My greatest professional achievement is never having created a LinkedIn account.
The first time I saw Michelangelo’s David in person, I wept. Never in my life have I witnessed a more beautiful piece of content. I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Museum patrons all around me were looking up from their phones to admire David as well. Despite it being legacy content, David was so scrollstoppingly captivating that it generated stronger engagement than TikTok and Instagram combined, despite those platforms offering fresher, more personally relevant content.
ignis is a small pourover coffee store off the Yanaka Ginza shopping street in the Sendagi / Yanaka area. We went here at the recommendation of one of my readers (thanks, keep them coming!) Having visited the area recently to check out some other coffee shops, we’re beginning to realise that Sendagi and Yanaka are a bit of a coffee hot spot. They have a number of different beans available for their pourover, ranging from 1000 to 4000 yen for a cup. They had 3 from Ethiopia, two from Panama and…
This spring E took down her WordPress blog and replaced it with a static website. In the past weeks she did the same for her business website (and added her own sales channel to it, with just the payment provider as third party element). Now I have static website envy. Until 2002 I had static websites, hand coded in a text editor. Still the easiest way for simple websites, I’m amazed to say. Then from 2003 I used a CMS for my blog, first Movable Type for about a decade and then WordPress from…
I just came across the Done by Humans “movement,” which appears to similar to not by AI: both offer badges to display proudly on your human-made website after some kind of vetting process. I don’t understand the appeal of sites like these or what they offer, and I think it’s possible they represent a new way to mislead people about AI use on the web. There are three main reasons I am wary of these efforts. 1. They’re unnecessary I don’t use AI on my website: I’ve coded it all by hand and I…
A recent book got me thinking about Silicon Valley’s history. Its origins predate the age of information technology, and yet relics of those times still structure the Valley. In this post, we go through just enough about its past to appreciate the significance of the curious incident that is Marc Andreessen’s marriage with Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen. Before we start, a quick note: I am sure that many people are familiar with the content of this post. In fact, you probably know more about it…
Perception of color, a fascinating idea — evident by last year’s IndieWeb blog carnival theme I hosted. This fascination is seeded by personal need to understand my own perception. I am often questioned about color choice in my art. Most consider them artistic choice. While I do oversaturate the hues, I actually see these hues. My art is my attempt to show the world the colors I see, hence the intensity of the saturation. Part of me afraid they miss the point. Painting Trees This spring I…
I'm supposed to be on a LinkedIn hiatus but I shamefully visited it yesterday to pimp a blog post (a largely pointless exercise, as it turns out). While I was on there, I couldn't help but notice the post from a founder I know well. I'm definitely curious about his new venture, so I decided to read the post despite it being much too long, but after several sentences it seemed obvious that this was AI slop. It didn't feel in any way personal, literally every sentence was load bearing, there were…
Bubbles is a website built by Ben, who lives in Mülheim, Germany. It automatically collects or aggregates a list from a whole pile on independent websites. Sites built by ordinary people posting about things that interest them. Subscribers to Bubbles can then vote on individual posts causing them to ‘bubble up’ to the top of the list. Rather than explaining, let me just show you. Here is the current list.You can browse down the list and check out any of the posts that might be of interest. And…
Shoreline with lights. License: CC-0 So, Brennan Kenneth Brown wrote about the experience of my response to one of his posts topping the Bubbles list for most of a day. To that, I have to apologize, and hopefully provide a little context. Brennan wrote at the beginning of his post: The writing was critical, but it was also fair and written in good faith. That said, seeing a 3,500-word article about me on the top of Bubbles.town yesterday certainly did give me anxiety—but that's par for the…
Meta, last month: We’re launching Meta Glasses with three frame styles offering distinct silhouettes that suit different faces, moods, and occasions: […] Meta Glasses by Kylie — A unique slim oval frame designed in collaboration with Kylie Jenner and inspired by her personal style. Katie Notopoulos, Business Insider, today: Interestingly, since the launch of her namesake frames, Jenner doesn’t seem to be wearing them much in public. At the World Cup finals, she wore what appeared to be…
Money helped unify trading and debt. Why don't we step back and pay with actual debt itself when we have these brilliant business machines in our pockets.
Link: This Conversation Is Being Recorded. They All Are., by Katherine Bindley at the Wall Street JournalI’ve been thinking about this story for days.“A Zoom call isn’t complete without an artificial-intelligence note taker. Phones are out at meetings, capturing every word. During impromptu conversations with co-workers, someone might turn on the Granola transcription app, which can turn the interactions into one-page summaries or a list of action items. Even at bars and on dates, people are…
OverpAId is not coming for the people who do the actual work. It is coming, with extreme prejudice, for exactly one category of job: the one that spent the last forty years insisting everyone else’s job was replaceable. This is fantastic.
"All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you." ~ Octavia E. Butler I have not written on this blog for many months now. Just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I could sit here and list off a bunch of excuses as to why, but I shan’t waste our time with that drivel. Long story short, I was feeling lost and scared to put words on paper. I was unsure if anything I had to say was worth saying, worth reading, worth the churning of little internet packets to deliver it to you, dear…
Last edited 2 minutes ago. Considering how much anything costs right now (bc of AI, blockchain, mining, or whatever the fuck is going on in tech), I have come to a point in life where I realized I can afford nothing. Add to that the fact that my main computer died and I'm struggling financially... well, what's a girl to do? Use older tech and forget about the modern world is the answer, apparently. GamingMy old ass laptop can barely handle multiple tabs open on a browser, let alone a modern…
Make a list of things you've owned for 2+ years, costed over 50 bucks and still actively use. For me it looks something like this: item when price dslr 2016 ??? pc monitor 2020 300€ tea machine 2021 100€ washing machine 2021 400€ trackball mouse 2022 100€? electric desk 2023 600€ split keyboard 2023 100€ I'm probably forgetting something but still, it's a short list. Most of the things I bought and thought were gonna be for sooo many years and go through soooo much usage weren't. Because I…
I stopped by a Filipino/Hawaiian (mostly filipino) restaurant/bar that was recommended to me a few months ago by someone I met at an AANHPI event. One of my friends that was eating with us had gone many times before and said they enjoyed the menu. We looked up the menu before heading over. As a Filipino-American I always get curious about Filipino restaurants because a lot of our dishes are family-style/comfort food, so it’s always interesting to see what foods will be on the menu. To our…
There’s been some changes to Marginalia Search: Migrated to systemd from docker New unranked query endpoint Wide domains got their own index for faster crawls In brief, this has removed a lot of operational headaches, reduced expensive queries leaving more computational power for the rest, and cut crawl times in half. Let’s tackle them in some order. We have docker at home The system has been migrated off docker compose, and onto bare systemd in production. This has been successful, and solved…
PT AI, androids,AI, androids, supercomputers, we’ve all seen them in fiction. In spy and superhero movies with their AI assistants, or in video gameswith their super robots. A robot/android discovering the world, learning to be human, and developing consciousness, or facing discrimination within society—are two common tropes in fiction. Detroit: Become Human (DBH) and The Zeta Project are two examples I recall watching (yes, I watched the gameplay). And even though I haven't seen them myself, I…
I love reading. I caught the bug as a middle-schooler when I got caught skipping school, and as punishment, I had to read The Chronicles of Amber and do a book report about it. Even today, opening a book and fanning the pages to get the paper smell activates very fond memories and emotions. I remember a time before e-readers came out. I always thought reading on one seemed very futuristic. In military sci-fi books, characters are reading on their data pads, and reading on an e-reader makes me…
Why is this an “app”? This summer, the kids’ performing arts school are singing and dancing in a show at Disneyland. We’re all very excited, but my excitement, at least, was muted a little when I was told to install the “Travelbound” app in order to get access to the itinerary, travel arrangements, and accommodation details. Fuck that noise. This should have been a webpage. Why do you want me to install a(nother) shitty app just to tell me something that could have been a (smaller, faster, more…
Reading through an RSS feed can dull the experience of enjoying a blog's unique style—try visiting the site directly for the full effect.
You've probably run into some Obsidian evangelist espousing some convoluted system of organizing all their notes, and building some knowledge base. Heck, I was just involved in a conversation about Personal Knowledge Management. This isn't that article. My personal use of Obsidian tends to be simple. I build into it the tools that I need to get things done, to make things easier. There is a saying (which I can't locate, so I'll paraphrase) that a system should only be as complicated as needed,…
I found grumpywelshman this week, via https://bubbles.town – a good place to go to read somewhat interesting things. His stuff is very funny, an acidic takedown of the internet as we find it, the side hustle EARN $10,000 A WEEK WITH THIS FREE METHOD (costs $499), the algo, all of that. I recommend it all, good stuff, worth subscribing to. This piece – we are all rankers now: or why the internet has turned to shit – has some stuff in it which made me think a bit more about a thought at the back…
Summer 2026 saw us shunning foreign shores and instead spending a week in Derbyshire, beginning with a four night stay in the spa town of Buxton.After checking into our holiday apartment, we wandered through the Pavilion Gardens, complete with octagonal concert hall, John William's theme tunes played enthusiastically by a band in the bandstand, and a Canada Geese population which threatened to outnumber Buxton's human residents. There was a queue of people waiting to fill bottles at the well,…
The latest anti-feature from Automattic—now infecting Gravatar. Photo by: Unattributed, License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0. Happily Imperfect posted Bye bye Gravatar a short while ago, and I have to say, I've had a similar thought about deleting my account on there as well. My feelings towards WordPress and Automattic started changing some time ago, back when they introduced the Gutenberg editor. Ever since this “improvement” it's been a downhill slide…
I’ve been using Photoshop since the mid-90s. First at school, with Photoshop 3, then through work. I bought my first boxed copy of CS2 in 2005, then upgraded to CS5 in 2010. I subscribed to Photoshop Creative Cloud on day one. Today, I uninstalled it. I hope I never have to use Adobe software ever again. Photoshop used to be a joy to use. Whenever I got access to an upgraded version, I’d always have fun exploring the new features. I got really good at using it. When Adobe launched the Creative…
Without spoilers, which should I watch, and which should I skip? Archive Colossal The Space Between Us Rim of the World Kin Spaceman (with Adam Sandler) Paradise Anon Extinction The Great Flood Office Invasion
After seeing Ian’s plea to Don’t Forget to Share the Posts You Love recently, I decided to get off my arse and do something I've been meaning to since I resurrected this blog back in October. I’ve had a few links I wanted to share, but not necessarily devote an entire blog post to. So here’s a little collection of them all together. I'm going to start with Terence's post This Blog is Written in en-GB because it resonated with me. I always write in my natural language and yes that means I often…