That got me a bit worried because in my experience, Google's translation tools have been very hit or miss, sometimes giving me exactly what I want other times some bullcrap that doesn't make any sense. And even at the best of times, when the translation is on point, the emotional value and the meaning behind the words gets lost in translation.
It also tries to translate idioms and other language quirks that don't translate literally so it sounds weird as fuck.

To be sure, I tried it myself cause I was curious about the experience my mom is getting, and it turns out that during all this time I've been judging their tool, Google has been cooking.
The text was translated to absolute perfection, expressions are adapted to fit in French, words are embellished and sometimes, full sentences are even re-interpreted to make more sense. But above all, the emotions of the text are transcribed in the most accurat:e way possible. Quickly, I jump on another note, to check it isn't a fluke, then another, and another...

That's when I realized, "shit, Google has become a better writer than me".
I mean, I would never pretend to be a great writer, especially on this blog where I apply a philosophy of "publish don't polish". But still, this half-assed tool that's been flaky at best since forever now writes my own text better than me.
You might say that this is simply self-deprecation, but to make sure I tried to write a note in French, then translate it in English myself and then ask Google to translate it back in French.
The results were indisputable, Google's sentence were more grammatically correct, the vocabulary used richer and more accurate to what I wanted to say. It felt as if what Google had translated is really what I meant, and what I had written was what I was able to come up with.
A bit like if I tried to build a chair myself without any experience building chairs. I have seen plenty reference points for chairs, I love them so much, so I'm sure I could envision and imagine a perfectly functional an beautiful chair in my mind. But if I tried to build it, it'd be a pretty crappy one, far removed from my original vision.
In this case, Google is the furniture maker, and it's like if I gave it the chair I built, and it made it into the chair I had in mind without me ever telling it what I had in mind to begin with.

In many ways, this is great. My mom and other non-english-speaking readers can enjoy my notes almost better than what the regular reader can.
But at the same time, it's weird to think that they are reading something that wasn't written by me. Everything is there, the emotions, the words, and yet it feels weirdly less authentic than what the old crappy Google translation tool would give me.
The literalness of it would probably give you a worse experience as a reader, but at the same time, you'd be reading the words that I chose to write.
They are probably not the best or most correct words, they might not even be the words I wanted to use. But they are the words I chose to write.
I would rather listen to a song that is homemade and imperfect, where the creator couldn't do all they wanted cause maybe they can't play the guitar quite well, but they poured their soul and ideas into it rather than this same song corrected and played as imagined.

I'm not sure what we really gain by getting a more polished, more objectively right version of things. Sometimes, often even, the good enough version is the best in my opinion.

If you can read my posts in another language than English, I'd be really happy to have your take on this. Maybe you'll tell me that I'm exaggerating and that the Googled version is actually an improvement. Or maybe you'll agree with me.

Either way, I hope you have a wonderful day, bye 👋

This is really foreign to me as I've always seen music as a commodity. Music is the thing you put in the car, while washing the dishes, when you have a long walk to go somewhere, what's on at the radio when you're grocery shopping.
It is never about the music itself, more like an enjoyable background noise that you pay some attention to, but never all your attention.
And it makes sense that it works that way for me, because music has always been so easily available in nearly infinite quantities so it seems like a nice but unimportant thing.
And I don't mean unimportant in the sense of "I don't care about music, I could live without it", because I'd be so desperate if music were to disappear! I mean unimportant in the sense of it's just a thing that is there, like cars, trees or toothbrushes, they're there and you don't think much about their presence, they're a given.

Nevertheless, this idea of music as an object of its own that I could pay my full attention to seems really appealing to me. When I think about it, it makes sense, music is art and art can often be enjoyed simply for what it is, without needing to do something at the same time. When I watch a movie for the first time, I'm surely not gonna be washing my dishes at the same time. When I read a book, I can't be coding at the same time or both would suck.
So why shouldn't it be the same for music?

And yesterday, the perfect opportunity offered itself to me.
For dinner, I had gnocchi with broccoli and soy cream, my current favourite meal, and as always, it knocked me right in the gut. Too much carbs, and by 8pm I felt like going to bed.
The thing is if I go to bed at 8pm, Neko, my dog is going to wake me up at 3am to go pee... So I had to battle my sluggishness at least until 9:30pm. After washing the dishes, it was still only barely 9pm, too early, so I decided "well why not use the half an hour I have to lay in bed and listen to music for once?".
I went in bed, swiftly followed by Matcha, one of my cats, who curled inside my arms as we tried to focus on the voice of Momoko Gill.
And it turns out that we both failed miserably!
Matcha was quickly asleep, purring away and dreaming of chasing pigeons. As for me, I was trying so hard to listen to the music, trying to understand the words and enjoy it, but since it was unoccupied by another activity, my mind would just wander eternally.
I couldn't focus on the music for more than a few seconds before a thought came to distract me and by the force of things, music became a background noise again. Background to my tired brain trying to lure me to fall asleep.
The battle was tough, but I resisted. I think I liked the album, but I'd be hard pressed to tell you for sure, because in all honesty, I didn't really listen to it.

And so I wonder, how did people use to listen to music? How did their mind not simply wander away and they forgot that they were supposed to be listening?
Maybe it's simply that I was tired and not able to focus, I'll have to try this another time when I'm fully awake.
Or maybe it's a question of habit, people were used to doing this already, their brains were trained to see music listening as an activity of its own. Then I guess I'll have to train my brain as well until it becomes natural to actually listen to music.

The next morning, I re-listened to Momoko's album while taking Neko to the park and I really enjoyed it.
The part of my brain that tends to wander away in thoughts was preoccupied by checking that Neko wasn't eating duck shit off the ground, it was much easier to let the other part of my brain focus on the music this way.
I wasn't fully present to listen to the music, it was mostly background noise to cover the sound of cars, yet I still listened to it more than when I tried to focus on it entirely, I definitely still have some work to do ^^

If you have any experience listening to music or have tunes to recommend, I'm all ears.
It'd be fun to discover some local artists from where you're from 👀

• Mail: hello@theoo.dev
• Instagram: @theokbokki
• Github: @theokbokki

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This is my entry for this month's IndieWeb Carnival hosted by James.

For the past half an hour, I've tried to write a note describing my very special relationship with museums, but I seem to be unable to transcribe the emotions I feel when I think of the different moments spent there. Every word I can use to try to explain how I feel seems weak compared to the sour pinch in my heart when I recall all these sweet memories.

So instead, I'm going to make a list. A list of a few memories without any context, just raw as they come to my mind.

• My grandfather "ice-skating" for the first time in like 20 years
• Paintings of prehistoric animals on mine and my classmates' faces
• Coming home and trying to light a fire with a bunch of grass and two random rocks
• Using my well kept school-trip pocket money to buy a lemur plushie (Oh how tough it was to choose)
• Seeing actual dinosaur bones for the first time (It still brings tears to my eyes to this day)
• Running around in the hallways, feeling the smooth carpet dampening the sound of my footsteps
• The first time I spoke to someone who wasn't yet important to me
• Hanging from a metal bar for as long as possible to try to beat the times set by others
• The way light hits old medieval artifacts in a beautiful modern room and the contrast of these two periods
• Eating fish and chips before seeing the same fish I had just eaten (Now, I'm vegan)
• The car ride playing mario kart on the nintendo DS with the same friends I used to play mario kart as a kid
• Discovering I'm not actually as scared of death as I thought I was
• Going by the Louvre, desperate to go inside, and promising myself that someday I'll actually visit it
• Starting to cry because I finally stand next to the Assyrian Lamassu that I'd been dreaming to see since I was a kid
• Making Speculoos
• Running around in an ancient Roman villa, making bread and visiting the herbs garden; Twice
• Laying on a Fakir bed persuaded I'm about to die (Spoiler, I'm still alive)
• A fake pig with a fake apple in its mouth on a very large table surrounded by knight armors
• Trying to shoot a fake bison with a bow and missing absolutely every shot
• Trying to shoot a fake doe with a slingshot and missing absolutely every shot
• Learning that my ancestors cut the hands of thousands of Congolese and all the other horrors they did
• The beautiful park of an English castle, running through the hedges the heart light with love
• Looking at an enormous blob of fake jelly wiggle after poking it
• My Grandfather taking me out of the exhibition because I started crying when there were sounds of guns and explosions (Turns out I wouldn't do good on a battlefield)
• Walking under the remains of a big blue whale
• The feeling on the skin of dark, silent, heavy rooms
• Being alone in a fairly big part of the Louvre and the feeling of a dream being even better than imagined
• The frustration of being at Stonehenge but not allowed to go inside it and the feeling of a dream being broken
• Buying magnets or wooden puzzles that have nothing to do with the exhibition
• Standing in a closed wagon that once had transported people to be executed in camps and feeling the gravity of the moment
• Getting denied the entry of a museum with school so we spent a ridiculously long time in the gift shop which was really beautiful
• Walking on the rails of the train because it is longer than the platform and we are a the tail end of it
• My grandfather sharing it's passion for trains while sitting in an old steam powered carriage
• My godfather and my godmother in the same place at the same time (It happened like 3 or 4 times at most in my life, some of these I was like a couple days old)
• Playing and running and climbing on way too many old castle ruins. It is always wonderful
• Sitting in awe watching the carefully crafted lighting environment
• Moon jumping attached to a cable after having walked through an actual rocket head

I cried a bit while making this list, it felt good.
I think I realised that what made museums so special to me is the people I shared these moments with. Some of these people I'll never see again, others I could but won't. People I miss, people I love.

If you've read this far, thank you and I hope you have a wonderful day :))

PS: I would like to thank Manuel Moreale and his Dealgorithmed newsletter for reminding me of the IndieWeb Carnival

The only things in place to tell you "the button is ready to be pressed" are a measly flashing green light that quickly turns red as you press (like did I do something wrong?) and a repeated beep. These two things are definitely unclear as I've seen countless people trying to press on the button before the door could be opened and then panic that they won't be able to get down and start pressing frenetically until the door finally opens.
And I mean, of course you would do this, it's the morning, the tram is full of people, you are tired and maybe a bit late, you ain't gonna pay attention to the flashing light or notice the beep over the sound of people talking.

At the same time, I get why they built it that way:

• It looks good
• It is resistant to degradation
• It won't break quickly and has few parts
• It is "accessible" to people that can't press strongly
• It is cheap to maintain and build

But like come on, you could at least have given me some haptic feedback right? A vibration to tell me it has worked or something like that.
But I guess that's just not the world we live in, I'm sure the designers didn't mean to create a bad experience for the user, it's just that "user delight" is pretty low on the company's priorities list.

It's a thing in life in general though, human happiness isn't really put at the forefront of things. For some reason, we have decided that time and money would be more important and we have all accepted that fact!

But could you imagine a world where this thinking is reversed. A world where each human tries their best to do good around them and not just do good for themselves?

I'd be happy to discuss this matter with you if you have ideas on how to imagine a better world ^^

I hope you have a nice day, bye 👋

Les riches contre la planète - Monique Pinçon-Charlot

• Rich people are the ones driving the climate crisis. They decide what we do with our resources because they control them. Money and by extension capitalism has become god-like and universal. The word to describe our current period shouldn't be "Anthropocene" but "Capitalocene" as to highlight how capitalism is having more impact on our era than each human at the same level.
• Rich people, since they control the cultural and production means, use them to get richer. They make sure to divide the interconnected problems in silos (ice melting, diseases spreading, draughts) so regular people can't grasp the full picture. The idea of a green transition is an unrealistic diversion since we currently have no truly decarbonated source of energy. The goal of the "transition" is to avoid confronting the need for social and organisational change so that rich people can continue exploiting their privileges. The "transition" is simply a rebranding of capital.
• A69 motorway is an example of the immoderation of capitalism and how far the oligarchy is willing to go to protect their interests. A lot more money was put in the project (and hidden by "montages economiques") so that the state won't be able to buy back the road. This way it has to stay private capital and the tolls go to the rich people owning the road and not back to finance the state. Naturally people want to protest but since oligarchs are the ones in power, they can crack down hard on the protesters using the police that is under their control.
• Carbon compensation credits are a "scam". First of, the point of them is not to reduce the carbon big polluters emit, but simply to offset it in forests and others as a way to appear green when you are in fact polluting a lot. Plus, most of these credits are "ghost credits", since the persons responsible for giving away these credits are the same as those who profit from them (think banks and big companies). Therefore, they don't play by the rules and they use the system to their advantage. Same goes for pesticides, only the declared substance is important for regulation, not the specifics. So if there is lead, arsenic or other dangerous chemicals, it's not taken into consideration. Again, those in charge of applying the regulation are the same ones that make it and profit from it so it's basically null and only there to look good.
• The movie Don't look up, is bringing an external threat. This makes it so that humans have no responsibility in the catastrophe and doesn't question the liberal capitalist system. It still had a positive effect in making people more aware.
• The rich, aware that their way of life will someday make other people rebel or that climate change will render many places unliveable have already started buying land and building bunkers to hide into when things go sour. She cites examples such as Patagonia, Nez Zealand or private islands.
• France allowed chlordecone to be used for 20+ years despite knowing it is a poisonous pesticide. It was particularly used in overseas territories and when people ask for accountability to the state for having knowingly mad them sick, the law and judges determine that it's prescribed cause too old. The climate crisis and social problems are undisociable from colonisation because capitalism means exploitation of resources but also of humans.
• Emanuel Macron, despite receiving the price of "hero of earth" in 2018 is really not an earth friendly person. He's very subject to lobbies, especially the lobby of hunters who are also closely aligned with RN. This is one of the reasons that promoted the departures of then minister of ecology Nicolas Hulot.
• Lobbys outnumber NGOs and they are tightly linked to the higher spheres of power because of "pantouflage" (AKA, going from public sector to private sector because you are a rich ass that knows people). This makes it so that laws that would actually make a difference for people and reduce liberal capitalism's power never get adopted.

But sharing my life is something that I love, and I don't want it to be private. I find it so awesome that thanks to internet, random people can know what you are doing and who you are. What I don't like about Instagram and other social medias is that I'm giving my data away for free to big corporations and they can do whatever they want with it. To put it another way, I'm not scared about someone random knowing where I live and what I like. Rather I'm upset that people are making money over where I live and what I like.

So lately, I caved in. I stopped making all these efforts to protect my online life because they were tiring, isolating and stripping me of something I liked. And for a few weeks now, I've been using Instagram again and it has been wonderful!

This has made me question myself about why my life with social medias is significantly better when most people seem to say that social media are making their life miserable. And I've come to the conclusion that this is just a question of how you interact with it. Since I haven't had Instagram for years, I have lost the habit of doomscrolling, and I never got into short form content cause it scares me too much. (It's way too addictive and I know I would be stuck like a slug to a window in a matter of minutes). This means that the way I use Instagram now is pretty positive and healthy. I watch stories, catch up on what the few people I follow have posted (Cause there thankfully still is a "following" tab) and post my own pictures or stories. Then I'm done, I close the app and go on with my day, I'm never trapped in the cycle of eternal scrolling since I don't even start scrolling at all.

This has meant that discovery has been happening through people's stories. I see they repost something and get intrigued, so I go on the account that posted the thing initially and sometimes, I follow them. This is in my opinion a great way to organically discover relevant content without letting the algorithms decide for you. Another side benefit from this way of using Instagram is that I feel way less lonely and isolated than I've felt for years. That's because before, the only way I had to find out what events were happening around me was through family and friends. That meant I was missing out on all the events they weren't a part of, and that's quite a lot of events! Since getting back on Instagram, I've had several moments where I simply look at stories and they share some gathering that is happening that week and it gives me opportunities to go and engage with other like minded humans and meet lovely people.

Overall, this has made me reconsider my position on social media a bit. I used to think they were like a bomb, nothing good comes out of them and it only profits rich assholes. But now I see them more like a knife. Very dangerous if you aren't careful but also extremely useful when used for the right reasons. Of course it still profits rich assholes (and that sucks), but it also profits me! And that's a small victory I'm more than happy to take :))

What's your opinion on social medias? Send me a mail so we can talk about it :))

• https://textonly.website/
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• https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/
• https://www.holovaty.com/writing/chatgpt-fake-feature/
• https://tonsky.me/blog/lockfiles/
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• https://justinjay.wang/methods-for-random-gradients/
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• https://emilkowal.ski/ui/great-animations
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• https://manuelmoreale.com

In that post I was asking about how long I was going to be able to keep up without feeling the need to change it all over and now we have an answer, about a month. And when I wrote that note, I really had the hope of being able to keep my thing going, to make it evolve with me and take care of it, to cite myself, I said:

I hope this time I'll be able to make this website evolve, endure the updates and the maintenance, and instead of nuking everything when my mood swings, tend to this garden that I'm trying to grow.

But here we are a month later and this website is changing again. And I hope I have learned lessons from my past failures and have finally found something that will last for a while. (Wishful thinking, but I have a plan).

So what was wrong about the previous edition? The website looked great (Or at least exactly like I wanted it to look) and it did everything I wanted it to in a superb way. This shows us that maybe the problem wasn't about the site, but rather about me, my relationship to the site and what I wanted vs what I felt like doing.

This is a recurring problem in my life, there are things that I want but I'm rarely willing to put the effort into getting these things. For example on this website I wanted to share the music I like, the books I've read, pictures of my life, notes and journal entries, websites I like etc. And I had made a really nice design for all these things, I had so much fun making this design! I even coded some of them and really enjoyed coding these features and solving the problems that came my way. Now you might argue that I said I didn't want to put the effort into things but still went out of my way to code and design them, that's some effort at least. But to me, these are not real efforts. Designing and coding are two of the things I enjoy most in life and doing the stuff you enjoy is easy enough. The hard part comes when I actually have to add content to the site. Taking pictures to put as album covers or photos for the website, checking that all things look good and that it's accessible, moving the stuff I had written in Obsidian to the admin. These are all things I hate, and therefore this super website that was ready to be used stayed empty. If there had been a way to just think "I like this song" and it would have been magically added to the site, it would have been great, but in the absence of mind control powers, I couldn't find the will to tend to the website.

So when I had accepted defeat and knew that I was just gonna not do things, I started looking for a solution. And the idea I had was to look into the things that I am able to do consistently because I enjoy them. And one of these things it turns out is taking notes! I have been doing it for months pretty consistently and I don't see myself stopping any time soon. The solution was then very simple and very clear: cut out the middleman.

I got to thinking, testing, prototyping, designing, and I came up with this site on the other end. On your part, it just looks like a blog with a nice backdrop, but on my side, once I am logged in, the text of the notes becomes editable, and with the press of a couple buttons, I can create a new note and publish it instantly!

And these notes of course can contain anything I want, for example here's a picture of one of my cats!

This means that if I want to make a note with all the books I read or a note with links to all the websites I like, I obviously can. It won't look as cool as the design I had planned on the previous iteration, but at least it will exist, and at the end of the day, that is what really matters to me.

The thing I am looking for in my website is for it to be a place where I can create things however I want at anytime I want and make them accessible instantly. If I have a 2 minutes break waiting for pasta water to boil and want to write a little something about my love for pasta, well I can! There is no faff to it, no writing somewhere then having to move it to the site, then checking it looks good etc. I just open my site which I've bookmarked on my phone's homepage, hit "create note" and start writing.

And I know myself, right now I think this is great, but the likelihood of me wanting more or wanting less in a couple of week's time is really high. That's why I'm going to make a list of rules in this note that I will try my best to respect, I think that having it written down somewhere will help me feel a little more accountable.

• Keep this site's version for at least 6 months. (So until August)
• I can add or remove features, but the core note taking part has to stay.
• I can't make a full redesign. Little updates to things like type, colors or the backdrop are fine.

A little technical note for those interested: The website is open source. It uses Laravel + Livewire under the hood to handle the editor part but should be perfectly fine without any JS for all readers. The backdrop is made using a few CSS animations that have a duration of 24h and is representing the time that it is currently where I live (In Belgium). An offset is calculated when the page loads and is then injected into the CSS using a custom variable.

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Lately, my algorithms have been feeding me a lot of "chronically offline" content.
You know, this is content where people swap their smartphone for a dumbphone, they delete social media apps, they read books, they use an iPod to listen to music, they practice outside activities, etc.
And like, this is really appealing to me, I love the idea that as a society we are slowly falling out of love with the online world and coming back to the real one.

But I'm afraid that all this talk about it online is going to make us miss the point. Like what if it's just another trend?
I feel like if people are going offline, it shouldn't get posted on social media as much. If you deleted social media apps why would you post on them, right?

And maybe this feeling is because what we are seeing online is only the most exacerbated part of it, and there are probably hundreds of people doing their thing in their little corner of the planet without needing to showcase it to the world.
But I would still like to discuss what a healthier way of being chronically offline might be.

So let's start by the dumbphone/iPod thing. At first, I was so into this, I was looking everywhere on the internet to get a second hand iPod for cheap and considering swapping my iPhone for one of my Grandfather's old phones.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that this was mostly driven by 90s/2000s nostalgia (a time that I didn't even get to really experience myself) and that I was probably much better of keeping my iPhone.
Texts and calls have improved so much since then and that's what I would do if I had a dumbphone, so might as well do it on my iPhone where I can keep sending pictures, links etc.
And I totally agree that texting from a dumbphone looks so much cooler. Like if I saw a young person doing it, I'd think that they're interesting, but it's in no way a practical thing to do.

And for the iPod bit, OMG would I want one. Apple really cooked when they designed that thing, I never had one as a kid nor did anybody in my entourage; but I so wish they did.
But then again it's like, my iPhone can do music superbly well even without streaming services.
iTunes is still a thing and I could also buy music on Bandcamp and many CDs/Vinyls now offer a QR code to download a digital version of the album.
And even if I'm not a fan of the apple music app, there are plenty of alternatives on the App Store.

Now you might be like "Ok sure but what's the fun in that" and I agree with you, it is so much funnier to go back to separate devices for doing things rather than to use the pocket slab.
But I think it's worth considering if you think you can keep it up in the long run. For me the answer is a big no.
For example, I got a cheap but cool camera that takes pictures exactly like I want them to look, and I still am barely using it because I don't think about taking it with me and because it's less practical than my phone.

So for the people like me who are keeping their iPhone, what they do is delete social media apps. And I so agree with this.
Like personally, I haven't had social media apps on my phone in years. I can still go on them on my computer when I want to and tbh I've never really jumped on the TikTok/Reels wagon, short form scares me because it's too addictive.
But I think there is something quite sad about social medias nowadays (and for quite some time already) in that they have all become places to consume content.

We could call that the "YouTubification" of the other platforms, they became places where you go to distract yourself instead of being places you go to keep in touch with your peers.
But I remember when social media was about your friends, and it was a blast! You'd just post whatever you wanted and your friends would leave comments and you'd comment your friends' stuff etc.
Like maybe you remember how cool Snapchat stories were in the beginning, you could just snap a picture of whatever you were doing, slap some text on top and your friends would reply to it.

It's just that I feel like the problem with social medias isn't the social media itself, but rather the fact that there is an algorithm trying to optimise the content you see. I feel that a social media that would ONLY display the stuff you chose to follow that you could only discover organically or through friends (since there would be no algorithm to make you discover things), would be so so great!

I don't know of an app like that that exists rn and the attempts I've seen here and there didn't quite have the reach of an Instagram or Facebook where literally everyone was on it.
But I hope that someone will build a new platform like this, maybe even a paid one like Are.na, where people will just go to interact with their friends.
And like, another thing that is in this same department is making a website. Maybe we'll see a wave of people building their own little place on the internet where they can share stuff. Gotta say I really like blot personally cause I think it's super approachable, you don't even need to learn markdown!

For the other things like reading books, going outside, talking to people IRL etc, I obviously think this is fantastic, ain't nothing more to add.
My issues are only really about this seemingly complete rejection of online life which I think is an awesome thing if done right.

What do you think?

Have a wonderful day, byeeeeeee

And for a few months, I actually stuck to it.
But lately, I've been watching or listening to videos from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep. And for the times when I can't watch videos (like when I'm walking in the street, for example), I will put a podcast or music to occupy the space.

I'm not sure why I went back to this sluggish state when I had been doing so well for a long time, but I think it's because I actually missed watching specific YouTubers and listening to specific podcasts. So I allowed some back into my life and then some more and eventually, it took over.

Which leaves me in a weird situation, because I now know that no YouTube at all is disappointing. There is some content that I actually like and don't want to stop watching, especially since it's only like at most 2 hours per week plus the occasional GeoWizard adventure.
But at the same time, I know that if I let these back in, I won't be able to stop myself, because there is a ton of content that I like, content that I wouldn't miss if I didn't watch it, but that is still nice to watch.
I could try an extension to hide the recommendations, but knowing me, I will probably deactivate it pretty quickly and find an "acceptable" reason why. Worth a try though, I guess.

The other thing that crept back is Spotify. I listen to music (or podcasts, but mostly music) when I'm not watching videos. On the one hand, it's great because I have discovered many new artists lately, but at the same time, I've been feeling more disconnected, irritated when someone is trying to talk to me and I have to remove my AirPods and, overall like my mind can never breathe.
I'd say that the thing that has changed since the last article is that now silence isn't weird anymore. I even enjoy it! But for some reason I always feel this need to listen to something. Plus, I have been questioning my relationship with music lately, but I will talk about it in another note.

Now again, I'm not sure about what the right thing to do is. I definitely don't want to stop listening to music, I enjoy it way too much. But I don't want it to be constant.
Trying to apply time restrictions won't work because I know that I will find "good reasons" to circumvent them.
Maybe something like "you can only listen to music when you do this and that" could work. This has worked for podcasts already, as there are some podcasts that I only listen to when cleaning and others I only listen to when grocery shopping.
Another idea would be to say "You can only listen to music out loud" and not in your AirPods. So that would automatically limit my time, because there are many situations where you can't listen to music out loud.

So where does this leave me? What about the things I said in the previous note about enjoying life without all this?
I guess it's as with all things in life, I need to find balance.

The approach to ditch all music and YouTube was certainly too extreme, but spending my whole days listening to stuff is also too extreme.
Another thing to consider is the fact that I tend to get absorbed by things, both the good and the bad ones.
So when I get to reading a book or programming something, I will just do it for hours upon hours to the point of forgetting to eat. But the same can be said for playing video games and watching videos, which has a much more negative impact.
And I don't know that I should change this, it's just a part of my personality, but I need to learn to put systems in place to prevent it for things that make me rot away.

I don't have a good conclusion yet. Honestly, I think that what would help me would be to have the opinions from a bunch of different people and see how they deal with all this, to try as many options as possible until I find the balance I'm looking for.

For now, I will try to limit Spotify and I will try YouTube "blocking" extensions. If you have any other ideas or want to share your experience, please email me, I'd be grateful to receive it.

I hope you have a great day, bye.

When I talk about techno-solutionism in this post, I mean it in relation towards climate change. Here's a definition to make sure we're all thinking about the same thing when reading this article.

Techno-solutionism is the idea that we will fix the climate crisis by using technology so we don't have to change our way of life.

Now let me preface by saying that I personally don't believe in techno-solutionism and I will develop why in this post. But even if you believe in it, I think you should read-on as my goal is not to judge or critisize but rather to ask questions and I think your answers would be as interesting as anyone else's.

The solutions that are often brought up in techno-solutionist discussions are Carbon Capture, AGI that will find the solutions for us, Geoengineering and Nuclear fusion.
As of now, none of these solutions are a reality. We are seeing progress in each of them, but they still pose many challenges that we are yet so solve.

The question then is, do we want to bet on things that we don't know for sure will ever become a reality? Because, you might strongly believe these will someday exist but you can't prove that they will. It's just a belief.
Personally, I don't want to throw the life of future generations of living beings to a bet.

Now, let's say this works and we actually figure these things out! What tells us that we'll figure them out in time?

Because while we are working on these solutions, the climate crisis is still going on. Living beings are quickly dying and becoming extinct, and even if you don't care about non-human forms of life, humans are dying too.

Are we as a species really willing to let so many other forms of life die for us to keep up with our current way of life?

Are we, the people living in privileged countries willing to keep exploiting other humans for our on profit and well being?

And can we really feel well and happy about how we'll live in a world where we have "fixed" the climate crisis but can still feel all the damages it caused?

Maybe your answer to all of these is yes, and maybe you'd even tell me that it's also possible that we will figure techno-solutions in time.
So let's say you are right about this, let's say that by 2050, we've found solutions that allow us to go to negative carbon emissions!

Then the question is, are you willing to let companies decide of the quality of the air you breathe?
Because since we live in a capitalist society, the companies running carbon capture machines and doing the geoengineering required to keep our current living standards will want to make profit.

They won't do it for the sake of being nice to us, when is the last time you've seen a company just trying to be nice and profit off of it?

Now you could argue that we are already trusting companies for many really important things like electricity or transport of goods. But these aren't vital things.
People used to live without electricity and they would grow their own food, but no one would be able to live without breathable air.

My personal opinion on this is that I am definitely not ok with putting my survival and the survival of future generations in the hands of any company. And don't get me wrong, I would love to keep up the life that I currently have, it's so comfortable. And I so wish that every human going forward would have the same comfort of life that I have. But I simply don't think it is possible.

Maybe you are ok with the idea that only a few living beings will have a great life at the cost of all others, in which case, business as usual is perfectly fine. But I am not.

I believe that it is more than overdue that we start rethinking our future.
I don't want of a future where machines are what is keeping us alive like we are some sort of ill person surviving only because of their ventilator.

Let's use what we know and are sure of to build a new collective imagination. A world where yes, we will have lost a lot of our current comfort at the benefit of more equality, more mutual aid, more connexion to nature and each other, more time to think and dream.
A world where we can wake up every day without being stressed by an imminent wall that we seem to being sprinting towards at great speeds.

Sure, we won't be able to eat McDonalds, order stuff from the other side of the world for only a couple bucks and get it delivered the same day, drive a car to go buy food at the big nearby mall, travel for a few hundred euros/dollars to go virtually anywhere in at most 2 days, change phone as we please, etc

But isn't that worth it for the certainty that we and other livings, will be able to live for millennia to come?

We should stop being trapped in our current vision of the world and I'm hopeful that someday we'll look back on this time period like we are looking back on how they lived in the middle ages.

I would love to hear about you opinion on this subject, even if you disagree. So please feel free to send me a mail so we can discuss this matter further.

Have a nice day :))

There is something appealing about .txt files for me, it's only characters that all look mostly the same, none are bold, none are bigger, none have a background.
Plaintext works everywhere, every computer can render it, it's fast, it's quiet, it's most likely futureproof, it's portable, I love it.

If I could, I would have everything written in plaintext. It's limitations make it predictable. It doesn't have links or blockquotes, it doesn't render code with fancy colors nor does it bolden or italicize text.
I might make an exception for images, but other than that, plaintext is all I want.

But despite it's seemingly perfect simpleness, plaintext has one big flaw for me, it doesn't work quite well on the web.
I mean, sure your browser can most likely natively render it (in a superb way may I had), and most users will be able to read it with not problems. But that's not how accessibility works, you can't accept 'most users'.

Web pages rely on semantics to convey meaning. Users with assistive technology can jump to headings and links, are warned when entering a list and know how many items are in it, etc.
So if you serve them some plaintext, they will only hear a big blob of text being read, with no way to differentiate between different parts of the text.

And for that people have invented markdown. It's still kinda plaintext, but with some light syntax added so that you can transform it into HTML.
This way, your users get all the benefits of HTML and you only had to write some slightly more verbose plaintext.
But generally, markdown doesn't look like plaintext once rendered, titles are bigger, blockquotes are well... quoted, code is rendered in fancy code blocks, lists have a dot in front of them etc.

And that's why I've written a small CSS file that takes nice semantic HTML and makes it look like 'enhanced' plaintext! You still get your links, your quotes and your images, but the overall vibe is plaintext.

It was deliberately inspired by the default style browsers apply to plaintext as well as the ways man files format their text to look legible. (I'm a huge fan of man files, but that's a story for another time).

If you decide to use it for something, don't hesitate to send me a little email ^^ I'll be super pleased to look at what you wrote with it.

My brain is constantly spewing out ideas, be it new pages to make, notes to write, silly songs to sing, stuff to take in pictures or to draw. And yet I only have so much time to fit it all.

And making out priorities is really hard. You have to constantly battle between what you should do, what you could do and what you actually want to do. And sometimes what you want to do is the furthest away from what you should do and then you feel like crap when you do it.
Like when I really want to watch that hour long video but then that's an hour I won't spend creating.

And I feel like creating has been the driving force in my life for a long time, I've always created stuff, whatever it may be. From stories to play with my toys to making cool websites. And there are so many things to create and so many ideas to bring to life that it is always overwhelming to make a choice about what to do.

So I often find refuge in browsing the web, watching series, reading books, etc. All fun but non creative activities; activities that barely ask me to make any choice and where the effort and brain power demanded is minimal.

Maybe the solution would be to choose one thing, only one, and force myself to do that. This means leaving out the other ones, or at least not prioritizing them, but I think that will at least enable me to progress in one area.
And the area I'm most preoccupied by these days is this blog you are reading. So from today onwards, I'm gonna try to block of 30min every morning where all I do is writing. It can be a blog article, or it can be the rest of my journal that I probably wasn't able to finish the previous evening.

We'll see how that goes, I'll keep you posted, bye 👋

Edit: I failed hard! But I'm still trying and struggling with this same idea months later which means there's definitely something to it.

I think this started with Youtube, I've always felt that since there is so much content constantly appearing, I shouldn't look at older videos. And this might be a valid point, because if I had to catch up with every video of every channel I like, I would never find time to watch the newer ones. But the problem is that I set my expiration date really early. Once a video is like a month old, it becomes pretty much unwatchable to me (Unless it's something I REALLY want to watch). And this attitude has grown to most of my internet usage.

I don't think it's a good thing. Stuff shouldn't feel expired (to me) just because it isn't the newest. So a while back, when I was still watching a lot of content on Youtube, (I've been pretty much using no social media for a couple months now, but more about it in another post), I added an addon that removed all dates from the interface. And all a sudden, I was watching older videos with no problem at all, simply because I didn't know they were old.

And this is the same for everywhere on the web, I have a hard time reading old blog posts sometimes. Even if the content is super interesting, a part of me feels like Yeah but this was written in 2005, you ain't got time for this, it's too old. But I try to force myself anyway and I'm getting better at it :))

The thing about dates is that I only feel this way about them on the web, I do read old books or watch old movies/series with no problem.
It's just that there is so much content on the web and we are always being bombarded with so much of it at the same time that my brain has had to find a way to cut through the noise. Maybe if the web was a calmer place, more organized and caring, I'd have a easier time strolling through old stuff[^1].

So this is why there are not dates on my website, because I can't cope with dates and I would feel like my content would be worthless after a couple weeks. If the dates aren't there, they can't rot, or at least, there is nothing reminding me of it.

• [^1]: Though you do get the web you choose to see. It's been way less stressful since cutting down on Youtube, Twitter and the likes and replacing them by reading blogs of people I like and decide to go on by myself, not by an algorithm.

What I call an adventure, is basically living your life like you're in some fun open world video game. You get out of your house with your stuff in your backpack and you start walking in whatever direction. Eventually, you spot something in the distance, or a street you've never gone through or a building entrance you feel like could become a shortcut if it turns out there is also a door on the other side and you go for it. Then on the way, you will most likely spot something else interesting, and that's where things get fun for real. Because you can either bookmark this thing in a corner of your head (or a note on your phone or whatever) or you can switch directions and go for that new thing instead.

Generally, as you go from point of interest to point of interest, you end up in some random place, late and it's time to get home. On your way, you've probably spoken to a bunch of random people, had some type of sugary treat in a shop you didn't know about, picked up a cool rock or seen some nice birds.

I think this is a great way to experience life and to discover more things about the area that you live in. This is especially fun to do in a city (even better if it's one you don't know much) or in the woods. Here are some of my tips for a great adventure:

• PRIVATE often doesn't really mean private. A lot of people are cool with you passing by when you explain what you are doing, and those who aren't ok will generally tell you off once they've checked you didn't steal anything.
• Give yourself an hour by which you should be back home and only walk for half of that time. The other half is used to come back! Trust me, you don't want to be trekking in some random woods 10km away from your home at night with no phone battery and your girlfriend waiting home. That doesn't end well.
• Be prepared for dead ends and going back on your steps a bunch. Not all roads lead to where you want and sometimes you take a wrong turn that leads nowhere and you have to walk half an hour back. That's just how it goes.
• Embrace opportunities and expect people to be nice. Especially in more remote places, people will be wondering what you are doing there and ask you about it. Explain your adventure and sometimes they might give you more stuff or they might even tell you about a new point of interest you should check out. Life is surprisingly like a video game when you live it like one.
• Bring ample amounts of water. It sucks to walk in the sun with nothing to drink and sometimes there is nowhere you can ask to refill your bottle.
• Treat yourself. If you see something you'd like to do or eat/drink and you can afford it, don't hesitate! Go for it and enjoy a nice moment in your adventure. Don't worry about the time, it's ok to have to go back home before you got to where you wanted.
• Everything is a path, you don't have to follow roads, cutting through woods or weird parking lots is fun and rarely that dangerous.
• Any means of transport is fine. If you feel like you live in a city you know like the back of your hand, well first, you don't, and second, you can take a train or a bus or your car to go somewhere else and start your adventure there instead! The adventure might even be getting back home from where the train/bus dropped you using your legs. Buses are also a real cheat code to be able to walk further since they make the "getting home" part much faster and can be found pretty much anywhere.

I hope this text could inspire you to try to go on an adventure as well, it doesn't have to be long, walking for an hour can already take you quite far!

If you do try (or maybe you already do this on a regular basis), I would be pleased to hear about fun stuff that happened during your adventures! You can email me at hello@theoo.dev.

But here's the thing, I live in a flat, on the fourth floor of a somewhat old building that doesn't have an elevator. The corridor is already taken by neighbours' bikes or stuff from the restaurant at the bottom floor and I don't have access to a basement.

Because of that, I do everything by foot. And that is slow (To be fair I walk fast, but a bike would be much faster). And I think that's also what's good about walking. Since it is slow, you have the time to enjoy your surroundings. I'm often stopping to watch dogs play, or bees going from flower to flower. Sometimes people stop you to ask their way around or so you can take a picture of them and their SO. It allows for situations you hadn't planned, like grabbing a coffee on your way because your favourite coffee shop is open late today, or finding a random street and ending up exploring a neighbourhood you didn't know about.
I also often get ideas of stuff to write or sites to code when walking. Unlike on a bike, you don't have to pay as much attention at where you are going and your mind can wander more freely.

Now that I think about it, even if I had a bike, I might not use it. I like walking too much, I'm too used to it. I would find excuses, exactly like I do currently with the tram, "ah 2 minutes to wait, might as well walk there" or "mhh there will be too many people at this time of the day, it's sunny outside". So maybe I don't want a bike after all.

Same goes for things like crossing the road when the light is green. The only reason you don't get run over is because the other person agrees to say that red means stop.

Here's a list of things that I think are reckless but since everybody agrees on the rules, it's mostly fine:

• Combat sports
• Gun/bow ranges or any weapons for that matter
• Going in any means of transport
• Roller coasters
• Anything involving electricity or fire/heat
• Eating food prepared by other humans

• [^1]: Note that there was nothing weird about the lady cutting my hair. She was nice and even offered some fizzy water.

For me the biggest time sink was Youtube, so I cut that off entirely, but I pushed the concept a tiny bit further and drastically reduced my usage of Spotify for music and podcasts. The hard part about this to me was walking outside with nothing in my ears, being forced to listen to cars vroom by, to people shouting at each other, to kids screaming, dogs barking and my own footsteps. I was scared of going outside and having this overwhelming feeling of city noises, but I had to do it anyway. And it went fine, I quickly got used to it, the sounds weren't nice, but I could deal with them. Eventually, a weird thing started to happen, I would try to put music on when walking and it would feel weird. A bit like if I was less aware of what was going on since I couldn't hear much anymore. Scared that people would ask me something and I'd ignore them. My brain had done a 180. I found that it is actually quite nice actually walking outside and earing the sounds of nature, ear the birds chirp, the trees move in the wind, the ducks honking, and my own footsteps, the problem is that a city doesn't have much of that.

By cutting off from my phone, I realised that the city, this environment I was so accustomed to, that I had liked and worshiped for my whole life, was actually crap. That I didn't want to live there anymore. I don't want to wake up to the sounds of motorbikes going by, or people coming back from a night of partying, I want to hear the crickets, the rustling of the grass, the cows from the nearby farmer mooing. I don't want to breathe car exhaust gases, I want to breathe fresh air. I realized that by modifying the soundscape, I was actually protecting myself from an environement I didn't feel comfortable in. These next years might be weird, because I know that I'm not moving out the city any time soon, I'm way too comfortable here. But at the same time, there is this thing in me that only wants to go away. Maybe I'll get used to it again, maybe I'll even start enjoying the true sounds of the city, who knows. I'll try to make an update on this in a while.

Ed is naturally limiting, it can only do one thing, edit a file. No file searching, no scrolling, no infinite undo/redo, no diagnostics or code actions. If you want things like these, you have to do them in your terminal[^1]. If you make a typo while typing a line of code? You can't go back with your arrow keys to fix it, you need to validate the line with the typo and then correct it using a regex. (Or you could rewrite the whole line if that's what you fancy). And these limitations happen because ed assumes you know what you are doing. You don't need to search for files if you know what you want to edit, you don't need ed to tell you you've misspelled a variable name, because you haven't misspelled it. And if you really aren't confident with yourself, you can use external programs to check after you, ed doesn't kow better than you, it can only edit text.

And for many reasons, I love these limitations. For one, ed is fast, it doesn't have a graphical interface, so of course it is quick to load a file. Also I love that ed forces me to be very sure of what I'm about to do, this forces me to think before I act and often produces cleaner code that I don't have to refactor later. Often using external cli programs to do things is faster than whatever implementation my regular editor would have. A great example is for finding a file, instead of using my editor's fuzzy finder, I can simply do a little ed $(fzf), instead of waiting for diagnostics to refresh, I can run php -l my-file.php and find out exactly where that goddamn missing dollar sign is.
Ed forces you to learn your basic unix tools, and eventually you figure out how powerful they are, you become pro at man pages and old stack overflow threads. It also makes you learn a ton about regexes, which in my opinion are one of the most essential and the funniest parts of software development. And ed's regex engine isn't even featurefull, it lacks a ton of modern features like using \U to uppercase a group, but it forces you to get creative with your regexes. Which remember, you can't fail at writing, or you will have to rewrite them fully again and can only undo once.

But despite my love for this mighty editor, I can't really use it, at least not in my day to day work. Because for all it's beautiful quirks and complex simplicity, ed can never beat the speed of modern editors. Because, obviously it is faster to use a search input to find a function name project wide rather than manually use grep, obviously it is faster to fix a typo by clicking next to it and erasing it rather than writing a regex to fix it, obviously it's faster to use a code action to rename something rather than grep for all the places where it's used and manualy navigate to each one[^2]. And in our world, speed is the second thing that matters the most after money. I think that this is pretty sad, I wish our priorities weren't set on economic growth all the time but rather on human happiness growth. I wish it would be alright for me to go slower and use ed, that I wouldn't have to think about rentability and only think about doing good work that is also fun. I'm afraid that us all as humans are heading in the wrong general direction, and none of us seem to know how to stop it. A lot of us don't want to stop what we are doing at all, it gave them a better life than most other humans, and many other people are just not aware or their life is too complex to take the time to think about these things.
Time is our most valuable asset, and we are giving it away without the slightest thought. Giving it away to a job that allows us to eat and have a roof[^3], to social medias, television and other fun but unfulfilling activities, to going places in highly inneficient modes of public transport or in polluting and isolating cars. We should stop doing this[^4], try to live a more sensible life, a life where time and money aren't the two dominating forces.

• [^1]: Which you can call inside of ed using the ! operator.
• [^2]: To be fair to ed there, if the occurences are in the same file, you can edit them all at once.
• [^3]: It is crazy to me that things like these which are in the UDHR aren't being enforced on governments somehow.
• [^4]: Though I admittedly don't have any clue how.

Maybe it's something inherently human, we have always relied on other humans for help, therefore there was never really a need to teach such things, you could always ask someone. Which would also explain why the stuff we are taught in school isn't the useful one but the rest. I couldn't have asked my mom or my neighbour to explain some weird Chemistry concept, they probably wouldn't have had a clue or just a rough idea. Because I don't really need a teacher to tell me how to clean my toilets in the correct way. Yet I can't help but shake the feeling that in a more and more isolated world[^1] we might not be able to rely on other people as much. Having to ask a neighbour for something is a hell of an effort, because I hardly know them, only from crossing in the hallways. Calling my family for help feels like a reach when I haven't seen them in months or barely for a couple hours [^2]. And sure there is internet and AI, and they have gotten me out of many situations before, but as useful as these tools are, it seems to me that they also are the primary cause of the lessening of human interactions.

So what should we do as humans? Should we teach useful life things in school instead of the more work-life/make money stuff we are taught? Should we try to rebuild links with our family, friends and neighbourhood? Maybe live together for longer like they used to do? Take care of one another more?
I'm not sure of any of these though I have a pretty positive opinion on most of them. Maybe I'm wrong as well, and figuring these things out by yourself is not as much of a big deal as I make it out to be. After all, none of these things has ever taken me more than a couple hours to figure out.
I don't know what I really think of all of this, and there are many topics addressed in this text that I would like to revisit later, but I think that for now I'm gonna try to have a more sociable life and talk more to other humans and less to the computer.

• [^1]: At least that's how I feel in my life. More isolated than the people before me, partially by my own fault.
• [^2]: Mostly a me problem this one, but I feel that modern life leaves you with little time to spare for yourself, therefore even less for family. I guess this depends on your values and priorities though.

Since then, they restocked! And I was able to get my hands on one 🙌

Despite this, I still had a thorough look at the website, and I discovered that they have a phone you can use to call the sites from the book!
So what I do now, when I want to take a break but don't want to mindlessly browse Twitter, is dial a random number and visit the site. It almost always leads to a deep rabbit hole and I discover many new cool places on the internet.

One other project I know about that works on a similar principle is the forest. You have a button and it teleports you to a random site somewhere!

If you know of other places like these ones that can be used to explore the small web, I'd be pleased if you can let me know and I will be sure to add them to the list on this page :))

Websites that help you discover other small web websites:

• Internet Phone Book
• The Forest
• Blogroll.org
• Cloud Hiker
• Scour
• Kagi Small web
• Marginalia
• PowRSS

The number one thing I don't have is a colorscheme. My code is black on white with a tiny bit of grey for comments, you might be thinking that this makes it hard to parse code and find what you want, but that's exactly the point. Since my eyes have few visual cues to grab onto, I've been forced to read the code to know what is happening, and that has in turned made me so much better at understanding and reading other people's code quickly. It also feels (to me at least) like my eyes are less strained after a day of working in black and white.

Another thing I don't use is autocomplete, neither the box that appears as you type or inline AI stuff like copilot. I've found that by removing these helpers, I actually had to learn the language I was writing my code in. Learn the order of arguments, the names of functions you only use ever so often, the names of the variables scattered throughout a project, and even namespaces[^2] of the packages installed on the project. Having the completion popup appear all the time was taking me out of my focus to read whatever it had to say and then validate it. Now I just write, without stopping, without breaking the flow. And it is often faster to do it this way rather than parse a list in a popup and select the right one.

I've also stopped using LSPs. This one was a hard choice, because LSPs provide 3 features that I heavily relied on: renaming, go to definition and file outlines. My solution to get rid of those is that I've started using grep or simply, my file finder. For sure it takes more time looking through a package's files to find out where a function is defined, but using ripgrep often makes it much quicker[^3] and I've found that searching manually through code allows you to learn the structure of the packages and over time, you get much better at using them. Another side effect of disabling LSP, is that I don't get squiggly lines when I make a mistake anymore. At first I thought it was gonna be a mess, that I would make so many typos or forget semi-colons and search for them for hours. But my brain quickly adapted, I started making less typos, and always keeping my eye on the back of my cursor to make sure I caught myself writing shit right away. I started double checking my code a lot more, to make sure there was no mistake, which often results in me finding ways to improve the code despite it being correct in the first place. You also become much quicker at finding the typos, your brain knows what common errors you make and searches for these in priority. And finally for the odd times where you can't find it, your language probabbly has some sort of linter you can run on the file that will tell you the problem.

So the only thing I've really kept aside from the ability to write text is a fuzzy finder that can search both file names and file contents[^4]. This is one of the most powerful features of my workflow, because since I don't have LSP to go to definition or other things like that, I use my fuzzy finder to navigate pretty much everywhere. But lately, I've slowly started replacing it with actual ripgrep and fzf in the terminal. When I do that, I also often use bat to preview the files and only jump in nvim when I know exactly what I'm going to modify. Another thing I use is Oil.nvim, it's a file explorer that works like a buffer, meaning you can edit the contents of directories, the names of files etc like if you were writing code. I don't have much to say about this, I just like it and have found it works better than NETRW[^5] for moving files around.

Outside of my editor, I use tmux, a terminal multiplexer which allows me to create many sessions for all the different projects. The terminal I use is Ghostty, it is fast, looks good and that's all I really need from a terminal. For git stuff, I'm a big fan of GitHub Desktop, because its GitHub integrations are on point and it simplifies many hard to remember git commands. My browser of choice is Zen but as I discussed in my blog post about browsers, I'm never really sold or satisfied with the browser I use.

That's it for my coding setup, it might[^6] change in the future, at which point I can write an updated blog post. But for now, I think that this pretty bare bones setup is good for me. It forces me to actually learn the programming languages I use and understand the codebases I work on, the more I code and the more I get a feeling for how code should be written, how to refactor better,... . If I had one change to really recommend from all the above, it would be to disable your autocomplete. I know that in today's coding landscape this is a weird advice with tools like Claude Code or Cursor where AI writes the code for us, but I swear that you will see improvements in your understanding of the code in very little time.

If you have questions, or want to share your coding setup, please feel free to send me an email, I would be pleased to read what you have to say ^^.

• [^1]: A modern version of vim, scripted in lua and with a really active community.
• [^2]: Talking about PHP here, a namespace is this for example Theoo\App\Components. It allows your code to differenciate between two classes with the same name but under different namespaces.
• [^3]: --no-ignore-vcs my beloved ❤️
• [^4]: I'm using Telescope.
• [^5]: Vim's default file explorer.
• [^6]: Will for sure

Hear me out, life is the funniest thing ever, you just have to make it fun. The world around us is full of things that were designed for one purpose, but have so many more hidden ones. See a small fence? Jump over it. Follow pigeons around, yes they are slow, but they might take you to a random fun place. A bus stop pole can quickly become a fireman's pole or just a bar to spin around like you are in some sort of musical. Cartwheels are surprisingly has much fun as an adult as they were as a child. Don't believe me? Try it. Raindrops on the windows are like dozens of races happening at the same time, which one will get to the bottom first? Try to remember graffiti signatures and you'll find them in many different places, sometimes even in different countries. Wear clothes just because you want to, even though it looks awful and even you agree.

The hard part is overcoming people looking at you weirdly, but that's ok, they are just not having as much fun as you are. And from my experience, none of them ever dares to confront you about it anyways, they must just think you are some sort of eccentric. A thing that helped me with this is to think about who I remember I saw today when walking outside. And the answer is pretty much no one, we just don't care about the people we cross path with. We might remember them for 10 minutes but then they go to the empty abyss of useless brain stuff.

So please, next time you go out, put on your coolest pair of shades (yes even if it's not sunny) and have some fun. Just make sure you don't break or make anything dirty cause that's uncool. I would love to hear about how you are making your life fun, so don't hesitate to tell me about it and have a great day!

The feeling of the hairs of the brush scraping on each tooth removing bits of food and undesirable stuff. The frothing of the toothpaste filling up your mouth more and more as you brush. The clean and minty taste that tingles your tongue, nose and eyes.

For me, it's a moment to reflect, a moment spent with myself in front of the bathroom mirror. A moment to prepare myself for the day ahead, to think about what I'm going to do, who I'm going to spend it with, what the weather will be like. It's generally the last moment before the day starts, 3 to 5 minutes after which I'm going to get engulfed in the movements of daily life. Then, it's also a moment to wind down in a way. When after a long day, I'm once again faced with myself. It means "you are soon going to bed", it's a time to think about the day that passed, how it went, who I met, how did I feel, how do I feel?

Teeth brushing is a moment where no one will interrupt you. Because you are not going to walk around creating white sticky stains everywhere, because you are not going to talk and spit all over the other person's face, they wouldn't understand any of your gurgly sounds anyway.

I wonder why I used to hate brushing my teeth.

As a kid, I would do anything to avoid it. The toothpaste was stingy, it took precious time I could have used to play, it meant going to school, or going to bed, two activities my kid self despised heavily. Maybe as a kid, I was simply more in the present moment rather than thinking about what was and what will be. These 2 minutes tops I would spend roughly scratching my teeth were a moment not spent having fun, and what can a moment spent not having fun be worth?

Somehow along the path of my life, I ended up studying web development, and that's when the problems started. Because you see, before that, a browser was just a box with tabs that allowed me to access the internet, nothing more, nothing less. But then it became a tool, and a very important one as well, I wanted it to look good since I would spend most of my days there, but also to be fast and support many features. So at first I downloaded the three main browsers, to be able to test my websites properly, Firefox, Chrome and Safari, and I started to have preferences. Safari was the sleek good looking one[^1], but so many websites would break when they encountered it and the dev tools sucked. Chrome was the web development beast, it didn't look too bad, its dev-tools were fantastic and it supported every feature under the sun, but it was run by Google... yuck. Firefox, was the ugly one, I hate how base Firefox looks, but at least Mozilla foundation felt less bad than Google or Apple and it supported most features with good enough dev-tools. I was torn, constantly switching between the three for different tasks, never feeling at home anywhere and I wanted it to stop. So I started looking online for alternatives, and there were many.

That's when my browser frenzy got started, at some point I had 22 different browsers installed on my computer. There were the minimal ones like Min, the featureful ones like Vivaldi, Opera or Orion, the plethora of privacy focused forks, LibreWolf, Mullvad Browser, Waterfox, Ungoogled chromium, Brave, Throium,... a bunch of Vim inspired ones like Vieb or Qutebrowser. I even tried to use terminal based browsers like Lynx or w3m[^2] but quickly gave up on these. I was never satisfied, always looking for a good balance between privacy, my love for the keyboard and good looks. And that's when a new name started to rise discreetly, Arc.

See, Arc definitely didn't tick the privacy nor the keyboard centric box, but it had such good looks[^3] that I couldn't keep looking away. I had it laying on my computer for about a year, using it on an off, never feeling quite at ease, but then it grew on me. At some point I had accepted that what mattered most to me was the way my browser looked[^4] and the ease with which I could use it to develop websites over the privacy aspect. And so I became a happy Arc user, there was little to complain about, after so many attempts and years of searching, I finally had found a browser that I would stick with in the long run.

But then "The Browser Company" decided to stop working on Arc, and that sucked and this Arc breakup re-ignited my frenetic browser search. The novelty of Arc, with it's thursday updates had been able to keep my mind quiet, always having something new to try, but then I didn't have this safeguard anymore. So I went back to previous browsers I had really liked, Orion, LibreWolf and even Chrome... But the Arc way had poisoned my mind, not being able to open something in glance? No folders? No nice catchy animations absolutely everywhere? These had all become necessary things in my way of interacting with the internet. Fortunately, great folks decided to create Zen. This browser ticks most of these boxes and it is also open source and more private. So I've been using it as my day to day browser for a while, but at the same time I'm still looking around for alternatives. The thing is, now that I'm not blinded by Arc anymore, I realize that I actually don't fancy the sidebar that much. It's alright, but I love the look of top tabs and the usability of them. And of course, Zen team has already said that they don't plan to support top tabs, ever. "The Browser Company"'s new browser, Dia, could have been a great replacement, but even if it ever reaches feature parity with Arc, I still don't trust "The Browser Company" anymore and I hate the AI and the monetary aspect of it.

So here I am, stuck in this browser landscape, with so many choices but none that perfectly fits me. Maybe it's time I accept that nothing will ever be perfect, and to be at peace with using a browser that is more than good enough. To stop losing time switching and setting up different apps over and over again. I think that's a lesson for my life in general, stop wanting to always change things up, and be satisfied by whatever I have as long as it works.

• [^1]: Sadly, apple killed that statement with their liquid glass update 🫠
• [^2]: On which this webpage works really well btw.
• [^3]: Debatable opinion, but as much as I dislike "The Browser Company", their designers do a pretty dang good job.
• [^4]: Again, very debatable, I don't always feel comfortable with this opinion.