You may already be familiar with the mythical Library of Babel, but if you're not then allow me the honor of introducing it to you! The Library of Babel is a short story/thought experiment written by the Argentine author _Jorge Luis Borges_. Imagine there's a library that contains every book of 410 pages that could ever be written using the letters of the Latin alphabet. _Each book has 410 pages,…

There was once a potato who could not go without eating chips. ‘Oh, what does that make me, Mother? A monster ’? He trembled at the truth of it. ‘Who knows’, said she as she heated the oil in the pan and sharpened her knife. ‘Who knows, little chip’.

First off, let me begin by clarifying that this post is not meant to offer any sort of financial advice. Long-term projections for both…

To one with a troubled mind, even the sweetest apple will taste rotten.

~ Not sure

I've always struggled with multitasking, especially at work. It's so alluring to try to do multiple things at once, more so when whatever I'm doing is slow-going or, in general, I have to wait more than 30 seconds for things to compile. I'm also often prone to that close cousin of multitasking called…

The rain has stopped, the clouds have drifted away, and the weather is clear again.

If your heart is pure, then all things in your world are pure. Abandon this fleeting world, abandon yourself, then the moon and flowers will guide you along the Way.

~ Ryokan

Well, my plan to write daily during the past week didn't really work at all! I thought I would be able to leverage all that free…

Despite my best efforts, I sometimes (always) worry about what others think of my writing. It's definitely been getting better (the more I write here1, the less I think about it), but it's still there.

This is something I've been wondering about for a long, long time. It comes from way before I even started this blog. Ever since I was little, I've always cared about what others think of me. I…

Si quieres cambio verdadero, pues camina distinto.

~ Calle 13 (La Vuelta al Mundo)

This is an idea that has been going around in my mind a lot lately. According to what I said in this post, I should already have written about it by now, but I keep putting it off, mostly because I don't feel I've thought enough about it. However, today I decided it's probably time, as I don't think I'll…

It's been around five years since I've been working 100% remotely. On one hand, it's nice being at home and not having to commute, but on the other, the lack of community can sometimes be a bit depressing. Seeing people in person, and more importantly stumbling upon them by accident, is something that just can't be faked when working remotely, or at least not with the current processes and…

I've been thinking about playing cards lately. Specifically, the odds of a specific shuffle configuration for the standard 52-card deck. This is actually a well-known thought experiment that professors of combinatorics and probability like to impress their freshman students with, but it’s not any less impressive because of it.

The idea is that there's an incomprehensibly huge number of ways you…

Whenever I want to remind myself of the awesomeness of the universe, I try to remember that trees are pretty much made of air solidified by light.

You probably already learned about this when studying photosynthesis in school, but somehow I didn't make the connection (or at least I can't remember). It was only recently that I read somewhere _Thich Nhat Hanh_ saying that a tree is mostly made out…

Content warning: thinking about death, how things don't outlast us, the futility of legacy, and what is truly important

Yesterday before bed I was thinking about this series, and my mind started playing with the question of "what's the use of it". One of the first things that came into my mind was that I simply enjoy writing it. But the second, which was slightly surprising to realize,…

I'm sitting at my local airport as I write this. I'm not entirely sure what it's going to be about, so I guess we'll have to find out together.

This airport is quite small compared to the usual huge international ones. It is a small country, to be sure, so maybe it's expected. Anyway, usually my flights depart from the "old wing", but today my flight will go out of the "new wing". I'd come by…

Beer dulls a memory, brand sets it burning, but wine is the best for a sore heart's yearning.

~ Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

For a long while now, ever since my first child was born ~4 years ago, I've struggled with the "morning slump". I frequently wake up and everything just feels... gray. Bleak. Cottonish. Irrelevant, unamusing, unsurprising. On the worst of days it feels…

Some days ago I was playing the excellent "Good Coffee, Great Coffee" on my phone (so wholesome; I sometimes just open it up to have the soundtrack playing in the background), and I eventually found myself in the "sponsors section," where the game allows you to watch "ads" in return for special in-game currency. I didn't care much about the currency itself; I was just watching the ads as a show…

Life began in the deepest recesses of the earth. Slowly, with incalculable effort through numberless ages, it pulled itself out of the depths and into the sea, then out of the sea and onto land, and finally reached its apex when it left land behind and moved into the air.

A beautiful race of feathered beings developed. They were kind and smart, built their towns on mountainsides, and largely…

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

~ Kurt Vonnegut (Mother Night)

Recently, I've come to realize how easily we humans tend to stagnate as we get older.

I see my kids, and all they do is run around doing "as dangerous as possible" things. They constantly put themselves in different and exciting (dangerous) situations. I feel that, for them,…

( ... I'm noticing I'm starting to care about "standards" on these posts. Whenever I check my little green notebook for ideas, I almost always ask myself _"but will I be able to write a good enough post about this?"_. Standards are not good. Must. Not. Give. In. ... )

I'm writing this post partly as an answer to a post (and an email) from Noahie, in which he goes on to say that people tend to…

I always feel weird when I'm about to do a "technical post", because it's so different from the sort of thing I usually write about. Which is strange, considering I live immersed in this tech world and AI stuff.

...

For a long while now I've wanted to add audio versions of my posts. At first I entertained the idea of reading them myself, but eventually dismissed it because I just didn't have…

After writing yesterday's post, I kept thinking about how I've actually managed to pull fifty posts out of thin air. I thought maybe sharing my _workflow_ might be useful for others, so that's what I'm planning to do here. Note that this works for me, but that doesn't mean it will work for you, or even that it will work for future me! It's just what I'm doing right now.

I've mentioned a couple…

Ahh, post #50. I've been looking forward to this! In many ways, when I first started this, "fifty" was my initial goal. The plan was to publish a post every day (or almost every day) for 50 days straight, and then re-evaluate how things are going. So far I think it been going awesome! When I first started I wondered how the hell would I manage to fifty post topics to talk about when (at the time)…

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

As some of you may know, a while ago I made my own (pretty minimal and open source) analytics service called Mochi, mostly because I was curious about how such a thing might be implemented.1 Lately, I've…

“The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.”

~ Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

AI-generated art is tricky. I'm of the opinion that it is indeed totally worthless if generated by a mindless, mouth-frothing AI bro, no matter how elaborate or impressive the piece is. However, like all mediums, it does at…

Woah, I'm already at post 48. Crazy how fast time flies! To be honest, there's a gray area between around post 17 and post 45. I have no idea what happened, and I have little recollection of what I wrote about. But since post 45, time has been moving really slowly! Maybe it's because I'm expecting #50 too much?

I told myself that I would run this experiment till #50 and then give myself the…

As I mentioned at the end of my last post, I recently found a cache of quotes and poems in my old Google Keep. Among these, I was surprised to see more than one poem written by young me (and many of them are quite good, probably even better than what I would be able to write today)!

I want to give these a new home, so every now and then I'll be sharing one of them here. I haven't yet gone…

When old age shall this generation waste,
    Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
    "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"—that is all
    Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Last stanza of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" , by John Keats

It's commonly said that "great art is the one that makes you feel something", but…

Last updated: 2026-02-11

Hi, welcome to my Now page! You can see previous versions here.

Hi! It's been a while since I updated my now page. If you've been following my blog, then you know I've been busy-really busy-posting almost once every day for the past fifty days or so (see context). I've, in fact, been so busy that I've pretty much put aside any other writing projects. However, I…

The more I write in this series the more I ask myself _why is it that I'm doing it_. Seems like a silly question, but not one I've yet been able to answer satisfactorily.

In my initial post I identified my reason as just wanting to pick back up a hobby which in the past had given me a lot of satisfaction. I still think there's some of that but it's also more. I could write posts only once in a…

As I sit down to write today, I find my mind is just not in it. I had originally planned to talk about how we tend to "stagnate" as we grow older, but alas, I think that will have to wait until a future post. Today I will talk about what's actually on my mind right now: Caves of Qud.

I've really just barely started the game. I've spent no more than a few hours on it and only gone through a…

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.

~ Zhuangzi

I've been reflecting a bit on my last post, and especially how I had to keep talking myself into working on it, but my mind just refused to "latch on to the task". I'd been playing Caves of Qud on my Switch for some days, and all I could think about was the game1. Last night I realized I frequently go through cycles such…

This is not really a wordvomit, but an old post from an old blog of mine that is no more. It was originally published on 2022-10-29. I've cleaned it up a bit and added a few things, but otherwise the idea and structure are unchanged.

I don't know if it has ever happened to you, but while falling asleep, in the hypnagogic state, I sometimes find myself being absolutely and completely…