I was almost sued
Was about to launch a project I had been working on for three years. It featured machine learning to analyze books of fiction and produced neat graphs to show exactly what the book contained, it also tagged it with zero user interaction. Worked with several rights holders who loved it and how quickly they could use it to tag their books.
Right before launching I was hit with a legal threat that claimed I used a publisher's books to train my LLM. My algorithm wasn't an LLM, I told them this, they ignored it. I told them I didn't train anything on their books, users just submitted them to have them analyzed, they ignored that too. In a way I don't blame them. With the industrial grade copyright infringement performed on a daily basis by openai, microsoft, google, meta, et alles I'm sure a lot of rightsholders have developed a scorched earth approach to AI. But it's so fucked that they would use lawfare with zero evidence of their claims, and there can be zero evidence because they were just flat out wrong.
Still, I couldn't afford the legal fees so that project is officially on hold until AI is determined to not violate copyright. And it will be, there's too much money at stake for it to not be. Bloody sucks that I was caught up in this, if I had just launched a year earlier or a few years later it would have been smooth sailing.
I quit almost everything
22 year zolpidem (ambien) habit. Most of which was 5-15mg per night.
22 year earplugs at night habit. Had accepted that I'd get ear infections every 3 months or so.
31 year nicotine habit. Teens were two packs of smokes a day (as in around 22mg), up to 120mg with snus and 200mg with vaping.
34 year coffee habit. Sort of. I still allow myself a cup some mornings, I'll also grab one if we're at a cafe. But the 8-10 mugs a day is no more. Green tea is ok though.
34 year nasal decongestant spray habit.
We're broke
In the 23 years Becka and I have been together I've never allowed us to get below a 50.000kr (€5000) financial buffer. There's always, without exception, been that much in our account and it doesn't include other savings (of course). We blew our entire savings and financial buffer to help someone close to us. This also included the money saved for marketing my next business venture. Great.
Always sort of shrugged when people talked about living paycheck to paycheck. But man did that hit me in the face full force. I've never felt this exposed before. Months of shit sleep, didn't exactly help I quit ambien right before this too.
Healed a fissure by water fasting
The amount of shit advice out there about this is staggering. Following doctors' advice I suffered for two months of it getting progressively worse to the point where surgery was on the table. "More fiber, you're not eating enough fiber." But fiber bulks up the stool, which caused the fissure to tear open every single time I went to the toilet.
Eventually I ignored them and went with what is the most obvious answer; if you have a wound, do you intentionally bulk up your stool and then rub it forcefully into the wound or do you attempt to rub little to no feces in the wound? Yeah, I opted for option number two, did one week of liquid diet, 6 days of water fasting and then another week of liquid diet.
Directly after the water fast I felt it had healed but I believe that second week of a liquid diet was necessary to prevent a re-tear. I'm going to make a quite detailed post about this.. adventure.. fairly soon in 2025 because I believe it can help a lot of people.
We've decided to move to a hotel
It feels fairly amusing to say that as we're at our lowest point financially. Ever. But truth be told the cost of living at a hotel isn't that different from renting these days. Becka and I have decided that we want to live centrally in whatever city we decide upon. Buying an apartment in central anything in Sweden is laughable, you need tens of millions in many cases. Renting is out of the question since the apartments either have 20 year long queues or are dolled out to politicians, their children or friends of them.
Renting a good apartment in a nice area that is vaguely close to a city center will run you around 12.000kr. If you add on water, heating, electricity, insurance, internet, etc etc you arrive at around 15.000kr-18.000kr. Renting a hotel room is 22.000kr a month. Now, yes, for that price you will get a 2 room apartment but the hotel room with inevitably be a single room and likely a smaller one at that.
But the mental relief of not having to worry about any of that nonsense, chuckling as you get a new room if a water pipe breaks, whistling as you get a new room if your neighbors turn out to be psychopaths, laughing outright as you terminate your stay and move to another hotel if the city decides to do bloody landscaping for six months right outside. This is how we want to live right now, and for the foreseeable future.
Expect many posts on this, but it will likely take us most of 2025 to just recover financially before we can move. That said we've pretty much cleaned out the entire apartment. In the four room apartment we now have a bed, a kitchen table and four chairs, a desk for our laptops and a 2 seat sofa. Nothing else. Not a single piece of furniture more. All of this can be tossed in a container in less than two hours. We're actively working on fitting our lives into one large carry suitcase, one backpack and a shoulder bag each. Exciting times ahead.
I've come to loathe possessions
No, this isn't about being a hipster minimalist. It's about realizing that possessions tie you down. They bind you to a specific spot in space, which in turn binds you to a specific spot in time. You can never really move forward because you keep getting pulled back to where you were. You never move on, you just get older.
I consider this my midlife crisis, but I also refer to it as my awakening. I've moved a lot in my life. My parents moved me seven times before I was ten. I moved four times on my own before I met Becka, and we've moved four times together. I'm no stranger to moving. But these last three places have felt worse and worse.
You're chained to where you live. Maybe because you need a place close to where you work. Maybe because you might not get anything better if you try. Maybe because you've just gotten used to it. You're comfortable. Is it perfect? No, but you're ok with it. So what are you meant to do to fill the days? Why you fill them with "stuff" of course. You buy more stuff to put your stuff in. Heck, you might even rent other places to put your excess stuff in, because who knows? You might need that stuff again.
Now that I'm finished channeling my inner Carlin I can wrap it up with the fact that I feel nothing but revulsion at "stuff" these days. I'm actively working to minimize my life, and it's not to be a minimalist. I don't find beauty in it. I'm not going to blog about it. There's nothing spiritual about it. I just want to be free of the chains.
2025
I've got high hopes. In general I doubt it could be any worse than 2024 even if I actively attempted to make it so. But hey, life has surprised me many times before so let's hold on to our butts. When I write this post on 2026-01-01 I might be doing so from a hotel room in a hot country as a cool breeze wafts across us. Ah, let a boy dream, won't you?
I'm really going to try to update both this blog and my youtube channel. There will be no "series" of posts on either. I'll do one offs that I think might be helpful, informative or entertaining for people. No grand projects. No massive timesinks. Just.. me, in small slices. I should have done it that way to begin with.
Thank you for reading all the way down here, assuming anyone ever does.