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Digital hygiene: Passwords

This is part 3 of a 3 part series on digital hygiene. I suggest starting at part 1. Whenever I watch heist movies, I always roll my eyes at the "hacker" character. They can consistently hack building's camera system; or download the contents of a target's phone for use later in the heist. They also manage to hack the bank, which questions the need for a heist in the first place. While there are real-world programatic attack vectors that can be exploited, they're generally opportunistic. When a new vulnerability has been discovered, nefarious actors try to exploit it at scale before it’s patched. The chances of finding and executing a "hack" on the spot (via bluetooth or something equally ridiculous) is highly unlikely. Although, I digress. The most common vulnerability is significantly mor… ( 7 min )

Ripped Wings: Paladins

Though I hope to post about literally anything else moving forward, I think it's only fitting that the beginning of a new era for me start by paying respects to the prior one. Paladins was so many things to me: a formative video game, my first solo CM job, my first design role, and above all the outlet for my passion. Every day working at Evil Mojo was one spent pouring who I was and wanted to be into this misunderstood gem of a project. From the moment I started my internship at HiRez, I had begged to be placed on Paladins. It's not that I didn't enjoy SMITE or their other titles but instead was because I knew at my core it was the best fit. The community it had built over years of living at the most niche of intersections between fantasy, hero shooters, and build crafting spoke both to m… ( 7 min )

you can stick with it

Extremely silly mood and admission: I’m mildly annoyed when I see so many others online stressing about changing hosters, tools and more. Completely ridiculous feeling to have, because that doesn’t even affect me at all. It’s not my life, so why am I getting annoyed by others constantly switching up their tools and services and talking about it? It’s just another link to follow, a new look, a new navigation, or them using another software to organize. Whatever, no problem! Some of it is even interesting! So? I might just be tired of watching so many people struggle and run in circles right next to each other, believing the next thing will finally be just right. I see many people on this side of the web praise one thing as the thing to beat them all, the thing that finally “feels right”, th… ( 8 min )

I'm smiling.

You know, sometimes I like to reflect on my past, and see what things I've accomplished across the years, like doing art! and making it somewhat possible of a thing I can do for a living! that's neat isn't it? Yet, sometimes I get reminded of my mistakes, of my errors, and they always hurt... But it's fine, I'm smiling as I know I'll get through them like I did before. Even then, whenever I remember them they feel... too real. Like I'm reliving them again. Like the times I was bullied in school, I was made a joke of for most of it, and I still remember their laughs. I tried to join in the fun of it, but at the end of the day I was just a clown not fitting at all in that group. But hey, I'm smiling, clowns gotta smile! don't you remember? (Even if that bullying ruined my school progression … ( 3 min )

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Making Sense of "Logical" People

Just last year, my colleague and I were called into the principal’s office (we’re teachers by the way, not students sent in for trouble 😂). She wanted to give us some feedback on our Sports Day programme, which we were planning for the following week. When we walked out of the office, my colleague looked at me, clearly upset, and said, “I don’t get how you put up with the principal.” “What do you mean?” I asked, puzzled. The principal had given perfectly logical feedback. Nothing unreasonable at all. “She’s always so rude and blunt. It feels like we’re just robots doing her bidding. There’s not even a simple acknowledgement of our efforts!” Then it clicked in my head. Nothing seemed wrong to me because the principal and I had the same working style, we were both Thinkers. We can be... a … ( 6 min )

Romanticizing an Ordinary Sunday

Just random snaps from today. I swapped my Ricoh GRIIIx for my Fuji X100V as my daily carry today. It’s been a while since I’ve used the X100V, and I’ve missed it so much. First we went to our monthly dachshund meet-up -- photos of said dachshunds not included. We took some photos (of each other). Then I took photos from the sunroof of a moving car. ...and saw a fruit stand with no humans around. The End. ( 5 min )

Should I Admit This?

I read only one Bear Blog with regularity. There are some that I check every so often and am sure to catch up on (if by some chance they read this, they know who they are haha, keep up the good work), but only one that I check every day. I will not be telling you which blog that is. On the small chance that anyone reads this, I don't think they would want me to be directing additional traffic to their posts. Their posts are personal. And small. And that's what I enjoy about them. That they seem to post here, almost as if there is no audience, even theoretically. Occasionally I do upvote their posts, so they must know that someone is reading them, even if they don't check their analytics. Or maybe they never look at their past posts to see if they even got upvoted. In which case, they may not think that anyone is reading. But I am. And I enjoy them. Most posts aren't memorable, but there's been an occasional post that has a line or a topic that really resonates with me. No real point to this post. Just something that I wanted to share. Yours Truly, [Redacted] ( 2 min )

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The GPT-5 Launch Was Concerning

Bs in Blueberry There were screenshots of a classic LLM issue floating around Bluesky after the GPT-5 launch yesterday, and I asked GPT-5 myself to confirm. Sam Altman touted GPT-5 as a “PhD level expert in your pocket”, but this PhD doubled down on incorrectly answering the oldest trick for LLMs in the book. When GPT-4 launched, I (and many others) believed that GPT-5's launch would be the “AGI moment”. Cherry picking “bs in blueberry” as a failure of the model and declaring that AGI is never coming is stupid. But it leads to doubts. And there was something else in the keynote that was quite a bit more disturbing. Custom Colors for ChatGPT Threads “We’re now allowing you to customize the colors of your chats, with a couple of options exclusive to our paid subscribers” They admitted that… ( 3 min )

Please Don’t Send “See Below”

Email threads have got to be one of the worst possible forms of communication. You've been here before. A perfectly respectable morning is passing by. You're working through your items at a chipper pace maybe humming a song you heard on Spotify that morning. Then, the dreaded email thread comes through. Innocently, you click into the top email. The only text is "[Your Name] see below." I hate this and I bet you do too. Suddenly, you're transported into absolute chaos. You're now a corporate archeologist and firefighter all in one. Forced to decode the two week long thread of baloney while being asked to complete some ambiguous task. Well, guess what? I don't read them, not anymore. If an email thread comes in that's longer than a few paragraphs, you're going straight to Copilot. It gets to decipher the weeks long back and forth bickering to get to what I need to know. Please, please - stop email threads. Emails: Written communication that needs to be documentable or a complex task Documentation (Confluence, Word, etc.): Repeatable process and procedures or recordings of key decisions IM (Teams, Slack, etc.): Actual communication Meetings: In the best possible way, arguing. If we meet and cannot possibly disagree, then it should have been an email. Save a vibe today and send an IM instead of an email thread. ( 2 min )

Introducing Me!

As part of the #blaugust blogging month of August most people do an introduction in week 1. We are running out of days in the first week, so I think it is time to get to know me. Those who regularly read my blog (thank you) will know some or all of what follows, but there may be a nuget or two that is new. I tend to keep my online life quite generic and I don't share a lot of personal details, but enough to stimulate some interest in Me as a person, rather than a collection of words online. The Basics My name is David, my pronouns are he/him, I am currently 55 years young. In my head I am around 26 but the bag of bones insists I am mid-fifties. I was born in Scotland, and now live my life between Southern Scotland and Southern Spain. I float between the two regularly as my work-life … ( 5 min )

The Fundamentals Still Matter

With the rise of LLMs, I am seeing tech professionals blatantly skipping over the fundamentals. For example, in my world of data analytics, SQL is table stakes. Yet, I see people blindly trusting LLM outputs to develop SQL queries, without knowing how to explain or debug them. I am getting increasingly impatient about how people and organizations are using LLMs. I worry that we are being over sold on a promise that LLMs will magically make up for a lack of proficiency in an area. It can get you to the answer faster, but you still need to understand what is going on, if you want to pass it on as your work. As organizations try to integrate AI into their processes, I hope that the fundamentals are not forgotten. Maybe another industry of cleaning up vibe coded messes will be a thing? :-) ( 2 min )

About JC and this Blog

⚠️ I tried not to repeat some of the things I said in last year’s intro post, but some parts are inevitable because I haven’t changed that much. We’re a week into Blaugust, and I’ve been putting off writing this intro post for the past few days. I never like talking about myself, which is a little bit odd considering this blog is all about myself, but you know what I mean. Anyway, I figured it’s probably time I re-introduce myself, just in case you’ve stumbled here and are wondering who I am, and what this blog is about. That way, you’ll at least know what you’re getting into if you decide to keep reading or even -gasp- add me to your RSS reader of choice. I’m Jedda, but also known as JC (Probably?). I live in the Bay Area (California, in the US for those less familiar), and tend to write… ( 6 min )

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the horror of too many readers

In a previous incarnation on Bear blog, I wrote a couple of posts that ended up on the Discover Trending feed. One post even got up to number 5 on the top 20 page, and as you can imagine, the number of views for that post shot up. Also, the number of likes, or toasts as they call them here, was suddenly huge. (I am using huge there to describe a number more than 50, and once over 100, which was huge for me) But strangely perhaps to some, I wasn't properly comfortable each time it happened at all. I mean, it is thrilling at first—'Wow, people are reading, and liking it' and all that—but then the introverted, private and the not very social—possibly even paranoid—part of my brain pipes up. "Wow, loads of people are reading that, total strangers now know exactly what you are thinking. Are you… ( 7 min )

Digital hygiene: Notifications

This is part 2 of a 3 part series on digital hygiene. I suggest starting at part 1. Over the past few years I've cultivated a decent relationship with my phone. Not a good one, mind you, but one I'm fairly comfortable with. There is a part of me that yearns for a return to simple, black-and-white phones, with Internet access limited to whichever room in the house had the phone line and computer. But there's no going back; and so I had to find a way to live with the Internet (and the hyper-connectivity it entails) in my pocket. Developing a good relationship to your phone is an intentional process. It doesn't happen by accident. All apps and media, by design, are fighting for your attention. I've heard the term "attention economy" thrown around, and I feel like it's an apt description of th… ( 5 min )

Taming the Feed: Cutting Back on YouTube and Late-Night Browsing

Previously, I wrote about stepping away from technology and escaping the pull of algorithms. But changing habits is harder than writing about them, and my previous attempts have been utter failures. Part of the difficulty lies in the fact that these platforms are undeniably useful tools.YouTube has helped me learn music production. Reddit has pointed me toward better routines, ideas, and insights. But there is a fine line between using these platforms and being used by them, and that line is deliberately blurred as companies spent billions making sure it stays that way. Working in tech myself, I also feel the constant urge to keep up and stay informed, which only deepens the pull. The internet still holds value, but only when I treat it as a tool rather than a default place to pass time. There is no shortage of ideas on what activities to do instead of browsing - at least in theory. Making music, practicing instruments, reading, cooking, walking. But past attempts to change my habits were not mindful enough. I did not give my brain the space to adjust. Without the usual rush of stimulation, frustration quickly set in, and the old habits returned. This time I am starting smaller. The first step is cutting off internet access on my Mac after 22:00. If I want to work on music late into the evening, that is fine. But there is no reason to be online. The ancient Greeks said that night brings counsel. I hope the quiet helps me reflect. YouTube has also been stripped down using the Unhook extension. No Shorts. No comments. No recommendations. If I need something specific, I will search for it directly. I know this will not be perfect. I will probably still find ways to drift. But two steps forward and one step back is better than standing still. I am not aiming for a radical reset. Just small and sustainable shifts. I will check in again after a week. This is not about rejecting the internet. It is about reshaping how I relate to it. Less feed. More focus. ( 3 min )

Write like nobody's watching

So, a couple of days ago I finally finished a blogpost I had been working on for a good while.1 When I published it, it got a total of two views. Bearblog is the first time I've actually been able to share what I write with an audience larger than just my immediate family. At first, I did actually care a lot about metrics. But I can't say I wasn't disappointed when a post got less toasts or did worse than my previous ones had. I think a lot of social media encourages this, in a sense. Likes, shares, views... They all give you that sweet, sweet dopamine, yknow? Humans love watching numbers go up. I should know, I finished cookie clicker. But, you also feel a bit of diminished self-worth when your new stuff isn't doing as good. That's inevitable, to some extent. At least I don't think most p… ( 4 min )

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Ethical AI is harder than you think

Ethical AI is an obvious goal to strive for, however it is far more complex than most give credit to. This is the first in a series of short posts which explores some of these rough edges. What is ethics anyway? Ethics is the branch of philosophy that deals with moral principles and values, wrestling with what is “right” and “wrong”. To attempt to evaluate what is “right”, several ethical frameworks offer useful lenses. Consequentialism judges actions by their outcomes. For example, a firm adopts sustainable practices because the benefits (lower emissions, reputational gains) outweigh the costs. Deontology focuses on duties and rights, regardless of consequences. For example, a company refuses to sell user data, not because it’s illegal, but because it’s the right thing to do. Virtue ethic… ( 7 min )

Do Nothing

You don’t rest — you disappear: scrolling until your thumb aches, binge-watching until your eyes give out, lying there marinating in the anxiety that comes from avoiding the very thing your nervous system is begging for — nothing. Real nothing is an act. A refusal — to let each moment justify itself through output. It’s a rejection of the idea that the animal inside you should be treated as if it were a machine — expected to keep going simply because it hasn’t broken yet. Every act requires practice. You can’t suddenly decide to stop performing and expect your body to remember how to exist without function. Start stupidly small. Find a corner of your space — one that doesn’t scream productivity. Not your desk. Not facing your vision board. Definitely not anywhere your phone can make eye co… ( 7 min )

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social media is like cigarettes

After abstaining from social media for three days, relapsing on the fourth, and using it in limited bursts on the fifth, I’ve started to realize that social media is like cigarettes. When I was spending 50 hours a week on social media, it felt like chain-smoking. During those three days of abstinence, I craved a hit of social media content every hour. To cope, I turned to chess.com, focusing on playing rather than winning. At first, playing against bots and learning was satisfying, but soon it only felt fun when I was competing against real people. Now, as I use social media for a few minutes whenever the cravings hit, my interest in chess has vanished, and something feels lost in my mind—like a sense of control or mental discipline. Using social media like a cigarette every hour or so is making me feel aloof and less driven. I believe social media should be classified as a controlled substance. ( 2 min )

Why are games scary?

I haven't yet written about the whole Collective Shout/Visa/Mastercard adult art censorship thing currently roiling Games World but: it's fucking stupid you can't buy whatever legal porn you wish to buy. It's particularly stupid that itch.io, of all places, ended up at the heart of all this. It's home to raw human creation, which means that a lot of the most "objectionable" material on that site is laughably-amateur, absolutely not-worth-discussing porn games exactly like No Mercy, the one which kicked off this whole chaotic mess. You can see a censored, no-visible-nudity example of its first 20 minutes here. If you're curious, I do recommend checking it out, if only to see for yourself how profoundly amateur and pointless it was. You can see the whole thing sampled in a playthrough here..… ( 7 min )

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Why your vibe coded app only works in your head

Anyone can generate an app now. You open Cursor, describe what you want, and out comes clean, well-formatted code. It even has comments. It runs, and the linter’s happy. You scroll through the code and think, “Yeah, this looks right.” So you pat yourself on the back. You built an app. Except you didn’t. You built something that looks like an app but doesn’t behave like one. It ignores the messy reality of systems, users, failures, and edge cases. You haven’t tested it against the world. It’s just a convincing guess. The problem is, it feels real. The structure, the syntax, the polish all trick your brain into thinking the hard work is done. But you're seeing what the model guessed you meant. It’s pattern-matching, not understanding. The illusion is powerful because it runs. Because it doesn’t throw errors. Because it looks right. In the real world, writing apps is an interaction between what you think the system should do, what it actually does, and what you observe when you try to make it do that thing. You write code, you run it, it breaks, you fix it. Through that loop, your mental model gets refined. You stop guessing. You start knowing. AI shortcuts the loop. It gives you code that seems finished, so you skip the part where you question it. You don’t test strange inputs. You don’t simulate failure. You don’t push the system to its edges. You just trust the vibes. That’s vibe coding: building on a model’s guess and assuming it works because it looks good. Eventually, something breaks. And when it does, you won’t know why. You never touched the system deeply enough to understand how it behaves. You weren’t building an app. You were reviewing a guess. Vibe coding feels fast. It feels clever. But it skips the part where apps becomes real. Real code gets tested. It fails. It surprises you. And through that, it gets better. If you’re not in the loop, you’re not building. AI can write code. But only you can make it work. ( 3 min )

recently

Felt like writing a little summary with pictures about what I've been up to recently. ---.𖥔 ݁ ˖ 𖥔 ˖ ݁ 𖥔.--- My guest post at Steven's is out! It's about my favorite in-game homes. So, if you want to see my Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley and Palia homes, you should go check it out. I've also started playing Hello Kitty Island Adventure and greatly enjoying it. I'm 50 hours in now, and I often play it while on my indoor bike: I also got a cute Cinnamoroll to attach to my bags: I love Mocha and Big Challenges the most, but they don't really get merch, so Cinna it is. In the meantime, I've also published two more translation/summaries to GDPRhub. I have three wiki entries up now, currently working on a fourth. There's also been a lot of MtG lately, especially in the LGS. My wife was at an Edge of Eternities Prerelease event (I love the set, but I suck at Limited, so I avoid that). I still need to pick up my two Commander set preorders. But look at this cool card she pulled: After my rough day earlier this week1, she was so sweet and got me flowers and gifted me a Normandy brick set <3 It lives next to my screen for now. By the way, she left a glass of water in the freezer for a little too long and it resulted in this whacky looking ice mold of the glass she was able to pull out of it: As you can see, she's been heavily into painting her minis lately. My coworker also had too much zucchini in his garden and gifted me two massive ones, totaling 2.5kg. Here's one filled with minced soy, rice and vegan cheese: And finally, I've made a meme to make fun of me hitting Bearblog's anti-bot protections every now and then by accident. Thankfully, Herman is always so patient with me and my blog shenanigans. (based on this song by PinkPantheress. Epilepsy warning starting at 0:22.) Reply via email Thank you for all the kind messages :)↩ ( 5 min )

never comply

Tired of this constant barrage of censorship hidden under the guise of protecting children, MasterCard/Visa monopoly setting the global standard of what is and isn't acceptable, and frequent attacks on encryption in EU law as well. Being online isn't worth all that. You aren't getting my ID for services like this. And I wish more big services would just pull out temporarily and geoblock instead of bending the knee - would love to see the hell the MP's would be living in if Meta, X, Google, Wikipedia, XBox, PlayStation and more would just not be a thing anymore in the UK for now, even rendering devices near useless. Boycott that shit! Let them squirm and undo it under pressure. The UK isn't even that huge of a market compared to others. All companies get by complying with it is suddenly hav… ( 8 min )

my month of movies

This past month I stumbled upon a desire, or really a fixation, on watching a movie every single day for the entirety of July. Initially it was a coincidence - we just happened to watch a movie for the first 3 days of July and as someone that averages only about 4 movies per month for the past few years, it spurred a single stray thought that changed the entire month's trajectory. Movies 1-3, not including the special In The Mood for Love 2001 short that followed the screening. Here are a few things I learned, about myself or in general, throughout this month of watching a movie every day. It is actually extremely hard to watch a movie every single day for an entire month. Maybe this isn't news to some people. Maybe it's not even news to me, given that I'm not a huge movie watcher in the… ( 6 min )

zine club

I was email chatting with B, and she brought up a really cool question about online zine clubs. I shared a few places where I hang out online for zines, but there isn't really a little "club" that I know of to chat all things zines. Like: tools, questions/feedback, sharing process and pics, or bouncing ideas off each other. Sometimes zine making can feel a bit lonely, so feeling a part of a group can be really fun, and encouraging. There are a few Discord places and Reddit channels that I like, but they sometimes feel a bit busy/big that my introverted self gets a little shy about sharing these types of things. Writing on my blog and on my Kofi page is still a way I love to share, but when it comes to gathering like-minded makers, I feel like there are no simple platforms for this. Tumblr has "communities" now, which actually could be fun. Like a tiny Bearblog zine space? Hehe. I'll have to think about it. If anyone has any ideas/feedback or knows of any online "club spaces" that are low-pressure, pls email me :) I added a digital version of my zine How To Share Your Zines Without Social Media in my Kofi shop. I like to send extra little treats through the mail with my zine orders, but I know sometimes it's just easier to print them at home! ( 4 min )

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What are They Carrying?

There's something grotesque about the way we expect other people to be convenient for us. We want people to be emotionally available, yet low maintenance — like a houseplant that texts back promptly and never makes things weird. What we’re really after is connection without complication — the sanitised version, the one that doesn't require us to bump into the messy subplot of someone else's emotional arc. I was in line at an organic grocery store in Ubud. A woman was paying at the only register, casually asking the cashier a couple of questions about those impulse items near the counter — stuff designed to seduce you while your card is already in hand. In front of me, a guy in yoga wear exhaled hard, then cut her off with a sharp “Are you buying or not?”. My first instinct was to tap him o… ( 7 min )

Go's race detector has a mutex blind spot

I recently read Ralf Jung's blog post "There is no memory safety without thread safety" which mentions that Go is not a memory safe language in the presence of data races. "But Go comes with a built in data race detector1" some might say. This reminded me of a quirk in Go's dynamic data race detection that causes it to miss data races in executed code that could easily be spotted by a human2. Here is the code the data race detector struggles with: package main import ( "fmt" "sync" ) var counter int var mutex sync.Mutex func increment(wg *sync.WaitGroup, id int) { defer wg.Done() mutex.Lock() counter++ fmt.Printf("Counter: %d\n", counter) mutex.Unlock() if id == 1 { counter++; } } func main() { … ( 5 min )

"Why don't you make art anymore?"

[drawing from 2008] So the "jetgirlart" screen name came about during college... 22 years ago. I got a bachelor's in fine art and used it to get various graphic design jobs here and there between having kids. I kept the screen name for all my social media and games but after college I didn't really keep up with making "art". In college they taught us all the techniques and such to get your work into juried shows or galleries. That's what a fine art degree does vs a graphic design degree. But the problem I instantly ran into was that I wasn't good enough to get into those shows. I didn't have a personal style or theme that set me apart from the other artists. That is a huge deal and you need to figure that out asap when you start wrapping up your fine art degree. I didn't, and fell out of t… ( 6 min )

defeatism antidote

There’s been posts in other places I read recently that made me sad. They all had one thing in common: Defeatism about changing anything about tech use. They treated apps as universal, specific companies as a must-have. And sure, I get that perspective; I myself have made the connection between Google and utility services. However, it was all woe is me. “No one is going to stop using these apps anyway.” “I know no one cares about this.” “I know it’s unrealistic to ever switch.” “It’s hopeless.” And I just wanna grab them by the shoulders and shout: “No!!! I’m here! So many people are here and doing just that! See, we’ve done it and we’re willing to share how and what we’re doing instead! We care, just like you! Look around the world. While someone in the US thinks iMessage and Facebook Mes… ( 5 min )

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too much social media

My phone just chimed, notifying me that I spent an average of 8 hours of screen-on time last week. When I checked what I was spending most of my time on, I noticed that Instagram, X and YouTube were my most frequented activities on the phone. In fact, I had spent an average of 51 hours on these media apps over the last 3 weeks. This is alarming and seems to be an indicator of my loneliness or other issues. I have decided to take drastic action and cut these off completely by setting time limits on my phone and browser on my desktop. I know conventional wisdom says that stopping cold turkey doesn’t normally work and that it’s best to wean off these gradually, but I don’t think I can manage that. Once I open them, I think I won’t be able to stop. The drawback is that I won’t be in touch with the news, but I realize that most news websites report everything from social media anyway, so I can stay apprised of the news without these apps. This also explains why I haven’t been making progress on my research work. It brings to my attention that if I spent this much time on my research work, I would be making considerable progress. The thing is, spending 50 hours on social media has nothing to show for it. It’s not like I’m creating content on these platforms—just consuming them. ( 2 min )