2025-01-19 08:00:00
There’s this idea that people like our friend Mark Zuckerberg have been pushing on us all for the past two decades, that we need to be connected to the whole world. Wouldn’t it be great to have one platform that everybody is on and everybody can share their opinions on things on, so we can all talk to one another and be one happy family of humans? Well as it turns out, no, it’s not great. In fact, it’s an absolutely terrible idea.
For most of human history, which spans about 300.000 years, humans lived in small tribes or villages of a few dozen to a few hundred individuals at most. Dunbar’s number suggests that we can maintain stable social relationships with around 150 people, give or take a few dozen, because that’s the number of people that we had around us for most of our existence as humanity, and that’s what our brains evolved to be able to handle comfortably.
Only in relatively recent history did we start to live in cities with tens or hundreds of thousands of people in them. Even more recently we invented electronic means of communication, first the telegraph, then the telephone, and then the internet. Then we made telephones and the internet wireless and accessible from everywhere, not just from a device tethered to the wall in your home. And then we invented social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and all the rest of it. So now, for the first time in human history, we can be connected with people all over the planet at the same time, all the time. If I’m bored waiting in the checkout line at the grocery store, I can just pull out my phone and read what some guy on the other side of the planet has posted five seconds ago.
And while that might sound like a good idea on paper, our brains have not evolved to handle this. On his podcast, Cal Newport often calls this “a neolithic brain trying to get by in the modern world”. When a person in my immediate circle or neighbourhood is behaving antisocially by being openly racist or homophobic or threatening towards anyone, I have an emotional reaction to that and an urge to push back, because it affects me. I’m right there after all. When a random person on a different continent is doing the same thing online, it doesn’t affect me in the slightest. I don’t know the person, I’ve never met them and never will. But my stone age brain doesn’t know that, and my emotional reaction is the same as if that person were in the same room with me.
And now we couple this with an algorithmic sorting of the messages that people post which ensures that I always get to see the most outrageous stuff in my timeline, because that causes an emotional reaction, which makes me interact with that person, which means I stay on the platform longer and make the platform money, and we have an explosive situation at our hands.
Zuck, Dorsey, Musk and friends know that of course. But they either ignore and downplay the negative effects their platforms have because changing something would hurt their bottom line, or they openly fuel the fire and enjoy seeing just how far they can drive the division of society. We’re all witnessing in real time what happens when a big social network is being taken over by a emotionally unstable person who is fundamentally unsuitable to run it.
It’s 2025, social networks have been around for about 20 years, and by now we can pretty confidently say we’ve run the experiment, the results are in and it’s pretty clear this stuff isn’t working the way it was intended to.
So what do we do? Abandon all hope and sit in a corner and cry? Sometimes I feel like it… But I think a more productive and meaningful approach is to get off these networks. Leave Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok and whatever else you’re using behind. Delete your accounts, delete the apps from your phone and don’t get on these platforms anymore. Block them if you have to.
But you don’t have to become a hermit and go offline permanently. Instead, you can use the internet in a way that is more compatible with the way our brains work. Find smaller communities around things you like and interests you have. Are you interested in board games? Retro computers? Knitting? Woodworking? Reading? You can start looking for blogs, online forums, small Mastodon instances etc. that center around the thing you’re interested in. Then follow these blogs, register specifically to those forums or smaller networks, and interact with the people there. It might take a while, but you can find like-minded people on the internet who share your interests and values, and you can build a community around that, engage with the people there and ignore the rest. If you’re particularly adventurous, you can even try to find local groups around your particular topic of interest, join them and then actually meet and hang out with people in real life. Crazy, right?
The point is, you don’t need to be connected to the whole world and read every little outrageous thing that people all over the world are writing all the time. It’s terrible for you and your mental health, and it’s terrible for society as a whole. Find a community of people that share your values and interests, interact with them and ignore the rest. You’ll be better off, I can pretty much guarantee it.
2025-01-17 08:00:00
It’s below freezing outside, I’m sitting in my favourite Café with a nice warm cup of coffee, and a minute ago a guy wearing shorts walked in and sat down next to me. And I can’t stop wondering - what’s up with that? Did he forget to put on pants this morning? Has he failed to notice that it’s the middle of January and he’s living in Germany? Unfortunately I’m too shy to ask, so I guess we’ll never learn the answer. But we can console ourselves with some interesting links at least.
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2025-01-14 08:00:00
Chris O’Donnell has tagged me in this year’s blogging about blogging challenge, and it’s been a while since I last blogged about blogging, so why not blog a little about blogging. You know?
I thought about starting a blog or a website for a very long time, but never felt that I had anything to say that people might be interested in. When I discovered the Old Computer Challenge in 2023 and saw that a lot of people were blogging about it, I thought yes, that’s something I have things to say about, so I decided to just go for it and give it a try.
I’m currently using Hugo. I didn’t want to use a CMS like Wordpress, I wanted something that I understood and was in control of. At first I thought about writing the entire page by hand, but when I discovered SSGs (static site generators) it felt like that was exactly what I was looking for; I could write the framework of the site by hand but then the SSG would take care of actually assembling everything.
Hugo was an impulse decision because it seemed to be the most popular one and I had to learn from scratch how the whole SSG thing worked anyway, so I just went for that.
I’m not totally happy with it to be honest, there’s still some stuff I don’t really understand and recently an update broke the generation of my site, so I had to roll back to a previous version… but unless I find the time and energy to research other SSGs or write my own, I guess I’m sticking with it.
Nope, first time blogger here :)
Posts in Hugo are written in markdown, and I use Obsidian for that. I have imported the contents folder of my blog as a vault into Obsidian and write the posts in there.
I did my best to automate the process; I have a script that I call with the name of the post as an argument and it creates the file in the correct folder from a template with all the relevant metadata already filled in, so I can start writing straight away.
For publishing I have another script that runs Hugo, commits the new post to a git repo, pushes the repo to my webspace, there it checks out the latest commit, moves everything into the correct folder, announces the post on Mastodon and gives me back the URL of the Mastodon post. Then I copy the Mastodon URL, paste it into the metadata of the blog post and rerun the publishing script. This automatically creates the “Reply on Mastodon” line at the bottom of every post.
It sounds like a complicated process and it kind of is, but because everything is scripted it’s really just “run script, write post, run other script” and that’s it.
I like writing in coffee shops, so I have developed this routine of going to a Café on the weekends and bringing my laptop with me, and a lot of my posts were written or started/finished there. But I also write at home sometimes when I have an idea for a post.
It depends. The linkdumps I usually write in a single sitting and then publish them immediately, with the other posts it’s maybe 50/50… some I write from start to finish and hit publish straight away, but I also have a drafts file with a dozen or so posts in various stages of completion that I come back to regularly.
I don’t really have a favourite, but I always enjoyed writing about the OCC because that’s what I started out with and there’s a very nice community around the event.
Yes, in 2025 we’re committed to continue working hard on bringing the most value possible to our readers by integrating affiliate links and sponsored slots into the blog, and we’ll soon be ready to announce our new premium membership program where subscribers can get early access as well as exclusive behind the scenes footage….
No, the plan is to just keep writing, stay consistent and given the current state of the world, try to find some positive and uplifting things to write about so that we all won’t go completely crazy. Hopefully.
I’m going to nominate Matto, Jon and Dom.
Update: Here are their posts.
2025-01-12 08:00:00
If you’re in your early thirties or older, you remember the breakneck pace at which computers were improving in the 90s and 2000s. If you brought home a shiny new 400MHz Pentium 2 system in 1998, it was literally outdated and replaced by a faster model with higher clock speed and more RAM/bigger harddrive by the time you had set it up and gotten familiar with it. But that’s not the case anymore, and it hasn’t been the case in a long time.
Of course today the development of hardware and the rate at which CPUs are improving is still fast and Intel, AMD, Apple etc are still coming out with faster and better chips all the time. By now though we’ve reached such a high level that unless you’re a high profile YouTuber who has the desparate need in his life to slash the render time of his 4k videos in half, dude!!!, there is simply no need for this amount of processing power for the average person. Certainly not for me.
In 2011 I bought a desktop system with an Intel i5 2500k CPU. It wasn’t the fastest machine available at the time, but it was pretty good. In 2019, eight years later I kind of felt the itch to upgrade and have something faster, so I got a system with a Ryzen 5 3600. Again, not the fastest machine you could buy, but pretty good. And it definitely was faster than the old i5, everything felt much snappier and the computer outperformed its predecessor in every possible way.
Now this system is 6 years old, and I’m starting to feel that same itch again. I haven’t upgraded my computer in a while, so maybe it’s time for something new? Ryzen 9000 maybe? With or without X3D?
But here’s the thing: I don’t need it. I don’t have a single usecase for which I would need this much processing power. In fact, I could still use that i5 from 2011 and it would do everything I want it to do perfectly fine. I didn’t need to upgrade, I just wanted to. And I don’t need to upgrade now either. That Ryzen 3600 system is still plenty fast, and it will be for the rest of the decade at least. I’m writing this post right now on an 11 year old laptop. I write all my posts on this laptop. It’s fine. It works. No need to replace it. And no need to replace the desktop system, which is at least twice as fast as that laptop, either.
And this means that until something drastic and unforeseeable happens in tech or in my life, for the rest of my life I will never have to buy a brand new computer again. I can just keep using the hardware that I have for as long as it works, which is hopefully at least a decade, and when something inevitably breaks or just doesn’t cut it anymore, then I can replace it with a five year old component from the used market that my friend the YouTuber just had to get rid of because those slow ass render times, dude!!!, and I’ll be fine.
2025-01-10 08:00:00
The year is in full swing, the christmas vacation is over and I’m back to work as I suspect everybody is, so I want to get back into the habit of posting a linkdump every Friday and one new blog post per week. Let’s see if I can stick with it.
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A lot of people have started new projects or made resolutions for the new year, and here are some of my favourites:
2025-01-06 08:00:00
Over the last couple of days my feed reader has been exploding with new posts! I can barely keep up. It seems that all bloggers have collectively decided that this year is the year to give it their all and write and blog like there’s no tomorrow. And I love it.
I’ve been in a bit of a slump recently due to some challenges life has thrown at me (don’t worry though - nobody died, I’m not sick, it’s just “normal” life stuff that has kind of accumulated and overwhelmed me in the last couple of weeks). But seeing so many of you post their new year’s resolutions for 2025 or starting new blogging challenges (a few people started doing 100 days to offload, posting weekly reviews or updates, posting regular linkdumps etc) is very inspiring and makes me want to come back to blogging on a regular basis like I did throughout the summer last year.
So what are my plans for 2025 then?
Actually, for now I think I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing last year - keep writing at least one post per week, with topics ranging from my own personal thoughts and obervations to random musings about tech, retrocomputing and whatever else I find interesting at that particular moment. And I’ll definitely keep writing my weekly linkdumps as they seem to be quite well received and I always get nice feedback from you guys, which is very encouraging.
And I think I’ll restructure the site a bit, apart from the blog I haven’t really updated any of the other sections of the site in months, so maybe it’s time to overhaul this a bit and maybe throw out some stuff that’s no longer relevant. We’ll see.
So happy new year 2025 everybody, keep blogging, and keep working on making your life this year the best it can be!