I love browsing https://www.themarginalian.org whenever I have a few hours to kill. It's a bit like TVTropes, but much more "literary" for lack of a better word.
The author has spent decades building a digital commonplace book of everything she's ever read, and hyperlinked everything together in a way that you can get lost in her notes for hours on end and never surface. It's one of my favorite websites on the internet, and the best example of the power of marginalia and hypertext.
> I've heard this sentiment repeated and I believe it, but at least the purpose of my own blog is to communicate insights I've had. I almost make a point out of not blogging unless I feel that I have something truly interesting to share. It seems that flipping that around would come at a price.
That's where the editing and curation step comes in, at least for me. I write a lot more than I publish. If my writing:publishing ratio ever became 1:1, I'll stop publishing things that are interesting and insightful (well, interesting and insightful to me personally; other people might judge my writing differently).
Sometimes what works for me is to write something and let it sit in my drafts for a few days. Then if I read it back and still find it worth sharing, I polish it and hit the publish button. If not, it goes into a folder called "Retired" in my Obsidian.
This lines up with my own experience with writing and (more recently) blogging.
You get over the fear of writing by doing a LOT of it, until you get to a point where writing a story or blog post stops feeling "special" and becomes just another thing you do. Each individual piece of writing stops feeling like an important work of art that you must get right at any cost, and becomes more like doing the dishes or taking out the garbage.
You can then separate the act of creating from the act of curating and editing. I regularly cut thousands of words from my writing before I share in public. I regularly throw away (well, archive) fully written drafts because I don't like them. A few years ago, this would've been unimaginable. Today, it feels like part of the process.
At some point, you gain confidence that you'll always have another story, another blog post, another poem inside you. If the current thing sucks, you just write another thing, and another, and another, until something clicks. It's freeing.
IME when creative work starts feeling like "just a job" is EXACTLY when it also becomes most fulfilling and satisfying.
E.g. Tauri uses WebKitGTK on Linux, which has historically been slow, unstable, and frequently lagging behind the main WebKit project. This is enough of an issue that even Tauri is working on the ability to use CEF instead of the system web view in Tauri apps.
Things are generally fine on recent versions of Windows and macOS. The system web views on these platforms will be evergreen versions of WebKit or Blink. But if you want to support very old versions of Windows or macOS, you might choose to use CEF instead of wrestling with Safari-from-five-years-ago.
Some web pages don't send referrers by making all links rel="noreferrer". Mastodon used to do this by default, though now they've changed their stance.
Links opened from non-browser apps don't have any referrer information either. E.g. if somebody shares your link on iMessage, WhatsApp, or Telegram.
Email clients may also strip out referrers, but I'm not entirely sure about this one.
If people read your work via RSS readers, you'll almost certainly not get any referrers. Unless it's a web-based reader like Feedly.
My website gets a lot of traffic marked as "Direct / None" by Plausible. I suspect this is traffic from RSS readers or Mastodon, but I can't be sure. A few times I've considered adding a "?ref=RSS" to all URLs served to RSS readers and "?ref=Mastodon" to everything I post on Mastodon. But like the author of this post, I feel uncomfortable tracking my readers like this.
I don't even want a local account, I just want to be able to set a custom username for my account instead of some autogenerated jumble of letters.
My Microsoft Account email is "contact@<my-domain-name>". If I set up a new Windows 11 computer using this account, Windows picks the first 4 letters of my email address and sets that as the username. So my username becomes "conta", and the path to my user directory becomes "C:\Users\conta".
I know this is a really small thing, but I find it incredibly irritating. I can't be typing that into the terminal all day long! It's not the end of the world, but it speaks to a lack of polish and care across the whole product, not to mention a disrespect for their users' intelligence.
I'm not a Windows user—I only use it for gaming—so I don't really know how to get around this issue. Maybe there's a secret keycombo I can press during install? Or some unrelated checkbox that I can toggle that will do the magic? I just know that I login via my iCloud account on all my Macs, and Apple has always allowed me to choose my own username and home directory.
I don't think this is high on their list of issues to fix so I'm not very hopeful that this will ever get addressed. Maybe I should just change my legal name to Conta?
I'm an independent consultant and frontend engineer helping startups (and a few large organizations) bring new products to market since 2012.
I can help you with:
- Building an MVP of your product to put in front of investors and early adopters.
- Overhauling existing products by adding major new features, fixing performance bottlenecks, or paying off tech debt.
- Helping your team get up to speed with emerging technologies (currently interested in helping with TypeScript, modern React, the Jujutsu VCS, and LLM-driven programming).
- Modernizing legacy products and migrating them off legacy tech stacks.
- Acting as a bridge between your design and engineering teams.
I'm primarily a frontend developer comfortable with vanilla HTML/JS/CSS as well as more complex frameworks (mainly React, but I've worked with others). I enjoy being a heads-down technical contributor to codebases. However, working with early-stage companies has allowed me to dabble in UX design, hiring, mentoring, technical writing, technical workshops, and product design. I enjoy wearing a ton of hats, and prefer to work at orgs that allow me to use the full set of my abilities.
Yes! I'm currently working on a script that modifies a bunch of sensitive files, and this the approach I'm taking to make sure I don't accidentally lose any important data.
I've split the process into three parts:
1. Walk the filesystem, capture the current state of the files, and write out a plan to disk.
2. Make sure the state of the files from step 1 has not changed, then execute the plan. Capture the new state of the files. Additionally, log all operations to disk in a journal.
3. Validate that no data was lost or unexpectedly changed using the captured file state from steps 1 and 2. Manually look at the operations log (or dump it into an LLM) to make sure nothing looks off.
These three steps can be three separate scripts, or three flags to the same script.
Take this with a grain of salt, because numbers from Statcounter are not fully accurate. However, none of those numbers are small. 3.86% of the entire PC market is not something to scoff at.
I've started using Python for many more tasks after I discovered this feature. I'm primarily a JS/TS developer, but the ability to write a "standalone" script that can pull in third-party dependencies without affecting your current project is a massive productivity boost.
> I think maybe we're talking past each other then. I'm saying I don't agree with the argument that music necessarily needs to have a story to be widely consumed in a positive way.
I can imagine that this is true for a lot of people. There are certainly folks out there who see music as an interesting sensory stimulus. This song makes you dance, this one makes you cry, this other one makes you feel nostalgic. To these people, the only thing that matters is what the music makes them feel. It's a strange, solipsistic way of engaging with art, but who am I to judge?
I personally don't connect to music—or any other art—that way. The process that goes into making a piece of music is as important to me as the music itself. The people who make that music are even more important. I don't believe in separating art from the artist. In fact, I find the whole idea of separating art and artist to be fundamentally rotten.
Here's an admittedly extreme example, but it's demonstrative of how I personally relate to music. In the wake of the #MeToo movement (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeToo_movement), some of the musicians I used to love as a teenager were outed as sexual predators. When I found out, I scoured my music library and deleted all their work. The music was still the exact same music I fell in love with all those years ago, but I could no longer listen to it without being reminded of the horrible actions of the musicians. Listening to it was triggering.
And so to me, music is not just a series of sounds that make me feel good. There are humans behind those sounds, and I care deeply about those humans. They don't need to be perfect—everyone fucks up from time to time—but they need to demonstrate some level of human decency. And they certainly can't be machines, because machines aren't people.
I love machines. I've spent my life building them, programming them, and caring for them. But machines aren't people, and therefore I don't care about the art they make. Maybe one day machines will be able to make art in the same way humans do: by going out into the world, having experiences, making mistakes, learning, connecting with others, loving and being loved, or being rejected soundly, and understanding deeply what it means to be a living thing in this universe. A generative AI model doesn't do that (yet!) and so I'm utterly uninterested in whatever a generative AI model has to say about anything.
I've started to "standardize" my own use of Markdown as "whatever works in the apps I use". For me these apps are iA Writer, Obsidian, and Astro's rendering pipeline (which uses the Remark/Rehype ecosystem under the hood).
This sucks for sharing documents with other people, but in practice it's not a problem. 99% of my writing never leaves my notes app or blog. And when it does, I often export it to PDF or Word to make it easy for non-techie people to read (I love Pandoc for this, it's easily one of the favorite tools in my daily toolkit).
> markdown is horrible, horrible format to parse...
I agree entirely. But it's a lovely format to use. Programming as a profession is entirely about making things easier for our users, even if it means making things harder for ourselves.
After all, that's the whole ethos around the web as a platform. Throw some broken HTML soup at a browser and it'll still try its best to render it.
I'm an independent consultant and frontend engineer helping startups (and a few large organizations) bring new products to market since 2012.
I can help you with:
- Building the first MVP of your product to put in front of investors and early adopters
- Overhauling existing products by adding major new features or paying off tech debt
- Helping your team get up to speed with emerging technologies
- Modernizing legacy products and migrating them off legacy tech stacks
- Acting as a bridge between your design and engineering teams
I'm primarily a frontend developer who is comfortable working with vanilla HTML/JS/CSS as well as more complex frameworks (mainly React). I enjoy being a heads-down technical contributor to codebases. However, working with early-stage companies has allowed me to dabble in UX design, hiring, mentoring, technical writing, technical workshops, and product design. I enjoy wearing a ton of hats, and prefer to work at orgs that allow me to use the full set of my abilities.
I enjoy using LLMs, but I do so responsibly. I write regularly at https://ankursethi.com/. I prefer short to medium term contracts (think 4-8 months).
I live in India and a surprising number of people here are using AI.
A lot of public religious imagery is very clearly AI generated, and you can find a lot of it on social media too. "I asked ChatGPT" is a common refrain at family gatherings. A lot of regular non-techie folks (local shopkeepers, the clerk at the gas station, the guy at the vegetable stand) have been editing their WhatsApp profile pictures using generative AI tools.
Some of my lawyer and journalist friends are using ChatGPT heavily, which is concerning. College students too. Bangalore is plastered with ChatGPT ads.
There's even a low-cost ChatGPT plan called ChatGPT Go you can get if you're in India (not sure if this is available in the rest of the world). It costs ₹399/mo or $4.41/mo, but it's completely free for the first year of use.
So yes, I'd say many people outside of tech circles are using AI tools. Even outside of wealthy first-world countries.
I've been analyzing my Obsidian vault using local LLMs that I run via Apple's mlx_lm. I'm on an M4 MacBook Pro with 48GB RAM.
The results are ... okay. The biggest problem is that I can't run some of the largest models on my hardware. The ones I'm running (mostly Qwen 3 at different numbers of parameters and quantization levels) often produce hallucinations. Overall, I can't say this is a practical or useful setup, but I'm just playing around so I don't mind.
That said, I doubt SOTA models would be that much better at this task. IMO LLM generated summaries and insights are never very good or useful. They're fine for assessing whether a particular text is worth reading, but they often extract the wrong information, or miss some critical information, or over-focus on one specific part of the text.
I love this idea! I've also been using LLMs to build tiny utilities and automations for myself, but instead of using HTML, I'm building them as:
- Shell scripts, AppleScripts, etc. that I trigger from Alfred
- Obsidian plugins
- The occasional Emacs Lisp function
They serve a similar purpose for me as OP's HTML Tools, in the sense that they let me automate a small part of my workflow that I wouldn't otherwise have automated. If I have to choose between writing AppleScript and just doing something manually, I'll pick doing something manually 100% of the time. But if I can just ask an LLM to write the automation for me and then test it in a bunch of different scenarios, the choice becomes much easier.
After reading this post, I really want to try moving some of my automations to the web. Using HTML/JS/CSS for some of these tools will let me solve a whole different set of problems. E.g. I could more easily build automations for the non-techy folks in my family instead of just keeping them to myself.
There are multiple dimensions to this problem. Putting everything behind Cloudflare might give you better uptime, reliability, performance, etc. but it also has the effect of centralizing power into the hands of a single entity. Instead of twisting the arms of ten different CXOs, your local politician now only needs to twist the arm of a single CXO to knock your entire business off the internet.
I live in India, where the government has always been hostile to the ideals of freedom of speech and expression. Complete internet blackouts are common in several states, and major ISPs block websites without due process or an appeals mechanism. Nobody is safe from this, not even Github[1]. In countries like India, decentralization is a preventative measure.
And I'm not even going to talk about abuse of monopoly power and all that. What happens when Cloudflare has their Apple moment? When they jack up their prices 10x, or refuse to serve customers that might use their CDNs to serve "inappropriate" content? When the definition of "inappropriate" is left fuzzy, so that it applies to everything from CSAM to political commentary?
For a few short months circa 2016 or 2017, KaiOS was the number one mobile OS in India. This was probably because of all the ultra-cheap KaiOS-powered Reliance Jio phones flooding the Indian market at the time.
I noticed the trend when I was working on a major web property for the Aditya Birla conglomerate. My whole team was pleasantly surprised, and we made sure to test everything in Firefox for that project. But everyone switched to Android + Chrome over the next few years, which was a shame.
If you live in Bangalore (or you're visiting), I want to grab coffee with you! Please reach out to me over email.
Website: https://ankursethi.com
Email: [email protected]