A blog about whatever technical stuff I feel like talking about today
August 8, 2026 The internet nowadays has become saturated in influencers. Whether that's the people we typically call influencers — TikTok and Instagram stars — or other people who basically maintain the same social role — like big YouTubers, or other big accounts on literally any other social media platform. To me, an influencer is just a person on the internet who has a sufficiently large enough…
July 19, 2026 Regardless of what the domain of knowledge we're talking about, there's a common tendency for people to forget what it was like to be a non-expert. It's practically a universal fact that the more experienced you become in a particular field, the worse you become at explaining those concepts to regular folks. This comes as somewhat of a paradox at first. Shouldn't the people who know…
July 18, 2026 There are a lot of things in this world worth fighting for. Things we would like to see improved in our society. Wealth inequality, corporate and political corruption, civil rights for queer people, especially trans and gender non-conforming folks. An end to the daily kidnappings of our neighbors by masked feds, who have been authorized to perform Kavanaugh stops — detaining people…
July 17, 2026 We live in a pretty scary part of history right now. Global fascism is on the rise, aided by a digital environment that seems to be purposefully engineered to devour public trust . We're watching civil liberties beginning to be peeled away, and a scare campaign be deployed against our neighbors. All the while, democracies around the world are embracing mass surveillance tools in an…
July 16, 2026 So, you've been hearing more and more lately about a free and better alternative to commercial social media, called "the Open Social Web", "the Social Web" or sometimes just "the Fediverse". You want to join this better, less terrible social network, and see if it's any good. This blog post is a guide for you. I'll cover the basics of what the Social Web is and how it works, where to…
June 23, 2026 I think it's become clear to a lot of people that the internet is in a state of decay. Platforms keep us locked in as they slowly make the experience worse and worse. And yet we find we can't leave. We are stuck, because, as it turns out, the internet is a wildly useful tool. It is not an option to leave the internet entirely, yet everybody is stuck in the walled gardens of Google,…
June 18, 2026 I've been thinking a lot about Big Tech and the various ways people have proposed fighting back. I think most people would agree that what's been happening to the internet over the last few years has been egregious, and definitely crossed a line. I also think that in recent years, especially after the pandemic, we're all online a lot more than we used to be. That's not necessarily a…
June 7, 2026 I've been looking into and learning a lot about Reinforcement Learning lately — which is a method of Machine Learning which doesn't rely on the copying of original human work. Modern "AI" systems like LLMs as well as the various image/video generation tools both rely on a Machine Learning technique known as "Structured Learning". In Structured Learning, the agent is provided with a…
March 23, 2026 Note: This post ended up being a lot more of a speculative exploration of ideas, rather than being a concrete declaration of opinions, so do keep that in mind while reading. I spend a lot of my time on the more independent sides of the internet, away from all the Big Tech of Google, Facebook, and that type of thing. Out here on fringe, there's a lot of tendencies of the mainstream…
February 01, 2026 Last week, I published a blog post titled The Internet Doesn't Suck: Blame Big Tech, Not The Internet . In it, I argued that the annoyances or issues we find with the internet are not inherent to the technology we use. Rather, Big Tech is designing these platforms in their own interests, which contradict our own — leading to the problems we're all quite familiar with. I wrote…
January 23, 2026 I think about social media a lot. I'm a computer science student at an undergraduate college, and I also happen to have an intense interest in political science and some of the humanities. I feel like it's almost natural from there that I would spend a lot of time thinking about the way we as humans use all this technology that makes up our world and our lives. Back when computers…
December 23, 2025 Anybody who's even slightly involved in tech-related activism will know that there is just simply a lot of jargon and technical details involved in the issues. Worse still, there's also just a lot of distinct issues: There's the fight for Net Neutrality, the right to use secure encryption tools, the right not to be spied on in public, the list goes on and on. It tends to be…
December 08, 2025 Well, it's been a minute since I've made a post. I've been busy busy busy going through a crazy semester in college. There was nothing in particular that made it this stressful, just a large collection of several independent factors all dragging me down in tiny ways. With the semester now coming to a close and everything sorting itself out, I wanted to come back and make another…
September 24, 2025 I just finished reading The Caves of Steel (1953) by Isaac Asimov. I really enjoyed it. I guess it's a little weird to write a review for a 70 year old book, so instead I decided to put together whatever the hell this post is. We go over the book, but then also its implications on modern society, as well as draw-backs to the 19th century Luddite movement that occurred during the…
September 17, 2025 Happy Constitution Day to everyone living in the United States! On this day, September 17, all the way back in 1787, the final draft of the US Constitution was signed, and would slowly make its way to the Congress of the Confederation, being ratified by the 13 states a year later, replacing the Articles of the Confederation. By the way, if you've never the Constitution in full,…
July 13, 2025 The Free and Open Web The internet is a truly incredible thing. Founded on the principle of shared ownership, the internet does not belong to any one group or person, it is shared by all of us. There is no single group you must go through in order to access the internet, nor in order to host an online service. There is no single set of rules governing what is and is not allowed to be…
July 16, 2025 Email is magic A good email client is like magic. As technologists, it's easy to lean into the world of the terminal and operating system, messing around with our Linux installations, Desktop Environments, or other things. It's easy to lean into this world and see this part as the "real world of computing", and then look at many of the more business and corporate tools such as email…
July 27, 2025 Lots of people right now feel inundated by information. In our digital age, it's like everything is flying at us all at once, and we're always just trying to sip from this super-powered firehouse of information. This is largely the fault of social media. Some people today, especially those of us in our 20s, are looking for an escape from this. People are trying to get away from…
August 10, 2025 I made an earlier post where I tried my best to inspire folks to use simple tech solutions in strategically useful ways in order to get large gains out of the tech they already have. Among one of the things I discussed was the power of using simple text files to keep track of things. I'd like to expand on that point here and give some of my own technical details of what I use. Of…