2026-05-15 05:28:32
i think, by now, it’s clear that a lot of people are fed up with social media, myself included. we’re long past the days where we use it to keep up with friends and family; now it’s just... a massive content farm. you have to lower yourself in dignity to gain clout. you have to keep up with the latest hot trends. you have to buy garbage from temu in order to “fit in”. you have to monetize your hobbies. you have to lie constantly. you have to pander to people with no attention span. you have to speak in a way that “favors the algorithm”. you have to know the best keywords and hashtags. you have to have accounts on every platform and post something new every single day on each platform.
it’s exhausting. i tried to do this a few times, on both tik tok and instagram reels, and i gave up after only 3 videos.
how do i say this… social media posters don’t make art. they, indeed, make content. what’s the difference, you ask? well, art is meant to stick with you for a long time. it makes you feel things, it inspires you, it teaches you something new. content, on the other hand, is designed to be watched for about 15 seconds, to which you respond with “heh, that was kinda funny, i guess,” give it a like, then scroll past it and forget about it forever... if you even keep watching it past the 2 second mark, that is.
i make art. i want my work to stick with you, make you feel things, inspire you, and teach you something new. whatever i create, i don’t want you to forget about it when you’re done watching, listening to, or reading it. and that’s why i say...
i’d rather die than be a content creator.
2026-05-15 04:43:48
The final message from a Mars rover in 2019 (translated to English by Jacob Margolis).
The message was transmitted as a status update on its low power and poor solar panel effectiveness, 15 years after its original planned 90 day mission.
I don't know why those words came to mind today, but they're a pretty good reflection of my mental state currently. My own battery is getting low, and while it might not be physically getting dark, the activity and light in my mind is going out.
Recently it's been harder to be creative, harder to put energy into activities I used to find fun. Is this what burnout feels like? Depression? That spark of creativity constantly in my mind has faded and I don't know how to rekindle it. It's as if I'm a passenger in my own corpse, left behind by the world around it.
There's projects I want to do and things I want to write about, but can't muster the will for any of them. I'm being dragged by a current I can't see, in a direction I can't control, and I lost the ability to hold my breath a long while ago.
The rover's name was Opportunity, but I don't get any of those.
2026-05-15 02:17:34
It's so god damn tempting to use AI to write. Whether it is articles, code, or documents. I feel like using AI is diminishing my ability to write myself.
I didn't necessarily feel I was bad at writing. I used to be a somewhat talented...well...mediocre software developer, but now, the more I use AI, the more I can feel my own skills getting worse.
I think the problem feeds on my self-doubt, my imposter syndrome, that I can actually produce the work. However, when I use AI to write, I read it back and think: God damn, this just looks like AI. It doesn't sound or look like me at all. It doesn't say what I want it to say.
With coding, I've been using AI entirely for a year or two. I've been entirely prompting and I haven't written a single line of code. I have mostly forgotten how to code, which I find very sad and depressing because coding used to be my life. I'm now teaching myself how to code by hand again.
I'm pretty certain that the skills of software development aren't going to entirely disappear with AI. There still need to be people who know how to read and write code. It will be fewer people but certainly there will be people needed.
I'm hoping AI might reverse a trend that's been happening over the past 20-30 years, where there's been more demand than supply of software developers. As Robert Martin (Uncle Bob) lectures; before computer science was a profession, it was physicists and mathematicians and academics who programmed. Professionals. The professionalism has faded away as demand for software developers skyrocketed.
This article isn't written with AI but I just caught myself about to copy and paste it into Claude to see what it thinks because I'm worried that it doesn't make sense or it reads funny or there's something missing. That's the self-doubt that it's feeding on and what I need to fight back.
2026-05-15 00:47:17
I've been distro-hopping for probably twenty years. Fedora, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Arch, and most recently Fedora with KDE Plasma. Every time I install Linux I feel a small swell of optimism, like this time it'll stick. However, every time I go back to Windows I feel relieved that I can use my computer properly again.
Linux never sticks with me.
I idolise Linux and the people who use it. High performing developers I've admired most use Linux. They seem to have this fluency with their machines that I've always found aspirational. I subconsciously tell myself 'If I just used Linux, I could be like them!'. I felt the same about Vim. If I just learned Vim properly, I could write code better and faster. Switching to Linux or Vim won't make me better. I think it's just me procrastinating from the real issue, whatever that is.
I've used Linux at least every year for two decades. Back in the day, I dealt with wifi issues, trackpad issues, sound issues, screen tearing, sleep issues.
This time, two things broke.
First, websites started taking ten to twenty seconds to load. Not DNS, not network. Firefox's DevTools just said waiting for server. I couldn't diagnose it. Maybe it was Linux, maybe it wasn't, but I didn't trust Linux enough to rule it out. That distrust itself is a problem.
Second, the update utility got stuck. Just frozen. Couldn't open it. I hadn't tweaked anything, hadn't installed anything unusual, hadn't deviated from the vanilla setup. Day seven of a fresh Fedora install and the update tool was bricked.
I can't tolerate vanilla installs going bad. If I tweak something and it breaks, that's fair. That's on me. But if I use a vanilla install, with the default tools, in the default configuration, and it still breaks, then I feel like I can't trust it.
A year or two before this, I tried OpenSUSE full-time. A routine update bricked my system on day seven. I went to IRC, Reddit, the forums. The community were genuinely helpful and gave interesting, considered responses. I still couldn't fix it. The time I lost to that was completely disproportionate to any problem I've ever had on Windows.
Windows friction is predictable. The setup screens asking me to sign up to Microsoft 365. The Start menu occasionally surfacing Bing results when I'm searching for an app. The notifications suggesting I try Edge. These things are annoying, but they're known. I can dismiss them, turn them off, and move on. Barely 10 seconds is lost.
Linux friction is unpredictable. The update tool freezing for no reason. System-wide slowdown I can't diagnose. Notifications telling me too many programs are listening for file changes and asking me to decide whether to increase the limit (a decision I don't understand why I'm being asked to make). The friction isn't necessarily higher in total, but the unexpected issues are more likely to cost me an entire afternoon rather than a few seconds.
With that said, Microsoft does kinda suck and has a habit of messing with things.
The default state of a fresh Windows install is unpleasant. News in the taskbar, weather widget, MSN content bleeding in everywhere (MSN represents the worst parts of the internet). It takes maybe ten minutes to clean up, but you're cleaning it up every reinstall. VS Code used to a pure code/text editor. Now it's an AI thingy. Notepad, a long standing and trustworthy app, was redesigned and had AI added to it. That felt like sacred ground that was encroached upon. That felt like a betrayal of trust.
I don't trust Microsoft not to crapify more things, but Windows still works better for me. I need my machine to work. I can't spend an afternoon tweaking my computer anymore. Maybe when I was in my teens or early 20's when I had nothing but time, but not now.
Maybe I'll try Linux again next year. I probably will. I always do.
2026-05-14 15:48:00
I am left behind, apparently. That is what you are if you choose not to use 'AI', as the many consumer LLM's are labelled and purported to be these days. I wonder what the next thing I'll be left behind by will be?
Anyway, I'm left behind many times over already, and I don't really care.
I was left behind when the 'Internet of Things' was the thing to be using, otherwise you'd be left behind.
Could never see the point, especially since I've never lived in a house big enough to need to control the lights via your phone and the internet, when physically getting there to flip the physical switch yourself took about two seconds anyway.
I haven't got a 'smart speaker', I've never wanted to speak to my phone either. I've never Hey Google'd or Hey Siri'd or Hey Alexa'd.
How do I live? How do I manage to navigate modern life? I don't know, but apparently I'm doing it somewhere behind everyone that does all these things as a matter of course these days.
 
The electricity company keep phoning me. Once a month or so, they phone to ask when they can come and install a smart meter. I ask them if it's optional, they say well, we would prefer it if you installed one. So I ask again if it's optional, because them telling me they would prefer me to doesn't actually answer the question I've asked.
Yes, it's optional.
So what benefit to me is it to install the smart meter? I ask (again, because I've had this conversation many times already).
Well, it'll tell you how much electricity any of your appliances is using as it's using it, so you can see what power is costing you, they say.
That's not really a benefit, is it? I say. I mean, if I need to use the washing machine, I turn the washing machine on and use it. Do I really need to know exactly how much it's costing me to the nearest tenth of a penny if I need to do the laundry AS it's doing the laundry? If I need to do the laundry, I need to do the laundry. I'm not going to go without doing the laundry, so the electricity it's using is necessary to use, whether I can see it totting the total up as it goes or not. Are you suggesting that I can simply not do the laundry because the smart meter tells me that it's expensive to do, even though I need to do it because I have a lot of dirty clothes?
The whole thing with appliances and power is you're using it when you need to use it, isn't it?
I was brought up during the strikes of the mid-1970's in the UK. Power was rationed then. Three day weeks. I know how to make sure unnecessary lights are turned off and unused plug-in appliances are unplugged.
OK, well, you'll never need to read the meter again because it sends the information to us directly, they say.
So while still on the phone I open the cupboard door that the current meter is in and read off the numbers to them.
What's that?
That's the current meter reading. It's not hard to read the numbers, I say, and politely decline their kind offer.
 
Because J goes places and does things in the world outside, she has loads of parking apps on her phone. I have none, because I don't go anywhere or do anything. If we go somewhere together and we go into a car park, she jumps out when we're parked and goes to the paying station, and I can see in her face if the app she needs to 'pay easily by app' is one she already has or not. If it's not, a thunderous darkening to her expression passes over, followed by a LOT of tippity-tapping on the phone screen for the next five minutes.
Or, she goes to the station, then steps back and holds her phone in the air, turns around, takes a few steps, holds the phone up again. After four or five different contortions, a eureka moment can be seen, and tippity-tapping will commence.
Or, she tippity-taps, waits, then tippity-taps again, waits, then tippity-taps again, waits, then STABS STABS STABS and SCOWLS at the phone and waits, then STOMPS back to the car and says we're going to a different car park.
I miss the days when you walked to the machine and just put a couple of coins in.
 
I don't know. Maybe it's just me, being behind as usual, but it seems to me a lot of the things they want us to do differently now are as a result of the technology needing it to change, in order to work with the technology and supply them with the data they're horny for, and aren't actually any 'better' in any way for human life.
Not my life anyway.
 
post link for sharing: https://skryblans.com/left-behind
If you got this far, you may as well click the star below on your way out.
2026-05-13 20:46:00
I don’t know when the transition happened.
Email used to be fun and exciting, like you’d actually look forward to seeing that you got a new email, rather than annoyed by whatever marketing email you accidentally signed up for five years ago.
These days, most of the emails I get are shipping notifications (alright, those are okay…), emails from my child’s school, a couple of substack articles, and promotions for a new sale happening. This is after I went through and did a mass unsubscribing - it was a lot worse before.
When did email become something to loathe?
I was skeptical of creating an email inbox for my bear blog, but WOW my mind has been changed. After a few posts, I started getting actual people sending me lovely emails and wanting to discuss what I wrote!! It was shocking. People don’t like emails, why am I getting emails from real people?
Bear Blog actually made getting emails fun again.
And now if I see an email attached to a blog post that I really enjoyed, I go out of my way to send a nice note to the author! Because everybody deserves to see a nice note in their inbox that isn’t a marketing promotion or spam mail.
Go send a nice note to one of your favorite bloggers today. :)