Intro
About a month ago my on-and-off back pain decided to stay on and forced me to see a doctor. After a month long process (two week wait for MRI, then another two week wait to see the doctor again for results) what I was hoping for a simple and easier to manage muscle issue turned out something more serious. Specifically, I’m diagnosed with a mid-level spinal herniation and even though it sounds like an obscure death metal band you’ll find on Bandcamp, it’s not something as fun as it sounds.
What this diagnosis means is that I need to change many things in my life and workspace, be more careful about certain things to make sure it doesn’t get any worse and start planning about investing in more ergonomic or specific office updates. The doctor also prescribed physical therapy but the first option covered by my insurance puts me on a waitlist which is around nine months long so we’re looking for alternative options.
Ironically, all of these means that I need as much paid work as possible to more comfortably deal with this health issue mainly caused by work itself.
Greetings from Sangarius. Hope you’re all doing much better than I do.
Mission Control
Inbox: 114
RSS Reader: 2558
Upcoming Events/Travel in Next 30 Days: 2
- Have some writing that needs to be done asap.
- Work on couple of article ideas to send them around.
- Start detailed planning on a workshop and talk I’ll give later in the month.
- Put some time aside to make plans about the changes I need to make in the office.
Check my Now page if you want to see what I’m up to in a more detailed way.
Here For The Music
About a month ago Cory Doctorow mentioned he’s using a local LLM to proofread his blog posts before publishing, and not surprisingly, some people on the internet decided it’s a major sin.
(And before you read any further, I want to let you know that I do the same thing with Apple Intelligence as well — just wanted to be transparent if you think that’s a deal breaker or something.)
Later, Cory wrote another blog post which I think is worth reading but also connected with something else in my head. Here’s a good quote from his post:
“Studying the origins of technology is good because it helps us avoid the systems and practices that hurt people. Knowing about the monsters in our technology’s lineage helps us avoid repeating their sins. But there will always be sin in our technology’s past, because our technology’s past is the entire past, because technology is a lineage, not a gadget. If you reject things because of their origins – and not because of the things they do – then you’ll end up rejecting everything (if you’re honest), or twisting yourself into a series of dead-ends as you rationalize reasons that the exceptions you make out of necessity aren’t really exceptions.
…
“The street finds its own uses” is a statement about technopolitics. It acknowledges that yes, there are politics embedded in our technology, the blood in the machine, but these politics are neither simple, nor are they immutable. The fact that a technology was born in sin does not preclude it from being put to virtuous ends. A technology’s politics are up for grabs.”
Cory Doctorow
I wanted to generously quote this post for two reasons. One, it reads like a really good follow-up to my previous Weekstarter post. Two, it points at something I’ve been disturbed with (and wrote about) “the discourse” for a long time, and one of the reasons why I don’t really talk about things on the platforms anymore.
Cory simply shared his workflow for other workflow-nerds like me, and then he had to deal with all the unrelated stuff. Someone else does a little experiment or creates something useful for themselves using AI/LLM/silicon magic/whatever and ends up put on trial by a bunch of people who most likely never knew they existed yesterday.1 If they don’t have anyone else to judge, they go around to find the worst examples to make sure they have something else to prove their righteousness.
On the other hand, if your approach is closer to the “The street finds its own uses”, you’ll actually look at what people are doing, why they’re doing it, and how you can do things rather than trying to win meaningless arguments on the internet by constant doomposting and attacking people you don’t have any idea who they are just to feel a little better.
But I don’t think taking the discourse seriously is worth it anymore. People who genuinely want to talk about these issues or have a discussion aren’t really there. And the ones who are part of the discourse mostly care about their performance more than anything else. Like Yancey Strickler wrote recently, they’re “like the guys who started showing up to mosh pits just to hurt someone. They didn’t come for the music.”
I’m here for the music and the ones who also came for the music. I don’t think the rest deserve neither our time nor the energy.
Consider this as my resignation letter from the discourse. You can find me on the streets if you need me.
Song of the Week
Looks like the upcoming Squarepusher album is going to be a great one.
Reading Log
- I didn’t start 2026 the way I wanted to when it comes to books. I’m more than halfway into the Superforecasting and have couple books I started late last year but I have to speed things up. I should use this mandatory change period to fix this problem too.
- We’re All Just ‘Monitoring the Situation’ – Amanda Mull
- “Prediction markets are, at their core, a service for doing financial arbitrage on our eroded information environment, or a sort of derivative market for reality. If you can dial in your feeds’ algorithms just right, maybe you can bear a type of witness so complete it feels like participation, or maybe even control. After all, there’s decent evidence that the people launching the bombs are monitoring some of the same feeds you are.”
- How American Camouflage Conquered the World | WIRED
- “It’s easy to lampoon these trend followers, who it’s assumed (perhaps falsely) have never gone hunting and don’t even know a member of the armed forces. What right do they have to MultiCam? The truth is, they might have the most authentic claim: It was made in Brooklyn by art school grads, after all.”
- In Today’s Conspiracy Theories, the Lack of Evidence Is the Evidence – The New York Times
- “Instead of engaging with what all the emails actually show, the new conspiracists stay focused on their bread and butter: nothing. In the world as they describe it, truth is made visible by the meaningful absences on the surface of the everyday: the blank outside of the day care, the empty grocery shelf, the ciphered references in the tranche of documents. In the world they help create, even when the truth starts coming out, it gets buried in an avalanche of slop.”
Outro
That’s all for this week. I have so much to do and good amount of pain at the same time. So you know I’m serious when I say take care of yourselves.
- These days, AI-hype guys don’t really care about whether you criticize them because either they think we’re all going to be obsolete in a couple of years or they’re too busy making another LinkedIn post/Twitter thread/YouTube video while trying to keep their OpenClaw instances in check. ↩︎
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