How does it determine the order?

Clearly it thinks you prefer Chinese to German. Was that correlated with the frequency of your requests on Google Translate? With your browsing history? With your shopping history?

Surely this is true, but if you’re a fingerprinting company aren’t you making so much money violating the privacy of the masses that it’s not worth your time going after the tiny set of Freedom Nerds trying to evade you?

I’m working on a couple apps using Typescript and for me (ex-JS hacker coming back to it after some years) it’s still an insane menu of bad choices and new “better” frameworks, some of which are abandoned before you get done reading the docs. Though I get that it probably moved faster a few years ago.

I settled on what seemed like the most “standard” set of things (marketable skills blabla) and every week I read an article about how that stack is dead, and everybody supposedly uses FancyStack now.

Adding insult to injury, I have relearned the fine art of inline styles. I assume table layouts are next.

To lurch back on topic: I’m doing this for AI-related stuff and yes, the AI pace of change is much worse, but they sure do make a nice feedback loop.

Additional factors that come to mind: the slow realization that you could be writing for an audience of one (yourself) after a brief surge of "famous bloggers"; and the rise of other forms of writing (social media, etc) that at least give you the illusion of an immediate audience. "Engagement metrics" and so on -- even if they represent the opposite of attention.

I think a lot of what used to go onto blogs now goes elsewhere, but doesn't necessarily stay bottled up in the mind of the would-have-been blogger. Even while pseudo-blogging platforms like Substack are having something of an upswing of esoteric low-audience content.

And I can say from experience that it's tough keeping a blog going when you have near-zero readership, even if you still consider the act of writing something and putting it out in public to be instrinsically valuable to you.

Just as a simple example, I have a once-in-a-while newsletter+blog on a niche topic, and I could get way more eyeballs if I'd just rephrase things as a Reddit post, but I'm nostalgic about it living its own life on the Free-ish Web. Or, I suppose, this comment right here, which could just as well be on a personal blog with a "backlink" to yours.

I went to a school of about 50 kids, and I often wished I’d been at a school of 500 or more kids, but looking back I’m very glad my family didn’t opt for the school of 5000 kids.

At 50 kids, if you were social you definitely had friends (not just acquaintances) from very different socioeconomic backgrounds. At 50 kids, you could play sports on the official team if you wanted to and showed up and didn’t slack off. You knew everyone and there were no cliques, that would have been ridiculous with 50 kids.

I could go on, but those are just a few things (IMO good things) you get in a tiny school that you probably wouldn’t have at 500 kids and surely not at 5000.

I find it strange that you don’t hear of more homeschooling groups pulling together to create something like the 50-kid school.