Web browsers are not document viewers. They are customer acquisition channels for massive tech ecosystems. They don't serve users, but corporations. AI features, VPNs, crypto wallets, and countless of other nonsense. Markdown, on the other hand, is a public good. It would empower writers to publish their words independently. It would strip out countless CMS systems, frameworks, trackers, and ads. All those things where the money sits. Markdown is practically anti-platform. It's simple. Why…
A scene keeps playing in my head. Over and over again.A man is riding his bicycle. He crosses the street and starts weaving right to left. He hits a pole and falls down. Head first on the street. He isn't moving. I get off my bike and run towards him. Blood is gushing from his head. He's still not moving. I turn him around and talk to him. No response. I gently nudge him. I hear him breathing. While helping him I signal cars passing by. A lady stands next to me, she's calling an ambulance. More…
Notes from a burning Paris. People are dying – 55 people died in Paris alone in the past 24 hours. Festivals, school, gym classes are cancelled. Hundreds of thousands of chickens have perished across France. I just read an alert: a bus driver passed out from heatstroke and crashed into a tree in central Paris. I’m not sure of the details yet. Mosques have opened their doors so people can sleep on the cool tiles. The parks in the capital are open 24 hours for the immediate future. Thousands of…
John Gruber writes about those annoying popups every website seems to have now and while he does a great job tearing into these ubiquitous, user-hostile patterns, one of the things that stood out to me about his piece was this meta commentary on blogging. Here’s John: If you visit a website you should ... see the website. See its content. Be able to read the article whose page you are attempting to visit. Showing a “subscribe to our newsletter” or “accept our fucking cookies” dickover to…
Please don't use an LLM to communicate with other human beings. I keep seeing people drafting documents, messages, and emails with some LLM, and it makes me sick. I experimented myself with the writing capabilities of the agents, and every time I felt something was missing from the text... I was missing. Communication is a fundamental skill, no matter the work you do! Being able to articulate your thoughts and deliver them in a way that is understandable by your audience has an impact in every…
Last month when we visited the Aoyama Coffee Roaster and noticed their signed autograph of Snoopy, one of the store’s customers mentioned that Snoopy fans like to visit both the coffee roaster and a nearby restaurant called Tofu Room Dy’s. We’re not big Snoopy fans by any means, but a little Snoopy pilgrimage sounded like fun and so we decided to check it out. The store is fully vegan, and as the name might suggest, it simply focuses on one thing: tofu. For your main meal, you have two options…
I can open a feed aggregator, click 20 random links, and close them one by one without reading a whole title. My brain does a fast check on the shape and style, filters it out, and trashes it. Everything is sterile. Zero pulse, no risk. Nice grammar, nice syntax, dead words. It's polished sludge copied from the same content mills, where every bit of emotion is sanded down by some checklist and fear of getting canceled. Everyone plays it safe, writing like they are sitting in a corporate lobby…
I've been reading about the heatwave in Europe and I'd like to point out some things we do in warmer countries to keep everything livable without relying on a/c. I posted about this once on cohost [RIP] and it got a bit popular, so I think it can help some people out there if I post it again. For context, I'm from a Brazilian city where it's 30ºC almost year-round, day and night (except in winter, when it drops below 10ºC for a few weeks), but I've lived in Europe for 8 years and dealt with the…
would they tell you how happy they are the friends they've made the grass they ate moo moo moo would they sing the farmer's praise for relieving their breasts of too much milk and bringing them new babes moo moo moo would they tell of the pens in which they're kept or big barns in which they lay the fields of grass where they get to play moo moo moo would they speak of cages where milk's pulled for ages where they're forced to stand but cannot moo moo moove would they speak of babies torn from…
Almost nine years ago, I decided to write my own website generator. Static-site generators (SSGs) were sort of new back then, and somewhat fascinating to me. After failing to start a website/blog for a decade, I realized that I’ll never be satisfied by a ready-made solution, and I need to make something of my own. I started with Hakyll, a small SSG framework written in Haskell. Over years, I expanded my website by adding new sections and features. The website code has grown from 500 lines to…
There's roughly a billion videos on YouTube about how great a device the Steam Deck is, so I'm not going to sell you one. I'm also not going to tell you about its specs, because spec-for-spec it's already long been beaten by the likes of the ROG and the MSI Claw. What those other devices have in common though, and the sole reason I'll never buy one, is the fact that they run Windows. I'll have you know that I turn down job offers when the company forces me to use Windows. I literally can't do…
Developers and nerds have seemed satisfied with Markdown as a plain text format for a long time. Now, I see Markdown approaching the edges of the mainstream. I casually mentioned Markdown in conversation with some of my schoolteacher friends and one of them nodded with recognition. That’s new. Maybe it’s because Google Docs enabled Markdown editing back in 2022. Or because, in 2026, Apple Notes enabled the import and export of Markdown-formatted documents. Markdown’s creator, John Gruber, wrote…
I had an interesting interaction these days. While I was in class waiting for it to start, I opened Bearblog (the class happens in the “computer room”), and the girl who sits by my side asked what I was looking. I told her it was a blog, and she was excited because she used to have one back in school but did not remember the name or login. I told her how I had a blog and posted in english and she was surprised. She started to ask many questions, what platform I used, if I knew how many people…
Hello fellow haters of marketing emails that you get signed up for on the way to creating accounts, sometimes as an explicit checkbox (this is not about you companies, you are gorgeous and I love you) but mostly as an implicit acceptance that yes, I have created an account and of course I also want to be sent all your marketing material. Today I had the joy of needing to unsubscribe from the emails of Samsung and was pleasantly taken aback by how human conscious they were. Ensuring multiple…
Natalie writes about being grateful to have many Little Free Library book-exchange boxes in her neighborhood. I am happy to be surrounded by such literary neighbors and I hope that this movement continues to spread. We have a few here in Sweden as well and it always makes me happy when I see them. More common here, though, are the ones put up by anonymous, book-loving neighbors. You see them at bus and boat stops, parking lots, or sometimes in the middle of nowhere. When I see one, I often snap…
I’ve been off social media for a while. I do dip into one of the platforms now and again, but my blog is where I do my posting. My online reading is via my RSS reader, Bubbles, Bear blog discovery, and Pika Pulse. The latter is new, and in beta. We all know that social media platforms are powered by an algorithm. We also know that their main function is to keep you on the platform for ads. So why bother shouting or attention while fighting an algorithm and have ai scrap your work and have no…
I can't stop thinking about this stupid interaction I had while playing an online game with strangers. For context, my username is very obviously feminine and I don't hide the fact that I'm a woman when talking to strangers. Somehow, in the chat, the topic of operating systems came up and I mentioned that I use Linux. This man proceeded to tell me that I must be a man because women don't use Linux. It might just about be the stupidest thing I ever heard. As if I'm only capable of thinking about…
Last night I deleted my Threads account. I have beenmostly avoiding Threads/BlueSky/Facebook for a while now but occasionally dip in to check… nothing of real importance. I only popped on last night ahead of the Scotland vs Brazil match —a match we are not gonna talk about— to share the camaraderie and whilst I was there I did a little scrolling and replied to a couple of threads. A few minutes later I got a not so nice response to my reply, then another backing it up. I’m a reasonable guy, and…
She may well be correct, but let's have some context. I live on the outskirts of a small village, which has one road in. There's no out unless you want to drive into the sea, so you turn around and come back the way you came to leave the village. My house is off this road, and my driveway is just over 500 feet (155 metres) long. At the end of this are two houses -- my own and an elderly couple. Bin day is a Tuesday morning. I trundle the wheelie-bins down on a Monday evening; they are emptied…
A few months ago I was getting ready for a trip by doing what I normally do: fill my e-reader full of new books. The trip included a very long journey on a train, so I wanted to make sure I had plenty to read (another reason why I prefer e-readers to physical books). I use Libby to borrow books, and my local library normally has everything I've ever searched for, usually with no waiting period either. However, now that it's Summer, that has changed. I guess everyone is doing their Summer…
How a kickboxer built an empire on male insecurity and called it freedom. Steve the Hypothetical Gerbil says: This one’s about Andrew Tate. There’s organised crime, a subscription model, and a man who rents Bugattis. I’d summarise it but Paul won’t let me near the keyboard. Steve the Gerbil is also the Head of Communications at JustRodents.com You can read more about him there. About a year ago I watched Adolescence on Netflix. It was a story about a 13-year-old schoolboy who murdered a girl…
I got laid off
I’ve had the Xteink X4 for a couple of months now, a £40 e-ink reader small enough to stick to the back of a phone. I’d seen a few posts about it (Khairul Selamat, Neil Brown, joelchrono, and moddedbear among them), so I got curious and ordered one. First impressions Out of the box, the X4 is lightweight, properly light, the kind where I’d forget it’s in my pocket. The display is crisp for its size, and the device ships with a branded 16GB microSD card (cute touch) plus a card reader and…
Some fault systems in the world are well known for their destructive potential. Examples are Turkey’s North Anatolian fault and California’s San Andreas. In both cases, large events in the not-too-distant future are widely predicted. In Turkey, the march of magnitude-7 earthquakes towards Istanbul has drawn attention. The fault is both locked and stressed close…
'What do you want to do with your life?' 'Any plans for the future?' 'Where do you see yourself in five years?' 'What's your greatest strength?' 'What's your greatest weakness?' 'How do you deal with conflict in the workplace?' 'What's your preferred work environment?' 'What's the meaning of life?'
10 years ago I woke up in a tent in Glastonbury and realised that the utterly unthinkable had happened. We spent the morning, we festival goers, wandering around in a daze. It can be true?! Can’t it? It was. The magical otherworldliness of Glastonbury faded quickly that day as the real world, the horrible hateful reality, crashed over us. You can track back a lot of what is going on now in the UK to that point. The single most stupid, selfish, ill conceived idea for a referendum. There is…
Apple's full statement: The consumer electronics industry is facing an unprecedented challenge. The rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage. We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly. We have shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of products, including today's increases for iPad and Mac. We know this is not…
A while back I read The Last Quiet Thing, a fantastic piece by Terry Godier, a piece about a twelve-dollar Casio watch compared to an Apple Watch, and why one of them is a product and the other is a relationship. I've been thinking about it ever since, keeping my eye out for single-use devices that just get out of the way. That's how I ended up with an Xteink X4 in my pocket.It's a tiny pocketable e-reader, smaller than a cell phone, with an E-Ink screen and no agenda beyond displaying books.…
For All Mankind is an American science fiction drama on Apple TV. Ronald D. Moore created it with Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi. It imagines an alternate history where the Soviet Union reaches the Moon first, and the space race never ends. Joel Kinnaman plays the astronaut Ed Baldwin. The idea is simple and strong. The Americans lose the first race, so they do not stop. Each season jumps forward in time, and with each jump the goal moves further out. First the Moon, then a base, then Mars, then…
