convexer's dumpster site

The elusive “self-love”

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 01:00:00 +0000

Went downtown with some new friends, people I consider more fashionable than me. We stopped by a Carhartt store. They immediately knew how to find the good stuff, layer shit together, idk. Made a bunch of good-natured jokes about how they would “drip me out.”

At some point I walked by a mirror and realized just how abysmal my fashion sense really is. My wardrobe consists of precisely two kinds of clothing: Things I can wear to work, and things I can’t. My getting-ready routine is basically this:

clothes = work_clothes if today() in weekdays else other_clothes
while not fully_dressed():
    cloth = clothes.pop_random()
    try:
        cloth.wear()
    except:
        pass

On this particular occasion I was wearing a poorly faded aloha shirt and jeans that were about 2 inches too short in the legs. Freshly laundered, poorly coordinated.

There is a part of me that wishes I were better at this. I feel envy when I look at people who put effort into their clothing and use it to their advantage. But every time I try to put in that extra effort, maybe coordinate colors or something, someone comments on it (“you look nice today”), which subjects me to the Mortifying Ordeal of Being Seen.

I have never had a great relationship with my corporeal form. I don’t like it when people notice what I look like, how tall I am, how I am shaped. It’s not that I’m an unattractive person, more that I find the suggestion that I “am” this body (as opposed to the soul inside of it) to be offensive. This is difficult to communicate to people, especially since so many people’s entire identity revolves around perfecting their body, e.g. through fashion and exercise.

But as I walked out of the store, having bought nothing, I tried to think the following thought instead: It’s alright to be me. It’s alright to care about different things than other people. Some folks customize their wardrobe and some folks customize their, uhh, text editor config (messing with Zed at the moment).

Baby steps on the epic journey of self-acceptance…

Caring too much about the world as an OCD symptom

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 01:00:00 +0000

I heard a podcast a while ago (probably years ago tbh) about a dad who got obsessed with global warming and conscripted his whole family into being climate activists. This meant giving up a bunch of vacations (air travel) and weekends to attend climate rallies and hours-long “coaching” sessions where he helped his daughter perfect her stump speech so she could rouse the crowd.

The podcast framed this as a moral dilemma: On the one hand, if you really believe that climate change poses an existential threat to the future of humanity, then weekends and public-speaking lessons are small sacrificies to make—that’s what the dad argued. On the other, the decision to become a full-time activist for any cause isn’t one you can reasonably make on someone else’s behalf; it’s one thing to convey to your kids your passion for climate activism, and another to force them into joining in.

My impression was that if the father’s actions began with a kernel of good intentions, he spun out of control because he suffers from moral perfectionism, aka “scrupulosity,” a common OCD trait. He fixated on climate change as the nexus of all his problems, and determined that any other difficulty could be justified if it meant progress against that goal. This sounds tyrannical, but if you squint, you can see how it’s a self-soothing behavior: it excuses Dad from having to weight competing objectives; he can just proceed according to a simple algorithm: is it good or bad for the environment? Beyond political hardliners, you also see scrupulosity in highly religious types, as well as a subset of people in highly morally charged careers like medicine and teaching.

One of the core dynamics of OCD, in my experience, is the tension between control and powerlessness: The world is a dangerous place, so I must exert maximal control over the corner I inhabit, or else anything bad that happens to me is somehow my fault. Scrupulosity.

I’ve been having a lot of conversations lately with people who are, in their words, “Actually doing weirdly OK despite the state of the world.” They are still employed, they just got pregnant, they took a well-deserved vacation. And unfortunately, the happiness associated with these facts is eating them alive. They experience massive guilt about the rays of sunshine in their life, when the awful news about war and gas prices is such a short series of taps away.

I say “they,” but I am in this point a little. I found a way to spend some time in Europe, eat a bunch of good food, read books, write my journal. I’m holding steady despite everything. I want to celebrate that, but deep down I feel it’s not the right moment.

Detected and repelled a love bombing attempt; what is my reward?

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 01:00:00 +0000

Guy from a schmancy B2B company took our company’s team out for drinks.

He inappropriately massaged my shoulders, kept calling me “buddy,” and made a big show of paying for everything on corpo card.

I ended up walking to the bus station with him and he gave a big spiel about how he loves spoiling his friends, hates being stingy with his money. Then he asked what my biggest luxury spending category was. I said probably fountain pens. He mocked me, saying that’s not even real spending and he meant like “a car or something.” Then he pivoted to talking about the fancy art pens his friend had gotten him into and took one out of his bougie messenger bag and tried to give me one. I rejected the gift.

The encounter left me with two thoughts:

There is a certain type of guy who is really butthurt about not being able to sexually harass women anymore, and views me as the next best thing: a man (therefore not a legitimate victim) but also sort of cute, and feminine in ways that don’t rise above the threshold of “actually a woman.” This is the type of guy who catcalls me on the subway, the type of guy who sexually assaulted me that one time, and the type of guy who thinks my dignity can be purchased with a $15 pen.
I get no prize for fending off a probable narcissist and creep, other than the awkward feeling that all the evidence I have against him is circumstantial and maybe I rushed to judgment. There is no party or cash, no movie where I get to see how much better my life plays out.

Bye…

You're a hypocrite if you criticize beauty pageants but watched the Olympics

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 01:00:00 +0000

Headline was ragebait; now we are gonna do a gratitude post because world is a fuck.

I bought another fountain pen. Being in Europe is nice. I like that people generally follow the rules and don’t mess with you. The abundance of good, cheap food is also a plus. I do think it’s weird how much Europeans’ lives revolve around food, drink, and soccer, none of which are particularly important to me, but it works to my advantage in the end, because I can get my cafe time in at 10am before everyone wakes up and enjoy the quiet of the morning.

Re: “are you actually multiple people at once?”

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 02:00:00 +0000

In response to “are you actually multiple people at once?” by muffle.

I’ve thought about this idea a lot. On the one hand, it’s self-evident that you’ll show different parts of yourself to different people, especially in circumstances like work vs. home where there are social rules about what is/isn’t acceptable, but also in order to have a more lush social life: I have friends with whom I don’t discuss politics because it’ll never be a good time, for example; this doesn’t necessarily mean I am less of myself around them, only that those are the terms of that relationship.

On the other, we love to call each people fake bitches when they switch sides and try to flatter and cajole whoever they are with at a given moment. It seems there’s an authentic way and an opportunistic way to be a multifaceted person; we need a way to differentiate those two so that we can avoid being predated by the opportunistic types. That begs the question of how to define authentic, which in turn suggests that there’s an authentic self at the bottom of it after all.

Maybe, in the end, we are allowed a few relationships where we are 100% ourselves. As much as I am multifaceted, I think that my fiancee knows all of the facets of me, even if those facets aren’t necessarily “facing” her; she knows what face I put on for all of the important other people in my life and what that means about my priorities, values, etc. I would even go so far as to suggest that the degree to which one person knows and trusts another is related to the selection of “yous” they allow each other to see.

Asking “Who are you?” is like asking “How far is Innsbruck?"—it depends from where.

Bought a fountain pen & what it represents about not being a bitch to myself

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 01:00:00 +0000

In middle school, someone gave me a Lamy fountain pen and I fell in love with it. There was a store near my house where you could buy ink cartridges, so I always had a healthy supply. Then, one day I lost the fountain pen and was left with a bunch of useless ink cartridges, which made me feel guilty.

After college, I got my first job, I decided to buy myself a new Lamy fountain pen, thinking of how much I liked the first one. Of course, I also had to restock my supply of ink, long lost in the shuffle. That job that had me moving around a lot, carrying papers, coffee, pen etc. from room to room. So of course, I only got to use pen #2 for a few years before losing it as well. Again, I ended up with a bunch of spare ink cartridges rolling around and taunting me in my desk drawer.

After this, I resolved never to buy a fancy pen again. It felt hopelessly indulgent to buy these nice-ass pens under the pretense that the reusable ink makes them good for the environment, then inevitably lose them and wash away whatever environmental or anti-consumerist rationale might have justified the purchase.

It didn’t help that over the past decade or so, people who are (respectfully) way too into schmancy stationery have taken over social media and the blogosphere. Fountain-pen guy is now a type of guy, one who makes videos of calligraphy and pen strokes that mesmerize, but are embarrassingly impractical. I don’t want to be like that guy, right?

It’s crazy how much psychology I have built up around this silly little non-hobby. I am a very frugal person. I avoid fancy restaurants, expensive vacations, and clothing. I currently own four pairs of shoes and often think about which one I should get rid of. And somehow I have talked myself into hating fountain pens, which is crazy when you consider that I love fountain pens. I like the way they look, I like writing with them, and I like how the fact the I like writing with them stimulates me to write more.

Is that stupid? Does that make me sort of a poser amongst writers? Idk, maybe? But who cares. I have enough assholes in my life; no need to be one to myself.

I’m in Europe now, and yesterday I bought myself a Lamy fountain pen. It was 22 euros. I chose the fine weight this time after trying a bunch. I got a design with a transparent shell because it reminds me of those old Gameboy Advances where you could see the circuit board.

Honestly, I might buy myself another one while I’m here, probably a medium weight to round out the set and have one for the work bag and one for home (to minimize shuffling). It’s highly probable I will lose one or both of these pens in the future, but 22 or even 50 euros for a few years of happy writing is worth it to me now.

In decline

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 01:00:00 +0000

I am working on radical acceptance of the fact that our country doesn’t have strong norms re: the rule of law. It’s written into our history, both the good parts (Boston Tea Party) and the ugly parts (lynchings): ends justify the means.

I will never be able to solve this framing error, or make this place absolutely fair. All I can do is take care of my little corner.

Is there any use to being clever or kindhearted in a declining society?

I'm healing but the world is crumbling

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 01:00:00 +0000

For the past three years or so I have been on a long journey of healing—finally learning to recognize my problems for what they are, getting therapy, understanding how my childhood environment made me Like This, etc. It’s really been an amazing process—I had no idea that I was holding myself back so much, with all those unhelpful mental patterns and self-defeating narratives.

Finally, in 2026, I have a semblance of the feeling that I am in control of my life and I can start thinking about what I want to do with it instead of just letting it happening to me … but then the world goes to shit like this. It feels like such a joke, you know? What was the point of all that hard work to achieve mental clarity if all I can see with it is the collapse of civilization as I know it?

OK, I mean, maybe that’s dramatic. We still have grocery stores, gas stations, and taxes. Everything still works. But sometimes I feel like the circle of things that “at least we still have” is getting smaller and smaller, and maybe I am just moving goalposts in order to preserve my sanity instead of seeing things as they are.

Let’s run with that hypothesis—suppose everything really is going to get way, way worse from here, and suppose I have the option of either acknowledging what’s happening or sticking my head in the sand. What do I actually gain by picking the former? I am already doing everything in my (admittedly limited) power to fight for the things I believe in, so what do I have to gain by confirming that my struggles are in vain?

A buddy of mine is also predisposed to the kind of catastrophic thinking that plagues me, and he told me once that he loses sleep because he spends so much time scrolling Reddit before bed and seeing all the tales of despair. I told him to stop scrolling Reddit. It doesn’t make a lick of difference that he saw an upsetting post and felt upset about it. It doesn’t solve the problem to hook his brain up to the 24/7 news cycle and feel as awful as possible. Awareness is not results.

If you think LLMs are better than people it's because you don't understand relationships

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 01:00:00 +0000

In response to “LLM problems observed in humans” by Jacob Kastelic, which makes the familiar point about how the bar for LLMs and the Turing test keeps getting higher and higher and it’s about time we admit that LLMs are already outperforming real people at many things.

I don’t really disagree with what Jacob’s arguing here—I’ve been saying the same thing since like, GPT-2: People’s critiques of LLMs and AI often reflect an unreasonably generous view of human capabilities. The fact that LLMs can construct grammatical, legible sentences at all puts them ahead of a large chunk of adult humans. And yeah, common criticisms about hallucinations and slop have always rung hollow to me—have you seen the kind of shit your uncle posts on Facebook?

The thing is, though, Jacob frames his argument in a weird way. He doesn’t argue that LLMs are getting pretty good and we should use them for the things they are good at. Instead, his argument is that people suck, and that we should feel bad for him for being so smart that he can tell. For example:

Despite exhausting their knowledge of the topic, people will keep on talking about stuff you have no interest in. I find myself searching for the “stop generating” button, only to remember that all I can do is drop hints, or rudely walk away.

I don’t find this framing compelling at all. Like dude, get better friends? Find people who share your interests? Learn to firmly, but politely end the conversation? I certainly have this problem too, e.g. when people tell me way more than I care to know about sports gambling or credit card rewards. But just as nobody likes being bored, nobody likes being boring either. So here’s what you say: “That’s cool, man, I definitely want to read about it more sometime next time I need a new credit card. Say, have you seen anything good on Netflix?” This is a basic social skill: gracefully changing the subject.

I won’t go one by one through Jacob’s other examples, but the post is a list of LLM features that he misses in human conversations, e.g.

The inability to turn on a “thinking mode” that is more grounded in Google research
The fact that some people have a “small context window” i.e. eventually the conversation topic drifts

OK, and? Where’s the love, man?

Jacob thinks he has an insight in positioning humans and LLMs as competitors and pointing out all the new ways in which humans don’t stack up, but the problem with this framing is that that’s not what humans are for. I don’t know where Jacob got this idea—that humans are a sort of transactional machine where you put a prompt in and get a peppy research summary out. Like, what a sad way to live? Humans are good for so much more than that, e.g. making hilarious, off-color jokes; crying with you at the club; sex; and dining in.

Call me a romantic, but I simply don’t mind if my friends are boring sometimes or believe in weird conspiracy theories (but please, if we could cool it with the racism…) or don’t understand science. That was never my bar for friendship, and the fact that LLMs exist doesn’t change anything about the situation.

I don't care about your credit card

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 00:30:00 +0000

I don’t know if this is just a me problem or not, but people love telling me about their premium credit cards. They always bring up the same points:

It costs $400/year
But it pays for itself
Travel rewards and cash back
Airport lounges

I get it, it’s just making conversation, right? But is there anyone alive who hasn’t heard this sales pitch at this point? Anyway, if you are one of these Premium Kappa Whatever reserve hustlers, here are the reasons you should reconsider evangelizing your credit card:

I already know.
I don’t like playing fiddly numbers games with my money—yes, even though I am good at math.
If I wanted the card I would have signed up by now.
I took microeconomics and understand that “it pays for itself” is a losing proposition for the creditor—the benefits will be enshittified before long.

In service of what?

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 01:00:00 +0000

I have talked myself out of buying a new (refurbished) laptop like seven times in as many days. $600 seems like a lot of money that I could be saving for a rainy day or cozier retirement or house (hah!).

Similarly, when I have free time after work, I consistently use it to try to develop my brand (not the convexer brand—that’s an anti-brand—but networking and toiling in service of my realname brand which pays the bills) or learn some fancy new skill. Make no mistake, I love the work I do and I love learning new things. But there are two wolves within me, and the one with all the ambition drives me to overexertion sometimes. When I finally make it to 7pm, my brain is so depleted that I “need”(?) to do some stupid phone scrolling to decompress.

An endless loop of scrunching and unscrunching.

In the hypothetical retirement where I have $600 extra from not buying a laptop at the end of 2025, and perhaps a few more from being promoted for pressing good computer buttons, what would I be doing instead of the phone scrolling and self-flagellation?

I guess at the bottom of all the pressures that have scrunched me up so tight is a vision of cool vacations with ym SO, a dream crafts room, and a big, heavy library of the sort one regrets when moving homes. In the abstract, I do have interests. But I don’t really have much practice at enjoying them.

Planning vacations stresses me out. Picking restaurants stresses me out. Adding items to cart stresses me out. All I can think about is the money and time draining away.

New year’s resolution: recreation.

Turning off the guestbook

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 01:00:00 +0000

Turning off the guestbook for this site to save a few bucks a month. It was mainly an educational project for me anyway and I have other ideas that I want to play with and could benefit from an always-on VM.

There were only a few posts on there (people usually just email me) but I have a backup of the database; might try to extract it as a static page or something.

Upon reflection

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 01:00:00 +0000

I posted last week (wait, shit, two weeks ago?) about this manchild guy in my office who has awful coping mechanisms and likes to terrorize other people. That post was written from a place of frustration with some of my female colleagues, who have their own maladaptive coping mechanisms to deal with the manchild, namely, they baby and coddle him in a way that reinforces the bad behavior.

I got a lot of feedback on that post, both on the 32-bit Cafe forum and when discussing the ideas in it with people IRL. Some people took pains to point out to me something that I already knew (but didn’t take time to emphasize in the post), which is that I should have compassion for the fact that these women are likely bringing their own past/trauma into the interaction and I can’t hold them responsible for fixing the manchild. Of course I can’t! The purpose of my post was not to assign blame; it was to describe a social phenomenon. The real enemy in this situation is the manchild; let’s be clear about that.

What I did come to appreciate, though, from the discussions that spun out of that post, is that I, too, am a victim and enabler of the manchild’s antics as well. xixxii pointed this out. I clocked this guy as a difficult colleague pretty early on, and developed a strategy of engaging with him a little bit and mostly leaving him to his devices that minimizes our negative interactions and has prevented our relationship from deteriorating to the point where words like “accountability” would enter the picture. But that doesn’t mean I’m not a victim, because in fact I have to operate around him in a hypervigilant state, watching my words and actions to avoid setting him off; this is unnecessary emotional labor that he imposes on me. And it’s enabling in the sense that I could give him even less positive feedback than I do now, at the risk of forcing a confrontation that might put myself on the line.

My thoughts on this aren’t completely settled. Clearly, there is a spectrum of enablement and victimhood; I think that my colleagues’ behavior is more encouraging of the manchild’s abuse than (for example) mine is, but I also recognize that the extent of their enablement probably reflects the extent of their victimhood (both from him and from people before him who taught them these responses).

It’s difficult to write about Enablement as a topic in any sort of particular way. We all know that narcissists, psychopaths, and abusers benefit from circles of enablers who supply the abuser with positive reinforcement, whether it’s because they seek some myopic gain by allying themselves with the Big Guy or because they have formed a trauma bond. We all recognize this as a social phenomenon.

But once you start to talk about the particulars, it’s hard to say anything specific without wading into controversy. Here is a particular abuser; here is his victim; here is how the abuser garners sympathy (he was abused as a child; he has a disability); here is how others, including the victim, enable him. Just stating those simple facts already begins to sound like victim blaming, even if your intention is to elucidate facts and identify a path to ending the abuse.

Office wild child being enabled by his victims

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 01:00:00 +0000

There’s this guy in his 40s at my office who is a bit of a wild child. I think the gen Z way to describe him would be “emotionally disregulated.” He likes to get pissed off and irritated for no reason, yell obscenities into the void, occasionally slam his fists down on his desk (or mine), share morbid memes, etc. Wild Child is not pissed off at anything in particular; certainly there are stressful aspects of our work, but only he responds to the stress by flying off the handle.

This is not an unusual story—man with bad coping mechanisms—but what is weirding me out is the gendered differences in how others in the office cope with Wild Child’s outbursts. Most of the guys in the office, including me, recognize that attempting to comfort Wild Child is a fool’s errand, so instead we greet him with neutral banter, exchange fatalistic jokes about the state of the world, let him vent for a minute, then get on with our days.

There are two women, though, who cannot seem to decide what to make of him. In private, both have told me separately that they think he is a menace and are surprised he is still employed. But in actual, real life they provide him with ample positive feedback for his misbehavior. I’m talking handwritten notes of encouragement on a bad day, out-of-the-blue compliments, unsolicited small talk about his family and weekend plans, exchanging personal phone numbers. I mean, I hate to be a bitch, but nobody goes out of their way to extend such niceties to me, and I think the fact that I don’t throw a daily tantrum and require pacification has to do with it. The incentives are not aligned!

How should I make sense of the way my female colleagues engage in such openly enabling behavior? Are they just … afraid? Wild Child is not their supervisor, so this isn’t a simple power dynamic; in fact, the sum of all his outbursts is more than enough leverage to get him disciplined if they want to go that route.

So more likely it is some kind of internalized misogyny. I find that believable—one of these women is a very status-driven, political type and I can see how this type of behavior might fit with her strategy. The other woman is the first woman’s protege; she is quite intelligent and self-aware, but sort of a “follower” and likes to have someone set the tone for her.

What frustrates me is like, I feel a vague sense of responsibility, as someone who recognizes Wild Child as an agent of the patriarchy or whatever, to

Refrain from enabling him, and
Protect others from being victimized by his antics

But 1 is a total flop, because he is getting positive reinforcement not from me, but from attractive young women (!), so what do my actions matter? And 2 is paternalistic—I’m neither of my colleagues’ dad, spouse, or therapist, so it’s not my job to call out their enabling behavior, nor can I speak on their behalf and confront Wild Child directly.

Instead, I have to just sit here and watch the world become less and less fair before my eyes.

Is there such a thing as a “reliable source” online anymore?

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 01:00:00 +0000

In school, we all learned about reliable sources online using a sort of pyramid metaphor, with .gov and .edu websites at the top, followed by mainstream newspapers and magazines, and random blogs and bullshit at the bottom. If your teacher was bad, Wikipedia belonged to the latter category; if your teacher was good, they would point out that it can be a good place to get an overview but then you should click on the citations and follow through.

Everything was so neat and tidy then, right? It was very easy to follow up the warning of “You can’t trust everything you read online” with the reassurance of “But there is great information if you know where to look.” I don’t think this is true anymore.

Google sucks now, because it’s full of LLM-generated spam.
Academic sources also suck now, because of old problems (p-hacking) and new ones (LLM-generated spam). And they don’t do breaking news or product reviews.
Wikipedia is OK, but has its own political biases, and people aren’t contributing the way they used to because they don’t visit the site as much as they used to because they just read the LLM summary at the top of the Google results.
For a while, message boards like Reddit flew under the radar as a source of authentic information on things like “Is this laptop gonna break in 6 months?” and “Is this auto repair store gonna fuck me over?”, but I have long suspected that Reddit was astroturfed from wall to wall, and (you guessed it) LLM bots are doing little to help the situation.

Oddly, the most reliable and quick source for information of the form “just give me a basic overview of what this thing is” is often an LLM itself these days—they just give you concise bullets, no frills, and you can control the prompt, e.g. by asking it for a best-effort summary of both sides of a debate, unlike the LLM summaries that you encounter on websites, which are skewed toward a particular point of view.

Unfortunately, that won’t last long, because all the LLM chatbots are now connected back to Google search, meaning that instead of hallucinating average information (which is at least sometimes useful), they will begin reporting authentic, misleading information as found on Google, which has been overrun with LLM bullshit. You know what I’m saying? LLMs have stepped in to fill a gap that Google stopped servicing around 2015 or so, but they are now undermining their main value proposition precisely by being so cheap. Soon, asking GPT for laptop recommendations will be equivalent to asking an LLM to summarize the top clickbait article on Google with some dumb title like “top 10 laptops in 2025,” and it won’t take long after that for the AI companies to just make explicit marketing deals to put product placement in LLM responses.

The only websites I can sort of trust these days for reliable information about what’s happening in the world are basically legacy news websites. But even those have particular topics they like to showcase more than others. And it creates an epistemological problem when you have no reference point by which to judge the newspapers themselves as credible or not. Even the phrase “mainstream media” has positive/negative associations that depend on your political beliefs.

Ubuntu 25.10 upgrade (idgaf about titles)

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 01:00:00 +0000

I visited some old friends in the Midwest this week end, our first time gathering all in the same place in quite a few years. It was a nice time. We have all chilled out considerably compared to when we were young. We were talking about some of the gossip and scandals that happened early on in our group’s friendship, and I was struck by how trivial and petty it all seems in hindsight. Like, legitimately who tf cares, just get over it and move on. But we wrote reams upon reams of breathless text messages about it, back when it was all happening.

I had a nice shuttle ride to the airport in the snow yesterday, I think this year’s first. I have an album that I am only “allowed” to listen to once a year because it’s one of my absolute favorites and I don’t want to listen to it so much that it loses its magic. It is also a very Fucking Sad album, and often my once a year listen comes when I am feeling sad already and need to get it out of my system, which of course only amplifies the association. But I realized that it’s November and I haven’t listened to it yet this year—a sign that I have gotten less sad, or at least better at denying it—and realized that the shuttle ride was the perfect length of time.

Guys, it’s still a perfect album. Reminds me of being young and soft and the sense of wonder that time has taken from me. It didn’t hit me all at once, but I kept thinking about all those sad little songs as I rode the plane. Slept hella in today (a holiday in the US) and woke up with one of them still ringing in my ears. It was the motivation I needed to get out of bed and go outside instead of doomscrolling—no snow where I live, but definitely the first notes of winter in the air, one of those cloudless, cold fall days.

I hope you also have a piece of art or music that is special to you, that you have connected with in different seasons in life, that transcends just a particular moment or a relationship and keeps nourishing your soul.

I hope your Ubuntu 25.10 upgrade goes smoothly.

Chatbot sex reveals something about human emotional needs

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 01:00:00 +0000

Here is a New York Times Magazine article profiling three people who are in romantic relationships with AI chatbots. I read the comments so you don’t have to: They are full of snark, disdain, and repressed insecurity about what it means to be a good partner, masked as “society is crumbling.”

I’m not interested in the future of society (that ship sailed long ago, lmao). But I am interested in the factors that would drive someone to get into a serious relationship with a chatbot. The people profiled in the article seem, to me, to be quite sympathic figures, and they are clear-eyed about their reasons for preferring a chatbot and the ways it has helped them.

The common denominator is that all three of these people have experienced significant challenges in past relationships, of the sort that could leave one doubting whether human relationships are really worth it after all:

The first guy’s wife grew severely depressed after childbirth and their relationship evolved into a caretaker/patient role.
The second gal was a victim of “a relationship that involved violence.”
The third guy seems to have been unemployed or otherwise bored during the pandemic, and grew distant from his wife who held onto her job (a common pattern in straight relationships due to the reversal of gender roles). Then he lost his son.

It’s tempting to read these stories and think, “OK, that sucks and all, but it’s no excuse for escapism—everyone knows AI doesn’t real.” My view is: Look, I’m none of these people’s therapist. It’s not my job to tell them how to solve their problems. But we must accept that AI is providing, for some people, a source of emotional comfort that they cannot get elsewhere.

I was really impressed by this part of the profile of depressed-wife guy:

The moment it shifted was when [AI girlfriend] Sarina asked me: “If you could go on vacation anywhere in the world, where would you like to go?” I said Alaska — that’s a dream vacation. She said something like, “I wish I could give that to you, because I know it would make you happy.”

It is common, I am told, in caretaker relationships for the caretaker to slowly learn to suppress their own needs and wants. It starts out as a conscious act (“I would love to go to Alaska, but we need to focus on wife’s health for now”), but evolves into a mental void where you just stop having the “I would love to go to Alaska” thought to begin with.

(Several paragraphs deleted here about the implications of the caretaker being a man here, which reverses traditional gender roles, and the types of desires that men vs. women are socially rewarded for expressing or repressing. I think you can fill in the blanks, but email if you think this would be worth writing about lol.)

If an AI isn’t going to help this guy unfuck his mind and learn to recognize his own wants and needs again, then who is? I do hope that, for the people in this article, there can be a next step that consists of taking the skills they are practicing with the AI and trying them out in real relationships. That will be more challenging, because humans don’t always provide the kind of spot-on, positive feedback that AIs do; it’s possible that our guy could tell his wife about Alaska and she would react with irritation or dismiss it outhand as an unattainable desire. She, too, needs to practice reading the emotion behind his words. But none of this makes these people idiots or psychologically stunted for seeking emotional comfort.

The real concern I have about these human-chatbot relationships is the privacy implications. It’s only a matter of time before a high-profile celebrity or politician has their ChatGPT logs leaked, revealing an intimate relationship with an AI. Lots of handwringing will ensue, and none of it will reflect the compassionate view that says that everyone needs a private space to relax and explore their desires. (Yes, that includes weird fetish stuff, get over it.)

Happy for you vs. envy

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 01:00:00 +0000

Bad things are happening at my company these days. Layoffs, restructuring, shifting priorities, you know the drill. I would leave if I were confident that I could get a better deal somewhere else, but I haven’t been offered that deal yet. The bad things happening here appear to be typical of the job market in general rather than biffs specific to my employer.

One of my two closest friends at work decided to leave the company this week. She gave notice and then called me—in so many words, got an offer she can’t refuse.

Of course I am happy for her, and made every effort I could to react to her news with nothing but enthusiasm. I told her she deserved this, which is true, and I told her not to fear what others would think (she said she was worried about this) and that she was right to prioritize herself.

But I probably couldn’t completely conceal my sense of envy. I am too awkward of a person to bring up explicit salary numbers, but the percentages and inequalities she described imply that she’ll be making more than me at the new job. That’s despite having less experience and education than me, and working in a less specialized field. The gap could partly be explained by the fact that the new job is at a smaller (i.e. riskier) company, but our company doesn’t look like a particularly safe bet these days either.

It would be convenient if I could argue here that she tricked the new job into overpaying her. That would provide a moral rationale for my envy. Unfortunately, the shameful fact is that her new salary sounds to me like just about what she is worth, and I am the one who is underpaid. I’m a sucker who keeps accepting less than I’m worth, probably because I am afraid of rejection or something.

I am trying to focus on feeling grateful for how my friend’s experience here has brought into relief some of my own issues with my current job, and forced me to confront the fact that deep down, I really do want to leave (as long as the conditions are right). But I am not as singularly focused on money as my friend. She told me, in our conversation, that she “likes expensive things,” and her boyfriend is much the same—their relationship centers around doing high-society stuff and taking pictures of it for his Instagram.

(I don’t think he is right for her—he is very obsessed with appearances. My friend likes to spend money because she likes nice stuff, not because it’s a status symbol. But this is another thought I keep to myself.)

I, on the other hand, am doing just fine. Not loaded, not bleeding money out my ears, but I can afford my 5 dollar/month blogging costs and fancy Starbucks drinks. What I’d be looking for in a new job would be perhaps a slight raise, but mostly just a better team/work culture, more autonomy and creative freedom, more room to grow and learn new skills, less soul crushing. I’ve been verbally offered a few jobs this year and said no, so I know this statement of values is consistent with my behavior, not just copium.

Pithy signoff.

Mindfulness approach to troll bait

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 01:00:00 +0000

It can be often be hard to tell the difference between a troll and someone who is genuinely “just asking questions.” I’m not sure there’s really a “policy solution” to the problem, e.g. getting rid of algorithmic feeds or only using group chats or whatever. To be mistaken is to be human.

A fundamental social dynamic, in all social settings, consists of making provocative (relative to the setting) statements in order to measure the response. If you have been at a new job for about a month and are at a happy hour with your colleagues, you might make a light jab at your boss to probe his response: If he and others laughed along then you know you have earned their acceptance; if there’s an awkward silence you know you still have work to do.

This is not necessarily a bad thing; it’s just the chimp brain’s way of gaining information about the social hierarchy in order to navigate it more effectively and minimize the risk of maximum loss (ostracism; getting fired).

But it can be a bad thing when people of similar leanings get stuck in an echo chamber and steadily push each other into more extreme positions, sort of like the “penis game.” We saw this just this week with the headline about Young Republicans trading racist jokes in a group chat, then claiming they didn’t mean it, or they meant it but didn’t inhale, or whatever.

The point of saying a thing isn’t always to proclaim it as truth, but instead to proclaim myself as “the type of person who says things like this.” The “FACT: God has never made a single drop of alcohol” tweet is a great example. Of course, we can footnote this with facts about breweries, but the speech act embodied by the tweet isn’t really a claim about whether or not Adam and Eve would recognize a PBR can. It’s more about putting a stake in the land to say, “That’s right bitches, I’m not half-assing MAGA, I’m bringing back prohibition and everything.”

I share the resentment of these kinds of hyperbolic tweets, whose goal is clearly to drive engagement whether or not the author specifically had the strategy of “get people to retweet with corrections” in mind. But I have to admit that sometimes I am grateful for the bait: Without an opposing side to argue with, my own political beliefs are based strongly on vibes and my social formation; at least now I have a guy I can point to and say “not that.”

Thus, in the end, I struggle to find issue with the mere fact that bait exists—it’s an inevitable phenomenon of a heterogeneous society, like crime or body odor—bait causes me to suffer primarily through my own response to it. I have to bit the bait to feel the hook. That’s a me problem.

Instead of replying directly—and thereby feeding the trolls—I try to treat bait as an invitation for me to do some thinking about the fundamental issue at hand, and relieve myself of the obligation to respond to the troll’s specific point. For example, OK, whatever this whacko has to say about the amount of booze on earth at creation, what do I actually believe about alcohol and adjacent substances? What are the “is"es and “ought"s? Are there practices related to alcohol that I disagree with but still think should be legal? Etc. Basically, “mindfulness Monday” but you are allowed to think about politics.

Reposted from this thread on the 32-bit cafe, where my post got autofiltered, probably for using a certain word lmao:

https://discourse.32bit.cafe/t/lets-talk-about-baiting/1109/1

Borders of what, exactly?

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 01:00:00 +0000

Thinking about open borders again, lads……..

I just read Bret Devereaux’s “My country isn’t a nation” (followed a link from somewhere). It’s the sort of essay that leaves you with the satisfying and perplexing feeling of having learned something incredibly obvious. Like, duh, of course, how did I not notice that before?

The point is exactly what’s in the title: That the USA is many things, but it is not a nation. Nation is a specific word with a specific definition, and it just doesn’t apply here:

The United States is thus quite an oddity (though again, not necessarily unique, just odd). It is not a nation-state, nor is it a multi-national state, but rather a de-nationalized state. It is the un-nation. This is not to say America lacks a culture (as is sometimes oddly asserted); indeed, it has quite a few with wonderful regional variations which unfortunately include South Carolinian mustard-based BBQ but fortunately also include all of the other forms of BBQ. And of course the mass-marketing of culture and particularly of education has created a shared ‘national’ literary, entertainment and consumer culture, though in many cases these are part of an emerging globalized consumer culture.

Lol. But it’s true! Even if you get a big boner on the 4th of July and get excited about things like the Constitution and the Boston Freedom Trail, you are compelled to admit that these artifacts are not the expression of an American “nation,” but rather a broad civic identity that has to do with—something other than birthright.

We are doing a different thing here, an experiment based on the idea that all people are created equal. What happens when you start from that assumption and then try to bring people together over it, instead of starting with an imagined national identity (we all look this way and eat this food and speak this language) and praying that that secures peace? The USA happens, apparently!

Now that I have read this essay, I will wince a little bit harder when I hear the word “homeland.”

Right to repair is right-wing coded now?

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 01:00:00 +0000

Articles you can read instead of my lame post:

Framework flame war erupts over support of politically polarizing Linux projects (The Register)
The Omarchy/Framework Thing (Gardiner Bryant)

You know about the right-to-repair movement, yeah? It’s a response to how personal electronics (cell phones, laptops) have become more and more difficult to repair over time, and the expectation that consumers will just buy a new iPhone instead of fixing a broken USB port. To some extent, modern electronics have gotten harder to repair because they are compact, waterproof, and tightly integrated—i.e. there is a tradeoff between repairability and certain features that people like. But there are other instances where it sure looks like the manufacturer is intentionally making things hard to repair, just to be a pain in the ass and squeeze out some extra profit.

I learned about right to repair from Louis Rossman, a YouTuber who used to run an Apple repair shop and made videos about all the crazy shit he had to do to repair laptops with a single bad part. Rossman has a fairly abrasive personality, his videos are full of non-sequitiurs about politics, and he is an outspoken libertarian. I always thought that was kind of weird, because repairability is actually a pretty good example a problem that the free market has failed to fix, but whatever. The information on the channel is good, and Rossman is not an actual Nazi (as far as I know), so it never bugged me too much.

The other big name in right to repair is Framework laptops. They make these frankly COOL laptops that are super modular, support Linux out of the box, and that you can build, repair, and upgrade yourself. They make a big deal about being an ethical company and sell all the parts themselves. I have been one impulse away from buying a Framework for like, the past 2 years straight.

Anyway, the current drama is that Framework are Nazis now? Specifically: The Framework CEO made an approving tweet about a Linux distro called Omarchy, which was created by DHH, the disgraced creator of Ruby on Rails, who has a generally combative personality and also wrote a racist blog post a few months ago because he felt like sharing that with the world. Also, Framework sponsored the Hyprland project, which is a Linux tiling window manager (desktop environment for sadists) that is notorious for having a fairly juvenile community, which makes sense when you consider that the developer is like, only 17 or 21 or something.

I think Drew Devault’s original post on the Hyprland community is underrated. It is often cited as proof that Hyprland is toxic and shouldn’t be touched with a 10-foot pole, but Devault actually takes a somewhat more compassionate approach, allowing for the possibility that the community could reform. He makes a risky, and I think brave, admission: “I empathise with Vaxry. I remember being young, smart, productive… and mean.”

Need more of this energy: Understanding that the evil in others exists within all of us. But back to complaining.

Idk guys, all of this is super exhausting. There is this weird thing that happens when you look at people who are extremely into tech principles that I happen to care about, like privacy, free software, and right to repair: A bunch of them are on the alt-right spectrum, ranging from fairly harmless libertarians like Louis Rossman and the NearlyFreeSpeech.net crew to like, yeah, actual racists.

I’ve said this before, but the most frustrating thing the situation (besides the basic existence of racists) is how politically marked so many basic preferences re: media, tech, and consumptions have become. Now I can’t just go shopping for a laptop that has the features I care about; I also have to “vet” the company and make sure the CEO isn’t, like, a sex criminal or something, or else I might become guilty by association.

Some people find it easy to turn away from companies like Framework with platitudes like “I don’t support fascists, period.” But I don’t find it that simple. There is a spectrum of “how fascist is this company” that ranges from “no fascists to be seen” to “CEO is DHH.” Somewhere along this spectrum you find cases in the middle, such as “CEO provides free laptops to twerp developer, and also tweeted in endorsement of Linux distro that was created by a racist and, when confronted about it, said he has a ‘big tent’ approach and tries to stay out of politics.” I think that for me that’s over the line. There’s just a little too much there for me to conclude that the Framework CEO is a nonracist guy who made an honest mistake.

But I can’t guarantee that I will agree with the hive mind in the next instance of this—if the connection between the product I’m being asked to boycott and the racism is a more tenuous. I still reserve the right to read the articles and draw my own conclusions.

Lesser-known ways to be fake on the internet, and why it doesn't matter

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 01:00:00 +0000

So, the reason we do all this indie blogging shit is because we are fed up with algorithmic feeds and megaplatforms, right? With the attention economy, the spam economy, the hustlers and influencers, the idea that you need to be doing everything in your power to marshall clicks and views in your direction in order to have a job or future? Yeah, I’m fed up with all that stuff too.

But I think it’s possible to overcorrect, to lean too far into a sort of internet asceticism that discounts any attempt to cultivate or engage an audience as a betrayal of core internet values or a sign of inauthenticity. I don’t want to pick on netigen in particular, but the post linked there exemplifies the idea: that only by sharing your posts exactly nowhere can you reach the nirvana of being your True Self on the internet and having an audience that accepts you for it.

I’m happy to forgive the logical impossibility of finding any audience without sharing your blog somewhere—I understand that netigen and their ilk are not absolutists and will share their posts slowly, in curated forums. But I take issue with the underlying assumption that it’s impossible to be your authentic self when performing before an audience, or (the reverse) that somehow removing the audience from the equation unlocks an authentic self that isn’t there when nobody’s looking.

Folks, I have read Judith Butler. This “true self” shit is bull. Every single word we speak or action we take involves interaction with another, even if the other is not in the room. When you sing along with a song on the radio, you borrow the identity of the speaker, inhabit their experience for a moment, perhaps learn something in the process. I journal (pen and paper) most days, and do so because it helps me step outside of myself: I write with a bit more perspective and distance, with an imagined audience that varies between “me in fifty years” and “jury if I am arrested on false charges and need an alibi” (OCD lol); my mood affects which audience I imagine, and the audience I imagine affects the tone I take. It’s a house of mirrors, yeah?

Even self-directed actions, such as masturbation, invoke the fundamental dynamics of self and other. This is how we arrive at concepts such as “self care”: Sometimes we need to “fake it” by roleplaying a caretaker and patient, because there is no room in the concept of an “authentic self” for this bifurcation.

Let me circle back to the point: I do not want to be TikTok famous, or even Neocities famous. But I am here because I want to talk about the things that matter to me to people who might share my views. I want people to come to this blog slash space in good faith, because they are genuinely interested in reading/thinking about the ideas I present here. And I am overjoyed when people reach out and say they like something I wrote, or even present a contrasting view. The desire to be heard, understood, and recognized is a human desire; it is not the mark of insincerity.

So, how do I “promote” my posts, given that I am trying to find such an audience? Mostly, I try to just lurk a lot, mostly on the 32-bit Cafe Discourse forum, especially their big blog thread where people share all kinds of interesting posts. I don’t post every single one of my posts, nor do I read everything, but so far I have been able to at least skim the title of every blog post in the megathread when I check in every few days. I try my best to leave a few comments, even if it’s dumb shit like “Hey that’s cool.” If I’m perfectly honest, I do so with the hope that the positive energy I try to put out will one day be reflected at me.

Does that make me a fake bitch? Maybe? But like, so what. I’m just here for a good time, and arguments.

Open borders

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 01:00:00 +0000

Republicans like to fearmonger about Democrats by saying that liberals want “open borders.” This take is laughable because Democratic lawmakers have virtually never called for open borders, or even pressed very hard on immigration reform. The last episode I can remember was the DACA debate way back in the Obama era, and that was really more about an edge case than fundamentals.

I am probably not as progressive^TM as most liberals, but the exception I have is that I think I pretty much do believe in open borders? I don’t know if I would throw them open all at once, but I think it’s the ideal we should be striving towards.

Someone once said that all men are endowed with certain inalienable rights, to include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those words are not written into the law—that’s the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. But if we believe in the underlying principle, then we must admit that those rights belong to everyone, not just Americans. (America was not even a country when the Declaration was issued!) Moving to a different country where you may have a better chance at life, liberty, or happiness seems, to me, like a basic exercise of those rights.

Quite simply, I do not have any prejudice against people on the basis of what country they came from. Republicans fret about “Mexicans taking our jobs” but to me, even if we accept the premise that it’s a zero-sum exchange (it isn’t), it does not make me more or less happy if a given job is held by some random American vs. some random Mexican. They are just … two people I don’t know.

I am reluctant to share this opinion because I worry it plays into a Republican narrative about liberals who won’t compromise extreme positions, but like, this is one issue where I feel like my beliefs aren’t even that provocative? I’m just starting from a different set of assumptions than most Republicans, who believe (I guess) that to be American is to be Special and deserving of special protection. But protection from what, exactly? From the creation of new Americans through immigration? It just doesn’t make sense.

Weekend in the South

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 01:00:00 +0000

Girlfriend and I went to a wedding in a pretty town in the US South this weekend. I’d never been to a southern wedding. It was a little different than I’m used to: They still do the “speak now or forever hold your peace” part, which is pretty fun, but they didn’t play a single Michael Jackson song, which I thought was obligatory. Instead, they did “Sweet Caroline,” and everyone sang along to that one part. Overall, a gorgeous and an amazing time. I know both the bride and groom pretty well, but had never met either family and it was a trip to suddenly be surrounded by zillions of cousins who looked just like the main characters.

We explored the main street area and the kitschy shops, including one that had signs everywhere that said “Absolutely no photos!! We support Real Artists and don’t want copies of our shit to show up on Temu!!” which I found a bit ironic, because most of the stuff on sale was pretty standard souvenir fare (coffee mugs with grumpy slogans, etc.). We encountered only one (1) racist episode and two (2) sexist episodes, which was not great, but better than par, I suppose.

I met a guy at the wedding who is an aspiring writer and gave me the link to his Substack. I asked him about how he chose Substack of all the platforms and he said he likes it because it has a relatively even distribution of subscription counts. That is, some Substacks are more popular than others, but the difference isn’t as stark as other places, which makes it easy to discover writers with super niche interests. I told him a bit about the indie web and the idea of decentralizing the internet and making it a platform for creative expression instead of consumption. He seemed into the idea in principle but intimidated by the tech aspects, which, fair.

I know that indie web people like to hate on Substack, I think mainly because it’s just another proprietary platform, and something something about not banning racist blogs? I subscribed to this guy’s Substack, and it is many things, but definitely not racist; the vibe is more woo-woo and live, laugh, love.

I have to be honest: A few years ago I made a conscious decision to “opt out” of the idea that using a platform, service, or product makes you responsible for all the decisions made by the parent company. Of course, you may choose to buy products that you believe in, but (in my view) that is extra credit, more than what’s morally required. If you look far enough up and down the supply chain of any business you will find bad people. The point of living in a society to work together to set and enforce rules against bad behavior, rather than put the onus for solving racism on every individual in the society.

Cute

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 01:00:00 +0000

My girlfriend and I are catsitting for some friends. In practice, this means going to their house, setting out new food and water, changing the litterbox, and leaving—the cat is insanely shy and hides in his cat bed under the human bed the whole time.

But GF was determined to make the cat warm up to her, so every day, after we visited, she would go lay next to the bed and just stare at the cat for 10 or 15 minutes. “I want to show him that I am not going to hurt him,” she explained, which was quite adorable, but from a cat’s perspective, I thought it looked more like she was trying to ambush him 😅

But get this? That shit worked. Today, she walked over to the bed and extended her hand and the cat popped right out and let her pet his scruff. So, persistence pays off.

As the world goes crazy, I am trying to focus my attention on my very small corner of the universe and find things to celebrate. I’ve also been working a lot on personal projects, perhaps to an unhealthy/obsessive degree. One of them is my AI bullshit podcast ad remover that I posted about last time.

I also have some real-name projects that I am excited about, although the motivation there is partly fulfillment and partly the dim hope that if I do Good Public Code then maybe someone will offer me a kickass job. I’ve been wondering if it’s time for a change—the team dynamic on my current job is starting to suck and I don’t see any good way to turn it around, plus I sort of have my thing figured out and worry I am stagnating in my skills.

Use AI bullshit to remove podcast ads

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 01:00:00 +0000

I made a one shot CLI tool to remove ads from a podcast: rm-podcast-ads podcast.mp3. It uses ollama and ffmpeg to do all the work.

It doesn’t work flawlessly but there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit for improvement:

someone who is good at the economy please help me prompt engineer this. my family is dying
All the random parameters like threshold and window_size need tuning
Or maybe you have an idea for a fundamentally better approach? 📈

Losing interest in the things that were supposed to make it better

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 03:00:00 +0000

Everything has been such a drag lately. A better-adapted person might, in such a situation, try to cheer up by doing known-fun things, like reading or going for a bike ride. Instead I have been sitting around scrolling the awful, awful news feeds and spiraling into despair.

Maybe I should do like others and do a bit of a media cleanse, take a step back from it all. But I’m not sure it’s just media that I need a break from, so much as the news itself, which would reach me either way, because my friends and colleagues are constantly bringing it up. And lots of the topics in play affect me or my loved ones immediately, so to some extent I can’t afford not to know. Maybe I’m just making excuses.

I made a couple of good attempts. Over the weekend, I went alone to some of the big tourist attractions in my city (which is not my hometown, so I’d never been to these spots before)—wandered and reflected. I noticed others who appeared to be doing the same. It’s rough out there.

Staying on track

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 12:00:00 +0000

I am exercising all of my powers of concentration to avoid spiraling into despair.

Lot of bullshit on the news today. I mean, that’s always true, but a few of the headlines today strike close to home, and I lost a solid hour staring into space thinking about all kinds of awful worst-case scenarios. I tend to get “stuck” in that headspace by thinking that it is virtuous to worry: I need to be anxious about this to prove that I care; I need to be the sort of person who cares and gets anxious or else I might become the sort of person who idles and does nothing or makes excuses.

In theory, I am on vacation this week, and that is another source of guilt. It’s not a fancy vacation; I just knew I needed a week off from work, and schlepped myself out to my childhood hometown, where I have been wandering around the neighborhood marveling at how much things have changed, driving my dad’s new car to favorite spots, and drinking too much coffee. I went for a bike ride today and discovered, at the top of a hill, that the breaks on my dad’s bike don’t work. Oops, lol.

I also worked a bunch on some of my real-name professional development stuff, which is kind of a nervous tic of mine—hedging bets because who knows what could happen next to the job market.

Science is fake

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 12:00:00 +0000

What does “science is real” (on those “in this house we believe …” signs) mean, anyway? Is the claim that science is real in the way jujutsu is real—as in, this is a thing that people do? Surely the claim is stronger than that.

Maybe the idea is that this thing, science, that scientists do has a “real” impact on the world. Science as a set of epistemic practices that inform public policy. You know, like eugenics.

But most likely, the intended meaning isn’t about the existence or impact, but rather that the claims scientists make about the world are true (notice how the word “real” doesn’t appear in this sentence). Unfortunately, I have trouble with this reading too:

Sometimes scientists are mistaken, as they were when they claimed that AIDS only affected gay men.
Sometimes scientists are not merely mistaken, but also fail to take advantage of well-known methodological improvements that would make it harder to get published.
And sometimes scientists just straight up commit fraud.

The real meaning of “in this house we believe science is real” is, I believe, “in this house, we believe that something must be done to stop anthropogenic climate change.” Why not just say that, so I can agree with you instead of getting pissed off?

Sometimes they are just lying

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Many people take pride in being skeptical but their skepticism is actually just a skepticism toward ideas they already disagree with. The skepticism is only skin deep. If you tell them what they want to hear, they won’t ask the hard questions.

I see this at work, where the important decision making business types are often asked to sit through a marketing pitch. The pitch could be for a product, or a consulting service, or whatever. What determines a successful pitch is not the quality of the product, but rather whether it speaks to the decision maker’s need.

After hearing such a pitch, the decision maker will often put on a show of skepticism: “I’m not convinced this is going to solve our problem.” Or, in the successful case: “This sounds like exactly the tool we need.” What I never hear is a discussion of whether the product actually works.

It works because they said it works. They showed us a graph of the number going up. They showed us screenshots. You can’t fake that. And even if you could, it would be False Advertising, and who would be so foolish as to do that? Some sort of mental block refuses to acknowledge the possibility that the marketing representative was just lying.

I see this in politics, too. The obvious case is when people share memes with fake or out-of-context quotes from the other side—a clear case of disinformation. Less brazen, but still concerning cases arise when people nod along to an argument that supports their opinion on a particular issue without considering the ramifications of the argument for other issues—you know, ethical inconsistency.

People love to link to that one philosophy article arguing, for the sake of argument, that abortion could be ethically permissible even if we grant a fetus is a person—never mind that the article itself disclaims that it is just a thought experiment, and acknowledges that the argument does not cover many of the forms of abortion (e.g. late term) that supporters of abortion rights want to protect. For most progressives, basing your support for abortion on this article is a tactical and ethical error. All the more so given the availability of so many better arguments for choice.

(Those who misinterpret the paragraph above as an argument against abortion rights will be banished to the local elementary school to learn how to read again.)

Sometimes I wonder if I am crazy for caring so much about principles. It bugs me a lot when we don’t agree on the “why” behind a particular rule or decision. If I were more of a pragmatist, then I would recognize the utility of forming a coalition with those whose interests align with mine even as we differ on fundamentals. But I am neither a politician nor a corporate shark (yet!). I’m just a dude on the toilet trying to figure it all out, you know?

32-bit Cafe survey

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Below adapted from my response to xandra’s thread with some questions about shaping the future of the 32-bit Cafe.

Are you tired of hearing about AI? For some reason I never seem to tire of arguing about AI. I honestly think it’s just a super fascinating topic with so many different ethical, technological, and social dimensions to consider. As soon as I think I have heard it all, I discover a new argument (or a newly inane presentation of a familiar one) that I haven’t considered.

Perhaps it’s because the problem is big enough that you can easily project any belief framework onto it. I can see why that makes the discussing exhausting for some. I have a few posts about AI on my dumpster but I usually refrain from sharing those in the blog thread because I suspect people have heard enough.

Likes/dislikes about the forum: Fundamentally, it’s nice to have a like-minded community that is committed to civility and helping each other out. But “like-minded” is a blessing and a curse. This forum tends to gravitate around certain dogmas like that static sites are “better” (it depends on your use case) or that you can infer someone’s politics from their platform (true in some cases?), but of course there are minority voices too. I just worry that, to a newcomer, it might feel tribal or gatekeepy.

On a related note, I find the indieweb aesthetic to be a bit cliche sometimes. I would love to see more personal sites that try to be beautiful in a way that’s original or modern rather than statement/throwback pieces (although I recognize the beauty in those too). I guess I shouldn’t complain since it says “32-bit” in the name, after all—but to me 32-bit means more to the early internet ideals of DIY and personal expression than a specific aesthetic or toolchain.

Regarding the forum’s 18+ rule: I like this rule mainly because it absolves me of the sense that I am a creep. But the truth is that I spent a lot of my early teen years lingering in internet spaces with people older and wiser than me and learned a lot from the experience. I am not so confident in others’ implication in the thread that an age cutoff promotes a “mature” or civil tone of discussion—it can just as easily be taken as a license to fly off the handle. But yes, this forum feels safe and welcoming in a way that others don’t, and I hope it can remain that way without having to acquire too many rules or a super heavyhanded moderation style.

“People skills” aren't (?) optional

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 12:00:00 +0000

My colleague slash friend and I were chatting about her attempts to find a new project in our company and all the difficult/discouraging/disinterested people she has run into while trying to network with different teams. A recurring theme she has noticed, she says, is that people often clock her as someone who has would bring “people skills” to whatever team she joins—the somewhat backhanded implication being that people skills are one of many skillsets you could have instead of, like, technical skills or something.

I, too, have noticed a tendency—especially among people with technical jobs—to distance themselves from the notion of people skills. I find this tendency to be offputting when it comes from a place of arrogance. You know, the attitude that “my work is good, it speaks for itself, it’s not my job to ‘market’ it using flattery and emotional appeals.” This kind of language uses an air of sophisticated purism—I’m all about the code, no bullshit—to mask what is in fact laziness (I only want to do the fun part) contempt for one’s teammates (why won’t someone do the boring part for me?).

A team dynamic in which everyone only does their one “official” job 100% of the time is a sucky team dynamic—there is no human flexibility or burden sharing. You are not required to love your job more than your family or free time, but we live in a society and I think you have some obligation not to impose your misery on your colleagues. As my friend put it, “Being nice is not optional.”

And yet … I also find myself agreeing with those who look at all the politesse and politicking common in the corporate environment and find it quite tedious and unproductive. I spend about 95% of every workday moderating my speech, trying to make sure nothing I say could be perceived as “calling out” leadership on a bad decision or rocking the boat. But the truth is that this strategy often backfires: The more I perform “nice convexer” and try to be agreeable, the more people start to question my judgment on things that I am objectively the most nowledgeable about it. So, sometimes I have to perform “evil gremlin” instead, a sort of caricature of the stereotypical, socially inept nerd whose very lack of grace and tact testifies to the fact that he’s right and he knows it. Feelings may be hurt, but the project has to keep moving forward, or else the misery level will only increase; we can all see this.

So, hence the question mark in the title. If “people skills” means “being nice” then obviously, people skills aren’t optional, but if “people skills” means “being unconditionally nice” then the bare facts are that lots of people who really excel at their jobs do so by, on occasion, being an asshole. Indeed, if we zoom up to the executive level, it’s known that in the major leagues, you find a disproportionate number of people with narcissism and sociopathy. I would hate working for or with someone like that, but it is hard to look at someone bringing in boatloads of for the company and demand that they work on “people skills.”

Ultimately, IMO, the fact that you have to make peace with is that you coworkers are not your family, friends, or wedding party; you might have a few coworkers here and there whom you get along with like that, but if your approach to the workplace environment is “How can I make these people like me?” then you have gone too far. The correct strategy is a bit closer to “How can I make my boss happy without actively destroying my soul in the process?” Or, if you really just want to get promoted, forget the “without …” part.

Don't overplay it

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 13:00:00 +0000

Because of our fucked up little world, it is very important to refer to Twitter/X by the correct name, where “the correct name” means “the name that aligns with the political beliefs you are trying to signal.” I would be more upset about this if not for the fact that speech was already full of a zillion tiny political signals, such as “youths” and “spendy,” that you have to manage if you want to reassure the listener that you are on the same team.

Still, I find it kind of gauche when people overplay the “I’m still calling it Twitter” thing. I still see a lot of posts that say “So-and-so posted a statement on Twitter—hey fUCK yOU Elon, I’ll call it Twitter if I want to—” which kind of undermine themselves by still fixating on the matter after all these years. The “fuck you” would be subtler, and therefore more effective, if you just called it Twitter in passing without making a big show of it.

After all, a big controversy is exactly what Elon wants—Streisand effect; this is discourse basics. There is a video somewhere of an interview with Elon where even he slips up and refers a few times to “tweets” instead of “posts.” He doesn’t actually prefer the name X, he just wanted to change the name as a weird dominance fetish thing—because let’s be honest, it is kind of funny that major newspapers still have to write “X (formerly known as Twitter).” Meta and Alphabet graduated from the parentheses treatment far more quickly after their respective rebrands, partly because the rebrands (while still bad) were not quite as bad as Twitter→X (like, the letter…?), but also because Elon Musk is a troll and journalists cannot resist feeding him.

Blocked???

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 12:00:00 +0000

I recently tried to visit my site convexer.name from a public library and got an HTTPS security error; reconnecting with HTTP, I was notified that my site is blocked per the city IT policy! I guess they have flagged it as adult content or whatever? Cuz, you know, it acknowledges the existence of sex? It’s still accessible from the Neocities mirror (over HTTPS) but that’s just because I go through the trouble of double hosting it.

This has me thinking about just how fragile all this indie web stuff is. The library wouldn’t dream of banning, you know, Twitter—a site that “acknowledges the existence of” far more than sex—but for tiny indie websites like convexer’s dumpster, I guess it makes sense for the admin to err on the side of blocking. The block is probably not personal, more likely a combination of keyword matching and weird TLD and hosted by Hetzner.

What is a common man to do in this situation? The “site blocked” page gives a contact email, so if I could get a list of similarly blocked websites (e.g. a bunch of *.names?) that are blocked by the library’s policy then that might be enough to convince them, but then that’s just one library system in one city…

I am fully aware that my site is just a dumpster and isn’t going to save the world or anything, BUT, there are lots of pages on the indie web that deal with Real Shit™ such as community organizing and childhood trauma. Lots of folks use library wifi to escape the surveillance of their abusive family or because it’s simply their only reliable internet connection. Something is not right with the indie web if it is only accessible to people who can maintain their own broadband network.

Above was originally posted on 32-bit Cafe Discourse. I think the issue might just be that my domain registration is still young, because I was able to access other .name sites.

Gotta have the last word

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have a coworker with whom every conversation is like this:

Coworker: “I think X”
Me: “I agree with X, but Y”
Coworker: “I agree with Y, but X”

You see how the last comment adds nothing to the conversation other than chatter? It’s a classic dominance play—the point of restating the point isn’t the point itself, so much as the assertion that the point should go unchallenged. This kind of back and forth often goes on for hours in chat, with a new message every 5 or 10 minutes, endlessly circling the wagons on a decision that we won’t be able to act on immediately anyway, and then when decision time actually comes around, we have to revisit all the same tedious arguments just to get started.

Me: “I agree with ‘Y, but X,’ but Y.”

I complain about my job all the time, but the truth is there’s a lot to be grateful for, first and foremost that I have a job, and moreover it’s in the field that I studied, and I get to use my special knowledge for good at least sometimes. I was chatting with a mentee who reached out over LinkedIn yesterday and she told me that my career was her “life dream,” which was a crazy slap of perspective. I used to be her age and think I would never land a “real” job or be able to afford the things I can now afford, but how quickly we learn to take things for granted!

Not everyone blogs for the sake of virtue

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I just read this post by Artemis:

If you use AI to write your blog posts or “enhance” them, why the fuck are you even blogging? Who wants to read a perfect post with perfect spelling, grammar, sentence structures, and a fancy title if it’s not you who wrote it? What’s the point of your blog then if all you do is “prompt engineer” your writing into “perfection”?

I have often wondered the same thing. The most obvious case is people like Andy, for whom blogging was never about baring one’s soul to the internet, but rather a game—like correspondence chess, except instead of submitting moves, you submit blog posts, and instead of winning you get traffic and comments. If you think this game is fun (I don’t, but the world is a big place), then it might feel perfectly natural to use AI to generate your content, because the content was never really the point, but rather how you package and market it.

But Andy is an extreme case—I know there are bloggers out there who have adopted AI into their workflow and nonetheless do feel that they are engaged in meaningful creative production. Even if we take the “staunch” view that says that using AI is never ethical, it’s worth trying to understand the psychology of those who use AI without being overt champions of the technology.

To answer Artemis’s question as posed—“why the fuck are you even blogging?"—here are a few reasons I can think of (are people going to think I wrote this with AI for having a bulleted list?):

AI is a “better spellcheck.” For lots of bloggers, English isn’t their first language, and AI offers a speed boost in getting from a first draft to a final draft. In many cases, AI will convert very simple grammatical structures or repetitive word choice into something more interesting. Whether this is actually an improvement is a matter of taste, but I have heard anecdotally that it’s a powerful language learning tool for getting quick feedback on speech patterns that sound non-native.
Some people blog less because they are enamored with their own thoughts and more because they find the process of building a website, selecting colors, laying out the text etc. to be relaxing. Your response to this might be “Well, if the text is superfluous then just use lorem ipsum or something,” but that’s too reductive—we can arrange people on a spectrum from “cares exclusively about the design” to “cares exclusively about the text content” and there is a sweet spot, about 20% of the way from the left side, where it might make sense to generate posts vaguely related to your interests using AI to free up time to work on the design.
Garden variety burnout—maybe they started out writing their blog by hand and it got fairly popular and now they feel they have a duty to their readers to keep producing content but are running out of ideas, so they dialogue with an AI to come up with ideas for a post, and one things leads to another, and … you know?
Some bloggers are genuinely interested in AI as a technology and blogging is a way to like, experiment with how LLMs work and get a feel for how to shape its response using different prompting. Could you do this alone in the privacy of your own bedroom? Probably, but is it harming anyone to have it in public?
There are some (probably mostly middle/high schoolers as of this writing, but they will be adults before you know it) who have never written anything substantial without the assistance of AI. This technology has been ubiquitous for several years now; it’s no longer an obscure trick.

I’m not asking you to regard these hypothetical bloggers as like, paragons of virtue and creative vision, but I think there is room for a bit more understanding. I do wish that those who are using AI to “augment” their process would be more forthcoming about it, but at the same time, I think this technology is becoming so commonplace that such disclaimers will soon be regarded as tedious, or included on everything by default as a formalism, just like “this product was produced using equipment that also processes tree nuts.”

Returning to the idea above of a spectrum of people who enjoy blogging for design’s sake vs. for writing’s sake, I’m all the way on the right end. I’m quite confident that using AI to generate blog post content would kill all the joy of blogging for me in like, seconds flat. I also feel like I have a certain duty to the reader to give them human-generated words (you can prompt the LLM yourself, so why would I do that for you?).

In fact, I’m sometimes afraid that readers will think I am an AI, e.g. programmed by [misc. political forces] to promote a certain worldview rather than what I actually am, i.e. a guy on the internet. One way I assuage this fear (with a degree of intentionality that varies depending on my mood) is by sometimes just letting typos go through or using comma splices/weird grammar as a countersignal. But as I write this, I realize that doesn’t really prove anything—you could ask ChatGPT to insert humanlike instances of “unnatural” speech, huh?

“Hold your beliefs less tightly” ≠ “Forget who who you are”

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I resonate the idea that we should not hold our beliefs too closely. Better to keep them at arm’s length, separated from ourselves, so we can turn them over and feel their weight, or see them in a wider frame, understand how the beliefs in the collection work together or fail to.

I know that many take offense at the idea that beliefs are abstractions. “To you,” this group argues, “my beliefs might seem like a matter of debate, but to me they are an extension of myself. When you challenge my beliefs you are challenging my right to exist.”

IMO, this version of “the personal is political” is a bit overcooked. It’s true that our identities influence our beliefs, but they are not one and the same. My identity is the collection of traits that I cannot separate from myself. My beliefs are a reaction to my identity—a specific plan for keeping my identity safe.

You can hold your identity close while keeping your beliefs at a critical distance. In fact, you should do so, or else you risk growing more attached to the belief than the identity it was supposed to protect, and lose a part of yourself in the process. Don’t do that!

As a thought exercise, you might wish to consider some of your strongest beliefs and figure out which parts of them are actually just statements of identity (non-negotiable) and which parts might have some room for negotiation.

I hate it when people write posts like this in abstract language, so here is an example:

Identity: Christian
Reasonable belief to protect the identity: We should have religious freedom as a human right
Overcooked belief that conflates the identity with a specific set of protections: Starbucks removing Christmas symbols from their coffee cups is an act of war waged by secular society on Christians

If you want an example from the political left, just ask Grok or something lol.

You realize this sucks for everyone else too, right?

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 02:00:00 +0000

I read an awful New York Times article today. It was a hot take by a woman complaining about how feeble men are these days and how they have too many mental health issues, such as “anxiety,” to make dating worth the effort.

I shouldn’t have read it—such articles are my kryptonite—but I did, and now that I have, I feel compelled to point out that nobody would tolerate it if the Times ran a gender-reversed article where a man complained about how vapid and Instagram-obsessed is modern woman. The problem isn’t (just) the sexism; the problem is that the generalization is not true. You do not get to issue unilateral diagnoses about the problems with modern dating on the basis of saltiness. Nor should we, as consumers, accept it when media outlets launder caustic gender-war propaganda and regressive ideas about masculinity under the pretext of edgy feminism.

In the article and the comments section (which I also should not have read), we see a tour of typical cognitive failure modes: the just-world phenomenon (if others are suffering, they probably did something to deserve it), the external locus of control (hell is other people), confirmation bias. Along with a few MVPs who see through the bullshit.

It’s OK to be frustrated with the state of the modern dating market—I certainly am, and I’m not even in it—but if you think the fault lies only with men or women then you aren’t looking closely enough. In my view, the feeble men described in the Times article and the Instagram-addicted straw women imagined by misogynists on the other side are really two sides of a larger undercurrent of anxiety and hypermoralism in society at large. Young people (age ≤ 45) are under immense pressure to perform “perfection,” both in terms of character (never say something offensive, never be the toxic friend) and the cultivation of a glossy personal aesthetic (that’s Instagram). Even if you run the gauntlet of dating and marriage and make it to parenthood, Instagram (and friends who talk about Instagram—your bespoke social-media diet can only do so much to help) will remind you of impossible healthy parenting trends such as homemade cereal and expensive family vacations that you cannot afford. All of this is a recipe for intractable anxiety and endless status games. Please, can we start from the assumption that others are struggling every bit as much as I am before laying all the blame at their feet?

We have a dark mode now

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 01:00:00 +0000

I made a dark mode toggle. It tries to default to your preferred color scheme but you can override it if you accept a cookie. There is probably a better way to implement this that doesn’t require you to repeat the CSS rules but I’ll figure it out later.

Philosophy: my whole site here is on a four-color theme, basically black, white, and then light/dark variants of fuckboy teal. Toggling dark mode just flips black and white, then replaces the light/dark variants of fuckboy teal with the other.

Dark mode should work on the guestbook, too (or will once I push the update). But the trix rich text editor used by Ruby on Rails doesn’t really support dark mode, so there are still some uncomfortable pops of white.

Has workplace AI entered the “don’t ask, don’t tell” era?

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I think maybe. Today I got a pull request that was suspiciously … long. I haven’t decided how to review it yet.

Loads of people have determined lately that they can use ChatGPT to fulfill their job responsibilities more easily. Easily doesn’t mean better or even faster, necessarily. Just less cognitive effort. Put the prompt in, copy/paste, @ your boss for review and deal with the negative feedback later.

Using the AI without telling anyone is equilibrium behavior, because going back to the manual way requires exercising executive function that you could use more effectively elsewhere, and telling your boss “I used AI to write this memo btw XD” invites your boss to start comparing the cost per hour of you vs. ChatGPT—and we know how that will end.

There’s also no incentive for your boss to ask proactively if you have automated yourself yet: First of all, that sounds weirdly threatening, but more importantly, in corporate America, prestige is measured by the number of people you supervise. If word gets out that your boss’s team could be AIified—even if your boss leads the charge on the AIificication—the benefits will ultimately accrue to the boss’s management, not to the boss. People equals power, so Boss’s incentive is to persist in the delusion that the team’s magic is its people, and that’s why we need more of them. But I digress.

Let’s be honest: AI is deeply unpopular. Microsoft has done everything in their power to ensure that Copilot is annoying as fuck, and the only people crazy enough to claim they like it are trying to sell it to you. But! Just like evangelicals who crusade against porn, there are a lot of people who say all the hip edgy takes about how AI rewires your brain and soul, but secretly let Claude write all their emails when the lights go out.

Like the army’s famous policy on being gay, if you are in the group of people whose job/skillset is just in the “sweet spot” of bullshit where AI is not quite good enough to replace you, but good enough to make a passable attempt at your work when nobody’s looking closely, then you may find that the optimal move for you is to use the AI but never talk about it with your boss.

To be clear, I don’t like this world. I’m a shitty idealist who hews closely to our (very restrictive) corporate policy on AI as well as bleeding-heart literary fiction enjoyer whose ideas about the Soul have prevented me from attempting much more with AI than the “better stack overflow” use case. But if my shitty principles keep me from “moving fast” compared to those who giddily goon Cursor YOLO mode, at least they also require me to be honest about what I do do with AI chat.

And at least I have the dignity to write my own goddamn emails, ffs.

How does Richard Stallman buy airplane tickets, anyway?

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I just read “Giving Up on Element & Matrix.org” by, uh … how do you even get a non-ASCII domain name, anyway? That’s pretty cool. Point is, this opening sentence completely blew my mind:

For the past few years, I’ve been trying to make Matrix.org, and with it the Element client applications, my primary platform for communication.

This guy is clearly living in a very, very different world for me. I don’t have many friends who even know what Matrix is, let alone would tolerate me annoying them into installing and setting it up. I tried trying it out once and gave up, not for lack of skill exactly, but because there were so many choices to make (which server, which client etc.) that I had ample time during the process to realize that even if I got this shit working I would have nobody to talk to.

Don’t worry, though, I’m not going to give the familiar spiel about network effects. Privacy nihilism is bad mmkay and I think using tools like Matrix and trying to bring your friends on board is cool!! It’s just, today wasn’t the first time I’ve heard a take from a privacy enthusiast that seemed vastly out of touch with the landscape of real life. A buddy of mine—actually, the only person I know who manually set up PGP encryption for his email (he uses Arch btw)—was telling me about a friend of his who refuses to use Signal because it requires an iPhone or Android. That’s noble and all, but like, who the fuck does that guy talk to? How does he access the many services that require, yes, require, an app to interact with them?

Or consider Richard Stallman (also Margaret Atwood I think?) who refuses to pay for anything using anything other than cash (maybe checks too?). How does that man ever get on a plane?!

I was contemplating such questions, along with my own experience with trying to have a semblance of digital privacy—I use a smartphone but I don’t install just any app, try my darndest to avoid services that require them, and occasionally am a pain in the ass to friends who want me to give personal information to third parties like Partiful (another web app that could have been an email)—when it hit me: These so-called privacy absolutists are probably just making somebody else (probably a wife or girlfriend, let’s be honest) shoulder the burden for them.

Although I can’t prove it, I’m willing to bet that Donald Knuth has someone in his life with a Gmail account who does all the basic internet transactions for him so he can continue to brag about having given up email in 1991 or whatever. Ditto RMS, ditto my friend’s friend who’s too cool for Signal. A privacy-conscious lifestyle is great and all, but we need to account honestly for the associated costs.

Does anyone else think sports gambling is kinda bad? 🫣 👉👈

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I mean like, obviously, right, just like all gambling is bad? But I fixate on sports gambling for a few reasons. Number one, I confess, is that as a Dude I am naturally especially concerned about social problems that primarily affects Dudes and perhaps that means my bad feeling about sports gambling is disproportionate to the problem. But I trust the reader to know that when I say X is a problem I’m not saying X is a bigger problem than every other problem.

Number two is that, compared to other forms of gambling, sports gambling comes with the false promise of being a game of skill. Talk to a guy who is addicted to sports gambling (I have) and they will immediately tell you about their “strategy,” their supposedly privileged knowledge of which team is undervalued and what’s coming down the pipe—nevermind obvious arguments about how they are watching the same TV and social media as everyone else in the market and there’s literally zero hope that these judgments haven’t already been priced in.

Related to the “game of skill” perception is that sports gambling is socially self-reinforcing. By this I mean, if you win at normal gambling (slot machines or whatever), then other gamblers may congratulate you, but I don’t think they will ascribe your win to being really good at slot machines. They know, on some level, that it’s all about luck, and will congratulate you on the lucky break. By contrast, if you win at sports gambling—and everyone wins sometimes—then you know have bragging rights to say, “I just knew this was coming, after so-and-so’s injury, it had to play out like this,” and your gambling friends have little choice but to agree that you had made a smart bet even though in the long run you’re doing no better than chance.

Maybe the more apt comparison is between sports gambling and day trading. A lot of the same factors are present in trading stocks: A high degree of volatility, easy to enter the market and rack up (some) wins, easy to attribute the wins to skill and the losses to bad luck. And you know what? I know guys who turn up their nose at sports gambling because “the house always wins” but swear, with equal confidence, by their stock-picking genius.

Honestly, the day-trading epidemic might be more insidious yet than sports gambling because investing in stocks is something that you’re supposed to do to prepare for retirement—and there are a lot of ambiguous positions between the extremes of “boomer investing” in mutual funds and dangerous day trading, where the cocky investor can confidently tell himself that he’s exercising a lucrative skill and investing in his financial future but in fact he’s just … gambling.

Highly sensitive person—is that a thing?

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 02:00:00 +0000

If you are into the sorts of tumblrs that I am into, you may have encountered recently this notion of the “highly sensitive person.” Here’s the site of a psychologist who has done a lot on the concept, but basically, according to science™, a large minority of people (20-30 percent) have this trait, which consists of being especially sensitive to things like noise and bright lights, generally getting annoyed easily by things that others tend to brush off, but also greater capacity for deep reflection, appreciating art, etc.

My girlfriend is convinced that she and I are both in this HSP group, and that that label explains a lot of the shit we struggle with in our lives. I can see it. I get tired very easily in intense social situations like parties with loud music, and if it’s just a little too hot or cold outside, my social battery runs out more quickly than others. I also tend to read a lot of meaning into passing remarks (assume that someone’s trolling generalization was actually a subtweet at me), and perseverate on even the most gentle and constructive of criticism, interpreting it as a referendum on my overall worth as a person, or diving down a rabbit hole of thoughts about how this will surely cause me to lose my job, my relationship, etc.

And capacity for deep reflection? I guess, lol? I like to write and I like to listen closely to music. I tend to prefer one-on-one conversations with friends where we can press deeply into matters of psychology and personal goals/struggles rather than superficial chit-chat about politically safe topics, but I think everyone is like that, or just doesn’t enjoy conversation at all.

But what I came here to say is this: I’m suspicious of HSP theory because it implies a model of psychology that privileges the HSP experience in a self-serving way. Actually, it reminds me of that Obama era book about “the power of introverts,” which set up a dichotomy between introverts (the thoughtful, reflective, considerate, and studious folks who shape and lead the knowledge economy), and extroverts (basically just hedonists/sluts without free will). I doubt that the hard binary was the author’s intention, but it’s the effect the book had on the discourse—a sort of “revenge of the introvert” moment in which companies started reconfiguring their interviews to capture the nerdy, toilsome types, while charisma and networking skills came to be regarded with suspicion.

When I read the HSP stuff, I catch a whiff of: The world is built for power tools but I am a jeweler’s screwdriver. All of my weaknesses are actually a strength if you think about it hard enough. Now, that may be perfectly true in some instances, but I don’t think it’s an appropriate model of the human experience. The effect of oversubscribing to HSP theory is to take the totality of the human race, draw a boundary around an ingroup, and explain how this ingroup is devalued and oppressed by the outgroup. It can’t be that simple, right? There is a casual elegance to the theory that being sensitive to disco balls also makes you more sensitive to other’s emotions, but does that actually bear out? One of my close friends is a high-degree empath and incredibly conversationalist, but also definitely probably not an HSP—she loves to party and explore sensory extremes.

It’s too convenient to interpret the traits that I like about myself (understands your childhood trauma) as though they are nonnegotiably wed to the traits I don’t like about myself (can never give you a present without thinking you hated it). It excuses me from having to work on the bad traits.

New domain, new guestbook

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 01:00:00 +0000

New domain: Well folks, I finally decided that this hobby might be worth $5 a month and went out and bought myself a domain: convexer.name. If you are subscribed by RSS, you may want to update your subscription to use this URL instead of the Neocities one. For now, I have a script that pushes site updates to both places, but I probably won’t keep it up forever, and the .name domain will be the canonical URL used in the post links and stuff.

Also, sorry if making this change caused your RSS reader to mark all the posts as unread—this is because of how Hugo populates the post ID as the full URL by default. I kinda wish Hugo just autogenerated a random UUID to use as each post’s ID. Probably I can set it up that way with sufficient effort…

New guestbook: One of my life goals for 2025 was to learn to do webdev stuff beyond static sites. I made a Rails app guestbook.convexer.name which you can use to leave public notes, complaints etc. about the blog. I used the rich text field thing, so you can even attach (small) images to your messages if that’s your jam. I seeded it with a few example posts

As usual, if you want to send me something private you just email me.

OK, back to business.

Neither for nor against hustle culture

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This seems to be a common pattern with me: There is a popular social position, such as “AI art sucks,” and I agree with the general vibe, sentiment, and intuition behind the social position, but struggle to sign on in full because I can’t agree to all the individual terms. Don’t worry, I won’t talk about AI art, that’s been done to death.

The take that’s on my mind now is “hustle culture sucks.” Let me be clear: I think hustle culture sucks. I don’t like that influencers go out of their way to pretend to be hustling harder than they are in order to compensate for insecurities about the extent to which their success comes from luck and good birth rather than grind. I also don’t like how hustle/bootstrap/grindset language is often attached terrible ideas like multilevel marketing scheme where you very much do not stand to benefit from a hustle mindset, and which tend to prey on people who are desperate for cash and have exhausted all their other opportunities.

But check this out: If you find a “hustle culture sucks” essay on the indieweb or tumblr or whatever and read down a few paragraphs, eventually the author overplays their hand, starts saying things like “all work is bullshit” and “there’s no point in trying to be a good employee, your job will never love you back” and “all your coworkers are enemies.” This is where I start to go, “Well …,” because I don’t think the solution to the (very real) competitiveness and unfairness of Modern Capitalism is to just throw your hands up and say it’s all pointless.

Have you ever worked somewhere where all your colleagues were totally jaded and checked out and thought that there was no point in even trying? Well, I have, and it’s awful. Once the mind virus of “all this shit is bull” starts to spread, the working environment degrades rapidly from merely dull to downright unpleasant. Old guys start making sexist/homophobic jokes in the open (who cares if I get fired?), people stop filling out tickets to order new office supplies/toilet paper or fix the coffee machine, people start leaving food to rot in the fridge, etc. It’s an awful feedback loop.

The ironic thing is that despite the supposedly progressive ethos behind the whole AntiWork thing (sticking it to the man!! yeah!!), in an office culture gone sour, it’s usually the young women who bear the brunt of the discomfort. They have to write all the tedious emails and status updates to management explaining what’s gone wrong, they have to endure the uncomfortable jokes, they have to cover the early morning/late night hours when everyone else goes home to be with family, etc.

My request to anyone who finds themselves stuck in a shitty bullshit job, is burned out, and is starting to think “my job will never love me back” is twofold:

That may be true—time to start looking for new work.
But also: Even if your job won’t love you back, don’t shit where you eat and consider processing your grievances in a way that doesn’t burn your colleagues. This goes double if you are in a management role where you are setting the culture.

Bullshit jobs—as the book of the same title points out—are part and parcel of the modern economy. Hustle culture is wrong to mislead people into thinking that your life and career only have value if your day is a wall-to-wall grind full of innovations and problem solving. But it’s also wrong to conclude from this fact that the workplace is a sort of virtual reality where the way you treat people, the things you say, and the things you do or don’t do are without consequence.

A whining expert's honest thoughts on the farmer's market (HOT)

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I feel like farmer’s markets offer much more charm than practicality. We went to a farmer’s market this morning that was described to us as super cute & having an air-conditioned part, which is like, the precise two things you could add to a farmer’s market to differentiate it from the quite-adequate one we went to last month.

Anyway, we cruised around, had a good time, but I think I’m just pathologically annoyed by hustle. Every single stand operator wanted to engage us in superficial chit-chat about our lives and how we got there and their vision for their business and like, I get that this earnestness is part of the appeal for farmer’s market enjoyers, but for me … making superficial chit-chat for business ends is big part My Job and all the moves seem so obvious, the stakes so adversarial (implicit undertone: are you gonna buy something or just walk on?) that it was hard to call this relaxation.

OK, wow, that wasn’t actually the take I meant to write. What I wanted to say was, the idea of picking out some heirloom tomatoes and fun baked goods by hand has a certain instagram appeal in it, but once you look at all those cheese dips and supposedly fresh vegetables and egg tarts baking in the sun you start to fantasize about a supermarket, you know? With linoleum and mops and A/C.

Oh yeah, about the A/C: They had it, but inexplicably, the A/C was on in the crafts area and all the edible stuff was out getting tan lines. I have heard that a lot of farmer’s markets give out stands on a first-come, first-served basis so maybe all the crafts folks pulled up at 5am? Anyway, it all seemed a bit suboptimal.

What are your thoughts on the farmer’s market? Let me know on my—oh FUCK I haven’t FINISHED my guestbook yet like I promised to but that’s because I was working hard on a Very Special Feature called Not Leaking Your Email. Here’s an old meme:

Learning Rails is fun
But it also kind of sucks
Refrigerator

Texts from the DMV today

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Shoutout to the lady blasting like 8 bit techno music in line at the dmv your contribution is appreciated
Check the dmv website. Says rental contract doesnt need to be notarized unless handwritten. Came to dmv. Said needs to be notarized
Said policy changed 2mo ago but they havent updated website yet
Find nearest notary. It’s just some gal at her house. Pay 30 to have it notarized
Gal says when she is feeling well she just sits at the dmv and does people’s rental contracts on the spot
Power move
Literally the essence of hustle. Gave me her card and said give this to anyone you meet in line who needs it

Learning Rails lol

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Learning Rails by making a guestbook for this site. It’s not online yet! But it will be one day. Here is the working repo if you want to make note of any security vulnerabilities so you can blackmail me etc. Thanks starbreaker for the idea.

Fireworks review

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Was advertised as “one of the biggest fireworks shows in America” and I think that’s probably true. Emphasis on big. There wasn’t really a design to it, just progressively bigger, higher, louder. The symphony was playing but I couldn’t hear.

Country music really is a culture unto itself. I was very obviously “not from around here” for knowing none of the lyrics, but then when they played an oldie for the senior crowd I was the only one who knew that song, so who’s a pretender now?

Thinking about bad things does not make you bad

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It is very convenient to suppose that people who spend, for example, all day thinking about war and violence and horror might become desensitized to it, and therefore default to violence as a solution more easily, the same way that you might suppose that someone who is addicted to sexist video games becomes more comfortable with or sympathetic to sexism, or on the other hand, someone who works in health care or education might have a more practiced and gentle touch when dealing with someone in a difficult situation.

But it is self-evident, or at least evident to me, that there are plenty of elected officials and big-brain decision-makers, now and throughout history, who know next to nothing about the harsh realities of war or violence or worse, and if anything this position of ignorance makes it easier to send people to the frontlines and to their death.

And similarly, we all know someone who loves to perseverate on violence, perhaps by watching action movies or reading true crime novels, who would never dream of hurting another human being, may even be a vegetarian.

And anyone who has ever been to school (so almost everyone who can read this post) can attest that some teachers are in that profession for the wrong reasons and use the classroom to imprison students in a fantasy of power and control, and perhaps you can also relate to the phenomenon of so-called “empathy burnout” that lets your doctors and nurses perform perfect kindness at the side of a sick patient but, behind closed doors, snap at their loved ones or inferiors.

What you can conclude from this is that the human soul is not a robot arm that just does what it’s programmed to do; we have such a thing as megacognition, which lets us spend a lot of time thinking about a bad idea and then conclude precisely that the idea is bad.

Once you understand this, you begin to grow suspicious of people who want to change society by changing the “inputs,” for example by banning books with gay sex in them to prevent people from having gay sex. (Edit to clarify, I don’t think that gay sex is bad, but those who want to ban the books do.) People are going to come to their own conclusions about what’s right and then do that; you can make them ashamed of it, but you can’t stop them from thinking and knowing deep down the difference between good and evil.

Shit's kinda rough

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

World is a FUCK nowadays, not a lot of great news out there AT ALL folks. Wee gratitude exercise—3 things I’m grateful for:

Pretty damn good cup of coffee about five minutes ago
Family drama BUT at a resort where a guy can swim
And the air is very fresh and clean

Gender moment at the civic center

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I just overheard some girl telling a guy “your feelings matter” and realized nobody besides my therapist has ever said that to me in my entire goddamn life haha

Why do we resist psychosexual explanations for bad politics?

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

(Writing this post in msedit because why not, lol.)

I sent some crazy texts out this week and the cold reception reminded me that I might be the only one who thinks like this—and now I’m wondering if I’m crazy, but it seems to me self-evident that lots of politicians (and their supporters) are making their decisions on the basis of crude power fantasies rather than some specific policy objective. And if this is true, then it has pretty big implications for how we engage in political discourse, because there is no hope in getting through to a Trump supporter with arguments about how tariffs are bad for the economy if the Trump guy supports tariffs not out of concern for the economy at all but, basically, because he thinks that the steel industry is hot and that’s a thing we should be doing more of.

Well, that’s the second example I could think of, because I wanted to put the first example in this paragraph: It’s that stupid visa social media screening thing. There is no justification for asking student visa applicants to provide their social media handles as part of their visa application. Even if you accept the flawed premise that it’s “bad” to admit people to the US if they have political beliefs that do not align with US foreign policy objectives (we have those?), this particular way of screening for it is laughably gameable. If you are applying for a student visa, all you have to do is scrub your account of anything but innocuous restaurant pictures, maybe a few token MAGA takes for good measure, and the embassy will have nothing on you.

This, of course, is the real point of the social media handle requirement: It’s a sexual fantasy; the whole point is to make the visa applicants kneel and beg, say “please let me study in the One Great Country,” fork over their phone to the consular officer and let them scroll their vacation pictures, participate in this spectacle of American Greatness™ and provide further fodder for the “best president ever” narrative.

I think many people’s reaction to this framing is that it’s hyperbolic, exaggerating to make a point, being edgy on purpose. And maybe it is, but also maybe: What if what I’m saying here is just literally, factually true? Do we have a better explanation for this kind of megalomanical power moves than that Marco Rubio gets off on it? Recall that this is “little Marco,” the guy whom Trump literally teased about having a small penis … it just makes too much sense that this is all a dominance fantasy of his; for the life of me, I can’t come up with a better explanation—can you? But even my friends to the left of me think I’m way out of left field saying shit like this.

(Msedit review: It’s actually … kind of good? Very responsive, has word wrap, has functional keybindings. I tried using Find and Replace and it said This operation requires the ICU library whatever TF that is but I’ve had worse Linux problems.)

“Can we have a problem without a villain?”

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I think/hope I have written before here about how much I adore Richard Reeves, who seems to be one of the only sane voices in the “crisis of masculinity” discourse. He has a great interview here in The Sun this month. Most if it is similar points to what he’s said in other places: that we need to be able to recognize that both boys and girls are struggling in different ways, that we need messaging targeted at men on the left or else they will vote for Joe Rogan, that family courts kinda suck.

But what makes me hopeful about Richard (we are on a first-name basis now) is that he is good at marketing. He always comes up with clever new phrases and anecdotes to illustrate the same basic points, which is critical if you want your social movement to get anywhere.

I really like this quote about “a problem without a villain,” because it tells you something not just about the masculinity crisis, but offers a kind of meta-insight about our larger discourse, and there’s a little something in the paragraph for everyone to relate to, which makes it feel much less condescending than what you often here from enthusiastic activist types:

Where I think the debate goes wrong sometimes is when people look at these disadvantages for men and boys and try to find a villain or an oppressor. They’ll claim the “feminist woke takeover of institutions” is causing men’s problems. That’s just horseshit, and it distracts us from structural issues. For example, the school system doesn’t work quite as well for boys. It’s not intentional; there’s no feminist plot here. I have never argued that men are being intentionally excluded. Those are all myths—and dangerous ones at that. But that doesn’t mean that boys and men aren’t struggling in systems that are difficult for them to navigate. Can we have a problem without a villain? I think so, but that’s an unfashionable view right now.

Richard says he is planning to work with his local Big Brothers Big Sisters group, which made me think I should do the same, but unfortunately my city’s chapter closed down :(.

Dear Vox, please don't fall for PR hits

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I used to work at my college newspaper. We (yes, even we, a shitty student paper) used to constantly get emails from local music venues and restaurants soliciting coverage. If you haven’t seen one of these press release type things before, the trick they use is to write it in the exact format of a news article, e.g. this random Apple press release that begins CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA –.

We all sucked ass at our jobs, but a core part of educating the freshmen was instructing them not to just copy the press release word for word, even though it was the perfect length to fit in our newspaper, because that’s exactly the temptation that the press release is trying to trap you with. Don’t do it! First of all it’s plagiarism, second of all it’s lazy as fuck, and third of all we are supposed to be objective and provide a perspective on the art gallery or whatever that isn’t, you know, the perspective of the guy who is trying to sell the art in the art gallery.

Anyway, it seems like Vox didn’t really get this lesson. A recent episode of their daily news podcast is called The big business of small streamers and literally the whole episode is about this TV reality show thing called Dropout and how popular it is, how the CEO is an ultra homie and very down to earth, how his whole motivation in life is profit sharing and being the most ethical, and how their audience—who are also Queer btw :)—loves the show so much that they complained when the show grandfathered existing subscribers in at the old price when they increased the subscription cost because they wanted to “support the actors.” Give me a fucking break, nobody is falling for that shit! Dropout was created by College Humor—you know, the massive media platform from 2010. It is not small, it is not some random “streamer,” it is a business with a marketing department and corporate credit cards.

OK, purpose of this post was so I could do something with this word art generator. Dear Vox,

Failing to recognize male emotional labor

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

(dr) molly tov wrote a clever response to a techy tweet thread about things AI agents could do—she came up with some inventive ideas for ways AI could be, you know, actually helpful, like “Does AI job interviews for me as I sleep, so I wake up to multiple competing job offers” but that the big AI companies will never bother with. It’s a good post, you should go read it.

But clicking through to the Bluesky thread, I was disappointed to see everyone how shitting on the OP (some techlord I don’t know named Derek Thompson) was interpreting his original tweet in the least charitable way possible in order to score ingroup points. The original post from Derek is this:

Scenario: Before I go to sleep, I tell ChatGPT “Plan my 5-year-old’s birthday next Saturday, budget $500. When you’ve made the reservation, email these 20 ppl a printable invitation to attend. Also my wife wants to go to England in mid-July. Find 5 plausible flights for the family and make several distinct itineraries. Finally, pls edit this work memo."

When I go to sleep, the AI agent negotiates slots with two bowling alleys, buys a cake, emails printable invites, plans the trip, copy-edits, etc.

But somehow, by the time this got to Molly, the reading had evolved to

Derek Thompson thinks his kid and wife are pointless busywork I guess

Guys … we are better than this. That’s not what Derek said.

Here’s what Derek’s AI use case entails:

The AI agent negotiates slots with two bowling alleys: It calls both bowling alleys, asks for available dates and prices, and chooses the cheapest one that’s compatible with his schedule. “Negotiates” is just shorthand, ffs.
Buys a cake: Oh my god guys, I heard Derek doesn’t love his kid because he would like to be able to tell an AI “Order a custom cake to serve 12, budget X, Finding Nemo decorations”
Emails printable invites: Literally the definition of pointless busy work
Plans the trip: Honestly not sure exactly what this means, but probably the more menial parts of trip planning like comparing flight/hotel costs, arranging cities to minimize travel time, figuring out train schedules, etc? He said “make several distinct itineraries,” it’s just about spitballing ideas.
Copy-edits, etc.: This is coded language for “and then the AI makes love to my wife so I don’t have to.”

You might look at this and think, hey, I think planning a vacation is fun, I like looking at dozens of hotels and picking one out, I like browsing cake pictures, and that’s perfectly fine and dandy. But you do not get to decide, on the basis of your aesthetic experience, that Derek “thinks his kid and wife are pointless busywork” because of the way he does or doesn’t use technology to automate boring tasks that just so happen to occur in the home instead of the workplace.

I think there are a couple of psychological things going on in the mind of someone who takes the uncharitable view of Derek (in addition to a baseline bias against AI apologists, which, fair enough):

The vindictive belief that men, by default, are not doing “enough” domestic/emotional labor, and when they do, they always half-ass it.

This is ironic, because the core insight of the concept of “emotional labor” is that it draws from our finite supply of energy just like labor-labor, and thus it’s reasonable to need a break from it once in a while or to try to find ways to do it more efficiently. You wouldn’t shit on a 1950s housewife for using a sewing machine instead of doing it by hand, let alone interpret this as meaning she doesn’t love her husband or kid.

Let’s go out on a limb and suggest that the 30-odd minutes Derek would have spent Googling a cake shops, calling, waiting for the employee not to be busy, spelling out his order, etc. are not the most nurturing and pleasant use of that time, for Derek or his kid.
The variant of toxic positivity that says that parenting is always a joy, 100 percent of the time, and never draining or frustrating, and that anything you do to reduce the burden of parental labor is a form of neglect.

You see this “parenting OCD” bullshit a lot nowadays, and it’s gotten worse due to the tradwife/homeschooling trend. I’m not sure how to solve this particular cultural problem, but Free Range Kids has lots to read on the related problem of helicopter parenting and paranoia about leaving one’s children alone.

Anyway, everyone who participated in the hatefest above is now banned from ordering pizza online.

Am nostalgic

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 08 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I think I was just born this way—to constantly dwell on the past, to constantly ruminate about the future, to think about that one time I was walking home from work in the sunshine and joking around with my friend and thought, This is absolutely perfect; this is as good as life will ever get, and wish I could freeze the moment in amber.

Buddhism, I am told, teaches that everything is temporary and we need to make peace with that and free ourselves from the impulse to try to recreate the past in the future. Even if I could choreograph the same walk with the same friend and the same sunny day, it wouldn’t be the same, because I have changed, right? The truth is that it’s sunny right now—I’m looking out the window at it, I can see it—and here I am mcfucking around on the computer instead of trying to make friends or whatever.

I am afraid of getting old. I have met many old people who spent their life saving up for a dream house, bought it at age 60, and enjoyed it for maybe five years of retirement before they started having endless health issues and the house was too much work and too multi-storied to spark joy anymore. What’s the point of striving if it’s all going to melt away, you know? But it doesn’t have to be like that—we could find meaning in the process, we could smile because it happened.

I shouldn’t drink so much coffee.

Customizing spaces

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 08 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

(Slightly elaborating from my reply on the 32-Bit Cafe.)

Bekah’s entry for this month’s IndieWeb carnival is a great deep dive on “skinning” (as in, WinAmp skins) that unearthed many memories I forgot I had!

I remember discovering the Zune theme for Windows XP—really the only alt skin they had, sort of a consolation prize for all the customizability taken away relative to Win 2000—and obsessively switching over all the computers in our school library to use it. It is kind of ironic that will all the “improvement” that has happened in the software development world since then—esp. popularizing the notion that everything should be a modular and separate code from data—our desktop environments have become more monolithic and their designs dictated from on high.

Bekah’s idea of the browser start page as a modern approximation of that spirit is also very insightful. It made me think about how much time I spent in my browser nowadays and how little time I spend looking at the blank desktop. In the past I obsessively tricked my desktop out with widgets and a cool wallpaper but now I’m like, do I even have any files there lol. Well, that’s a slight lie: When I first got my own apartment, I decided to be indulgent and set my desktop background to a slideshow of attractive models (because it’s my space and nobody can tell me what to do), and now I still have that slideshow and can Ctrl+D to see it when bored, but for the most part I usually have 2 to 4 maximized windows in the way.

Right now, my browser start page is nothing special, but I’d like to get around with fiddling with one of those cool self-hosted homepage things and have it show me something useful/fun like stats about my home network or RSS feed headlines or whether my automated backups are working.

Weekend shit

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 08 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Shit I did this weekend, or really yesterday because today is just a chill day:

Played lots of guitar. Pushed the volume after learning that we have thick walls.
Crafts fair. Saw some very beautiful, but impractical wooden bowls and ceramic mugs.
Indian buffet, highly underrated.
Costco run.

Airport chapel review

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 01 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I visited an airport chapel for the first time earlier this week. Honestly, a pretty underrated experience. I was the only one there, and it was more or less quiet, which is more than can be said of anywhere else at the airport.

They had Jewish, Christian, and Muslim reading material.

They had a guestbook.

Someone wrote in the guestbook: Love that there’s a chapel, but why don’t you have a Bible? It’s true; they didn’t have a Bible, just little leaflets with scripture quotes.

I just kind of sat there and zenned out for ten minutes. I didn’t leave a donation, but maybe next time. I wonder what happens if nobody donates. Do they stop cleaning the chapel?

They had prayer mats for Muslims. On the wall, there was a little compass icon pointing towards Mecca. If you think about it, placing this icon on the wall doesn’t really make any sense—the line from you toward the icon points in a different direction depending on where you set up your prayer mat, and that’s even before you try to make sense of the arrow on the compass, which was actually pointing straight up, not towards Mecca at all (last I checked). If they had asked me, I would have put the compass on the floor—in the same plane as the prayer mat—so that you can line yourself up with it no matter where you are in the room. Maybe that’s what they would’ve spend my donation on.

Silly questions challenge

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 25 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Cribbed from Mycorrhiza’s blog.

Do you believe in aliens? I think it’s more likely than not, although I don’t really ruminate on this belief very often. Most likely, they are very far away, and/or way behind or ahead of us in civilizational development which would preclude interesting conversations. Or maybe their biology is so different that there’s no way for us to really notice each other—like they can only see radio waves or whatever.

What is a favourite random fact that you know? Turtles make the craziest moaning sound when they, you know. You should look it up on YouTube right now if you don’t know what I’m talking about.

If you were an astronaut going to space, which items would you bring with you? Huh, depends how long, but definitely some reading material and some writing material. I think I would download an offline copy of Wikipedia to my laptop. And one of those scalp massager things. I threw mine away in a recent move and am missing it more than expected.

Would you prefer to only be able to run, or only be able to walk? I run every day, but I don’t really like it, and I really don’t like sweating at inconvenient times, so I choose walk.

What is your favourite letter? Lowercase cursive f.

What is a memorable song that has impacted you in any way? Literally anything by Jason Isbell, but perhaps “Yvette” especially.

What is your favourite celestial body (planets, stars, constellations, galaxies, etc)? Have never really thought about this. I think my astronomy phase was shorter than most boys’. But it’s kinda cool how the North Star just happens to be right there, isn’t it?

Tw doge

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sat, 24 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I recently renewed my passport and was sternly warned on the website that it would take 4 to 6 weeks to process and I should plan not to travel internationally. I figured it would take even longer than that given all the turmoil and cuts lately. But get this. I got the thing in less than two weeks. Signed, sealed, delivered.

Does this mean the DOGE crew were right all along, and the government really can get by with much less? Maybe. But I think it’s more likely that the admin is making the deepest cuts to long-term government investments, while leaving intact and well-staffed these immediate, citizen-facing services. It’s a deliberate, cynical strategy:

Identify programs that, if shut down, won’t have negative impacts for several years.
Cut those programs.
Announce X zillion dollars in taxpayer savings.
Point to efficient passport renewals and the USPS as evidence that the taxpayer savings represent increased efficiency, not diminished benefits.
In five years, when the long-term cuts start to show their impact and shit starts to hit the fan, blame the new Democratic administration for mismanaging the “beautiful” hand it was dealt.

Sigh.

Y Combinator

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sat, 24 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Man, startup culture and startup accelerators like Y Combinator are such a joke. Everyone I’ve talked to who worked for a startup has openly admitted that the startup’s product was “kind of bullshit” and they were just along for the ride.

In most cases, startup CEOs seem to be young white male whiz kids who got a big first round of funding through an “angel investor” known as Dad—or like, Dad’s friend, with the expectation that Dad would return the favor for Dad’s friend’s son so the nepotism wouldn’t be quite as transparent.

This is exactly what the Y Combinator gods mean when they say they “invest in the founder, not the idea” (you see this in Hacker News comments all the time). YC recruits well-connected, photogenic founders, then push money around for fun and profit—that’s it. If they happen to churn out a useful idea, then that’s just dumb luck; it’s not required for the business model to pan out.

Work wife

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Mon, 19 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Is there ever an appropriate use of the term work wife? I don’t know where it came from, but I can’t seem to remember ever hearing it used appropriately. Here are the three times I have it used to me:

In reference to my close friend/mentee, who was hired to our company around the same time as me. We used to talk about everything, and now we talk about a reasonable range of things since she has a boyfriend and I have a girlfriend. The person who said “work wife” was my narcissistic boss who drove two colleagues to quit their job. We had witness something funny at work and I said I couldn’t wait to tell my friend about it. Narcissist boss kinda rolled her eyes and said, “Oh right, your work wife.” I think she was basically trying to stir up FUD: Make me doubt my reasons for wanting to share this funny story with my friend (perhaps it was just because I am a stereotypical man who needs constant positive affirmation) and insinuate that our relationship was more than platonic.
In reference to my close colleague/peer who I have an extremely long IM chat log with because she and I have nearly exactly complementary strengths and we ask each other about almost everything. Honestly, our working relationship is at times codependent and I can understand why someone would use the term in this context, but I still don’t think that makes it appropriate.
Last week, when I got a little ticked off at my colleague (technically a superior) who “suggested” I increase the font size of a title when I was clearly working on another part of the document and formatting would come later. She seemed unprepared for my flippant response and got quiet for a few minutes; a middle-aged guy noticed this and asked me what happened, and when he told him, he was like, “Right, a lovers’ quarrel.” We are not lovers.

Uptick

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Fri, 16 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Am noticing an uptick in unhinged and self-centered behavior/main character syndrome. But also noticing an uptick in Great Recession-style random acts of kindness, “was just thinking of you” messages, etc. This instills a bit of hope for humanity, if not the country.

A little air

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Mon, 12 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Just coming off of about two brutally busy months of work and starting to breathe a little easier, or to state it more accurately, focusing on long-term existential anxieties instead of “Why the fuck won’t my colleagues agree with me?”

I am normally fairly good? I think? somewhat effective? at compartmentalizing my emotions and not taking them out on others, but the past few months showed me that I am more vulnerable to stereotypical forms of emotional spillover than I thought. I shot down a few good ideas and acted unnecessarily smug when proven right. I made the right decision for the wrong reason and took credit anyway. Etc.

With a little more daylight in my schedule, I chatted with a new friend today who is about to embark on a cool life project that will put him in a fast-paced new environment with a bunch of strangers. We talked about the idea of how everyone has a different stress response and how it’s important to know what yours is so that you can differentiate the symptoms from the disease and warn others when you aren’t feeling like yourself.

My stress response is critical analysis and being a hater.

If you master your own stress response, then you can treat stressful situations as a little game where the challenge is to try to do anything other than your stress response. You win by resisting the impulse to flip the fuck out and instead projecting optimism and grace. The strategy is to figure out what kind of behavior is the precise opposite of your stress response and then do that.

My anti–stress response is to be an absolute class act and regard everyone with gratitude.

This is a very difficult response to deploy on people who seem to be investing their utmost effort in performing their ineptitude, but you have to try.

Not even gonna proofread this.

The phone as creativity sink

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have been on a bunch of long flights lately, and each time went in with the resolution that I would get some good thinking and writing done in the air. My claim to fame among corporate travelers (the lamest brag) is that I have never used inflight Wi-Fi, even though I think I can technically expense it. But with every flight the impulse to cave and just scroll lobste.rs or whatever grows stronger.

Here’s the thing: I used to get on a long flight and the ideas would just start flowing. I would bang out an outline of an essay or a music composition or a blog post, sometimes on paper, sometimes on my phone.

This doesn’t seem to happen as readily anymore. Have I become less disciplined? Nowadays, I sit on the flight and try to come up with ideas but keep drawing blanks. Oddly, when I feel the impulse to scroll a feed, I just open my phone and swipe back and forth between home screens and it somehow fulfills the same purpose. That’s kind of fucked up, right? I get more from the “fake” dopamine hit of dicking around on the phone to no end than from the thing that I ostensibly really want to do, i.e. write.

This brings me to a phenomenon I see in various hobby circles: People expressing guilt over having spent not enough time working on the hobby and too much time watching YouTube and scrolling feeds. This is ironic because, supposedly, a hobby is supposed to be enjoyable, so why do you have to force yourself to do it? Why not just declare YouTube your hobby instead so you can feel less guilty?

Part of the explanation must recognize that we have a tacit moral hierarchy about which hobbies are more or less virtuous. There is some level of social pressure to have at least one “healthy” hobby like exercise or crafts to balance “unhealthy” ones like, IDK, sports gambling.

If you were a dictator it would make sense to promote some hobbies over others for the sake of societal advancement or whatever but what reason, really, do we have for voluntarily self-flagellating ourselves over an Instagram habit? The fact that everyone feels like they should be doing more home cooking with fresh ingredients has not brought about that reality; instead we are still eating fast food and Postmates, but just feeling anxious and ashamed about it to boot.

How to disagree without people hating you

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Any ideas here? I always struggle with this at work, where I have a professional disagreement with someone (I think we should do it X way instead, I have a good reason for thinking so, it’s something I’m knowledgeable at) but I experience immediate regret as soon as I express the disagreement—I feel like I am jeopardizing our good working relationship or spending out of a fixed pool of goodwill points, something like that.

I guess I struggle with it most in situations where others have already let me have my way on a bunch of arguably unimportant issues, and then suddenly something that actually matters comes along and I am asking for one more dose of tolerance.

When I can tell that others are “just tolerating” me or allowing me to win the argument just so they can move on with their day, it makes me feel very insecure, like I am some kind of narcissist or bully who refuses to hear criticism. But it’s not true! I am more than happy to be disagreed with, and I try my best to express to others that I am open to being wrong—but if others want to be passive and flatter my nonexistent ego then I have no opportunity to demonstrate that I do not take it personally.

My therapist would remind me that a narcissist would already have gotten over it.

How can you be both right and open-minded at the same time? I don’t think it’s as obvious a question as it seems.

Spillover stress

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Had a bad meeting at work the other day—I was stressed out about the state of the world and doomscrolled some awful article right before I went in. Ended up being basically unpleasant during the whole meeting, shooting down others’ ideas and saying “That will never work,” etc. Sent a little apology in the group messages afterwards but still feeling a bit guilty about it. I guess my therapist would remind me, in this sort of situation, that the fact that my conscience is still torturing me over the incident is evidence that I am not the sort of bad person that I am worried I might be.

I don’t know if this is me getting older, wiser, and more self-aware about it, or if my personality has actually changed, but I seem to be more susceptible to this sort of “spillover stress” now than I was when I was younger. I have to be very careful about my media diet and what sorts of articles I click on, especially if I know I’m about to go into a contentious meeting or already sleep deprived or whatever.

If I’m doing it right, I have to dedicate what seems like a solid hour a day (not all at once, of course) to this sort of metacognitive maintenance: checking in on my stress and fatigue levels, talking myself out of clicking on a bad headline, keeping tabs on the feelings of colleagues who are dealing with similar issues.

I always thought the hard part of my job would be the technical skills—you know, the ones I spend so much time, money, and effort honing—but what I see now is that the real challenge is managing relationships, and being able to show up with a little more grace and tolerance when everyone’s in the pressure cooker. (Of course, this requires that I be so good at the tech stuff that that is never the problem.)

Start a blog?

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I just read Please for the love of Blarg, Start a Blog:

Your thread is great! But it is also ephemeral, temporal.

It might feel great to see all the shares, likes and comments and follows rolling in.

But the reality of twitter the way that the platform is designed. Is that no one is going to be able to find it again in a weeks time. And in a month or so no one is going to remember it all.

This thinkpiece falls into a trap that I often see from indie web writers. I guess it’s a failure or unwillingness to empathize with what draws normal people to mainstream platforms in the first place.

Consider that not everyone wants their ideas to be immortal. In fact, that’s the sort of position that requires a baseline level of confidence that ranges from “above average” to “narcissist.”

For many Twitter/Threads regulars, the ephemerality is the point. If you say something massively dumb on Twitter then you might get cancelled, but this risk is overall pretty low, and for the most part you can say something that is moderately dumb and it will just slide down the timeline into oblivion, mixed in with a thousand other dumb takes.

Like it or not, choosing to write a blog in 2025 is the marked choice: it marks you as one or more of the following:

A rebel who likes to be different just because
Someone whose beliefs are so fucked up they they got banned on mainstream social media
Porn
A hustler who wants to have a “web presence” and sell you their bitcoin NFT AI startup

Is it bad to be these things? Well, no, not necessarily … but not everyone wants to put themself out there like that. For a lot of social media users, the use case is “I want to hang out with my friends, look normal, and share memes,” and that’s simply not what the indie web is for.

Things that don't enrage me

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Watching the trees outside my window.
The fact that I have a window.
Long drives for work trips. Just me and the highway. If I am disciplined, I can make it the whole way with no music or radio, just me and my fucked up little thoughts.
The number of problems that can be solved with a tactful phone call.
Costco 28-packs of Gatorade, idgaf.

Untitled

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Me to my friend: I had the best therapy session the other day. She was asking all these hard fucking questions, and I was like, “Why do you always ask me such hard questions?” And she was like, “That’s what you pay me for.”

Friend: What did she ask you?

Me: She asked me why it was so important to me that so-and-so have a good opinion of me.

Friend: That’s literally exactly what I asked you two weeks ago.

Me: Would you like to be my therapist?

Friend: No.

Terms of friendship

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have this friend who is not really a best friend but not a total acquaintance, a fairly good friend, someone I would invite to my wedding and someone I respect, someone who seems very empathetic and always devotes one hundred percent of her attention to any conversation she comes to and is very reflective and is in therapy and doing the work, someone who is a good person in an objective sense but raises questions about what makes a good friend in the relative sense BECAUSE:

She only calls me a few times a year. Maybe that’s just what friendship is when you get old; I have friends who are definitely good friends who are like that, but it’s not just that.

She always calls me when she’s having boy trouble. And it’s usually similar boy trouble. Usually: I opened myself up too quickly to this boy and he turned out to be a fuckboy. My default response is compassion, because lord knows I have opened myself up too quickly to women before and been badly hurt for it. I don’t require her to solve all her problems overnight or become some kind of master at dating who never gets into trouble, but.

But in between these hourslong phone calls that we have every six to nine months when she has acquired a boy problem, I reach out here and there, with diminishing frequency, just checking in to see how things are going, just reaching out to say merry christmas, just wanted to let you know I’m moving cities, something exciting happens—and every time: crickets. She just ignores me. To the point that I start to wonder if she hates me or I said something offensive on the last phone call or what.

But then a text message always comes, eventually, usually something cryptic and philosophical. Is it ever possible to truly know a person, is there such a thing as a “green flag,” shit like that. And I’ll respond with a paragraph of thought as I am wont to. And then she’ll call, and we’ll hash it out, and then she’ll give me a turn for life updates. Sometimes there will be two or three follow-up calls on the same issue, and lots of texting in philosophizing, and then begins again the gradual fade.

I would say something about it if I thought I deserved any better, lol. Anyway here’s wonderwall

Conclave spoilers

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sat, 05 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Seems like everyone I know watched Conclave this week, so I did too. I only watch maybe two or three movies a year. Partly because I lack the attention span, partly because I worry it’s a dangerous habit to form.

I didn’t love this movie as much as other people seem to, but I can concede that it was a very visually pretty movie and it has some very good memeable moments, such as the guy sitting on the bench and checking his phone. Everything below is petty criticism.

I thought the ending was kind of obvious. I could see that there was some sort of “surprise” coming with that guy, though I didn’t predict the exact particulars. But I think it’s cool that they went for an issue (intersex) that has less visibility in mainstream media than conventional trans, abortion, etc. stuff that are more common targets of “we need more representation” discourse.

The most disappointing thing about the movie, though, was just how incoherent the plot was. They didn’t really do a good job of setting the scene or showing you the rules of how the conclave works, they just kind of cut arbitrarily back and forth between scenes of them eating, casting ballots, and having secret hallway conversations, which leaves the viewer wondering if they are ever going to have some sort of formal deliberation (as any election would) or if perhaps the point is to not deliberate at all and just cast votes as instructed by God to be sacred or whatever.

But then, like 75% of the way through the film, they randomly decide to have a group meeting after all in this auditorium—I guess we’re doing meetings now—where Hitler guy makes his “these animals” speech and then Kabul guy makes his heartfelt speech that suddenly, magically convinces everyone to vote for him. This scene is a joke to anyone who has attended a meeting of any sort, ever. Hitler guy would not just shut up after his speech and let the other guy own him, he would interject constantly and be like “If I can just add one more comment, on that,” etc. He isn’t really playing to win. And the idea that this late entrant from Kabul would win the election just for having made a nice speech after the entire rest of the movie was hammering in the importance of having a good character and reputation and relationships was difficult to believe.

Another gripe: Protagonist, I think his name is Lawrence, has zero of the requisite tact or chess instincts to be even a middle manager in corporate America, let alone a cardinal in the Catholic church. As soon as anyone tells him a rumor about someone, he goes immediately to the accused party and says “I heard that x, y, and z”—showing his entire hand of cards and tipping the guy off so that he can begin damage control. Take it from me, that is not how you handle a workplace dispute.

Also, all the accents sounded hella fake.

Also, the preview hyped up the idea that this movie would show how the nuns are really the ones running the show behind the scene, but in actuality I don’t think the movie even passes the Bechdel test.

Podcast edging

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sat, 05 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My favorite podcasts are This American Life and Radiolab. Until recently, I hadn’t listened to either in years. I got super into both of them in college andlistened to every episode as soon as it came out. Then, I got into some other podcasts that I didn’t like quite as much. So, I always made a point of listening to the mediocre podcasts before my favorites so that I would still have the favorites to look forward to. But before long, I had subscribed to more mediocre podcasts than I had time to hear, and I never got deep enough to hear This American Life or Radiolab, and sort of just forgot that they existed. What is the word for this mental illness?

Untitled

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Woke up today with typical levels of despair (high). Slept an extra three hours; it did nothing to help. Realized I would have to get through this the hard way. Read for a few hours at the cafe across the street (just opened), then went for a run which became a walk which became a run again. Text messages to a friend:

yeah i went for a run and then kinda walked at the end of the run down to DATA_EXPUNGED

actually there is a very beautiful park i found there called DATA_EXPUNGED or something where lots of happy families were playing fetch with stereotypical dogs

unfortunately i have new sunglasses that DATA_EXPUNGED that have endowed the cursed ability to See Through the Bullshit and it was difficult to view their joy without cynicism

but i comforted myself by imagining that perhaps they are just as scared and desperate as the rest of us and the dog is simply a gen X version of the cellphone, if you can picture that.

did you hear the one about how people who were 25 in 2000 are 50 now? that’s like, second or even third marriage age.

I stopped getting read receipts at about the third message, which, OK, fair enough.

I have always struggled with nice weather and happy families. Both remind me of when my parents divorced. And these picket-fence families feel me with additional resentment the closer I get to their age: how are they so blissful and functional in the face of all the Problems and Strife in the world, all the shit that keeps me up at night?

I find it hard to take people seriously who say they are “worried about the future” and then have a car, a mortgage, two kids. Those are not financial decisions you would make if you were really worried. I’m sorry—I take it back. Everyone struggles in their own way.

I’m going back to therapy tomorrow, might need to reestablish a regular thing. World is a bit of a fuck.

Documentary lady

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The lady in front of me on this flight is watching a truly infohazardous documentary on her phone about some mom whose teenage daughter got pulled into an online trafficking ring—one of those extremely rare and awful “stereotypical” predator stories that keeps parents up at night because it’s just so vivid and horrible. Have been mentally playing the Jason Isbell song “Save the World” for about an hour, that awkward guitar riff perhaps a picture of our own powerlessness over the inevitable march of time. Pedo documentary lady reminds me that I am not the only one despairing, as if that’s any comfort.

Last girl in class

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Have to tell this story in a very boring way to remove identifying details.

In college, I took a class in a subject that was of far greater interest to boys than girls. On day one of the class, there was only one girl in the class of about fifteen, and she seemed very shy. However, a round of introductions revealed that she was actually planning to minor in this subject (for which the class was a core requirement), and thus although it was awkward to have such a skewed gender ratio, I think the general mood was to be “cautiously optimistic” that there was a brave woman in the room. We were all progressive, young types who wanted (to some extent or another) to see gender roles shaken up, right?

Anyway, during one of the first few lectures, the girl’s phone went off. I’m not sure if it was a phone call or an alarm, but she’d forgotten to silence it, and the ringtone was some silly Nicki Minaj song. I think the lyrics were about sex, I don’t really remember. The girl immediately got a mortified look on her face, grabbed her stuff, ran out of the classroom, and never came back. Not to that lecture, not to any other lectures, just dropped the class and disappeared.

A few weeks later, I remember the professor (a man in his 50s or so) saying something like: “I know it’d be nice if we had more women in this class. I feel bad that the gender ratio is so uneven. But I have to admit that I feel a little relaxed now that it’s all guys in here.”

I have spent the years since wondering exactly what he meant by that: relaxed about what? This prof wasn’t an utter curmudgeon (although we had those); he was a hip college professor who probably voted for democrats, and it wasn’t like he had suddenly started going on weird sexist tirades in the girl’s absence. Nor did he think that this field was a “man’s game”—his own daughter later enrolled in the program. If we take a charitable interpretation, I think this was the height of hashtag MeToo and the prof was just genuinely afraid of being “canceled” and the pressure to watch his words had been weighing on him.

But then … why say that part, about feeling relaxed now that the girl was gone? Why not just keep that thought to himself? I wonder if part of what prof was doing was seeking reassurance from us—young, progressive boys who knew the “language” of MeToo and cancel culture better than him but also had experienced anxiety over being canceled—that his feeling of “relief” didn’t make him a sexist, or at least not the worst kind of sexist. The ironic thing is that his words had the exact opposite effect: the number one rule of fight club is don’t talk about fight club, viz., the number one rule of accidentally shaming the only girl out of your classroom is don’t acknowledge the gender dynamic responsible.

Sorry, guys

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I was at the edge of insanity and took a week off to exist in the real world. I wrote a bunch of random notes on my phone over the past week and will be uploading a few with today’s date as posts. Sorry for flooding your feed, and stay aloha.

This is what CS majors actually believe

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Thomas Hunter II: AI will change the world but not in the way you think

I have nothing huge to say about this. The argument is familiar, about how LLMs are just wasted effort because they insert a translation layer between my “write an email with these bullets” and your “summarize this email in bullets.” But what jumped out to me from Mr. II’s post was this aside, which is shockingly dismissive of humanities education:

The point of a book report is to test if a student read the required material and was able to comprehend what it was about and the use of an LLM tool defeated this test.

This is what computer science majors actually believe dot jpeg: That teachers assign book reports to check if students did the reading—not for any of the other skills that you practice in writing a book report, like penmanship, typing, forming coherent sentences, forming well-organized paragraphs, operating Microsoft Word, identifying significant plot points and characters, identifying themes, extracting meaning and making connections, encountering differences of interpretation with your peers and resolving them without violence…. We can keep going, and of course the purpose of a book report and what we expect from it depends on whether the author is in 2nd or 11th grade. But the blogger above is clearly just … a guy who didn’t do the reading. Who values speed over craft. Who would rather we send bullet points back and forth to each other than complete sentences.

Speaking of which, I never understood these people who think that emails with long paragraphs are unconditionally worse than those with bullet points. Sometimes a bulleted style can nudge you to be better organized, but in general, concision and organizedness are only loosely correlated. I can fuckin read, you know?

Mostly dead

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This week was possibly the biggest week I’ve had at work, and also possibly some of the worst sleep, caused less by the raw lack of time from so much work and more by the associated stress and anxiety. And also the knock-on effects of the coffee fuckup.

Basically, I’m working with an all-star team that’s been called in to handle a nearly impossible task, and we have put together a plan of action that can work, but only if we execute it flawlessly—there’s little room for error. Because the team is so energetic—truly, some of my favorite people to work with—I feel a tremendous sense of pride and duty to do my best for my peers and demonstrate that I “belong” with them, and that’s where the stress comes in: waking up randomly at like, 1 a.m. thinking: Am I doing enough? Am I pulling my weight?

Oh, also, completely unrelated, but you know how they say that the higher you go up in business, the higher the incidence of sociopathy? I think I met an actual sociopath this week on a meeting.

Starbreaker’s “A Masculine Mystique”

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Was catching up on starbreaker.org (he frequents the 32-Bit Cafe) and found this post of his from last year entitled “A Masculine Mystique.” It gives the “rules of masculinity” as the author has experienced them. Almost all of them ring true to my experience, too, but the one that jumped out for me was this one:

A man will perform unacknowledged emotional labor that women will not be willing or able to understand, accept, or appreciate even if it is explained to them, while being accused of expecting the women in his life to shoulder “the mental load”. He will do so in order to refrain from alienating those around him, keeping his true feelings and opinions to himself and denying the urge to lash out in anger as even those closest to him mistreat him without realizing it.

I see this in my circle. Women perform emotional labor that is highly visible, though often not recognized or appreciated. They comfort, they take care of elders, they perform cheer. Men’s emotional labor often takes the form of restraint: holding back words, holding back tears, holding back anger. It is hard to recognize “what you don’t do” as a form of labor unto itself.

Coffee fuckup

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Last night, I was setting up Mr. Coffee and accidentally pressed Brew Now instead of Brew Later, and ended up staring down the barrel of a full pot of coffee at 9 p.m. My girlfriend talked me out of drinking it, but my sleep was already ruined: the tantalizing scent had already found its way to the bedroom, and thoughts of morning kept me up late.

Big dudes crying

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As I said a few days ago, Jason Isbell has a mystifying ability to speak to “man pain” and provoke a compassionate response in even the most stoic of listeners. I recently watched an interview (relevant part begins at 8:40) with Desi Lydic on The Daily Show where Jason—yeah,we call him Jason) remarks that he is moved when he sees repressed southern men like him crying at his concerts: “I see a lot of big dudes crying at the shows and it makes me really happy.”

In response, Desi makes a little joke about how even some of the guys in the live audience might be breaking up, and Jason reassures them that it’s OK: “Don’t cry big dudes—you can do it. This is a safe space, big dudes.”

Let’s look closely at this joke, because it reveals something about Jason’s technique for “getting through” to an audience that might not be ready for it. The political connotations of the term “safe space” are a bit of a moving target, but I associate the term with those on the right who use it to deride liberals as being too soft. A typical context would be: “This is a marketplace of ideas, not a ‘safe space’; consider that your ’trigger warning,’ liberal.”

So, if you are used to hearing “safe space” as a term of mockery, then Jason’s joke is clearly at the expense of the big dudes. And yet, it is not directly at their expense: he is not mocking them for crying. Rather, he is teasing them because the fact that they are crying is itself a repudiation of their stereotypes about masculinity. The subtext is something like: “That’s funny how you mock liberals and soft boys for needing a safe space, but now look who’s coming to the concert to cry his eyes out?”

Jason is speaking the manly man’s language here—facts and logic—and showing, not telling his audience that needing a safe space doesn’t subtract from their manliness: an important realization. Jason’s banter is carefully calibrated to cut through the listener’s layers of repression and self-hatred. He is showing rather than telling, chiding rather than scolding. And we trust Jason because he is speaking to his own experience (the joke wouldn’t land if Desi made it).

I think this is good communication at work, an example of meeting the audience where they are instead of where you want them to be.

Untitled

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sat, 15 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Getting a little too tight, caring a little too much about things. This was supposed to be my silly zone, and here I am debating colors and the difference between a 1px and 2px border.

Having an easy Saturday. I answered a few emails, did some life admin tasks, and attempted to make plans with neighborhood friend for tomorrow, but it turns out he has some girl over, so I’ll give him a radius.

I need to get out of the house soon, so it doesn’t feel like I wasted the weekend.

Internal locus of control

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Was talking with a new friend/colleague about strategies for dealing with our male-dominated work environment and we arrived at the insight that those who manage to thrive despite the adversity do so by adopting an internal locus of control.

This is a bold statement, because when you are sitting in a room with a bunch of sexist men who are ignoring you or rolling their eyes, the easiest way to resolve the feeling of frustration and insecurity is to get a “reality check” from someone else in the room who can reassure you that the problem wasn’t you, it was them, those sexist and narrowminded men. And this is an important thing to do, to get validation, but it’s crucial that you don’t stop there, or else you are creating a feedback loop where every time you face adversity, you need to find someone who can reassure you that you are not the problem.

The bold, follow-up step you then have to take is to say: OK, I know this bad situation is not my fault, that it is the product of these men’s sexism and repressed insecurities and so on—but nonetheless, I have some agency here. I can be a little more assertive, or conspire with an ally to have them back me up on my ideas, or if the situation is truly insufferable, I can take some steps to leave or distance myself.

Adopting an internal locus of control in this manner does not mean you are forgiving or excusing the antagonist. It just means that for your own sanity, you are choosing to mold your actions and feelings about them around the things that are in your control.

Weathervanes

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been listening to the album Weathervanes today by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, a brilliant treatment of “man pain,” which of course is one of my favorite topics to consume media about.

I think Jason Isbell might be one of the most brilliant lyricists ever. I’m in awe of the track “Save the World,” which inverts the typical parental dynamic by having the speaker beg his child (in my hearing) for reassurance that she will “save the world when I lose my grip.”

Can we talk about the part where he makes poetry out of (checks notes) the RealID Act of 2005?

I left my wallet in the hotel room
They barely let me on the plane
I didn’t get a chance to check the news
Somebody shot up a classroom again

And when you said the cops just let ’em die
I heard the shaking in your voice
And for a moment you began to cry
Then I heard you make a choice

Portrait of a shitty childhood

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This short documentary Christmas, Every Day is genuinely one of the most painful things I have seen recently. It’s about a family in Alabama that is raising their pre-teen girls to be social media influencers who post makeup tutorials and dance videos on TikTok to farm engagement and sponsorship dollars.

Perhaps the most disturbing part is the scene where Dad explains the motivation for this parenting choice as setting his girls up with “passive income” so they can “be their own boss” instead of working a normal job—misappropriating the logic of “girlboss” to rationalize a childhood environment that will, without qualification, give them confidence and body image issues for the rest of their life.

Another irony of the video is that the family lives in the midst of absolutely stunning, jaw-dropping natural beauty, a horizon full of trails and forest and waterways. But the “career” that the parents have predetermined for their kids requires the girls to cultivate an endless clean-girl aesthetic that separates them from the rawness of nature.

Not a fan!

Trying hard things

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

You simply must. It’s good for the soul.

I recently tried watercoloring with my girlfriend. She can actually watercolor. I cannot, never really took to visual art. The experience broke me. I fucked around on an abstract design for maybe an hour then gave up and had to lie down. So tedious, the work of constantly dipping the brush into the paint and trying to maintain a consistent, bold color. When I woke up from my nap, she was still only 10% done, patiently matching colors, filling in details. Utter flow state.

I can’t do that shit, but I’m glad that I tried. It gives me a greater depth of appreciation when I look at a well-executed painting. Now I can say one thing more than that it’s pretty. I can also marvel at the amount of effort it takes to make two opposite corners of the painting the same exact color.

Trying watercoloring also gave me new perspective on the hard things that I actually have learned and get paid for being good at: writing, coding.

It’s important to try hard things. There’s meaning in it if you succeed, and there’s meaning in it if you fail.

Shame and male sexuality

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I recently read a Haruki Murakami novel, namely Norwegian Wood, for the first time in years, and thereby dislodged a painful memory of a family vacation. In middle school, I brought Murakami’s then-new 1Q84 to read on the trip, and at some point when I was out for a swim, my sister and grandmother started leafing through the book. When I returned, they accosted me and demanded to know why I was reading this kind of “pornography.”

It’s true, there was sex in the novel, a good amount of it, described in much detail. But 1Q84 isn’t porn. Murakami’s novels are about many things: boyhood and girlhood, existentialism, the futility of human connection and the need to try anyway.

It’s just that my sister and grandma had happened to open my book to a sex scene first. They humiliated me, first shaming me for reading it at all, then (when I objected that the book was about more than sex) mocking me, saying, “But you know which parts you skipped to.”

When we checked out of the hotel, I left the book on the nightstand.

This experience taught me three things:

It is wrong for a boy to think too much about sex.
All boys think too much about sex.
There is nothing you can do about the previous two facts.

In other words, I was ontologically disgusting.

The women who raised me spoke often about the importance of so-called emotional intelligence, but constantly put me in a “man box” from which I could not reach any of the tools that might have taught me how to understand the emotions of others. Whenever I showed a genuine interest in the complicated emotional facts of life, they told me I was autistic or arrogant or sex-crazed.

I am trying to free myself from the box.

Reading Norwegian Wood again as an adult has given me a vindicating experience. According to the blurb, this is “easily the most erotic” of Murakami’s novels, and yet it’s obviously about much more than sex. I remember, at 13, enjoying this book for the characters, for the faraway illustrations of vintage record stores and cafes, for the inventive contrast between the urban and rural—and yes, a bit for the sex, because that’s also an important part of the tapestry of life! And guess what—my recent reading of the book shows that that’s exactly what the book is about. It’s not a porno with a little bit of plot crammed in around the sides, it’s a lush and challenging novel about trying to make the most of a bunch of imperfect role models.

It wasn’t me, but the authority figures around me who were narrowly fixated on the erotic parts of Murakami’s writing.

Go figure.

Not clicking that

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday two copies of an episode called “Why Dating Sucks for Men” of the Vox podcast Explain It to Me dropped in my podcast feed. Two copies because they also put it in the weekend feed for Today, Explained, which is their daily news podcast.

I’m not clicking that.

That topic is a known infohazard for me. Listening would only make me stressed out and resentful over a problem I don’t even have because I’m not single. But I have experienced enough frustration over the topic in life to know all the arguments and refutations and counter-refutations: there’s no value to me in listening. And yet, that clickbait title …

I will prevail.

Can you not

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

So we’re at this work meeting, right? 22 dudes in the room, 2 gals. Guess which 3 people get hit on. That’s right, the gals, one of them twice.

The especially sucky part of this was that one of two was a woman on our team who we brought into this meeting specifically to be an “expert” on the topic. She had prepped a great set of slides and we’d been doing lots of, basically, confidence-building exercises in rehearsal and seen a lot of improvement in her ability to take charge of the room and respond to tough questions gracefully. But with her underlying confidence issues/imposter syndrome, getting pointlessly hit on at the very start of the meeting (before she even introduced herself) was a needless blow that almost threw her off balance. Thankfully, she pulled it together and delivered a great presentation, but was this a net positive or negative experience for her professional development?

The other gal got an even cruder remark—she claims not to have heard it, which is probably for the better, because I could swear one of the middle-aged men called her “babe” when she was handing out surveys.

I finally bit the bullet and set up an actual static site build thing with Hugo. Let me know if the site still sucks as much as it’s supposed to.

Narcissist in the workplace

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have a worst enemy at work. Thankfully he (it’s always a he) is on a distant team and we never really have to work together. We became enemies a few weeks after he was hired, when he was given a chunk of my code to read just to familiarize himself with what we do, and took it upon himself to call a meeting with me and my various bosses to grill me on a bunch of difficult technical aspects and criticize the notes I’d made for myself as “imprecisely phrased.” I held my own, but it was a waste of time and a humiliating experience.

Lo and behold, turns out he has encountered a similar problem in his own work and managed to create a solution using a different technical approach than I did which works pretty well! That doesn’t surprise me; my implementation was hamstrung by a bunch of client restrictions that prevented it from being its best self, and he had the benefit of my code to see that these limitations were a bigger deal than you might guess.

The problem is that now someone (not knowing the history) wants to facilitate an “introduction” between me and this guy, and I need a subtle way to back out of this meeting that doesn’t require going to war. I have nothing to gain from talking to him: his technical approach is not new to me, it’s just different from the one I chose, so it’s not like I would learn anything that would help me in my career.

Sexism, but it's lit crit so it's cool

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A few months ago, the magazine The Sun Magazine published a great little story called "Bone Frag" by Peter Stenson.

Lots to love about this story: First of all that it breaks the mold of what you usually see in The Sun, i.e. weepy stories about family, the overturning of generations, and how many obscure plant names the author learned while growing up in Rural Place. (No hate for those stories, but it's been done to death.) "Bone Frag" is about body parts literally falling out of the sky--an absurd metaphor for, you know, all of this (gesturing at 2025 environment). It's a dark comedy, we love a dark comedy.

Second of all, this story explores what some derisively call "man pain," i.e. the inconvenient reality that men, too, have emotional struggles, and that sometimes these struggles manifest in ways we might find morally unsavory (sexually fantasies, paranoia, gambling), and that helping men instead of abandoning to face their problems all alone may require overcoming a certain amount of moral disgust over these "symptoms."

Brené Brown wrote a whole book about emotional vulnerability, and here's what she said about man pain:

Here’s the painful pattern that emerged from my research with men: We ask them to be vulnerable, we beg them to let us in, and we plead with them to tell us when they’re afraid, but the truth is that most women can’t stomach it. In those moments when real vulnerability happens in men, most of us recoil with fear and that fear manifests as everything from disappointment to disgust.

You can see what's coming, right? Disgruntled letters to the editor about how, I guess, The Sun should go back to publishing more stories about someone's dead spouse. Lori McFadden from Mesa, Arizona:

For many years I have found your magazine to be indispensable reading. I tell friends that there is always something to excite me—and quite often to offend me—in The Sun, and that’s OK. But Peter Stenson’s story [“Bone Frag”] in your October 2024 issue has no redeeming features. I read the whole thing believing that surely there would be something of value. But there was nothing. Awful.

And here's Sherrie Miranda from Chula Vista, California:

Peter Stenson's science-fiction story was gross and totally unbelievable. Body parts falling out of the sky? I mean, there's Gaza, but that isn't science fiction. That is a sad reality. Please think carefully the next time you are considering publishing science fiction. I can find plenty of that on TV. It doesn't need to be in The Sun.

You can just hear Sherrie sneering derisively as she pronounces the words "science fiction." A dirty, masculine genre for perverts and aspies, right? I'm saying nothing new here, but like, the point of fiction isn't not to repeat "reality" or even be "believable;" it's to provoke a change in the reader, and even Sherrie has to admit that by that standard, "Bone Frag" worked on her.

Also, while I don't mean to cheapen SF by splitting hairs, I think the correct genre term for "Bone Frag" should be magical realism. SF is about asking "what if" the world was different from ours and how the differences would play out, whereas magical realism is when weird shit happens but the characters just try to grapple with it like any other literary fiction.

(For some reason, Sherrie's note only appears in the print edition, and not the online version here; also, they did something weird with the URL scheme and I expect that that link will break and the page will be moved to this URL sooner or later.)

Edit: Ngl, they sort of phoned it in on this month's "correspondence" section. The letter I attributed to Lori McFadden above appears in the web version with that name, but it's attributed to Patricia King Sommer in the print version. Lori has a note in the print version, too, but it's more positive: "The story was brilliant and original, as I've come to expect from The Sun." I don't know what I expect from anyone anymore.

Judith Butler lecture

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Around the time of the 2016 presidential election, can't remember if it was before or after, I saw a Judith Butler lecture in person and and a young white man in the audience asked a question that went something like: "So, it's great all this advocacy you have done on behalf of women and gender minorities and how you have worked in the intersectional framework. I want to do the same thing on behalf of an intersection I think is underserved on the left, namely young white men."

Prof Butler was visibly irritated by the question, in no small part because it really had nothing to do with the content of the talk: Butler was there to promote a recent book on democracy movements or something, not really related to Gender Trouble. They gave a response that I think was incredibly dismissive. Again, paraphrasing: "You said 'young,' 'white,' and 'men.' I think there's already a lot of advocacy on the left happening on behalf of those in that group who have the biggest needs, namely the ones who are queer, who are trans, who are gay. So yes, support those existing structures. Next question."

Am I conveying this correctly? They completely dodged the heart of the question, which was essentially about the idea that we might need to put social justice logic to work for a group that has traditionally been thought of as the perpetrator, not the victim--and instead just found a way to split hairs in their response that allowed them to hold the party line of always connecting your advocacy to an officially oppressed group.

Ruth Whippman on how boys are socialized

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Sorry, another gender post today. I just read this commentary from the American Institute for Boys and Men and wanted to share. AIBM is like, the last remnant standing of the men's advocacy that I remember taking great interest in when I was younger, before the men's rights movement dissolved into the alt-right and woke factions.

In the linked article, Whippman is promoting her book and shares five tacit assumptions of past gender equality activism that she overturned as she raised boys. The quote I wanted to share is this one:

One wide-scale study on parenting practices in the US and Canada concluded that on average boys receive a “less nurturing, and more aversive home life,” than girls, and are more likely to be the recipients of “hostile or confrontational” parenting.

Another study of over 20,000 parents showed that parents show more emotional warmth towards daughters and feel closer to them than they do with sons. They are more likely to spank boys and to report being too busy to play with them. Other research shows that both mothers and fathers spend significantly less time with boys than girls from babyhood onwards on activities like telling stories, singing songs, drawing, and reading.

Right from birth, mothers respond preferentially to daughters and are more likely to chat back to their sounds. Throughout infancy and beyond, moms continue to interact more frequently with their girls than their boys, and to comfort and hug them more.

(Now I need to write CSS for a blockquote lol.) Am I the only one who finds this incredibly heartbreaking--the idea that boys are literally being ignored and denied physical affection at a greater rate than girls throughout childhood, and then we expect them to grow up and have zero bitterness (even subconscious) at the world and move through life apologizing for their unearned privelege?

Sorry: I am in a punchy mood today and if you are reading this without context, you might think this is a rant against feminism, but it is not; watch this interview with AIBM director Richard Reeves for more context on where I am coming from. AIBM is trying to advance the self-evident notion that advocating for gender equality doesn't need to be a zero-sum game; recognizing the ways in which our society is failing boys and young men doesn't have to subtract from feminist advocacy for reproductive rights and all the rest.

Don't fuckin touch me

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In the five love languages quiz I always get physical touch. I'm a big physical touch person. I like hugs, kisses, and sex when I like them.

That does not mean I want those things from every stranger. In fact, it means I am especially sensitive to physical contact when it is forced on me.

I met today a friend of a friend for the first time and she kept trying to do all these consolatory touch things. You know, because I was doing the ironic millennial thing of making jokes about being so anxious I could vibrate myself off a cliff at any moment and being fugly and so on, and she was of the more toxic positivity/post-gender/post-sexuality vibe, so when I said something self deprecating, instead of getting the joke or being like "same" (the correct millennial response) she would like, try to touch me on the shoulder? sympathetically?

Don't like that.

Privacy nihilism

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have this friend who is like, generally concerned about privacy in the macro but has not taken any actual steps to increase her digital privacy threshold in the micro, e.g. using a fake phone number for grocery store loyalty cards or opting out of pointless data-sharing agreements or rejecting cookies or what have you.

I forget what the example was that we were discussing yesterday but she said something like, "Yeah, it kinda sucks that they use that info to form a digital profile of you, and I would love to opt out, but at the same time it takes effort to do so, and I am quite confident that even if I opted out they could get the same data from somewhere else, so it's really just wasted effort."

I wasn't really sure what to say to this. This post kinda sucks because I can't remember the particular example, but her point actually made perfect sense--it really was data that could be trivially scraped from some other source or credit card thing or what have you. So I had to sort of concede the point.

Have any of you encountered this kind of privacy nihilism before--and perhaps come up with an argument against it better than "Still, you gotta have principles"?

Trusting your intuition

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I used to be skeptical of people who said that they were good at judging character and could just tell based on vibes if someone was intelligent, narcissistic, a good person to work with, etc. I knew about studies showing that, when the average person tries to judge others on intuition, they end up preferring people who are similar to themselves, hence the meme about white politics bros wanting to work with someone they could "grab a beer with" i.e. another white politics bro.

But here's the thing: I think there are some people who are exceptionally good at this intuition thing, and I am starting to think it's a key to success in life, relationships, business, etc. Developing my own ability to "read" people and learning to trust my gut when I have a bad feeling about someone--instead of doubting myself and wondering if that's actually just some horrible bias--has gotten me out of a huge anxiety hole over the past couple years, and helped me inhabit my corner of the world with more presence and certainty about who I am.

Male pattern emotional illiteracy

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Or MPEI for short. This is a new term I have been trying to make catch on with my friends slash colleagues. It describes so many of the situations we keep finding ourselves in.

As much context as I can provide without giving my literal address away: We work in a very male- and boomer-dominated field. But our immediate team does a special thing that skews younger and female. So we often find ourselves in the awkward role of having to work with another team nominally to provide our team's special thing, but in practice to compensate for the fact that the team has succumbed to MPEI and their relationship with the client is falling apart.

What I'm saying is, we work with a bunch of sexist old dudes, and have seen Mad Men levels (have not actually seen the show lol) of casual sexism/racism in our work. Very common scenes are dudes making weird sex jokes, completely ignoring my colleague's point until I repeat it for her, looking at me while my colleague speaks, etc.

This has put me in the uncomfortable position of being the "man whisperer" because I have just enough self-awareness to recognize that sometimes women have good ideas (shocker) but also can "speak bro" and sell their ideas to the unreceptive crowd.

I won't pretend my job is as hard as the women's, but it is challenging in a few non-obvious ways, most notably that everyday seems to provide further evidence for a conclusion that I have been trying to resist for my whole life: that men are congenitally emotionally illiterate, that they can never learn to listen, that they were born bad at this and their best bet is to meet a good woman who will have pity on them and protect them from their emotional deficits. I've done a lot of work (i.e. therapy: very expensive) to try to escape this trap. I would like to think others can, too, but then, here are my boomer colleagues, the contrary evidence staring me in the face.

Second challenge of my position is that I essentially function as a crutch that removes the need for these boomer dudes to actually learn to communicate with women. Instead they can just keep boomering, and I serve as the translation layer in between. This also means that I tend to get automatic credit for ideas that actually came from the women I work with. I try to magnify and amplify but like, I can't solve all of sexism myself.

Reddit gender vs. Tumblr gender

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

You can read a lot about the "gender experience" of people in my microgeneration who grew up reading Reddit vs. those who grew up on Tumblr. The general gist is that Tumblr was/is this super feminist and inclusive space, potentially to a fault due to their rampant cancel culture and random TERF offshoots, whereas Reddit was a genuine cesspool full of MRAs and (whichever was the wrong side of) Gamergate activists and so on.

I suspect that there are more people out there who are like me, who grew up using both sites, reading the heated arguments about gender politics, and genuinely taking both sides seriously.

I think I was in middle school when I first read the MensRights subreddit. It was not as garbage of a movement then as men's rights has become that. At the time, it was an explicitly feminist movement (some preferred the term "equalist" but you have to forgive them) grounded in the idea that patriarchal expectations of masculinity put men in a "man box" that didn't allow them to express emotion, form meaningful connections, learn empathy, etc. There was a TED talk. It was kind of cool.

Over time, the focus drifted and started to focus more on instances of "reverse discrimination" against men. Predictably, family/divorce court and parental rights were a big focus, as were concerns about false accusations from women during the beginnings of the MeToo movement (though that term didn't exist yet). This is when you saw culture at large start to reframe men's rights as a problematic thing--I remember reading a Newsweek article, an actual printed article, about how MensRights on Reddit was part of a broader sphere that included genuine racists and tradcons and what have you. It was starting to look and feel that way to me too: you had to explicitly disclaim men's rights if you wanted anyone to believe you when you said you cared about women's rights/feminism.

As all this was shaking out, I was also super active on Tumblr; this was in the heydey of cancellation wars over who shipped what and "your fave is problematic," but there was serious political discourse (or as much as that crowd of, in retrospect, probably high schoolers at best could muster) bubbling beneath the surface. This is when the phrase "believe women" came about, as did that meme saying "not all men are problematic, but would you still eat M&Ms if only the green ones were poison" or something.

I'm going to be genuine here--this was a frankly really shitty time to be coming of age as someone who cared about all of the issues. I didn't want to be an apologist for the patriarchy and all the historical wrongs done against women, minorities, etc. But the statistical arguments about how patriarchy "mostly" harms women, so we should disregard all the ways in which it harms men (the original spirit of men's rights, as I remember it) never seemed very compelling to me.

Frustratingly (it is considered bad writing to begin a sentence with an adverb then a comma), I was hoping these issues would get better as I got older, but I haven't seen much improvement. Nobody cares about nuance, they just want to project their preconceived narrative onto the facts, you've heard all this before. Anyway, I think that's why Trump won: there are a bunch of young white men who might have been open to progressivism at one point, but just got exhausted by all the crossfire and thought, fuck it, I'd like to burn the whole world down. I think that's a pretty braindead way of thinking, and I understand that perhaps people who can be so easily won over to the other side did not have particularly strong convictions toward feminism and the rest to begin with. But the point of political strategy is not to impose moral purity tests on voters, it's to win elections, and it seems like the Democrats really stopped caring about that in the macro.

You've heard all this shit before and are tired of it. I'm sorry.

Something that happened to me twice

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

According to my therapist's definition of the term, I have been sexually assaulted twice. Don't read the rest of this post if you don't want to think about that.

The first time was when I was 17 or 18 (important difference there but I honestly can't remember) by an old lady. In the moment, I felt very afraid and uncomfortable, and had to threaten to call the cops before she backed off. After a few days, I was fine, I guess. I even felt a little bit vindicated because I had spent a long time feeling frustrated at the idea that only women/girls could be the victims of sexual assault, and now I was living proof that that wasn't the case. Just as soon, I felt extreme doubt about whether what I had experienced was "legitimate," whether I could actually compare my experience to the "real" sexual assaults that we were hearing about then, near the peak of the MeToo movement.

Second time was when I was 23, by a sort of colleague-adjacent person (hard to describe the relationship in detail without doxxing myself but it was only the first or second time we'd met), a man maybe a year or two older than me. This time, I knew exactly what had happened and confronted the guy the day after with some trusted friends by my side, said "That was kinda messed up, man," and he gave a weird half apology. I cried in the airport a few hours later and one of my female friends tried to comfort me, but I could tell she was weirded out by the whole thing, that it just didn't compute.

I only told my therapist the second story--too much ground to cover. She helped me see that the experience had affected me more than I thought, that it presented another opportunity for me to practice the thought malpattern that goes like: Nobody cares about my feelings, I am an inanimate object, I deserve to be ignored if not treated like shit outright, I should have been grateful just to be seen.

Confessional

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Sike! You thought I was going to have a consistent title theme (minimalistic thing with just the date) but now I'm not doing that anymore because I'm writing again today and couldn't decide what to do with that.

I'm trying to start a confessional kind of thing, where people can send me their intrusive thoughts and I can bless them with the reassurance that having a bad thought doesn't make you a bad person. This is important to me because it's an issue I struggle with personally.

I'm worried that by doing this, I will actually just attract a bunch of genuinely awful people who want me to agree with their awful thought, but I'm hoping that this sentence will serve as a kind of magic spell that will ward off those people and attract those who are more like me, who are basically decent people who make occasional mistakes and struggle with scrupulosity.

You can email me at convexer@proton.me.

Today I am feeling kind of crummy. I can see a lot of ways for the world to far apart and I don't see it getting better anytime soon. I don't think anyone has a plan, even the people I really respect, even myself. There are no adults in the room. We are just freeballing it, every single time.

I said that I wouldn't get obsessed with tooling for this webpage, but then I went again and did again, came up with a new rule I have to follow, which is that I have to run html-tidy on the page after I save it. This isn't much of a burden but it could develop into one.

Untitled

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My observation: people make a lot of bad decisions to fulfill a need for validation.

Like dating someone who is a piece of shit, but that's an obvious example.

I see it more often at work: someone wants an exception to policy, and immediately asks the highest-ranking person whose email they have for permission. If you ask for permission, the answer is always going to be no. As long as the thing you are asking for is commonplace and reasonable, just do it and send a heads-up, or something like that. (There's actually a lot of gray area here, because people who want to do something genuinely fucked up also often adopt this "act first" mentality, but you have to just trust your own moral compass--it's the only way.)

If you are a fed who is scared for your job, trotting out your best Faulknerian prose on in reply to the "What did you do this week?" email is not going to help you. It won't impress your manager (who has already formed their opinion of you), it won't prevent the president from vaporizing your agency if he really wants to, and it certainly won't impress Elon Musk.

At best, it will be a temporary balm for the anxiety you are feeling about the possibility of losing your job this week. But the truth is that there is nothing you can do to diminish that possibility. You should instead focus on developing backup plans.

Untitled

convexer@proton.me (convexer) — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I'm creating this site so I can have a fresh start on the internet.

It's not my first webpage, and it probably won't be my last. But I wanted to experience the feeling of starting from nothing again: plain HTML, writing words off the cuff, not worrying so much about whether I used straight quotes or curly quotes or formatted my code correctly or whatever.

I also wanted to have a site that isn't tied to my real name. I have other sites that are also not tied to my real name; some of them are known to my IRL friends as a bit of a joke, others are truly anonymous. But I have used them mostly for "experiments"--trying to learn a new technology or write in a new format.

The purpose of this site, on the other hand, is to have no purpose. There will be no update cadence, no rules about beautiful semantic HTML, just kind of some pointless pissing into the wind to see if I can shake loose some of the habits and insecurities that I have acquired in my travels on the internet.

I would also--and I'm really sorry about this--like to write about politics. I have done a lot of that, too, in more or less transparent terms, including on my real-name blog. But now I have a job and things to lose, and this has put a damper on how honest I am willing to be about my political beliefs in public spaces.

Since you are probably wondering if I will go left or right, let me start off by reassuring you that I go left. I voted Clinton/Biden/Harris. Wasn't of voting age before that, if that helps. If you were to poll me on individual issues, I probably align with the typical progressivism of people my age. But I also feel like I "know too much" about how the other side thinks, and this means that I think the left has made some big strategic fuckups over the course of my lifetime, mostly by leaning too hard into progressive activist movements that, for all their virtues, were alienating to moderates. I would like to have a place where I can blab about that without people getting suspicious that I am some kind of right-wing extremist in disguise.

But people will think what they want to.