Nov 07, 2025 - 1:36PM
I've decided to migrate this thoughts page and my blog to WriteFreely, hosted by Write.as.
I love thoughts so much, and I've praised it constantly. I'm so grateful that it's gotten me back into writing short little blog posts, something I loved doing as a kid but somehow lost interest in, perhaps because so many blogging platforms eschew simplicity to seem more profound. At the same time, I'm now looking for features that thoughts doesn't offer, like pagination, dedicated pages for individual posts, email signup, RSS, tags, and more. I still think thoughts is amazing, a beautifully simple blogging platform with an "old internet" feel in the very best way, and for that reason, I don't recommend everyone switch to WriteFreely. It just seems like the better choice for me right now.
Medium, on the other hand, I could do without. They display giant banners on top of public blogs to encourage readers to sign up for Medium, which is really annoying. Their recommendation engine is also horrific, and it encourages clickbait nonsense. That doesn't much affect anyone who reads my blog, but even still, I see it when I log in. I also don't want to support a company that does that, and I don't want that perverse incentive to change my writing.
Over the next little while, maybe a few weeks, maybe more, you'll see posts disappear from here and reappear on my Write.as blog.
Aug 22, 2025 - 1:47AM
Last night, I slept on the floor next to Kika, my sweet black cat, as she neared the end of her life. I told her something that I'd like to remember, because it may be true and it may be important.
I don't know if there's any problem that can't be solved better with love.
Kika passed peacefully early Thursday morning. She was a wonderful cat, and I miss her very much.
Aug 20, 2025 - 1:20AM
The internet is a confirmation bias machine. If one wants to find evidence that Wegmans is amazing, they will find it. If one wants to find evidence that Wegmans is terrible, they will find it. For that reason, I don't think anyone should celebrate when they find others online who agree with them. It feels like validation, but it's meaningless.
Consensus is different. If almost all scientists agree on some fact, despite their different upbringings, cultures, and worldviews, then it probably is true. Can one find people online who believe that wombats cause climate change? Probably. Can one find broad consensus that wombats cause climate change? Absolutely not. That's how we know it might be bullshit.
Is broad consensus everything? No, but it's a strong indicator of truth. Add it to your truth detection scorecard. Have it replace "my tribe agrees with me."
Aug 09, 2025 - 3:27PM
I recently discovered a trick which one can use to save money while shopping online. If a store offers a lower price for a product when "autoship" is enabled, purchase the item with autoship, then cancel autoship after the item arrives. I don't know of any store that charges any kind of penalty at that point. Of course, one needs to actually cancel autoship when the item arrives; forgetfulness can be costly.
Is it dishonest? Yes, it is. But the dark patterns that motivate people to choose autoship (for example, making autoship the default) are even more slimy, especially when one considers how many customers these platforms have. I've known people who have enabled autoship accidentally, and I'm sure many, many others do. I consider this trick a reasonable way of fighting back.
Jul 29, 2025 - 10:44PM
Incentives rule the world.
Jul 17, 2025 - 1:10PM
I just heard about Tin Can. What a great idea! It's a physical phone for kids that can connect with other Tin Cans for free. For a monthly fee, it can even connect with other phone numbers. Only approved contacts are supported, and best of all, there are no apps! It's an old concept, of course, but something about it seems so exciting, novel, and fun. Imagine kids spending less time on screens and more time actually talking to their friends, building real communication skills. This is what the world needs.
Jul 10, 2025 - 10:44AM
This is a little sci-fi.
I'm not a physicist or a philosopher, but I'm interested in how the universe works. One thing I'm curious about is time. Believe it or not, nobody really knows how time works, and effects like time dilation show that time does not work the way we intuitively think it does. Personally, I think time is like an undirected graph of cause and effect (or effect and cause), a directionless web of events, even though it feels like it has a forward direction.
When folks start talking about this, they inevitably mention that it's not possible to travel backward in time. There's a problem with that statement, though, and it only occurred to me recently. When people say it's not possible to travel back in time, or that entropy tends to increase, and so we don't generally see wine glasses unshatter and float back to their original resting places, they're really saying that it's not possible for external events to move backward in time while they themselves move forward in time. Why should that be possible? Why should someone be able to retain their memories and continue aging while everything around them reverses? That would be like the food in my oven cooking while the food in my microwave becomes cold again. Maybe it's simply not possible for time to "move in two directions" at once; the events that led me to start the oven also led me to start the microwave. How could one set of events be reversed without the other?
Maybe backward time travel does happen, but we don't notice it. By analogy, if we were living in The Sims (more sci-fi!) and the "player" decided to rewind the game, causing the most recent frames to be played back in reverse order, wouldn't our memories and experiences also be undone frame by frame? Wouldn't it feel exactly like experiencing it "forwards"? The "me" from a frame one hour ago would have the idea to write this post, and he wouldn't have the memory of having already started it.
I know this is pretty out there, as far as my posts go. Maybe this is easily refuted by people who actually know what they're talking about. But it's interesting to me. And hey, maybe it would make for a fun Star Trek plot point! "We are going back in time, we just don't remember it!"
Jul 02, 2025 - 4:48PM
I don't remember where I first heard this. It may have been spoken in a conversation about road rage. I think there's something very true about it, though, and it speaks to much more than driving.
When someone is unkind to you, they're probably not reacting to you. They're probably reacting to the last person who upset them.
In other words, when one is unkind or behaves strangely toward you, especially when there is no obvious explanation for their behavior, their annoyance may be misdirected. They may be treating you the way they wish they had treated someone else, someone who came before you. It's not fair, but that's life.
Apparently, psychologists call it displacement.
Jun 30, 2025 - 1:07PM
[The] social internet is, I would argue, not a net positive for humanity, even if it has greatly benefitted some of us who use it a lot.
—John Green in Am I Cigarettes?
Jun 28, 2025 - 10:31PM
What is the price of lettuces? An obolus perhaps. If then a man gives up the obolus, and receives the lettuces, and if you do not give up the obolus and do not obtain the lettuces, do not suppose that you receive less than he who has got the lettuces; for as he has the lettuces, so you have the obolus which you did not give… Give then the price, if it is for your interest, for which it is sold. But if you wish both not to give the price and to obtain the things, you are insatiable and silly.
—The Enchiridion of Epictetus, as translated by George Long
In other words, don't complain about a trade-off you're willing to take. You can buy an apple at the farmer's market, or you can keep your money and leave without one, but you can't demand an apple and refuse to pay. That just makes you a jerk.
In the same way, if your spouse dislikes being corrected, you can correct them and accept their annoyance, or you can let it go and appreciate the harmony, but you can't correct them and then complain when they become annoyed. Well, you can, I guess, but you can't demand that other people consider you reasonable.
Jun 18, 2025 - 11:53PM
"Why are there different programing languages?"
An acquaintance once asked me this shortly after taking an online programming course. I said something about how any given language can be better or worse at solving a particular problem. French is great for poetry, and Haskell is great at representing algorithms and mathematical functions.
Nonsense!
Well, no, not completely. It's true. It's just not the whole story. Consider Python and Ruby. Why do we need both? Yes, yes, sure, there are important differences, but in the grand scheme of things, are they really that different? Hardly. They're both dynamic scripting languages which work well for web development. We could save a lot of time and energy by deprecating one and only using the other.
For that matter, why do we need Billy Joel and Elton John? They're not that different. They both play piano, they both write pop songs, and they both tour internationally. Talk about a waste of recourses! We could really save a lot of time and effort by having them join forces.
Does anyone think that would work? Of course not. Elton John doesn't want to sing "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" and Billy Joel doesn't want to sing "Tiny Dancer." Billy Joel doesn't care about fashion and Elton John doesn't care about Long Island. They don't want to work together!
In the same way, Guido van Rossum thought it would be fun to create Python, and Yukihiro Matsumoto thought it would be fun to create Ruby. Millions of programmers like using blocks and millions of others love **kwargs. Who are we to disagree with them? Do we really think they would be equally productive doing something they don't enjoy?
Music is not a utilitarian matter, and neither is computer programming. Software development is an art as much as it is a science. When we forget that, we miss some of our most important opportunities.
A bottle of red, a bottle of white
It all depends on your appetite
Jun 01, 2025 - 8:47PM
The newly-published video Impossible Challenges (Google Veo 3 ) by demonflyingfox is both an amazing showcase of Google's new Veo 3 AI (to be fair, I'm sure there was post-production) and hilarious commentary on the kind of algorithmic bullshit YouTube is constantly manipulating creators into publishing.
May 21, 2025 - 7:35AM
"Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy."
—Unknown, though commonly attributed to Guillaume Apollinaire
May 03, 2025 - 3:12PM
It seems to me, we're more different from our friends, family, and acquaintances than we've ever been.
Two hundred years ago, if a neighbor child had caused trouble on one's farm after a storm and the victim wanted to learn how to manage their frustration from a Christian perspective, who might they turn to? Who would fully understand their situation? Everyone! Well, almost everyone. Their friends, family, and acquaintances would be neighbors, with the same weather, religion, fellow acquaintances, and, in many cases, the same occupation.
Today, if a former Lutheran and current Buddhist accountant living in Portland has trouble getting along with their boss, an evangelical former banker living in Omaha, who might they turn to? Who would truly understand their predicament? Hardly anyone. Many people would be able to offer advice, yes, but would they really get it?
I haven't even mentioned political affiliation, with politics now less a tool for solving practical problems and more a means of self-realization.
I wonder to what extent this explains rising rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and other unhappiness.