What I am up to

I wrote a post about digital ownership that was very fun to write. I think my voice isn’t super consistent in it, switching too much between a very analytical and a more humorous style. I think it came out pretty well regardless, but I guess I would think that, otherwise I would have edited it more.

Finished the retrospective on Demonschool. It came out way more negative than I had intended and will need some editing 1.

Also, finished Terminator: Resistance. What an excellent game, very hard to write about though. There is really nothing super special about it, just clean old AA shooter fun. We don’t get enough of those, so this felt like scratching an itch that had been left unscratched for way too long.

Since Qwen 3.8 27B came out, I have been somewhat in a state of “local AI psychosis.” Alibaba performed black magic on that model to fit as much “intelligence” as they did into a 15GB file on my disk. The first reaction I have seen from people is that the benchmark scores have to be inflated. There is simply no way a small model like that could possibly be that good. I think for a lot of tasks it actually is. There is some part of me that wants to write a post about it. On the other hand, doesn’t the internet already have enough AI content, written by AI or otherwise?

Games

Playing a co-op run of Baldur’s Gate 3. Trying to get my golden dice. Reached level 12 after 40 hours. We are deep into Act 3 now. Playing an Eldrich Blast Warlock — pew! — and a Spirit Guardians Cleric.

Playing through Control right now. I had a few false starts with that game, but never because it was bad or anything. It just didn’t pull me in. Recently I have been much better at giving games and other media a real shot. Spending a tad longer than my whims would usually give something and it’s been very helpful here and elsewhere. 12 year old me would have looked at me like I was a crazy person if I told him that I needed discipline to enjoy video games.

Maybe I will max my Old School RuneScape account before my membership runs out? Likely not. Literally zero progress on that since the last update of /now. Haven’t even opened RuneScape since then.

Reading

There are some very good posts that I read around LLM writing — I know, dangerous topic that. I am sure that most people have come across enough Claude written slop to last them a lifetime. As an avid reader of what the good folks at /r/LocalLLaMA/ get up to, I certainly had more than enough of every blog post reading like breathless marketing copy.

But it’s also not like LLMs are useless for writing. They catch mistakes that a regular spell- and grammar checker wouldn’t, can find things when you know what you want, but not how to get Google to give it to you, and give you the word that is just sitting on the tip of your tongue but doesn’t want to hop on the page. It’s “discipline” in this update, if you are curious. Yeah, I struggled to get “discipline” out after writing a sentence where that is essentially the only word that would fit. The human mind is a strange thing.

It’s an interesting topic, I think, but before I go and write a full blog post, there are some posts in that category that I would like to highlight: Bryan Cantrill’s The revolt of the reader and Your intellectual fly is open, Cynthia Dunlop’s Why developers use LLMs to write blog posts and How developers react to AI-scented blog posts, and Vincent Bernat’s Blogging with LLMs as a non-native speaker.

I should start collecting posts that I liked reading. I think that could be interesting.

As a last note. I am still only a third through “The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet” by Becky Chambers. No progress since last time. That whole discipline thing? Clearly not a bulletproof way to get me to enjoy things.

— Last updated September 7th, 2026