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2026-02-28 12:05:00

So, I live in Brazil. Have lived in Brazil for all of my 31 years so far, in fact.

There's a thing about living in Brazil and being in the American corners of the internet (of which there are many, if not most): you get reminded, over and over again, of just how much your currency sucks compared to the american dollar. The currency exchange has never been good, unless you count the super brief period in time in 2008 where it became 1:1, of course, but right now? It's at a whooping 5:1.

This means for every USD, I have to pay FIVE BRL. A seemingly low amount in dollars suddenly blows up when translated to brazilian reais and a lot of the time, it means having some difficulty accessing things you might want or need. It might mean not accessing that at all. Often it makes you feel like a space isn't really for you, like you've wandered into someone's party and your name definitely wasn't on the guestlist.

So when I checked out Bear's upgrade page, I was really surprised to see this:

this reads "Hey, it looks like you're from Brazil 🇧🇷 We support Purchasing Power Parity to make Bear affordable to everyone."

I'd seen this elsewhere sometimes (Gumroad, Steam) but I didn't expect to see it here. Holy shit! This makes it so much easier for me to upgrade my Bear account once I'm able to and makes it possible to consider grabbing the yearly upgrade, and it feels wonderful to be acknowledged in this way. It's comforting to be seen. It's so kind. It's like I'm trying to reach oranges in the tree and someone brought in a ladder for me.

Thank you Herman, for keeping us with weaker currencies in mind!! It means a lot. Fico feliz de estar aqui. :)

2026-02-28 06:55:00

Why the fuck are laptops pre-built with AI chips now?

Excuse me for starting so harshly, but genuinely; why? I don't want a bloody Copilot+ hoohaah chip in my laptop! Why the hell am I expected to pay a jacked up price because you jammed some weird little LLM processor in there. I don't want that! I don't want Copilot! Let me use my stupid little internet sandwich in peace!

I must admit, I am already writing this from a pretty frustrated place. I ordered a laptop last Saturday and paid extra (quite a bit extra, actually) to have it delivered next day. It is now a whole week later. No laptop and no answers. I have absolutely no faith that it is going to show up, so I started looking at what was available in-store right now. It's only stupid Copilot+ Microsoft laptops. Why.

I wanted to make a more eloquent post about my feelings on AI, but that can wait for now.

It's everywhere. It's even made its way into my workplace now. Colleagues of mine are being forced to use it. Luckily that conversation hasn't made it my way yet, but when it does I will be refusing. I don't need to use AI to do my god damn job. You hired me before that was a major thing. Clearly I am good at what I do. I don't need some fakey-ass hype sidekick telling me how amazing I am all the time. I have a wife for that. Get out of my face.

This is more of a rant than a blog-post, but then again what is a blog for if not expressing my opinions on things.

So here it is. My opinion.

Fuck AI.

Here's a picture of my cat becoming an orb.

2026-02-28 00:02:00

I only have a few more days here in Chiang Mai. Then it’s back to Sweden to start working again.

It’s been great, as always, apart from the dog bite. Great weather, many new places, and a lot of writing and coding.

I have friends who are also in Thailand right now, but on the islands. When we talk and I ask what they’ve been doing, the answer is always the same. They’ve been at the beach or by the pool all day.

When I tell them what I’ve been up to, they think it sounds like a waste of time. Sitting at a cafe writing or coding, what kind of life is that?

In my book, it’s a fantastic life. It’s one of the things I love to do. It gives me something no beach in the world ever could.

Still, I sometimes feel that even if this is a marvelous life in my book, it’s not by the book. Like it goes against the norm. Like I ought to feel guilty for enjoying it.

That’s how strong the general idea of how to live your life is. You work and save money, you go on vacation, and you just chill. Basically.

Not for me. Never has been, never will be.

With that said, time for another cup of coffee and back to working (read: playing) with my new theme for Bear blog.

Guilty as charged.

2026-02-27 23:55:00

Hey, you. Yes - you, dear Reader who is most likely my dad (Hi dad!), my husband (Hi F.!), or some poor chap who has chanced upon this on Bear's Most Recent page: I have literally nothing today that hasn't already been said and over analyzed in popular culture before, so if you are looking for an insightful piece of writing, you can stop right here and carry on with your day.

Are you still here? Fine, don't say I didn't warn you.

Here goes:

I suck. At drawing, at playing the Ukulele, at knitting, at running, at writing, at singing, at pottery, at water colors, at photography. These are all the activities that lie scattered around the graveyard of hobbies I took up and gave up on once I found that I was not immediately brilliant at them.

The easy thing to do would be to, yet again, blame my parents. There has always been a certain level of excellence expected from me, which I have ended up internalizing in my adult life. The sources of this are varied, some of it is familial (looking at you, father), some of it social (I'm a brown woman in tech, and in this field, the luxury of mediocrity is only afforded to straight white dudes).

As a result, I've grown to value the result more than the process. This is bad for several reasons. First, a direct consequence of this is that the hobbies that have stuck around are those where I consume rather than create (reading, cinema, live music). Second, I have a rather low threshold for tolerating discomfort for my own sake (I am more than happy to do so when someone is expecting an output from me). Third, the distance between who I want to be and who I am continues to grow and frustrate me.

So, here is my resolution for the 35th year of my life: I am going to suck. I will actively be bad at things I enjoy and continue to do them anyway. Every day I commit to suck at one of the following: (a.) writing (b.) playing my baritone ukulele (c.) doing yoga.

What are you planning to suck at?

2026-02-27 21:49:40

The thing about pain is that it's tyrannical. It crops your life, redrawing its borders around a single, catastrophic moment: a rejection email, a breakup, a humiliating mistake you harrowingly replay in your head. It crops your vision, and your feral instinct becomes staring even harder at the dumpster fire, in hopes your vigilance would reverse it.

When I feel my world collapsing, I learned to zoom out. Analogically, it's like a framing back a camera, widening the lens until the edges of the periphery return. When I'm living inside of pain, I always mistake proximity for permanence, but my scale recalibrates when I widen the lens of my life. I become a person in an apartment, in a city, in a country, on a planet spinning 1,040 mph in an offensively vast, indifferent universe.

The humiliation is still there, of course. It just isn't everything.

This isn't an insulting attempt to belittle your suffering (Nothing I hate more than saying "But other people have it worse"!) but an act of perspective. I widen the frame to soothe my panic, steady my pulse. When I zoom out to the year instead of the week, to my life instead of this chapter, I remember how much of my life has already unraveled and reassembled and how many more will.

My life isn't small, but simultaneously? There is mercy in realizing, in the grand scheme of things, it still is. Because small means survivable, doable. It means my current grief doesn't define my remaining existence.

A while ago, a kind reader emailed me a link to this video, as response to the final part of what do you when life keeps going on without you. Thank you!

2026-02-27 21:02:00

In May of 2023, Google introduced “AI overviews” into their search engine.¹ This followed years of decisions leading to worse search quality and the consummation of their mission to answer every query on Google instead of sending you to outside sites. This was upsetting but something I groaned about and then moved on.

Then, in January of 2026, Google introduced generative AI into their Gmail inboxes. For me, this was the last straw. I decided it was time to leave Google.

My email is now clean

I always thought I loved Gmail. Turns out I just had the habit of typing in “gmail.com” in my search bar. I honestly can’t tell you a single feature of Gmail that I miss.

I used to let the algorithms sort my emails, but I realized this actually sucks. This is a “feature” that Gmail touts, but when I stepped back for a second I realized it’s not something I ever wanted. I sort my emails and have filters, but I’ve never wanted an algorithm to do that for me.

I can't think of any other differentiating features in Gmail. Ads in my mail? Nostalgia?

The email service I decided to switch to is Proton.² But ultimately there are tons of great non-Gmail services around, some other notable ones being Fastmail, Tuta, and Mailbox. But this isn’t an article about how to de-Google or what services you should use, and all of these services are better than Gmail.

Leaving Gmail also gave me the opportunity to start implementing better digital hygiene. I no longer give my primary email to fly-by-night sites, and I'm deliberate with what things I'm signing up for.

My inbox is so much cleaner now, and I patiently await the newsletters I’ve signed up for like a gleeful child waiting for the postman.

Searching the internet can be fun again

Similar to my habit to go to Gmail, I think the only reason I’ve been going to Google is out of habit. But Google sucks. There’s no reason to Google things anymore.

After giving them a fair shot, I think I can now honestly say that Brave and DuckDuckGo are better than Google for >90% of searches.³

Leaving Google also makes finding stuff fun again. As far back as 2012, Google has tried to answer queries in a way to keep you on google, not other sites. And Google is not fun. The open web is fun.

By getting off Google and using a mix of search engines and independent sites, you are forced to make an initial conscious decision when you want to find something. You need to think not only “how do I find out this knowledge?” But “where can I find it?”

That’s a fun and fulfilling decision to make. You might still end up searching (on Brave or DuckDuckGo or Kagi or wherever, not Google), but you also may find yourself going directly to IMDB or Wikipedia or Reddit or your local news org or who knows where.

Taking Google out of things has brought me back to the yesteryears of “surfing the web” instead of just “Googling.”

It’s better.

My conscience is a tiny bit cleaner

I do my best to boycott bad things. And I fail pretty often. I still use Amazon on occasion and I can’t get off Spotify. I use Uber and DoorDash a lot more than I’d like. And I have too many Apple products/services.

Individual actions probably will not save the world, but big tech is bad, and Google is one of the worst. So it feels pretty good to have completely^*^ cut out one of these bad companies. And it legitimately has made my life better.

Why isn’t everyone doing this?

I'm convinced the reasons people stay on Google are habit and dark patterns. Google’s services are actively worse than the alternatives, but people are forced to stay.

Google is not only the default on iOS, it’s also impossible to start a new search engine and be used on iOS. You are limited to: Google, Bing, Ecosia (which is just Bing), Yahoo (which is just Bing), and DuckDuckGo (which is also just Bing).⁴

Google pays Apple $20 Billion a year for this sweetheart deal. That’s around an 8th of all of their profit. Similarly, Google is the default in Chrome (of course) which ~70% of people use.⁵

So no one is really choosing to use Google Search. It’s being chosen for them.

Paying for the services you use

Google has taught us that internet services should be free. But they’re not really free. Google is one of the most profitable corporations in history. They are profiting off of you to an enormous degree.⁶

The old adage of “if you’re not paying, you’re the product” is certainly true here. People should pay for the online services they use (I certainly do!), but I want to note that this is not an actual obstacle to getting off Google. All of the alternatives listed in this article offer free versions.

Google has convinced the world that a free product needs to be ripe with ads and privacy violations, but that’s a lie they’re peddling. Even if you can’t afford to pay for email or search or anything else, there’s still a better world out there without Google.

Social stigma

There’s a weird stigma around leaving mainstream tech.

But as someone who has switched from Google I can also say that most of that stigma was a façade. It turns out most people hate Google and are just looking for an excuse to quit. I’ve had so many conversations with people in every part of my life about how much they hate big tech.⁷

^*^The woes of YouTube

I would be remiss to not mention that Google owns YouTube. My one exception to being off of Google’s products is YouTube. Unfortunately, YouTube has a virtual monopoly on online video, and at this time there truly are no real alternatives.

Unlike Google itself, YouTube operates as a platform and benefits from massive network effects. It’s impossible to quit the platform unless you want to quit the creators you watch as well.

Note:

There is hope here for the future. Several large YouTubers have started to create alternate platforms, like Curiosity Stream and Nebula and Floatplane. Spotify has started to compete on the platform level. And independent groups like Dropout have also dipped into business models closer to Streaming and News publishing.

Have thoughts on leaving Google? Email me to talk about it!