The Art Of Not Asking Why

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 04:04:08 -0400

It’s 4 AM, and I’m up again. I really need this insomnia to go away.

Apple Watch after 2 years

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:14:28 -0400

My AppleCare informed me that my Apple Watch’s coverage is running out. Yep, turns out it’s been two years since I got it. I’ve been wearing it every day pretty much since, so I thought I’d write up a follow-up to my initial post and see how it lives up to the hype.

Since I got the Apple Watch, I stopped using TrainWell (which at the time was called Co-Pilot, until Microsoft came knocking on their door). Overall, I think leaving Trainwell was a good choice, even though it’s a good app. If you’re curious, I expanded on this previously. The Apple Watch is still good for exercise, and I use it often for walking, running, and strength training. Of all of those, I think it really shines for jogging. I can use it without my phone (so I don’t run with a slab in a pouch or around my arm), and it syncs automatically when I’m back. It gives me a map of my route and my speeds in various colors, so I know where I stopped to take a breath and how long the entire thing was, along with a bunch of other metrics for average speed, elevation, etc.

Strength training is… OK. It doesn’t do much besides measuring how long I’ve been training. There’s some useful data, like my heart rate or calories burned, but I’m not generally concerned with those. What I am missing is a way for it to track the exercises and sets I’m doing (TrainWell did this nicely), and maybe resume automatically after each set, but I can live without it. I currently track my exercises in Apple Notes because I can see them on the watch (took Apple long enough): this way I can take a quick look and see what I need to do without looking at my phone, which can be distracting.

Meditation is treated like other exercises on the watch, under “mind and body.” That’s too little in my opinion, and shouldn’t be included as an exercise cateogry, but I guess that’s why there are dedicated meditation apps. When I time my meditation with the watch this way, the slight vibration works as a way to tell me how far along I am, but even that can be too distracting, and I’m considering just using a soft audible chime from my phone, using a regular countdown. I recently started using a new meditation app, Waking Up, after a friend recommended it. It’s too early to expand on it here, but so far, it’s pretty good - ~~no Apple watch app though~~. Actually, there is an App, I didn’t realize. I’m not sure it does more than just measuring how long I meditate, though. I shall explore.

My sleeping issues… Oh man. What sleep.
The Apple Watch doesn’t help me with sleep as much as it reinforces what I already know: I don’t sleep enough. The new sleep grade from Apple makes sense, and it’s explained well enough, but it’s like being reminded constantly that I suck at math all over again, as was the case for me during my school and college years. I know I have a problem, and constantly looking at graphs and charts and bad grades visualizing this to me every day is not helpful, though I’m aware it’s up to me to do something else with the information or just turn it off completely. The positive side of it is that it helps me to justify naps during the day, as I do need them.

As for the gimmicks, like taking selfies with the watch or the double-tap to open and dismiss certain apps - I don’t use those. The watch face is too small, and the interface is often too minimal to do much with. Every now and then I use it to respond to a message in WhatsApp, which I use with the family, but when I do, I just tap the microphone to say something quick. Otherwise I reach for my phone, which I have on me all the time anyway.

I got rid of Teams on the watch long ago, even though I thought it would be useful for work. The number of messages I get on this app is impossible to manage, and I find that I mute conversations constantly. The last thing I need is another vibration on my wrist to remind me that two people are talking to each other in yet another 20-plus person chat which happens to include me.

There is one gimmicky feature I use all the time though, and that’s the reminders. Having the watch on my wrist is the quickest and easiest way for me to remind myself to do something later. Even if I mess up the dictation, which happens often enough, I have it written down and it’s easy to go back and edit later on my phone or Mac.

Overall, looking at what I wrote two years ago, the hype died down for sure. I still find that I don’t like how the Apple watch looks. It’s a generic square slab, and I miss how my Casio G-Shock looked on my wrist. Still, it’s a piece of technology I use every day, mostly for MFA for work when I sign into various apps, and when I pay for stuff (being able to pay for the subway this way, even through the sleeve of my coat in the winter, is very nice). One feature I didn’t think much about when I got it was how well it works with Apple Maps: when I walk, it vibrats e a certain way for a right turn than it does for a left turn, and it’s really nice to be able to keep my hands in my pocket (again, this comes in handy in the winter).

I’m probably going to buy a new one soon, though I feel like if I wait another year or so it’s not a big deal.

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 08:33:30 -0400

Apple Mail - highlight a part of an email, and it shows up in your reply. Email threads are sorted by chronological order.

Outlook - Highlighting does nothing. Copy-paste automatically defaults to the original fonts and style, not that of the email. Email threads (“conversations”) have two timelines in one: chronological and reverse-chronological.

I’m starting to think they have a position for “torturer” they hire for now and then.

We've built an AI so good it will kill us with its kindness

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:32:21 -0400

From my journal, about trying Claude yesterday:

I went back and asked it a couple of questions for the options it chose and it explained those to me too in a way that in the past I’d spend hours on IRC (or Reddit or whatever) to try and get this info from some Linux asshat who would only know half of it, if at all. It’s the learning part I like the most. The part that it gives me an answer, and I can ask why, and then why again, and again. I understand why people freak out AI will teach their kids one day, but dude, if this was my programming professor at college… I’d be in a different place today.

It’s yet another example of what a great teacher AI can be, but this time, it really landed home:

There’s a lot going on at school (and in college) in terms of human to human relationship. But those afternoons I fell asleep in the library trying to cram information into my head that I just couldn’t understand for hours, no matter how hard I tried. Those hours of frustration trying to find help on various Linux forums, to get someone to help me boot up my computer, and being told again and again to RTFM (and that’s when I got a response) were a punishment I earned for my curiosity.

It took me years to gain the confidence I have today to justify my unorthodox learning style, that of going from the end, not from the beginning, with tomes of text.

I was discouraged by my teachers and at some point by my parents. I don’t think they had bad intentions: it came from a good place. They saw me struggle and fail again and again and again and suggested (some less gently than others) that I should try something else.

Yesterday I tried Claude with something rather elementary for Linux users: mounting an SMB share from my Synology to my Linux computer.

The traditional approach (which I believe is still best) is to work through the fstab. I didn’t want to “mess with it” because I knew that it’s one of those sensitive system files that might mess up the computer boot if I’m not careful, and I used that fear to have me just use the GUI file explorer.

Claude gave me just the right amount of encouragement from the start:

Your concern about fstab is valid but manageable — the risk is real but small if you’re only adding a new remote mount entry at the bottom. You’re not touching the existing lines for your OS drives, so even if the SMB entry is wrong, the worst that realistically happens is the mount fails on boot and you get dropped into a recovery prompt. You can add nofail to the options to completely eliminate even that risk:

That was right. I was just adding to the file. It wouldn’t damage things this way. What’s more, it suggested the nofail option, which I had in my fstab before, but I didn’t remember why and where I got it from; it was one of those things I copied and pasted because it worked. Claude, with this simple sentence, explained what it was and how it would help.

The rest of the conversation with it felt like a good patient teacher, because that’s how I treated it. Claude could have given me the whole answer, and it did suggest it. I could have just copied and pasted my fstab as it is, let it work its magic, paste it back, and enjoy the magic without understanding it. But that’s not how I work.

I chose to go step by step. I told it I’m going to switch from my Mac to my Linux desktop, which wasn’t needed, but it helped me by roleplaying with it a bit, making it my teacher. And it got better from there, as it assumed that role and waited for me patiently. Of course it would, it’s code on a computer. But it acted out the role nevertheless. It polite and patient, and that’s one of those small things that clicked and made it work.

When we got to a point of testing the fstab and it didn’t work, it asked me to paste the errors I got and worked with me through them patiently. It told me I forgot a sudo one time (duh), and at another time, it asked me if I’m sure I downloaded and installed cifs-utils on my Linux desktop as it suggested, and I forgot. “Oops,” I typed, playing my role; “no problem, you need some coffee,” it replied to me with a wink emoji. Once again: I know it’s not human. I understand it doesn’t have real patience. But how much I needed that patience - even an artificial one - before! How often was it missing!

Suddenly, I got goosebumps. I remembered something else:

The Terminator would never stop. It would never leave him. It would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there. And it would die to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine was the only one that measured up.

In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 12:06:50 -0400

More signs of spring 📷

I took a walk and listened to the birds for a moment. It’s always nice to get chances like this in Manhattan:

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:26:05 -0400

Fighting with bots. I’m not provided the option I need (work/enterprise-related shipment, and the only option on the website or on the phone is for home service.) The bot doesn’t route me to a human, no matter what I try. Some service.

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 07:26:04 -0400

One of my automatic tasks for my Mac is to delete my downloads folder every weekend. At the start, I was worried this would cause me to lose important files, but I have backups and it actually made me more purposeful with how I save them.

What are some of yours?

So I fixed my blog again

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 09:06:07 -0400

I’ve mentioned that some pages of my blog haven’t been working. I’ve since fixed those pages and reinforced two pre-existing notions of mine: first, AI (LLMs specifically) can be a great tool if you use it to learn and enhance your existing skills; second, my blog writing is more important than I realized.

What went wrong

As you may know, if you visit my blog (though I realize most of you probably read this via RSS readers), I have several pages on my blog (which effectively make it a website, right? Are all blogs websites? 🤔). Some of those correspond to categories (such as my Emacs org-mode page or my movie reviews), while others are informative, like my about page and archive, which also include a search option for the site. You know, the basic blog-owner stuff.

My website is hosted by Micro.blog, which utilizes Hugo to build its sites. I switched to Tiny Theme, which is made especially for Micro.blog and comes with a few extra features, two years ago. These features, called Microhooks, can further customize the theme if you’re willing to make a few technical adjustments.

In my case, I use Microhooks on some of the pages. The archive page, which displays categories and all posts by day by default, was modified to include the search plugin and additional information I added before the default page starts. Then, for the Emacs org-mode category, there’s an introductory text with an image I created a while back, and then the rest of the post that fits into that category.

About a week ago, those Microhooks stopped working. The pages I mentioned displayed the default theme, as if I never customized them with Microhooks.

The fix

I struggled for a couple of days trying to figure out what went wrong. I thought a recent update to the theme and the plugins broke something, but I didn’t know what. I looked into the Microhooks instructions, but as far as I could tell, everything was set up correctly. I have a test blog, and when I ran the same code on it, the issue with the archive page repeated, while the Emacs Org-mode page was fixed. I went back and forth a couple of times, but I couldn’t see anything that would cause the problem.

Over the weekend, I had more time, so I took a deeper look into the theme. I am far from a Hugo expert (in fact, I one of the main reasons I oppted for Micro.blog was to stop working with on my static blog directly) but I understand the general idea of how things are built: there’s one main page which calls other parts, and these parts call other parts in turn, each one is defined in a separate HTML file. I scanned the different HTML files of the theme and found where the Microhooks I used were activated.

For the archive and search page, there is layouts/_default/list.archivehtml.html, which includes the following lines:

&#123;&#123; if templates.Exists "partials/microhook-archive-lead.html" }}
&#123;&#123; partial "microhook-archive-lead.html" . }}
&#123;&#123; end }

That partial (which is Hugo’s sort of “functions” or quick plug-ins for the theme), microhook-archive-lead.html, is the microhook HTML I created to include the search plugin and the intro to the archive and search page. This looked OK to me at the time, until I saw that another page, layouts/list.archivehtml.html, contained no reference to this Microhook. This looked odd to me: both pages have the same name (and thus the same function, I guessed). One is called default, and the default one is the one that was modified with my changes? That didn’t make sense.

This is where I fired up Qwen3-Coder (through Kagi) to help me understand how these pages work in Hugo. I asked it which page Hugo uses first, and sure enough, it replied that layouts/_default/list.archivehtml.html page is the default, sometimes used as a fallback option when layouts/list.archivehtml.html is not present¹. So, as it turned out, my files were flipped: the default file showed the changes, while the file meant for customizations showed the default. I copied the code condition above from the layouts/_default/list.archivehtml.html to layouts/list.archivehtml.html, and things started to work as they should.

Why this happened, I have no idea. I made no changes to the pages. My only theory is that a recent update flipped the code in the files somehow for whatever reason.

My other issue was a stupid user error, as most of these issues go. The Microhook layouts/partials/microhook-category-header.html is the one responsible for pointing out which category page should have a special introduction. What the LLM told me that I didn’t know (or maybe forgot) is that it does that by utilizing the page’s .title variable. This is where I made a mistake: I used the file’s name, using the URL, not the title of the page, which happened to be different. Since this was a conditional statement looking for a specific page title that wasn’t found, it was ignored. Once I changed the value in the HTML to reflect that page’s proper title, it was fixed. Of course, it was a damn dash I omitted by mistake.

The fun of blogging

While this was a technical issue, it affected my desire to blog. As long as my pages didn’t work correctly and I couldn’t fix them, I didn’t want to blog. It didn’t feel right, even though these issues were not critical, at least from the readers' point of view, but they were important to me. I enjoy my blog. I had to fix it. Once I did, that feeling reversed completely, and my desire returned in force. The post you’re reading now was itching to be written, and it’s only now, half an hour before midnight, that I have the time and some reserve energy to draft it. It feels good.

Footnotes

¹: I can’t emphasize how useful AI has been in scanning Hugo (or other technical documentation in general) and explaining things to me in plain English. I could spend hours looking at Hugo’s documentation and indexes, rereading the same sentences over and over, and not understand what something does or how it works with something else. Even now, as I write this post and check for links, the AI links me to the relevant section in the documentation, which I would otherwise just glaze over. It’s like having a teacher holding a pencil to a word or a phrase in a huge textbook.

A Minecraft Movie, 2025 - ★★½

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 07:47:50 -0400

Solid fun, a nice plot for a movie based on a video game. Highly expected, nothing too special, but a somewhat confusing plot - the one that is based on the real world feels almost as fantastical as the Minecraft one.

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 23:58:21 -0400

I seem to have fixed the issues on my blog. This required a deeper dive into my template and understanding how Hugo prioritizes pages. Qwen3 helped by answering my clarifying questions from the documentation and gave me a bit of confidence, which did the trick.

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 18:00:28 -0400

Some of the pages on my site are not working properly. I’m trying to figure out the problem and get it sorted out, but so far it’s a lot of head scratching. I’m replicating the same structure to a new, similar theme, with a newer Hugo build, so we will see how that works out.

Mushroom Soup 🍜

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:05:40 -0400

This was my first attempt at making mushroom soup from scratch - well, with vegetable broth. All from vegetables I got from the farmer’s market (I usually go on weekends). Up until now, I only made Butternut squash soup, and these are pretty good, so I decided to expand a bit.

To make it, I used:

5 King Oyster Mushrooms
1 small yellow onion
4 regular Yukon potatoes (1 large, 3 small ones)
4 garlic cloves
Fresh Parsley (a few leaves, about a spoonful)
Olive oil (about 1/3 of a cup)
Water + vegetable vegan broth

I wanted to create a creamy-like soup, and I thought the potatoes would work. They did, and it made a good thick soup.

To prepare any soup, I usually work from the “hard” veggies that need more cooking toward the soft ones. In this case, the diced potatoes (big chunks, each potato cut three to four times) went in first with the garlic and onion, and let it stay on medium-high heat (not boiling) for about 10 minutes. It’s important to remember that for this kind of thick soup, the liquid (water+oil+broth) should not cover the vegetables completely. I’d say about up to 2/3 or so, maybe a little more. Less liquid = more thickness, naturally.

The potatoes got soft fast. I added the chopped parsley and mushrooms next for another 5 minutes or so, adding salt and some black pepper - I wanted the most basic ingredients, since I wanted to taste the basic soup first, building on that and thinking what to add later.

After everything was ready (give or take the 15-18 minute zone), I poured it into my blender in two batches (too much for one batch). The Vitamix makes quick work of everything in seconds, but I let it run for about 20 seconds, then poured the thick, yellowish-cream mixture into a bowl.

The soup was hearty and good, very easy to make. For next time, I took a couple of notes:

The consistency was good, but I want to improve on the mushroom flavor. I should increase the amount of mushrooms, probably from 5 to 8 to try.
For texture and flavor, I want to try chopped mushrooms at the end after the blender phase. I could also use a different kind of mushrooms for this finish, perhaps.
Some recipes I found suggested using fennel. After tasting this soup, especially with king oyster mushrooms, I tend to agree. I think it would add a good flavor.
Salt and black pepper were a good idea. I have a lot of spices, but this soup is good in its basic form, and I think that if I were to add anything too sophisticated, it would take away from the mushroom flavor.

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 09:01:44 -0400

‘Tis the season…

Gesundheit!

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 09:23:00 -0400

Seems like some of the pages on my blog are now working as they should. There’s supposed to be an introduction for the Archive page and the Emacs page. I’m using Tiny Theme, and the HTML for those micro-hooks is in place, which makes me think something went wrong with the update I did about a month ago.

I guess rebuilding the blog is the next step - which usually breaks the movies page… stand by….

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 09:03:24 -0400

Hank Green on why AI scares him:

“People tend to prefer their choices to be taken away.”

(The link below will take you directly to that part)

It’s an hour and a half long video with a long introduction and a video thrown in the middle, probably one of the longer rants by Hank Green, with an interview in the middle by Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University.

I’m still watching this conversation. It’s a lot to take in, but I think it keeps going back to the sentence I quoted above. It has been true for a while (forever?), on different platforms (not just AI), and one of the most apparent examples for me is dating apps. Tinder started the trend of “swiping people” left and right, emphasizing how people look and present, and not who they are.

It’s easy to blame the app, but we who use them are not much better. Going through profiles on a dating app (even those that allow more detailed ones), the person usually sums up their being into a single sentence, with a “bumper sticker” style emojis presenting whatever ideology is popular this time around.

The very concept of a dating app today is a joke when you think about how impossible it is to summarize who the person behind the profile is. Yet, this is what we prefer and what we use. We all have decision fatigue, and it only gets worse as we get bombarded by even more information, so we rely on technologies like AI to summarize that for us as we grow lazier and our capacity to retain information and make knowledge decisions based on that information is diminishing every day.

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 11:52:18 -0400

I find myself highlight gems like these every 2 pages or so. The Cunning Man

Of Frued:

mankind, as always through history, has half-heard the call of the prophet, half-understood what he says, and vulgarized and cheapened whatever of his teaching may come its way.

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 06:59:06 -0400

Oddly Satisfying. 📷

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 07:22:10 -0400

Yesterday morning, I imported an old-blog post of mine, which discusses org-id and UUIDs in org-mode. It’s a bit of a deep dive into how org-mode works. I find that I don’t do those as much anymore - probably because I mostly use Emacs “as is” with a few packages I use day to day, and my workflow has been pretty much the same (capture templates not included) for the last two years or so.

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 06:40:28 -0400

I was a paid subscriber to 404 media, but I decided to let my subscription run out this year around. They started to feel too one sided and tend to focus only on AI. Still excellent reporting though, for those things.

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 20:59:43 -0400

I found a post on my old blog that I wanted to bring over, but I ran out of time today. I could copy it as is, but I want to read it again and probably update it.

It was a jolt to get back to work today. Feels like my job is to poke different people to do different things, and they poke others. if you have one or two projects like that, that’s one thing. If your entire agenda revolves around email chains like this, nothing gets done.

At least I managed to exercise today, after a nap. Made some tofu and beans after. Nothing special, but nutritious and filling. Tomorrow is an office day.

Using AI to edit and polish posts

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 13:47:54 -0400

I use Grammarly to correct typos, grammar mistakes, and sometimes some style issues. I’ve been using Grammarly for years, as I have a paid account through work.

Since Grammarly doesn’t work on Zen on my Linux desktop for some reason (it refuses to sign into my account, and I suspect it’s my VPN I have there, which I’m not going to turn off), I was looking for a solution. There is the pretty good LanguageTool, but I got curious about using AI to do more than just a quick grammar check.

With folks around me using AI for creating more sophisticated tools, especially after reviewing Doctorow’s usage of AI and his viewpoint on using such tools, I thought of using it to help me with some of the editing itself. Since I use Kagi, I could utilize its custom assistant feature, which allows me to choose an LLM from an available list and then build and save a specific prompt to use each time I want to work on a post.

There’s a lot that goes into long-form¹ blog posts. I believe I went into that in detail before, but here is my process again, especially since I started to be more “hands on” in different social media platforms:

Write the draft in Emacs org-mode
Export to markdown inside Emacs, copy-paste into the Micro.blog macOS app
Correct grammar and style in Grammarly inside the Micro.blog app
Select a category, add a summary, and decide which platforms I’m going to cross-post the post to automatically (these are usually Mastodon and Tumblr, which allow me to edit posts; Blue Sky doesn’t allow that, which means I need to create another post there manually)
Go into the different social media platforms and polish those up (character limit issue, adding hashtags, etc.)

I was blown away by how well this worked from the get-go.

Here’s what I’m asking Kimi, the AI model I chose for that task, to do

Explain who I am (the author of this blog, what pronouns to use, how to call me)
Scan this blog, and look for posts that “greatly overlap” the draft I just submitted. Kimi has been smart enough so far to figure out when I’m basically rambling about something I already did, or if it’s close but I have something new to add (or if it’s new content altogether)
If it finds an identical post, it stops and asks me if I want to proceed anyway.
If I say I want to continue, it starts looking for spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. It corrects me automatically, but in a separate section under the draft, it tells me what it corrected. This is useful because it’s not always correct, and I want to make sure it doesn’t kill my awesome grumpy style.
It goes over the links of my post to check if any of them are problematic. I was delighted to see it caught a mistake where I pointed two different links to the same URL, a simple copy-paste error, and brought it to my attention.
It recommends terms I should expand on, while offering references. I asked it to prioritize official links and Wikipedia links, and it works well. Additionally, it will scan this blog and let me know if any of my other posts already explain the terms in my current draft, summarize them, and provide links to those posts.
Finally, it gives me a list of hashtags that it thinks I should use for Mastodon, Blue Sky, and Tumblr. This part is the weakest, as these trends change frequently and don’t always align with what my post is about, but it’s a good starting point. I edit those manually as needed.

The key to using AI, in my opinion, is to always see what it finds and inspect its reasoning if something feels off. Because I’m using a reasoning model, I can see what it was “thinking” and where something went wrong; this is how I’ve been able to polish it over the last few days.

I’d love it if I could get Kimi to also scan my old blog at https://master--taonaw-blog.netlify.app, but netlify.app isn’t indexed by AI bots or Google (which Kagi is built on mostly), so it doesn’t work. I could probably work around this if I upload a text of my old blog or post it somewhere else, if I get to it.

Here’s a glimpse at how it looks like when I let it work through this very post:

Footnotes

¹: In general, I split my blog posts into quick “bursts,” sort of “tweets” or “toots” which are quick and easy, and then there are the longer posts which take more time. These tend to get edited more deeply, as I like to use different sources and include visual aids, among other things. Those longer posts are the kind of posts I’m discussing here.

A good day to have a blog

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 13:45:13 -0400

Since waking up early in the morning (sleep? What sleep?) I’ve been active around my blog and enjoyed dedicating time to this personal work that doesn’t get much attention during my day-to-day.

Here are a few things I got into:

Instead of an email, I ended up writing a post.
Speaking of writing, I tweaked my custom AI prompt for “post polish” with Kagi’s assistants (I will expand on this further down the line)
- Due to the above, I also learned that Kagi featured a picture of my blog in their update post.
  - The update post itself reminded me how cool Kagi’s small web is, now even better!
Playing around with Kagi’s small web, I found another interesting blogger to follow
Reading the Micro.blog feed, I found out miljko is building an Emacs to Micro.blog package!
- Emacs + Micro.blog + frequnt posts = another person to add to my RSS feeds
- This reminded me about adventures on Micro.blog by Scott. Yet another RSS feed to add.

Then, thinking about all the stuff I’ve done around my blog today, I thought about expanding my “blog check list”, adding the few items I’ve learn. It is now divided into maintenance and inspiration parts:

    * Blog Stuff to do
    
    ** Maintenance 
    
    - [ ] check taonaw email
    - [ ] tinylytics:
      - [ ] most popular posts in the last month (3 places)
      - [ ] Insights can be interesting
    - [ ] new webmentions (under *Account* on the Micro.blog site)?
    - [ ] "On this day" if exists:
      - [ ] check for typos
      - [ ] check for bad links/broken images/missing emojis
    - [ ] check plugins (updates?)
    - [ ] delete used bookmarks (Micro.blog) 
    - [ ] photo page (add 📷 to posts)
    
    ** Inspiration 
    
    - [ ] Check old blog for posts to import
    - [ ] Journal
    - [ ] Bookmarks (in Micro.blog)
    - [ ] RSS feeds!
    - [ ] Kagi small web (in browser) for sites
    - [ ] Take a random picture

I feel like a very efficient blogger today 😄

About Stable Products

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:28:45 -0400

Pete doesn’t think companies can make Stable products that just work. I mostly agree with him, but not fully.

The problem is that, no matter how much you and I say we would want that sort of thing, there is no incentive for companies to actually do it. Any CEO who suggested doing this sort of thing would be immediately sacked by their board and replaced with someone committed to an ever-expanding user base and perpetually growing recurring revenue, because that is what the investors want.

Very much agree here. Any company that has investors would “move fast and break things”, as Zuckerberg’s saying goes. And if they can’t come up with new “innovations,” they’d copy them. And if they can’t copy them, they’d buy them or the company¹.

I’ve been thinking about this endless cycle recently, when I read about Bluesky and their association with crypto-related investments². If we go that route, it’s pretty much how Enshittification works. Doctorow coined the term, but not the concept, which I think is as old as society and money.

But then there’s this:

I am unconvinced that most of the mass public actually would want this sort of thing and even if they did, we would have to contend with a commercial and financial economy that has figured out a way to keep profits rolling in utterly disconnected from what buyers of their goods and services actually want.

I think this is too US-centric and tech-centric. My counterargument? Bread 🥖.

People love the concept of good old-fashioned bread that comes from bakeries that have been doing the same thing for generations, along with some pastries 🥐 and good coffee ☕️ or tea.

The emojis I used above to emphasize my point? Yeah, those will keep changing, along with the tech companies that keep rolling out their own versions.

Even traditional bakeries adjust and move with what the customers want; that’s true. What was only bread then would be bread and cake tomorrow, and after that they would offer coffee too, etc. But I think the old-fashioned bread would stay.

The US economy is built against this, more or less, with big capital coming from the stock market and investors that always want more more more. Even if a business is profitable and has shown stable growth for decades, they’d still want more. This is human nature on steroids under what we know as capitalism. But travel in Europe, in small villages (or even in the US in small towns that want nothing to do with the hustle of opening a chain), and you’d find these gems.

Stable products that just work could just work, if they weren’t about money and profit - but most of the products we see around us are. You could make a living and stick to something that pays the bills, or even allows you to enjoy your money and save it, without selling out. There are plenty of examples. But then it’s about passion, not about money.

Footnotes

¹ : This brings to mind how InvokeAI is now owned by Adobe, something else I was checking on recently (for now, it seems the free product is still around and kicking, but I doubt it will remain this way). There are plenty of such examples.

² : I’m not sure what this is about. Most of what I see is the fallout in Mastodon. As far as I can tell this is part B or some funding strategy that started with part A, which was pretty much common knowledge back then too, so people being upset now is more of the “well, duh” to me.

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:01:31 -0400

Kagki just included a screenshot of my blog in their Kagi Small Web news! 🤯

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 23:02:32 -0400

This is a better video than I expected. The main idea is nothing new, but the video games he mentions are perfect examples: I’m also looking for my next game after Hades 2, and I think thanks for this video, I found it. It’s about cats, how can you go wrong?