Every commercial social media platform operates on the same formula: provide service for free, attract as many people as possible, then start selling that attention to businesses in form of advertisement. Once people cannot leave without losing all their connections, and businesses cannot leave without losing their marketing channel, do everything in their power to squeeze as much profit as possible, enshittifying the platform and ruining the experience for everyone.

In order for those platforms to keep growing their profits, they have to come up with all kinds of creative ways to harvest as much private data of their users as possible. In addition, they put enormous resources at finding new ways to monetize all the data they have, like refining their algorithms to prey on people’s addictions, aplifying hate and outrage because that makes people to engage more in their ecosystem. When you follow people on their platforms, you don’t really ‘follow’ them in a traditional sense, but training their algorithm which then is used against you.

There’s an argument to be made that the algorithm is what makes these platforms useful, because it serves content that you might be interested in, and I get that point. Not for me though - I’m not looking for mindlessly scroll just because I’m bored or I crave for a dopamine hit. I follow people because I’m interested in hearing what they have to say, and nothing else. If there was an application that allows me to receive posts from different social media platforms in a format that I want, I would use it. But it does not exist, because the data is what makes those platforms so much money, so they protect it at all costs. If you attempt to do anything like that, you’re exposing yourself to huge fines that would financially ruin you. And it doesn’t matter if they did the same thing for their competitors when they were small. Now when they accumulated so much wealth, they’re abusing the IP law to trample any attempts to give them a taste of their own medicine.

When Mastodon started to get traction (especially after Musk acquired Twitter), I was reluctant to say anything about it. I’ve seen the many times how new platforms come into picture, promising to be different, and ending enshittified as everyone else. Mastodon has distinctive differences from everyone else, though. First, it’s not a platform per se. Mastodon is using something called ActivityPub, a protocol defining how information should be shared between different websites that work upon the same protocol. In other words, you could have a number of completely different websites, and people would see their friends posts across all of them. Imagine if someone posted a tweet on X, and people on Facebook, Snap, WhatsApp, Instagram and any other website would see the post on their feed, allowing them to like or respond, and their response would appear back in X. This is what federated platform is - instead of having one website controlling everything, you have many websites working on their own, sharing information with each other in the process. The protocol is the platform.

It also helps that Mastodon is a non-profit, which reduces the chances of it getting enshittified, even though its not a guarantee (see OpenAI case). But the fact that it’s the protocol that its built upon, I’m not forced to trust Mastodon as a company. I can use any other website using ActivityPub and fully participate in the discussions with people using Mastodon. I can even run my own website with sole user (me), and be a full-fledged citizen of the Fediverse.

The fact of one company controlling the platform was one big reason why I avoided social media, but the Fediverse and decentralized platforms makes this reason not valid anymore. I also sometimes feel the urge to share some small things (especially when I started to learn music production), but don’t want to write the whole blog post about it, so Mastodon could fill that gap nicely.

With all being said, I’m tempted to give Mastodon a proper go. I had an account for a few years, just following some people to test the waters, but haven’t commited to post anything… yet. But I think you’ll see me on the Fediverse sooner rather than later.

Code is a liability. Code’s capabilities are assets. The goal of a tech shop is to have code whose capabilities generate more revenue than the costs associated with keeping that code running. For a long time, firms have nurtured a false belief that code costs less to run over time: after an initial shakedown period in which the bugs in the code are found and addressed, code ceases to need meaningful maintenance. After all, code is a machine without moving parts – it does not wear out; it doesn’t even wear down.

[…]

“Writing code” is an incredibly useful, fun, and engrossing pastime. It involves breaking down complex tasks into discrete steps that are so precisely described that a computer can reliably perform them, and optimising that performance by finding clever ways of minimizing the demands the code puts on the computer’s resources, such as RAM and processor cycles.

Meanwhile, “software engineering” is a discipline that subsumes “writing code,” but with a focus on the long-term operations of the system the code is part of. Software engineering concerns itself with the upstream processes that generate the data the system receives. It concerns itself with the downstream processes that the system emits processed information to. It concerns itself with the adjacent systems that are receiving data from the same upstream processes and/or emitting data to the same downstream processes the system is emitting to.

“Writing code” is about making code that runs well. “Software engineering” is about making code that fails well. It’s about making code that is legible – whose functions can be understood by third parties who might be asked to maintain it, or might be asked to adapt the processes downstream, upstream or adjacent to the system to keep the system from breaking. It’s about making code that can be adapted, for example, when the underlying computer architecture it runs on is retired and has to be replaced, either with a new kind of computer, or with an emulated version of the old computer.

Because that’s the thing: any nontrivial code has to interact with the outside world, and the outside world isn’t static, it’s dynamic. The outside world busts through the assumptions made by software authors all the time and every time it does, the software needs to be fixed. Remember Y2K? That was a day when perfectly functional code, running on perfectly functional hardware, would stop functioning – not because the code changed, but because time marched on.

We’re 12 years away from the Y2038 problem, when 32-bit flavors of Unix will all cease to work, because they, too, will have run out of computable seconds. These computers haven’t changed, their software hasn’t changed, but the world – by dint of ticking over, a second at a time, for 68 years – will wear through their seams, and they will rupture.

[…]

AI can write code, but AI can’t do software engineering. Software engineering is all about thinking through context – what will come before this system? What will come after it? What will sit alongside of it? How will the world change? Software engineering requires a very wide “context window,” the thing that AI does not, and cannot have. AI has a very narrow and shallow context window, and linear expansions to AI’s context window requires geometric expansions in the amount of computational resources the AI consumes.

Can AI be trained in such a way it would handle constantly changing world? Can it be trusted to make right decisions in unexpected situations? Humans are incredibly complex, and even small deviations in situations could make previous decision undesirable. Since AI is not a deterministic system, how can it be trusted to make right choices?

If I have to choose between a strict algorithm that fails well in unexpected situations, and AI that attempts to come up with any solution it can “think” of, I’ll always choose the algorithm. I’d sleep better at night knowing my system will not make some catastrophic decision because neural networks decided that deleting all data that it’s causing issues would get rid of the problem.

Can AI become good enough that it could navigate complexities of the real world and make correct decisions in novel situations? I guess we still yet to see. But one thing is clear - having people involved is not going anywhere any time soon.

First, is when I created my first website. After writing gaming-related articles for others, I got tired of waiting approvals from website owners, so I decided to create my own. After dabbling around with php-fusion content management system, following multiple tutorials to buy hosting, upload files through FTP and configure MySQL database, I managed to launch something real.

It was a big deal. It was a similar feeling when you move into the new home: you get absorbed by the idea that this is your place, and you can do whatever you want in it. Like painting walls in a color you like and moving furniture where it makes most sense to you, same with the website, you find a theme you like, add a few widgets that you need and so on. The idea of owning this website and the fact that I can slowly improve it every day felt liberating.

Second, it was when I made my first change in code. I wanted to make some adjustments in website theme, which lead me reading tutorials about HTML and CSS. I opened text editor of one of the stylesheets, changed color code of the background, re-uploaded that through FTP and refreshed the browser. Voila! I immediately saw the change go live, and that planted a seed in my head that I can learn how to do these improvements through code, and make website do things I thought I never could.

The latest big moment took about 15 years. It was realizing this: Everything, that I ever thought was too difficult for me to learn, can be learned. It’s only a question whenever I’m ready to invest the time.

This might seem obvious, but it took me so long to really internalize this. Now I try to capture every opportunity to learn something, even if that’s somewhat outside my area of expertise. For example, I was playing around with visual scripting in Unreal Engine, which was enough in a lot of cases, but I didn’t like that I didn’t understand C++ concepts in Unreal, so I picked that up. I’ve also been learning a bit about x86 assembly and low level systems programming, purely because this field used to feel “off-limits”, since I only programmed in higher levels of abstraction. In my previous job, I didn’t need to know, for example, intricacies of configuring Kubernetes clusters, but when I faced issues with that, I didn’t ask sysadmins for help - I used it as an opportunity to level up, even though it’s not strictly my field.

Nothing is rocket science (except rocket science of course, but even that can be learned!), and there’s nothing more fun than building competency in things that are interesting to you.

If there’s something you use every day, why not to level-up and become as effective with it as possible? The mastery of a tool would not only save your valuable time, but will make you stand out from everyone else. Also, the temporary discomfort of getting used to do things differently will pay out dividents forever. If you lose 20% of productivity for the first week, but gain 200% after for the rest of your life, isn’t this a good trade-off?

Being proficient with something has also satisfaction on it’s own. Anyone would love to become good at what they do, right? You can start that right now. Read documentation on how each function in your software works. Start using keybinds, at least for tools that you use the most, and don’t accept that there’s only one way to do things. You’ll be surprised how much time you will save.

I made a decision that my website will be the source of truth of my identity. It’s my server, my domain, my data, and no-one owns whatever I write or photos I upload but me. Well, until AI came around and billion dollar companies decided they plainly don’t give a shit.

The final straw was the latest app that OpenAI released, which allows any asshole to take someone’s photo and create a shitty, but fairly believable fake videos of anyone they like. Deep fakes in it’s infancy was still an expensive operation and the result was clearly fake, but we’re at the point when that’s not the case anymore (at least as long as VCs are willing to foot the bill).

I believe that having your face, publicly accessible to anyone, is a big security issue. Imagine someone taking your photo, generating video of you asking for money and sending it to your elderly parents? Having no visual identity online is the only way to prevent this.

It sucks, and I wish this problem wouldn’t exist, but the cat is out of the bag. It’s the new reality that we need to adjust to, and I’ll do exactly that.

Ever since I went back to Linux I explored the idea of using terminal-based tools instead of familiar GUIs. First I started with replacing by beloved Sublime Text editor with Neovim, and Sublime Merge git client with lazygit. This was already quite a step, but I wondered how far I could push this, and started replacing other, not strictly dev-related software with terminal alternatives as well.

These days I navigate file system from the terminal (yazi), listen music through the terminal (cmus), even read email from the terminal (aerc). Combine that with tiling window manager (Sway) and you get amazing setup of simplicity and productivity. The fact that it’s not only possible, but incredibly satisfying to use, is mesmerizing. It made me think why that’s the case, and I came up with a few explanations.

First, using the terminal is fast. Really fast. The speed at which you can get things done depend not on the speed of the software or how fast you can move the mouse into a particular spot, but solely on how well you remember keyboard shortcuts and how fast you can type. And there’s nothing that stops you from getting good at it, same as nothing is stopping you learning any other skill. You can be as fast and efficient as you want to be, and software will not hold you back.

Second, terminal is an antidote for distractions. As good as graphical user interfaces are these days, there’s a lot of visual noise that gives absolutely nothing - purely aesthetics, which increases cognitive load for the person that needs to get the job done. Don’t get me started on software that embeds ads (yes, I’m looking at you Microsoft). Terminal is as simple or complicated as you want it to be. You can do plain text, with no colors, or use pretty themes, and even render images. But the foundation is still text, and what you get is content, and nothing else.

Third, it’s the feeling that is hard to explain. Terminal based UIs date back to 60s, and the fact that its still widely used, 80+ years later is the legacy worth cherished for. It’s not even for programmers only! - terminal was used by many different people to get the job done, from receptionists to librarians. Receiving my order confirmation email in my terminal feels almost like I’m in a video game, where you can read conversations between different characters through in-game computers, which often displays only text.

There’s of course one type of software that do not work well on the terminal, and that’s the browser. Unfortunately that’s not going to change, and I wish more companies would pay more attention on making applications work well with text-based browsers. This is something I’m looking forward contributing to in the near future though!

Now you could say that it’s just nostalgia. The thing is, I never used terminal in my childhood. My earliest memory was seeing how Pacman was launched on MS-DOS, but my own adventure began with GUIs and Windows 92. Terminal for me came into picture only when using Linux for the first time, somewhere around 2008, when I already was learning to write code.

I just think that terminals are better way to consume content and get the job done. It hides all distractions that exists around GUIs and the internet, and it is something we all should seek in this economy of noise and attention.

Wishing is something that we hope will occur without our direct involvement. It’s a sweet and hopeful dream, which almost never becomes a reality by itself.

Wanting, on the other hand, is something that kicks off an action. It’s a goal that you actively pursue, even in exchange of your own leisure time.

There are plenty of people who wish, but very few that really want. When choosing who to work with, keep that in mind.

This year, I decided to move back to Linux, almost exclusively. There are multiple reasons why: worsening quality of Apple software, hostile actions of Apple towards the developers and consumers, but, most importantly, huge improvements in Linux and its ecosystem.

Mac OS was known for a long time to be a super-stable, everything-works-out-of-the-box type of operating system. It had a great balance of having a beautiful UI without sacrificing usability. The developer ergonomics were pretty good for people that are more familiar with UNIX instead of Windows, which made Mac a great choice for a lot of programmers.

Something changed over the years. System updates were constantly breaking something for me, which forced me to ignore any major OS releases. The file system became slow, which you could notice not only by using Docker, but simply using the Finder. For example, I tried to transfer 3GB worth of files into USB storage, which Mac estimated to complete in 50(!) minutes. Cancelling operation and ejecting the drive would freeze the Finder, and eventually, show an error message. And it wasn’t USB’s fault - I tried the same thing on Linux and had no problems.

Apple Music is another example. iTunes wasn’t perfect, though it worked most of the time. Today, 9 years after its release, Apple Music is still having trouble recognizing already downloaded purchases and re-downloads them again, resulting in duplicate files. Not to mention general sluggishness when navigating an app or music that just appears in my library and the only way to get rid of it is to contact Apple support.

Apple as a company changed a lot as well. From being a champion of people’s right to privacy, it:

• Became hostile to developers for attempts to provide alternative options to pay for their services, evading outrageous 30% tax from all sales (including outside the App Store!)
• Released products that are difficult to repair, and in some cases, plainly impossible.
• Asked ridiculous premiums on any spec bumps on their hardware (like $800 for 2TB storage, or $400 for 32GB memory).
• Prevented customers from installing any apps they want into their phones, which they already paid for.
• Used malicious compliance to EU regulations, like slapping huge fees for 3rd party app stores or attempting to completely remove PWA’s in Europe to force internet-based apps to go through the App Store.
• Forced developers to play app store review roulette where survival of your business could literally depend on the mood of the reviewer that day.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Apple has become a huge behemoth that focuses purely on profits rather than providing best customer experience, including doing everything to stop healthy competition from emerging. These actions make you think “why am I supporting this type of behavior?”. For most people, convenience is just more important, even though a lot recognize the dark side of it. Apple made a beautiful walled garden, if you can live with them dictating what you can and cannot do. But there’s more to the world if you’re ready to peek over the wall.

What about Windows?

Windows, while it’s been making notable progress from the Windows 8 era, still has a lot of problems. Microsoft just can’t resist putting garbage software, ads, stupid pay-to-win and attention grabbing games, Bing, AI integrations, telemetry and mandatory online sign-in into Windows. There are ways to get around that of course, but it will always be an uphill battle. Microsoft treats their customers in a way that they don’t know what they want, and decisions need to be forced upon them.

This is what really bugs me about companies like Microsoft - treating their customers as idiots. That means not allowing (or making it super hard) to do things they think are too difficult for average Joe to do or understand. The fact that everything needs soft cushy walls and rounded corners is becoming a problem in itself, but that’s a topic for another post.

Going back to Linux

Linux is not a new thing to me. Before moving to the Mac, I used different flavours of Linux, starting from Ubuntu to Arch. It was a fun experience, though I always faced some problems, either with hardware not working correctly, or some software I needed not being available (and the alternatives were seriously lacking). But it’s kind of incredible how things have changed since then.

I went with Linux Mint, because since the last time I used Linux, this distribution was the most stable and my experience with it was really positive. Oh man, Mint is just amazing. The whole thing is rock solid, everything works, everything is customizable, no drivers to install. And while UI is not as pretty as Apple’s, it’s still pretty good!

Gaming is now a real thing in Linux as well, thanks to the hard work of all the people working on Wine and Proton. Valve’s investment in the Linux gaming ecosystem had a tremendous effect, not only by the sheer number of games that are supported, but the performance in a lot of cases is better too. I remember we used to wait for Linux ports of new games for months, while now often you can play games on day 1 without any issues (I just played a beta version of an unreleased Windows-only game, the experience was flawless).

And it’s not just games, more software is becoming available on Linux as well. I was surprised that Epic now regularly releases Linux binaries for Unreal Engine 5, and it works out of the box!

5 years ago it was unthinkable that you’d be able to develop games in Unreal on Linux.

On the hardware front, Framework came out of nowhere and proved to everyone that you can build a fast, light, good looking, relatively cheap and fully repairable laptop with first-class Linux support. The FW13 I’ve been using is a delight: compared with a Mac, it’s much lighter, has a more comfortable keyboard, high resolution 3:2 matte screen, webcam/mic hardware privacy switches, customizable I/O, and is easily upgradable and repairable. It’s kind of incredible to know that this could be literally the last laptop I own, since every part of it can be upgraded or replaced with ease.

I’m struggling to think of where Linux is seriously lacking at this point. Of course, supporting all the hardware of vendors that have no interest in Linux is the work of Sisyphus, but on other fronts? This is the first time I’m thinking that Linux is not only a good desktop operating system, but… BETTER than the alternatives!

Escaping the walled garden of Apple has its challenges, but not impossible. I replaced Apple Music with plain old MP3s, bought straight from Bandcamp (it’s also nice to know artists are getting paid a fair share). For backups, a 1TB storage box from Hetzner and rclone allows quick and painless encryption and uploading for just a few euros per month.

Linux has also made me excited about the platform itself, something that Apple has never done. Every day I have the opportunity to learn something about the system I use, like a configuration change, a shortcut, a terminal command, an optimization technique, you name it. What’s even better is that I can apply this knowledge of Linux on my production servers, since they run the exact same thing.

Because I moved to Linux, I knew I’ll probably spend a bit more time in the terminal than I was on a Mac (though contrary to popular belief, using a terminal is not a hard requirement on Linux anymore, since most of the stuff has graphical user interfaces now). This was a good opportunity to reevaluate the software that I used for work, and try a more TUI-based approach: I replaced Sublime with Neovim and lazygit, regular terminal tabs with zellij, lazydocker for Docker management and so on. It takes time to get used to, but when you do, doing things not just becomes faster, but also becomes more fun. Now the day is always better when I boot up my computer and punch in some vim motions on my HHKB.

2025 is the year when “The year of Linux desktop” transformed from a meme into reality, at least for me. Apple, it was a good 9 year run, but I’m not going back.

[…] Again, one of the frightening things I see now, especially in democracies, is the way that the people at the top, especially politicians, are denied a private life. That anything they say at any moment can and will be used against them. And, as a public speaker, I know that when I speak in public, I have to make a very big effort to concentrate and to be very aware of what I’m saying. But then when I’m off record, I can let my mind rest. And part of resting is saying stupid things. Saying things you don’t think about carefully. The mind of every person is full of garbage. And I think this is a basic human right. You have a right to say stupid things in private. As a gay man, if a politician, tells a homophobic joke in private to some friends, and somebody records it, and it’s now on YouTube and Twitter and whatever, I don’t care.

I care what this leader says in public. If in public, he or she tell a homophobic joke, this is very bad because this is inciting hatred among millions. I care about their policies. But what they say in private, it’s not my business. Some people think the opposite. That, finally, we get to hear what they really think. This is their authentic self. What they say on stage, this is something that some spin doctor told them to say. What they really think, this comes out in private. And that’s a very dangerous direction because I don’t want authentic leaders. I want responsible leaders. Politics is not psychoanalysis. I don’t want somebody who stands there and just gives me his stream of consciousness. Anything that comes up in the mind immediately comes out of the mouth. That’s authentic, and that’s bad. We need people who have a barrier, a wall, between the mind and the mouth and think very carefully about what they say, because it’s a big responsibility. And then they should have the privacy to go somewhere and just say stupid and terrible things. That’s, you know, just being human.

What we’re hoping for is to get viral. We hope that our idea is so good that it will spread on it’s own, without having us to do anything to get the word out.

That almost never happens. When we start to second guess ourselves, it’s a good exercise to ask yourself: If you were to take 1,000 people from the street, how many of them could say that they heard about you or your product?

Don’t rush to conclude that you’re idea is worthless. The world is massive. Let enough people to know about it first.