2025-11-08 23:52:14
I’m rolling with the punches as I try to refine my plans for the new year. I hope you enjoy this off-the-cuff reflection on where I’m at now and what I’m focusing on moving forward. I am thrilled to report my new low of 327.1. I’m quite happy to have gotten below the three-thirties which were a particularly difficult range for me.
A lot of positive attention has come my way because of how radically different I look these days, but I admit to being in the midst of some difficult feelings in this recording. I wish growing was always fun and exciting, but I’m hoping to make the best of it even when it is challenging.
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2025-11-03 04:16:37
I apologize for the audio quality of this particular recording, it didn’t turn out quite as I had hoped, but I believe it was still worth sharing an update.
Things have been a bit difficult lately because I majorly injured my foot over a week ago. I clumsily dropped a 45lb plate on it while unloading a leg press machine. It seems I am to endure weeks of of pain for a moment of exhausted carelessness. Quite a painful lesson in diligent and careful moving of weights. Despite that, I have finished the first iteration of my 2026 exercise plan. I am already beginning to ramp up towards being able to stick to it and I am excited for the gains to come.
The first mini-rant of this recording I talk about how I think many things that are often discussed as ‘genetics’ in health and fitness circles seem to cover what I would call “external lifestyle factors”. This navel-gazing hair-split is about recognizing the distinction between inherited constraints on health that are not explicitly encoded in genes but rather inherited socially. This would include things like ACE (adverse childhood events) and other direct impacts on quality of life.
The second mini-rant is a sappy one about the importance of cultivating skill as individuals and as a society. As covered in my Digital Autonomy & The Arts Series I touch on how I am concerned that generative AI may undermine people’s desire to develop important skills, and for people to generally devalue human ingenuity as a whole.
Lastly I finish up talking about a great experience I had at a ‘meet & greet’ lately. I had the thrilling opportunity to talk to one of my personal heroes. After a very nice back-and-forth I was encouraged to explicitly talk about how the Canadian response to the Covid Crisis played a role in making my dire health situation get a great deal worse.
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2025-10-20 00:08:36
I’m overjoyed to share that I’ve hit a new low of 333lbs. With that, many other things are coming along quite nicely. I hope you’ll enjoy this stream-of-consciousness monologue from a recent walk. I start with updates on how things have been going, then navel-gaze about my reflections on overall fitness discussions that I’ve witnessed.
Beyond continuing to lose weight, I’ve also made some significant strength progress. I can finally do a couple push-ups and my overhead press lifts are progressing well. I am learning more about how to better apply myself in strength training and it’s incredibly gratifying. Becoming stronger and more mobile has been a huge comfort in what has been otherwise a very challenging time.
I can definitely say that I feel like I’m in ‘uncharted territory’. I’m fitting into the oldest clothes I still held on to, and I’m more mobile and capable than I’ve been in quite a long time. I’m regularly told by people that I’m ‘unrecognizable’. It is absolutely surreal to have gone from total self-imposed isolation out of shame, to being surprised by a deluge of kindness when I’m at the gym.
I’ve come quite a long way from my 2023 New Year’s Resolutions. Soon I will be drafting new resolutions based off everything I’ve learned in this last transformative year. The central focus of these will be trying to become more process focused than results focused. My goal for 2026 should be more about my ability to “keep promises to myself” rather than losing X many pounds a week/month. As such, part of my resolutions will be to more formally plan out exercise routines so I can continue the focus on putting the work in. But I’m also looking forward to taking monthly limb measurements to track change beyond just the scale. I’ve learned a great deal about both diet and exercise, but 2026 is going to be all about how much I can really put it all into practice.
In defense of motivation: I talked a bit about how I think the concept of motivation is unfairly discarded. Many rightfully recognize that motivation alone is not sufficient to drive long-term change, but there’s more to it than that. I believe that people need to at least have hope change is possible before any change can be made.
Against weight gain fear-mongering: For me, the fear of gaining all the weight back was a big barrier to making meaningful progress. I think people are often too critical of the specifics of people’s weight loss efforts. For someone like me, it’s a long road and there is a great deal of time for learning through trial-and-error.
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2025-10-04 13:48:53
This post is an attempt to navel-gaze on the finer points of self-hosting your own sites & services. I’m going to put down some of the important but easily over-looked considerations that can really make a big difference. The goal is to help plan to make the most of the hardware you have access to without breaking the bank. There won’t be too much in-depth technical details, but more of an overview of things to think about to guide decision-making. If you’re looking for specific instructions, Reclaiming Territory in Cyberspace is a good place to start. I’m also writing this as a reference to myself for any future server-side projects I intend to build.
I dream of a future where ordinary people express themselves from social web sites & systems that are wholly their own. This requires a bit more than mere static sites. If speed was the only consideration, we could all simply put our data on a rented cloud servers leveraging high-performance SSDs and memory. This has two major problems; cost, and lack of independence. For significant amounts of data this would cost quite a bit, effectively filtering out anyone interested in sharing non-trivial amounts of multimedia content. Realistically, if we want a vibrant open web, people are going to want fast sites & services without too much overhead.
The good news is that local storage and compute is relatively cheap. Self-hosting in 2025 means that your largest constraints are bandwidth and latency. With some clever techniques, you can intelligently leverage limited cloud resources to make the best of your personal systems. By optimizing your setup, you can make the most out of even relatively trivial computing resources. Today the bar is quite low to be able to broadcast so much to the world.
Speed is relative. Some systems and services are inherently faster than others. Static sites are king when it comes to speed on the web, but with proper care other systems can be relatively close. In addition to the privacy risks, serving sites and media from your home is generally not advisable. Your home internet connection won’t be able to handle any non-trivial amount of burst traffic, and will likely leave your visitors waiting to load any media. This gets much worse in situations where residential users only have access to so much bandwidth during a given month.
With enough of the big picture out of the way, let’s consider practical steps. Regardless of what systems and services we choose to run, we have to contend with physics and real-world costs. Hardware can only work so hard and data can only move so fast. The goal is to make the best use of available resources by contending with their limitations. In some situations it may make sense to be extremely selective, but in others it may make sense to take advantage of everything that is available.
Consider the following table, outlining the trade-offs of retrieving data from various methods:
| Type | Retrieval Scheme | Cost | Speed | Throughput | Independence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Network | Enterprise ISP | Extreme 💰 | High | Extreme 🌊 | ? |
| Network | Residential ISP | Moderate | Slow 🐢 | Low 💧 | Low |
| Network | Mobile ISP | High | Slow 🐢 | Low | None 🔇 |
| Network | Sneakernet | Moderate | Varied 🤷 | Varied 🤷 | Perfect 💎 |
| Network | Postage | Cheap 🫰 | Glacial 🥶 | Varied 🤷 | High |
| File access | Memory (Cloud) | Extreme 💰 | Extreme ⚡ | Extreme 🌊 | None 🔇 |
| File access | Memory (Local) | Low | High | High | Perfect 💎 |
| File access | File System (Cloud) | Moderate | High | High | None 🔇 |
| File access | File System (Local) | Slow | High | High | Perfect 💎 |
| File access | Object Storage (Cloud) | Low | Extreme ⚡ | High | None 🔇 |
| File 🤡 | Generative AI (Cloud) | Absurd 💸 | Fast | High | None 🔇 |
| File 🤡 | Generative AI (Local) | High | Slow 🐢 | Low 💧 | High |
The point of this chart is to point out that there are inherent trade-offs when it comes to leveraging particular resources. You can specialize by focusing on a few, or handle the complexity of trying to ‘have your cake and eat it too’. By understanding this, you can understand that there are opportunities to leverage (but not necessarily depend on) particular tools to help enhance your systems.
The main point of self-hosting is to keep your data under your control. This is best done with your data on machines you control, rather than cloud providers. This has another significant advantage, storage devices themselves are often relatively cheap. You can store your data on high-end SSDs, and make what you want accessible to either your network or even the public. This can be a LOT cheaper than buying large amounts of cloud storage at the price of some initial cost. That said, if you intend to serve a large volume of data, or to a large audience, trade-offs may have to be considered.
Just like cloud storage, cloud compute can become expensive quite quickly for demanding tasks. By self-hosting you can pay up-front for your compute needs which often saves you money in the long run. An example of this would be using powerful machines at home as remote runners for a PeerTube instance running on an inexpensive VPS. This would allow you to speed up processing videos without sacrificing on availability to the public Internet. Also similarly to storage, there are serious privacy & security benefits of doing the majority of compute tasks on your own machines.
For small or simple sites and services, redundant mirrors can allow your setup to exist across multiple networks (such as darknets) but a ’thin-cache’ is a simple way of achieving the same goal. By having the external facing server (such as a cheap VPS or mini-pc running a darknet daemon) operate as a server-side cache, you can still reduce the latency penalty of self-hosting. This allows your media to be highly available despite having a relatively modest setup.
Since you’re likely dealing with constrained resources, or at least a ‘shoe-string’ budget, it makes sense to optimize things however you can. Even if you’re not aiming to be on the 512KB club, it is absolutely worth your time to consider how you can save your guests time, and yourself resources.
Content: Text is king
It may be worth applying the logic of “this meeting could have been an e-mail” to your own content. If a visual medium isn’t entirely necessary, text may suffice. At minimum, treating text content as a first-class format is critical. Text is universally accessible, and plays nice with text-to-speech systems as well as translation. This also applies to file formats, plain-text data such as html tables and svg images can often be much lighter than images for simple information. With some creativity, a great deal of information can be presented with hardly any bandwidth at all.
Compression: Minimize all the things
Hosting media files can be the biggest challenge for small self-hosting setups. If you’re not familiar with how to compress audio & video files you may be unnecessarily using up loads of bandwidth and storage. For a great deal of content it’s not entirely likely that you need full 4K resolution to get your ideas across. The smaller your media files are the easier it is to mirror them and the faster they load for slow connections. FFmpeg is my go-to for compressing audio & video. Remember that you can always keep your full-quality copies for local use!
Client-side: Make it their problem
With some careful consideration, it can be effective to optimize your setup to have much of the work done on the client-side. At minimum you’re going to want to make intelligent use of client-side caching to reduce load on your services. Another valuable pattern is to lazy load media files on your pages. These simple but effective optimizations can make a big difference on constrained networks.
Since the optimal strategy is to divide tasks between at least two machines, it makes sense to make use of tools like SSH tunnels and VPNs to provide a secure ‘backbone’ for them to communicate. It can be useful to use a cheap VPS to act as the public cache/mirror for your sites & services rather than just purchasing a tunnel to the Internet directly. Ultimately it will depend on your bandwidth and latency as well as the nature and volume of media you’re sharing. The cool thing is that with a deliberately distributed setup, you can make your systems available not only for the ‘clearnet’ but darknets or even nearby networks as well. With enough flexibility the options are truly endless.
I am always excited to see more people get into self-hosting and I’m hoping that people find this helpful. In an ideal world, the web would be small and filled with ordinary people expressing themselves easily and seamlessly. I believe that achieving that dream requires for there to be more resources and tools for people to not just self-host but self-host well and effectively. If nothing else I hope that this minor overview can be a small contribution towards that.
I’ve really just scratched the surface of this topic, but there is certainly more to cover.
Any feedback you may have would be greatly appreciated if I’ve missed some major blind-spots.
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2025-10-03 06:17:24
In this off-the-cuff recording I celebrate being back on the downtrend, and spend time reflecting on my concerns related to the politicization of health. It seems that novel therapeutics and the end of the ‘monopoly on medicine’ may create unique challenges for biological human rights in the future.
I am experimenting with using libre audio & video formats in this post, so please let me know if anything isn’t working.
I am thrilled to report that I’ve managed to hit a new low again, confirming that I am already back on the downtrend. It is comforting to overcome being disrupted by pain as well as become slightly more comfortable with making mistakes. I have to admit that I’m at kind of a weight point in my journey. Having made so much progress since the high of over 570, I’m struggling to comprehend how much better I can feel as I approach a healthy body weight. As strange as it may sound, I am now near the lowest I’ve been for most of my adult life, so I feel the best I have been acclimated to in a long time. That said, I’m very much looking forward to biking in the spring time, and many other activities that open up as I change.
To satisfy my insatiable curiosity, I’ve recently been absorbing discussions around anabolic steroid use, as well as experimental peptides. In reflecting on these issues I’ve wondered to myself if losing weight (or building muscle) ’naturally’ matters much. I have not / will not be taking any weight loss or performance enhancing drugs, but I am very fascinated by the broader discussion around these things. The implications seem to be directly related to broader trends in healthcare and human rights in our time.
To spoil the rant a bit, I am concerned that the combination of unique therapeutics, social pressure, and public health initiatives can politicize health on a level previously unthinkable. This is especially concerning in light of governments and Big Tech taking control of people’s health data, and potentially weaponizing it against the public. I wholly expect that a combination of debilitating austerity and the digitization of health information can create a terrifying form of automated bio-tyranny.
I wholeheartedly believe that natural (and healthy!) body change is an act of defiance and rebellion from some of the most insidious forces at play in our time. However, I think it is important to have the humility and understanding to recognize the forces that drive people to consider potentially self-destructive ’enhancements’. So I would say, how we approach weight loss or other body change does definitely matter. The challenge is that these novel advancements seem to ultimately raise the stakes of our responsibility to care for those around us in the face of very insidious challenges.
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2025-09-25 19:30:13
The last week has been a bit of a disaster. I was very excited to continue pushing towards the low 300s, but unfortunately I’ve hit a major setback. I have a wicked ear infection that has been causing me extreme amounts of pain. As such, I’ve essentially lost nearly all control over my eating habits. In a fit of restlessness, I recorded this update while coming up with a plan to bounce back from this. It is frustrating to lose all of September’s progress to this, but I’m taking it as a lesson in patience and perseverance.
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