Tag: blog

Bad Grammar Can Be a Feature

~ Veselin ~ 29 Comments

Engines love to consume lengthy content and rank it higher on search. ChatGPT can generate tons of additional meaningful text for the idea. However, as a reader, I prefer to read content written by humans and for humans. I’d rather read meaningful ideas in ugly sentences with simple words and poor grammar than AI-assisted beautiful novellas with a summary and headlines.

In that context, bad grammar, slang, lower-case text, and such can be a form of anti-language that identifies the post as human-written and non-AI-augmented. It can be a feature, not a bug (now I have an excuse to turn off Grammarly lol).

A Sleep Trick for Computer Zombies

~ Veselin ~ 2 Comments

I have slept more over the last year. My average has increased from under 6 to over 7 hours, and though that’s not Nirvana, it feels better.

My morning routine is fixed. Kids go to school, and the alarm clocks go off at 7. So increasing sleep time can only be achieved by going to bed early. But how so? The former self would play games, code, and watch TV shows or YouTube. Some of these can be very addictive and I would often go to bed after 2am, setting myself up for a difficult morning that would not work without caffeine. Coffee can disrupt sleep even further.

Then I found a saying somewhere, perhaps on Reddit, source unknown:

If it’s not worth doing first thing in the morning, it’s not worth doing last thing in the evening.

Would I start the morning with the next episode of Halo? Hell no. Why am I staying late for it, shut it down. Would I read that book in the morning? What about another game of chess? You only need to overcome each of these urges once, then it’s defused by default.

The quote stuck with me and I rarely stay after 12. Feels better.

Blast from the past

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

Back in the late 90s, this brand Koop was a symbol of change. We saw the cooperative was some kind of incorporation, a private structure instead of the nearly 100% government-owned everything from that era. The outside A/C unit doesn’t fit though, I don’t remember seeing a single A/C unit in Bulgaria before 1989.

The pavement is from the same period.