2026-01-02 20:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with V.H. Belvadi, whose blog can be found at vhbelvadi.com.
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I’m currently a Trinity–Cambridge researcher at the University of Cambridge, pursuing my PhD on the development of climate models. I’m also a researcher on the Cambridge ThinkLab group examining the credibility of AI models. My background is in condensed matter physics, which previously led to my research in astrophysics studying a type of eruptive variable star, and that in turn helped broaden my interests in the fascinating field of the history of science, about which I remain very passionate today.
I’ve enjoyed writing for as long as I can remember and I write on my website about a wide range of topics, but mostly centred around science, technology, history and society. I also run an infrequently despatched newsletter that discusses similar themes. In my spare time I make photographs and engage with my local photography club, read a lot, punt on the Cam, ride my Brompton, take long walks or participate in the Cambridge Union, which happens to be the world’s oldest debating society.
To be honest, it’s quite unremarkable. I first came across the idea of a weblog through an explainer in a physical magazine. My earliest website was a bunch of hard-coded html pages uploaded to my ISP’s free subdomain. I eventually moved to LiveJournal and then to Vox, which had just been launched (and about which I still have fond memories). In 2008 I moved to Wordpress, because that’s where seemingly everyone was, and I stayed there for about eight years. Between 2016 and 2018, in search of better alternatives because I had started to feel Wordpress was bloated, I tried Kirby and then Hugo and finally Statamic. Over the years my blog has had many names, all of which are best forgotten. Today it’s eponymous.
My perennial motivation has been the joy of seeing my thoughts printed on screen. The general structure I have on my website now, besides my ‘notes’, has been the structure I’ve had since the early 2000s. (My notes were on Tumblr.) Besides all that, I like that in my website I have a safe space in which to engage with a multitude of ideas and sharpen my thinking through my writing.
I’m starting to get the feeling all my answers are going to be unremarkable. I don’t really have a creative process mostly because I don’t force myself to write at specific intervals for my website and because I find I do not work well with ‘knowledge gathering’ disconnected from a purpose for that knowledge. What this means is that ideas incubate in my head as I read things, and over time one, or a set of ideas, will reach critical density, prompting me to write something. Consequently, by this point I usually know what I want to say, so I just sit down and write it.
I already do a lot of writing as an academic and deal with plenty of deadlines, so the last thing I want is to replicate that environment on my personal website. As a result some things I do tend to be polar opposites: I keep no schedule, I give myself no deadlines, and I publish my first drafts – warts and all – with little proofreading, or throw away entire essays at times. This is not to say I never refine my writing, but I generally try not let a sense of perfection get in my way. I also, therefore, permit myself plenty of addenda and errata.
I write in BBEdit and publish from BBEdit using SFTP. I have a bunch of scripts, clippings etc. on that wonderful programme and am yet to find an equal. If I am on my mobile I use the dashboard built into my site, but usually only for fixing typos and not for typing entire essays. I may type entire notes this way, however, because notes on my website are usually quite brief. And if I ever want to make note of something for later or return to a webpage, I either save it to my Safari reading list or make a note on Apple Notes. However, I rarely make separate, atomic notes anymore (I did try to at one point), choosing instead to write a few lines summarising a source and saving the source itself. In case of my RSS subscriptions (I use NetNewsWire) I star posts for later reference but prefer to read on the actual website, as the writer intended.
I can write anywhere but there certainly are some things that make writing a more pleasant experience. Good music has no equal and I prefer classical music (which varies widely from Mozart to George Winston) or ambient works like those of Roger Eno and Enya; if push comes to shove, anything without words will do. I prefer quiet places, places from where I can see the natural world around me and a warm cup of coffee, none of which are absolute necessities. The environment on my computer is probably a bit more controlled: I like to write on BBEdit, as I said before, and in full screen with, perhaps, Safari on a neighbouring workspace.
My website is hosted on a VPS with Hetzner, which I also use to self-host a few other things like a budgeting software, a reference manager, Plausible and Sendy. It runs on Statamic and is version-controlled with Git. My domain is registered with Cloudflare. In the past I used mostly shared hosting. I also maintain an updated list of stuff I use daily on my website for some inexplicable reason.
It costs me about £5 a month to run my website, including daily automated backups. I neither generate revenue through it now nor plan to in the future.
I do not have thoughts on people monetising their personal blogs. However, if their attempts at doing so involve ruining their writing, presenting misleading content or plastering ads all over their page, I might not be inclined to return to their site or recommend it to others.
I know how wonderful it felt when people showed support for my website through small donations so I like to give similarly when I can afford to do so.
Amongst those who have not already been interviewed on People & Blogs, here are four people who are far more interesting than I am: Juha-Matti Santala, Pete Moore, Melanie Richards and Anthony Nelzin-Santos. (This in no way means there isn’t a fifth person more interesting than me.)
I feel a strong urge to apologise for my responses but I’ll instead take a moment to nudge people to subscribe to my newsletter if that’s something they’d like, or visit my website and start a conversation with me about something either they found interesting or with which they disagree.
If you have 30 min to spare, head over to ncase.me/trust/ for an interactive website designed to illustrate the evolution of trust according to game theory. But if you have less than 30 min, here’s a ‘tediously accurate scale model’ of the solar system that is the internet edition of Carl Sagan’s pale blue dot.
Besides all this, I’d encourage people to help build a better, more inclusive and kinder world for everyone by engaging meaningfully both online and offline (although not at the cost of your own mental health). Slow down, read more books and please don’t lose your attention span.
Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed.
If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 122 interviews.
Make sure to also say thank you to Luke Dorny and the other 130 supporters for making this series possible.
2026-01-01 18:35:00
I distinctly remember waking up early, on January 1st, 2017, going downstairs with my laptop, making myself some coffee, and coding what ended up being the first iteration of this blog. I wanted to write weekly updates to hold myself accountable. I failed spectacularly. Reading that post from 9 years ago made me smile: 27-year-old me wanted to cut down on distractions and get the habit of waking up early back. Guess what? 36-year-old me also wants to cut down distractions and get the habit of waking up early back. Some things apparently never change.
On the first day of 2017, I published my first blog post; I’m posting the 620th. I also sent out the 1st edition of Dealgorithmed because I guess I’m a sucker for starting projects on the first day of the year. It does make it easy to remember when there’s an anniversary to celebrate, though.
I genuinely think this is going to be my last digital project. I said it many times before, but this time it does feel different. I don’t know about you, but I’m seriously starting to feel digital fatigue. I’m cruising towards my 15th year as a freelancer—I’ll officially hit that milestone on July 1st, 2027, even though I started working solo at the end of 2011—and I find myself reflecting a lot on the possibility of completely changing career and doing something completely different that has nothing to do with the digital world. Time will tell if this stays an idea or it becomes a concrete plan.
I do know that no matter what I end up doing, I’ll still continue posting on this blog. Because blogging is fun, it’s therapeutic, and more people should do it. Plus, I want to become one of those oldheads with a blog that is 30 years old!
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2025-12-30 00:40:00
The year is about to end, and it’s unlikely I’ll finish more books, so I think it’s a good time to recap the books I read in 2025. I’m not going to include links to buy these books. There’s no point in doing that because you know better than I do where you like to buy books. Some I read in Italian, others in English, but I’ll list the English version here when possible.
That’s it, that’s the whole list. Those are the 35 books I read this year. How about you, though? What did you read in 2025?
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2025-12-29 01:45:00
No matter how busy life is, there's always time to admire a beautiful sunset.
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2025-12-26 20:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Lars-Christian Simonsen, whose blog can be found at lars-christian.com.
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My name is Lars-Christian Simonsen. I'm a guy in my twenties. No wait, thirties? Actually let's just scratch that part. I was born and raised on an island deep inside the Arctic circle. Up there, I spent the first quarter century of my life, before relocating to the Norwegian capital, Oslo, while looking for work after getting a degree in finance and business administration.
There was also a girl and that girl is now my wife. As she was less than excited about the prospect of settling down somewhere where the number of what she considers a warm summer day per season is typically counted on one hand, and the dark days of winter seemingly never end, I simply could not convince her to move back north with me. Instead, we hopped on a train and found a quiet suburban neighbourhood when we were ready to settle down. A decade later, we're still here and we're raising two children in this community. We've concluded it was a good compromise.
My days revolve around the aforementioned children, and juggling keeping them alive and content (tall ask, but we aim high) with a nine-to-five and trying to find some time for other things I enjoy. This includes, but is not limited to, running, reading and writing. I also enjoy being outside in nature, hiking and camping in the mountains in particular. Alas, I don't find nearly enough time for it. In an attempt to compensate, I double down on exercise and reading, and try to spend around at least half an hour on each every day.
Circa 1995 my dad took me to a newly opened local internet café. It was the first time I went online, and I was hooked. A couple years later we got a state of the art ISDN line installed in our house. Back then we paid for usage by the "call unit" (the Norwegian term "tellerskritt", which translates literally to "counter steps", is far more memorable) and there were months where I wasn't looking forward to the day the bill dropped into our (physical) mailbox. My life as a chronically online person was underway.
Hanging out in local IRC channels, moderated by our community tech gurus, it didn't take long before I was inspired to make my own website. The year was 1998, and I used a program like FrontPage or some such to get my very first personal site online. Domains were expensive back then and the site was hosted on a directory provided by our ISP.
After that, I spent a few years making a website dedicated to a popular video game series. But when 2005 rolled around, blogging was all the hype, and I decided that I needed to have a personal blog as well. Domains had become more affordable, and I decided to register the .com for my given name, Lars-Christian. It has housed my personal website since.
As I have changed (grown?) as a person through these years, the blog has changed with me, and there have been many iterations through these two decades. Last year, however, I made a concerted effort to reconstruct as much as I could of the content from the earlier versions of the blog. (I relied heavily on the magnificent Internet Archive which I think everyone should support.) By my estimate, the posts archive now contains at least 90% of the posts I ever published to my blog. There honestly isn't much to be proud of. My 2007 phase of trying to fashion myself an internet marketing guru is particularly cringe. But I like the idea of my personal website as a reflection of my many past selves, so I leave everything for posterity.
The blog laid dormant for many years, before I decided to bring it back to life in late 2023. Like so many others, I had become disillusioned by the state of the big social platforms. Withdrawing from those, breathing life into my blog again as a place to express, collect and share whatever interested me seemed an obvious move.
Nowadays, I think of my website as not just a blog, but an online home. My personal space to do whatever I want. And a place to experiment and tinker with tech. You know, like we used to do back when tech was exciting and spoke to a world full of possibilities as opposed the dystopian timeline we stumbled upon as we ceded our lives to a handful of algorithms. Turns out that part is mostly optional, even today. I've built functionality to replace centralised services like Goodreads and Strava, and share my reading and workouts on my blog.
Admittedly, those are mostly just things that aren't doing the thing. Because the thing I really want to do is write more. To the extent that I have a goal for my blog, it is simply to write more.
There's a stanza from the song Marching Bands of Manhattan by Death Cab for Cutie. It's one of my favourite songs, by one of my favourite bands, and the particular line is this:
And it is true what you said
That I live like a hermit in my own head
To the extent that I have a creative process, it is living like a hermit in my own head. Always thinking, contemplating, obsessing over some thing or other. It can be exhausting, and often leaves me feeling restless. But committing my thoughts to paper is something of an antidote. The song continues:
But when the sun shines again
I'll pull the curtains and blinds to let the light in
Putting my thoughts to the sword by writing them down, examine if they make sense, sometimes feels like pulling the curtains and letting the light in. It helps me discard that which doesn't make sense. Which is to say most of it. I can then spend my energy on that which does make sense.
Of course, what I'm thinking about is, to a large extent, determined by input. That would be the "content" I consume. And that's why I had to step back from social media. The hot-takes and constant negativity and never-ending dread made me depressed. Now I try to control my inputs to a great extent. Avoiding the 24 hour news cycle and social media. I don't really watch TV either. Instead, I read books and listen to audiobooks and long-form podcasts, for education and entertainment.
Inspiration to write comes from these sources, but also my daily life — particularly my children. They never cease to amaze me and they frequently force me to challenge my own assumptions and perspectives, letting me (hopefully) grow with them. To the extent that I've written anything worth reading, it was probably inspired by my children.
My technical setup is as simple as can be. I do all my writing in my plain text editor of choice, Sublime Text, using simple Markdown for formatting. If I have one enormous weakness as a writer, it is my aversion to reading my own writing. I believe it induces similar feelings in me as many people experience when hearing a recording of their own voice. I dread it. Proof reading… well, let's say I have room to grow. It's usually just write it, and if I have a vague feeling of what I wrote having made some sense, I try to be quick to publish. If I don't publish something the same day I write the bulk of it, it is likely to end up in my enormous pile of mostly not even half finished drafts.
That's easy.
The sun is about to come up. I'm sat at the kitchen table and through the window I see world come back to life. I'm sat at the kitchen table. My laptop in front of me, a cup of coffee on the side. The rest of the house is still asleep. No matter how sleepy I might be, I can access something in these moments that is locked off and unavailable at all other times. Creativity never comes more naturally to me.
Unfortunately, life often gets in the way and too often I only find myself with time to spare for writing in the evenings. At night, I'll be tired and groggy and anything that requires effort feels like a tall ask.
Surroundings definitely influence my creativity and ability to get work done. Concentration is hard to come by in an untidy environment. Usually, I start any work session by tidying up the room around me. Some people excel in chaotic surroundings. Me, I'm at my best, creatively and productively, in quiet, comfortable and familiar settings.
Dialogue is especially distracting to me, and it will consistently throw me off. Even music will eat into my concentration. I've found one exception: ambient music. A pair of noise cancelling headphones and Brian Eno's Music for Airports (good luck purchasing that in a digital format) and Boards of Canada's Tomorrow's Harvest have saved me many times.
I mentioned earlier that I do all of my writing in a plain text editor. This after a desire to simplify my tech stack a couple of years back. In the same process, I also threw out my CMS and — because all the existing static site generators confused me to no end — put together a few Python scripts to generate a static version of my website based on markdown content files. It was quite a challenge, but an enjoyable one.
When I've finished a post I dump the file in a specific directory. The scripts take over, generate the new and updated pages of my website, before uploading it to my web host. Speaking of web hosts, I rent a Virtual Machine (VM) from OpenBSD.amsterdam. They are an independent host that contribute to an independent Free and Open Source (FOSS) initiative. That, and the opportunity to learn more about working in the command line and doing some simple server administration, was why I chose them. And they've been great! If I have a question, I just send them an email. An actual human being responds within a reasonable time frame, answering my question. What a luxury!
My domain registrar of choice is Hover. I think I've been a customer for close to fifteen years. I've never had any problems, which is all I want from my registrar.
That depends entirely where you're coming from. For someone who wants to start a blog primarily to write and share their thoughts, I certainly wouldn't recommend going down the path of obsessing about the tech. Do the thing! Get a domain name and start with a service like Bearblog or Micro.blog. Both are small, independent services that work for the betterment of the open web.
A virtual machine from OpenBSD.amsterdam costs €69.00 per year, and I pay Hover $18.99 per year for my domain name. Let's consolidate that in a common currency, and say that keeping my blog alive each year costs me £74.76. Were I more cost conscious, I could easily get away with half or less. I'm privileged to be able to afford some idealism in these choices.
Similarly, I have no real need for, or interest in, monetising my blog. I've long dreamed of carving out a little niche of my own on the web and spend my days providing something people value enough that it could generate enough income to sustain my lifestyle. Today, my blog is not that. It is a public notebook, a playground and a biography.
Monetisation is, to me, inherently linked to providing something of value. I'm just not providing anything of value on my blog. Nor would I want to commit to doing that. If someone else thinks differently about that, I have nothing against it at all. In fact, I've supported a few independent web writers whose work I enjoy in recent years.
The 2007 internet marketing guru version of me would probably be full of advice on how someone could best earn a pretty penny from their blog. Today, though, I have fewer opinions on the matter. What I will say is this: If someone is creating something that you enjoy on a regular basis, whether that's writing, audio, software or whatever, you should find a way to help them sustain their practice. Otherwise, you have no right to be upset when they change or disappear.
You should interview V.H. Belvadi. Venkatram's writing often makes me stop, think and question myself. His blog is also one of the most aesthetically pleasing websites you'll find.
There are so many blogs out there worth mentioning, but I'll try to stick to a few:
Slice of pi is always a delightful read. Pete writes in a playful and unpretentious manner, which I find inspiring.
Alex Chan's writing is equally inspiring, in a completely different manner. Her language is precise and to the point, while still remaining personable and engaging. A very difficult balance to to strike.
Likewise, I enjoy Meadow's blog as well, but for another entirely different set of reasons. He is a smart thinker and a gifted writer who isn't afraid to be personal. He also become somewhat of a hero to me when he told me that, just like me, English wasn't his native tongue.
My friend Fabian writes with both curiosity and authority at once, and comes across as wise beyond his years. I always sit up straighter and try to get ready to learn when he's published a new post.
Through the 32-Bit Cafe forum (another recommendation!) I also recently came across Stephanie's blog. I've been enjoying her well thought out posts.
One last suggestion will be Ye Olde Blogroll. Whenever I'm in the mood for some "doom scrolling" I go there and visit a few blogs I haven't visited before. It'll leave you feeling much better than spending an hour or two on your algorithmic engagement-farm of choice. Promise!
I've got nothing, so I'll end by sharing a profound experience and a call to action.
My daughter, four years old, started dancing ballet this year. Yesterday, she was part of her first recital. A big production. In the local theatre with professional sound and lightning. Hers was a small role. But she got on the big stage in front of hundreds of spectators and did her dance together with her ballet classmates. It wasn't so much her role, but the whole spectacle that blew me away.
There must have been several dozen dancers on stage throughout the two hour show, and they were (to my admittedly untrained) eye so, so great at what they were doing. Sitting there and watching all these children, small and big, perform at an amazing level, I realised that each and every one of them must have worked diligently and with passion for years to be there that day.
The kids are alright.
My call to action, therefore, is this: If you have the chance, get involved with someone in your local community who is working to provide opportunities like these for children. Be it sports, dancing, singing or theatre, or computer clubs or whatever. If you can't get involved personally, make a donation. Give money if you can, or some old stuff you've got lying around. You can make a difference to someone. Providing as many kids as possible with the opportunity to explore their interests, find ways to express themselves and become part of a community is how we ensure that they continue to be alright.
Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed.
If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 122 interviews.
Make sure to also say thank you to Martin Matanovic and the other 130 supporters for making this series possible.
2025-12-22 02:35:00
Every now and again, a post I read on Mastodon weeks ago pops back into my head. It said:
We should keep the bigots out and let all the good normal folks in.
It does sound simple, doesn’t it? Everything is such a shitshow. Why don’t we simply keep the bad ones out and let the good, normal ones in? This was in the context of social media, but why stop there, I wonder? This solution applies to everything. It’s so simple and effective.
I keep thinking about this tweet because to me it embodies one of the core issues I have with general social media discourse: the lack of depth. The idea expressed in that single sentence is so devoid of details and substance that it is effectively meaningless.
Call me insane, but I believe two things when it comes to the other ~10 billion human beings out there:
The whole concept of being able to divide people into “the bigots” and “the good normal folks” sounds so insane to me. And by the way, I have zero doubts in my mind that I’d be left out and not be labeled as a “good normal folk” in this scenario.
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