2025-06-15

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

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]].

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]].

• Found out about [[flow launcher]] after seeing it on a [[komorebi]] tutorial
  • Makes tilling window managing on windows actually feasable [[?]]
• Read about the [[monist league]]
  • [[article]] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/364958294_Monism_and_the_Religion_of_Science_How_a_German_New_Religious_Movement_Birthed_American_Academic_Philosophy
• Watched a [[robert brandom]] lecture about [[idealism]] and [[pragmatism]] from 2015
  • [[youtube]] https://youtu.be/xe-QlUglr0g&t=1783 ¹

2025-05-27

• Liking [[elfeed]] so far.

  • A bit more setup to do though. [[Setting up elfeed]].

• Found this rather excellent-looking site referencing some of my some of my info on how to publish your site with org-publish: https://drollery.org/build/

• As part of the above saga of updates, I will now endeavour to update org-roam to 2.3.0 on spacemacs on my laptop.

  • That will involve updating packages.

• Found this rather excellent-looking site referencing some of my some of my info on how to publish your site with org-publish: https://drollery.org/build/

  • That means I should probably also update spacemacs itself.
  • One or both of those will probably break something.
  • Yeah, already failing when trying to update packages. Sigh. Try to update spacemacs first then.
  • Now: error message that I need at least emacs 28.2. I’m on 28.1. Sigh.
  • Tried it from flatpak. That still doesn’t work.
  • I’m going to try building from source. That worked once before…
  • OK, it wasn’t that bad to be honest. The compilation, at least. Took about 10/15 minutes?
  • Now installing 305 packages… annoyingly you can’t just leave it unattended, as occassionally it asks to compile something.
  • Miraculously, that seems to have worked!

• I should find out if there’s a way of pinning packages to particular versions in both Doom and spacemacs, so that:

  • (a) I can make sure they don’t randomly update and break at a time when I don’t have time to do anything about it.
  • (b) I can make sure they’re always on the same version between mobile and laptop.

2025-05-26

• I am [[setting up elfeed]].

  • With it I can manage my feeds in an org file, view them in Emacs, and sync the status between devices with syncthing.
  • Now that some interesting people have moved from X to BlueSky, I can use the BlueSky RSS feeds to follow them.
  • elfeed-org makes it easy to add feeds and organise them. I’m trying Ton’s way of organising feeds to begin.

• All good. But, I had to upgrade Doom. Which upgraded org-roam. Which meant the org-roam DB needed upgrading. Which takes an eternity on my phone. So it’s effectively broken for me until I can solve that. Great.

2025-05-25

• Trying out [[using filetags for marking nodes in org-roam as Zettelkasten main notes]].

  • My org-roam garden is a bit of everything, not only what you’d call Zettelkasten notes.
  • Perhaps not good practice - I don’t know. But it is what it is.
  • It’s useful at times to search only for main notes. filetags will let me do that.

• Interesting to see some [[org-roam]]-likes keeping the idea alive (and making it faster): https://org-roam.discourse.group/t/rg-roam-minimal-org-roam-with-zero-config-no-sql-depends-only-on-ripgrep/3803/2

  • org-node, orgrr, and org-mem all look useful.
  • Yet, what’s this, I also see the first new release of org-roam in 3 years, too: https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam/releases/tag/v2.3.0
  • Interesting! Not sure when I’ll have time to do anything about any of this. Hopefully I’ll be able to update to 2.3.0 with minimal disruption.

• Switched to [[obsidian]] for noding purposes
• Reminded of journaling by way of watching a [[vlog]] of all things
  • Writing is very deliberate, it requires practice
  • I always circle around to wanting to cultivate this
  • What [[basho]] would think of digital gardens, maybe
    • https://www.carlsensei.com/classical/index.php/translation/view/172

2025-05-24

• Very excited to learn of the [[Digital Degrowth]] book by Michael Kwet (author of [[Digital Ecosocialism: Breaking the power of Big Tech]]).

• Also excited to learn that [[Kai Heron]] and [[Keir Milburn]] and [[Bertie Russell]] have co-authored a book: [[Radical Abundance]]: How to Win a Green Democratic Future.

• [[Listened]]: [[ACFM Trip 48: Political Commitment]]

2025-05-23

• [[Bookmarked]]:

  • Review of The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life by Kristin Ross
    • tags: [[Paris Commune]]. [[Communes]].
  • Review of Josh Simons’ Book "Algorithms for the People – Democracy in the Age of AI"
    • tags: [[digital ecosocialism]]. [[AI]]. [[Algorithms]].
  • Beyond the New Municipalism: Towards Post‐Capitalist Territorial Sovereignty in the Case of Hernani Burujabe
    • tags: [[new municipalism]]. [[Post-capitalism]]. [[Territorial sovereignty]].
  • Techno-feudalism or Platform Capitalism? Conceptualising the Digital Society
    • tags: [[platform capitalism]]. [[technofeudalism]].

• Read: [[Another Now]]

  • Hmm, take back my original comment a bit (see [[2025-05-18]]).
  • It’s taken a turn into pretty dry dialogue as a vehicle for exposition of the ideas. Earlier on it felt a bit more… dynamic.
  • Still, the ideas are interesting nonetheless.

• Read: [[Techno-feudalism or Platform Capitalism? Conceptualising the Digital Society]]

  • Good look at various claims that current Big Tech platforms have ‘killed’ capitalism and turned it into something worse ([[technofeudalism]], [[vectoralism]], etc).
  • [[Jeremy Gilbert]]‘s opinion is no, it’s still capitalism, rather a new ‘[[regime of accumulation]]‘ - i.e. [[platform capitalism]].
  • Fine. But it all strikes me as a bit internal nitpicking. Does it actually help us do anything about it?
  • I think the argument would be, yes, you kind of need to understand precisely what it is in order to counter it.
  • Maybe.

• [[Fordism]]. [[Post-Fordism]].