Around the beginning of my vacation I put some effort points into picking the "right" web browser for me as of mid-2025.

Desiderata:

• Open-source
• Non-kneecapped uBlock Origin
• Cross-device sync
• not on some weird slippery slope of trying to get monetized (though it's okay if it's downstream of a browser that is on that slope)

I had been using Brave for a few months since Chrome stopped supporting Manifest v2, but eventually Chromium is going to deprecate Manifest v2 as well, so Brave's days are numbered.

Conclusion:

• For desktop, LibreWolf: reasonably well-resourced Firefox rebrand without the monetization junk. To install it you have to tell macOS that it's okay that it hasn't been notarized by apple, e.g. using brew install --no-sandbox. There are some very annoying default settings that you'll want to change (e.g. I'd recommend turning off the stuff aimed at avoiding fingerprinting, which makes Google Maps buggy and prevents you from uploading images on many sites) but after I did that everything works great.
• for android, Fennec: similarly rebranded / un-monetized Firefox; available only from the F-Droid store. Didn't need to change any settings for it to be surprisingly nice; maybe even nicer than Chrome for android.

I don't use any iOS devices very often so I haven't figured out the "right" browser for me on iOS yet; probably there are firefox forks available there as well.

These can sync with each other using Firefox Sync, which you can even self-host if you want to badly (I don't).

I got a Claude Max subscription and have been playing around.

First big experiment was to see if we could reimplement a part of our pipeline from Julia into Rust. The quality of the code it produced was really good, and it did good analyses on what parts would be easier or harder to port. Eventually this convinced us that a port wouldn't have been worthwhile, because the Rust <> Julia interop is currently quite difficult. I think it might have taken us several days to come to that conclusion otherwise, so this was a big win.

Second significant experiment was asking Claude Code to optimize a pipeline. It pretty much failed abysmally – it successfully added a lot of profiling and came up with a lot of ideas, but not a single one of them made the code any faster. Later, I was able to make a significant improvement to that pipeline with about half an hour of work. So, a failure here.

Third was a moderately difficult refactor, replacing some dicts with structs, that then get serialized and read in another part of the codebase. Claude Code did really well here – it occasionally produced code that was overly verbose, but nothing was *wrong*, and it took corrections/feedback quite effectively. Another big win here.

I kinda miss using and checking Superstimulus so here's a Latin update:

I've finished the substantive part of my Latin textbook, and am now on the chapter about how poetry works. It's cool that I'm done with all the grammar, altho realistically I'm not sure I remember it all (e.g. there's something weird going on with 3rd declension adjectives and/or neuter nouns IIRC), so probably I should have another read-over at some point.

I'm currently reading the supplement, Fabulae Syrae, and it's pretty hard this chapter because it has a lot of verse. Should I keep slogging? IDK maybe - especially because I think the difficult verse was concentrated in a bit I'm now past? Also it's sort of good to challenge oneself? But I sort of worry that I'm being pig-headed and should just switch to something easier (e.g. "Caesar the Ethnographer", a cool tiered reader of parts of On the Gallic War that I recently got). But IDK presumably poetry is the one area where knowing the original language gives you the greatest advantage, so who knows.

I now "get" the appeal of dactylic hexameter, altho I still don't understand why it's 6. Also in practice I have to read it slowly for comprehension and that ruins my appreciation of the poetic qualities. But the start of Amores III.2 is pretty cool, I like that. Hendecasyllabic verse still seems dumb to me, but IDK maybe one day I'll get that too.

Anyway I am looking forward to the next phase of Latin learning where I just practice reading stuff at various difficulty levels in a way where I'm more selecting things I actually want to read and the readings are actually interesting. I think in the short run this looks like graded readers for actually interesting stuff and also just reading simplified texts (e.g. Ora Maritima, Epitome Historiae Sacrae).

Well I should probably get back to reading.

Common plastics tier list, from a guy who basically doesn't know what he's talking about:

S tier:

• Polyethylene (HDPE, LDPE): Fucking excellent. I am pretty confident that polyethylene is just totally safe; I don't mind that it's used all over the place. You can basically look at the chemical structure and go "yep, seems obviously fine."

A tier:

• Silicone (polysiloxane): Sliiightly less trustworthy than polyethylene, biochemically speaking. But very very useful, and nowhere near as scary as later entries.

B tier:

• Nylon: Pretty cool plastic for fabrics. Strong, not a huge amount of health concerns, though it's hard to say for sure.

C tier:

• PTFE (Teflon): Extremely useful as a dry lubricant / non-stick coating, e.g. in non-stick pans. Unfortunately this might mean that it's especially likely to accumulate in you, since probably most of the food you eat was in contact with PTFE while cooking; worse, PTFE decomposes into less-stable things at plausible cooking temperatures. Vaguely recommend avoiding.

D tier:

• Polyester (e.g. PET, but others also). It is hard to avoid polyester in clothing and bedding, which kinda sucks because it probably lets off a bunch of endocrine disruptors during regular use.

F tier:

• Things with BPA in them: idk man, I would prefer if my food storage plastics (e.g. aluminum can linings) didn't basically act like a constant low-level estrogen supplement.
• PFASs (other than PTFE): This is a big category and other than PTFE there's no obvious single PFAS to call out and research, but the whole situation with them seems sketchy to me.

Learning a little about steel has given me some new cool physical and conceptual metaphors:

1. Complicated phase diagrams: In basic chemistry I learned about the typical "solid/liquid/gas" phase diagrams, but in metallurgy there are much more interesting phase diagrams describing differing crystal structures and so on. If I understand correctly (which I totally might not) these phase diagrams can even be pretty weird in the sense that the phase can be path dependent (think Ice-9 from Cat's Cradle)
2. Carbides: Steel alloys typically have some elements "in solution", i.e. dissolved in the iron, and others that form tiny islands of carbide and nitride compounds (collectively these islands are called "carbides"), which are actually the biggest factor influencing the material properties of the steel, since they're typically very "hard" (i.e. crystals that really want to stay in their current configuration, and so are very resistant to wear, scratching, and deformation) but not very "tough" (i.e. once you do get them out of their configuration they crack/shatter/chip and cause a cascade effect of shattering carbides that will cause the steel to crack on the macro-level as well)
3. "Properties" as sets of correlated measurements: There are many different ways to measure a piece of steel. Some of these ways of measuring are highly correlated, and we label these clusters as "properties". e.g. "Hardness" is not really one thing: When you're reporting a "hardness" you have to say which kind of measurement you mean, because while the different ways of measuring "hardness" are correlated with each other, the correlation isn't perfect. If a thing is very difficult to indent with a diamond point, it is probably also very difficult to scratch with corundum, but you can't say exactly how difficult.

I’m currently a little over a month into a planned 3+ months of travel and, as always, I’m finding that solo travel forces me to be flexible about plans and expectations in a way that doesn’t come naturally to me. I tend to over-plan by default and experience a lot of internal pressure to make good logistical decisions. And travel is complicated; every situation is new and there are a lot of decisions to potentially make badly.

I try to be more flexible when I’m traveling because over-planning often leaves less margin for error when things go wrong and less opportunity to pursue interesting things as they arise. This strategy sometimes means that I realize after the fact when I could have structured things better (eg. I could have gotten much better utilization out of my rail pass) in addition to making actual mistakes (like getting tickets for the wrong day).

I don’t have, like, an insight or even a well-formed question here but I feel like I’m converging on the correct amount of perfectionism? I’m getting to do basically everything that I wanted to do, I haven’t had any major catastrophes and things go better-than-expected about as often as they go worse-than-expected.

I’ve heard that some people relax when they go on vacation? I might try it sometime

Another note about the pocket knife world:

A common phrase is, "a sharp knife is a safe knife", the reasoning being that sharp knives don't catch as much when cutting, and require less force when cutting, and are thus more predictable and don't slip as much or as forcefully.

I used to just assume that this was right because all the knife guys say it, and presumably they know the domain best. But this week I'm becoming increasingly convinced that this is very-persistent copium from people who really like having sharp knives, or at least is heavily dependent on the way you're using your knives.

It is just way easier to cut yourself with a sharp knife than a dull knife. It's way easier to cut yourself way deeper with a sharp knife. A sharp knife will just slide right through your skin and organs. A dull knife requires way more force than I usually find myself using (regardless of knife sharpness), to actually break the skin.

In some sense this is a "skill issue": If you're an expert at handling your knife, then sharpness does make the knife more predictable to you. But even then I'm unconvinced that the net effect is in favor of safety. I've watched a ton of knife youtube this week, and I sure see a lot of professional knife guys, whose whole deal is having and using and reviewing sharp knives, with fresh red lines all over their hands. I just don't buy that a typical person is going to entirely avoid steel-to-skin contact, and dull knives are way safer conditional on that steel-to-skin contact.

I've been getting really worried about Sam's severe photosensitivity, headaches, and malaise (diagnosed as "migraines"). There are updates to this story!

He was supposed to get an MRI since things weren't getting better. But the scheduling team was really slow and gave us inaccurate info. Thursday morning, I got up early to take matters into my own hands, making many calls and wrapping my head around the scheduling/logistics/pricing.

Soonest I could get was an April 9 appointment. But they advised me to get a "stat" added to the order, so I messaged this to Sam's doctor.

At about 2pm, we got a call back that we could get an appointment in SF (40min away) at 3:15pm. We rushed out the door. (Sam wore an eye mask on the way over. He hadn't left home in... weeks?)

More inaccurate info, more decisions, long wait time... But we got it done.

Since the order was noted as urgent, we got results 7am the next day. They say he's all clear! (Brain + orbits, with and without contrast.) Yay! This rules out tumors and various other serious problems. These problems were seeming increasingly likely to me, since he wasn't getting better.

But also, coincidentally... he might be getting a bit better now? The big MRI day didn't trigger him and he's been fine the last few days. Increased medication dosage MIGHT actually be working. Cool!

(The improvement isn't "he can tolerate a normal amount of light." We haven't checked that yet. The improvement is "if he is maximally careful about light/stress, he feels ok" — previously, we struggled to make him feel not-shitty at ANY level of avoidance.)

I, on the other hand, developed very bad PEM from the experience. 😝 I spent roughly 7pm Thursday to 4:30pm Saturday (today) in bed. I was so depleted that I think my body was struggling to digest food — at least, I think that's why my stomach was in overwhelming pain. That one's new for me.

It's pretty sketch for someone with ME/CFS to push themself like this, but I did it because I felt sure enough that I'd recover. And Sam is very, very important to me. Definitely the most I've pushed myself in a long time.

Anyway, we're really happy to have negative results and possible improvement!

This week in "Ben has been doing consumerism to his bedding and clothes, to an embarrassing degree, and has recommendations":

• I really like my new buckwheat-hull pillow. It's cooler and firmer than any other pillow I've used, and it doesn't need to be fluffed or get lumpy. It can be adjusted to be more or less full / malleable (just add or remove hulls). Until recently I've been using some latex pillows that are better than traditional pillows on these axes, but the buckwheat pillow blows them out of the water.
• I also really like this muslin blanket: muslincomfort.com/products/the… . It's got an extremely pleasant soft texture; it almost gives me goosebumps.
• Less extreme, but this cotton knit weighted blanket is also great: silkandsnow.com/en-us/hand-kni…
• I like Kuhl pants, especially Kuhl Denim Klassik jeans.
• Duluth Trading Co makes two kinds of cellulose-based underwear that are extremely comfortable even though I'm fat and most underwear is torture: duluthtrading.com/s/DTC/mens-f… and duluthtrading.com/s/DTC/mens-d…

I've continued to be relatively well this past month. Frustrated I don't have more energy to socialize, but thankful my health remains non-terrifying.

However!! Now Sam's unwell. We don't know exactly what's going on. Right now, he's about as disabled as me.

About 8 years ago, Sam noticed he started getting headaches from sun exposure. At first, this was entirely resolved by wearing sunglasses. But he's slowly gotten more and more sensitive.

Usually, he gets a headache, but not always. Sometimes it's just brain fog and fatigue, which still impairs him significantly.

Last month, his day could be ruined by 30-60min outside. Even with sunglasses on a cloudy day. This month, he's ~never going out when the sun is up. He's wearing sunglasses indoors, and spending a lot of time in our bedroom, where we've totally blacked out the windows.

Relatively small amounts of stress/effort can force him to rest for hours.

Talking to LLMs, I learned that this could be due to migraines. Even though he doesn't always get a headache, and his headaches aren't severe, his experience still could be classified as "having migraines." We spoke to a migraine specialist at Neura Health, and they confidently confirmed the diagnosis.

He was given rescue meds (triptans, nurtec) plus preventative meds (amitriptyline). But nothing is helping, besides resting in the dark.

He's been on 10mg amitriptyline for 3.5 weeks. Can take 6 weeks to kick in. (Apparently that's a low dose — we're probably going to try to ramp it up.)

The rescue meds aren't doing anything. We gave him a ton of supplements recommended for migraines, and they also aren't helping much (or at all, idk). He's taking magnesium (as Magtein), fish oil, B2, D3, multivitamin, CoQ10, NAC, and curcumin.

Ibuprofen might help a bit.

We haven't tried an elimination diet — I'm not sure if that's worth the effort or not. With how unsuccessful everything else has been, I'm wondering whether "chronic migraine" is a misdiagnosis. He's not having acute attacks centered around headaches; it's more of a constant sensitivity, leading to varying levels of impairment (with or without a headache).

I've run this through Deep Research. It sounds like his symptoms and treatment-reactions are atypical for a migraine, but nothing else is clearly a better fit. (It suggests: Intracranial hypertension, MS, chronic infection)

I think I'm going to book him an appointment with a neuro-opthalmologist at UCSF. I welcome recommendations on who else to see, or what else to investigate.