I've stopped wearing my Apple Watch. Kurzgesagt did this great video on exercise that annoyingly confirmed some things I already knew but would prefer to not be true. The main one being that exercise alone isn't enough for maintaining/losing weight. Diet is way more effective, and also better for your long term health. During covid (I know it's not gone but you know what I mean), and for a little after, I was so good about exercise, and essentially all that happened was I reached a weight and stayed there. For 2 years. Cycling 30km a day (both virtually and a little less on the road). 2 years. 1 hour a day. Same weight; no movement. Not sure why it didn't really sink in at the time. My diet's never been terrible, but I don't watch what I eat, and my portion control is terrible.

The Apple Watch is great at two things: telling you things you already know (you were active enough today), and telling you things you don't need to know (how many calories you burned. What your calculated VO₂ max is). It's theoretically good at other things - crash detection, ECG, and fall detection are useful, but given that it can't reliably unlock my laptop, you'll forgive me for not counting on those things! Pretty much everything else it can do, I can already do on my phone.

So I've spent the last however many years (I got the first one and I've been wearing one pretty much constantly since then) with this thing on my wrist, having to charge it every day, and it's not doing the one thing that I thought would most useful about it - helping me to lose/maintain weight. I just need to let go of the notion that I can use it in this way. I think I've given it a fair shot.

It also means something else is gone from my life. Notifications don't immediately grab my attention and distract me. If I know there's a notification, I have to know what it is. It's annoying, and I don't love being that way, but you play the hand you're dealt.

This has had a very nice effect on my life in the last few days. My phone is always on silent or Do Not Disturb anyway, so I often don't hear notifications when they come in unless my watch taps me. Now I'm not getting distracted by notifications, which has made my phone more like the internet used to be - a place you go to check your messages. People can't just get me now - a message has become an indication of intent and I'll see it when I see it. I pick up my phone when it suits me, and if I've got messages I'll see them then. I am enjoying that.

If I carry on feeling this good about my phone just being away from me, and there when I want it, I don't see myself going back the Apple Watch. It's a cool piece of technology, but when I look at what it actually does for me, versus the ways I couldn't get it to work for me, I think I'll prefer being without it.

Tabitha played her final U13 match for Sussex yesterday. Weirdly emotional day. She's been with this team for maybe 3 years and has made friends with some lovely kids (and I feel like I've made friends with some of the parents, too). I hope she gets into U15 or at least stays in touch with them; it'd be a shame to lose that.

I love sport and I wish I'd had more of it at her age. Badminton has been incredible for my confidence and I've met such a diverse bunch of people through it. I'd love to have more sports but I barely have time for the two I actually do.

I guess you can call it "back on my bullshit", but I'm giving social media another try. I had a Mastodon instance a while back and when I looked at the cost of running my own (I am never not running my own. There's no version of this reality where I'm on someone else's instance. Is that main character energy? I don't care, you should want to own your own creative output), it was like $40 a month, + £25 a year for Ivory and that's just too much. All that, combined with how difficult discoverability is in both directions just made it untenable for me at the time.

However, I recently discovered the linuxserver Mastodon Docker image. I had been using a linuxserver image for FreshRSS until recently (Reeder is now iCloud only so I don't need an RSS backend) and they work so well out-of-the-box that I wanted to give Mastodon another try, on infrastructure that I'm already using (the same server this blog's hosted on) so it's not costing me ~$500 a year.

I've been feeling for a while like there's writing I want to do that is now-focussed. I miss that about how I used Twitter and Instagram - that was always used for what I'm doing now; what I'm thinking now. And my blog was for what I've done of note. I've tried to fold more of that stuff into this blog but a lot of it doesn't fit and is just left un-written, and I love to write. I don't want to not write just because I don't have somewhere for that writing to live.

So I'm writing on Mastodon as well now. It'll take me a while to find my voice there; it always does. But I have my brief - Mastodon is for what I'm doing now, and blog is for what I've done. I like that distinction: it keeps both places focussed.

The discoverability issue is still there, but I've always wanted to be unmotivated by my follower count. The number of people watching shouldn't dictate what you do. That's part of why I don't have comments or anything on here. I assume no-one reads, so when I do get an email or a message about a post, it really means so much, and that's what social media used to be about. I want that again; I got so much from that era.

If you have recommendations for accounts to follow on Mastodon (especially if it's you!), please email me some links!

Aegir shared this post on Mastodon earlier and I think it's an interesting take on something I've attributed to an ability to debug.

Fixing stuff for a living makes you really good at being wrong. Forty times a day you'll be all "Bet it's one of the outputs on this chip. Nope, well let's check the inputs, what're they connected to... okay so it's further up the line," and you get practice at dropping wrong ideas fast before you follow them down a silly rabbithole, you get to be okay with going "Well, it'll be this, unless I was wrong two steps ago and then it'll be that."

I worked with a guy once who was REALLY bad at being wrong. Like, he'd spend literally hours hilariously misaligning a single pair of flippers rather than consider that he might've used the wrong coil stop. He bloody soldered his crimp connections as well!

Being wrong is a skill and with a lot of practice you can get good at it. When you've let enough silly nonsense run through your head and dribble out your ears then it's as easy as inhaling to get a wonderful perfect beautiful boy of an idea, and in the next exhale you can toss that same idea in the trash with all your other nonsense where it belongs.

I won't toot my own horn about many thing but damn it I'm GOOD at being wrong. It's taken me YEARS to get this good at fucking up.

I learned to debug really early on in my career. My first job where I wasn't a junior, I worked on a codebase that had been maintained by someone who was always 100% sure that they were right (this isn't an exaggeration - I've genuinely never met or known someone so arrogant in my entire life), and that had resulted in so many incredibly confusing things that were an example of that "misaligning a single pair of flippers" mentality. Some people have an idea of how they're going to implement something and they will not deviate from it (or consider deviating from it), even if they meet with substantial resistance.

At the inoffensive end, this looks like reimplementing existing functionality (i.e. not stopping to think surely this must have been implemented already or not R-ing TFM), but at the terrible end, you usually end up implementing hacks in your initial idea because you didn't test/think it through sufficiently, and you didn't go back to the drawing board when you hit real problems.

There can obviously be a tonne of reasons that you might not be able to go back as far as you should, to refactor your code or approach to accommodate these realisations, but you should always at least try to learn lessons from them when you can¹. Analysing your own ideas and output and accepting when you were wrong, or could've been better, is the easiest way to improve in almost anything. I do it at work, and I do it whilst playing badminton; it probably fits most places. The ability to be constructively self-critical² gives you a toolset for self-teaching that l've found so incredibly valuable over the years, I couldn't even list the ways it's helped me if I tried.

I'm not really sure what my point is here. That toot got me thinking and I'm not sure I agree with it entirely, but a lot of it fits with me. It can't just be a matter of being wrong because I am terrible at that sometimes, but I think it depends on where I'm wrong. There's at least two people that I can't bear being wrong in front of, but I'm definitely fine being wrong in the comfort and safety of my own office. But it also can't just be a debugging ability because you need to be able to do it before real problems arise.

I should've mulled this for a few days before trying to write something.

¹ Most notably, every relational database relationship is many-to-many, given enough time. Always design systems so that converting to many-to-many would be minimally disruptive
² I don't recommend just being self-critical if you can help it

Apple Intelligence isn't just an inferior product, it seems to actively make everything it touches worse. Lasted three days before turning it all off. Does time just make everything worse? It seems to.

I bought Forza Horizon 4 on Steam because it was super cheap, and everyone says it runs better than 5 (it does seem to), and it's so fun. I feel like I knew, but it didn't occur to me, that it's set in England and that might mean I would recognise parts of it. It has the Southwick Hill Tunnel (or something that looks a lot like it), and they talk about Broadway, which is a Cotswold village where we used to go and get sweets as kids when we passed our driving test. Is this how Americans feel about every other game?

It does have one thing I hate though. The licensing for all the DLC expired so you can't buy any of it any more. Fortunately, that means that all of the signposting and upselling from the game is gone, too. I mean, it wouldn't make sense to regularly nudge me to buy DLC that I can't buy so it's good that that's all gone.

Of course it's not gone. The game is still full of nags to upgrade, and there's a big LEGO logo on the map that you can't interact with unless you like looking at feature lists for dead DLC, then clicking links to Steam pages that don't exist any more. Personally, that's not what gaming is about.

It's a shame because the game is a lot of fun. I'm hoping that I can ignore the completist side of my brain long enough to play the game until I can't win races any more, then let it fall down my recently played until I fully forget about it like I did with Forza Horizon 5. In fact I should probably get the 5 DLC whilst I still can, so that that can gather digital dust in some database row with my user ID on it.

Licensing is truly one of the worst things about 21st century media. It makes me laugh that a thing designed to curb piracy and preserve ownership actually does neither.