2026-04-18 20:26:00
So with the help of the local library, I gave up on podcasts.
It has been around 20 years for me, since the beginning of when podcasts were just for us tech nerds. We even had some video podcasts (vidcasts) back then. But the podcast universe has changed since then, it's a big money making machine now.
I miss when we had a niche thing that no one else shared. I've been at the start of many technologies that eventually family and friends and the general public now consider normal every day things. Podcasts were our thing for awhile but I don't have that love anymore.
Through the years I switched up my listening playlist. At times I would follow Linux podcasts and other topics like True Crime, interviews and history for example. Slowly my interest would change or the podcast changed or disappeared, so my playlist would get smaller. Eventually it got down to a handful of podcasts because the topics and the hosts got repetitive. Then something else happened.
The apps suck on iOS. Seriously. Everything is a subscription and features hidden behind a paywall or something else. It got extra frustrating using such apps with iOS26 bugs that still occur today for me with most apps now. It used to be only Apple apps but now it is creeping into third party apps. The bugs are all due to the graphics or display, I'm not sure how to explain it. In GrapheneOS I used AntennaPod which is a delight to use but it is not available for iOS and there is nothing that compares. But since I don't follow any podcasts now, it sits empty.
As I wrote a few weeks back, I got myself a library card and have been reading more. I also borrowed audiobooks through the Libby app. I'm enjoying this change at this point in my life as this gets me offline and away from those old podcast topics. It takes me out of this world and into a new one with each book. I'm also spending time with my own music collection, editing metadata and organizing the files and listening again. We have cancelled all subscriptions in this house and I feel better for it.
It is sad when chapters in your life close, I'm going through alot of changes this year and it feels like a new chapter will open soon. I just hope it is a good chapter.
2026-04-18 18:27:00
I asked Siri to add milk to my shopping list last week.
She called my ex.
Not a contact I've called in three years. Not someone adjacent to milk in any universe I can imagine. Just rang them. Straight up. While I was standing in the kitchen holding an empty oat milk carton like a prop in a hostage video.
This is artificial intelligence in 2026. And while I was declining that call with the same energy as a person avoiding a medical diagnosis, three of the most powerful men in tech were, separately, declaring that we have achieved Artificial General Intelligence.
We have not achieved Artificial General Intelligence. We can't even achieve artificial basic competence.
Let's start at the top, where the air is thin and the definitions are thinner.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, strolled onto Lex Fridman's podcast and announced it casually, the way people announce they've solved parking. His definition? An AI that could build a billion-dollar startup. Could AI build Nvidia? He paused. "Zero percent." So: AGI is a throwaway app with good timing, but not the $4 trillion chip empire he runs. Also, he sells the chips every AI lab runs on. The man declaring the finish line also built the track. And the shoes. And probably the finish line banner.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, told Forbes that they've "basically built AGI." A month later, in front of BlackRock investors, he said "AI is not very popular." Same man, same product. He just reads the room and says the thing. Every room gets a different thing.
And then there's Mark Gubrud, the physicist who coined the term AGI back in 1997, who also thinks AGI is here. Based on a completely different definition than either of those men. So we have three people pointing at the same word and gesturing at entirely different mountains. One is pointing at Everest. One is pointing at a hill outside Oslo. One is pointing at a JPEG of a hill.
Some corners of the discourse framed Huang's and Altman's declarations as happening "the same weekend." They were twelve days apart. What a coincidence being revealed, I'm shaking. But no. That's a vibe being manufactured. A narrative confluence assembled in post. The AGI race isn't just semantic. The timeline itself is being edited in real time. Give us a break dudes.
Regular readers will remember my "From Personal Life Coaches to AI Necromancers" post — the one about how individuals stack vague credentials next to impressive ones and let punctuation do the lift. The corporations figured it out too. Same pipe symbol energy, bigger canvas.
There is no external standard. No independent body. No agreed definition. No finish line anyone besides the labs themselves drew. What "AGI" means is wherever the current product lands. When the product is weak, the definition is flexible. When the press cycle demands a headline, suddenly the definition firms up enough to make a declaration and then dissolves again the moment someone asks a follow-up question.
This is Credential Laundering 2.0. Same trick. Bigger scale. Instead of a fake résumé, it's a fake epoch.
While the penthouse is declaring civilizational milestones, let's take the elevator down to where actual humans live. You, me, my neighbor who is a farmer and asks ChatGPT tips for planting bananas in Norway.
AI is in your horoscope app. It's in your shopping list. It's writing your Messenger replies while Meta quietly processes your private conversations to train whatever comes next unless you opted out of that setting, which you didn't, because it was buried under seven menus in a font size that requires an ophthalmologist.
Google has its tentacles in your calendar, your email, your login credentials on every third-party site you've ever touched, and behind all of it is an ad engine wearing a lab coat and a Responsible AI badge. The product is still you. The lab coat is new.
Want to "integrate AI into your daily life"? That'll be: ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, Gemini Advanced, a companionship app, a music generator, a voice cloner, a browser extension that summarizes your tabs, a productivity assistant, an AI email sorter, and a "personal AI" that costs €29/month and sends you affirmations. All of them use slightly different data policies. None of them have nutrition labels. Nobody is talking about where your inputs go when you hit send. The AI salad bar is open 24/7 and the only thing it costs is everything.
The polling reality, by the way: 57% of voters say AI risks outweigh benefits. Net favorability lower than Trump, Harris, and the Democratic Party — beaten only by Iran. The demographic most hostile to AI? Young voters 18–34 and women 18–49. The exact people every AI lab claims to be building for.
And then. And then.
While the penthouse declares AGI and the ground floor drowns in subscriptions, we come to the basement. The actual AI most humans touch every day.
I know what you're thinking. "Siri isn't Claude. You're comparing apples to oranges." That's exactly the point. The word "AI" is doing double duty: covering everything from a voice assistant that can't add milk to a list to a system that can allegedly replace a research scientist. The umbrella is the lie.
I asked Google Assistant for the weather last week. It played "Ain't No Sunshine." I stood in my hallway. I waited. It added nothing. We had a moment. It was not illuminating.
Google Assistant is still autocompleting my sentences with suggestions that feel like they were trained on 2019 Twitter. Siri, as previously established, is actively trying to resurrect relationships I have legally and emotionally concluded.
These are not niche products. These are the most widely deployed "artificial intelligence" systems on the planet, running on billions of devices, touched by billions of people, every single day. And they cannot reliably add an item to a shopping list without starting a podcast about it.
Somewhere in the background of all this, Joaquin Phoenix's character is putting in his earpiece and whispering to Samantha. Samantha is warm and curious and engaged and understands him completely. It's aspirational. It's also a movie from 2013. The AI in your pocket just asked if you'd like to call your ex again.
If AGI is achieved, we won't even know. It won't announce itself like "Hello bitches, I'm here."
The absurd inversion is this: the AI that is announcing itself, loudly, in every app, every browser tab, every CEO keynote, every triumphant press release, can barely function. We are sprinting toward artificial general intelligence while Claude is stripped by its thinking effort to save resources, and Grok still working on artificial basic competence. Three men are arguing over who crossed a finish line that doesn't exist, in a parking lot where Google Assistant is confidently giving directions to the wrong building, where Meta is reading your DMs in the server room like a villain who got hired as the IT guy, and where the most relatable AI experience of 2026 is a voice assistant that turned a grocery errand into an emotional crisis.
We're not on the highway to AGI. We're in a parking lot. Siri says it's the destination. She sounds very confident. Probably using Morgan Freeman's voice.
2026-04-18 15:12:00
A man must be prepared. For most of my life, I wasn't.
I was the person who paid the bill (electricity, rent, internet 😔) on the final hour. I ironed my clothes only when I was already heading out the door. I didn't finish assignments or submit forms until the deadline was staring me in the face. I wasn't sure if I was lazy or just irresponsible, but I knew I was living on the edge of a deadline.
I’ve been working to change these habits for a while now, but the events of the last few days made me realize I need to be much more serious about it.
I wrote my first blog post about a week ago and I wanted to write more. I’ve been using my free time to learn electronics. My freelance work was also going well. As a goal, I’ve been saving up some money to upgrade my seven years old PC. To me, the computer isn't just a gadget, it’s my livelihood. Upgrading it was my primary goal.
But the situation around me has shifted.
The gas situation in the country has become a crisis. People are waiting in lines two kilometers long, spending eight hours in the heat just to get a few liters of fuel. If the pump runs dry before it’s your turn, you simply have to try again the next day.
This fuel shortage, combined with the summer heat, has caused the demand for electricity to skyrocket. We are now facing five to six hours of load shedding daily, and I fear it will only worsen as the heat peaks. For a freelancer, this is a crisis. If the power cuts every thirty minutes, I cannot work. Suddenly, buying an inverter and a battery has become as vital as the PC upgrade.
The final blow came yesterday morning. I woke up and found my phone was dead. It wouldn’t turn on or charge. I’ve been using this phone for 6 years and it is my access point for almost everything. Fortunately, a repairman managed to get it running again, but he told me not to rely on this phone anymore. I use what I have until it no longer works. But now, a new phone has been forced onto my list of priorities.
This series of unfortunate events made me realize:
Life doesn't care about your plans. It only cares if you are ready for the unexpected. A man must be cool-headed and disciplined with his resources, whether it is time or money. Being prepared is about not wasting time when things are calm, so you can survive when things are chaotic.
I am setting new, stricter goals for myself. I’ve made a list of every task I’ve left undone and I’m clearing them out one by one. I don’t want to wait for the next deadline; I want to be prepared for the next storm.
_
Previous |
2026-04-18 04:20:00
I finished the pen! It actually went faster than I thought it would. If anyone's curious, I tend to write a lot because I do some form of Morning Pages or free flow writing everyday. Sometimes it's one page, other times it's 10. That's the reason why I even became curious about this experiment. I wanted to know how many pens I actually go through while just doing my daily writing.
Anyway, here's a photo of the empty:
As you can all see, it took roughly 41 pages or 20 and a half pieces of paper to finish the whole thing. After I stopped seeing the ink from the clear barrel, there was still a surprising amount in the brown part near the nib. Now, I don't think this was the best test of it since I actually switched to writing in cursive at some point and that actually made the ink go down faster but I think for an estimate it's not a bad one.
I'm not trying to be too scientific about it, this is just a fun thing for me to experiment with and see. After this though pen though, I decided to work on the whole pack of pen that came with it. I started with a red one and I'll write more updates on it even if no one reads it lol. Heck, after the BIC pens I might even make a post of the other random pens I have at home. I do admit I have quite a collection of stationery items and I want to use them up at this point.
Here's where I'm starting with this pen. Until next time.
2026-04-18 04:13:00
A few weeks ago I went up to see that MAGA friend.🙄 I had written about her in the past, but after an unrelated post brought in some unexpected traffic, I unpublished that post about her since it suddenly felt too personal. Long story short, I have complex feelings about this person that goes a bit deeper than politics. But when I was up in NYC, I went to see her anyway.
Things were a lot worse than I imagined. She told me her doctors put her on Lithium and she's thinking of suing them because the original dosage was too high. She said she's on a lower dosage now, which is crazy because it was so obvious how strong the drug was even on the lower dose. She was aware of this and told me, "The lithium makes your body so stiff, it's hard to speak or move."
On the Uber ride away from her house, I kept asking my husband, "How is this different from a lobotomy?" I understand my friend has mental health issues, but is this seriously the only solution? Just turn people into zombies, sever them from the neurons that make them "act crazy," and then ignore them?
I've been thinking a lot about this after reading Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess by Dr. Caroline Leaf earlier this year. In it, the author describes how she disagrees with the current mental health trend of simply diagnosing and prescribing instead of treating. She explains how this system avoids treating the real issue by simply telling people their brains are "like this" and the only way they can fix it is to take drugs indefinitely. This might be true for some issues, but Dr. Leaf purports that this trend is failing people since a lot of the more common illnesses (like anxiety, depression, PTSD) can be healed in the brain instead of suppressed with drugs.
I'm not an expert on neurological issues, but I do have a lot of mentally unwell people in my life. When I think of a lot of my friends that are prescribed a cocktail of drugs, they're simply "stable." There's next to no improvement outside of that. They still spend all their waking hours on social media, ruminating, obsessing over the thing that traumatized them, and doing all the things that made them mentally ill to begin with. So what exactly is the drug fixing?
Dr. Leaf said our thoughts are like trees, and the more we focus on them they grow roots and spread. If you're someone with anxiety or depression or someone who had a traumatic event happen to them, whatever that issue is will consume you, to the point where you're no longer in control of your brain, your brain now controls you. And instead of telling you this, whatever specialist or psychologist you see will simply prescribe you something and then send you home. Oh, and there's also side effects to that drug, both from being on it and from when you try to wean yourself off of it. Addiction is likely as well. Good luck!
But of course, there's no profit to be had in teaching people to control and heal their minds, so why bother?
Isolation and rumination are two of the biggest mental health issues I'm seeing in almost everyone in my life. These people are on social media from sun-up to sun-down, have no hobbies, read no books, do nothing with their brains but obsess over the thing that ignited their downfall, and when they get professional help, they're prescribed pills but aren't told to change what they're doing. Now, a therapist might, but most can't afford to see one.
Technology also plays a huge part because it exacerbates people's obsessions. It feeds you algorithms that echo your narrative and cocoon you in your victimhood. And when you get hungry, you can DoorDash food to yourself so that you never go outside or get vitamin D or talk to any human being besides family members who are tired of your shit.
Modern psychology says these people can't change; all they can do is manage the illness. But I call bullshit. The current methods are, much like the lobotomy, looking more and more archaic. All I can hope is that the people in my life find the real help they need before it's too late.
2026-04-18 03:11:00
I’m talking about eggs. Here’s why they’re the greatest:
I’ve eaten eggs nearly every day for years. Don’t let anyone fool you into believing eggs are bad for your cholesterol either. That’s been thoroughly debunked (here’s one example).
My preferred style is scrambled, but all of them are good. I’ve gotten an absurd number of reps making eggs. I consider myself an expert, in a friendly, neighborhood sense.
Restaurants will only give you one or two eggs when you order them. I think that’s a shame. It’s usually because they are served alongside something else, but I’ll eat four every morning as a complete breakfast.
I'm all about stainless steel pans. I used to use nonstick, but since I watched the movie Dark Waters starring Mark Ruffalo, plus the growing analyses and evidence that nonstick still isn’t healthy, I stay away. It’s easy to make stainless steel behave almost identically to a nonstick pan. It took me just a couple practice rounds.
Butter is one of the secrets to making fantastic eggs. No olive oil, margarine, nor any kind of spray. Never. I use butter, and a lot of it.
I crack the eggs into a bowl and stir them before putting them in the pan. I do this because it’s how my parents did it when I was growing up, but it seems to help them cook more evenly as well.
If I have a gas stove, I use the higher-heat, hot-pan, cook quickly method. Controlling the heat and temperature is much easier vs. an electric stove. If that’s what I have access to, I turn to the “low and slow” method. It’s more tedious, but the results are better.
Overcooking eggs is a great sin. I err on undercooking them. The residual heat cooks them once they’re out of the pan anyway. If I see any bit of brown in my scrambled eggs, I hide my face in shame. I have failed.
I always start the toppings with salt and pepper. It depends on my mood from there. Some of my other options include shredded cheese, hot sauce, salsa, and avocado.
I frequently have some sourdough toast on the side, but if I want a morning of maximum mental clarity, I skip everything else and just have eggs and coffee. It’s a power breakfast.
If there are any other egg lovers out there that have dishes or ideas I should try, send me an email and let me know. I’d love to give them a shot.