• Had a very nice start of the day with my mum and Burup.
  • Then very nice lunch with [[KM]]!
  • Then idem conversation with [[TW]]
    • He told me to look up [[positional embeddings]] as they are key to understanding how attention works in practice

• Back home on my free day :) I took the day off to do something with my mum off-peak (meaning not in the weekend). We were going to go to the [[St Beatus Caves]] but due to the weather we changed plans as she wants to go to [[Ikea]] ([[KM]] called it the artificial cave and it’s very fitting!).
• I’m typing this on my new small [[RK61]] keyboard and I quite like it! It is a very limited layout as it’s only 61 keys, so maybe not ideal for some use cases, but definitely good enough for doing general purpose writing.
• [[KM]] :)
• [[burup forever]]

• I met [[KM]] this week and it was wonderful!
• The reference Agora at anagora.org is partly broken and the server it mostly depends on nowadays might be on the way out so further downtime could be expected, I’ll be noding about troubleshooting activities here and posting to https://social.coop/@flancian/114865307000829931. Please excuse any disruption!

2025-07-16

• [[Emacs]]:
  • Useful when searching: rgrep.
    • I have a bunch of files named the same, of regular meetings I have with the same person on different dates.
      • i.e. something like ‘Catchup with Shevek yyyy-mm-dd’, with corresponding file names catchup-with-shevek-2025-07-16.org.
    • I wanted to search for a specific term, but only from meetings with Shevek.
    • M-x rgrep, then search term when prompted, then catchup-with-shevek*.org for the file pattern when prompted.

• Mi mamá tose mucho mientras duerme :(
  • Espero que se le pase pronto!
  • En todo caso la pasamos muy bien en Calp! Me hizo muy bien.
• I am now writing in [[tara]], the "main" project computer as of now :)
  • I have just [[meditated]].
  • I am thankful for existence!
  • I am thinking of my commitment to try to work for the benefit of sentient beings.
• Also I am wondering why nvim in [[guanyin]] is sort of broken, extensions that work fine in [[paramita]] and [[tara]] don’t quite behave like I expect here. I suspect a [[chezmoi]] conflict, let’s see…
  • (These are the sidequests that make up so much of life… I try to enjoy them!)
  • I am tying this on my new keyboard, a [[Royal Kludge]] :)
    • It is the smallest keyboard I have typed on in very long, but I am happy to report it works! Maybe I wouldn’t use it for coding initially as some key combinations I use are relatively awkward to press (it involves extra modifiers), but it is very pleasant to type prose or [[Agora]] text in which I’m very happy about, and it seems to easily support three bluetooth connections. I am tying this on my new keyboard, a [[Royal Kludge]] :) I am tying this on my new keyboard, a [[Royal Kludge]] :)
      • (See, [[nvim]] is indenting for some reason when I start a new line while doing outlines… I’m rolling with it for now…)
        • (OK, I spoke too soon, it turns out that [[paramita]] is broken too! Editing wise. So it could be I have fixed nvim only in [[tara]] and forgot to push that change to [[chezmoi]]…)
  • Hmm
    • Yep, it’s fixed in Tara!
    • How nice to have a working vim based setup for the Agora again ;)
    • Now to figure out why it’s broken elsewhere \o/
    • Oh, I was missing bullets.vim in my init.lua! And tara somehow still had it, I think because removing plugins from init.lua doesn’t actually uninstall them (this is good to remember as it means that my nvim is not yet [[fully reproducible]] starting from init.lua).
    • Fixed then! :D

• Back here after a long while!
• I spent ten days with my mum in [[Calp]], [[Spain]] — I expected to write and code a lot, as I usually do (expect, not do, during holidays). In the end we mostly spent time in the sea or the pool, spoke, read and played [[Rummy]]. I have no regrets!
• As I write this, we are in the [[Alicante]] airport waiting for our flight. I am looking forward to being reunited with [[Lady Burup]]!

• Internet restored!
• Downtime made me go through a couple of books and half a dozen podcasts
  • Of note is The work of David Lynch
    • Belated listen given his passing in January
    • Makes me want to rewatch both old [[dune]] and [[twin peaks]]
  • Also this¹ passage from [[jay rubin]] in [[making sense of japanese]]
    • Regarding the active vs. passive voice in the Hiroshima monument inscription
    • Strange book when it comes to translation/language learning
      • The focus is on how to approach things that are difficult/impossible to translate

2025-07-05

• I was getting this error:
  • Before-save hook error: (wrong-type-argument org-roam-node nil)
  • Narrowed it down to when orgrr adds a #+zettel property to the file, it does it before all other properties, and org-roam doesn’t seem to like that.
• I like the look of Jeff Brown’s [[skg]] (Share Knowledge Graphs) project.
  • I haven’t clocked all the details, but a high level it has [[Agora]], [[FedWiki]] etc vibes.
  • Some discussion here.

2025-07-04

• [[Listened]]: [[Trip 49: Debt]].
  • [[Strike Debt]] campaign. [[Rolling Jubilee]].
• Private AI companies profiting off the back of public infrastructure and the commons with no return is not surprising.
  • Exploiting commonly owned resources for personal gain is what capitalists have done throughout history.
• [[Bookmarked]]:
  • Atmospheric Colonisation and Ecological Imperialism in the World System
  • Mark Carney caves to Trump and the tech industry
  • Tell the EU: Keep AI within Planetary Boundaries - Green Web Foundation
  • Protect Yourself From Meta’s Latest Attack on Privacy | Electronic Frontier Foundation
  • In Search of a Democratic Eco-Socialist Politics | SpringerLink
  • Why should the US decide who can have certain tech?
  • Alien | Typeset In The Future
  • A Sense of Rebellion
  • Excellent! Denmark Set to Replace Microsoft Office with Open Source Alternative
  • Wow! German State Ditches Microsoft for Open-Source Software

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]].