nicbou

Yeah it's just the big budget movie with the non-stop marketing. It's everywhere.

My website also gets LLM visitors to URLs that never existed, and in many cases to topics that I have never covered. This means that they use my name to give authenticity to things that I have never said.

There's a difference between giving your neighbors eggs from the chicken you raise, and the local chain hotel including them in their breakfast buffet.

Even if the output is free, you might enjoy the community, the gratitude or other indirect rewards.

What about really good information? Instructions? Guides?

It's one level of abstraction below "enrichment"

I see more simple blogs about the joys of having a blog. It’s still much better than the cottage industry around growth hacking your Substack.

A personal website is whatever you want it to be. Mine is getting more personal with every passing year because I don’t need a job. I want to geek out about stuff. However people’s websites are a product of the society they live in. Them bills gotta get paid.

Spanish Citroen C15 memes are my type of humour

Great writeup, and welcome aboard!

A few things I would add:

- Make it a habit to share other blogs that you love. The IndieWeb relies on word of mouth and human curation. I love "what I enjoyed this month" posts.

- Be lavish in your praise and hearty in your approval. Email your appreciation, initiate conversations. Static sites without user tracking can feel like talking to yourself at times. Reader mail feels awesome.

- Have fun! Personal sites should be personal. Allow yourself to be incomplete, to be whimsical.

- Digital gardens are great. Not everything needs to be a chronological feed. This is your space. Arrange it as you please.

I maintain that a Renault Kangoo is the best car format ever.

Where do you live? I believe that this will make a huge difference. Does the state ensure decent work-life balance and childcare?

Regular 1.5GB updates are nuts, especially when WebOS is so terrible.

How does it improve upon existing blogging platforms? It does not let me access any posts without creating an account. So far, every step seems heavily vibe coded or AI generated.

Account requirement and AI slop are the two exact things I want to avoid in a quiet place.

Tinder for assembling ikea furniture. The service pays for itself by selling assembly services.

Fancy notebooks are cheap enough to treat them like a drainage ditch. My no fucks given notebook is IMO the best Japan has to offer, and it’s just 10 euros. I have had more expensive sandwiches.

Get a good notebook and a good pen, if only because the cost is almost irrelevant. I waste them just like the cheap crap because wasting pages is am essential part pf the creative process.

Midori notebooks have set a higher bar for me. At 10 euros every few months, it is well worth the upgrade. Likewise for pens. They are like 2 euros each.

I just use one notebook for everything. Midori A6. It keeps all my notes and sketches in one sequential set. Learning to waste pages has allowed me to sketch a lot more, which made me a better artist.

There is no system. I use the paper to write things down. Some pages are ugly and others are nice. The cover is full of stickers. There are drafts, coffee stains, doodles, watercolours, to do lists.

The important thing is that I always have this notebook nearby and that I am not afraid to use it. Having two notebooks seems pointless to me, like saving the good china for rare occasions and eating out of paper plates.

It might be worth a heads up, but your writing is excellent and you totally get to ask for payment.

I meet everyone this way. I reach out to people and people reach out to me.

I fully agree. I have experienced the same thing. It was hard not to take it personally, but I have come to accept that people are busy, tired, shy, and sometimes just not organisers of things.

When I feel that way now, I remind myself that to some people, I am the one who does not reciprocate invites, or who rarely has time. I rarely feel anything negative about them; I am just bbusy/tired/shy/not-in-an-organising-mood.

It's not much more of a free market when giant corporations do.

There is a point where the things you took for granted start decaying. Your body, your things, your communities, your relationships. It's only when you start repairing or replacing them that you really value maintenance and the people doing it. As you point out, it's usually done by surprisingly few, surprisingly motivated people, and their work is often underappreciated until they stop doing it.

Maybe we should teach people to maintain something early on, as children, so that they learn to appreciate the work that goes into keeping the wheels turning.

It made me disconnect and live more in the moment after directly threatening my source of income, filling every interaction with spam, accelerating climate change and generally making the future a lot more uncertain.

Offspring: the pupniks

It beats nonstop AI stuff

Note: there is a paywall much later in the post, but even the free part is a wonderful read.

The googly eyes are such a nice touch! Great writeup.

I don't like this. I'm here to do a job for money. This just pressures me to present myself as whimsical and interesting in an HR-friendly way. I feel for the regular dudes who feel like they have to dance for HR people who spend too much time on LinkedIn.

Nice site! I think it will always be there, but the world is noisier and noisier, and it gets hard to hear human voices.

people loved them

There's the thing. AI creates something that looks like quality, especially to an undiscerning audience. It ticks all the boxes of a professionally-made creation: composition, lighting, bokeh and so on. It takes humans a lot of time and practice to get to that level.

The problem is the lack of human intent. A stranger who never met the groom and bride could have created the same thing. It's shallow and impersonal, like a Hallmark card without a note in it.

There will always be creative people, and once we've seen enough AI-generated slop, we will come to value anything that doesn't look like it.

For those missing context: we beat all-time heat records with ~42ºC, and it was quite difficult to manage for 3 days with our current infrastructure.