I never heard of Gangrel magazine [1]. It had only 4 issues total, and this essay was in the last one. Editors J.B.Pick (age 24 at the time) and Charles Neil asked Orwell and other writers to explain why they write. Pick later became a writer himself.

All this to say that we might've not see this essay if not for those two young editors trying to get established writers' perspective on the craft.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangrel_(magazine)

The whole 'demon' thing in the essay reminded me how my mom likes to say: you should only write if you cannot not write.

[1] https://storage02.forbrukerradet.no/media/2026/02/breaking-f...

1. 2016 was years after Bitcoin was developed. So you could still make 200x returns without being early adopter.

2. Is this even true? I'd bet scraping experts or people who can fine tune LLMs have easier time finding a job than classical ML academics.

3. Candy Crash was released when iPhone was on its 5th iteration.

If anything, you just added to OPs points. Being an early adopter gives limited advantage.

> That’s not to say we don’t fix important bugs during regular work; we absolutely do. But fixits recognize that there should be a place for handling the “this is slightly annoying but never quite urgent enough” class of problems.

So in their case, fixit week is mostly about smaller bugs, quality of life improvements and developer experience.

> More coming soon. Or not. I don't owe you shit.

I can't find any info on the government app though. It might not work. But still, I can actually consider GrapheneOS now.

[1] https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...

And this is not even always possible. In Ukraine, government app is released as an app, not a web service. Same goes for banking app. You just can't do these things from other devices, you must have (mainstream) Android or Apple phone.

I've been looking into projects like GrapheneOS for a while now, but it is just impossible to use in Ukraine.

If anyone here is Microsoft employee living in Ukraine, I'd love to heat your take

There was a PISA report from 2022 though, that showed 19% of Danish 15-year-olds are below 'Level 2 reading'. But this bar is considerably higher than 'understand a simple text'.

> Some 81% of students in Denmark attained Level 2 or higher in reading (OECD average: 74%). At a minimum, these students can identify the main idea in a text of moderate length, find information based on explicit, though sometimes complex criteria, and can reflect on the purpose and form of texts when explicitly directed to do so. The share of 15-year-old students who attained minimum levels of proficiency in reading (Level 2 or higher) varied from 89% in Singapore to 8% in Cambodia.

So yeah, I doubt that claim. Journalism at its best, as always