More from Naz Hamid — Journal + Links
Tagged by Scott and Luke and in thoughtful return, I’m answering the Blog Questions Challenge here. Some of these answers may overlap with the answers I gave Manu for his People & Blogs series, so I’ll do my best to do something a bit different. Please visit Manu’s P&B site though, and read through many of the excellent interviews there. Much credit to Bear Blog for these questions. Why did you start blogging in the first place? I noted how I appreciated the early bloggers, in particular from the Pyra Labs/Blogger crew, but to go back even further, I was fond of journaling early. Much of that was in the form of drawings as a child, then coupled with text. It wasn’t until I read about how musicians like Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam would keep copious journals, and in particular, Henry Rollins’ Get In The Van, showed me that documenting your life was important as a record of a lived person. Rollins would later read from these journals early in his transition from full-time musician to spoken word artist, and the storytelling inspired me. Since I was online, and web design had captivated me, it all came together. What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? I’m currently using the lovely static site generator, Eleventy (11ty). It pushes to a GitHub repository, which triggers a deploy to Netlify. After using so many different platforms over the decades, with my posts and data semi-locked in MySQL databases, the idea of a fast, file-first, SSG was the way I absolutely wanted to go when I started blogging at this domain. Steph Ango’s File Over App is a thoughtful read on data portability. Have you blogged on other platforms before? As mentioned just before this, yes. I started with Geocities, Livejournal, tried Greymatter, then Movable Type was the first to make it all click. I got really comfortable and pushed that system far — Gapers Block was the most involved version that I had done with multiple blogs running under one instance with different layouts and sections and includes all over the place. Dean Allen’s (RIP) Textpattern stole my heart away for many years after MT got acquired, and then I stopped blogging when Weightshift became my focus, and social media started to bloom. Weightshift used various CMSs for clients: MT, TXP, ExpressionEngine, CraftCMS, Wordpress, etc. I toyed with Tumblr, and other things, but eventually restarted with Jekyll, but quickly switched to 11ty. How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog? Most everything starts in Bear. I have a master note of ideas, that links out to other notes and I keep adding new ones, revisit others, and check off published ones. When do you feel most inspired to write? Whenever an idea strikes. This can happen at any time and drafts are started anywhere. I generally publish in the evening though. Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft? I used to be more immediate with my publishing decades ago, adhering to a near daily schedule. These days, some thought and care goes into each post, and if possible, I like to add a touch of flavor to a post, like the rotated album covers for the Music in 2024 post. What are you generally interested in writing about? How we as humans live in a world ever-changing because of technological influence and society’s adoption and adaptation to it. I love travel so posts about cultures and countries, as well as overlanding and camping domestically. And personal things that are more feeling the feels. Who are you writing for? Myself first, but through a lens of, “this information or thought could help someone else, and/or I’d love to share a different perspective that’s unique to me.” What’s your favorite post on your blog? 2023 in the Rearview is a big one, and I worked on that for a while. Taken for a Ride is a good one I think about taking a Waymo autonomous vehicle for the first time, but I like the sort of pieces that come from a more emotional and resilient place, like Let This Be a Moment, that allow me to work through things. Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature? I’m very content with 11ty. I’m constantly evolving and refactoring the design and code where I can see improvement. This is a lovely mode to be in: it’s iterative like software development than constantly new like marketing. As for features: a work section (underway), and better ways to showcase my photography, which is a longtime interest and activity for me. Tag ‘em. I’m going to tag Bix, Ethan, Gosha, Grant, Matt, Piper, Rachel, Simon, Susan, Thu, and Winnie. Read on nazhamid.com or Reply via email
We are tenants with landlords who want to make sure that we can’t leave the building or go hang out with friends elsewhere, all while showing us how happy we should be with the limitations imposed on us. — Den Delimarsky A long, weighty one, but very worth the read. Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →
01/05 PREDATORS, AMERICAN GREED — Steven Soderbergh Director Steven Soderbergh's media recap of 2024. It's fascinating to see how many movies he watched multiple times, and the reverse watch of the original Star Wars trilogy. Phantom of the Menace twice too? Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →
I’m including the most memorable, impactful, or beloved works of—creative genius, or something, that I’ve encountered this year. I’m not a critic; I am mostly just talking about things I liked. These are tremendous to me. I hope they can be tremendous to you, too. — Anh The list is great, but this one is also visually gorgeous. Best experienced in a browser near you. Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →
It’s idealistic and very millennial of me to reminiscence the early days of Web innocence, unbound creativity it hosted and wonderful lack of monetisation of virtually every aspect of being online. We can’t turn back time. But, individually and collectively, we can strive for better as the Web evolves as a home for work, knowledge, community, and love. We can resist the ongoing enshittification and corporate capitalism. So I jotted down an non-exhaustive list of what I’d love the future Web to be. — Karolina Szczur A great list. Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →
More in life
One small but meaningful shift to make hard conversations a little bit easier
I apologise that the site has been a bit slow since it suddenly turned into a travel blog. My plan was to roll out my poor man’s CDN before we left, but I ran out of time. It’s definitely not just a nginx GeoIP lookup that refers image requests to a different cloud instance running in Toronto depending on where you’re coming from. I’m trying to use the computer less on this trip—if you can believe it—but I’ll see what I can do to improve this a bit. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-04-24.
Theanine is an amino acid that occurs naturally in tea. Many people take it as a supplement for stress or anxiety. It’s mechanistically plausible, but the scientific literature hasn’t been able to find much of a benefit. So I ran a 16-month blinded self-experiment in the hopes of showing it worked. It did not work. At the end of the post, I put out a challenge: If you think theanine, prove it. Run a blinded self-experiment. After all, if it works, then what are you afraid of? Well, it turns out that Luis Costigan had already run a self-experiment. Here was his protocol: Each morning, take 200 mg theanine or placebo (blinded) along with a small iced coffee. Wait 90 minutes. Record anxiety on a subjective scale of 0-10. He repeated this for 20 days. His mean anxiety after theanine was 4.2 and after placebo it was 5.0. A simple Bayesian analysis said there was an 82.6% chance theanine reduced anxiety. The p-value was 0.31, but this is a Bayesian blog—this is what you'd expect with a sample size of 20. A sample size of 20 just doesn’t have enough statistical power to have a good chance of finding a statistically significant result. If you assume the mean under placebo is 5.0, the mean under theanine is 4.2, and the standard deviation is 2.0, then you’d only have a 22.6% chance of getting a result with p<0.05. I think this experiment was good, both the experiment and the analysis. It doesn’t prove theanine works, but it was enough to make me wonder: Maybe theanine does work, but I somehow failed to bring out the effect? What would give theanine the best possible chance of working? Theanine is widely reported to help with anxiety from caffeine. While I didn’t explicitly take caffeine as part of my previous experiment, I drink tea almost every day, so I figured that if theanine helps, it should have shown up. But most people (and Luis) take theanine with coffee, not tea. I find that coffee makes me much more nervous than tea. For this reason, I sort of hate coffee and rarely drink it. Maybe the tiny amounts of natural theanine in tea masked the effects of the supplements? Or maybe you need to take theanine and caffeine at the same time? Or maybe for some strange reason theanine works for coffee (or coffee-tier anxiety) but not tea? So fine. To hell with my mental health. I decided to take theanine (or placebo) together with coffee on an empty stomach first thing in the day. And I decided to double the dose of theanine from 200 mg to 400 mg. Details Coffee. I used one of those pod machines which are incredibly uncool but presumably deliver a consistent amount of caffeine. Measurements. Each day I recorded my stress levels on a subjective 1-5 scale before I took the capsules. An hour later, I recorded my end stress levels, and my percentage prediction that what I took was actually theanine. Blinding. I have capsules that either contain 200 mg of theanine or 25 mcg of vitamin D. These are exactly the same size. I struggled for a while to see how to take two pills of the same type while being blind to the results. In the end, I put two pills of each type in identical looking cups and shuffled the cups. Then I shut my eyes, took a sip of coffee (to make sure I couldn’t taste any difference), swallowed the pills on one cup, and put the others into a numbered envelope. Here’s a picture of the envelopes, to prove I actually did this and/or invite sympathy for all the coffee I had to endure: After 37 days I ran out of capsules. Initial thoughts I’m going to try something new. As I write these words, I have not yet opened the envelopes, so I don’t know the results. I’m going to register some thoughts. My main thought is: I have no idea what the results will show. It really felt like on some days I got the normal spike of anxiety I expect from coffee and on other days it was almost completely gone. But in my previous experiment I often felt the same thing and was proven wrong. It wouldn’t surprise me if the results show a strong effect, or if it’s all completely random. I’ll also pre-register (sort of) the statistical analyses I intend to do: I’ll plot the data. I’ll repeat Luis’s Bayesian analysis, which looks at end stress levels only. I’ll repeat that again, but looking at the change in stress levels. I’ll repeat that again, but looking at my percentage prediction that what I actually took was theanine vs. placebo. I’ll compute regular-old confidence intervals and p-values for end stress, change in stress, and my percentage prediction that what I actually took was theanine vs. placebo. Intermission Please hold while I open all the envelopes and do the analyses. Here’s a painting. Plots Here are the raw stress levels. Each line line shows one trial, with the start marked with a small horizontal bar. Remember, this measures the effect of coffee and the supplement. So even though stress tends to go up, this would still show a benefit if it went up less with theanine. Here is the difference in stress levels. If Δ Stress is negative, that means stress went down. Here are the start vs. end stress levels, ignoring time. The dotted line shows equal stress levels, so anything below that line means stress went down. And finally, here are my percentage predictions of if what I had taken was actually theanine: So…. nothing jumps out so far. Analysis So I did the analysis in my pre-registered plan above. In the process, I realized I wanted to show some extra stuff. It’s all simple and I think unobjectionable. But if you’re the kind of paranoid person who only trusts pre-registered things, I love and respect you and I will mark those with “✔️”. End stress The first thing we’ll look at is the final stress levels, one hour after taking theanine or vitamin D. First up, regular-old frequentist statistics. Variable Mean 95% C.I. p theanine end stress 1.93 (1.80, 2.06) vitamin D end stress 2.01 (1.91, 2.10) ✔️ difference (T-D) -0.069 (-0.23, 0.083) 0.33 If the difference is less than zero, that would suggest theanine was better. It looks like there might be a small difference, but it’s nowhere near statistically significant. Next up, Bayes! In this analysis, there are latent variables for the mean and standard deviation of end stress (after one hour) with theanine and also for vitamin D. Following Luis’s analysis, these each have a Gaussian prior with a mean and standard deviation based on the overall mean in the data. Variable Mean 95% C.I. P[T better] end stress (T) 1.93 (1.81, 2.06) end stress (D) 2.00 (1.91, 2.10) difference (T-D) -0.069 (-0.23, 0.09) 80.5% ✔️ % diff (T-D)/D -3.38% (-11.1%, 4.71%) 80.5% The results are extremely similar to the frequentist analysis. This says there’s an 80% chance theanine is better. Δ Stress Next up, let’s look at the difference in stress levels defined as Δ = (end - start). Since this measures an increase in stress, we’d like it to be as small as possible. So again, if the difference is negative, that would suggest theanine is better. Here are the good-old frequentist statistics. Variable Mean 95% C.I. p theanine Δ stress 0.082 (-0.045, 0.209) vitamin D Δ stress 0.085 (-0.024, 0.194) ✔️ difference (T-D) 0.0026 (-0.158, 0.163) 0.334 And here’s the Bayesian analysis. It’s just like the first one except we have latent variables for the difference in stress levels (end-start). If the difference of that difference was less than zero, that would again suggest theanine was better. Variable Mean 95% C.I. P[T better] Δ stress (T) 0.0837 (-0.039, 0.20) Δ stress (D) 0.0845 (-0.024, 0.19) difference (T-D) -0.0008 (-0.16, 0.16) 50.5% ✔️ % diff (T-D)/D 22.0% (-625%, 755%) 55.9% In retrospect, this percentage prediction analysis is crazy, and I suggest you ignore it. The issue is that even though Δ stress is usually positive (coffee bad) it’s near zero and can be negative. Computing (T-D)/D when D can be negative is stupid and I think makes the whole calculation meaningless. I regret pre-registering this. The absolute difference is fine. It’s very close (almost suspiciously close) to zero. Percentage prediction Finally, let’s look at my percentage prediction that what I took was theanine. It really felt like I could detect a difference. But could I? Here we’d hope that I’d give a higher prediction that I’d taken theanine when I’d actually taken theanine. So a positive difference would suggest theanine is better, or at least different. Variable Mean 95% C.I. p % with theanine 52.8% (45.8%, 59.9%) % with vitamin D 49.3% (43.2%, 55.4%) ✔️ difference (T-D) 3.5% (-5.4%, 12.4%) 0.428 And here’s the corresponding Bayesian analysis. This is just like the first two, except with latent variables for my percentage prediction under theanine and vitamin D. Variable Mean 95% C.I. P[T better] % prediction (T) 52.7% (45.8%, 59.6%) % prediction (D) 49.3% (43.4%, 55.2%) difference (T-D) 3.3% (-5.7%, 12.4%) 77.1% ✔️ % diff (T-D)/D 7.2% (-10.8%, 27.6%) 77.1% Taking a percentage difference of a quantity that is itself a percentage difference is really weird, but fine. Discussion This is the most annoying possible outcome. A clear effect would have made me happy. Clear evidence of no effect would also have made me happy. Instead, some analyses say there might be a small effect, and others suggest nothing. Ugh. But I’ll say this: If there is any effect, it’s small. I know many people say theanine is life-changing, and I know why: It’s insanely easy to fool yourself. Even after running a previous 18-month trial and finding no effect, I still often felt like I could feel the effects in this experiment. I still thought I might open up all the envelopes and find that I had been under-confident in my guesses. Instead, I barely did better than chance. So I maintain my previous rule. If you claim that theanine has huge effects for you, blind experiment or GTFO.
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