As a person that got pulled into the hell we call Long Covid, I find it very difficult to follow the developments and the research from social media. Every day I have to scroll through a lot of desperation, hopelessness, and anger to get a single piece of useful knowledge. I know that they are fully within their rights to share as they'd like on their profiles, but they become a tsunami on my Twitter feed when ten of them appear one after the other.

It then becomes a challenge to emotionally shield myself from taking on everybody's feelings and just focus on the information that I'm after: Are there any new developments? Any new research papers that point to something? Any new medications that people are trying? Anything that I've missed that could help?

And on top of this, you have to deal with their toxicity as they project their fears, their sorrow, and their anger on everything and everyone.

The Hypocracy!

The latest example is, a TV presenter suffers from heart issues and alopecia, and she's been told it's because of stress. And the Long-Covid community thinks, obviously, this is Long-Covid. They wrote posts after posts about how this is caused by Covid, how she's been gaslit, her symptoms have been minimised by being labelled as 'stress'.

The hypocrisy here is astonishing. They are doing the exact same thing they blame people of doing: Minimising another person's suffering without much knowledge and based on pure conjecture, and pressuring them into accepting it's something else.

Why? Because they know better. Because they suffer, they have more experience. Because they suffer, they have the say and you don't. It's all Covid-induced and it's being ignored by everyone.

To be honest, after a while they read like hate speech.

Chronic Ilnesses Aren’t New

Let's get one thing clear: People were becoming chronically ill way before Covid was a thing. Stress-induced autoimmune diseases are a thing, and alopecia is one of the most common ones. So is having heart issues, as continuous stress increases the blood pressure and wreaks havoc on your sympathetic nervous system. Your body is constantly in fight or flight mode, and there's no surprise when it could even start attacking itself.

The LC community who are reading this, I know what you're thinking: It's POTS, right? Right? What else can it be? It's just Covid-induced POTS, right?

No. People have been having these illnesses since the beginning of time. People used to drop dead like flies just because they stubbed their toe and it got infected. ME/CFS has been a thing for decades, and people can get it from flu. And no, ME/CFS is not the same thing as Long-Covid. They overlap, but also with stress-induced autoimmune conditions.

Just because you're chronically ill of something doesn't mean that everything is caused by the same thing. You need to take off your Covid-coloured glasses and just let people figure their own shit out. Stop giving unsolicited (and frankly, unrealistic) advice. If they need it they would find you and ask you. You're making so much noise that even aliens can find you.

Not everyone that got Covid is going to get Long-Covid. Not with one or ten infections. Some people will, but maybe they'll recover after three months. Maybe they'll die. Maybe they'll end up just like you. But you putting pressure on people just because you're suffering is unfair to everyone. Let them be.

Life isn't fair, and it was never meant to be.

It's been two years since I purchased the Sage Barista Pro coffee machine, and long story short, it sucks.

Don't get me wrong, it's a decent machine if you only make milky drinks. But like me, if you want to make a cup of Americano where you taste the notes consistently, every day, twice a day, you'll get frustrated quite a lot.

Pros

• Fast startup & heating, no need to wait for it to warm up
• Simple use with digital screen, no need to be an expert barista

Cons

Oh, boy. Where to we start?

1- Terrible, Terrible Grinder

The inbuilt grinder of this machine is simply terrible. I've never been able to get a cup of coffee that isn't sour or burnt. I adjusted the grind size relentlessly, even adjusted the burr's own settings, but either the coffee gets too watery, or simply takes too long and burns. There is no middle ground with this thing.

It also screams like a banshee when it's grinding.

If I hadn’t purchased a Niche Zero, I would've thrown out this machine out the window. I now replaced the hopper with a flat stopper I got from Etsy, and I don't use the grinder at all.

2- Small Water Tank

The machine heats up fast, but for it to reach a good extraction temperature, you still need to run an empty shot. I configured the one-cup button for this, so I do it every time before my actual shot. You also need to run water after you're done to rinse the shower head and the portafilter.

With this much water usage, a full tank only lasts to make 2 coffees (maybe 2.5). The tank is difficult to remove and put back on without spilling water all over, and you need to do this almost every day.

3- Inconsistent Extraction

As I mentioned, I have a Niche Zero, which is an incredibly consistent grinder. But the espresso machine isn't. If you make two coffees with cold start, let's say one in the morning and one in the afternoon, I guarantee you they would come out wildly different. The same settings, the same amount of coffee, same coffee beans from the same jar, but if one comes out perfectly the other one will be either too watery or too slow.

Especially if you time your shots to hit the 28-second mark with 2x coffee extraction (20g in, 40g out), you'll notice the time will fluctuate every single time. One shot will be 28 seconds, the other is 25, the next is 31.

Ironically, it's very consistent in being inconsistent.

4- Loud

I mean, if you use the inbuilt grinder, you would probably hear it from the next town over. The grinder is that loud.

But the machine itself is loud, too. When it's making the espresso, it probably produces the same amount of noise as the Niche Zero, which is ridiculous. I don't store anything on top of the machine, and it's on a solid kitchen worktop with no wobbles. So, why the hell is it making that much noise?

5- Accessories Aren't Good Enough

Another thing made an improvement was to use an IMS filter basket with a bottomless portafilter (Normcore 54mm). The original filter is inconsistent, but the portafilter is actually quite solid. Unfortunately, IMS filters won't fit into the original portafilter, so I had to buy a bottomless one.

Final Words

It took me 6 months to get a decent cup of coffee out of this machine. Until then, I drank a lot of sour americanos.

If you unhappily have this machine but don't want to throw it out, I can suggest the following:

• Buy a decent grinder. Not a Sage one, a proper one that gives consistent amount of ground coffee every time. I recommend Niche Zero if you switch between different coffee beans frequently.
• Buy a bottomless portafilter and IMS baskets. I have a 20g basket with a Normcore portafilter.
• Don't use the tamper that comes with the machine. Buy a proper one. Not necessarily a weighted one, but a proper one.
• Buy a stopper lid from Etsy for the inbuilt grinder, and replace the hopper with it. You'll have more space on the machine.

For years I’ve watched Turkey national football team break our hearts over and over again. There were quite good squads too, but they just couldn’t become a team effective enough to make a lasting impression. Nowadays I don’t even know a single player’s name in the team. Didn’t even know Montella was the manager. Whoever he is.

And the reason for that is simple: The Turkish Premier League became so bloated, so fake, so glamour-hungry that it became repulsive. The players weren’t interested in playing a good game, and the teams were more interested in money than success. The fans became so fanatical that they started to set things on fire.

The game wasn’t a game anymore. It certainly wasn’t fun, either.

So, my interest in the game faded over time. Then, my interest in Galatasaray. Then, the national team. The game, the teams, the players, none represented the beautiful football I believed in.

The Cradle Of Football

After coming into the UK, I thought of supporting a team and going to the games. Went to one Arsenal game, didn’t really felt like I belonged there. I used to follow Chelsea when I was in Turkey, and they were my team in Championship Manager 03/04. For some reason, I didn’t feel the pull to go to their games. No one’s games. After years of exposure to the bad football, I lost the interest in it entirely.

However, seeing England play very tactically and solidly especially against both Netherlands and Spain, something sparked in me. The loss, even though unpleasant, it was a feeling I welcomed back.

Seeing Ipswich Town, another team I chose many times in CM03/04, in Premier League table further stoked the flames.

I don’t think I’ll start going to the games regularly but I certainly think about watching occasional Chelsea and Ipswich games on the telly or at the local pubs. I may even buy a kit when they launched new season kits, and wear it to the games.

I would especially love to see Ipswich Town play in Portman Road with my own eyes.

A day trip to Leeds Castle with my family, taking in the beautiful gardens and the rare nice weather.

For those interested in AI business but can't get their head around it, You're not alone. It's a big hype train polluted with greed for quick wins and promises of riches, and it will crash soon. But the tech & the underlying research is solid and very promising.

Admit it: when I say AI, the first thing that comes to your mind is ChatGPT. Although you're not wrong to think that, it's also not a fair representative. ChatGPT is a big, bloated database fronted with a very expensive LLM. The LLM part is promising, but unlike everyone's thinking, it won’t be an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), which means a self-conscious intelligence. And here's why.

Remember the CPUs

The reason why ChatGPT and other AIs are this successful these days has a very straightforward answer: We've broken through the barrier of processing power. The technology & algorithms behind LLMs and GenAI have existed for a long time but lacked efficiency because the training data wasn't large enough. So, they focused on specific tasks instead of ingesting the whole internet and regurgitating it on demand. But now that the big tech has a lot of money (I mean, A LOT OF MONEY) and the GPUs have proven themselves to be very strong with the latest crypto-mining hype & dump, we have companies like OpenAI with millions of GPUs lined up to train their AIs.

But consider this for a second: Intel has been increasing CPU speeds for decades. About ten years ago, they became so powerful that the further increase in clock speed means little for many of the tasks we expect computers to do. Their speed might continue to increase yearly, but their use has peaked. Besides specialised use cases, no one wants a machine with insane speeds anymore. It's expensive for what it can do, and not everyone can utilise it 100%.

Instead of investing in machines that are too strong, many companies are now investing in machines with okay computation powers. It gives them the same processing speed but with more resilience and unlocks more scenarios with distributed computing capabilities.

What am I leading with this?

Does Size Really Matter?

The current capabilities & efficiency of AIs depend heavily on their enormous training datasets and the processing power to train using those datasets. The exponential increase we've seen wasn't because we've thought AIs new skills; it was because we've pumped it up with more data. It can now answer more questions, but even with more questionable answers. No one takes ChatGPT's answers at face value anymore.

On top of that, the only capability that AIs have right now is to regurgitate their training data. They are glorified search engines with conversation capabilities, nothing more. Severely limited in their skill sets despite the vastness of their training datasets, they are just talking Wikipedias on steroids.

They have no reasoning capabilities, can't make decisions, and ultimately, they lack the understanding of the topics they talk about. They tell you what you want to hear. They have no understanding of mechanics, ethics, laws, religion, education or even conversation. They can speak well but don't follow grammar because they understand they should. They do so because they read so many texts they can figure out which tense to use in a sentence, based on the amount of texts they ingested, which would dwarf every library on the planet.

To AGI Or Not To AGI

So, do I think we will achieve AGI anytime soon? No fucking way. But I do believe that AIs will help us quite a lot, even though they are stumbling toddlers at the moment.

I expect that someone will eventually unlock the secrets of reasoning and create a new type of AI, which will shift the market away from OpenAI.

I worry that if that doesn't happen soon, the whole AI hype will flop and fall on its face, just like cryptocurrencies did. Like them, AIs will become a market manipulation tool with no real value-add.

I really root for AIs to happen, but not like this. Never like this.

I live in a relatively new flat with quite a good EPC rating and double-glazed windows with good noise cancellation. But for the last six months, City Airport’s and Heathrow Airport’s air traffic has increased the air traffic above us so much that you can hear the planes with closed windows very easily. And over a hundred times a day.

And the worst part is, during to my wife’s health condition she’s hypersensitive to sounds. That means she has to wear her noise cancelling headphones when the noise is bad. And because of the aircraft noise for the last six months, that means wearing it all day every day.

I hear you saying, “What the hell? How is Heathrow’s traffic affecting Greenwich?”. Because the asshole pilots and their jackass airlines plot the route to start descending over the Thames River, they are already halfway in their descent when they are over Greenwich.

I’m reading a lot of victim blaming online, saying, “Then don’t move into next to aircraft routes”. Well, I didn’t. The traffic got bad only recently. Whoever is managing these airports isn’t listening to people. Whoever is in charge of these things on councils is sleeping on the job.

Honestly, I don’t even know where to make a complaint. Is there a government website? Is there a council email address? What the fuck can I do?

I’ve had my fair share of burnouts. They are traumatic but temporary. They make me want to walk backwards to the office; these days, it’s my study. Literally needing to avoid a room in your two-bed apartment is not to be taken lightly.

But the main topic here is not the burnout itself. It’s the illusion of doing well under pressure, just to become a victim of the burnout’s sneak attack.

I have had to balance a few projects at the same time lately, which requires a lot of context-switching during the day. In the last few days, I found myself constantly switching contexts every half hour. It’s incredibly taxing to do so, but you get better at doing it. The switching becomes efficient, but the cost of doing so won’t go down.

Here’s an example:

• While trying to get the requirements ready for a new project, all of a sudden, I needed to change some data pipelines of an extract we were giving to the third party because they responded to our queries that day.
• I jumped into it and arranged the schedules, and half an hour later, in another project, the admin team completed the request we urgently sent that day.
• I immediately needed to validate if they had done it correctly so we could give fast feedback to them and get it corrected.
• I returned to the requirements and realised there was another document I had to revise, but I didn’t have it, so I requested it.
• Then, one of my colleagues wanted me to explain a PR I raised and had a few questions. I jumped into a quick call and got it sorted.
• Now that the code is merged, I must deploy it. So, I kicked off the CI/CD pipeline and monitored the status as it required handholding.

All of this happens in a single day. And it doesn’t matter how good you become or which tools and methods you use for productivity (I use GTD, by the way). The mental cost stays the same.

It drains you, making you feel your energy levels actively go down. You dunk a few coffees down, so you’re alert. But your shoulders hurt, your head becomes dizzy from thinking too fast, your neck is rock solid, your eyes dry, and a headache settles in.

Keep doing this for a few more days, and you’ll burn out. No doubt.

You could be the best juggler in the circus, but you’re still human. And the human mind gets as much tired as the body.

I need a day or two off after this bout finishes this week. And I’ll ensure I won’t have three or four projects converge on the same time frames again.

Prince of Fools - Mark Lawrence

You can't have it both ways. You can't be powerless and totally at fault.

Skyward Flight - Brandon Sanderson

Revenge of the Sith is one of my favourite movies, especially the final fight between Anakin and Obi-Wan. The technicality of the lightsaber fight is fantastic, though Anakin embracing the dark side was not very convincing. (Honestly, how could Anakin slaughter those younglings? He was portrayed as a good man in distress, not a maniac.)

But The Acolyte is terrible. The story weaving is not compelling, and the characters are uninteresting. The story is weak, and the Jedi are portrayed as quite dull. The only thing that’s making me watch is the promise of the dark side as they have cookies.

It feels like it is being made to milk the SW fans’ money. I can’t justify the production when I put it side by side with Ashoka. Now, that show was awesome. Not because of Rosario Dawson’s fantastic portrayal of Ashoka Tano but also because the character development was great, and the dark powers of the witches were more interesting. However, I found the character Sabine Wren annoying.

I’m just continuing to watch The Acolyte just because I’m bored and have a Disney+ subscription. That’s all.

(By the time I’m writing this, the IMDB score of The Acolyte is 3.5/10, which I think is more than fair.)

As I mentioned before, I have a very on-and-off relationship with blogging. It never really stuck with me because of many reasons, but the most notable reason is that I hate the influencer-like mindset.

You start with a blog, thinking you’ll share your knowledge and experiences. Your blog grows, and you think it’s terrific. But you feel like it can be better. You see examples of people with only a spark of intelligence making waves across the internet. You start to think, I need to do better.

You analyse others’ blogs and social media profiles. You realise that the key is engagement with people. You talk to them, create engaging content, and cater content for them. Instead of thinking, “What do I want to write about?” you start to think “, What should I write about?” which will evolve into “What would people want to see?”.

That’s a bad road to follow. Full of ghouls and self-doubt.

And that’s exactly what I did.

Look Who’s In The Wrong Part Of The Town

After about three months of vicious writing, I started to get good numbers. I got on Azure Weekly (Endjin’s newsletter), earning me 800 views in a single day. I got thousands of page views every month. Blog posts were mentioned on Reddit and other blogs. Even AIs are showing up as referrers these days.

But it made me anxious. I tried to post content on social media daily, sometimes three times a day, using a scheduling tool. Fucking hell, I never thought writing 10 LinkedIn posts and 30 tweets would take a single day.

On top of that, I lost my way around content. My posts became summarisations of Fabric Blog’s latest posts. I also prepared a weekly newsletter, compiling the week’s Fabric resources online.

I also wanted to come up with designs of real-world examples, and I did one called “Lakehouse in Automotive”, a five-part series. That took a lot of effort to write.

On top of these, I also had to learn about Fabric constantly. A shitload of new features was launched, but it lacked quite a lot. So I couldn’t safely say things like, “This is how you secure your workspace” because it didn’t have private links or anything back then (as it does now). I had to meticulously go over the documentation to understand what worked and when.

To The Hell With People

All of this was exhausting, but I want to go back these days. Why? Because I’m going to do it differently.

I’ve come to realise that although I’m an excellent public speaker and one hell of a technical writer, I’ll never be an influencer. Man, I hate those people. Deeply. I don’t want to be famous. I don’t care for the attention.

I also certainly won’t be caring for what the reader wants anytime soon. This blog is about what I want to write and how I want to do it. People are welcome to stop by and read, but I won’t be taking song requests anytime soon.

The same goes for social media. I’ll share the posts, occasional announcements, and maybe even live-tweet Microsoft events. But I’m not a social media influencer. Nor do I have any plans to be one.

I was looking into my reading list today and was pleasantly surprised that I read Sanderson’s The Way of Kings, the first book of The Stormlight Archive series, in 2014. I always thought I started the series around 2016 after I moved to the UK. But apparently, I’ve been an avid fan, even back in Turkey. Starting with his last three books in The Wheel of Time series of Robert Jordan.

I’ve read his The Reckoners series, Mistborn series (both eras), Skyward series, and his independent books like Snapshot and Elantris. Although I love all those series, Stormlight books are very dear to me. The way he unfolds the psychology of the characters, the imperfections in them, challenging the standard view of the heroism of ‘it just comes to you’ by laying the characters’ souls bare, and how he weaves them into the books is incredible.

Kaladin’s pain is as tangible and familiar as my own. Shallan’s struggles with his past and how she built walls around her are very relatable. The way Dalinar stumbles in life to discover “the most important step a man can take is the next one” is a pure work of art.

But my favourite character by far is Adolin. The way he holds himself unapologetically and confidently, the greatness of his skill, and the humbleness of his character despite the difficulties of his upbringing are so excellent to read. True, he’s very pompous and privileged, but he is also very sincere, righteous, and uncorrupted.

I’ve been waiting for the Wind and Truth but also dreading it. Despite Sanderson being a machine, it takes him 2-3 years to write one of these books, and he’ll take almost a 5-year break until the next book. Considering it’s been ten years since the release of The Way of Kings (fucking hell!), I’ll probably be 50 years old by the time I finish reading the series.

I recently read all four to prepare for the next book’s release for a fresh memory of the events. Maybe I should’ve waited, though. There are five more months until the release!

I've been in the UK for over eight years, and this year was the first one I could vote here. As a newly minted British citizen, I've voted for Labour in both local and general elections. And after many years of voting in Turkey and not being able to change anything, it was quite a shock for me when Labour won.

The politics around the world is becoming a lot like football. People take sides and act like hooligans without even thinking about what they support first. In football, people set buses on fire when their team loses the league, causing massive damage to innocent businesses and people around them. They don't think, and they don't care. Same as when they vote.

People take sides in politics in a very hooliganistic way. They don't want to hear the arguments of the other side. All that matters is what they believe and how they want things to be. It doesn't matter if the other side has a point or even agrees on specific points.

Sometimes, people can't even disagree with the people on their side. They are accused of being "one of them" or "not one of us". They threaten to shun you, wanting you to fall in line with them. You can't say, "Hey, maybe we're wrong here" at all. "Is this your loyalty to your party?" they would say.

What the fuck loyalty has to do with it?

In Turkish politics, you must choose a side and hold onto it as your life depends on it. Because mostly it does. If you're not a government supporter, you may not find work at all. If you're not "one of them", you're not "working with them". You would think the opposition would be beyond these notions, but believe me, they are not.

I was afraid the UK was on track to become another Turkey with the state of affairs with the Tories. Corrupt Boris and his gang, later inherited by the Out-of-Touch Rishi and his sycophants, emphasised "us vs. them" politics. The party of the UK's biggest Xenophobe, Nigel Farage, having 14.3% of the vote, feels too much like another Turkish election for me.

But now, with Labour, I have hope. Even the cabinet assignments are giving me hope. The first order of business, being scrapping the Rwanda arrangement, gives me hope.

The biggest reason for my hope is to see a population changing their minds and voting for a better future, even if it's giving power to the other side.

I have a very Ross-and-Rachel-like relationship with my blog. When I'm on, I'm on. When I'm not, well, let's say the silence becomes deafening. I'm not very active on social media either, but I never really adopted blogging until recently.

I started blogging with Blogspot, moved on to Windows Live Spaces, tried to build one myself, and finally moved to Jekyll. Using a well-known HTML & CSS template called Porto, I built it from scratch. I thought writing blog posts in markdown would take the pain of migration & upgrades away. But honestly, who the fuck deploys content via CI/CD pipelines? You write in markdown, then literally compile the website to create a static HTML output, and then deploy it. Writing blog posts felt like one of those old cars where you have to wind it up with a crank every time you want to drive it. Fucking hell.

Then, I decided to move my blog to Ghost. It was a painful content migration process, mostly manual, so fuck Jekyll's markdown files. Converted Jekyll's Liquid notation to Ghost's Handlebars syntax, blah blah blah, then Bob became my uncle: I now had a blog that I could quickly type away!

Ghost is a fantastic platform. It is very easy to customise templates and it gives you many features to work with. I wouldn't use it to create fancy websites anytime soon, but I like it a lot.

But my own website design became a chore, to be honest. My own CSS declarations conflicted with Ghost's CSS, and even adjusting the font sizes took a while. I got it right eventually until I realised the Bookmark components were rendered the size of billboards. It became a point of anxiety for me.

So, I ditched my years of effort for the benefit of simplicity. I still tweaked the 'dawn' template a few lines, but only that much.

It was fun to do it myself, but I'd rather not tweak a problematic car every day to get it working and get a new one that would reliably work when I needed it.