2025-12-13 04:47:00
My predictions! With a little humor. Take it with a grain of salt, only did this for fun as a little creative exercise, but maybe you agree or wanna write your own?
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2025-12-13 03:50:00
I’m still working on my new public theme for Bear blog.
It takes time. A lot of time. Probably three times longer than if I were doing it just for myself.
Since it’s meant for an audience, I’m paying extra attention to details. I want to ship good quality, not something that’s merely “good enough”, like when it’s only for me.
For the same reason, I prefer sharing my writing on a blog. It makes me a better writer, even if I’m the only one who notices.
An audience sharpens me, even when they’re invisible.
2025-12-13 00:54:56
Made it another year.
Decided to celebrate by upgrading my Bearblog account. I've blogged almost every day since I moved from Neocities, which seems to me a sign that it's time to commit.
The one thing that has me a bit gunshy about the upgrade is the discoverability. It's been nice writing knowing that no one is going to read it. This being the post I chose to upload after upgrading, I'm hyperaware of the fact that I could lose my anonymity if I write candidly about my age, and how I'm feeling about it, and what it means when I compare it to the years that came before it.
Anonymity is important to me right now. With everything going on in the world, and governments trying to invade Internet users' privacy in the name of "protecting children," I want to keep as much of myself offline as possible. This might be baggage leftover from my pre-diagnosis days, when my symptoms were perceived as moral failings by people in positions of authority, like my parents or my professors or my psychiatrist. It's been months since I got rid of my smartphone and moved to a rugged "dumb phone," I've successfully de-Googled my workflow, and I've completely left Windows for Linux. I have a lot of baggage to work through, and that is not what this blog is for.
One of the reasons I value my privacy so heavily: I'm a gay man in a state that has increasingly draconian anti-LGBT laws. I'm not on any social media, and my circle of friends has shrunk so significantly that I can count the number of people I talk to in a week on one hand, not including my sister with whom I live. Mental illness is another reason. It's not something I choose to publicly blog about, but living with ADHD and a psychotic disorder, it's better for me to have speed bumps between the thought and the publication.
The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are. -- Carl Jung
That said, I am glad to be here. The lack of engagement algorithms and absence of a recommendation engine is like a breath of fresh air, and it's heartening to see that most of the people who are posting regularly are similarly privacy-oriented. It feels like I learn something new about what's capable with technology every time I check the Discover feed. I come onto the Internet to read other people's thoughts. It's hard to get that on sites like Tumblr or Neocities, where everyone is cultivating an image.
Here, it feels like so long as I am careful about what I divulge, I can be honest and anonymous at the same time.
At this point, I can't answer "Who are you?" I'm a guy self-studying computer science and learning to program computer games. I'm prone to falling down rabbit holes. I'm disabled. I'm an introvert and a loner. And today I am turning an insignificant age. Not a milestone, but a continuation. The last time I had a birthday, I felt as if I had finally become who I truly am. I am able to be honest with myself, if I cannot be honest with anyone else.
Tomorrow will be more of the same. Today is more of the same. But I wanted to acknowledge that I am a year older today, and I didn't think I would make it this far. It's nice to prove myself wrong, occasionally.
2025-12-12 03:24:00
On Simulacra and Simulation we see how easily we mistake motion for meaning. Borges wrote that two mirrors are enough to create a labyrinth. Now, consider sound.
We make noise to be noticed. We announce, post, ping, repeat. Sometimes visibility, sometimes ego. Noise tempts us because it feels like progress. It gives shape to uncertainty. It fills gaps that should stay empty for real work to happen. But like Borges’ mirrors, it creates infinite reflections—convincing, familiar, and entirely false.
Noise multiplies faster than information. Give it a little time and it becomes process, then ceremony, then meetings about ceremony. Some projects get buried under people who talk more than they build. Too many teams optimize for communication instead of creation.
Communication should be simple: Alice talks, Bob listens. If both understand each other, the meeting succeeds. If a meeting needs another meeting to explain it, that’s management.
Listen, focus, be quiet. Don't talk too much. Do one thing and do it well.
Noise isn't music. Noise is just noise.
2025-12-12 01:03:44
If you dropped by my blog yesterday, or subscribe via RSS, you might have seen a post appear and then quietly disappear.
It was a post about an idea I had for creating a Bear theme “live”, documenting every part of the process. It lasted about three hours, then I realized it was a bit too much work for me to handle.
Hasty idea? Should I have thought it through a little more?
No, I don’t think so.
I did think about it, and I decided to give it a try. I figured it was the only way to really know if it would fly.
Otherwise, I would’ve spent endless hours just thinking about it, never really knowing how it would feel in real life. Instead of three hours, it might have turned into three days down the drain.
If you have an idea, don’t waste your time trying to perfect it. Try it out, within reasonable limits. See how it feels and how others respond... if it even survives longer than three hours.
You might end up with something you would never have discovered by only thinking about it. Go live and see what comes alive.
Good luck!
2025-12-11 13:51:00
My wife the other day was looking up haircuts for our two year old and walked up to me showing me her phone and asked, "is this an AI child". As she kept scrolling there seemed to be no end to these phantom impossibly smooth-skinned and perfectly tussled hair children. "Is it AI" is the new "is it cake", the cake being orders of magnitude less harmful. The fact that my wife is searching for 2 year old boys haircuts and can't find a damn actual photo of a real child's haircut is fucking infuriating. The general availability and accessibility of generative AI for content generation has hastened enshittification.
For those of you who have not heard of this term, "enshittification", this is the definition per Wikipedia:
Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders.
I first started using the internet in the early 90s, when a simple website was used as personal expression. The world of BBSs, E-Zines, and personal sites is not gone, it just can't compete with the algorithm. You want to find the "best robot vacuum 2025"? You're going to get SEO-optimized AI slop from a site like "bestvacuumreviews2025[.]xyz" written by no one, for no one.
So what is one to do? You could become an off-grid mountain hermit, or you can carve out a bit of the internet for yourself. I've been calling it, "de-shittification". I am starting to realize you can have a better online experience, it just takes a little intentional setup. This is what has been working for me.
This is a technology that has been around forever, and essentially is a way for you to subscribe to feeds from different news sites and blogs. Prior to using RSS I was using Google news and hating it. Now I pull all of my threat intel blogs, investigative journalism, and other information into my own feed.
The reason that using an RSS reader is so important in this process is that you can collect sources of information that you find credible, useful, or just enjoyable. This way you can keep track of all the sites that you find along your journey that aren't roided out on ads or affiliate links.
I personally self-host Miniflux which is a pretty simple barebones RSS feed aggregator, with robust API, which is perfect for my needs. But if I were to suggest a hosted aggregator I would go with Inoreader; it has a pretty decent suite of features for a reasonable price.
For more on RSS check out this blog: https://blog.remainna.xyz/you-should-use-rss/
I assume you have probably "googled" something in the last couple years, and you have probably noticed search results have degraded immensely. It happened so gradually that you may have just let that pass by.
I just pretty much assumed that we were stuck with this, and now needed AI to filter the results for us. While AI searches are great, why can't search just be better? Well it can. While free options like DuckDuckGo and Brave are definitely alternative search engines I wouldn't necessarily say they are better.
Though I haven't tested and benchmarked every search engine out there, I have been testing out using Kagi. The experience is refreshing... you know, searching for something and finding it without having to dodge a bunch of paid results and trash content. One thing to note here is that Kagi is a paid search engine, which I think is perfectly fine based on my experience thus far. Some of my favorite features are the ability to block, down rank, or up rank domains in your search results and the ability to filter out AI generated images from image search. For more details of the features check out their docs.
This is something that is dependent on so much per person. Obviously social media for some people is a way that they make their living, while others use it to keep in touch with their friends and family, and some use scrolling their feed as a way to decompress from their long day. However you use it, I think most people have the common experience of having wasted enormous amounts of time on it. You click on one video, then scroll, look up, and all of a sudden you've lost time.
There are plenty of people who give it up completely, and good for them. But there are plenty of us that still would like to use it, in a healthier way. The way that I handle this is by "containerization", and what I mean by that is introducing friction to accessing the social media that I want to limit my exposure to.
There are a multitude of apps that allow you to set timers and lock you out of apps based on your time usage settings. For me I put all of my social media, into a separate user profile on my phone. There may be some other Android OS variants that have this ability, but I use Graphene OS which is a security and privacy focused Android OS. This profile which I have all of my social media in, essentially is turned off not allowing for notifications or anything to get through into my main profile. When I want to look at any of my socials, I need to leave my main profile, put in a pass code and wait for it to load. I have found that this friction is good enough for me to significantly reduce my usage.
At first I was having issues with alternatives to what I normally would consume, but over time you start to gather sites that you like. A lot of the time it's been sitting right in front of you, such as someone posts an article on Bluesky, Reddit, or HackerNews; if you like the content, just add the blog or site to your RSS aggregator.
Other than organically finding content, you can always follow Kagi's Small Web feed or Bear Blog's discovery feed (the blogging platform where this site is hosted).
There is so much more around this subject that I would like to share, but I must wrap up for fear that I will never post my first blog. That being said, I will definitely be having more posts around my attempts at de-shittification.