Unbridled Thoughts: 4
Hello my dear witness of thoughts! This one's dedicated especially to you. Here we go with another installment of the Unbridled Thoughts series, featuring my random thoughts from April 21st to THE END (of April).
What happened in April? Now you should know, my little Ghost blog is the only place where anyone can gawk at my ramblings. These thoughts are henceforth exclusive to this publication.
04/21/2026: Sad things happen. Sad things happen. Nature is sometimes sad and sad things happen naturally. It is natural that some sad things happen. Recognize and allow yourself to feel the sadness and let it guide you away from creating more sadness for other beings.
04/22/2026: There is a really good feeling that comes from figuring out a puzzle. This feeling has been vital to my motivation through the years as I've been learning to write code, and now I realize it is a feeling that is dulled to near-numbness or altered into pure frustration when using AI coding tools.
04/23/2026: My bank stopped my credit card without notice. I should have been on top of it, surely. I didn't notice that the one recurring charge to it had stopped. It dented my credit when my longest-held credit account suddenly closed. I see also that my bank now charges me $15/month to "maintain" my account, now without a line of credit.
04/23/2026: The biggest tell for me in AI writing is this sense of something that has density but lacks higher-level coherence. It feels like an extremely covert version of a non-well-read person using big words to sound a certain way, or a bad sci-fi film's inaccurate technobabble, but overall the ideas don't quite play together well. Whenever I feel like I'm experiencing a particular type of unfruitful cognitive load paired with incomprehension while I'm reading something, that is what tells me it was written or influenced by some LLM bullshit.
04/23/2026: The other fabric arrived yesterday! I was so wrong about the fabric that arrived first, by the way. It was the jute burlap. But now it is all here anyhow. I'm excited to make things with both the duck cotton canvas and the burlap. Surely the undyed natural fiber will be easy to dye if I want. I'm shocked to see what a 50-yard roll looks like in person! I'm also shocked that the burlap was only $2.55 per square yard and cotton was even more affordable considering the double width. I have enough to experiment with making some more advanced clothing items without worrying about cost or misappropriating limited supplies now!
04/23/2026: The managed database services for PostgreSQL that I use through Azure is disproportionately expensive. It always costs more than the app services it supports and sometimes I can't figure out why I'm being charged what I'm being charged. I also suspect that a few times my resources have been automatically upgraded as Azure products change, or that resources are automatically requisitioned whose purpose and pricing isn't clear until the bill arrives. I shouldn't be charged $50 for momentarily requisitioning a development-tier managed database. Their class-based customer service ecosystem appears to be an extortion scam. Their billing interface is a showcase of friction. When I have to learn or do anything from the Azure portal, I risk inducing a circulatory health catastrophe. How is it possible to make an interface that is so awkward, laggy, and that is perpetually unviewable from any screen layout? This 2011-themed corporate caricature dashboard bullshit isn't worth your price. You have finally motivated me to find the exit. For now, I think I have one burstable instance down to only $15; we'll see if the bill reflects its expected charges.
04/24/2026: I woke up bothered thinking about the article I read by the creator of that mystical pseudoscience movie that I was repeatedly exposed to almost 30 years ago. Why does a stranger's hypocritical finger-waggling and rosé-tinted retrospect bother me so? Maybe it is a comfortable nonsense unimportant bother to think about. Maybe something else. I bet I can write it here and think about thinking about it because the apparent cause isn't actually too bothersome.
04/24/2026: I started making a couple of experimental clothing things with the canvas yesterday. Both are very baggy simple designs, one top and one pants. The shirt thing was good practice as it was mostly mistakes that have rendered the thing currently unwearable but full of good lessons and some potential. The pants have legs, but the seat is incomplete and the waist is just a wrap. Attempting both of these non-flat things is surely helping me build some more intuition for what sewing machine techniques work where when the item is something folded and 3D with curves and seam intersections that aren't straightforward.
04/24/2026: I'm currently working on this text-to-image encoder that will let me encode text as pixels in an image. This will let me encode JSON data directly to the sign language animation images without having to architect some fancy relational system. It makes the format self-contained and I hope something that can survive if found without documentation. So, I'm designing from this premise that the images will be found somewhere without context but still must be interpreted easily. A series of frames is obviously an animation. I think a grid of grayscale pixels is obviously bytes of data, and the most obvious encoding would be UTF-8, yielding the most obvious data structure of JSON. The alternative would be designing a system that is more conventional but less obvious: one that could lose meaning or that would be rendered nonfunctional if these resources are found outside of the system that made them.
04/24/2026: I often think about a skit from long ago, I think it was SNL? Could be Mad TV but surely there's no way to find out. The skit was disposable toilets; the gag emphasizing that some disposable products and consumer practices are much more troublesome than whatever alternative they are attempting to address. It is a good lesson to think about and interesting to notice the unending amount of wasteful products and practices, on many levels, all the time.
04/24/2026: I feel like someday future humans will look back on this era of social media in the same way that we look back on opium dens.
04/24/2026: I guess Meditations by Marcus Aurelius was practically an early microblog. I feel stoically inspired.
04/24/2026: This text-to-image encoding could be a fun way to publish premium or private stories... The data images could be encrypted and public and then the keys could be sold or shared to limited people. Or leave the encoding unencrypted, it would just be an interesting way to share text through messaging apps, text that is only easily readable elsewhere. Could multiplex pixels to maximize data density for a given dimensional size. A free webapp could do the encoding to image and decoding to a reader.
04/25/2026: How can I put energy into caring about people around me who are suffering with homelessness, unjust incarceration, or other forms of systemic violence? How can I care about even-less-pressing issues like education and humanities and self-actualization? The world is on fire in areas and ways that I feel too far away from to help. The scale of suffering from wars, mass displacement, and the concentration of power and wealth makes every other problem seem almost frivolous.
Helpless yearning from afar is only detrimental to my capacity to actually make the world a better place from where I am. I shouldn't completely avoid awareness of distant worldly things, but I also shouldn't avoid doing what I can do in my immediate vicinity by getting distracted and staring off into the distance saying, "If only I could do something". That helplessness will only make me overwhelmed with uncertainty and panic again and again.
I know what to do, I am doing it when I'm not overwhelmed and fruitlessly scrambling to imagine the overall ultimate solution. Even if I thought I could see how to fix everything, what then? I can't care if the state of the world is truly hopeless. I can't let this sense of worldly helplessness erode my desire to push forward with working on what I think is right, within my scope. Even though the world is in the midst of what appears to be hell, I can only do the next right thing; I can always help something right in front of me.
04/25/2026: I love how Picard pronounces "charade" and now I wonder if he would also say "lemonade" as if it rhymes with "promenade"
04/25/2026: I remember waking up this morning with Nina's song "I shall be released" playing in my head. I hope I dreamed of her.
04/25/2026: I made a bottom bedsheet with the cotton canvas today. Wow I had no idea it'd feel that fancy. Most of my sewing work is on the edges and invisible, but I'm very glad it is mine and seems like it will work well. While putting it on the bed, I was also happy to see a straight black hair got woven into the fabric; I wonder who it belongs to.
04/25/2026: I really don't understand the Substack monetization model. People are already worn out with subscription services. All users are asking all other users for $8/month in support and producing a handful of essays in that time. The more they produce, the lower the quality. Supporting an author for about $2 per OK essay doesn't make sense to me. That is an obscene price for an amateur essay, especially as many essays are written in the same generic LLM voice. Many people appear to be on there trying to make money at any cost to their artistic integrity. People are clearly trying to appease the algorithm and end up losing their real voice, building silos of repetitive ideas. Users unsubscribing is clearly emotionally detrimental to the authors and a common topic there. I would never subscribe for that emotional lock-in reason alone. There is so much wrong here. I doubt subscribing makes sense to many other people who aren't deluded by visions of viral Internet riches. So then I think the people who do shell out and subscribe are likely mostly authors who wish other people would pay for them. This sentiment is reflected in posts that excitedly announce that the author of that post will subscribe to other authors on the platform if a certain number of authors subscribe to them first. This economy of empty hope feels more like muli-level marketing or gambling than supporting a community of writers. If Substack truly wanted to support writer socialism, the platform wouldn't have subscriptions, but would sell tokens in bulk and make a pay-per-read fee $0.10 for the 2nd half of premium articles. Instead, they have a few enviable accounts at the top that can drive the Substack lottery delusion.
04/26/2026: It is interesting how many websites present information in a unusable way. Amazon is overwhelming; the product descriptions are tiny walls of text while the images are often too big to see on the product page or too small elsewhere. I constantly have to zoom and resize my windows to try to understand what I'm looking at. Unnecessary, unrelated information always takes up more room than the things that I am trying to see. The other visually horrific aspects are another discussion. It is inexcusable from a company with their resources, and I think the sloppiness sets a low bar for other websites.
I'm looking at a sewing website now; it is an indie free thing with a neat philosophy and parametric designs and I'm very glad it doesn't have ads. Unfortunately, it is hilariously difficult to navigate and very complicated to use. Also, the generated patterns are too small and crowded with superimposed non-pattern information, opaque grid, and logo watermarks which make the miniscule measurements unreadable. The measurements and pattern outline are the most important yet somehow the least visible things across the site. They are missing the point of their own site. Otherwise, I can print a simple pattern out to 33 pieces of paper that also look like a jumbled unreadable mess. The idea of this project is impressive, but I get the sense that this execution of the idea has been vibe coded and made by an over-ambitious indie dev. The about page reveals a thick layer of communication and comprehension issues as well. Apparently it is very expensive to run, I believe for reasons that are likely unnecessary. I don't think it will survive unless it is simplified and then completely reworked. But this indie developer would need to realize a completely different architecture. Maybe I should make a single sewing pattern website when I can. This feels like a good example of a project that could be streamlined and made nearly-free to host by turning each pattern into a static webapp with a parametric measurement calculating tool and a sane pattern explorer.
04/27/2026: Windows updates are a stressful thing that I try to postpone as long as possible. Every single time after updating, which is required frequently, I'm faced with a mandatory "set up" that involves a near-endless series of confusing and forceful Microsoft product offers that can't be closed out of. In the past, Windows update has nonconsensually installed heavy-handed AI tools that I have to frantically find the shutoff for in order to operate my computer without constant distracting and unhelpful nonsense. If I press the wrong button during the post-update offer gauntlet, the Windows adware changes my settings or initiates subscription bullshit and it is very stressful. I should take this as a forceful hint to move back to Ubuntu ASAP. I don't use anything that I need Windows for and it is getting shittier and more desperate by the day.
04/28/2026: Imagine the world if exercise replaced coffee. Exercise delivers superior benefits on all fronts that coffee does, with many additional benefits that coffee doesn't offer.
04/28/2026: If I don't get the feeling that everything I've ever said or done is at least a little bit stupid in retrospect, then surely that is the legitimate reason to feel self-consious in the present.
That's all for April 2026. We'll continue the series soon as we start our Maytime jive with Unbridled Thoughts #5.
<3 Grant