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In Game Design, one of the greatest achievements is to get your player to enter flow. They need to be able to work in a problem space that they know how to navigate, that is somewhat defined, but leaves a bit of an opening for their (usually previously learned) expertise to solve the problems posed in a creative way with the means given.

In my youth I was able to consistently enter flow at will during multiple activities, but especially making games, and increasingly so as I was getting better at it.

That eroded away with time, and these days it's extremely rare I find myself on the other side of a flow state. I think it's because I have much more on my mind these days, so I don't allow myself to really fully commit to something for a longer while. So I feel you on the having to defend it aspect, but for me it wasn't really LLMs that prompted it. It's more growing up and extraneous circumstances.

Basically as soon as I got a real job in tech, and the business aspects trumped every other consideration, creativity went out the window, and there's only the occasional mildly interesting problem to solve. In contract work you are rarely incentivized for doing the best possible job. Doing a middle of the road job yields more billable hours. And that's just not an interesting problem to me.

So I find flow elsewhere in my spare time, as rare as it may be. But it may be high time for me to condition myself a bit to allow myself enter flow more often again.

(Btw. the colophon on your website has a typo. The font is called Inter.)

That I of course didn't test. Yeah, I'd expect them reencoding images to save on bandwidth, and they're probably doing so naively for JXL (maybe even converting to HEIC).

Actually, in my recent vibe coding adventures I tested making a ProRAW converter app that also applied the included gain map to the image and encoded via libjxl on device. Surprisingly, Photos.app was able to display the converted image with HDR, but the HDR tag in the UI is only displayed for images with the proprietary gain map.

There seems to be some support there, though I tested on iOS 26.

I have permanent tinnitus and have this too, though it very rarely happens on its own. When it happens, for me, this sound is usually a signal to immediately change my posture when sitting in a chair.

When I reach flow, I tend to not notice until later that I'd now be sitting cross-legged, or that I've tucked one leg under myself.

That pressure tends to trigger the sound you describe after a while. I imagine because of bad blood circulation, though I have no idea why it's that sound signalling that for me.

Right, I didn't consider Google. The 360MB/day of free egress traffic (Spark plan) strike me as very peculiar. But at least it isn't Cloudflare's "unlimited" with secret limits in place, or Netlify's 100GB/month and then enormous costs on everything above.

Thanks for reminding me! I'll give Firebase a look.

By the way, very minor thing I noticed. Clicking on your photo on the homepage swaps backgrounds, but the timer-based swapping still runs on its fixed interval. Can look unpolished if you click it a bunch or in the wrong moment.

Fully concur with the points you made. I also just finished transitioning my personal website to Astro from an Eleventy setup that I got too lazy to maintain. I made a couple of landing pages for clients and my own projects with Astro and the maintenance experience was eye-opening.

Astro really is quite wondrous. If you don't stray too far from its opinionated route, it's almost magical. But some more advanced things do still take some tinkering. My sitemap and RSS with full text setups I wouldn't describe as the most elegant things in existence, but they do their job.

What I'm still lacking/wondering about is whether there's a CDN static site/serverless hosting provider like Netlify, Vercel or Cloudflare, but that isn't free or $20/mo. I'd like to pay for a good service that obviously has running costs, but I don't believe there's quite something like those.

Anyway, I like the website. It's easy on the eyes.