2025-07-03

• [[Listened]]: [[Trip 49: Debt]].

  • Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger referenced favourably.

  • Debt is one of the key drivers of individualisation.

  • Anti-debt movements, cancellation of student debt, credit card debt.

  • [[#ACFM]] is consistently excellent.

2025-06-30

• [[Listened]]: [[Trip 49: Debt]].
  • To become an indebted person under advanced capitalism is to lose the ability to act collectively with others for democratic goals.
  • Student debt changed the logic of education from something communistic to something mercenary and transactional.

2025-06-29

• [[Listened]]: [[Trip 49: Debt]].
  • [[Debt: The First 5,000 Years]] by [[David Graeber]].
  • [[Everyday communism]]. Sociality.
  • Very little in everyday life operates like a market.
  • Even the internals of corporations don’t operate like markets.

• [[17]]
• [[53]]
• [[67]]
• [[2063]]
• [[7]]
• [[Höllgrotten]] today with my mum, it was lovely!
• I also cleaned the house, did some light project work, and enjoyed into the evening.

2025-06-28

• [[Listened]]: [[Trip 49: Debt]]

2025-06-25

• Trying to figure out why a pair of Bluetooth headphones was suddenly, randomly, no longer pairing correctly to a laptop running under [[Windows 11]], and I am genuinely surprised how bad the experience is.
  • Useless error messages. Multiple interfaces to the same operation, unclear why to use one over the other. Different visuals for different config dialogs. Arcane dialogs and squirrelled away options.
  • This for a device that was clearly built to work on Windows.
  • The trope that [[Linux]] has a bad user experience vs Windows does not seem accurate.

• Reading [[essays-on-suffering-focused-ethics]]
  • Views are presented as counterintuitive, but I’ve actually found them to be the opposite
    • Classical utilitarianism is a lot less intuitive!
  • Seems like there are parallels with [[buddhism]]
    • [[william macaskill]] et al. disregard some suffering-focused views as nihilistic
      • What of the attainment of [[nirodha]]?
      • How helpful is it to talk about [[repugnant conclusions]] in the first place?
        • [[slippery slope]]
• Also reading [[frédéric bastiat]]
  • Likely the inventor of the now ubiquitous popular economics journalism
  • [[broken window fallacy]] [[opportunity costs]]

2025-06-24

• Managed another run. Doing the couch to 5k.

• The weekend was chill and great!
  • Mostly spent time with my mum who is visiting and Lady Burup.
  • We went to the river on Sunday as it was very warm (with my mum, not Lady Burup). It was very beautiful.
• I am talking to someone very interesting and that makes my whole life a bit better as well.

2025-06-23

• Watched: [[The AI Crisis We’re Ignoring]]
  • Seems pretty well-researched. I like this guy’s videos in general - he’s an ecosocialist.

2025-06-22

• First jog with the buggy. Not an unqualified success, but good to have done it.

  • It’s really hard to steer in jogging mode. Like playing as Bowser after getting used to Toad.

• [[Bookmarked]]:

  • People vs. Big Tech
    • tags: [[Big Tech]].

• Happy!

2025-06-20

• [[Nobody asked the world if it wanted AI]].

• I’m enjoying using [[orgrr]] for adding [[Folgezettel]] ids to (main) notes.

  • For exactly the reasons outlined by [[Bob Doto]] in [[A System for Writing]] (i.e. [[Folgezettel makes you consider your new notes more carefully]]).
  • I wish I could use some of orgrr’s other features, but I think they are mostly predicated on the existence of file links rather than id links.

• [[org-node]] looks neat and an improvement over org-roam in many ways.

  • I haven’t tried it though, as the feature list described ‘separate note piles’ as a won’t fix.
  • Assuming ‘separate note piles’ means different knowledge bases for different purposes, which I guess it does, then I rely on separate note piles quite heavily.
  • But then - things like this: https://github.com/meedstrom/org-node/issues/92 and this https://github.com/meedstrom/org-mem/blob/cf3ae8a90d11381910530a7d7ef00883d6b20850/org-mem.el#L85 make it look possible?

2025-06-19

• [[AI companies broke the labour market]].
• [[AI companies should bear responsibility for the repercussions of their products]].

• And I’m back!
  • Says the person who keeps going away :)
  • But I come back happily.
• Some days I dedicate very few cycles to the [[Agora]]. Instead I tend to focus on: work, family, friends and thoughts.
  • That’s alright! Or more than alright actually.
• To the [[readers of the future]] I say:
  • Thank you for being here!
  • Please excuse any bumps in the ride :)

As I we pass mid-June I am:

• Thinking of the women in my life
• Enjoying the visit of my mum!
• Enjoying life in general.

I now intend to:

• Take out the remaining paper for recycling.
• Fix Agora bugs!
  • Marginalia -> Google as the marginalia.nu iframe has issues
  • Maybe a [[scroll to bottom]] button, keep it simple :)

2025-06-16

• I should read more about [[Permacomputing]].

• [[Bookmarked]]:

  • What we in the open world are messing up in trying to compete with big tech - Bert Hubert’s writings
    • tags: [[Libre software]]. [[Big Tech]].

2025-06-15

• [[Listened]]: [[ACFM 51: Heroes]]
  • Great as always.
  • Heroes. [[Heroism]].
  • The problems with [[Hero’s Journey]]. [[Jordan Petersen]].
  • Masculine and feminine heroism.
  • [[Che Guevara]] vs [[Subcomandante Marcos]] as heroes.
  • Cowards and traitors.

2025-06-14

2025-06-13

• I’ve been naughty and haven’t upgraded to a new major version of Linux Mint for a while.
  • I’m on 20.3. Support expired April 2025. Latest version is 22.
  • Apparently you can’t go directly between the 2.
  • You need to go 20.3 -> 21, 21 -> 21.3, 21.3 -> 22.
  • Yeesh. I can imagine this being quite a faff.
  • [[Upgrading Linux Mint 20.3 to 22]].

• I met [[P]] when I was in California, it was great!
  • We shook hands on friendship and I’ll mean that forever.
  • We might also not talk more any further and that is also OK. I am grateful for having met her.
  • I wish you the best! That goes for [[P]] and for you, reader:
    • May you be free!
    • May you be happy!
• I met [[Teodora]] today through my great friend [[Pesho]], it was also great!
  • We walked home (we live in the same town) taking [[Covid]] precautions because I was to an outdoor party where the host tested positive.
• It was [[AG]]‘s birthday and I loved it!
  • It was great seeing her after the long trip.
  • And meeting her friends and family again!

• Watched A.I. is a Religious Cult
  • Reminded of [[timnit gebru]] and the TESCREAL argument
  • These are largely absent in places like China, another major player in AI
  • Techno-dystopian visions vs. pragmatic and regulatory ones [[?]]
    • HAL vs. MOSS
  • There was a comparison between the civilizing mission and the superintelligence race

2025-06-10

• What happens to Zettelkasten, digital gardens, etc, with the advent of generative AI and agentic AI?

  • https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1jmqukl/my_thoughts_on_ai_in_zettelkasten_lets_not_turn/
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1jhsdc0/zettelkasten_and_ai/
  • A-Mem: Agentic Memory for LLM Agents
  • Enhancing Knowledge Management: The Intersection of AI, Zettelkasten, and the…
  • AgenticMemory: Zettelkasten inspired agentic memory system | Hacker News
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/18qkrad/zettelkasten_with_potentially_support_from_ai/
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1ktxacc/has_ai_killed_the_zettelkasten/
  • Reflecting that for almost everything in my life (work, hobbies, my family) I have to consider "How will it be affected by AI?". Whether I want to or not.

2025-06-09

• I started using the Scatter command in org’s agenda.
  • Finding it oddly pleasing, more so than just bulk scheduling things to a few days from now.
  • "Reschedule randomly into the coming N days. N is prompted for. With a prefix argument (C-u B S), scatter only across weekdays." https://orgmode.org/manual/Agenda-Commands.html

2025-06-08

• Some interesting tidbits from a couple of interviews with [[Bob Doto]]:
  • Each main note, for Doto, he has max 4 other main notes it links out to.
  • He says you can have a zettelkasten of 300 main notes and you’ll have enough for writing and connections for 10/15 years.
  • People get stressed out over whether they’re doing it right. But the most important thing about a system is simply that it works for you for whatever you want it to do.
  • His rubric for creating zettels: do I want it to interact with other ideas, and am I possibly going to write about it.

2025-06-07

• Enjoying the slow pace of my hand-curated RSS subscriptions.

  • Following [[Ton’s way of organising feeds]].
  • Once I get to the end (of a very short list), I get to articles I’ve saved for later.
  • I rarely get drawn in to any doom scrolling.
  • [[Participate in social media on your own terms]].

• Reading [[A System for Writing]], and learning about [[orgrr]], has gotten me to try [[Folgezettel]].

  • [[Folgezettel makes you consider your new notes more carefully]].

• I’m currently experimenting with [[running org-roam and orgrr side-by-side]].

2025-06-06

• [[Capture ideas you disagree with]].

  • Says Bob Doto in [[A System for Writing]].

• [[Listened]]: [[Is AI about to steal your job?]]

  • [[Agentic AI]] and the Anthropic guy with his [[white collar bloodbath]] prediction.

• [[Watched]]: [[Andor]].

• Worked on [[voidmacs]]
  • Critical support for LaTeX
  • Found the hilarious package syntactic-sugar.el
• Thinking about the recent travel restriction

2025-06-05

• The upcoming [[Silicon Empires: The Fight for the Future of AI]] from [[Nick Srnicek]] is going to be a banger I’m sure.

2025-06-03

• [[Capitalism produces high degrees of inequality]].

• Started using org-transclusion at work for making a status page of all the various projects I’m working on.

  • Very nifty so far.
  • Couple of bugs encountered, one pretty wild, but not a total showstopper.

2025-06-02

• [[Capitalism produces high degrees of inequality]].

2025-06-01

• Read: [[The Case for Digital Degrowth]]

• The #revolution started today!
  • Like every day :)
  • I think [[ActivityPub]] is actually rather important; the Agora should publish (before it does anything else) nodes
    • (as users? or too confusing? hmm)
  • We will do the revolution together, my [[friend]], if you want to.
• The 31st of any month is [[Las Jaras]]!
  • (In the [[Flancia Pattern language]] and the associated calendar..)

2025-05-31

• [[Capitalism creates and shapes desires]].

• [[Capitalism tends towards the commodification of everything]].

• Jammed: Pretty in Plums by Shida Shahabi

2025-05-30

• Read: [[Repairing Our Way out of Commodity Fetishism]]

  • [[The desire for new things is essential to the continuation of the capitalist system]].
  • [[Commodity fetishism disconnects us from where objects come from]].
  • [[Repair reconnects us to the materiality of objects]].
  • [[When we repair something, we think about its history and provenance]].
  • [[Repair undercuts commodity fetishism]].
  • [[Repair is anti-capitalist praxis]].

• Bookmarked:

  • Fixing as Repair – Fixing Futures
    • tags: [[Repair]].

• [[compost.party]] is fun.

  • A website running on solar power on an old phone.

2025-05-29

• [[Bookmarked]]:
  • Repairing Our Way out of Commodity Fetishism
    • h/t: [[Panda]].
    • tags: [[Repair]]. [[Marxism]]. [[Commodity fetishism]].
  • Global data empires: Analysing artificial intelligence data annotation in China and the USA
    • tags: [[AI]].
  • Our Mutual Friend: The BBC in the Digital Age | Briefing | Common Wealth
  • The Home Office’s new "ChatGPT-style" LLM tool is riddled with mistakes that could mean life or death for people seeking asylum - Foxglove
    • tags: [[AI]]. [[LLM]]s.
  • Why capitalism is fundamentally undemocratic
    • tags: [[Capitalism]]. [[Democracy]].
  • OpenAI explores platform to rival X, following $40B funding round
    • tags: [[Platform capitalism]].
    • See the point from Nick Srnicek about platforms all converging towards each other…
  • International Civil Society’s Tech Stack is in Extreme Danger
    • tags: [[Big Tech]]. [[Reclaim the stacks]].
  • Criminal Court: Microsoft’s email block a wake-up call for digital sovereignty
    • tags: [[Microsoft]]. [[Digital sovereignty]].
  • Negatechnology | POST GROWTH TOOLKIT
    • h/t [[Panda]].
  • We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard….
    • tags: [[AI]].
  • Livin’ on repair: The workshops, garages and cafes of Berlin’s thriving DIY s…
    • tags: [[Repair]]. [[Berlin]].
  • Apple launches Self Service Repair for iPad, expands repair programs - Apple
    • tags: [[Apple]]. [[Repair]].

• [[fellowship of the link]] [[2025-05-28]]
  • [[jerry michalski]]
    • [[family systems]]
    • theory: this is internalized.
    • parts try to help but are trapped in old patterns.
    • must be approached with curiosity and benevolence
  • https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0874778956/jerrymichalskisr
    • "You are a natural explorer, adventurer and builder of new worlds. You love travel and experiencing other parts of the country and other cultures. You are a natural visionary. Instinctively, you can see what needs to be re-built or designed in new ways whether it be environments, ideas, projects or people. You have a natural ability to renew and regenerate yourself and others. People will see you as highly creative, practical and productive, innovative and original, and passionately involved in what has heart and meaning for you."
    • "At different times in your life you will be very ecologically minded and deeply concerned about the Earth and very active in making the universe a better place in which to live. You may experience yourself questioning the origins of the universe as a whole or contributing towards theories, projects and services that assist universal understanding. National and international work will appeal to you, or travel that allows you and others to value cultural differences as well as honor inherent similarities found within the human species."
    • "You will find it difficult to be limited, restricted or restrained in any way. With your inherent ability to cut through things and get to the bottom of most situations, you are able to build new worlds internally and externally. The concept of freedom at different times in your life will be very important."
    • [[substack]]

2025-05-28

• In the latest episode of ‘Neil tries to update something related to Emacs’ (see [[2025-05-27]]):

  • I thought that I might be able to process org-roam.db on my laptop, as that is faster, and then sync it to my phone.
  • Two problems: firstly, it doesn’t work. Not sure why but it must be checking something else other than version to check whether it needs processing. Secondly: the DB contains links to file locations, which are different between devices. So, ultimately a no go anyway.
  • Ho hum. I’ll need to think of a way of doing a full update of org-roam.db on my phone somehow without it taking an eternity / bombing out.
  • At least I have an updated Emacs on my laptop!

• Later: I fixed it by moving the files out of the org-roam dir for the project, then moving them back in and processing then in batches of 1000 at a time.

  • Still took ages, but didn’t crash and I just let each batch run while getting on with something else.
  • I also learned that the slowness is probably down to me having the files on the shared storage rather than on termux’s home. See e.g. https://github.com/termux/termux-app/issues/2174

• Going to start moving some repos from Github and Gitlab to [[Codeberg]].

• [[Four in five Britons want the government to do more to support repair]].