2025-11-13

Writing. Doing the thing. That is what we are here for right now: doing the thing. Getting the words out.

What I’ve been doing today is mostly just trying to get all my shit out of Google. I’m back on my tech independence, self-hosting the universe bullshit. My reason for this is mostly that I’ve been thinking lately about building more stuff “outside the system”, so to speak. Sometimes I feel like the anti-capitalist ethos is that capitalist systems are really bad, and we should dismantle them. I think my bigger thing is that these systems are kinda Fine, Actually, but if they do bad things – use your data in ways you don’t like, fund futures you don’t like, etc. – you can simply not use them. For whatever reason that seems kinda impossible for some people, but it’s not really that hard. Don’t use Google to sign in to everything. Use a different search engine. All that good stuff. You don’t have to self-host your own notes or whatever, because a lot of the defaults are pretty decent. I’m pretty sure Apple’s Notes app is quite private, there’s not really a reason for them to pawn that information off to people. Yes, maybe you have to pay for things if you want to use them and not have them track you (e.g. for LLMs), or you can go through all the work to self-host them or whatever, but you can always just not use them.

The thing I’m always thinking about is well just how much of the world can I opt out of? I’m not totally sure yet, but I think the answer is a lot. I’m not working a traditional job, I buy untracked physical books or get things from Anna’s Archive, I still use a Kindle sure but that’s on the chopping block (plus I don’t really imagine it transmits all that much about you). Okay, governments know where I’m traveling now, but they probably know quite little about what I’m actually doing, writing, thinking about, and so on. I would like for that to continue.

To some degree this is paranoia, because I highly doubt anyone gives a shit about me personally, but in the future it’s less about personal anonymity and more about independence from the whims of large corporations. I don’t want the decisions made by some PM at Google to have major affects on how my life works. We’ve seen it happen a million times over that Google kills some delightful tool and then everyone has to scramble now that it’s gone. And I’m not just picking on Google here, but Google is the one trying to organize the entire Internet, so they’re probably the people with the widest view of my interests and activities.

So yeah, I’m gonna be somewhat paranoid for a while.

The other main reason for doing this is simple: when I do want a system, like an LLM, to ingest all of my data, having it in plaintext and Git is a superpower. I can just chuck this entire content/ directory into a zip file and we’re good to go, plus Github will probably always be the first thing to get integrated when text is involved. Text is the Universal Interface and all that. I don’t want to have to wait for the BS Google Drive integration to get built, I want it all to just be dropped in and Just Work. Markdown is great because I can always convert it into docs or something, very flexible, and I can open it up in literally any IDE, Google Docs, Word, or just about anything else. Fuckin' TextEdit. I don’t care.

Blegh, tirade over. Well, not quite, since I have another hundred words or so to meet my target. I’m thinking it would be interesting/horrifying/potentially illuminating to have an LLM read over all of my old journal entries and try and pull some interesting bits out of them that I may have forgotten. (That also may be considered LLM tortue once we get the LLM ethics committees up and running – sorry in advance!)

I’m also incredibly hungry. I went to this Vietnamese street food market where there were a bunch of vendors selling a bunch of different things, and I had one and left when I really could have eaten like 3 more meals. Serving sizes are somewhat small here for when you’re ravenous after a day of walking around. Probably will just Grab something in.

Anyways, that’s time. Peace.