Preah's Website 4 days ago

Running Regularly, And Other Habits

A few months ago, I started exercising regularly. I mean, I've been "exercising regularly" on and off for years, to no one's surprise, but I have been actually consistently doing it for probably my longest streak yet now. Also to no one's surprise, this has improved by mental and physical health, made me feel more confident, and expelled anxious energy. Here's a timeline of exercising in my life thus far: As a teen, my brother and his wife had a membership to a really bougie gym . I went sometimes, skinny as a twig, and thought it was pretty fun. They had a sauna, climbing wall, pool, hot yoga, guided cycling, the works. Eventually it cost too much money for my brother to continue going, and I didn't even attend that much anyway after a while. Use parents' home gym to work out every other weekday. Helped to be at home, as I have agoraphobic-adjacent tendencies, especially related to driving. Eventually they dismantled their home gym to use the room for something else. I used the free app Caliber to track and plan workouts, which I still recommend for people new to working out who don't know where to start. Lower standards for exercising and do it solely in my bedroom. I found that if I saw exercising as something you need a bunch of equipment and a gym for, it actually kept me from exercising more. I kept one pair of dumbbells in my room as my only equipment, and started working out every weekday. I was also off-put by having to change clothes to work out every day, since I get all sweaty, so I simply didn't wear clothes. That's uh, not something you can do at the gym. This is also when I started using the app Hevy , which I still use to this day. You can find curated workout routines for free and track them easily, with little videos on how to do sets. Get membership at Planet Fitness, because my job at the time covered gym expenses. This showed me the power of gyms, and how much easier they make working out. Having an actual treadmill, weights, and cycling machinery was awesome, and I started running the most I ever had since high school P.E class. I didn't do much strength training because I was (am) socially anxious and scared of people nearby. This was ultimately the downside of having a gym, because I had to drive to it. It wasn't that far, I just really am that anxious about driving. Present day, I use my fiancé's parents' home gym because it's on the same property. It has everything I need: dumbbells, treadmill, air conditioning. This means I now work out 4 days a week for an hour, which has been fantastic. I'm still working on being able to run longer and faster, and lifting more than 30 lbs. I do about 30-40 minutes strength training, and 20-30 minutes running usually. When I'm really feeling unmotivated, sometimes I only run, or I do high-incline walking instead of running if my leg muscles are feeling sensitive. From the beginning, the point was very much just doing some exercise each day, no matter how small. A walk, 10 minutes at the gym, whatever, just go do it . I can't really say it has gotten much easier to exercise; I'm procrastinating going to work out this second, writing this post... Something that helps me go do something I am mentally resisting doing, such as working out, has been to-do lists. This doesn't work for everyone, but I've found that having an annoying notification on my phone, set to repeat every day, gets me to Do The Thing. The satisfaction of clearing that day's tasks is phenomenal as well. I use Todoist for this. The free plan is more than enough for me, personally, and I even have a shared to-do list I share with my fiancé. This includes a grocery list, upcoming plans with friends and family, and a whole shared project just for wedding planning. My routines include simple stuff for now, such as working out, reading scriptures for 30 minutes 1 , and attending catechumen class every Wednesday at 20:00. Having a to-do list for my habits has been immensely useful, especially sorting them by day of the week, and having individual Home/School/Work projects. Hopefully I'll keep exercising like I am, and maybe even more, with more motivation. Subscribe via email or RSS If you're curious, I use the Orthodox Study Bible , and am a catechumen of the Eastern Orthodox Christian Church currently, under the OCA jurisdiction. My religious journey/life is a whole thing that I'm not sure I'll post much about besides references, but feel free to email/Signal me about it if you're interested. ↩ As a teen, my brother and his wife had a membership to a really bougie gym . I went sometimes, skinny as a twig, and thought it was pretty fun. They had a sauna, climbing wall, pool, hot yoga, guided cycling, the works. Eventually it cost too much money for my brother to continue going, and I didn't even attend that much anyway after a while. Use parents' home gym to work out every other weekday. Helped to be at home, as I have agoraphobic-adjacent tendencies, especially related to driving. Eventually they dismantled their home gym to use the room for something else. I used the free app Caliber to track and plan workouts, which I still recommend for people new to working out who don't know where to start. Lower standards for exercising and do it solely in my bedroom. I found that if I saw exercising as something you need a bunch of equipment and a gym for, it actually kept me from exercising more. I kept one pair of dumbbells in my room as my only equipment, and started working out every weekday. I was also off-put by having to change clothes to work out every day, since I get all sweaty, so I simply didn't wear clothes. That's uh, not something you can do at the gym. This is also when I started using the app Hevy , which I still use to this day. You can find curated workout routines for free and track them easily, with little videos on how to do sets. Get membership at Planet Fitness, because my job at the time covered gym expenses. This showed me the power of gyms, and how much easier they make working out. Having an actual treadmill, weights, and cycling machinery was awesome, and I started running the most I ever had since high school P.E class. I didn't do much strength training because I was (am) socially anxious and scared of people nearby. This was ultimately the downside of having a gym, because I had to drive to it. It wasn't that far, I just really am that anxious about driving. Present day, I use my fiancé's parents' home gym because it's on the same property. It has everything I need: dumbbells, treadmill, air conditioning. This means I now work out 4 days a week for an hour, which has been fantastic. I'm still working on being able to run longer and faster, and lifting more than 30 lbs. I do about 30-40 minutes strength training, and 20-30 minutes running usually. When I'm really feeling unmotivated, sometimes I only run, or I do high-incline walking instead of running if my leg muscles are feeling sensitive. If you're curious, I use the Orthodox Study Bible , and am a catechumen of the Eastern Orthodox Christian Church currently, under the OCA jurisdiction. My religious journey/life is a whole thing that I'm not sure I'll post much about besides references, but feel free to email/Signal me about it if you're interested. ↩

Sports Culture Writing

Preah's Website 4 days ago

Good Morning Oct 10

Goodmorning everyone 😪 it's 10:00 here. Going to be taking my guinea pig Pina to the vet today, I think she has a UTI... She stays cute though. Subscribe via email or RSS

Writing Business

Manuel Moreale 4 days ago

Linda Ma

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Linda Ma, whose blog can be found at midnightpond.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Aleem Ali and the other 120 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Hey, I’m Linda. I grew up in Budapest in a Chinese family of four, heavily influenced by the 2000s internet. I was very interested in leaving home and ended up in the United Kingdom—all over, but with the most time spent in Edinburgh, Scotland. I got into design, sociology, and working in tech and startups. Then, I had enough of being a designer, working in startups, and living in the UK, so I left. I moved to Berlin and started building a life that fits me more authentically. My interests change a lot, but the persistent ones have been: journaling with a fountain pen, being horizontal in nature, breathwork, and ambient music. I was struck by a sudden need to write in public last year. I’d been writing in private but never felt the need to put anything online because I have this thing about wanting to remain mysterious. At least, that’s the story I was telling myself. In hindsight, the 'sudden need' was more of a 'wanting to feel safe to be seen.' I also wanted to find more people who were like-minded. Not necessarily interested in the same things as me, but thinking in similar ways. Through writing, I discovered that articulating your internal world with clarity takes time and that I was contributing to my own problems because I wasn't good at expressing myself. I write about these kinds of realizations in my blog. It’s like turning blurriness and stories into clarity and facts. I also do the opposite sometimes, where I reframe experiences and feelings into semi-fictional stories as a way to release them. I enjoy playing in this space between self-understanding through reality and self-soothing through fantasy. I also just enjoy the process of writing and the feeling of hammering on the keyboard. I wanted the blog to be formless and open-ended, so it didn’t have a name to begin with, and it was hanging out on my personal website. The name just kinda happened. I like the sound of the word “pond” and the feeling I get when I think of a pond. Then I thought: if I were a pond, what kind of pond would I be? A midnight pond. It reflects me, my writing, and the kind of impression I’d like to leave. It’s taken on a life of its own now, and I’m curious to see how it evolves. Nowadays, it seems I’m interested in writing shorter pieces and poems. I get a lot of inspiration from introspection, often catalyzed by conversations with people, paragraphs from books, music, or moments from everyday life. In terms of the writing process, the longer blogposts grow into being like this: I'll have fleeting thoughts and ideas that come to me pretty randomly. I try to put them all in one place (a folder in Obsidian or a board in Muse ). I organically return to certain thoughts and notes over time, and I observe which ones make me feel excited. Typically, I'll switch to iA Writer to do the actual writing — something about switching into another environment helps me get into the right mindset. Sometimes the posts are finished easily and quickly, sometimes I get stuck. When I get stuck, I take the entire piece and make it into a pile of mess in Muse. Sometimes the mess transforms into a coherent piece, sometimes it gets abandoned. When I finish something and feel really good about it, I let it sit for a couple days and look at it again once the post-completion high has faded. This is advice from the editors of the Modern Love column , and it’s very good advice. I occasionally ask a friend to read something to gauge clarity and meaning. I like the idea of having more thinking buddies. Please feel free to reach out if you think we could be good thinking buddies. Yes, I do believe the physical space influences my creativity. And it’s not just the immediate environment (the room or desk I'm writing at) but also the thing or tool I'm writing with (apps and notebook) as well as the broader environment (where I am geographically). There’s a brilliant book by Vivian Gornick called The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative and a quote in it: “If you don’t leave home you suffocate, if you go too far you lose oxygen.” It’s her comment on one of the example pieces she discusses. This writer was talking about how he couldn’t write when he was too close or too far from home. It’s an interesting perspective to consider, and I find it very relatable. Though I wouldn’t have arrived at this conclusion had I not experienced both extremes. My ideal creative environment is a relatively quiet space where I can see some trees or a body of water when I look up. The tools I mentioned before and my physical journal are also essential to me. My site is built with Astro , the code is on GitHub, and all deploys through Netlify. The site/blog is really just a bunch of .md and .mdx files with some HTML and CSS. I code in VS Code. I wouldn’t change anything about the content or the name. Maybe I would give the tech stack or platform more thought if I started it now? In moments of frustration with Astro or code, I’ve often wondered if I should just accept that I’m not a techie and use something simpler. It’s been an interesting journey figuring things out though. Too deep into it, can’t back out now. The only running cost I have at the moment is the domain which is around $10 a year. iA Writer was a one-time purchase of $49.99. My blog doesn’t generate revenue. I don’t like the idea of turning personal blogs into moneymaking machines because it will most likely influence what and how you write. But — I am supportive of creatives wanting to be valued for what they create and share from an authentic place. I like voluntary support based systems like buymeacoffee.com or ko-fi.com . I also like the spirit behind platforms like Kickstarter or Metalabel . I started a Substack earlier this year where I share the longer posts from my blog. I’m not sure how I feel about this subscription thing, but I now use the paywall to protect posts that are more personal than others. I’ve come across a lot of writing I enjoy though and connected with others through writing. Here are a few I’ve been introduced to or stumbled upon: Interesting, no-longer-active blogs: I like coming across sites that surprise me. Here’s one that boggles my mind, and here’s writer Catherine Lacey’s website . There’s also this online documentary and experience of The Garden of Earthly Delights by Jheronimous Bosch that I share all the time, and Spencer Chang’s website is pretty cool. 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 110 interviews . Make sure to also say thank you to Ben Werdmuller and the other 120 supporters for making this series possible. Lu’s Wikiblogardenite — Very real and entertaining blog of a "slightly-surreal videos maker and coder". Romina’s Journal — Journal of a graphic designer and visual artist. Maggie Appleton’s Garden — Big fan of Maggie’s visual essays on programming, design, and anthropology. Elliott’s memory site — This memory site gives me a cozy feeling. Where are Kay and Phil? — Friends documenting their bike tours and recipes. brr — Blog of an IT professional who was deployed to Antarctica during 2022-2023. The late Ursula K. Le Guin’s blog — She started this at the age of 81 in 2010.

Writing Culture HTML CSS

annie's blog 5 days ago

Reading notes: August, September

I need to get back on the monthly routine because I’m squinting back at August like Uuuuuuuuuuh I vaguely remember it  so anyway let’s see how this goes. What could she say? What sentence would pierce him while leaving her intact? She had built her life so carefully around him. To say something, to do something, to feel something, would be to self-destruct. Okay. So. I want to like this book. I love books about food, involving food, including food. And this book has a lot of food. Of course it’s a tool, a metaphor, a… I don’t know, an environment. But still: Food. Hell yeah. Actually maybe that’s what I don’t like. I love the messy earthy good realness of food and people taking pleasure in it, cooking and sharing and enjoying it. Food in this story is not that. It is a measure of control, self-inflicted punishment, purgatory, avoidance, annihilation. And that makes me sad. ALSO I think if we’d moved things along and had the final inevitable explosion happen at, say, page 215 instead of page 300-ish, that would have been better. Also also, I said the writing was good and it was but.   But there were a lot of stretches of text that went like this: She (did a food thing). She (did another food thing). She (did another food thing). Details of the ingredients. She (did another food thing). Sizzle. She (did a food thing). She (did another food thing). She (did another food thing).  Etc. I don’t know how you’d write it different but it got repetitive. It was too much. I was inwardly screaming OKAY I GET IT I GET IT SHE IS COOKING AS A WAY TO HAVE CONTROL SHE IS EATING AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR ALL THE OTHER THINGS SHE SHOULD BE DOING I GET IT. Also it annoyed me that he (the fiance) did a horrible thing that ruined it all but we treat it like a big mystery and it is never clarified. I know the point is it doesn’t matter what he did . The point is he betrayed her and instead of rising up with immediate willpower and boundaries and hell naw  she just cooks and eats and pretends it’s fine. (Until she doesn’t.) I get that in a really personal way of having done the same thing myself (less cooking, less eating, but just as much pretending it’s fine) and I know it doesn’t matter how  the betrayal happens, what matters is that the betrayal happened and what matters even more is the self-betrayal that happens and then keeps happening. Until it doesn’t. Again: I GET IT. But also: I WANT TO KNOW. Tell me what he did. This book both destroyed and healed me. I don’t want to talk about it. I want to talk about it. It’s beautiful, it’s full of music and connection and fear. It’s a time-outside-of-time book but you know, the whole time, that there is a reckoning, there is an end, and you know it will pluck your heart out and smash it like a grape and you go forward anyway. Because you are there too and the music you can’t hear is carrying you along and the slow threads are weaving together and you are somehow woven in and then your heart is broken and you have no one to blame but yourself. And Ann Patchett. Is there a satisfaction in the effort of remembering that provides its own nourishment, and is what one recollects less important than the act of remembering? That is another question that will remain unanswered: I feel as though I am made of nothing else. First pick for the book club. We had our first meeting the last week of August and I picked this book without knowing anything about it other than I wanted to read it. It wasn’t what I expected. I’m not sure what I expected. Something lighter, I guess. Anyway I loved it but I felt kind of bad about picking it for CBBC because it is weighty. It is depth. It is pondering.  It is kind of bleak. Also beautiful. Also heavy. It’s a book I want to read again in a few years and see how it hits me. Perhaps, when someone has experienced a day-to-day life that makes sense, they can never become accustomed to strangeness. That is something that I, who have only experienced absurdity, can only suppose. I guess this is a stranded-on-a-desert-island book, kind of . But only in the sense that the environment, the context, has been set up to give us this thought experiment, this experience, this long echoing question of purpose and the even more important unignorable thump-thump-thump of loneliness. Anyway this book is excellent. Read it. Or don’t. But do. Also read The Wall by   Marlen Haushofer. I was not sure about this book but Stewart wrote and produced Xena, Warrior Princess so I figured it would be worth a shot. And yes: It was. If you like well-written badass heroines doing cool shit in a dystopian world (I do) you will like this. Really quite gorgeous. I liked the characters, good adventure, good pacing, good story. A satisfying if bittersweet fantasy (don’t worry, the ending is good). Loved this one. Scifi, really, but reads like fantasy. I should say more about it but I’m tired and I have already said a lot of words. Okay thriller. Plot twist was not so surprising. Tolerable writing. Good escape for a few hours.

Books Culture Writing

Preah's Website 5 days ago

I Got My Mom Into Blogging?

I somehow got my mom into blogging. I visit my parents weekly and have dinner. I was showing my mom my blog, describing the idea behind it and how I follow other people, and people can read my posts. She really digs the idea, and immediately wanted me to show her how to blog. I sent her my blog and described RSS briefly, and sent my guide as well. She ended up using Blogger, which is owned by Google, for a user-friendly experience. She gets overwhelmed by technology easily, and using Markdown is basically like being a coder/hacker to her. To my surprise, she already has a blog under that account, from 2011! It was a recipe blog called Nutritious Kitchen, where she posted a lot of recipes, with pictures she took as well. It was such an amazing blast from the past. I also fiercely enjoy cooking and sharing recipes in the same way now, except that I self-host them on Tandoor , so it's cool seeing that she was compiling her own online recipe book well before I was. I had to leave to go home while she was writing her homepage, but I sent her resources on using Blogger and my guide on getting started with blogging . I imagine I’ll have to continue helping her a bit through this, but to be fair, she’s done blogging more than I have. If anyone has better recommendations for her, like super non-technical blogging platforms that are not overwhelming at all, reply to this post using email using the button below. Subscribe via email or RSS

Writing

DYNOMIGHT 6 days ago

Will the explainer post go extinct?

Will short-form non-fiction internet writing go extinct? This may seem like a strange question to ask. After all, short-form non-fiction internet writing is currently, if anything, on the ascent—at least for politics, money, and culture war—driven by the shocking discovery that many people will pay the cost equivalent of four hardback books each year to support their favorite internet writers. But, particularly for “explainer” posts, the long-term prospects seem dim. I write about random stuff and then send it to you. If you just want to understand something, why would you read my rambling if AI could explain it equally well, in a style customized for your tastes, and then patiently answer your questions forever? I mean, say you can explain some topic better than AI. That’s cool, but once you’ve published your explanation, AI companies will put it in their datasets, thankyouverymuch, after which AIs will start regurgitating your explanation. And then—wait a second—suddenly you can’t explain that topic better than AI anymore. This is all perfectly legal, since you can’t copyright ideas, only presentations of ideas. It used to take work to create a new presentation of someone else’s ideas. And there used to be a social norm to give credit to whoever first came up with some idea. This created incentives to create ideas , even if they weren’t legally protected. But AI can instantly slap a new presentation on your ideas, and no one expects AI to give credit for its training data. Why spend time creating content so just it can be nostrified by the Borg? And why read other humans if the Borg will curate their best material for you? So will the explainer post survive? Let’s start with an easier question: Already today, AI will happily explain anything. Yet many people read human-written explanations anyway. Why do they do that? I can think of seven reasons: Accuracy. Current AI is unreliable. If I ask about information theory or how to replace the battery on my laptop, it’s very impressive but makes some mistakes. But if I ask about heritability , the answers are three balls of gibberish stacked on top of each other in a trench-coat. Of course, random humans make mistakes, too. But if you find a quality human source, it is far less likely to contain egregious mistakes. This is particularly true across “large contexts” and for tasks where solutions are hard to verify. AI is boring. At least, writing from current popular AI tools is boring, by default. Parasocial relationships. If I’ve been reading someone for a long time, I start to feel like I have a kind of relationship with them. If you’ve followed this blog for a long time, you might feel like you have a relationship with me. Calling these “parasocial relationships” makes them sound sinister, but I think this is normal and actually a clever way of using our tribal-band programming to help us navigate of the modern world. Just like in “real” relationships, when I read someone I have a parasocial relationship with, I have extra context that makes it easier to understand them, I feel a sense of human connection, and I feel like I’m getting a sort of update on their “story”. I don’t get any of that with (current) AI. Skin in the game. If a human screws something up, it’s embarrassing. They lose respect and readers. On a meta-level, AI companies have similar incentives not to screw things up. But AI itself doesn’t (seem to) care. Human nature makes it easier to trust someone when we know they’re putting some kind of reputation on the line. Conspicuous consumption. Since I read Reasons and Persons , I can brag to everyone that I read Reasons and Persons. If I had read some equally good AI-written book, probably no one would care. Coordination points. Partly, I read Reasons and Persons because I liked it. And maybe I guess I read it so I can brag about the fact that I read it. (Hey everyone, have I mentioned that I read Reasons and Persons?) But I also read it because other people read it. When I talk to those people, we have a shared vocabulary and set of ideas that makes it easier to talk about other things. This wouldn’t work if we had all explored the same ideas though fragmented AI “tutoring”. Change is slow. Here we are 600 years after the invention of the printing press, and the primary mode of advanced education is still for people to physically go to a room where an expert is talking and write down stuff the expert says. If we’re that slow to adapt, then maybe we read human-written explainers simply out of habit. How much do each of these really matter? How much confidence should they give us that explainer posts will still exist a decade from now? Let’s handle them in reverse order. Sure, society takes time to adapt to technological change. But I don’t think college lectures are a good example of this, or that they’re a medieval relic that only survive out of inertia. On the contrary, I think they survive because we haven’t really any other model of education that’s fundamentally better. Take paper letters. One hundred years ago, these were the primary form of long-distance communication. But after the telephone was widely distributed, it only took it a few decades to kill the letter in almost all cases where the phone is better. When email and texting showed up, they killed off almost all remaining use of paper letters. They still exist, but they’re niche. The same basic story holds for horses, the telegraph, card catalogs, slide rules, VHS tapes, vacuum tubes, steam engines, ice boxes, answering machines, sailboats, typewriters, the short story, and the divine right of kings. When we have something that’s actually better , we drop the old ways pretty quickly. Inertia alone might keep explainer posts alive for a few years, but not more than that. Western civilization began with the Iliad . Or, at least, we’ve decided to pretend it did. If you read the Iliad, then you can brag about reading the Iliad (good) and you have more context to engage with everyone else who read it (very good). So people keep reading the Iliad. I think this will continue indefinitely. But so what? The Iliad is in that position because people have been reading/listening to it for thousands of years. But if you write something new and there’s no “normal” reason to read it, then it has to way to establish that kind of self-sustaining legacy. Non-fiction in general has a very short half-life. And even when coordination points exist, people often rely on secondary sources anyway. Personally, I’ve tried to read Wittgenstein, but I found it incomprehensible. Yet I think I’ve absorbed his most useful idea by reading other people’s descriptions. I wonder how much “Wittgenstein” is really a source at this point as opposed to a label. Also… explainer posts typically aren’t the Iliad. So I don’t think this will do much to keep explainer posts alive, either. (Aside: I’ve never understood why philosophy is so fixated on original sources, instead of continually developing new presentations of old ideas like math and physics do. Is this related to the fact that philosophers go to conferences and literally read their papers out loud?) I trust people more when I know they’re putting their reputation on the line, for the same reason I trust restaurants more when I know they rely on repeat customers. AI doesn’t give me this same reason for confidence. But so what? This is a loose heuristic. If AI were truly more accurate than human writing, I’m sure most people would learn to trust it in a matter of weeks. If AI was ultra-reliable but people really needed someone to hold accountable, AI companies could perhaps offer some kind of “insurance”. So I don’t see this as keeping explainers alive, either. Humans are social creatures. If bears had a secret bear Wikipedia and you went to the entry on humans, it would surely say, “Humans are obsessed with relationships.” I feel confident this will remain true. I also feel confident that we will continue to be interested in what people we like and respect think about matters of fact. It seems plausible that we’ll continue to enjoy getting that information bundled together with little jokes or busts of personality. So I expect our social instincts will provide at least some reason for explainers to survive. But how strong will this effect be? When explainer posts are read today, what fraction of readers are familiar enough to have a parasocial relationship with the author? Maybe 40%? And when people are familiar, what fraction of their motivation comes from the parasocial relationship, as opposed to just wanting to understand the content? Maybe another 40%? Those are made-up numbers, but I think it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that parasocial relationships explain only a fraction of why people read explainers today. And there’s another issue. How do parasocial relationships get started if there’s no other reason to read someone? These might keep established authors going for a while at reduced levels, but it seems like it would make it hard for new people to rise up. Maybe popular AIs are a bit boring , today. But I think this is mostly due to the final reinforcement learning step. If you interact with “base models”, they are very good at picking up style cues and not boring at all . So I highly doubt that there’s some fundamental limitation here. And anyway, does anyone care? If you just want to understand why vitamin D is technically a type of steroid , how much does style really matter, as opposed to clarity? I think style mostly matters in the context of a parasocial relationship, meaning we’ve already accounted for it above. I don’t know for sure if AI will ever be as accurate as a high-quality human source. Though it seems very unlikely that physics somehow precludes creating systems that are more accurate than humans. But if AI is that accurate, then I think this exercise suggests that explainer posts are basically toast. All the above arguments are just too weak to explain most of why people read human-written explainers now. So I think it’s mostly just accuracy. When that human advantage goes, I expect human-written explainers to go with it. I can think of three main counterarguments. First, maybe AI will fix discovery. Currently, potential readers of explainers often have no way to find potential writers. Search engines have utterly capitulated to SEO spam. Social media soft-bans outward links. If you write for a long time, you can build up an audience, but few people have the time and determination to do that. If you write a single explainer in your life, no one will read it. The rare exceptions to this rule either come from people contributing to established (non-social media) communities or from people with exceptional social connections. So—this argument goes—most potential readers don’t bother trying to find explainers, and most potential writers don’t bother creating them. If AI solves that matching problem, explainers could thrive. Second, maybe society will figure out some new way to reward people who create information. Maybe we fool around with intellectual property law. Maybe we create some crazy Xanadu -like system where in order to read some text, you have to first sign a contract to pay them based on the value you derive, and this is recursively enforced on everyone who’s downstream of you. Hell, maybe AI companies decide to solve the data wall problem by paying people to write stuff. But I doubt it. Third, maybe explainers will follow a trajectory like chess. Up until perhaps the early 1990s, humans were so much better than computers at chess that computers were irrelevant. After Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997, people quickly realized that while computers could beat humans, human+computer teams could still beat computers. This was called Advanced Chess . Within 15-20 years, however, humans became irrelevant. Maybe there will be a similar Advanced Explainer era? (I kid, that era started five years ago.) Will the explainer post go extinct? My guess is mostly yes, if and when AI reaches human-level accuracy. Incidentally, since there’s so much techno-pessimism these days: I think this outcome would be… great? It’s a little grim to think of humans all communicating with AI instead of each other, yes. But the upside is all of humanity having access to more accurate and accessible explanations of basically everything. If this is the worst effect of AGI, bring it on. Accuracy. Current AI is unreliable. If I ask about information theory or how to replace the battery on my laptop, it’s very impressive but makes some mistakes. But if I ask about heritability , the answers are three balls of gibberish stacked on top of each other in a trench-coat. Of course, random humans make mistakes, too. But if you find a quality human source, it is far less likely to contain egregious mistakes. This is particularly true across “large contexts” and for tasks where solutions are hard to verify. AI is boring. At least, writing from current popular AI tools is boring, by default. Parasocial relationships. If I’ve been reading someone for a long time, I start to feel like I have a kind of relationship with them. If you’ve followed this blog for a long time, you might feel like you have a relationship with me. Calling these “parasocial relationships” makes them sound sinister, but I think this is normal and actually a clever way of using our tribal-band programming to help us navigate of the modern world. Just like in “real” relationships, when I read someone I have a parasocial relationship with, I have extra context that makes it easier to understand them, I feel a sense of human connection, and I feel like I’m getting a sort of update on their “story”. I don’t get any of that with (current) AI. Skin in the game. If a human screws something up, it’s embarrassing. They lose respect and readers. On a meta-level, AI companies have similar incentives not to screw things up. But AI itself doesn’t (seem to) care. Human nature makes it easier to trust someone when we know they’re putting some kind of reputation on the line. Conspicuous consumption. Since I read Reasons and Persons , I can brag to everyone that I read Reasons and Persons. If I had read some equally good AI-written book, probably no one would care. Coordination points. Partly, I read Reasons and Persons because I liked it. And maybe I guess I read it so I can brag about the fact that I read it. (Hey everyone, have I mentioned that I read Reasons and Persons?) But I also read it because other people read it. When I talk to those people, we have a shared vocabulary and set of ideas that makes it easier to talk about other things. This wouldn’t work if we had all explored the same ideas though fragmented AI “tutoring”. Change is slow. Here we are 600 years after the invention of the printing press, and the primary mode of advanced education is still for people to physically go to a room where an expert is talking and write down stuff the expert says. If we’re that slow to adapt, then maybe we read human-written explainers simply out of habit.

AI Writing

Brain Baking 6 days ago

I Made My Own Fountain Pen!

Those of you who know me also know that I love writing with a fountain pen . My late father-in-law had been pushing me for years to buy a small lathe and try my hand at some simple shapes—including a fountain pen barrel, of course. Being quite the capable woodworking autodidact, he taught me how to construct a few rudimentary things. Together, we created my stone oven cabinet on wheels I still use on a weekly basis. To this day, I regret not buying a lathe to create more things together. The idea of following a woodworking workshop or a pen creation workshop stuck on the back of my mind but never quite managed to materialize. In May 2024 , when I visited the Dutch Pen Show, a few artisans that presented their home-made pens there also offered workshops but lived more than away in the northern part of Germany, being out of reach for a quick “let’s go there and do that” excursion. Until last month, when my wife somehow found out about Eddy Nijsen’s Wood Blanks & Penkits company and neglected to tell me. Instead, she organized a secret birthday present, invited two more friends over to accompany me, and booked a “mystery event” in the calendar. That morning, when I heard one of my friend’s voices coming to pick me up, I expected us to go to some kind of board game convention. An hour later, we pulled over in a rather anonymous looking street in Weert, The Netherlands, and I had no clue what we were doing there. Boy, was I in for a pleasant surprise! We spent the entire day doing this: Me working on a lathe carefully shaving off wooden clippings to create a pen barrel from a blank. Note the enormously varied amount of available wooden pen blanks on the shelves in the back. It was quite possibly the best day I’ve had in months. The hours flew by and at the end of the day we all made two pens: one regular ball pen with a typical Parker filling that twists to open, and one fountain pen. Both pens turned out to be remarkable for different reasons. The ball pen is not one I will be using regularly but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth creating it. The wooden blank we used for this pen is unique to say the least. The black splintery wood almost smelled and felt like charcoal. Eddy, our instructor, managed to salvage it during a local archaeological dig that excavated a medieval oak water well shaft. Experts estimate that the ancient oak was felled in around 1250. Decades of exposure to ground water penetrating the oak cells permanently deformed and coloured the wood. After years of drying in Eddy’s workspace, it was sawn into smaller rectangular blocks called “pen blanks” where we proceeded to drill a hole in, attach to the lathe, and rework into a cylindrical shape that can be pressed onto other components called a “pen kit”. The metal components we worked with that day were high quality Beaufort Ink pen kits . After sanding, multiple waxing steps, the involvement of glue and a dedicated pen press, it was ready to write with! The pen has a mechanical twist mechanism on top that’s part of the kit. Therefore, we only needed to finish one pen blank. For the fountain pen that has a screw cap, we’d need to up our game, as not only we have to work two barrels, but the dimensions and particular shapes differ: the pen is thinner on the bottom and thicker near the grip. A blurry photo of the result: walnut fountain pen (left) and medieval oak ball pen (right). For the fountain pen, we could choose whatever wood we wanted. My friends chose different kinds of bright looking exotic wood while I went for the dark brown-grey walnut. My parents had multiple walnut trees when we were kids and I loved climbing in them and helping with the harvest. Selecting a type of wood closer to home seemed like the obvious choice for me. I carefully recorded all specific steps we took that day—with the home-made pen, of course—in case I accidentally buy a lathe and want to get in some more exercise. It felt amazing to work with my hands instead of staring at a screen all day long. Eddy’s mastery over his woodworking felt magical. He said that there’s only one way to achieve this: practice, fail, practice, fail, practice, fail some more. I doubt I’ll be able to finish one pen on my own without his guidance. I wish my father-in-law was still alive. It gradually dawned to me that I wasn’t really making a fountain pen. I was just creating a beautiful hull. Woodworking is not enough: you also need to be an expert jeweller to craft a great nib that writes like a dream. The stock nib that came with the Beaufort Ink pen kit unfortunately didn’t: it felt scratchy and dry. I anticipated this and have since replaced it with a fine platinum Bock nib that writes great although I’m still struggling with the ink flow going from the converter to the feed. The platinum nib was expensive ( excluding shipping) but it would be a shame never to use the pen. While the Beaufort Ink material indeed is of very high quality, this particular pen kit model is not the most well-balanced: posting the cap is entirely useless as it’s much too heavy. Also, the metal grip is much thinner than the wooden body that we created. Compared to a Lamy 2000 or a kit-less pen, searching for the right grip and writing takes a while to get used to. But who cares, I made my own fountain pen! The second mod I’m planning to do is to laser the Brain Baking logo on top of the cap. I love the way the pen and walnut wood feels and the subtle colour differences that neatly line up when you screw on the cap again is beautiful (but difficult to catch on camera). I do wonder what else you can do with a lathe if you do not limit yourself to just using a pen kit… Related topics: / fountain pens / activity / By Wouter Groeneveld on 8 October 2025.  Reply via email .

Writing Hardware

Michael Lynch 1 weeks ago

Refactoring English: Month 10

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 did complete this successfully, but I spent too long on the post and felt somewhat underwhelmed with my final result. I wrote a first draft of a new chapter but didn’t publish it. I ended up spending more time than I planned on “The Software Essays that Shaped Me” and freelance editing clients. I was going to write this off and say that I’m not learning anything new anymore by reaching out to customers. Then, a few days ago, I heard back from a reader I’d reached out to who said he used what he learned from my book to get an article on the front page of Hacker News for the first time. So, that was pretty indisputably valuable and tells me I should be doing more of this. I brainstorm more about this below . September had a nice bump in website visitors and pre-orders. I’d like to get to the point where there’s a virtuous cycle of readers referring other readers, but I don’t think I’m there yet. Still, nice to make almost $1k for the month. In baseball, a bunt is when you hold the bat in the ball’s path rather than swinging the bat. The upside is that you’re less likely to miss, but the downside is that you won’t hit the ball very far. The best you can hope for with a bunt is making it to first base, but a bunt is almost never going to be a home run. Most of my blog posts are “swing for the fences” posts. I put in a lot of effort because I want to reach #1 on Hacker News, reddit, or search results. The problem is that my “swing for the fences” posts take me about a month to write, so if I’m publishing blog posts as I write my book, I’d have to put my book on hold for a month every time I write a blog post. I’ve been thinking about whether I could do some “bunt” posts instead. That way, I can only put my book on hold for a week rather than the whole month. I don’t want to take a topic that deserves a lot of care and just do a lazy version of it. Rather, I want to take a topic that’s easy to cover and just see how it does. My first bunt was, “I Once Appeared in The Old New Thing.” It was about an experience I had at 22 at my first real job. I didn’t have a lot of insightful things to say about it, but I thought it was an interesting story. I was able to write it in about four hours, and it felt complete for what it was. My next bunt was, “The Software Essays that Shaped Me.” I’ve seen other people share lists of their favorite software blog posts, and I thought it would be an easy, fun thing to do. Best of all, the people who appreciate good software writing might also find my book interesting. As I started to write “The Software Essays that Shaped Me,” it turned into more than just a bunt. I ended up spending almost all of September on it. I originally thought I’d list my favorite blog posts and call it a day, but that felt too boring. So, I tried to include short commentary about each post. Then, I got carried away and ended up writing commentary that was longer than the originals themselves. It took me several drafts to figure out what commentary felt interesting, and I still don’t feel like I quite succeeded. I ended up spending 17 hours on “The Software Essays that Shaped Me” and never stopped to evaluate whether it was still worth writing if it was going to be all that work. I think the post is interesting to people who read my blog. If someone I knew published a list of articles that influenced them, I’d find that interesting. But in comment threads about the post, people shared their own lists, and I found strangers’ lists totally uninteresting. Maybe I counteracted that some by investing a lot in my commentary, but I just don’t think a list of good blog posts can be all that interesting. Both posts did well. They both reached the front page of Hacker News, though they did it through the second chance pool , which feels a little like winning through TKO rather than a real knockout. It’s interesting that the results scaled almost linearly with the effort I invested, which I typically don’t find to be the case . Previously, when one of my Refactoring English posts did well on Hacker News, there was a noticeable uptick in readers purchasing the book . This time, “The Software Essays that Shaped Me” reached #2 and stayed on the front page for 11 hours, but only one person purchased. Maybe everyone seeing my post on Hacker News has already seen that I’m writing a book, so everyone who’s interested has already bought? I woke up the morning after my article had already fallen off the front page of Hacker News and suddenly realized: I never included the ad for the book! All the sample chapters on the book’s website include a little self-ad to tell the reader I’m writing a book on this topic, and they can buy early access. All the pages on the Refactoring English website are supposed to have a little self-ad on them for the book. I forgot to include the self-ad for the blog post, so the first 14k readers saw my post and had no idea I’m writing a book. D’oh! I’ve updated my blog template so that I can’t possibly forget to include the self-ad in the future. A few months ago, I decided to offer freelance editing services to help other developers improve writing on their blogs. My idea was that it’s an opportunity to make sure the way I explain concepts in my book makes sense to real people. The downside is that there’s a high cost to the editing. Each job takes me between four to seven hours, and it eats up my “hard thinking” of the day, so it’s tough to do my own writing in the same day. I also feel pressure to offer quick turnaround, even though nobody has asked me to hurry. But just knowing my own writing process, it sucks to be stuck for days waiting on feedback. At the beginning, freelance editing worked as I planned: it gave me good ideas for my book. As I do more jobs, I’m getting fewer ideas for my book. Now, most of the feedback I write is basically writing a personalized version of something I’ve already written for my book. I want to keep doing the editing, but only for authors who have read my book. I doubled my rates, so now my price for editing a blog post is $400. But I’m going to offer a 90% discount to readers who have read my book. At a 90% discount, it’s almost not worth charging at all, but I want clients to pay some amount so that they feel like they have skin in the game, too. I’ll continue to take on clients who haven’t read the book, but I want to charge enough that I feel like it’s worth the tradeoff of taking time from my book. $400 might still be too low, but we’ll see. I’m trying to figure out why I keep missing my goal of reader outreach. On its face, it doesn’t seem that hard, but it never seems like the most important thing, so I keep deferring it. There are other tasks I procrastinate because I don’t enjoy doing them, but I actually enjoy reaching out to readers. It’s fun to see what different readers are up to and how they might apply my techniques. Part of the issue is that emailing readers requires activation energy because I have to: It might help if I first gather a list of customers to email and their websites. That way, when I’m in the mood to reach out, I’m not starting from scratch every time. A few Refactoring English customers have emailed me confused because they paid but never got an email with a link to the book. I collect payment through Stripe, and Stripe redirects customers to the book’s URL after they complete payment. If the customer doesn’t notice the redirect or forgets to bookmark the page, they lose access to the book. Whenever customers tell me they can’t find the link to the book, I dig around in Stripe to look for a setting to customize post-purchase emails, give up after a few minutes, and then email the correct link to the customer. Last month, I finally sat down and searched through Stripe’s documentation and forum posts, and I can’t find any way to customize the email Stripe sends after a customer completes a one-time payment. As far as I can tell, the only option is to spin up your own web server to listen for Stripe webhooks, then send your own emails from your own email provider. All because Stripe can’t be bothered to let merchants customize any text in the payment completion emails… Setting up a web server to respond to webhooks shouldn’t be that hard for me, but it means writing code to glue together Stripe, Buttondown, and Netlify functions, and they all have their little gotchas and bugs. Especially Stripe. I’ve spent about 10 hours so far just trying to get emails to send after a customer makes a purchase, and I’m still not sure it’s working correctly. Here are the gotchas I’ve hit so far: I’m still tinkering with Hacker News Observer, a product that I still haven’t released and don’t know what to do with. For now, I’m just gathering data and using it to satisfy some curiosities about success on Hacker News. One curiosity I’ve had for a long time is whether there are times of day when it’s easier for a post to reach the front page of Hacker News, so I aggregated what percentage of posts reach the front page over the course of a day: I created a view in Hacker News observer to show front page stats by hour I initially thought I had a bug that overcounted the success rate, as the percentage of Hacker News submissions that reach the front page feels lower than 12% in my experience. Then, I looked at some random slices from the last few days, and it seems to match up. If I browse , there will typically be 2-5 stories that reached the front page. I found a 30-minute slice from a few days ago where 27% of submissions reached the front page, which is surprising. I thought that success rate would be significantly higher on the weekends, when there are fewer submissions. Weekend posts are more likely to reach the front page, but the effect is much smaller than I thought. I thought it was going to be like 5% on weekdays vs. 20% on weekends. It makes submitting on the weekend less attractive because your chances of hitting the front page are only slightly better, but if you succeed, there are substantially fewer readers. I’d like to try limiting the data to personal blogs like I do on HN Popularity Contest , as I’m curious to see if personal blogs have better chances at certain times. I’m experimenting with low-investment, low-payoff-style blog posts. I’m adjusting my strategy for freelance editing to work specifically with people who have read my book. My intuition was way off about the odds of reaching the front page of Hacker News. Result : Published “The Software Essays that Shaped Me” , which attracted 16k readers in the first three days Result : Didn’t publish anything new Result : Emailed two new readers Go to my list of pre-paid readers Look for ones that have a website (so I can say something personalized) Read through their website to learn more about them Write an email and word it carefully to avoid sounding AI-generated Stripe’s Go client library is compatible with exactly one version of the Stripe webhook API. No, the documentation doesn’t say which one. Run it and find out from the webhook failures! If you update your Stripe account to use the latest webhook API version and then resend a webhook for a previous event, Stripe still uses the old API version even though it claims to use the new version. Netlify silently converts HTTP header names to lowercase, so if you’re looking for the header, you have to look for . Instead of a normal v2 Go module , Stripe for some reason decided to make every package upgrade a source change as well, so when I upgrade from v83 to v84, I have to replace in every file that imports the Stripe package. Normally, you’d upgrade the version in one place without affecting imports. The Stripe webhook signing secret is different from your Stripe API key. Weekdays: 12.1% of submissions reach the front page. Weekends: 13.2% of submissions reach the front page. Published “The Software Essays that Shaped Me” Published “I Once Appeared in The Old New Thing” Published “Get xkcd Cartoons at 2x Resolution” Worked with two freelance clients for Refactoring English Set up a webhook handler to send post-purchase emails to Refactoring English customers Added “success by hour of day” feature to Hacker News observer Started contributing to the Jellyfin Roku client code Had a call with AirGradient to discuss improving relations between the company and community members Consider bailing if a low-investment post turns out to be high-investment. Stripe does not allow you to customize post-purchase emails. You have to do a bunch of other stuff to send your customers an email. Set up editing discounts for readers who have read the book. Create a list of early access customers to reach out to. Publish a new chapter of the book.

Business Career Go Writing

Harper Reed 1 weeks ago

Now @ 10-06-2025

As many people have said “it is going to get worse before it gets better.” Let’s see! Thank you for using RSS. I appreciate you. Email me This company has been going. We published some research. It is fun. We have raised some money from amazing people. I am excited to be building things again. I can’t wait to show you more what we are building. Spending a lot of time “vibe coding.” I code everything! I am still feeling a deep sense of uncertainty. AI is coming for us faster than we thought. I don’t think people my age who are being laid off now are going to be able to find jobs equivalent to what they had before. The state of the US is very concerning at the moment. I seem to be living in a freshly occupied city. Weird. There is a sense of fear out here that is stresseful, and terrifying. Reading a lot of books. Send me your recs. Still taking a lot of photos. It is still fun. We have a new office, swing by! Trying to meet people out and about. HMU. let’s get lunch Running and working out a lot. It is nice. I feel great. I am an AI assistant. Trying to blog a lot more and at a regular cadence. Now with notes . Pretty excited about Bluesky and atproto specifically. Very neat. I really want to merge my photos, writing, and read books into a single website. Thinking a lot about that. Give me ideas I think I am making progress! Now just need to figure out photos. I still haven’t figure this out Still, excited about the future. Although a bit worried about the present.

Career AI Writing

Harper Reed 1 weeks ago

Note #289

Just got a Covid booster and a flu shot in HMart Thank you for using RSS. I appreciate you. Email me

Programming Culture Writing

vkoskiv 1 weeks ago

New Website

A few years ago, I got into the habit of keeping thorough notes on projects I'm working on to make it easier for me to track my progress and jump between projects. I want to improve my technical writing, so I'm taking on a new project to turn these project notes into blog posts on this new website.

Web Development Writing

Weakty 1 weeks ago

Just call

Just pick up the phone and call a loved one. Just call, don’t bandy messages back and forth about when a good time is. Pick up your phone, hit the little phone icon, and say "hello, I was thinking about you and wanted to say hello, is now a good time to chat?" If the person picks up and says, "sorry, now’s not a good time", that’s fine. You called. Maybe they’ll say I’ll call you back . In the end, you heard their voice and they heard yours. If the person doesn’t pick up, you can leave a voicemail. Maybe they don’t check their voicemail. Maybe they don’t know how. But you can still do it. When you call unannounced and your call is missed, that recipient might think it’s an emergency. Who would call unless it was an emergency? They might think. They might text you back and say, "is everything alright? I saw you called." As I continue the practice of "just call" I know to follow up a missed call with a message that says: "hey, I was just thinking of you and wanted to catch up and hear your voice! No need to call back, I’ll try again another time." A few years ago, I started my year with a resolution that if I thought of someone, I would send them a message . I did that. It yielded more connection in my life. But a text message was easy, though, and I think it is a poor stand-in for hearing a loved one’s voice. The point of all this, though, was to reach out when the feeling of being able to reach out was present in me . Then, I changed messages to phone calls for the closest people in my life. But it’s not easy. There are many things that stand in the way of calling. It feels more vulnerable and intimate and when it doesn’t go the way we want, it’s uncomfortable. So we might tell ourselves that people’s lives are so busy . We don’t want to interrupt. It might hurt, even just a little, to reach out and hear that a person can’t talk right now, or when they don’t pick up. I’m still learning to practice empathy and understanding when someone isn’t available, and you are; when you want human connection, but the other side can’t meet that need in the moment. If that moment hurts, acknowledge and feel that hurt, and then move on with the day. It can be difficult to feel feelings, of course, so we can also reassure ourselves rationally (if we must). By calling and experiencing a missed connection, you can know that you’ve shown up for the people you love, by trying to reach out. And, yes, the true reality is that people are indeed often busy— you weren’t when you called, but that was you , and this is them . Sometimes, you might try and try and try again, only for the pile of missed connections to grow, like loose threads coming off an old sweater. Sometimes the person won’t hit the ball back. Maybe you’ll need to try scheduling your calls. Maybe even that doesn’t work out so great. This is something we fear to experience — a connection we value growing weaker, or the other party simply is not able or willing to meet you where you are at. Sometimes that’s just life. Sometimes we grow apart. Sometimes we grow back again. But wouldn’t you be grateful to say you tried when you were able? Not many people call these days.

Writing Culture

A Working Library 1 weeks ago

Trauma and Recovery

Judith Herman’s canonical work on trauma remains one of the core texts on the topic, over thirty years since its first publication. Critically—and in contrast to much current popular discourse about trauma—Herman locates psychological trauma in a social and political context, arguing that the political standpoint and testimony of survivors are necessary to an understanding of how trauma is remembered and mourned, and how stories can be reconstructed for more just futures. “Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told,” she writes. We live in a time of ghosts; we live among storytellers. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

Culture Writing Books

Entropic Thoughts 1 weeks ago

Why I Keep Blogging With Emacs

Writing Programming Open Source

ava's blog 2 weeks ago

notebook 10 - yapping edition

Don't know why I had so much to say this time! Feeling better again. Reply via email Published 28 Sep, 2025

Writing Journalism

Sebastiano Tronto 2 weeks ago

When I say "alphabetical order", I mean "alphabetical order"

When I say "alphabetical order", I mean "alphabetical order"

Web Development Programming Writing

Manuel Moreale 2 weeks ago

Digital fatigue

I think I’m starting to feel what I can only describe as digital fatigue. I believe this is the result of a combination of two main factors: The solution is going to be a fairly easy one: I think I’m going to stop consuming digital content for the rest of the year and focus more on reading books and creating content myself. I know I’m going to miss reading content from a bunch of people I really like, but right now, this seems to be the only reasonable solution to save myself and my mental sanity. 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

Books Writing

ava's blog 2 weeks ago

grief, disability and gratitude

I don’t know if it’s the weather, hormonal, my increased pain recently, or because I finally have enough space between now and a year ago when I just tried to survive (a year on Infliximab soon!), but I am currently grieving my future. It doesn’t have to be grim, of course, and I should probably worry when I get there, but my mind goes there anyway. I think about the fact that I am immunosuppressed for life, as I need this treatment for the rest of my life. How will that affect me in future sick seasons? Future pandemics that are sure to come? I have seen enough how society treats the immunocompromised/suppressed during the height of the Covid pandemic. Who cares, they’re just old people right, and people die, I wanna dance and go shopping! Never mind that that includes people of all ages anywhere, like cancer patients, people with HIV, people with autoimmune diseases, people with donor organs, and more. I think about growing older and getting sicker in a system that, even after a huge pandemic, has refused to properly invest into healthcare and hasn’t stopped privatizing hospitals. A future in which health insurance will be even more expensive and probably covering less and less. I see a future in which hospitals keep deteriorating, personnel thinning even further, overworked and underpaid, maybe even lacking basic qualifications one day because they can’t find qualified people that want to subject themselves to this. I don’t want to have to give my life in the hands of people who are tired, resentful, and seeing me as a burden. I don’t want to have to rely on someone that gets exploited so hard that mistakes become likely. I don’t know why people aren’t more mad about this and doing something - these are the people who help you in a medical emergency, a sudden onset illness, an accident that leaves you disabled, and who might one day come to your home to care for you or a loved one. I don’t want robots to do this. I know my future will rely a lot on medical professionals, just not exactly to what degree, and it scares me when I see how much we burn them out and take them for granted. The current system is reckless and dangerous, and aiding in the abuse of not only the personnel, but the sick people in it too. I think about the fact that cancers and benign tumors have become more likely for me. Even when harmless by itself, they can still grow places that significantly impact nerves and other important parts. I think about the risk of demyelinating diseases that my medication brings, and I realize that I should make the most of my ability to move, just in case. One day, I might need a wheelchair, or have trouble walking, at least. I think about how fragile the spine really is, and how much consequences damage to it really has - pain, mobility, feeling - and I wonder how much horror is ahead. As the breadwinner in my marriage, I wonder: What if one day, I can only work reduced hours, or none at all? Will we be able to handle it? Would my wife find a job that could support us and still enable care? Would disability payments be high enough to supplement it? It’s so easy to point at government or health insurance websites or flyers and go: See, they have programs and options for you! But you only get to truly find out how accessible and helpful those are when you need them. Their existence is good, but only a small part. Suddenly you find out: Long waiting list. A huge pile of confusing paperwork. Interviews. Checkups by their approved doctors. Hand in more documentation. Re-hand in that form you filled out wrong. Getting statements from your doctors. Months or years of waiting for a decision. Denied, trying again. Approved, but only for a year, then you need to do it all over again. Only a low sum. Only this and that. These options do not exist to truly help disabled people and their families - they’re crumbs to shut people up, for healthy people to go “but these things exist for you - if they don’t help you, then you’re probably not sick enough”. They treat you like you’re acting entitled when you just want the bare minimum. These are the things that get reduced and cut first, under the guise of “misuse” and “fraud”. The people who truly need it seem to barely get a cent out of the system they paid into for decades and give up or die halfway through, but allegedly, there are of course issues with lots of fraudsters getting thousands out of it somehow, so all of us have to be punished. Disabled people aren’t sitting at home like on some great vacation spending your money on frivolous things. Many have to count every cent, are isolated and lonely at home, barely go out, and are still suffering from their illness. Many feel useless to society, a burden, and guilty. Many haven’t seen friends or family in years because they turned away when things got dire. And every couple months, they have to read on social media or in newspapers how abled, healthy people gamble with their lives - talking about disabled people like they can’t read that. Cuts to what they rely on to survive as if they are a hypothetical problem instead of a real person. Do you understand the financial stress of everything always getting more expensive, but your benefits not getting adjusted? Having to reapply and hope for the best every 1-4 years? Having to justify yourself over and over again for the same disease(s)? Or, possibly being right in the gap between unable to work but not deemed sick enough for benefits? No financial stability, no ability to plan ahead longterm, no trust that it is being taken care of. Just being a bit safe for now . Sick people are forced to live lives that others would not even let their pet live. Accused of faking it, denied claims on a whim, treated like an addict for pain medication, seen as a freeloader, not allowed much dignity; and then at the end, kept alive against their will because assisted suicide is “wrong”. Too many sick people live a life too shit to live and not bad enough to die. I know that I will get more sick and disabled as I age, and I have to come to terms with the above - that it will happen to me too. Right now, I can still hold a job, I can grocery shop, I can treat myself to something nice, I can exercise at the gym and dance in the kitchen and travel with my wife. But for how long? And also - have you realized that this could be you, too, as you keep putting off taking care of yourself as this thing you can do later when the consequences hit? Visualize the future you will realistically have if you continue like this, and if you want that. Please be kind to your body, do what is best for it as much as is feasible for you, even if it’s hard. Delay having to be sick and reliant on the medical system for as long and much as you can. Be grateful for what you still get to do and have. Reply via email Published 25 Sep, 2025

Programming Writing Culture

annie's blog 2 weeks ago

Why do I love my Pika guestbook so fucking much? Let’s discuss.

This blog is on Pika . Part of having a Pika blog is having (if you want it) a guestbook . I have it, I want it, I fucking love it. I was kind of surprised by how much I love it. I had a self-hosted WP blog for years and years, but many years ago I turned off comments. The maintenance effort wasn’t worth it. I haven’t had analytics of any kind for years either. I like it better that way. I blog about whatever bullshit is on my mind; maybe I have a little chat about it on Mastodon with a few folks; maybe I get an email or two. The end. It’s lovely. Let me be clear, lest I sound like I do not want attention or praise: I love attention and praise. What I don’t like is pressure. Dealing with comments and comment spam feels like pressure. Receiving and responding to an email feels like a conversation. Knowing how many clicks or visits happened on my blog feels like pressure. Getting a little note or drawing in my guestbook (aka friendbook) feels like a little treat, a hello from a neat person. Maybe there’s even a link to a blog I’m gonna love. I recently had a blog post show up on Hacker News and the way I knew is that my inbox was full of Someone signed your guestbook notifications.  It took me a day to figure out why. I enjoyed all the notes and drawings and figured a dubiously important internet personage had linked to my blog for some reason and brought me all these new friends. Close enough, I guess. Things have been quite busy for the last couple of months. I haven’t done much in the blogging world, reading or writing, and I’ve missed it. I read a bunch of comments on Hacker News and thought Oh boy I better blog about something really smart and insightful next. And then I was like, Nah. No pressure. I’m not here for pressure. Only friends.

Writing AI Web Development

Bill Mill 2 weeks ago

Writing good technical articles is hard, we should do more of it anyway

An article is making the rounds about what it feels like to read a technical article when you don't understand the terminology

Career Writing