lesser daemon: brent bailey's personal weblog

23

Apr

Most people are just people

A hard thing to wrap your head around is that most people aren’t particularly bad or good. I mean I think most people would like to be good but it really depends on how they’re feeling that day or what else they’ve got going on. Like, I try to give cash to beggars in the street but I’m not usually going to go out of my way if I don’t have cash that day or I’m in a hurry or they rub me the wrong way. I’d like to think this doesn’t

2 min read

21

Apr

Why This Isn't A Newsletter

Occasionally people will ask me why I have a blog instead of Substack (or a Buttondown, or whatever else is popular now). Ghost, the hosting service I use, is functionally designed to be an open-source version of Substack - I just disabled all the email functionality.

First, I don't actually like reading newsletters very much. Even though I have been making myself blog most days for the past few months I have very little desire to have someone else's writing in my inbox at a regular cadence. I like to be able to choose to visit a blog! I like

2 min read

18

Apr

Touching peace

I've always had a fantasy about becoming a monk. I'm not wedded to a particular kind of monk, I just figure a life of peace and solitude dedicated to pursuing a relationship with God or internalizing the Four Noble Truths might be the thing that fixes me.

This is an idle thought that I have not seriously pursued. I love my little treats and abandoning all material attachments sounds hard. I assume I will be stuck in the cycle of samsara for some time yet.

All the different schools of thought on this basically boil down to the bell curve

3 min read

17

Apr

The Death of Learning

I've been thinking more about vibe coding lately and getting pissed about the whole concept. I think there's something deeply wrong with the mindset behind "prompt, don't read the code, don't think about it." I have written in the past about how artificial intelligence is a tool that accelerates the worst impulses of capitalism, and vibe coding is the latest iteration on what is possibly the one I hate the most: sacrificing understanding for efficiency.

Here's the thing. I like learning. I know it's very east coast liberal arts elitist of me but I think there is inherent value in

4 min read

16

Apr

Using lazy.nvim in VSCode on Windows

I've been using VSCode Neovim for a while, but had been irritated at the tradeoff of access to the VSCode ecosystem at the cost of losing my once-heavily curated .vimrc setup. Turns out you don't have to live that way!

A lot of doing dev work on Windows feels like making a Rube Goldberg machine to make it behave more like Linux, and this is not particularly different, but I do wish I'd moved faster to replicate my preferred IDE setup in VSCode. You really can have your cake and eat it too, sort of. Some stuff doesn't work the

2 min read