Martijn van Exel - Reading Log
Articles, Blogs, Essays, Videos
I read (and watch) quite a bit, this is a selection of things that I think are worth sharing.
- 2025-06-03 Rampant AI Cheating Is Ruining Education Alarmingly Fast (2025). “Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought”
- 2025-06-05 Web technology optimism hour - macwright.com (2022). Observations on positive trends in the web development software landscape.
- 2025-06-07 Why I Won't Use Next.js (2022). On why next.js may be a poor choice for your next web project.
- 2025-06-07 My ADHD founder toolbox – hypatia dot ca (2022). About learning to tackle ADHD while running a company.
- 2025-06-07 The Story of The Powersharing Series (YouTube video, 2019). Charles Mann telling the story of the Powersharing Series of lectures and talks by influential folks like Bill Atkinson, who passed away today.
- 2025-06-08 Vechten voor de vijand: Nederlandse soldaten in de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Dutch, 2019). About 25,000 young Dutch men voluntarily joined the Waffen-SS during WWII. Why?
- 2025-06-09 Fixing the AMIGA 1200 with a cheap meter! (YouTube video, 2025). Mend It Mark is one of my favorite people on YouTube and he's fixing a particularly beat up example of my favorite computer model, the Amiga 1200. What's not to like?
- 2025-06-10 I Think I’m Done Thinking About genAI For Now (2025). This piece is all over the place (as the author readily admits) but it does capture my feelings of exhaustion with the GenAI debate. I've not given up reading about it (yet), but I have given up using GenAI for anything. Not for ideological reasons, of which there are plenty, but because I genuinely want to learn things, in what you might now very well call the hard way.
- 2025-06-10 Why wordfreq will not be updated (2024). Generative AI has polluted the data. "OpenAI and Google can collect their own damn data, and I hope they have to pay a very high price for it. They made this mess themselves."
- 2025-06-12 A receipt printer cured my procrastination (2025). One of those "I tried everything in the book to become more productive and here's my definitive solution" pieces. I liked it because I actually do a lot of these techniques, such as starting with a few simple accomplishments every morning to get those early rewards from the "game loop". I don't believe in the physical manifestation of tasks on sticky notes or similar. The barrier to doing that every day would be too high; it would defeat the purpose. The Hacker News thread I picked this up from is a treasure trove of lived experiences and techniques, as these threads often are.