2026-01-05 03:37:00
The first time I went online, it felt like freedom.
I was no longer just a kid in a small Eastern European country. Suddenly I was part of the whole world.
The early internet was a blast. I feel very lucky to have lived in the 90s and to be there at the birth of the web. I could talk about dial-up modems and the strange beeping sounds when you tried to connect, but that was only the surface. The real change was deeper.
I was twelve when my dad showed me the internet. He did not fully understand it yet, but he felt that it was something big. He wanted his kids to see it early. I was very lucky to have access to a computer and the internet in his office.
The real turning point came one Christmas Eve.
My sister and I got a small box. When I opened it, I started to cry. It is the first and last time I ever cried because of a present. Inside was a 56k modem and a card with a MATAV username and password for internet access.
From that day on I did not need to go to my dad’s office anymore. I could go online from my own bedroom on my 486 PC. Looking back, this was one of the biggest turning points in my life. Everything I have today comes from that moment. I still work on the web and build things online at 40.
After that my days had a rhythm. Every afternoon at 16:00 a special tariff started. You could use the internet until the next morning for almost nothing. I remember sitting in my room, waiting for the clock to hit four, then listening to the modem sounds and feeling like the whole world just opened again.
Everything changed again when I found IRC. For the first time I could talk to people from other countries in real time. It was magic. Today everyone carries the internet in their pocket, but back then this was unbelievable. A 13 year old kid from a small Hungarian city could talk to anyone.
I went deep into a Hungarian hacker subculture around 1999. I still remember watching TV with my parents when the news reported that a hacker group had taken down the website of MATAV, the Hungarian telecom company. They replaced it with a punk style page that said Y2K in big Win95 Paint letters.
I ran to my computer to tell my IRC friends. The craziest part was that some people in my channel were part of that group. A few months later they told me parts of the story. It blew my mind. I was 13 and learning about the internet from the smartest kids in the country.
I am 40 now, but that kid is still inside me. Still curious. Still looking for people who think the same way.
The internet has changed a lot. Big tech controls most of it now and the old feeling is hard to find. But sometimes I still discover small corners that feel like the early days. When that happens, it feels like a time machine.
A few weeks ago I found Bearblog and it really clicked with me. I am not a great writer, but I want to share some thoughts and memories.
So here is my first post. Thank you Bearblog and the community. Even if nobody reads this, I will be reading you.
2026-01-04 18:16:43
I’m finally in the air, on my way to Bangkok. The plane was delayed about an hour because of the weather. They had to de-ice the wings before we could take off.
The treatment made the windows so smudged that it was impossible to see outside. But all of a sudden, I could feel the plane moving. Soon I felt my body press against the seat, and moments later the sound changed.
I realized we’d left the ground.
There have been other times when I’ve had a perfect view outside. I’ve clearly seen what looks like the plane starting to move, only to realize seconds later that it was an illusion. It was another plane rolling past. We were standing still.
Maybe that’s what happens when we get too tangled up in the outer and forget the inner. We’re busy watching how others go about their lives. Believing we’re advancing when we’re actually standing still.
What happens if we check in with our inner pilot a little more often? Any warning lights blinking? Do we have enough fuel to get us where we’re going?
Cross-check complete.
Ready for takeoff.
2026-01-04 10:57:00
Today, Trump's government executed an extraordinarily illegal kidnapping of a foreign head of state. Any US government official that is not calling for his impeachment is an embarrassment and should be primaried. This includes anyone who bothers to acknowledge the illegal operation's PR framing by discussing whether they dislike Maduro or not.
I'll feel safe in this country again when the people involved in planning and carrying out this event have been tried and jailed and, where appropriate, executed by the state. I don't believe that the state should be able to execute civilians for any reason at all - name any crime, and I'm against killing civilians for it - but I do genuinely believe that government officials should be executed for committing war crimes specifically. It's a form of anti-death-penalty politics that we can maybe call "The Guys In Power Should Be Scared."
It takes an extraordinary lack of fear to do something like this. You should be thinking about what they're not scared enough to not do next - these guys themselves have been mentioning countries like Mexico and Cuba.
You should also be thinking a lot, all the time, about what it would take to make guys like Hegseth too scared to terrorize you and your siblings overseas.
Because he's not scared of Congress, and he's not scared of the UN. Guys with raw power who aren't scared are your enemies. They want you poor and sick and angry, and they want your kids to die overseas, and they don't think of brown people born south of Texas as human.
2026-01-03 18:51:00
Back in the day Enron abused "mark to market" accounting. They counted future profits they hoped to earn as actual profits today.
Now it feels like a new type of accounting is going on for AI hyperscalers. I call it: ==mark to belief==. It’s valuation based on where you hope things are going, rather than where they are.
The big labs all have strong models, but it’s crowded at the top. Performance differences are small and the models are basically interchangeable. And anyway, open source models are now almost as good - sometimes better.
In an open market it’s hard to justify a premium when a free alternative exists at roughly the same standard.
The labs know this. They can see the "commodity death spiral" looming. Competitors have reached parity, open source has set a ceiling on price, and "intelligence" is fast becoming a utility with thin margins.
So belief becomes the differentiator. Belief that this lab will be the one to crack AGI. That belief is what supports the valuation and keeps the music playing.
But as I’ve written about before, the product wrapper is the "known known." It’s where investment has a much clearer and more immediate return. If the model itself becomes commoditised, then the entire value proposition collapses down to the wrapper*. And wrappers are infinitely easier to copy than genuine breakthroughs.
Any competent startup can build a polished UI, solid integrations, enterprise features, and a sweet UX. None of this is a durable moat.
So you end up with this strange inversion: companies valued via mark to belief as if they’re on the brink of AGI, while competing day to day on features that have nothing to do with it. As was the tagline of Enron, maybe we should “ask why.”
*When I say product wrapper, I am including hosting. I didn’t go into it here as I think smaller models with simpler hosting needs are going to increase in demand in 2026, meaning the convenience of the hyperscaler cloud matters less.
Maybe AGI is round the corner. I actually believe it’s something we should be taking seriously and preparing for, so this isn’t a commentary on the likelihood of AGI. Instead it’s simply an observation on what we’re paying for (and using) vs what we’re being told.
2026-01-03 12:59:00
Don't get confused or otherwise perturbed by the "uwu," it's just part of the new post title format tweak. As per my New Year's Day post:
✅ Post title format (2026): lowercase month + arabic numeral day + "omg" or "lol" or "wtf" or "xxx" or "fml" or "brb" or or or anything else of that nature (and yes, "etc" will still be in the mix).
I am already happy to not have to "etc" on the end of every title. I like "etc." I know and like many things and always have and so I have made very, very good use of "etc" over the years. It is as sturdy and noble an abbreviation as there is. That said, after a while of the big blogging streak (#tbbs) I started to feel like the "etc" connoted something less than good, as if I were giving some other group of readers the choice cuts and tossing the tripe in a bucket for you.
In this moment I am reminded of this part of Beautiful Losers:
Oh, F., do you think I can learn to perceive the diamonds of good amongst all the shit?
— It is all diamond.
Beautiful Losers was a favourite of a former friend of mine. I say former because even though I'm sure he'd take my call and I'm sure I'd take his call, I know we won't ever call each other again. Ours was a weird, prolonged falling out that happened slowly over years and then very quietly all at once. I don't have any hard feelings about it anymore, but I did for a while.
It was an important friendship for me. B and I were close for over 20 years and he contributed to the person I was and the person I ended up becoming in both good and bad ways. We went through some stuff and he taught me a lot but I also picked up some of his worst habits and one or two of his more retrograde beliefs. When I look back at those years with clear eyes I can see all the times our friendship fell, got cracked, and never got repaired —— giving it an expiration date. That's how it is sometimes. With some friends you just innately know that certain cracks need to be attended to with speed, seriousness, and attentiveness. You will have to use "I feel" statements and clarify a lot of positions but you will also have to concede many points and make actual grown-up apologies. With others you know the way to pave over a crack is to leave them alone for a while because you know it will 100% absolutely and totally be fine but only if you know exactly how long to leave it alone.
I could have been clearer there but I rewrote that sentence five times and it came out like that the fifth time and I just left it. It is what it is.
I think B thought he was the only one who could see all the cracks and fissures and times where we probably should have gone our separate ways but didn't for whatever reason (spoiler: it was loneliness) but I saw them too. My read on the situation is that I think he got comfortable with one idea of who I was and did not ever seem to understand that for the first ~17 years I was in character as the version(s) of myself I knew he would approve of.
Still, he was (and is) a good man and I cared about him very much. If you read this, B, please know that I still think quite highly of you and also that I am disappointed in who you ended up becoming.
==#Also also also:==
When Kaleb Horton died, I wrote the following (in this post):
Kaleb Horton died when I was in Montreal and I didn't know what to write about it so it's a good thing that Luke O'Neil did. If you didn't know who Horton was, go and read some of his stuff. It's very, very good.
Mike Fossey, the author of the banger tweet pictured above and about a thousand more truly excellent jokes, died over the holidays. Unsurprisingly, Luke O'Neil's obit post over at Flaming Hydra is the one I instantly gravitated to. If you're interested, here's the real obit. Seems like Mike was a good dude offline as well as being a hilarious dude online. RIP to one of the greats.
Most people weren't obsessed with and extremely online on Twitter during its best and weirdest years but I was. This shit was my life. I learned so many things and met so many people (including my best friend) and just like experienced so much on and because of Twitter. I haven't tweeted in years because Elon and his ilk run that place now, but I still can't bring myself to delete my account. I should, for ethical reasons, but I just can't seem to. I know it's dumb, especially since I have everything archived, but there's something so final about deleting an account and maybe maybe maybe I have some stupid stupid stupid hope that we can all go back to 2015 again by way of science or magic. (I dream big because I'm built different by which I mean incorrectly.)
==#Also also:==
==#Also:==
This lady on Threads writes little notes to her recently deceased husband because she misses him and it's one of the most lovely things.
🌲 gonna
🌼 go
🌱 touch sleep
🌳 grass sleep
🌷 now slep
Be good to yourself.
==If you enjoyed this post, click the little up arrow chevron thinger below the tags to help it rank in Bear's Discovery feed and maybe consider sharing it with a friend or on your socials.==
2026-01-02 23:43:00
Anyone who has been following me for a long while knows I've beyond-dabbled in magic, that is, the occult! Everything from doing little doodles called sigils, all the way to goetic summoning (Don't bother, entities are a garbled experience of vague communication, generally little more than an assumed gesture, and, rarely mentioned, very icky). I've been there, I've done it.
If you've been reading my Burnt Out Nothing series, you'll 'know', or at least have read, that I've been a bit burnt out, not the whole way, because then I doubt these words would or could be written, but enough to get a sense of what reality is and can do. Which is all to say, stuff's happening, apparently. And, with the things of that 'happening' (Now!) being forms, there's not really anything there, everything is both nothing and everything. From this, understanding (or non-understanding, if you want to be a nondual goof), we can condense all magic down to two simple methods: Manifestation and Sigils. Honestly, you only need the first method. But, before going on, keep in mind that U.G. Krishnamurti believed the most important question any person could ask themselves was What do I want?
Method 1: Manifestation
An example list might be:
You can choose to be specific when it matters, but more often than not, it doesn't. Want to add a bit of snazziness to your manifestation? When you read each thing, really feel it, whatever that means to you.
FAQs for Method 1:
But what if-
It's fine.
How do I know if-
Wait, it's fine.
I'm not sure I-
Honestly, it's fine.
Method 2: Sigils
Oh, you're above writing stuff down and reading it? Well, how about squiggles?
An example might be:
This blog post is popular
Cross out the repeating letters:
hbgtisopular
Remove vowels:
hbgtsplr
Transform the remaining letters into a sigil:
Charge the sigil:
FAQs for Method 2:
But what if-
It's fine.
How do I know if-
Wait, it's fine.
I'm not sure I-
Honestly, it's fine.
~
Right, that's 14 years of magical searching condensed into a tiny blog post. You don't need anything more than this if you just want stuff and want things to work. If you want to play, be creative, and have fun, then by all means garb-up and get that incense burning, but most of us don't have the time for that.
That right there is absolutely everything you need to blow your life up.
Don't blame me for what you wanted.