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Never did I imagine myself getting into running, especially as a middle-aged man. It always seemed a bit boring to me. Cycling is what I thought I‘d inevitably venture into, especially because I love watching that sport. But here I am, roped in by a couple of friends, fully embracing the running trend. Well, kind of. I have zero aspirations to run a marathon, or even a half for that matter. But I’m thoroughly enjoying doing short stints a couple of times a week, ranging from 5k to 8k, with a goal of consistently running 10k. Why? First and foremost for my health and cardio fitness, but also because I‘ve signed up for a 10k charity run in October that I’m determined to complete in under an hour. It was actually late last year that I first got a bit of the so-called runner’s high. I went on a 3-week remote work trip to the beautiful island of Lanzarote, which is filled with volcanic landscapes. Well, it turns out circling some of those under the sun makes for great trail runs, which I discovered over the course of that trip. And it was a lot of fun, if not a challenging way to introduce my body to running. Anyway, I’m returning to Lanzarote for another 3-week trip in November, and I intend to pick up where I left off, but hopefully in much better cardio condition. If you want to follow my progress, you can find me on Strava. Experimenting with a running photo aesthetic P.S. You’ll never catch me on a treadmill. It’s outdoors in the fresh air, invariably battling a Scottish headwind, or nothing. P.P.S. I still much prefer rock climbing to running as a form of exercise, so you’ll still find me bouldering on plastic or real rock a couple of times a week.
At the risk of sounding melodramatic, it feels like the end of an era. Or at least the end of the familiar formula that indie businesses relied on to build, launch, and grow over the past decade. Something has quietly changed. It’s probably been happening for a couple of years, to be fair. But recently it feels impossible to ignore. The reasons are pretty obvious. What’s less obvious is what comes next. And maybe every generation of builders feels like this. The tools available today have probably never been better, although I‘m also wading through plenty of sewer shit. We’re building software and shipping feature updates at an absurd pace, and at a much lower development cost, at least in the short term. Yet unless you’ve managed to build an audience, every product launch these days feels harder than it used to. Not because a product necessarily lacks quality or value in its own right, but because we’re drowning in software. You either have a million competitors, or your potential customers now have the tools to build a rough version themselves, whether they have technical skills or not. SaaS is far from dead, but the abundance is staggering. And the old assumptions around product roadmaps, paid advertising, and organic discovery no longer feel reliable. We can now build more refined products with fewer resources. But each improvement to a product seems to have less influence on whether anyone discovers or buys it. I’ve been feeling this most directly through 099 SPLY. We started by making digital assets and mockups for designers. More recently, we built a browser-based 3D editor that lets people create still and animated product mockups without specialist software. It‘s comfortably one of the most capable things we’ve made. But the editor has also been one of the hardest things to get people to care about. I knew it was a risk, though. Browser-based mockups are very niche, but it‘s an experiment I have zero regrets about. Maybe the positioning is wrong. Maybe we simply haven’t found the right audience. It‘s tough to know. But I also don’t think our experience is unusual. Plenty of small teams are now discovering that being able to build something is no longer much of an advantage in itself. Cutting through the noise has always mattered. It just feels much more pertinent now. For years, SEO offered some kind of safety net. You could publish a useful product, write about it, optimise content, and gradually find an audience through search. It was never easy and it tested your patience, but there was at least a recognisable path. But search today is dog shit. Results are crowded with ads, aggregators, AI summaries, and content written primarily to occupy space. An increasing number of searches end without anyone clicking through to an external site, and taken to their logical extreme, they point towards what some call “Google Zero”. There’s a label for everything, isn‘t there? Then we have social media, which tends to favour founders who are comfortable performing in public, have the time to publish constantly, or already have enough attention to generate more of it. The product can start to feel secondary to the content wrapped around it. Each release needs its own miniature marketing campaign, and even then the response can disappear within a day. But I also respect the grind and energy some founders put into making that work. Distribution has always required effort. So where does that leave indie hackers? Honestly, I’m not sure. I don’t think the answer is to stop making software, and I certainly don’t think small digital businesses are finished. But relying on the same combination of product quality, SEO, launch platforms, and occasional social posts feels increasingly naive. Maybe the next phase is less about finding another universal playbook and more about building in ways that are harder to replicate or make interchangeable. Or maybe it‘s about building a stronger rapport between founder and customer. I’m trying to think more experimentally myself, with less attachment to any particular format. And more willingness to test strange ideas, abandon weak ones, and follow whatever appears to have genuine energy around it. None of that makes the current landscape less frustrating. But if your launches feel quieter, your growth has stalled, or a project that once looked promising is beginning to decline, I doubt you’re alone. It might not mean the work is bad. It likely means the conditions around it have changed. For the time being, I‘ll keep listening, learning, and adapting. Maybe I‘ll even start a YouTube channel or something. If any of this resonates, feel free to continue the discussion over email or DMs with me.
It recently dawned on me that, as a digital designer, I had yet to make a macOS or iOS app. So I wanted to give the former a try while also experimenting with a coding agent to bring it to life. While it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the constant stream of AI tools and announcements, I think it’s enough to explore a couple properly and find your own way through the noise. Keeping up with the industry is one thing. Feeling pressured to try every new tool is another. Anyway, for this project, my agent of choice was Codex. It felt like the logical option given my existing subscription to ChatGPT. So I ran with it, and it didn't disappoint. I vibed, nay, context engineered my way to a beautiful little Mac app in just a week. Local Log is a minimal open-source journaling app that lets you record both text and video entries in one quiet, focused space, with everything stored locally on your Mac for privacy and simplicity. No accounts, no cloud dependency, no clutter — just a clean archive of your thoughts, searchable and always yours. With autosave, editable entry titles, keyboard shortcuts, and light and dark mode support, Local Log is designed to stay out of the way so you can get straight to logging. Local Log app icon in dark mode Why a journaling app? I’ve always loved the notion of blogging and thinking in public, but there’s always been a layer of restraint to it. I wanted to create a digital space where you can be unapologetically honest with yourself. A private space to recalibrate, reflect, and reset. Where each entry becomes a small record of your mind that you can revisit whenever you like. The design was inspired by the irreplaceable iA Writer and the open-source app Freewrite, which gave me the idea of adding vlogs. The typeface felt important to me, and I had no desire to offer multiple choices to the user. I made a decision and I stuck with it. And that font was Geist Mono by Vercel. And a shoutout to Manu for the clever app icon, which mirrors the UI itself. You can view the GitHub repo and download directly for free. Local Log app icon in light mode Default screen in light mode Entry example in dark mode Entry example with collapsed sidebar Select actions in the entry archive
Another blogger challenge, but this time one I’m initiating. I previously wrote about a list of silly things I hate. So to balance this, I’ve decided to write a more positive list of some random things I like, because it’s good to smile at the world now and again. volunteering the smell of coffee beans when perseverance pays off noticing someone practicing patience experiencing collective creative momentum receiving video messages or FaceTime calls finding an item of clothing that actually fits well receiving random emails from strangers that build unexpected connections the rare occasion of articulating a thought so flawlessly it’s almost surprising seeing cats sitting on windowsills (they’re the unassuming neighbourhood watch)
More in life
I talk to a lot of old people, those who were born in the 20th century, and if I ask them what the word “unalive” means, they usually have no idea what I’m talking about, except for some of them who have kids or who study Internet culture. This will, of course, probably seem very weird to most people who were born in or grew up in the 21st century. Just to recap for the olds: “unalive” is the word you use to represent concepts like dying, or death, or killing or being killed, on digital platforms where saying those words accurately will cause the algorithm to punish or censor you. Or, maybe, where the perception is that using those words will result in being censored by the algorithm, and no one is actually willing to find out what happens if you use the forbidden words. This sort of attack on people’s expression started on platforms like TikTok, where nearly all content is distributed through an algorithmic feed, but has since become ubiquitous in nearly all digital media that we see. In fact, these tics are now so prevalent that it’s routine to hear people using this kind of language in everyday life, even though there’s not yet an algorithm to appease in the physical world. I’ve heard people say, out loud, “he unalived himself”, in reference to someone dying by suicide. And all of this has become even more visible in recent days as online conversation has turned to discussion of the horrific lack of accountability around the tragic rape case at Cornell University. Across the Internet, people are routinely referring to the central crime in the case as r*pe or “grape” or even using the 🍇 emoji, without a second thought for what it means that the very word can’t be said online anymore. Or, at least, the assumption is that it can’t be said. To be clear, I am very much in favor of people using content warnings or sensitivity markers for content, and fine with people using abbreviations like “SA” for references to disturbing or triggering topics like sexual assault; we should provide people with as much context and control as possible when choosing what information they want to consume and when. I also know that sometimes, people use lesser terms for stressful subjects like death or assault to create a bit of ironic distance from painful or upsetting topics. But most of the different variations of wording and emojis are coming from trying to appease the platforms, and there’s a heavy cost for those who are worried about being mindful: If someone is using a tool to filter out content, it will no longer be effective because everyone is using misspellings and euphemisms and imagery to get around the algorithm. The spread of censored and mangled syntax is happening because people believe, or have experienced, that platforms will silence them for accurately describing the world in plain language. This shit is terrible, and it has to stop. You Were Not Born With These Constraints One of the things that’s most concerning to me is that an entire generation has grown up not realizing how extreme it is that their very language is being chosen for them by platforms run by people who hate that generation’s ability to express itself, and who hate the things it has to say. From their youngest days, this generation grew up watching people make stupid faces at them for YouTube thumbnails and never had a chance to reflect on the fact that those creators didn’t want to be humiliating themselves by making those expressions — the demands of the algorithms of Big Tech forced them to do that. The rituals of feeding the algorithm are so built into people’s everyday habits that they’re invisible to people who weren’t alive before today’s platforms took over. Every parent of my cohort remembers the first time they heard their toddler finish doing something cute in their living room, and then turn around and say, “please like and subscribe!” afterwards. It’s a ghastly, sickening feeling to confront the fact that our little kids were being brainwashed into thinking that every adorable thing they did should be followed by a prompt to provide data to Google. Over on Instagram, where people originally signed up thinking they were going to see someone’s vacation pictures, or shots of their cousin’s kids, you’re now stuck watching people beg for everyone to reply with cultish phrases in the comments, which will then earn them an obviously AI-generated response in return, all in service of “showing activity” to the algorithm, like it’s an angry god that needs a sacrifice. They’re just not sure exactly what the angry god wants. Your free speech was taken away from you, and the people who did it are the same ones who spent years pretending to care about “free expression”. They contrived examples of lack of free speech on college campuses while squashing protests, and cried crocodile tears about “cancel culture” while getting people fired for political criticism. Now they have no problem with billionaires deciding exactly what words everyone is allowed to say. Larry Ellison is not content with his family owning all of the movies and TV shows — his family has to control what words people are allowed to speak on TikTok, too. Elon Musk isn’t content to merely generate and distribute child sexual abuse material for profit — he wants to silence the messages of the few decent people who are foolish enough to remain on Twitter/X, too. (That’s why I wrote you a guide on how to get your organization off of that cursed platform.) Now that an entire generation has grown up using these Orwellian euphemisms, and all of the Big AI products are trained on the Internet that was created under this regime, do you think today’s AI tools even know that the real, uncensored world exists? If you can’t say “genocide” on any of the major platforms, yet those are the ones all of the Big AI tools used as their training data... well, then the AI tools sure aren’t very likely to know much about genocide, are they? Fuck the Algorithm Our creativity can be constrained by the language we use — our imaginations are limited by what we can think to say. If we’re trained to limit the words we speak just by habit, and those limits are put in place by people whose social, political, cultural and moral goals are the opposite of what we value, then our work is unalive before it is even born. The answer to this is simple: say what you mean. This will take, to some degree, courage. It may even take, I hesitate to say, some sacrifice. When I suggest this course of action to people, they inevitably say, “But it will cost me audience!” or “But what if I lose followers!” or “What if they demonetize me!” Okay, what if they do? What if they do. Are you willing to push on this? To make a point about it? To move to platforms where you can actually say what you mean? Or to remember that you already have platforms where you can say what you mean? On an email newsletter or podcast you can say whatever the hell you want and nobody can stop you. On my blog right here, I can even curse in a headline and it won’t affect anything about how my site operates. (And a reminder: Substack is not an email newsletter, and a Spotify show is not a podcast — they’ll be unaliving your distribution any day now.) If you are a 20th century relic like me, it is incumbent upon you to remind the generation that grew up inside the algorithm that another world is possible, and that we know this because we lived it. We were able to style a MySpace page in any way that we wanted; the code for LiveJournal was entirely open source so there was no part of the algorithm that was unknowable. A blog like the one you’re reading right now could be made by anyone, and put up for pennies, and nobody could stop it from being read by millions of people. (And that last one? It’s still possible.) If you are from this century, forget all that rambling bullshit about ancient history: all that matters is you getting what you deserve, because you’ve been fucked over by the same billionaires who’ve poisoned your planet and infested your world with slop. The best artists around you are invisible to you, and the most important statements by activists that you care about are being silenced. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a system working as designed. And the proof is as obvious as the fact that the angriest activists you know can’t even talk about systemic abuses or state violence without having to put it in algorithmically approved speech or censoring their captions like they’re going to be read by 5-year-olds. It should make you furious. It is time to kill “unalive”. The response is simple: For every message you put out, start by saying what you mean. Don’t work backwards from what the algorithm wants or what a platform permits. Build a presence on every platform you can, even the ones where you have fewer followers or where you’re harder to find. Tell your audience that your speech being free matters more than corporate convenience. Keep saying it, and keep it positive: independence gets them better art, better information, and more connected communities. Build alliances with other artists, activists and people who share your values, and let them know you’re going to start sharing your work uncensored. Start releasing your work uncensored and see where the platforms push back. (You may be surprised: sometimes you were censoring yourself in anticipation of limits that weren’t even there.) If a platform does try to limit your reach or expression, make a LOT OF NOISE about it. Tell the press, rally your alliance, and spread the word on your other platforms, using the moment to build audience and raise support there. Get others to amplify the parts of your work that don’t violate platform policy, so the controversy drives people to the rest. Find the others pushing back on algorithmic control of expression, and raise and praise their work when they do the same. If we keep accepting the words that are forced upon us by TikTok and Meta and Google and all the rest, while platforms like Twitter/X allow the most hateful and harmful content in the world to be distributed completely unfettered, we’ll only see authoritarianism rise, and the harms against the vulnerable accelerate. But what breaks my heart almost as much is that we’ll see so many brilliant artists and activists and thinkers whose genius will be muted or silenced by mindless, heartless algorithms that capriciously decide who gets to say exactly what words, in what ways. I get angry every time I think about it. The tech tycoons get ever more brazen in what they’re willing to say publicly, boasting about how they’re going to cause the end of the world, or calling for ethnic cleansing, all while putting tighter and tighter reins on the speech and expression of ordinary people. It’s time for “unalive” to die.
Measuring output and time spent is easy, while measuring efficiency and effectiveness is hard. Here's why trusting your engineers beats tracking their productivity.
i used to be one of those people who would say, marriage is just a piece of paper. but after being with her for years and years through all the tears and laughter it is starting to make me sad that if anything were to happen to me she wouldn’t be able to do things like make medical decisions on my behalf, collect my body when am gone, etc. I had to go to a lawyer to do specific paperwork that were not necessary if we were simply married. will i be able to call her my wife in my lifetime? it is just so saddening that the closest person to me will never be recognised as such in the eyes of the law. when i die, she will just be my “friend”. nevertheless am grateful to spend these 125 months together, perhaps even if she won’t be able to claim my body and if history will deem us as just“friends”, there will still be 125 pieces of my love lingering somewhere on the internet. (she made us clothes again! it is 98% zero waste!)
Anthropic now treats the Pope as a competitor in a battle for souls
