2026-04-28 01:18:00
I was sad today!
I love discovering, and reading new, personal blogs. I'm always interested in people and opinions.
Imagine my sadness when I stumbled onto a new (to me) blog, only to discover that the author had an AI Generated Summary at the top of each post.
In my opinion, this is devaluing the work. All that effort infused into researching, planning, writing, and editing. And then thrown through the sausage-machine for it to summarise the work in about three sentences.
It probably vacuumed up the discourse and threw it into the depths of its learning model, to later regurgitate as "AI content" to someone else.
Do you really think your own words are worthless?
For very long articles, it's nice to have a summary, but AI? Really?
Spend an extra two minutes and summarise your own content, please.
2026-04-27 00:03:00
Many videos exist on YouTube about minimalism and how to be distraction free. I came across this video recently after watching this YouTuber's video about the end of the Canadian free weather broadcast.
The idea here is to leave your tech in one spot similar to how we used to. The desktop computer in one room on a desk and your phone in one location, perhaps the kitchen, plugged in.
Uninstall apps you don't need and use your phone as intended. The value of your phone is a device for outside of the house. Turn on do not disturb and turn off the sounds.
Set up a schedule for daily use, perhaps an hour in the morning and evening, don't use any tech. Use this time for reading a book or exercise.
We used to use single purpose tools such as cameras and music players. These devices were the best of the best in some cases. No distractions and worked every time. Notebooks and pens to journal is another great use of single-purpose tech.
Get a life and touch grass! Do something you like, bike ride, play a guitar, just get curious about stuff.
Hopefully you find this list a good starting point and find some peace from this world of distractions and negativity.
2026-04-26 22:58:00
Image by Egor Vikhrev on Unsplash. Glitched.
age verification but it's just a dialog box that asks "are you old" and the answers are "yes" and "maybe later"
So. The Liberal party here in Canada - the party that now has a majority in the federal government - has adopted a motion to ban children under 16 from social media.
Age Gating isn't It though, because:
Read the full article here.
And lastly - especially if age gating is being suggested, proposed, or otherwise discussed in your area - The time to speak up is now.
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2026-04-26 00:04:00
I paid for a lifetime subscription to Bear after discovering that this is a better place to spend my time scrolling. Thanks to Kagi Small Web for the introduction.
I do not have much of a plan here yet. I just want a simple place to write things down, collect and work through ideas, and keep a public trail of what I am learning.
Some posts will be technical. Some will be half-formed. Some will probably just be notes to myself. That sounds fine.
So: hello, Bear.
2026-04-25 22:55:00
Yesterday, I found the post i think we're obsessed with aesthetic on the Discovery Feed. It featured quite a few nice quotes. My favourite was this one:
It's a real "people die when they are killed" kind of quote. Your first reaction is probably going to be some faint amusement, accompanied by a thought like Well, duh. Thanks, Captain Obvious.1 But aside from the factual layer, it also has a personal, contemplative element. This scene shows one of those moments where you see something that you've seen a thousand times and suddenly feel a deep sense of appreciation. We come from non-existence, and go back into it. The time where every one of us gets to experience sunsets or soothing spring rain or beautiful autumn leaves is just a tiny fraction of existence as a whole. From that perspective, even the most commonplace, mundane or tacky things can seem truly beautiful.
I think this scene is from the documentary "The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness", which has circulated pretty widely online. I've never actually seen the whole thing, just the clips of it that get uploaded on YouTube. Another one I like is this one. The interviewer asks: "Aren't you worried about the studio's future?"
Miyazaki's response:
The future is clear. It's going to fall apart. [laughs] I can already see it. What's the use worrying? It's inevitable. [...] "Ghibli" is just a random name that I got from an airplane. It's only a name.
He then walks away, and the interviewer quietly says "how beautiful", to herself. I find that last part ruins the scene a bit; it feels like the interviewer is telling the audience how to interpret what was just said. It would've been much more effective to just end with the shot of Miyazaki walking across the garden.2 However, a short scroll through the comments under the video will tell you that people still have different opinions on Miyazaki's stance. Some criticise him for being a stubborn old fart who'd rather let his studio fall apart than properly train a successor and make sure it continues to live on. Others just see him as a bitter nihilist.
To me, these quotes embody a kind of optimistic nihilism. Yes, nothing is forever. Everything will return to nothing one day; the world and our lives don't have inherent meaning. But despite of that, or rather precisely because of that, it becomes meaningful what you do with your life, and how you choose to live it.3
Miyazaki's oeuvre makes it obvious that he's not a bitter defeatist who declared life to be meaningless and simply gave up. Quite the contrary, he's dedicated his life to art and creativity, with all the self-discipline, self-criticism, doubt and despair that comes with it. He's a "suffering artist" type, but not one that wallows in their suffering or sees it as the source of their art. He simply accepts it as a consequence of life.
When he laughs after saying that the studio is going to fall apart, it's not a laugh of self-pity, or a mask for disillusionment. It's a laugh born out of the awareness that all things will eventually fade away, and that, from a "cosmic" perspective, all human efforts are but small scratches on the ground. This serves as a way to balance out the deep attachment he has to his work. It's an Absurdist take, really. The same is true for the comment about the name of the studio. It's just that, a random name, an empty container, like a drinking glass. The glass is only a vehicle for the water, tea, or juice you fill it with. At the same time, it's what allows you to drink the water, tea, or juice - meaningless and meaningful at the same time.
Some of the comments under the YouTube video point out that the end of the movie The Boy and the Heron represents Miyazaki truly coming to terms with the things that he says in this interview, or maybe truly internalising their meaning. Instead of desperately trying to hold onto a form (the Studio) and trying to find a successor, he realises (and posits to us, via the movie) that it's not the form that matters, but the spirit.4 It doesn't matter whether or not people use your drinking glass - treating it as some kind of heirloom, or letting it shatter on the ground. As long as they too realise the value of drinking a cold lemonade on a summer evening or hot tea during a cold winter, any glass, cup or mug will do.
Unless you believe in some kind of afterlife where you get to enjoy sunsets for the rest of eternity.↩
This is a documentary, so it's obviously "staged" to some degree. I don't believe that Miyazaki is lying, or the interviewer is simply reading off a script with her response. Still, the context that allowed these images to get made ends up guiding what they say in a certain direction. It's another kind of inevitability.↩
Fittingly, the Japanese title of the movie The Boy and the Heron (and the book it was based on) is "How Do You Live?"↩
When watching the documentary clips, I get the impression that Miyazaki already came to terms with this a long time ago; The Boy and the Heron is simply the first time he expresses this thought in one of his movies in a very clear and straightforward fashion.↩
2026-04-25 22:31:00
How do you know the output is good without redoing the work yourself?
You've received a report, a market analysis for the new product you're planning to launch. Reading through it you notice problems: the date on the report doesn't match the date you requested it on, it's from 6 months prior. Several paragraphs have obvious spelling errors. Some graphs are mislabeled and duplicated.
The report is disregarded. The existence of typos and copy-paste errors which may not change the main conclusion of the report is enough to discard it. Someone who didn't put in enough care to make the report presentable on the surface level also didn't care enough to produce good research.
You have judged the quality using a proxy measure: the superficial quality of the writing itself. It's not what you ultimately care about — what you care about is whether the report reflects reality and points you toward good decisions. But that's expensive to check. Surface quality is cheap, and it correlates well enough with the thing you can't easily measure.
All of knowledge work has this problem. It's hard to objectively judge the quality of someone's work without spending a lot of effort on it. Therefore everyone relies heavily on proxy measures.
Proxy measures kept misaligned incentives in check. LLMs broke them.
Large language models are great at simulating a style of writing without necessarily reproducing the quality of the work. You can ask ChatGPT to write you a market analysis report and it will look and read like a deliverable from a top-tier consulting firm written by Serious Professionals.
A software engineer can write thousands of lines of code which looks like high-quality code, at least if you have just a couple of seconds to skim through it. Their colleagues will ask AI to do a code review for them, the code review will uncover a lot of issues and potential problems, and these will be addressed. The ritual of working will be upheld with none of the underlying quality.
We have built a working simulacrum of knowledge work.
The incentives almost guarantee we are in big trouble. Many workers, quite rationally, want to do well on whatever dimension they are being measured on. If they are judged by the surface-level quality of their work, then it's no surprise most of "their" output will be written by LLMs.
The LLMs have the same problem.
The training doesn't evaluate "is the answer true" or "is the answer useful." It's either "is the answer likely to appear in the training corpus" or "is the RLHF judge happy with the answer." We are optimising LLMs to produce output which looks like high quality output. And we have very good optimisers.
So here we are. We spent billions to create systems used to perform a simulacrum of work. Companies are racing to be the first on the tokens-spent leaderboard. The more LLM output workers produce, the less time anyone spends on looking deeply at the output. All we have time for is to skim it, slap "LGTM" on it and open their 17th Claude Code session.
We've automated ourselves into Goodhart's law.