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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 )

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Computational Tyranny

We are under constant cognitive assault. Buying plane tickets is navigating a minefield - one misclick blows a hole in your wallet. Resolving a mistake on your utility bill is a tactical operation: dodge hold music traps, outwit the chatbot, then convince the agent you shouldn’t need to pay your neighbour’s bill. Our decisions aren’t shaped by direct threats or outright lies. Governments and corporations work together to overwhelm our cognition and they benefit from our weakened state. Everyday activities require more and more thinking. That's bad. And computers made it worse. That’s computational tyranny. The tyranny distilled Computational tyranny is the rapidly increasing complexity in all areas of life where we bear the costs (in time, money and sanity) and where we are exposed to larg… ( 8 min )

Computational Tyranny

We are under constant cognitive assault. Buying plane tickets is navigating a minefield - one misclick blows a hole in your wallet. Resolving a mistake on your utility bill is a tactical operation: dodge hold music traps, outwit the chatbot, then convince the agent you shouldn’t need to pay your neighbour’s bill. Our decisions aren’t shaped by direct threats or outright lies. Governments and corporations work together to overwhelm our cognition and they benefit from our weakened state. Everyday activities require more and more thinking. That's bad. And computers made it worse. That’s computational tyranny. The tyranny distilled Computational tyranny is the rapidly increasing complexity in all areas of life where we bear the costs (in time, money and sanity) and where we are exposed to larg… ( 8 min )

re: what does the indie web need right now?

Via James' post, I found out that xandra has asked: "what does the indie web need the most right now? if that’s kinda hard to answer, to phrase it in another way: if you could snap your fingers and add one of these to the #indieweb, which do you think would have the biggest positive impact?" Examples to choose from in the poll were: easier ways to make websites cultural moments & shared experiences sharing information across communities & outreach web design tutorials & guides, and more widgets to add to our websites. I have some thoughts about those options, and more. Lots of this needs nuance, so bear with me. Easier ways to make websites In theory, this sounds awesome and is very welcoming and ready to accommodate almost everyone, which is always a plus. However, there are already very … ( 9 min )

Entertaining myself to death

As cars whir by and birds are chirping outside, I am laying in bed and I tell myself "just one more video." Before I even realize it, two hours have passed. I have done nothing except consume content that further supports my beliefs. The internet sucks now. Everything, anything, and everyone is a bot. We are screwed. Society is screwed. Kids are addicted to this, adults are addicted to this. We can't escape, we live in a surveillance state dystopia, lacking purpose other than waking up every day to consume and then consume some more... I used to have an awful internet addiction, made wonderfully possible by abusive boyfriends, a dysfunctional family, and a boring remote job that paid well but had no meaning other than to make profits for The Big Company (trademark). My days were spent desp… ( 5 min )

hot people read poetry

Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy—that’s the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all. — JOHN STEINBECK, East of Eden The timesheet for my part-time job says I've worked more than 20 hours last week. It's nice feeling like I have some control over the number in my bank account — after all, the more I work, the more I make — though I can feel the schedule starting to erod… ( 7 min )

Nothing fucking works anymore

I went to top up my phone. It should be fairly straightforward, right? Load up the app, choose the package, pay for it. Job done. It took me twenty minutes because I needed to change the card associated with the app and just trying to find the option to do that, never mind complete the actual task, took a ridiculous amount of effort. Because nothing fucking works anymore. I spotted a comic book bundle, I’ve got a chunk of it on paper but hey, at the price and for some easy to move around digital copies? Yeah, why not. I went to buy it, pressed the button repeatedly and the web page wouldn’t progress from the payment selection so I guess I’m not buying that after all. No error messages, no indications as to whether the button I’m pressing even does anything. Because nothing fucking works an… ( 3 min )

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My Experience With Claude Code After 2 Weeks of Adventures

Hatching... Cursor Shenanigans Cursor, my beloved, started rate limiting shenanigans a few days back. For a good 2 weeks after June 16, 2025, we had almost infinite API request access. I had a lot of code-related work around this time as I was working on Gumroad bounties plus my AI engineering/LLM eval-related consulting work. Apart from just codegen, I also use these tools to onboard/understand codebases faster and just ask a lot of questions in general. cursor rate limiting shenanigans starting to kick in pic.twitter.com/abc123 — sankalp (@dejavucoder) December 20, 2024 But one fine day, they pulled the plug and started rate-limiting. I admit I milked them too much, so I didn't feel bad about this. It's worth asking whether I was doing shenanigans or it was Cursor. cursor shenanigans … ( 15 min )

Numbers from my recent job hunt

I recently started a new job as a Senior Software Engineer at Headway. Now that I'm a few weeks into my new gig I thought it might be fun to share some numbers from my job hunt. I started job hunting full time in January 2025 and signed an offer in June 2025. A bit less than 6 months from start to finish. Although, I wasn't actively applying for jobs during all of that time so it's probably closer to 3 or 4 months of intensive job search stuff. Here's the numbers at a high level: Total applications submitted: 73 Responses received: 48 Interviews (not counting recruiter screens): 10 Offer stage: 3 Offers: 1 And here's a nice funnel graphic: The above graphic is broken down by application type. My number one take away from this job hunt was referrals are very powerful and by far the most effective way to get to the interview rounds. I did apply directly to some roles but I quickly realized that that method was a waste of time and stopped. I cringe when I see people post on LinkedIn that they've submitted 800 applications and not heard back. Please don't do that. Unfortunately, the spray and pray method will not work in this job market. A number of times I thought that I had tapped out my potential referrals, but ended up combing back through my network a 2nd, 3rd, or 4th time. I always ended up finding new referrals. Feel free to contact me with any questions and I'll be happy to expand on any of the above numbers and offer some (maybe) helpful advice. ( 2 min )

How I accidentally got into Atlan

I want to write this better [Draft] So I'm keeping this as a draft view. If you already know the story, that's great, but there might be some questions or some things that you really want to ask about that I haven't talked about in person. So I'm keeping this as a draft state, so that I can write it better later. Before you read this post, if you got this link from a friend or someone shared this with you, give them a high five from my side :D If you don't know me (yet), or we haven't met, don't worry — we still have time. Just look me up and let's connect. The short version? I kind of stumbled into it. I did a lot of interviews, but with my skills and ability to learn, I always believed I could do better, and kept applying and doing interviews, and one day I saw a random post in a random … ( 3 min )

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Five Years Later

Today's the five year anniversary of Necrobarista's release. For those unfamiliar, a quick primer: Necrobarista is a 3D visual novel set in a cafe that sits on the boundary between the real world and the afterlife, acting as a place for the recently departed to stop for one last cup of coffee. It was developed by a team of less than a dozen people mostly based in Melbourne, Australia, though there were a small number of personnel, such as myself, who worked remotely. It shipped on three platforms and in fourteen languages, was generally well received, and won a couple of awards. It was first released on July 17, 2020 (Apple Arcade), followed by a PC launch on July 22 and an expanded "director's cut", dubbed Final Pour, released for existing platforms and Nintendo Switch in August 2021. I w… ( 22 min )