My recipe for not hating myself consists of three elements: 1. Keep changing -- and by changing, I mean improving, and by improving, I don't mean "be more productive." I mean be a better person today than I was yesterday. Better means more patient, more kind, more loving. Not richer. 2. Practice gratitude. If I'm constantly looking for things to be thankful for, I don't have time for self-pity, and self-pity destroys. 3. Punch Nazis. I want to go into Nazi punching in a little more detail.…

The easiest way to make an interface harder to maintain is to rebuild the browser badly. A div can look like a button. It can be given a click handler, a pressed style, a hover state, a focus ring, an ARIA role, a keydown listener for Enter, another one for Space, a disabled class that hopefully also blocks interaction, and enough attributes to convince assistive tech that it is interactive. Or it can be a button. That sounds obvious until you look inside a lot of modern component libraries.…

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…

Few months ago Cloudflare introduced Markdown for machines: As a business, to continue to stay ahead, now is the time to consider not just human visitors, or traditional wisdom for SEO-optimization, but start to treat agents as first-class citizens. Feeding raw HTML to an AI is like paying by the word to read packaging instead of the letter inside. You get HTML, trackers, cookie banners, popups, and JavaScript. This needs a browser built by thousands of engineers just to show you a paragraph.…

Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. 2001: The Family Computer 3. 2004: Exploring the Web 4. 2007: Living There 5. 2012: When Everything Started Changing 6. 2026: Logging On Today 7. The Internet I Miss 8. Closing 1. Introduction The internet; what can I say? It's the driving force behind nearly the whole world today - economies, countries, communities, and more run solely on the internet these days. However, it wasn't always this way. Once upon a time, the internet didn't even exist. When it…

I don’t know if you play video games, but it’s likely you enjoy games in one form or another. Maybe you play a cozy game on your phone, a card game on your work computer (definitely only during breaks), or a cute adventure game on your gaming console. And table top games count, too, of course! NoteThere is no such thing as a real gamer or not, only gamers and gatekeepers. I mostly play on PlayStation, and a bit on PC, but also play a lot of sudoku on my phone (yes I am 400 years old), and the…

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…

I've always been interested in how dating apps work. You really only have two choices if you want to get in the business. Help people find a match, and they will never come back Make people pay and keep them on the platform as long as possible. Let's pretend for a second that we actually want people to find love. Love is such a weird thing that we don't even know how to define it properly. Ask two people what it means, and you will get five plausible definitions. If you approach it…

I am living under a rock!Apparently there’s a schema for recipes??? I was genuinely surprised when Mealie popped up a parsing dialog while I was trying to import a plain-text recipe. Turns out websites can embed recipes using JSON-LD, following the Schema.org Recipe specification. I had no idea this even existed! Google uses it for recipe rich results, and according to their data it’s used by tens of thousands of websites. I only found all of this because the recipe I copied from Instagram…

I shared some thoughts earlier about building Moments. In simple terms, it’s like Bear Blog, but focused on photos. I expected a handful of people to get it. More did than I thought. Some signed up. Some posted old photos. Some wrote just to say the feeling made sense. Not because it’s refined. It’s not. But because the idea connected: a calm space for photos. No metrics, no audience-building, no pressure. Most responses weren’t about adding features. People just got the premise: a photo can…

Big tech social media, Mastodon, blogs. They all have inherited from the libertarian culture of the internet. And I'm tired of it.

I try to do my best with my technology stack, by ensuring they meet my own morals and standards for life. I do this via a combination of informed choices; supporting independent developers; self-hosting. A combination of these help me feel I am doing the right thing. What is the Right thing?That is the million-dollar question. For me, I want to be as sure as I can that my tech stack is not exploiting people; is fair to the community; delivers and lives by standards I can identify with. Changes…

I live in an apartment that first gets heated up on one side before noon, then later from the other side. My kitchen is especially hot each year because it has a huge bay window with no shutters installed. My strategies for keeping cool have been to air out everything at night, and if possible draw in and circulate air via a fan during some of it. Then as soon as the sun is coming up, closing windows, lowering the existing outside shutters so the sun can’t heat up the glass or insides, and…

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…

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…

Joining part of the indieweb that feels like the best part of the old internet.

LLMs are making inroads into just about every industry on the planet, they’re everywhere now. AI for X, AI for Y, if there’s a thing that somebody is willing to pay for, there’s another person looking for a way to use LLMs to do it. But no human activity is becoming as dominated by LLMs as writing. It’s not that I can’t see the attraction of it as an author, especially where you feel a pressure to produce a lot of content. They’re very good at that, volume. I’ve experimented with LLM assisted…

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…

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…

Someone submitted an issue to one of our open GitHub repositories a week ago, suggesting a new feature. We didn’t respond, since we didn’t notice it. Today, someone else submitted an implementation of the feature in a pull request. I rejected it and explained that the feature request must first be accepted by the project architect, and only then would it be worth making a pull request. The author of the PR got offended. He won’t be back. Good. A year ago, we would have been sad to lose an…

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…

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…

I started founding my second company in Germany in late January. It is now late June. In that time, the state, two courts, a notary, a law firm, a tax firm, and software vendors have all found a way to bill me. Every single one of them, on time. I have spent more than 9,600 euros to start a company: a little over 7,600 in fees and bills, plus 2,000 in share capital frozen in an account I am not allowed to touch. And after five months, here is what I have to show for it: I have not been able to…

Darializa Avila Chevalier is almost certainly headed to Congress, having won the Democratic primary in New York’s 13th congressional district. In 2024, while she was a sociology PhD student at Columbia,1 she founded a group called “Columbia University Apartheid Divest”, which was involved in the Palestine protests. In a now-deleted Instagram post, CUAD declared: “We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.” Avila Chevalier’s group also t

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…

I'm getting more worried, and more frustrated, about this new phase of AI disillusionment.Some of it is fair. Hundreds of billions are sloshing around in financing shell games. The real cost of inference is still a wildcard. Noticing that danger and being concerned about it is healthy.But a lot of people are taking that concern and stretching it into something else: proof that this whole thing was another Crypto/NFT moment. Safe to ignore. Safe to make fun of.That's the part that worries me,…

In the dusk and early evening hours of my life, I have been integrating a language that I feel was with me at the very beginning of things, before the dawn of it. [ in progress... ]

This was never the plan. In fact, if you’d asked me at almost any point in my adult life where I saw myself ending up, I’d have confidently told you it wouldn’t be here. And yet, here I am. Must Get Away Growing up in a medium sized town, near a vibrant big city (Glasgow), is nothing unique, satellite towns exist all over the world and no doubt inspire the same emotions of their teenagers: I must get away from this small place. I can’t remember exactly when that feeling began. Somewhere in my…

Bulls and bears agree the technology is real—they disagree on the clocks. Not whether AI is a bubble, but whether the payoff arrives before the financing runs out.