :) I still have to figure out where my sweet spot is between my ambition and what my body can give. I don't mind giving 200% for a time, just not forever. It seems like 1.5 years is my limit. With that said, I am gone the entirety of July. I won't blog 1 , I won't reply to emails until August, I won't read your posts. Friends can still reach me via Matrix and Signal. Reply via email Published 30 Jun, 2026 There is one announcement that I'll likely publish, that's it. ↩ There is one announcement that I'll likely publish, that's it. ↩

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A Working Library 2 weeks ago

Two Cheers for Anarchism

In this series of short explorations of anarchist thought, James C. Scott proposes a “process-oriented” view of anarchism, or what might be termed anarchism by doing rather than theory. He sees anarchism especially in everyday practices of freedom and in the refusal to submit to higher, unjust, authorities: the foot-dragging, insubordination, desertion, poaching, sabotage, absenteeism, and so on which undermine empire and authoritarian rule often better than any mutiny can, and with less blood. And he sees that same anarchism in places of improvisation and experimentation that create conditions for living while also building know-how and solidarity: small, chaotic but fertile farms; mixed-used city neighborhoods; shopkeepers who answer to their community rather than a boss. Perhaps accordingly, the book comes together more as a collection of interconnecting parables than as any unified theory—not a plan but a collective and liberating practice. View this post on the web , reply via email , or become a supporter .

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Farid Zakaria 2 weeks ago

A TacoSprint 2026 Retrospective

This is my retrospective of TacoSprint 2026 that took place in June 2026 at La Saladita, Guerrero, Mexico. For a while now, I have watched from the sidelines as Nixers around the world gathered for sprints: OceanSprint , ThaigerSprint , SaltSprint , TransylvaniaSprint , AuroraSprint and NixCamp . Wow, we Nixers sure do like our sprints! All of them also happen to be in Europe or East-Asia. With an upcoming fourth baby on the way, I figured it was now-or-never to put words into action. I messaged @domen , who organizes OceanSprint every year, and asked if he’d be interested in helping me set up the first sprint in North America. Domen is an avid surfer, a recurring theme in his OceanSprints, so I appealed to his inner-surfer and we spec’d out some places in North America that were both cost-effective and had ample, amazing surf 🏄. I had already been to the Troncones and the La Saladita area, so my prior experience removed a large vector of the unknown. It seemed like a no-brainer. Domen was already going to be in South America in June, so the timing lined up nicely (+ summer is the swell season there!). We set to work standing up a website and trying to attract sponsorship and attendees. This was probably the hardest part of organizing a brand-new sprint. We had far lower turnout for registration and sponsorship than I foresaw. Several people responded on our application form, or told us directly, that they were unsure about the safety of visiting Mexico, since the US Department of State had it under a travel advisory. Despite my best efforts to soothe everyone’s fears, it remained a real hindrance. Note For those still on the fence for next year: the area felt extremely safe. We rented a house in a fairly secluded stretch that caters almost entirely to surfers. At no point did anyone feel uncomfortable or unsafe. Getting there was its own small adventure. Flights were unusually challenging to book thanks to the World Cup soaking up demand across the region. The most dramatic casualty was Alex ( @adeci ), who managed to completely miss his connecting flight and arrived three days late. To his credit, he showed up in great spirits and slotted right back in to hacking with the group like nothing happened. Once everyone was settled, we fell into a rhythm that I can only describe as suspiciously sustainable : It was amazing to bookend each day with a surf at La Saladita’s left point break. Surfing for me lets me enter flow state very similar to when I am deep in thought hacking-away. It helped clear through a lot of built-up gunk and I often returned back with a clear intention or solution to a problem I had been working on. One of the more unexpectedly wonderful parts of the trip was the meal preparation from Gladys, our local cook, who pretty much cooked for us three times a day. We were extremely well-fed, which let us focus on the Nix-hacking and motivated me to make sure I kept up with the surfing to put off any weight gain 🫠. The website will be updated to have a more formal summary of every contribution we managed to put forward and their current status however it was amazing to see how much work a group of nine people can put forward in a single week with a combined mission and passion for an ecosystem. Our work spanned dynamic linking, package relocatability, peer-to-peer remote builds, faster module systems, shrinking the OCaml runtime closure and cross-distribution packaging. A few of my own threads, if you want to go deeper: LLM-based agents featured prominently throughout. We were fortunate to have Geoff Huntley with us, who is quite the AI-maximizer , spiritually guiding us and offering us some SOTA insight in how we might want to explore leveraging AI. Alan ( @alurm ), had the greatest idea for us to put together an academic style trip report. We worked together on the paper and the result is Attention, Nix and Tacos Is All You Need , a loving parody of a certain famous paper. An arXiv submission is coming, but in the meantime you can read it below or download it here . Your browser doesn't support embedded PDFs. You can download it here instead. We already agreed to organize the same sprint next year. I can’t wait. This was literally the most enjoyable thing I’ve ever done as it combined my two passions (surfing & hacking) in a way I honestly did not think was possible all while producing a ton of value to the Nix ecosystem. For a different vantage point, please check out the retrospectives from my fellow attendees! GuixPkgs: every Guix package, as a Nix flake Hijacking ELF entry points for NixOS compatibility, or wtf is wrap-buddy Nix needs relocatable binaries Alan Urmancheev Jared Siegel

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iDiallo 2 weeks ago

I turned my prologue into a short video

It's hard to write a whole book. So for now at least, I've turned the prologue of my book into a short video. I hope you enjoy it.

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Manuel Moreale 2 weeks ago

On ends

I’m sitting on a rock, in the middle of a forest. On my right, not even 30cm away from me, a dog panting like crazy, because even though it’s almost 8pm, it’s still way too warm for his liking. To be fair, anything above freezing probably fits that description. Behind me, the ruins of a church that was, and no longer is. A stone arch and a few chunks of walls are all that’s left. I don’t know what happened to this church. I could probably look it up, but I don’t need to do it. Knowing would not add anything to my experience of sitting here. Is it important to know how things end? Is it important to know when something has ended? Some things are clearly easy to know when they’re done: I have a bottle of water that’s almost empty, and the end is gonna come pretty fast. Other things are a lot trickier. When does a life end? I remember reading that the medical definition of death keeps evolving as our technology progresses and we’re able to bring people back to life. Maybe in the future we’ll be able to upload our brains to the matrix and “live” forever, who knows. I’ve been thinking a lot about the end of things lately, as my mind wandered around, stressed out by a series of things not worth discussing. And thinking about the end of myself is weirdly comforting. The classic this too shall pass. Everything is transitory after all, and life itself is impermanent. We’re here now, we might be gone tomorrow. And when gone, what’s left? Maybe just ruins, traces of our past, books left on a bookshelf, photos in a box, a blog online perhaps, destined to be washed away quickly like everything else in the digital world. If you’re wondering where I’m going with this post, I’m afraid the answer is nowhere. I’m just sitting on a rock, in the middle of nowhere, thinking about death as a way to figure out how to go through life. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

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