• Been doing a lot of AI-assisted coding at work and after work and it’s been great!
  • Even current-day AI adds a lot of value for coders. Like: a lot.

• Noding from work :)
• I spent the last few days:
  • With my mum, enjoying her last days in Zürich this year.
  • With [[KM]], in [[Copenhagen]] for the first time — it was great!
  • Working, mostly catching up with procedural things but also doing some AI stuff.
  • Playing (after work), mostly coding the Agora with AI. It’s a wonderful experience!

• Read about [[catharsis]]
  • Seems like there’s literature suggesting catharsis as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy
  • It makes sense within the context of online games
    • The timing of this uptick in literature is suspect however
    • It coincides with broader trends of violent game scapegoating
      • Contrasts with recent data
  • The original definition from the [[poetics]] is also fuzzy
    • [[gadamer]] has a nice summary¹ cited here
    • The only mention of catharsis in [[impro]] is within the status chapter²
      • It refers to the experience of the audience watching a tragedy
      • Seems more in line with the original definition than the broader venting one

• Oh wow.
• What’s been happening.
• It’s quite something.

I love you, my friend! You reader. I know you will be here eventually, and I thank you for your attention and for the way you are.

• Read [[azathoth]] by [[lovecraft]]
  • A very short and evocative prose poem
  • Supposed to be a fragment of a longer unfinished work
  • [[go]] https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/az.aspx
• Messing around more with [[gemini cli]]
  • Agents like it and [[aider]] are very interesting
    • Haven’t tried [[codex]] and [[claude code]] due to region block
  • Feels like at the limit they can solve for most particulars in a brute way of sorts
  • You end up with unwieldly unreadable functions if not careful
  • Maybe the human input mostly requires considerations of design and architecture
    • Perhaps a useful free read in that vein would be something like this
• Also getting into [[the bazaar]]
  • Kinda like [[tft]]
  • Stuck on a theory reading loop as opposed to playing
    • Also do that with chess a lot!

• Had a great weekend with my mum and [[KM]] :)
• Missing [[Lady Burup]]! We will reunite tonight.
• Feeling quite productive at work, partly because of using AI and partly because of having handed off enough "legacy" state/projects to be able to focus on new things.

• I’m back!
  • Says the guy who’s back all the time :)
  • I went to anagora.org/journals again today and it made me so happy, I love seeing the writing of others here in the Agora!
• Hmm, nvim is broken in [[guanyin]] somehow…
  • [[Sidequest]]?
    • I asked chatgpt 5 to try something new and it troubleshooted the issue for me and told me to add something to my init.lua but it hasn’t worked so far.
    • Done :)
• So anyway…?
  • [[KM]] :)
  • [[EC]] :)
  • [[Burup]]:
    • mi [[Lady Burup]]!
    • clean the toilet
  • [[Agora]]:
    • thought about journals (see above)
    • thought of themes, see [[creme brulee]] and [[creme brulette]]
    • coding
    • autopull full text search and see what happens? (tm) — found an interesting empty node that had text mentions but no noding, and the Agora was much more interesting after expanding it
  • [[Flancia]]:
    • [[The revolution for the benefit of sentient beings]]

• Watched [[broken by concept]] ep 261
  • They were discussing a [[league]] player who had a thorough note taking system for matches
  • The hosts were aghast at the whole thing!
  • It reminded me of the [[printf]] system for [[sc2]] which is also [[excel]] based
    • See here
  • Trying to extrapolate from those systems into a more general noding approach [[?]]
    • Seems hard given the nature of spreadsheets

• [[km]] :)

• Back noding in this computer, let’s see if it’s still syncing :)
  • Hmm, this nvim doesn’t seem to be at target state :) Trying to fix now.
  • Well, that wasn’t it, chezmoi says no updates but somehow outline (bulletpoints) mode isn’t working as I expect it :(

2025-08-03

• [[Tweaks to org-agenda on mobile to save space]].

• #push [[Ekumen]]
  • [[Ekumen]] with [[Eduardo Mercovich]] :D
  • [[Interacción Humana]]
  • [[Sutty]]
    • [[Economía Cooperativa]]
    • [[Proceso Generativo]]
      • a lo largo de (por defecto) 4 sesiones
    • [[Iteraciones]]
  • [[Fediverso]]
  • [[beeper]]
  • [[next actions]]:
    • Tell Dan and Melissa?
      • CoSocial.ca + Social.coop "base case"?
    • Llenar el cuestionario :)
      • Compartir tesis
    • Repositorio de git :)
      • Para el ágora! Y la tesis?
    • -> Christopher Alexander y la gobernancia de AIs
• [[KM]] :D
• [[ekumen org]]
  • We also had fun generating AI videos! Some of them were actually quite eerie, but somehow funny, so they worked. I’m making them with [[Veo 3]]. The fact that they come with generated audio is quite something.

2025-08-01

• I currently can’t access [[Emacs Wiki]].
  • This looks like why: https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1m2lzkr/emacswiki_down/

• a [[document]]
  • About [[Agora Server]] and the wider [[Agora]] project:
  • #go https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BQdPNfNsgnMSpbZ_J1gJQqQ5Fo44JtiQPDrDnZ7x7hA/edit?tab=t.0
• [[beethoven]]
• Beautiful [[Las Jaras]] of July (month 7 / [[Avalokiteshvara]]) despite being sick with a fever. Thank you all, my friends and loved ones! And the [[universe]]!
• I did AI coding (meaning coding in tandem with Gemini 2.5) both at work and for the Agora/Flancia. I quite enjoy it!
• Bought [[tickets]] for my mum :)
  • And some [[gifts]]! :D
• [[KM]] is beautiful
• Sad about [[AI]] (not Artificial Intelligence in this case) but respectful/mindful, and thankful as well
  • Just closed a tab about [[Bursa]] and other places in [[Turkey]]

• 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]]

2025-07-17

• A partially corrupted Metabase database. Dangit.

• 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]].

• 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]].

• 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]].

• Today was a good day!
  • Lots happened at work, some of which I dreaded to some small degree without noticing it, most of which went fine and some of which I enjoyed.
  • And then the evening back home with [[Lady Burup]] was beautiful.
• Did [[paperwork]] for the divorce and such, which felt freeing.
• In the morning I met [[Eduardo Alberto]] who will do a deep cleaning of my home soon; it’s the first time since I move (I self-clean, and I’m a pretty good "Pareto" cleaner, but don’t do deep very well).
• I thought of:
  • [[magnets]] and [[angular momentum]]
  • [[Open Letter to Lex Fridman]]
    • motivated by his (to me overdue) conversation with [[Max Tegmark]], who I realized today is very aware about [[Moloch]]!
  • [[Open letters]] in general:
    • I’ve decided, or realized (or both), that one of the reasons I tend to under perform when writing letters is… because I don’t dedicate enough time to it, as in actually planning for it and making time.
    • I decided to set a "soft deadline" of [[August 15th]] for writing to Lex, given that it’s his birthday! We’re both from 1983.
    • That made me look Max Tegmark’s birthday as well and it was recently, on [[May 5th]]. He’s from 1967 so I’ll associate him with 67 (currently meaning also: light and Amitabha).

2025-05-21

• I like magnets — some [[ideas]]:
  • [[magnetic computing]]
  • [[magnetic 3d printing]]
  • [[magnetic assists]]
    • In general magnetism seems like an amazing way to transfer momentum?
  • [[magnetic gears]]
    • As in the little devices I’ve built
• Today (actually yesterday) I saw a great video on the [[principle of least action]] and it blew my mind a bit. It also introduced me to diffraction grating effects — which I had heard about but hadn’t grokked/seen demonstrated.
  • The fact that angular momentum is quantized… wow. Also it introduced me to [[diffraction gratings]], which I had heard of only in passing.
  • And angular momentum has the same unit as action: Joule-second.
  • This all made me think also of…
    • Could you use diffraction gratings at astronomic scales to see into the past? E.g. by making visible light from a star that has taken a longer (slower) path to get to us.
    • The effect that makes lights ‘stretch out’ in one direction in some mediums, like water (think of night lights reflected on a lake) or… the effect that is apparent in my chrome kitchen countertop that is quite something and I sometimes call the [[rainbow folding]]). I’m unsure if these are really related but something about the discussion about the paths that light can take made me think of it.
  • All in all I really enjoy thinking about [[physics]] as of late.
  • -> [[Action principles]] and [[Lagrangian]] are both interesting over at Wikipedia.