/reader

1. My first attempt at iOS app development by mgx
2. I Like Your Blog If… by Lou Plummer
3. You’re the One Making This Heavy by prickly oxheart
4. The illusion of knowledge by Vince
5. My BEARy First Anniversary by JCProbably
6. The Strange Rhythm of Loving Books by Yordi

Wat zag ik zoal deze week?

Glitch was altijd die online service die ik te weinig gebruikte maar echt te gek vond. Bij Glitch kreeg je simpelweg de ruimte om je eigen projecten te hosten. Van een eenvoudige about-me pagina tot interactieve browser-games, verzamelingen, test-scripts, noem maar op. De community rondom Glitch was divers, enthousiast, open en positief. Glitch was een typisch gevolg van de online remix-culture uit het begin van deze eeuw. Waar bloggers en artiesten constant elkaars werk overnamen, knipten, plakten en er iets nieuws van maakten En ja, je kreeg de ruimte. Want Glitch houdt op te bestaan. Het moederbedrijf Fastly stopt met de cruciale onderdelen van Glitch, de profielen en het hosten van apps. Voormalig Lead Engineer Keith Kurson schrijft een uitgebreide blogpost over de achtergronden, de community en wat Glitch achterlaat. Met een bittezoet einde.

Glitch was the closest thing we had to the early web’s spirit of “view source” and “anyone can build here.” But let’s be honest: we proved that you can’t build a sustainable platform around helping people create rather than consume—at least not in today’s internet economy.

PS: Check de rest van Keith’s site en glimlach om de hovers bij diverse links. ✨ ✨

Het korte verhaal (of de tokenized koortsdroom van een literaire dataset) Shit’s Gonna Get So Fucking Weird and Terrible doet me enorm denken aan The Day the Internet Woke Up waar ik recent naar linkte, en een ouder project van Robin Sloan, Sentence Gradients. Je leest een dystopische reis waarin de mensheid door zelfingenomenheid en winstmotieven, langzaam en dan ineens onder de controle komt van LLM’s.

None of this will look like a sci-fi apocalypse. It’ll look like another tool being adopted. Another budget adjustment. Another quiet month.
Collapse by a thousand optimizations.

Genoeg gloom and doom, tijd voor het internet dat we willen! met Taking an Internet Walk zou ik 25 leesmappen kunnen vullen, dus zie het als een cadeautje. Je klikt je kwijt in de lijst van boeiende online experimenten, alternatieve zoekmachines, webrings en niche communities. Dit is het internet waar ik verliefd op werd en verliefd op blijf.

Over communities gesproken! Ik wilde het wel, maar schoof het steeds voor me uit. En nu is het juni. Dus is de Indieweb Carnival van mei officieel ten einde. Met het mooie onderwerp Small Web Communities. Ik werd heel blij van Sacha Chua’s “Working on the plumbing in a small web community”, over haar werk om de Emacs community constant te voeden met updates uit diezelfde community en ze samen te vatten. Eerder deze week zat ik met Martijn Aslander in de avondzon, herinneringen op te halen over de Lifehacking community die we ooit startten, hoe ik met de Dutch Bloggies de weblogcommunity een plek wilde geven, en wat nu gebeurt in de Digitale Fitheid community. Het voelt goed om weer samen op te trekken. Zo ben ik maandag 2 juni zijn sidekick bij de Beginnerssessie Obsidian in Utrecht.

Dat was de LinkLeesMap van deze week. Ga naar buiten, de zon schijnt. Maak een wandeling, praat met je buren en bezoek je lokale bibliotheek!

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I really enjoyed this post and agreed with a lot of what Ibrahim said. The simpler history of the web was nice, and it's something I try to maintain with this blog. I'm running Kirby, which is PHP, but does use Vue as well. That's still pretty good by today's standards though.

As I've been learning PHP by doing a course and a few fun little projects, I've thought about building my own, super simple blog in PHP. Problem is, I really enjoy using Kirby.

One final point: I'm not sure jQuery was as great as Ibrahim makes it out to be - I can't speak for the earlier days, but when I used WordPress with jQuery, it was a bloated mess. 🤷🏼‍♂️

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is great, and you're great for using it. ❤️

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But recently I have found myself wondering if I would still have these inner expectations if I was born in some remote village up in some mountain. Where did these expectations come from? Why do I feel like I have to do certain things? Do I continually guilt trip myself because I am a product of a competitive city-state with no natural resources? Sometimes I think about monastics – they spend their entire waking life meditating and doing chores, do they feel bad about themselves for not being creative? Maybe if I was born few hundred years ago I would either be hunting, gathering or performing some hard labour. I wouldn’t have the time or the mind-space to have existential anxieties.

Somehow I just have this inner-belief that I ought to feel alive, though intellectually I would not ask someone without limbs to run a marathon, so why do I keep wanting my deficient brain to feel something it can’t?

It seems I have this deeply ingrained wiring predisposed to unhappiness, unable to appreciate what I have in the present. I keep wanting more, feeling I should be more, when in reality I have already covered an unspeakable distance. I am blind to my own accomplishments, and I feel like I can never meet my own expectations of myself.

I just wish I can accept myself more. I never had this acceptance as a child, and now it has become a lifelong curse. It is as though once we miss the window to feel whole, we would permanently lose the capacity to feel so. This sense of brokenness plagues everything I do, especially at rest.

But isn’t wishing for this self-acceptance a form of an unrealistic self-expectation too?

The strange thing with life and the human psyche is that the more we want something, the more it seems to elude. It may come to us naturally if we stop grasping after it. So many times I have found myself to be strangled by my psyche, only to suddenly break out of it. Things that used to bother me tremendously have lost their power over me over the years.

Inner work is mostly invisible, yet it determines so much of how our lives would unfold. There is nothing to show for it. No measurements, no outward accomplishment. It is not like accumulate badges when we work through our inner battles. I tend to place disproportionate value on what can be seen, but becoming my self is a tedious creative process too. My adhd brain seems to apply to how I view my life, quickly forgetting all the obstacles I’ve worked hard to overcome and instead hyperfocusing on all that I cannot overcome.

Can I design a better system for myself to review periodically so I can appreciate my own long and lonely journey? This is partially why I like to look back at “on this day” entries for my journals because the contrast between my past and present selves reminds me of all the work I have done. I intellectually know that it is not just my creative output that is representative of my life, but the mindset seems deeply ingrained in me.

Perhaps more than creative output, the harder thing to know is where I am as a person. Monastics meditate and do repetitive mundane chores because they prioritise being in harmony with their mind. My inner conflicts come from a misalignment in how I think about my priorities and how I act towards them. It is a form of forgetting I suppose. What I truly want for myself is optimal health which is inclusive of psychological health, yet my automatic default is to judge myself based on my capacity to be creative. Psyches are weird.

I feel like my weekly posts are different from my private morning pages. Somehow writing on a public blog brings out an analytical side of me that may not necessarily exist otherwise. The process of writing this post has once again unwound the tangles in my messed up mind.

Inner expectations can imprison us deeply and infinitely, but if we are lucky enough to ever step out and look at it from a distance, we would be able to see that they are arbitrary and illusory.

Dus, 9 juni 18:00 uur, Seats2Meet Utrecht: WWDC Viewing Party. Gratis toegang, komt allen!

The first thing I noticed is that when the kids are here I always feel like I don't have time to do stuff. But now that they're not here I still feel like I don't have that much time! Sure, I do a bit more stuff, but it doesn't feel drastically different. Perhaps that's just the nature of time, or perhaps I'm using my kid-free time for things I don't really want to do (e.g. work)?

Something else I realized is that this week I've been a lot less irritated. It makes sense, of course, as I am here by myself without anyone or anything to irritate me. I've found this to be especially noticeable in my mornings, where I think I'm extra susceptible to what my kids do, or keep me from doing. It's so easy to get frustrated with them! I hope that now that they come back, and now that I know this about myself, I will be more able to stay grounded in our interactions.

Staying grounded is the goal, as once you swing out of your center then it's much harder to find your way back. On the other hand, hyper-fixating is a trap and will cause the rug to be pulled from under your feet. We'll see how it goes. But having kids is definitely a stressful hobby. Beautiful, but taxing.

...

Yesterday I was showing my niece and nephew a new project I'm working on where I use text-to-speech technologies to create audio versions of my blog posts using my own voice (I'll probably write more about this in a future post). I was curious to know if they felt the artificial voice really sounded like me. They both said it sounded similar, but not quite exactly the same.

My niece said my real voice just sounds so much happier than the TTS one. She said that my voice always sounds happy. It got me wondering that how they see me is probably not the same way as I see myself. Especially with them, I always feel I'm so... Ironic? Lofty? I don't like it, but it's a kind of wall or shield I put up so as to not be my full loving self. Why I do it I have no idea. Perhaps I think it makes me look cooler in their eyes? Embodying such an ironic persona protects me from having them see my failures and weaknesses. Perhaps I'm chasing after their approval in some twisted mind game?

"My voice is always so happy". Maybe they don't perceive my ironic facade, and instead see me as I should see myself? The faults that we want to hide are often the most evident ones after all. Perhaps the only person I'm fooling is myself... I wonder if they can perceive my internal struggle, wanting to be the cool uncle.

I should be more myself with them. In many ways this ties in with what I was talking about above regarding being centered. How we see ourselves definitely affects how we act. Do I see myself as a calm, grounded person? Do I accept my own faults or try to hide them with flaky wax? Do I see myself as loving?

In the moment, it doesn't matter if I aspire to be happy or compassionate, or truthful. What matters is how I think of myself, how I label myself, in the present. That's the thing through which my actions will be filtered before acting on the world itself. How do I see myself? And how can I see myself as I want to be?

A common phrase in spiritual circles is a variation on "you already are perfect" (e.g., Buddha mind or bodhicitta, atman, etc). Everything you have is already here. Everything. How you choose to label it is up to you.

We all have hate and anger, greed, and violence inside of us. But we also have love, happiness, compassion, wonder, awe. I would say we have them in the same measure, and it's only how we choose to label ourselves that changes how much each of these expresses itself.

A person that views themselves as wicked will do wicked things. If a wicked person repents and changes to see themselves as saved, they're bound to become a more considerate and compassionate being. But what happened with all that wickedness? Did it burn out or is it still inside of them? One would say it's the same person after all, no? But, ah, no. The person is a different one, because the core way in which they were labeling themselves has changed.

I think this goes to show just how important it is how we think of ourselves. How, ultimately, that's who we are.

The good thing is that we can choose. We can reflect on how we think, and choose to think differently. It's not all that easy, but it definitely can be done. I myself have experienced substantial shifts in my own idea of myself over the course of my life, and I would bet most other people have as well. What changed? Life is like a river that erodes us into a shape of its own choosing. And as a leaf in a river, we're powerless to resist the currents of life, nor should we. That way only lies resentment, dissatisfaction, and insanity. When reframing our own idea of ourselves, we should roll with the punches so to speak, and embrace the entirety of our lives.

How to do it then? I have no idea. But in my little experience, I know some things that help, and all of them involve getting a bit out of yourself to examine this idea of who you think you are. Psychedelics help, as do meditation and journaling.

I haven't done lots of psychedelics. Only 3 times I can actually say I was blown out of my head. During one of these, I had a strong experience where my mind was clear as the space around your hands, and I could see this thing that I called me, my ego, and all the unbelievable pressures that made it into what it is. I also saw how this me was just another idea. Just an idea. Just a thought floating in my head.

We are just a thought of who we think we are.

Of course, it's easy to say all this and feel holy and whatnot when one is feeling good, when one is high or calm. But the true challenge comes when life doesn't go according to one's plans. How can we maintain these ideas when one is angry, or depressed?

A suggestion I've found useful in these cases is the metaphor of seeing your true self as clear sky, and the anger and depression as dark stormy clouds. You could be in a situation where dark clouds is all you see, from dawn to sunset, but the perfect clear sky is still beyond, still there, waiting. That doesn't make the anger or depression go away, it in fact recognizes it as what it is: just a passing cloud. Eventually it will pass, and the sky will be visible once more.

I think this exercise does something that's really useful for any person struggling with depression or anxiety or what have you: it separates you from identifying with your negative feelings. The moment you feel you are that depression then you're lost. But if you recognize your depression as a cloud, as a passing mood on the perfect clarity of your own self, then you know that the best thing to do is wait for it to blow past, not taking it personally. Not telling yourself "ah I'm such a horrible person because I feel this and this". It's just a mood, a temporary cloud.

Again, this is all easy to say when one is feeling good. I know well that, when in the midst of the cloudy weather, it's really hard to see past it, if not impossible. That's why we should try to reflect and internalize these things when we're feeling well, so they may echo in our heads when we need them. And even if the echo sounds useless (as it often does), it nonetheless offers the opportunity for us not to identify with the clouds. It won't make them go away, but it does kindle the flame of hope.

... ☁ ...

In many religions there's a practice that is basically "repeating the name(s) of God". There's a nice story about this I heard not long ago that I think merits retelling here¹.

One day, an Indian saint was talking to a group of lay-people about the importance of constantly repeating the names of god. Suddenly, a man from the congregation rose up and loudly said

"Why do we have to repeat the names of god? What good will that do? It's just a simple word, it seems silly to expect it will have any effect."

The saint sat still for a moment, and then his face turned to anger and said:

"You're such an idiot for not getting my message. I don't want any imbeciles in my congregation, please go away immediately."

The man was of course taken aback by the harsh reaction, and immediately got angry at having been insulted in such a way.

"Oh yeah? You call yourself a holy man and yet insult me with such vile words?!"

The man rose up and, out of respect for those around him, decided to leave rather than pick a fight with the saint. Fuming, he started to walk towards the door.

As soon as his hand touched the door, the saint called him by name. The man turned, now itching for any excuse to return insults to the man who had wronged him. But as soon as he saw the saint he was surprised and all his feeling of malevolence quickly evaporated, as the saint was now smiling, and his eyes were twinkling as if he had just pulled a particularly funny prank.

"Sit down sit down" said the saint amiably "You ask why repeating the name of god works, and I've just showed you"

The man sat down again, but didn't really understand what the saint meant. Before he could ask for clarification, the saint went on.

"You see, I just showed you the power of what you call simple words. I filled your head with negative words and see how easily you got upset, you couldn't think of anything but hateful things" chuckled the saint.

"Now, imagine what happens if instead you fill your head with the purest love of all, the name of God."

...

I think this is so on point. I'm not a particularly theistic person, but even I can clearly see how this story rings true. Imagine if you were to constantly repeat the word "love" or some other phrase that had especially strong positive connotations for you, and contrast that with the kinds of things we usually tell ourselves: I'm not good enough, I'm not worthy, nobody likes me, I'm not interesting, people don't like me, and on and on and on and on. I know I myself am always critiquing myself. What do these words do to my own mental state? And more importantly, what do they do to this idea of what I think about myself?

I believe that the way life erodes us is by affecting our thoughts, and then our thoughts are the ones that erode our labels. To a firmly positive person, any occurrence in life will be experienced drastically differently than to a firmly negative person. Your mental state is one thing, but the way in which you see yourself will be the way in which you interpret anything that happens to you.

Think happy thoughts. Use them as the antidote for your usual mind processes.

~ 🌥