In the technology realm, companies and enthusiasts alike like to talk about ‘the future of computing’. Typically, the companies that make such claims have just recently invented a ‘the future’ and it can be yours for a very steep price. The enthusiasts who claim to have found ‘the future’ typically just parrot the talking points of their favourite company.

Late stage capitalism, and so forth.

What I want to talk about however, is how the ACTUAL future of technology is almost always a boring quality-of-life increment over existing solutions. Rarely, is it actually the visionary new project that was just announced as the future. And this is a good thing!

To make my case, let’s look at some historical examples.

Writing is something we have done for a very; very long time. And for the majority of the time that we have been writing, we have either scratched away layers of a substrate, or added pigmented layers to said substrate. When you look at things like this, fountain pens evolve from styluses, cartridge-style pens from fountain pens, ballpoints from cartridges, etcetera.

These advancements have been really valuable, and they make writing easier, more accessible, cheaper, less fussy, etcetera. All of them are also boring increments on a proven concept. The big writing revolution comes with typewriters[1].

Typewriters completely change the game when it comes to writing. Typing becomes a skill that many people need to acquire because -- even though there is a lot of effort involved – writing using a typewriter comes with various benefits over handwriting. Of course, it is not a straight upgrade, which is why we still see handwriting have a major function today.

Then, mechanical typewriters become digital typewriters, digital typewriters become interfaces for teletypes, which become keyboards, and ultimately touch-screen approximations of keyboards. None of these developments are visionary or revolutionary, they are minor adjustments on technologies that have proven to work, and when you look at the start and end, it can become hard to see the connection.

Now, it is not as if people have not tried to revolutionize writing since. People have always attempted to invent different writing systems, alphabets, and shorthands. Few of them caught on. When the gramophone became popular, diction was going to be the ‘the future’ of writing. To this day, companies tout voice-typing (or similar) as ‘the future’ of human-machine interaction[2]. There are gesture-based keyboards available, where a given key requires two dimensions of movement, rather than just one[3]. Perhaps the future is in the past, and typing will (de)evolve into handwriting recognition.

Some of these developments have been useful, none of them have been ‘the future’.

Let me make one more example before making my case: personal transportation.

It starts as walking, and then carts. Carts get pulled by animals, and then by engines. Then they get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Swimming to canoes, to row boats, to sail boats, to engine boats. The only truly revolutionary addition is the aeroplane, which has since followed the trend of the automobile and grown bigger and bigger.

What then – I ask – is ‘the future’ of personal transportation. Some have said it is the ‘people mover’ or moving-sidewalk. Instead of having boxes moving across a stationary road, the road will move. It did not catch on. Some say it is flying cars, or hovercraft. I am still waiting for functioning public transport.

Now of course, companies selling you digital experiences will say the future is to not move at all, why move when you can use our proprietary video-conferencing software which projects a true-to-life™ avatar of yourself into a true-to-life™ replica of your grandmother’s house, with a – wait for it – true-to-life™ AI copy of your deceased grandmother. That’s what you want right?

Let me bring it back to personal computing. Recently, Apple unveiled ‘the vision pro’, their latest ‘the future’ which shifts the old desktop-paradigm to ‘spacial computing’. As far as I have been able to gather, it was a commercial flop, and nearly no-one liked it. I have heard positive things from people who used it to turn their car into a full office, but most people I spoke to saw it as a dystopian attempt to get yet more of our lives tied to a given device and company.

According to Microsofts 2030 vision[2], ‘the future’ will be voice-interaction with an AI-operator – akin to the 2013 movie ‘her’ I imagine. The mouse and keyboard will be completely removed. This will allow humans to “connect more with others’’ and focus on “creativity’’. Many people have since noted that this is such an incredibly out-of-touch comment (one among many coming from Microsoft lately) especially coming from a company that has spent the past decade trying to migrate the control panel to the settings app, and failed. How exactly is taking away my agency and giving it to an AI going to make me more creative? How is talking to an AI – instead of clicking buttons – going to free-up my time for more human interactions?

Microsoft’s vision of windows? AI. Of writing? AI. Of passwords? AI. We will “have infinite compute from quantum’’ (whatever that means) and what will we do with this power? Why AI of course.

I wrote recently that I believe that the team at Fyde has the right idea about what the future of technology is. You can read the whole post here [4], but the long-and short of it is that they combine desktop applications, mobile apps, and web-based-applications all in one system that treats all as first-class citizens and makes for smooth interoperability[5]. The veteran input methods are all there: keyboard, mouse, stylus, and finger, and (once again), they are all treated as first-class[5].

This solution is boring. It does not do anything new – basically just combining existing technologies – and it doesn’t really look or sound sexy. When apple launched the Iphone – which, one must admit: was revolutionary – it didn’t do anything truly new. To combined a mobile phone, with a PDA, took blackberry’s full-size keyboard and put it on a touch screen, and called it a day.

So many companies aim for revolution these days. And not just in the personal computing space either. I have seen advertisements for ‘the next generation of sleeping technology’ (it’s a mattress), the latest kitchen doohickey which replaces a single function of your trusty kitchen-knife, and do not get me started on water bottles.

Stop aiming for revolution, start making your products better.

Apple already found ‘the future’ of computing in the Ipad, which many people use as their primary computer, only they refuse to treat is as a first-class citizen alongside the mac-line and allow it to run desktop-garde applications. Even allowing users to use a mouse took years.

Samsung is showing that one can combine the smartphone with a tablet in the form of the recent tri-fold, only the software holds it back. Making it a decent phone, a poor tablet, and an essentially unusable laptop.

We don’t need your crypto coin to revolutionize banking, we need banks to get their acts together, provide solid digital-interfaces, good customer support, and tangible benefits.

The ‘the future’ of movies and tv was to be streaming, until streaming became just as bad as cable.

None of these problems require actual innovation.

Someone will respond to this post by citing the age-old story that “Socrates though books were a fad’’, and I agree with the sentiment that we shouldn’t always discount innovations; revolutionary or otherwise. All I am saying is that so many companies announce a new ‘the future’ every month, and so few of them actually succeed (or actually have any chance of doing so).

Discounting anything that is not an incremental improvement or a combination of existing technologies that make sense together (NO to a tablet built into the fridge, YES to a gaming handheld that also runs a full desktop OS) has proven to be a safe rule-of-thumb.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

I have not used social media for many years. In fact, this blog is the primary way in which people can keep up with me without being in direct contact. The reason why I quit social media – all the way back in my teens – had to do with its addicting nature. Though I rationally KNEW nothing on those platforms mattered, I still FELT inclined to share everything I did and watch the numbers go up. I decided that I didn’t want to be encouraged to chase that cheap high at the expense of everything else, so I quit, and I did so early, before the platforms really had their hooks in me.

Recently though, I have noticed social-media-like qualities seeping into more and more products and services. I will cover in this post the most surprising one, and explain my decision to leave.

If it wasn’t clear yet by the title, I will be talking about “the news’’. Specifically, I mean updates on geopolitics, typically in the form of monotopic videos around 15-30 minutes. These can take the form of simple journalism, analysis, discussion, it doesn’t matter.

It might at first be difficult to see how these sorts of videos have social-media-like elements, so let me explain. Unlike traditional media – primarily tv news and newspapers – which do not have a way to directly comment (outside of sending a letter to the editor), new-media news does. Whether it is a video or article, whether it is on youtube, instagram, substack, or otherwise, it is possible for you to ‘engage’ with the topic. Secondly, the platforms mentioned above are all algorithmically driven to get you to give AS MUCH OF YOURSELF AS POSSIBLE to them.

Newspaper subscriptions can be predatory – with deals, bonuses, and scummy billing cycles designed to keep you locked in – but the editor ultimately doesn’t care how much time you spend reading that paper. For television news it is slightly different – as these tend to be ad-supported – but the ways tv networks have to collect engagement data (spy on you) and influence user behaviour are much less sophisticated compared to digital media. Besides, while a certain tv channel can be optimized to capture a certain audience, everyone still sees THE SAME CONTENT. In other words, there is no stream of videos specifically designed to keep YOU watching, just people LIKE YOU.

Now, thus far what I have said amounts to the classic “the medium IS the message’’ statement, which is definitely a PART of the problem, but not entirely so. Politicians, companies, and other parasites all know that social-media operates on engagement, and digial-media platforms such as youtube – whilst they have fewer strictly SOCIAL aspects – still thrive on audience engagement. And the easiest way to get engagement out of people is by hijacking our hormonal systems.

I mentioned in the introduction that social media was addicting to me because of the satisfaction of watching the numbers go up. I know that this is a general character trait of mine – and many people I know – and so do the social media companies, who have no qualms about using this weakness against us. Likewise, they learned a long time ago that anger and outrage is much better at getting people to engage than proper journalism is. As such, all the news we see these days – especially when presented on digital media – is deigned to be as emotionally destabilizing as possible.

Even when a particular platform or broadcaster DOESN’T feed on negative emotions and engagement, they still need to report on what is happening in the world. And the politicians and companies they are reporting on will definitely hijack your emotional systems for their own preposes.

Every. Single. Day. I listened to news about how Europe was at the brink of war with Russia, China with Taiwan, the USA with virtually everyone. I heard how Italy – the country in which I live – was on the verge to economic collapse, as is the US, Argentia, actually, perhaps it is the entire global economic system. Radical Muslims, Radical leftists, Radical neo-Nazi right-wingers are all on the rise apparently, and I should be SCARED. And damn it I was.

I truly felt like everting was going down the gutter globally.

And then I left.

I stopped following the news (in all of its forms) as an experiment over the winter holidays. And suddenly, everything seemed a lot more okay.

Not in the sense that the problems were all imagined, but in the sense that the limited set of problems which I was now aware of were now largely ones on which I had actual influence.

Sure perhaps Trump is still “destroying American democracy’’ (from what I have heard by word-of-mouth, he indeed is), but I never had any influence over those events. Nor – do I think – did it particularly help to be more prepared for the future.

Perhaps The EU will go to war with Russia, and when elections come by, referendums are held, or when voices are called for, I will make my stance clear, but until then, I will ignore the aggravating rumour mill and leave politics to the politicians. If war does break out, would I have been more prepared if I heard daily updates on the border skirmishes and ridiculous claims by everyone with access to a camera and an internet connection (very much including the politicians involved)? Perhaps slightly, but I will take that loss in exchange for my sanity.

I am still hoping to find a publication and a medium (I am thinking newspapers) that will let me stay informed without getting sucked in, but I have yet to find one that suits my needs.

Now that I have started looking, I noticed this social-media-like-suction in many other places as well.

Goodreads – the app that I used to keep track of what books I read and get book recommendations – had me chasing my pages-read number (and never actually gave me any good recommendations over 3 years); deleted.

Komoot – an app for hike/trail navigation – has a social-media feature where pictures you take, tips you write, and highlights you make can be seen by other people. If enough people like your stuff, you become an ‘expert’ and start to earn fake-internet-points on a fake-internet-leader board. Komoot is too-useful for me to just get rid of, but I can at least turn off all the social notifications.

Spotify has frankly always sucked, and I have been using it less and less over the past decade-or-so. Now they added AI and direct messaging, perhaps it is time...

Of course, nothing is completely avoidable, and I am no-way trying to hide from the news (or other social-media-like things) at all costs. However, the reduction has made me happier nad perhaps it can make you happier too.

This blog does not have a comment section, and your engagement will only cost me more in server-fees. Nevertheless, if you have thoughts you consider worth sharing, send them to blog@wester.digital.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

Around two months ago, I ordered a fyde tab duo, a self-described “hackable linux tablet’’ which I indented to replace my aging pinebook-pro and also take over as my main annotation (touch) device, a role currently held by an ipad mini. Generally, I believe that having fewer devices for a single purpose – in this case: several research devices – makes like easier, and unifying my annotation device and writing device with the fyde-tab was my attempt at doing so.

Full-disclosure: I have applied for a refund for the fyde tab duo. Simply put, the software and hardware were both too half-baked, and I ran into several issues – two of which made the device completely unusable – which lead me to ultimately send the device back. This post however intends to cover the lessons I have learned from my time with the device, because – despite its numerous problems – I believe that the fade-tab is a peek into a potential future for general computing.

Background

For those unaware, the fyde tab duo is a tablet-laptop two-in-one type of device. One might see it as a tablet with a keyboard and trackpad integrated in a detachable case, but I think this description does the device a disservice. An equally disservice able description would be to call it a laptop with touch functionality. I will get more into this later, but for now know that the fyde-tab is a true two-in-one.

The fyde-tab comes by default running fyde-os a chrome-os based operating system. This means that it primarily runs web-apps, android apps, and (with slightly worse integration) Linux applications.

The device comes with an active stylus, the aforementioned keyboard-case, and a kickstand. It sports a single USB-C port, a headphone jack, and a micro-SIM/micro-SD tray, though no LTE module is installed by default.

Lessons

One of the main things which I learned from this device concerns the future of general computing. Chrome os was originally intended to run web-apps exclusively. The sales-pitch was that “most users to everything in the browser anyways’’. This statement – I believe – is obviously wrong, and the fact that this design efficiently locked users into Google’s ecosystem did not go unnoticed by many users. Google quickly switched gears and now support both Android and Linux apps alongside the web-based applications.

This path – I believe – shows an important set of realisations on behalf of Google regarding computer software. First, many people do a lot of their work in a browser. As such, web-based-applications must be treated as first-class-citizens. Websites must be made installable for easy-access, offline-support, and faster load times. Second, Android apps have provide much to the other functionality which users rely on. Messaging apps, authenticators, music players. Android fills in where web-apps fall short. Thirdly, professional (desktop) software is still a must-have. Mobile-, and web-based- office suites are still more limited than their desktop counterparts. This goes even more so for image-, and video- editing.

The development makes a lot of sense when looking at it in this (chronologically accurate) order, however, I think it should also give us pause when starting from a desktop operating system. There is functionality which – like it or not (I don’t) -- is NOT AVAILABLE on desktop, but only on mobile. Primarily banking, messaging, and authentication. If the operating system cannot treat these as real-, and legitimate- applications and integrate them alongside ‘native’ applications, they I fear it will be left behind in the coming years. The same goes for web-applications.

The second point is related and became clear to me by using all three app-types side-by-side: input methods – namely touch -- should be treated as first-class citizens as well. Now, do not get me wrong, I do not think that all laptops should have touch-screens (far from it), however, I do believe that touch has some real benefits which must be recognized. I already mentioned pdf-annotation which is simply much faster using a stylus compared to either mouse, trackpad, or keyboard. I also noticed the benefits of the touchscreen in editing images with the lasso-select tool, not to mentioned handwriting and drawing. But even for normal computing tasks, it was simply faster and more precise to use the stylus compared to the trackpad (perhaps even faster than using a mouse).

That being said, app developers should also recognize that the keyboard is a valid mode of input as well (the amount of calculator apps I went through until I found one which accepted keyboard input was staggering).

On the whole though, just as with application types, I think hardware manufacturers should look at ways to incorporate SEVERAL METHODS OF INPUT for the varying types of applications people use on a daily basis.

The fyde-tab showed a potential future in this direction. The default ‘fyde os’ automatically switched between ‘tablet mode’ and ‘laptop mode’ depending on whether the physical keyboard was attached or not. Essentially, this switched all windows from floating (like on a typical desktop) to tiling (full screen or side-by-side), and changed the navigation to one based on gestures. What this showed mostly is really how little difference there is between the paradigms these days. In fact, I frequently manually switched to tablet mode with the keyboard attached and vice-versa depending on the work I was doing at the time.

There has been a persistent dream among hackers and general users to unify all computing into a single device. Having a phone which slides into a case to become a tablet or which plugs into a display and keyboard to become a desktop. More recently, this has outed itself in the dime-a-dozen “can you use an iPad as a pc’’ videos and articles. Each time however, it is the software which falls short: Ipads do not support enough professional software (believe me I have tried), because apple treats them like big iPhones (though you also cannot use one as a phone because they restrict the modem to mobile-internet only). Android has much the same problem. But a phone running something like Fydeos? That might just do it.

Of course, I should mention that the fyde-os integration between these three-systems and two-form-factors is still half-baked. Linux apps take a lot longer to start up compared to websites or android apps. Each platform has its own separate filesystem, adding friction to sharing data between them. The on-screen keyboard does not work for Linux apps and many of them don’t respond well to touch input (they treat it like a mouse). Android apps meanwhile often ignore the keyboard input, and sometimes get confused about the device’s orientation (the wide-screen orientation seems to be read as ‘portrait’ while the up-right oration is ‘landscape’ which is exactly opposite of how the camera reports making the image always show up on its side), but nevertheless, the framework is there.

Perhaps one day I will look at the linux-phone approach. People working on these projects tackle this dream from the opposite direction, turning the phone into a simple touch-screen computer and optimizing the software for touch, standby, and cellular connections. These devices can be simply plugged into a monitor and keyboard (or a hypothetical tablet enclosure), but they are currently still poor phones.

Generally, I believe in the ‘Unix philosophy’ of “do one thing and do it well’’. And this dream might be seen as the antithesis of that. I would counter that the Unix philosophy works well for software, but less-so for hardware. When each of these devices (laptop, tablet, and phone) costs up to (and over) 1000 euros, and when each of them has essentially the same internals (in the case of apple: literally the same internals), then it becomes simply a case of having different form-factors for different tasks. And honestly, I do not think we should – for reasons ranging from the economic to the environmental – encourage the ownership of several ENTIRETY SEPARATE devices only because the software ran on each is limited to a niche so that the companies that make them can sell you more stuff.

Conclusion

As I mentioned in the introduction, I ended up applying for a refund for the fyde tab. I took a weekend to patch up my pinebook back into a usable state and will probably keep using it for a couple of years. But when the time comes where it truly breathes its last breath (this is its third resurrection after all), it WILL be a GENERAL computing device, perhaps not the true all-in-one that I would like, but it should at least accommodate my needs by being versatile in the manner of interaction (touch, keyboard, mouse), operation (desk, lap, hand) and application (desktop, mobile, web).

In the mean time, I will keep an eye on the various projects (mainly coming from the Linux-mobile space) which could bring parts of this versatility to my – now 7 year old – patchwork of a pinebook.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

I recently read a post by Drew DeVault titled “Cloudflare bankrolls fascists’’[1]. “Quite a provocative title’’ I thought, though after reading it felt rather disappointed. It seemed to me that Drew was throwing around the term fascist rather lightly. This post will discuss my opinions on this matter.

So, let us have a look at the two accused fascists and the points Drew makes about them. Obviously, I will not claim to have detailed insights into the philosophical beliefs of the individuals under consideration – and thus will not claim that they are definitively NOT fascists – instead, I will look JUST at the points made by Drew in his post.

Drew’s post concerns Cloudflare sponsoring two open-source projects: Ladybird (a up-and-comming browser engine) and Omarchy (a customized Linux installation). Drew has the following to say:

Ladybird makes some sense, given that it’s aligned in principle with Cloudflare’s stated objective to “support the open web”, though I remain bearish that new web browser engines are even possible to make. Omarchy is a bizarre choice, though – do we really need another pre-customized Arch Linux distribution? And if we do, do we really need a big corporation like Cloudflare to bankroll it?

I completely agree with Drew on this point. There has been a lot of ‘hype’ around both Ladybrid and Omarchy lately, and while I understand excitement around the former, the latter not so much. Drew correctly points out that the sponsorship given to Omarchy might better be spent on the people actually writing the software, rather than the Omarchy developer who is just customizing said software. I think this investment decision (and yes I o believe it is an investment from Cloudflare’s perspective) makes sense as they try and buy-in on the hype, but yes from a "supporting the open web" ideological position, it makes little sense.

Drew then gets to his main point

Omarchy and Ladybird are both run by fascists.

Let’s look firstly at Omarchy, Drew has the following to say about is maintainer David Heinemeier Hansson:

• 1. Dog-whistling allegiance to Elon Musk
• 2. Racist views on Immigration
• 3. Fat-shaming & objections to diversity
• 4. Anti-feminist, homophobic & ‘rapey’ views on consent
• 5. Tone-policing anti-fascists

Now, all of these matters might be quite damming for an individual, but are they fascist? I will no the that guy who uses a dictionary-definition of fascism and then says “clearly this is different’’: words change over time. However, if we change the meaning of a word too-much too-quickly it loses its meaning and especially its shock-value.

Going over these points one-by-one – taking Drew’s analysis at-face-value – indicating allegiance to Musk can be seen as fascist, racist views on immigration CAN as well. Though fascism was not racist – in the sense we use the word today – from its onset, obviously Nazism (arguably the most famous form of fascism) was. Fat shaming and objecting to diverse representation COULD fit I suppose, certainly fascist ideology placed great emphasis on being as fit-as-possible for the purposes of the state, with physical fitness being an aspect of that. That goes in addition to the erasure of individuality (diversity) which was a core tenant of fascism from its conception. Weird views on consent... Honestly I do not see how these fit into fascism specifically, but I concur that these might be adjacent views which are often seen in company of each other. Lastly there is tone-policing. The only way I can make this fit is through censorship, but fascist censorship comes from the sate, not some random guy with opinions, actually: ESPECIALLY NOT some random guy with opinions.

So, at face-value Drew’s points succeed 3.5 to 5. Now let’s look at his references.

Musk

Allegiance to Elon Musk is signaled by using “Super Grok’’ a product of X-ai which is owned by X which is owned by Musk. I find this a BIT of a stretch, but overall I am okay with the argument. One could say that – by-extension – everyone using twitter is signaling allegiance, to Musk. I would argue that twitter became popular well-before Musk having some people stuck in its systems, and that there is very little reason to use Grok over other ai systems OTHER THAN political motivations. Now, this is an INDICATION at best, but Drew does call this a “dog whistle’’ (a form of signaling allegiance characterized by plausible deniability), so the point is acceptable.

Immigration

Related to Immigration, David argues that if his home-city of Copenhagen was made up of only ⅓ Danes, that it would feel like a non-Danish city. He then mentioned a bunch of disputed statistics concerning crime in Britain committed by foreigners. Now Drew calls this post ‘racist’, but I am not sure whether this label is accurate. David mostly mentions crime problems, and only mentions another race once. One could argue that ‘crime’ is a dog-whistle for racism, but this is not what Drew does (and I would find such an argument unconvincing). A more convincing argument would be pointing out that the Article which David linked[3] – which he heralds as predicting the ‘catastrophe’ that “Danes would be a minority in their own country by 2096’’ – indicates that immigrants AND THEIR CHILDREN would make up 71% of the Danish population by 2096. Now THIS seems to be a matter of race, since even second-or-third-generation descendants of migrants are apparently a problem ENTIRELY SEPARATE from crime.

Fat-shaming and diversity

When it comes to the fat-shaming, I have to be honest and say that I do not see the article linked by Drew[2] as fat-shaming directly. As far as I can tell, David’s point is that we should have idealized people in advertising because ideals are something to strive-for (not a ‘standard’ to be reached), that the advertisement in question adds nothing to the ‘representation’ of people in Copenhagen (where the it was located), and that advertisements like this are patronizing “however little you try, you’re perfect just the way you are’’.

Now, granted, David does compare the advertisement to the “loser culture of the 90’s’’ (paraphrase), indicating that being fat makes you a loser. And we might infer from the quote above that David believes that being overweight is a problem of effort (“however little you try’’), but I don’t think these can be classified as fat shaming per-se. As David doesn’t seem to want to use shame as a way for people to stop being fat, but the beliefs expressed CAN be classified as fascist (or perhaps fascist-adjacent).

Consent

On the matter of consent, I find Drew’s take the strangest. Anti-feminsist it may be – David laudes the idea of having children over personal freedom (though he doesn’t seem to want to force women back into the home) – homophobic MIGHT be included by extension (homosexual couples have a harder time having kids I suppose), but ‘rapey’? As I understand it, David argues that “consent is not enough’’. Just because two rational adults consent to a certain action does not make it morally good. And argues that the state should incentivize “the good life’’ which – in his option – induces settling down and having kids.

David’s main reason for promoting family life as the good life seems to be to keep the birth-rate above 2.1 for the sake of the country. Now THAT can be called fascist. In fact, many fascist regimes actively ‘encouraged’ women (with various degrees of force) to have more children. If anything, Drew should have gone after this.

Tone policing

“Tone policing anti fascists’’ is – quite frankly – the LEAST charitable interpretation of the blogpost Drew linked[4]. In this post, David expresses his disdain (using the words “Deeply, profoundly sickening’’) for people (the anti-fascists Drew mentions) celebrating the death-by-assassination of Charlie Kirk. NOWHERE in this post does David call on these ‘anti-fascists’ to be made to change their speech. Instead, he calls on “morally upstanding people’’ (paraphrase) to combat this “Deeply, profoundly sickening’’-speech with speech of a moral variety. Which is also exactly what he is doing.

Regardless of one’s opinion on celebrating death (which I might add is a popular fascist ideal), there is NO WAY this can be viewed as tone-policing, let alone fascism-associated censorship.

That leaves David at two-dog whistles, one case of Nietzsche-like strive for excellence, and one case of encouraging reproduction of ‘fit’ individuals for the sake of the state (which went unmentioned in Drew’s post). How does this a fascist make? Is a fascist simply a person you dislike who is to the right of you politically? Or is it actually a meaningful term for one of the most destructive-, dehumanizing-, and disgusting- belief-structures in recent history? You cannot have both.

Let’s move on to Andreas Kling from the Ladybird project. To him Drew attributes the following believes:

• 1. A dislike of gender-neutral terminology
• 2. A call to “carry on the quest’’ of another fascist
• 3. An objection to punching nazi’s
• 4. Managing open-source projects with a lacking code-of-conduct
• 5. “endorsing white replacement theory’’
• 6. Promoting (the aforementioned) David

Now, I really try to make a case for Drew’s argument. In the previous section, I believe I did a rather good job of it. But this? This is difficult.

Gendered terminology

So, as far as I am aware, gender-neutral terminology has exactly nothing to do with fascism. But one could argue that it indicates a belief that women, transgender individuals, or non-binary folks are inferior in some way, especially since Andreas prefers the use of male pronouns over neutral ones.

Supporting fascist quests

The “carrying on the quest’’ of another fasist refers – once again to Charlie Kirk. Specifically Kling says the following:

    I hope many more debate nerds carry on his quest to engage 
    young people with words, not fists. 
				

Now, I should note that fascism is one of the most violent ideologies in existence. In fact, it is one of a very select group which glorifies violence and ware for their own sake, while most ideologies are conflict-avoidant. Calling people to ‘debate’ and ‘engage’ without fists seems diametrically opposed to this idea. But one COULD argue that even debating fascist ideas is inherently fascist in itself. Wether or not Charlie Kirk was a fascist is not a discussion I have time for today, but I think that the general maxim of “saying anything good about any fascist makes you a fascist too’’ is an unsustainable one. Here in Italy is is a well-known joke by left-wing people that “at least Mussolini made the trains run on time’’ as a critique of the current fascist government.

Punching Nazi’s

When it comes to the objection to punching Nazi’s Kirk specifically points out that this seems to a care-Blanche to simply label anyone you disagree with as a Nazi and then perform acts of physical violence against them. One might argue that this is because Kirk is in fact a Nazi and does not want to be punched. However, I think a real Nazi would encourage this behaviour. It dilutes the terminology, might put anti-fascists in legal trouble, and makes the fascist position seem like the reasonable and non-violent one. Also did I mention fascism’s glorification-, and welcoming- of violence?

Code of Conduct

Managing open source projects with a lacking code of conduct. Well Drew is right about one thing, the COC sure is brief. In fact, I can include it here in its entirety[5]:

• Participants will be tolerant of opposing views.
• Participants must ensure that their language and actions are
• free of personal attacks and disparaging personal remarks.
• When interpreting the words and actions of others,
• participants should always assume good intentions.
• Behavior that can be reasonably considered harassment will not
• be tolerated.

I will be blunt here and say that I cannot find any steelman argument for how this might be fascist. Nothing in the COC itself seems to promote anything of the sort, and I don’t think a term as strong as ‘fascist’ is one which can be applied through omission.

White replacement theory

Endorsing “white replacement theory’’ comes in the form of arguing that “corporate diversity targets’’ discriminate against white men. I will give this to Drew. Doomsday talk of how the insert-race was being replaced was common practice for fascist regimes, usually to defame the other races and geta casus-belli against them. I would however also point out that truth is an absolute defence against a defamation claim, making this an argument about facts (and I tend to find such arguments entirely boring and – ultimately – pointless).

Being friendly with David

Lastly, there is Andrea’s proposition of David. Now, since we already discussed David, I will not go into the question of whether this point is valid, but I will make a more general point here. Namely that – by Drew’s playbook – you can take a single person, declare them (possibly for very good reasons) to be a fascist, and then declare anyone associated with them as well. Indeed, this was exactly what Drew did in point 1 for David, arguing that using Grok made one Musk-friendly and therefore fascist by association. Furthermore, you massively thin out the definition one you include fascism-by-association.

All-in-all I find the kind of thought-patterns visible in Drew’s post rather worrying. I would very much like for the term ‘fascist’ to mean something other than “guy i don’t like’’. If someone I respect (which includes Drew (most of the time)) makes a claim like “xyz is a fascist’’ I would like to react immediately with shock. This is – after-all – a serious accusation which must be taken seriously. As-it-stands however my initial reaction is one of scepticism: “Do you mean REALLY fascist or just kinda dumb and right-wing?’’

This is exactly the reason why we have different terms for acts like murder and manslaughter. One provokes an immediate-, visceral- reaction, one provokes a reaction dependent on circumstance. We distinguish rape from sexual assault with a similar effect (which is why it is especially silly when countries define a non-consensual french-kiss as rape: this is not what people react strongly to when one says ‘rape’). If we take fascist to sometimes mean “dumb and rightwing’’, then people’s reaction to the term will be calibrated to that definition.

To conclude, given my best-faith reading of Drew’s post, he is giving a very bad-faith reading of David and Andreas’ posts. My worst-faith reading of Drew’s post is that he is helping fascists hide by labeling as-many people as possible such. I won’t promote this bad-faith reading though, because I would like the term “fascist collaborator’’ to continue to mean something substantial.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

I have used Proton Mail (and related services) for many years now. I switched to it (and away from Google) at the end of highschool, and I have been generally happy with it over this period.

At the time, my needs were fairly simple: I wanted an email provider which had a good privacy record, which was free, and which was easy to use. Back then, I had no need for using email clients, so I didn’t feel limited by Proton’s restriction to official apps.

Over the years, Proton expanded to include many more services, most of which I adopted. As this happened however, I grew more and more frustrated with Proton’s development direction. For example, the mobile apps for Proton Mail have always been much more limited in comparison With the web-version. Most notably for me, the mobile apps cannot send plain-text emails, and you cannot toggle the attachment of your gpg-key. These limits (and others) went ignored for many years while Proton developed a passwords app, a crypto wallet, a 2FA authenticator, a VPN client, a file-storage-, and collaboration- drive, etcetera.

Furthermore, as my needs changed, I grew more and more frustrated with the inability for Proton services to be used with "standard" tools. The most notable offender is of course Proton mail; which does not allow for IMAP and SMTP connections, instead requiring an official app or a bridge application (which does not run on mobile). This is supposedly necessary for the zero-access encryption to work (more on this later). Proton drive is also problematic, giving neither webdav access nor working well with standard tools like rsync or rclone.

While Proton continued being a worse fit for me every year, I didn’t really see any viable alternatives other than self-hosting. Just over a month ago, I finally took that jump and switched over to my own email server (the same VPS hosts this blog now; both the web and gopher versions).

Selfhosting

Email

Email was rather complicated to set up, though there are many good guides available. My email is now set up with zero-access encryption while also allowing for regular IMAP and SMTP connections (which really made me wonder what the point of Proton’s "bridge" application was). This finally (for the first time since I got it in 2019) allowed me to login to my email on my phone.

Furthermore, while I always received comments on this blog at <blog@wester.digital>, I was never able to SEND from this address. Once the server was set up, it was trivial to make a new account for the "blog" user, now allowing me to send from that address.

Setting up my own email server also showed me the insane amount of trust one places on their email provider. The postmaster (or system administrator) is easily capable of intercepting or altering emails, changing your password, and may even be able to bypass encryption (if they even have it) by backing up your keys. If the provider does not use on-disk encryption, all your emails are readable by anyone with access to the server or its files. This includes the company, law-enforcement, and potential thieves.

Self-hosting your email still requires SOME degree of trust in one’s hosting provider, but at least I know that I have set up the encryption system properly, and that no one – not even someone with physical access to the disk – can read my emails without my password.

Calendar

Another non-standard Proton application is Proton Calendar. Sadly, not using standard protocols (calDAV in this case) is much more common in the calendar space compared to email, but hosting your own calendar allows you to bypass all of this. Much like with mail, this allowed me to finally log in to my calendar on my phone, meaning that I no-longer need to stand around notice boards at the university to see what room my lectures are in.

Furthermore, much like with the email, the calendar data is encrypted on-disk. Yet; no bridge needed!

Files

I installed NextCloud on my server which handles file storage (wait for it) using standard protocols (!) accessible from many many services. Now, I can mount the remove drive on my laptop as if it is a local folder, I can quickly send files over with rclone, I can log in from all my mobile devices because support for webDAV is much more wide-spread compared to proton-drive.

Conclusion

While setting up the email server was rather complicated, especially making sure everything is secure and up-to-spec for sending emails to external servers, I think it was definitely worth it. More generally, I think it is worth it for many people to rent their own server as it allows you to do SO MUCH with just a single (low) monthly payment.

My server now handles pretty much my entire could/online life, from my personal email/files, to this public-blog, to other simple services which I would like to have running at all times. For now, I still use Codeberg for hosting my programming projects, but perhaps I will migrate this in the future as well.

The feeling – honestly – is a lot like moving out of one’s parents’ house. Previously, I depended on services provided by others. Now, I have my own place (still rented), but one which I can arrange and use as I see fit.

If you have a comment – and want to try out the new email server – you can reach me at <blog@wester.digital>.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

Pedants can be found anywhere, and they take on a wide variety of subjects towards which they direct their pedantry. One such group which I have always found particularly frustrating are Dutch language pedants. Folks who insist on ‘correcting’ ‘mistakes’ made by other native speakers. While I have always found these types frustrating, I have never spoken out against them, as they are – by-and-large – well-educated and respectable people. Now that I have finished the first half of my masters in linguistics however, I feel both a right- and even stronger need- to refute some of the points made by these people.

Firstly, let me make clear who I am speaking about. I intentionally use the term ‘pedants’. I do this not in an attempt to demean or belittle this group of people, I do it simply out of a desire to be precise. Many of those who fall under this term might rather be called grammarians, linguists, language-lovers, or the like, but I contend that much of what they maintain actually has very little to do with language at all, let alone grammar.

To make this clear, let me give an example in English. I – personally – use the so-called “oxford comma’’ in my writing. This means that, when I am listing several options, I will separate them by commas INCLUDING a comma before the ‘and’ or ‘or’.

    We have apples, bananas, and strawberries on sale today 
				

Amateur linguists (by which I mean self-styled linguists with no formal education) sometimes mistakenly call this a grammatical mistake (or otherwise a grammatical choice). It is however not, at least not in the proper use of the term ‘grammar’. The oxford comma is a style-choice, a matter of convention and etiquette.

Indeed when speaking about grammar and language, linguists tend to – in most cases – ignore the written word. While there certainly is interesting research to be done about the written word, language is the organically arising SPOKEN WORD, which can in-turn me written down, formalized, and changed. This leads me nicely into my first point.

Spreektaal

‘Spreektaal’ is a Dutch term which literally translates to “spoken language’’. At the end of this section I hope to have convinced you that this is something of an oxymoron. After all, as I started before, language does not arise in its written form but rather originates in sounds and/or gestures. ‘Spreektaal’ is therefore just ‘taal’, just language.

This term is primarily used to distinguish phrases and words typical in spoken language from those which are acceptable in written/formal language. As such, this is a matter of etiquette, not of language (indeed much like the oxford comma). Some folk indeed use the term MERELY in this way, others however take the etiquette a step further and use it to talk down to those who use it. “Wat een verschikelijke spreektaal’’ (“What horrid spoken-language’’) they will say to their (invariably lower-educated) interlocutor “You can’t speak like that’’.

Let us recall the etymology of the word ‘etiquette’. Coming from the French, it means literally ‘label’ and was used to describe a set of rules to which only the nobility were privy. You can tell a serf from an aristocrat because the former will hold their fork in the right hand rather than the left, raise a cup of tea to their lips in a manner which is most comfortable to them rather than with their little finger raised, and they won’t cutesy with the right leg in front and extended. Such ‘labels’ were of course invented because – at the end of the day – there is no AUTHENTIC difference between the blue-bloods and the rest of us. Instead the difference must be simulated with clothing, etiquette, and language.

For indeed language was a part of this matter as well. The peasantry spoke English while the nobility spoke French. Yet another way of setting the elite apart from the unwashed masses.

Fast-forward to today and we find a perfectly capable Dutch speaker. They grew up in an environment where a certain term or phrase was common. They acquired this phrase and its accompanying grammar as we all do as infants. At some point, they will have formed a complete language (what Chomsky calls their I-language) and – lo-and-behold – they can use it to communicate with those around them, for they have an incredibly similar grammar and lexicon.

Then the pedant shows up to tell them that there exists this thing called “Algemeen beschaafd Nederlands’’ (general civilized Dutch) and that it does not allow for certain constructions this person has used their whole life. In fact, this use of language is WRONG because the grammarians in Holland laid out the law that is Dutch Grammar, and YOU DO NOT ADHERE TO IT.

Wilde / Wou

One such point is the past-tense of the Dutch verb ‘willen’ (“to want’’). There is a roughly 50/50 split between those who use the irregular ‘wou’ and the regular ‘wilde’. Whether a certain verb in one’s lexicon is marked as having irregular- or regular- conjugation is a matter of acquisition. If you grow up in an environment where the irregular is used, then that will be how you acquire it, that will be your language, and that will be correct.

According to the pedant however, the correct from is the regular, because so spoke the grammarians who – in all honestly -- are simply describing the grammar of THEIR individual languages/dialects.

“‘Daarom’ is geen woord’’

Okay, before I start I must admit that this is really only said by the most-amateur of self-styled-linguists. Certainly no self-respecting language enthusiast would ever claim something so ridiculous. The phrase above translates to “‘Therefore’ is not a word’’. Translating it into English immediately shows the ridiculousness of the statement, but let us first see the argument.

In Dutch the word for ‘why’ is ‘waarom’, which more literally translated to ‘where-for’. To answer in response to a why-question with ‘daarom’ (‘there-for’ or ‘because of that’), is simply an empty meaningless response, and since words must have a meaning, ‘daarom’ cannot be a word.

I won’t spend too much time on this matter and instead will simply point out the following: ‘Daarom’ DOES have a meaning, it is simply context dependent. We see the English are completely capable of using their equivalent ‘therefore’, likewise with the Italian ‘perche’, without devolving into meaningless gibberish. Secondly, words are added to dictionaries all the time even if their meaning is fluid or yet to be established concretely. The BBC aired a report recently on the addition of the word ‘skibbidi’ to the Cambride English dictionary. A spokesperson for the dictionary admitted that the term can be used in various ways: as a noun, adverb, or intensifier, to indicate approval or disdain, or simply as a joke.

Merriam Webster seems to take the route of the pedants and chooses to talk down to those who don’t speak the ‘proper’ English is conformity with the etiquette:

    Skibidi: A nonsense internet term 
    ~Merriam Webseter Online [1] 
				

Gender

Now onto everyone’s favourite topic: grammatical gender. At first glance, Dutch appears to have two genders: common and neutral with two corresponding determiners ‘de’ and ‘het’ respectively. Some grammarians and pedants like to insist that Dutch in fact has three genders, since this was the case in Old Dutch.

The difference between the male and female gender – they maintain – exists, though it is entirely opaque. One simply needs to learn the genders of all the words in the lexicon. This is – in my opinion – one of the most egregious example of Dutch language pedantry as it is still a rather widespread sentiment, even in schools. Let me be clear: If an aspect of spoken language (unrelated to etiquette or style) cannot be acquired during the natal process of language acquisition, then this aspect is NOT (or no-longer) an element of the language in question.

Yes, Dutch did at some point have three genders, and it was only proper to say “Let nature go HER way’’ and “The girl climbed out of HIS window’’ (technically this last one is due to a separate rule which I will leave aside for now), but this is no-longer the case. Children growing up in a Dutch speaking environment now make the distinction for the use of pronouns the animate/inanimate difference. Inanimate nouns in the common gender receive the same pronouns as neutral gender nouns, and animate nouns get pronouns based on the gender of the individual in question. No longer does one need to know that the cat ‘de kat’ is masculine and therefore refer to a female cat as ‘he’.

In all fairness, it seems that most dictionaries have started removing the masculine/feminine distinction in favour of listing these nouns as ‘common’ gender, so perhaps we are making progress on in this regard.

Hen/Hun

Staying on the topic of referring to other entities. Dutch (apparently) makes a distinction in the terms used to referring to a direct-object and an indirect-object of a sentence. For the former ‘Hun’ is used while for the latter ‘Hen’ is used[2].

... Or perhaps it is the other way around. This shows immediately the problem with this grammatical rule (for it is actually grammar this time): Native Dutch speakers have not acquired this rule for some time. The process behind this language-change is rather interesting and sadly outside of the scope of this post. But the point stands that native speakers do not have a ‘feel’ for this distinction, our I-languages do not allow for the distinction between direct- and indirect-objects. Much like it only allows for two registers of formality, while other languages allow for several. The Dutch of a century ago did include a feel for this difference, but this has gradually disappeared. Leaving us now in an awkward phase where some insist on the distinction which others simply cannot make.

All of that is to say: the next time you intend to correct someone’s use of language – be it in Dutch or otherwise – consider: Whether you are actually correcting language or rather style, Whether it is possible that your interlocutor acquired a slightly different dialect which is misaligned with yours, and lastly, whether the correction matters for the purpose of communication which is – after all – the aim of language.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

If you read the web-based version of this blog, you might have noticed that it has recently received a minor makeover. Instead of the previous formatting in plain-text, there is now ACTUAL formatting happening, paragraphs can be re-flowed to fit on smaller screens, lines are actually lines and not just a bunch of hyphens, there are actual headings which are picked up by screenreaders, etcetera.

If you read this blog on gopher, you should have noticed... absolutely nothing. This post is about that.

For those unfamiliar: Gopher is a protocol much like the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (http) which is used to serve this web-page to you. However, instead of transferring hypertext (HTML) which allows for formatting, re-flowing, and all the other nice things mentioned in the introduction, the gopher protocol transfers mostly plain text files.

When I started this blog up again, my main intention was to start writing as soon as possible. As I mentioned in the first post on this blog (The return of the blog), the program I wrote to generate the front page was incredibly simple. I did not want to spend time to make something complicated, I just wanted something that worked. At the same time, I wanted to support both gopher, web, and rss as targets. To achieve this (still: without putting in much time so that I could start writing as soon as possible). I just formatted plain text which gopher could sever directly and then added VERY minimal html tags to the web version which basically told the browser: don’t do anything with this text, just show it as it is.

This approach was great, and it served its purpose in allowing me to write. At the same time though, it was quite a bad reading experience on smaller devices, and it did not allow for as much creativity in styling as I liked.

As such, since I had some time this summer, I wrote a new indexer which (amongst other improvements) added html tags to the plain text files that I was (and still am) writing in. These tell the browser where the paragraphs are, what is a heading and what is normal text. It recognizes, quotations, code-snippets, horizontal lines. It coverts the backticks and single-quotes I write

    “like this’’ 
				

To properly curved left-double-quotes and right-double-quotes.

“Like this’’[1]

This post is to call out to other writers who target these platforms that writing content which is nice to read for both gopher AND the web is indeed possible. And it is possible even if you don’t use and off-the-shelf solution such as markdown. The important thing is that – whatever formatting you use – you have to be consistent with it.

I for example underlined headers in the text version with hyphens for main headings and equals-signs for sub headings. This made it incredibly trivial for a program to detect these lines and add the relevant html tags to them.

Likewise, I always indent code blocks with tabs, and quotation blocks with The greater-then symbol.

This allows for easy detection, processing, and subsequent styling

    Insert code snippet here 
				

All the while without affecting the formatting seen by gopher readers.

This consistency in formatting allowed me to code up a completely custom parser in just an afternoon.

That being said, I did have to make some minor adjustments to some old posts. A rather funny bug was that if I had a paragraph immediately following a horizontal line, the whole block would be counted as a line, and the paragraph would not show up on the web version. I decided to leave this in as a feature and just move all paragraphs away from the horizontal lines instead.

There were some other inconsistencies In my writing particularly when it came to lists. I decided (since it was much much easier to program this way) that all lists should henceforth be indented. This was a minor change since I don’t use lists overly much.

And that is all. I hope this might be useful to some other writers in the gopher space. If you want to check out the new indexer/parser, you can find it on my Codeberg page[2].

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

I read a lot, and I read a lot of different types of works. On a typical week I will read about one novel, one non-fiction -article, or -essay, and a handful of blog posts.

In the novel-section of my weekly digest, one may often find books in the ‘progression-fantasy’ genre. Books about characters getting progressively stronger, smarter, more powerful, etcetera. There is broad overlap between progression-fantasy and Xianxia cultivation fantasy, meaning that it involves elements of individualism, spirituality, religion, and so forth.

In the non-fiction-essay-section one can find various political, philosophical, or religious texts and manifests. This week, this included Mussolini’s[1] short essay “La dottrina del fascismo’’, which I – due to my still-lacking Italian knowledge -- read and English translation of: “The doctrine of Fascism’’. The Doctrine of Fascism, outlines – unsurprisingly – the core tenants of fascism as a political, social, economical, and spiritual doctrine. Also unsurprisingly, the essay is rather unclear in many parts. Fascism is of course not known for its rigorous philosophical basis, but I truly cannot overstate quite how poor some of the reasoning in the work is.

It happens surprisingly often that my non-fiction reading finds parallels, allegories, or examples in whatever fiction I am reading at the time. Though I must admit that I was rather surprised to find a great overlap between the tenants of fascism and the ideas expressed in many progression-fantasy novels.

A brief disclaimer before I start: while this blog post intends to point out similarities between the philosophies expressed in The Doctrine of Fascism and popular progression-fantasy novels, I do not intend for this to smear the genre or authors writing in it. There are plenty of works of fiction wherein any number of characters are adherents to awful systems of belief, or who commit terrible actions and this does not make them worse works, nor does this imply that the author adheres to-, or attempts to glorify- these actions or beliefs. Furthermore, the similarities are within fascisms ‘less’ problematic doctrines (anti-Semitism is luckily not a common occurrence in progression fantasy nor is it actually a part of Mussolini’s fascism).

Lastly, since I will be talking about various novels in this post, there will be some MINOR spoilers for The mother of learning, Defiance of the fall, and Cradle.

The doctrine of progression fantasy

Let’s start with some frequently recurring ideas in progression fantasy. Ultimately, in such works, the focus tends to be on self-actualisation and -cultivation. The protagonist is trying to become the most powerful-, smart-, developed-, version of themselves. The path to such power is paved by hard work. Certainly, there is often an element of luck involved, but the protagonists of these stories succeed because they are willing to put in the work to turn their fortunes around and to capitalize on the advantages they receive.

This hard work usually takes the form of struggling on the brink of death. Certainly this is not essential, but the greatest gains are always found millimeters away from the breaking point.

Cultivation (which is how I will refer to the development of these characters from now on) usually results in increased physical-, and mental-, fortitude, drastically lengthened lifespan, and higher social status. In most cases, society is set up in such a way that the powerful rule over the weak. “Might makes right’’, as many like to say, and if a country bumpkin manages to reach a higher level of cultivation compared to the emperor, then the emperor will bow down to them from that point forward.

Cultivation tends to require a lot of resources leading to conflicts over materials and opportunities. Those that succeed are the ones that seize whatever they can get their hands on. Deference, sharing, and charity have no place in these worlds.

In fact, charity is actively frowned upon. Since power is gained by struggle, when opportunities and materials are freely given, then recipients will not struggle for them and will thus be (perhaps permanently) handicapped. This leads to a strong individualistic mindset, though also to the forming of sects.

Large organisations can get their hands on materials more easily, and the presence of a high-cultivation individual keeps members more safe and provides them with resources (all in exchange for contribution to the sect of course; no charity). Since a single patriarch or matriarch can outlive generations of dependents at higher cultivation ranks, these sects often start out as families.

The doctrine of fascism

Having covered that, let me try to outline the core element of Mussolini’s fascism as I understand them.

First and foremost, fascism is conceived by Mussolini out of a disillusionment with the dominant philosophies from the early 20th century, namely socialism, liberalism, and scientific materialism. This disillusionment seemed to stem (as it often does) from a previous affiliation. During the first world war there was an apparent schism in the Italian liberalism of which Mussolini was a part. With one camp being in favour of the great war (which we now call the first world war) and one camp being against. Mussolini was in the former camp, which ended up being the less-popular – and therefore rejected – path.

When the war ended in 1919 Socialism, as a doctrine, was already dead; it continued to exist only as a grudge, especially in Italy where its only chance lay in inciting to reprisals against the men who had willed the war and who were to be made to pay for it.

Fascism, therefore, is anti-individualistic, pro-war, pro-state, and anti-well-being.

Let’s start with this first element: pro-war. Way, Mussolini argues is the ULTIMATE occupation of any state (and the state is all that matters as we will see shortly). War should not necessarily be waged for any particular purpose. Indeed, I don’t think Mussolini saw it as a very emotional excessive. War is waged for the purposes of strengthening oneself (id est: the state) through struggle.

The Fascist disdains an ‘easy’ life

The idea that any state, race, religion, etcetera is particularly better than any other – and therefore should rule over the others – is laughable to Mussolini. War is held for the purpose of struggle, and if any one state would subjugate all the others, then there would be no more struggle, which would be disastrous.

Secondly, there is the pro-state mindset. The state, Mussolini argues, is the only way for a person to fully express and develop their moral, spiritual, and physical selves. At the same time, the individual does not matter, in fact, they may completely cease to exist, being incorporated entirely in the state. This is to Mussolini the highest aim of life, in a rather spiritual sense:

which suppressing the instinct for life closed in a brief circle of pleasure, builds up a higher life, founded on duty, a life free from the limitations of time and space, in which the individual, by self-sacrifice, the renunciation of self-interest, by death itself, can achieve that purely spiritual existence in which his value as a man consists

The state therefore should manage everything, from religion, to economics, as the state is the only thing which exists. On this note, while this essay specifically suggests a roman catholic religion and a guild-based economy, these seem to be to be merely suggestions for the Italian fascist state in particular. Mussolini does not seem to hold any particular affinity for these (in fact, he actively despised catholic Christianity), nor does he necessarily think they are any good. However, a state should have a religion and an economy, the details don’t matter, all that matters is development through struggle.

Coming to the anti-well-being aspect, this is tied in closely with the anti-individual aspect.

the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State

The interests-, pleasure-, and even life- of the individual does not matter to the state. Just as any particular person does not care about the life of death of a single cell in their body.

the well-being and freedom of the individuals composing it does not seem to be in conformity with nature’s plans, which care only for the species and seem ready to sacrifice the individual.

The comparison

I think those are enough fascist quotations for one post, let’s move on to the comparison with progression fantasy.

To point out the obvious: growth through struggle is a core concept (perhaps THE core concept of both ideologies). And everything, from pleasure to well-being to life can be sacrificed before the altar of progress.

We see this in Defiance of the Fall, where The System (the mechanistic god of this universe) plans and sanctions entire wars between galaxies to strengthen the victor[2]. In Cradle, we see a society which has lived in peace and prosperity for generations and has grown weak and feeble because of it, with a literal child from the outside being able to best the entire valley if they wanted to. In The Mother of Learning, we see one character becoming an Archmage by putting in the work, using others, and having a complete disregard for their own life, while we watch another with greater opportunities and talents waste his potential by investing time in social bonds, romance, and fun.

The anti-individualism of fascism seems at first glance to not mix well with the individualistic mindset of cultivation, though I believe they actually align rather well. You see, individuals at the high-levels of cultivation are states unto themselves.

We see this for example in Defiance of the Fall where individuals who have reached the ‘monarch‘ stage of cultivation are entire worlds onto themselves, worlds which can house many other people. In Cradle, the sects formed by lords, monarchs, and sages often involve the (sometimes literal) sacrifice of lower tiered members for the cultivation of the benefit patriarch or matriarch, id est: the benefit of the sect.

Another interesting parallel is not as common across the genre, but I feel like it is still worth pointing out. In Defiance of the Fall, faith is a source of power which can be accumulated, and is actually one of the most powerful forces in the universe partially powering the system itself. Importantly however, faith does not need to be targeted towards an actual god. Instead, faith can be directed practically anywhere. No faith is particularly better or more true than any other. Instead, most major sects will have a faith directed towards their founder with rituals and practices designed solely for the purpose of accumulating faith power. This rings with Mussolini’s approach to Catholicism, where he didn’t particularly believe in the teachings of the Bible or pope, but DID believe in the earthly benefits of having a unified religion.

The heroes of both the progression-fantasy novel and the fascist mythos are the Nietzschian ubermenschen. Those who have shed the weaknesses of morality, charity, and non-zero-sum-thinking, to become truly noble. That is: brave, and strong, and demanding respect. In all cases: if you help others, you will only cripple them. If you truly want to help another state/person: declare them war, fight until you are on the brink of death, then go a little further.

Of course, In these novels, a common theme is that the protagonists gradually lose their humanity, and typically authors include interpersonal relationships to keep the characters grounded and relatable. At the same time, the attitude of that characters seems to be that you cannot argue with the results. They might look at the great-war and world-war in our universe and say: “well you all learned a lot didn’t you? Warfare was revolutionized, the atom was split, advances were made in medicine and science... And look at you now: Lazy, decadent, content and deeply miserable’’.

I don’t know what to make of this. In a restrained quantity, I think that the message that you can improve yourself by working hard is a good one. Obviously fascist ideology goes much much too far in this regard. Since progression fantasy is mostly written-, and read-, by young men – And since there are already plenty of fascist influences on young men these days – and can’t help but be slightly concerned. I would like to believe that other readers can – much like myself – recognize that these are works of fiction, that the ideologies and characters should not be idolized, and that our world is one where human life-, and well-being- matter. But I have been let down so many times before.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

I have recently switched away from GitHub as my codeforge to Codeberg which includes the hosting of this blog. In this brief post, I will cover my reasons for switching and briefly describe the process.

I have been using GitHub at least since 2016 (possibly earlier, I was using a different account at the time, so and cannot see exactly when I joined). Back then, I wanted to host some code I was working on, and GitHub was (and still is) the most popular choice for doing so. Since then however, many things have changed, notably the acquisition by Microsoft, the increasing social-media-lisation, and now: The AI [1].

Firstly, let me talk about the acquisition of GitHub by Microsoft. At the time – in 2018 – I didn’t care much about this change. I was still using Microsoft products occasionally for university, and I believe I still had a Google account at the time as well. Since then, I have increasingly switched away from big-tech, but GitHub’s Microsoft ownership was seemingly stored in a bit of a blind-spot in my brain, even though migrating away from it would have been much easier than many of the products I *did* switch away from (Such as Windows, Office, GDrive, GooglePlay, etcetera).

Then there is the fact that GitHub is increasingly becoming more of a social media platform. At first, many of these features were nice. Stars give you a good idea of how popular a project is, and following people can be a nice way to discover new projects. However, too many *behaviours* carried over from social media as well, such as follow-back and like-farming. Besides, at the end of the day, I do not want GitHub to be my social media, I want it to host my code and allow me to work with others. When I have to star a project before my PR will be considered,,, we have lost the path.

Lastly, there is the AI. Now, I do not refer just to AI in the sense which it has recently taken (ie: LLMs). Rather I mean both GitHub bots and the Copilot LLM. Popular GitHub bots such as stale-issue bots completely mess up issue threads. They encourage a behaviour where people periodically ‘bump’ an issue to keep it active. The aforementioned star-farming is made possible with a bot. Once again, these are *behaviours* which frustrate me, but they are *enabled* by GitHub’s features. It also doesn’t help that GitHub – as the most popular codeforge -- has the lowest-common-denominator of users. When GitHub recently introduced a LLM service which would write issues for you, I decided it was about time to leave. I can already see the future wherein this feature enables bad issue etiquette, and I don’t want to be here for it[2].

So I switched. I archived all my repositories which are not using GitHub actions, and migrated active repositories to my Codeberg account. I have used Codeberg for some time already to comment on projects that I used[3] and I really like the interface and featureset (I cannot say the same for GitLab or Sourcehut respectively). The migration process was mostly painless, with the biggest time-sink being the archiving on the GitHub-side.

I hope to stick around on Codeberg for a while, and perhaps to also keep it more professional than by GitHub portfolio (interests, standards, and personalities tend to change over the course of a decade). In fact, this transition has occurred at roughly the same time as my learning of the ‘go’ programming language which I will write about shortly and I hope to write some larger projects in which are not convenient to write in shell or python.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

I have not used a smartphone for about 5 years on-and-off (discounting of course the years as a child where I didn’t need to worry about silly things like this). It started in the summer of 2019 when by best friend gifted me his old Nokia 8110 4G (more on this later). Since then, I only had a smartphone for about a year. This device burnt through its charging circuitry a month or-so ago, so I am back to the dumb-life, though now with more insight into how to do things.

In this post, I will be sharing the insights I have accumulated over the years. Just as a warning, the advice provided in this post might come across as ultimately unsatisfying. While it is definitely possible to live off of the information-grid, that is not the type of life I can live currently. Therefore, a lot of my insights revolve around using alternative but highly similar solutions to having a smartphone. The main difference being that you don’t or can’t bring these devices around in your pocket.

With they being said, let me start by covering briefly the things which smartphones provide to us. Obviously, this list is not exhaustive, instead only covering those things which I personally find valuable and things which are outside of my control.

What do smartphones give us?

• 1. The valuable
• a. Photography
• b. Navigation
• c. Phone calls
• d. Music and podcasts
• e. Alarms
• 2. The enforced
• a. Multi-factor-authentication
• i. TOTP codes
• ii. Specific apps (primarily banking and government ID)
• b. Certain communication platforms
• i. Notably Whatsapp
• c. Bus/Plane/Train/Cinema Tickets/Identification

How do we replace these services?

Now we come to the interesting part: how do we replace all these services provided to us by smartphones. For this section, I will keep the same divide as listed above, as interesting patterns emerge when we do so.

The valuable

Generally, for items in the ‘valuable’ category, we have a two main options: specialized technology or feature phones.

Specialized technology speaks for itself. Get yourself a camera, map or GPS, dumb-phone, disc-or-walk-man or mp3 player, and an alarm clock. Obviously, this is a lot more to carry around which will force you to be more concious with what you bring with you. Furthermore – while I find this highly upsetting when it comes to the state of society – you can get all of these items (new or second-hand) for less than the price of a new smartphone.

The other option (and the one I have gone with) is the feature phone. Feature phones are a class of devices reminiscent of the dumb-phones of old though brought into the modern world. They typically allow you to connect to 4G networks, install apps, and use the internet. At the same time, they are typically very low-powered devices with traditional button-navigation. Some of them run Android (which allows you to install all your usual apps, though with the processing and navigation limitations mentioned), Android-go (Android with a reduced and simplified library of apps), or KaiOS (A operating system based on web technologies).

Each of these have their up-and-downsides. The android devices are by far the most capable, though in my opinion you might as well get an old second-hand smartphone at that point. Many of them even have touchscreens making them just overpriced smartphones with a built-in keyboard. The android-go devices seem more in line with what I would want, though they are typically not optimized for button-navigation and I have never actually used one. That brings us to KaiOS. KaiOS is the operating system which runs on the phone which I have used these past 5 years (the aforementioned nokia 8110) and exists at the nigh-perfect intersection of usable and limited. I should point out at this point that KaiOS is more-or-less a dead project, though that doesn’t mean that it is not still perfectly usable, nor that there are not still exciting (though small) developments made by the community.

My Nokia runs KaiOS. The camera is not very capable, but more than sufficient for capturing memories. It runs a stripped-down version of the google-maps website, sufficient for finding your way when lost using GPS and 4G. Obviously it is perfectly capable of phone calls and texts (even with two sim slots – revolutionary, I know –). The built in music player app is sufficient for my needs, though it does not allow you to make playlists (third party offerings in the KaiStore do offer this functionality) and there are plenty of podcast apps available.

In other words, my Nokia covers all the bases of what I find valuable in a phone. Problem solved right? Well actually, the ‘valuable’ list is the easy part. Now for the elements outside of my control.

The enforced

The enforced section of services is both more difficult and less satisfying. Let me just rip of the bandage right away by dealing with the least satisfying ones: Authentication, Identification, and Communication.

Many services in this area simply REQUIRE an app on either android or IOS. Banking applications, Government ID, Healthcare, and Whatsapp all require apps to some extent. Banks occasionally allow you request a dedicated code-device, though more the more-modern e-banks usually don’t offer such services. Governments and Health-insurance-providers (at least the ones which are relevant to me) require apps to authenticate to online environments. Lastly is Whatsapp, for those not from mainland-Europe it might seem strange that this app is in the ‘enforced’ section, but here governments, public institutions, customer-service-lines, and the public at-large all use whatsapp. And since these services have still not been forced to allow for interoperability with other services, I am stuck there for now.

Now to the (rather unsatisfying) solutions to these problems. Over the years I have found three options: 1. Run an android container on your laptop or PC 2. Get a tablet running android or IOS 3. Get a smartphone that you leave in a drawer somewhere at home In other words, you will be stuck with these services (and Android or IOS) either way, though at least these are not services you will need to have on you at all times. Whatsapp is perhaps an exception to this, though this depends on your lifestyle.

Whatsapp is furthermore an exception because it doesn’t provide an IpadOS app for some reason. Therefore, if you want to go with the tablet-route, you cannot use and Ipad. Furthermore, while Whatsapp does offer a web-version, you will still need to login from Android or IOS. Personally, I run an android-emulator on my laptop (waydroid) where I authenticate my whatsapp-web and hardly ever look at it again. Do keep in mind that you need to add contacts in your replacement device of choice as you cannot do this through Whatsapp-web. Other communication platforms like telegram are much better in this regard as they just have a standalone web-app, though for the reasons mentioned above, I cannot use these.

When it come to non-app-specific two-factor authentication, the story is a lot more encouraging. Firstly, the feature phones I mentioned before all have apps which allow for receiving TOTP codes. Furthermore, such apps also exist for mac, linux, and widows. Allowing you to simply authenticate with your laptop or pc instead. Of course, if you are already getting a tablet for the services above, then you can also use it to authenticate, though at that point you are committing to carrying around your tablet to most places where you might need to authenticate (such as university, work, or public institutions).

Lastly is tickets and identification. Once again, you can carry around a tablet whenever you need a ticket for something, though -- especially if you use public transport a lot like I do – this is not always feasible. Luckily, all services I have encountered thus far still allow you to print a physical card (for identification) or just print your ticket on paper (for entry tickets and such). This does not necessarily mean that you need to buy a printer though. Many libraries and universities will allow you to print for a small fee. Some countries (especially in southern Europe) also have many copy-shops spread throughout their cities. The only difficulty in using the later is somehow transferring your documents to the shop. This is usually done on-the-spot though email, which is obviously not accessible without a smartphone or similar device, though luckily many places also accept USB sticks, and you can always send your email ahead of time with an explanation that you will come by soon.

Final remarks

The copy-shop example also leads me to one final point, that being the ability to rely on friends and family for help. At the end of the day, many of ditch smartphones to feel more connected to others, and having a friend help you out with their printer or mobile-internet-connection at the copy-shop is one such way of connecting. The same goes for navigation. In a group, only one person needs to have a method of navigation on them. You can meet-up in-person instead of discussing things over text, or just inform your friends and family that they need to call you if they want to get a hold of you.

Obviously, this lifestyle (if you want to call it that) can be limiting, and it can feel especially discouraging when smartphones are forced upon you. I have written in the past about QR-codes and how their proliferation for restaurant menus, ordering, locker reservation, etcetera basically forces you into getting a smartphone (or a friend with one), and this can make be limiting. There is almost always a way around this though (talk with a waitress instead, see if someone around can get you a locker in exchange for cash, etcetera), though there is not one generalized solution (Yes, the nokia 8110 can scan QR codes and use the websites, but I will always try to find a different solution first.).

Ultimately, I have found not having a smartphone quite fun, and ultimately more liberating than limiting. If you have never tried it however, you don’t and can’t know what you are missing (and I can’t really describe it either other than a feeling of freedom). I would love to say “Everyone! Just give it a try’’, but there will be a large adjustment period and even a fair amount of money spent in some cases.

Therefore, my final point of advice is this: If you want to try living without a smartphone, don’t bring one the next time you go on holidays – provided you are traveling with someone who does have a smartphone. In this way, you will always have the safety of falling back on your partner’s device, while simultaneously forcing yourself to keep the experiment up until the end of your trip.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

A phenomenon I have seen going around the internet is so-called post-Christian vitalism [1]. PCR is based on Nietzschian moral philosophy, specifically the ‘master-mentality’ towards ethics. I believe this view is incredibly misguided, and will argue so from a Neoplatonist [2] perspective.

Let us begin by exploring Nietzsche’s master-morality and the specific interpretations of the post-christian vitalists. Nietzsche distinguishes between two types of morality, master-morality and slave-morality. Master morality – he asserts – is the classical form of morality, where virtuous and noble were interchangeable terms. Masters are courageous and follow their own agenda, like Odysseus. Slave-morality instead celebrates weakness by promoting ‘virtues’ such as humility and charity. Slave morality originated from... well slaves, and non-nobles generally to give themselves some access to the morality which the nobility had. Indeed, slave-moralists assert that their form of morality is the only one, and that the masters such as Odysseus are not virtuous at all.

Post-christian vitalises then claim [3] to embrace Nietzsche’s master morality, becoming Nietzsche an super-humans and driving froth progress in humanity. They asserts that all current-day slave moralists are simply still under the thumb of Christian propaganda, something which they have rid themselves of (hence the post-christian part of the name).

Now, I think that this approach is fundamentally misguided and indeed that it does not stand up to historical scrutiny. I might write about this some day, but today, I instead want to asses the PCV position from a Neoplatonic perspective. The reason this is of interest to me is because Plotinus and Porphyry assert that the sage indeed has no care for others. Neither does the One for that fact [5].

This certainly seems to lend credence to the post-christian vitalist, though, upon closer inspection, we will see that this is not the case. Neoplatonic ethics – much like nearly all ancient ethics – is built upon virtues. The four prime virtues are Courage, Wisdom, Prudence, and Justice. For a person starting out on their ethical journey, these virtues exist in the ordinary (civic) sense. As one processes however, these virtues take on a different character and become the intellectual (cathartic) virtues.

At the cathartic level, it is wise to “refrain from opining with the body’’, observing through intelligible means rather than sensory ones. This eliminates the blindness which sensory knowledge is inherently accompanied by. Cathartic courage is the soul being turned away from the concerns of the body, such as pain, fear, and discomfort, but also death. Prudence, is the presence of desires exclusively directed by psychic considerations, as opposed to bodily impulses. And finally Justice, still guarantees the cooperation of the virtues, in this case allowing the rule of reason and intellect without opposition [7].

As the practitioner turns away from concerns of the physical world, naturally they turn away from the suffering of others. They regard their body with a form of indifference, and do likewise for the bodies of others. Where the post-christian vitalist is mistaken though is the order of operations. They see that the noble sage has no regard for others (in the traditional sense) and takes this to be first step. They mistake an accident of the goal to be the means of achieving said goal.

Furthermore, while the sage has no regard for others, this dispassion is not the same as a complete lack of care. Indeed, the sage is said to give to others without taking away from himself [8]. Plotinus (by all accounts a Neoplatonic sage) is said to have taken care over the education of the young people in his community, whist also housing several widows and orphans. What the sage lacks is merely a passionate interest in the affairs of others, but he does not lack other directedness altogether[9].

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

For more information about making a moral impact, search for “giving what we can’’, “give well’’, or “effective altruism’’.

In applied ethics, I believe one of the fundamental questions to be that of helping others. Whether it is full-on charity, or just showing someone the way to the library, it is unquotable that these actions have a moral aspect.

A question arises however when it a person asks for help repeatedly. In particular, I see two common situations arise. First, there are those who abuse charity. People asking repeatedly for handouts to “get back on their feet’’ only to blow the assistance on matter non-conducive to bettering their situation. Second, are those people who become reliant on your help because they never learn to do things themselves. Instead of learning to read a map, they become reliant on asking you (or other helpful people) for directions. These two situations are distinct in that the former contains an intentionally malicious actor, whereas the second person might be seen as a victim from some perspectives.

Unfortunately for me[1] virtue ethics does not have as clear an answer for this problem as some other ethical systems do. Consequentialists for example, can simply say that not-helping is more conducive to the overall increase in good compared to helping. Deontologists – of the non-categorical variety – can say that the imperative to help others is contingent on said aid not being misused or making the recipient dependent[2].

I believe that the virtues of wisdom, courage, moderation, and prudence quite plainly inspire one to aid others when they are in need. Indeed, the virtues as a whole inspire us to give to others what we have and they do not. The virtuous way is to give in such a way that one is personally not diminished[3].

Despite the virtue in giving, it is also undeniable that virtuous people are responsible for the moral education of others. Enabling immoral behaviour, or otherwise limiting the growth of virtue in another person is not just, prudent, wise, or courageous. Rather, such behaviour is the result of either foolishness, pride, jealousy, insecurity, or other such vices.

How do we square this circle? How do we provide others with what they need, without diminishing their moral progress? I believe that answer of the virtue ethicist involves much more moral responsibility than the consequentialist-, and deontological- answers provided above. The answer boils down to this: As a virtuous person you are responsible for your fellow humans. For their material and spiritual needs, and for their moral growth. As such, when you provide aid to someone, your responsibility in ensuring their moral development grows proportionally to the aid provided.

Each time you give your cousin money “just to cover the rent this month, I’ll pay you back next month when I land that job-interview I swear’’, you become more responsible for ensuring that they take their life in the right direction. In other words, if someone abuses your charity, then this is your own moral failing. You only took half of the steps which virtue required of you and in doing so bred vice in another person. Specifically, you are lacking in justice, which keeps the virtues balanced.

Despite one’s increased moral responsibility after helping someone, this does not imply that one gains the right to take decisions for the recipient. Even more so, even though it is your responsibility to morally educate this person, that does not give you have any more right to take up their time to lecture or berate them.

What then should you do? The answer is simple when you think about it. You must give education simultaneously. Your aid must come in the form of a moral lesson. Not the type where you give someone money and a lecture on the dangers of indulgence at the same time, but rather of the type where you teach a hungry man to fish rather than feeding him directly. When someone asks your for directions, show them where to find the answer. When someone asks your opinion, show them your though process. When someone someone asks you for money, advise them on how to spend it.

After all, at the end of the day, virtuous actions breed virtue, and passing on what you know, do, and feel – as a virtuous person – will slowly build virtue in those you help.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

In the near future, I plan to make some posts about morality and ethics. This post will simultaneously serve as a FAQ page and declaration of affiliation. Here, I will write briefly what I think about the major branches of Philosophical ethics, and show where my personal affiliations lie.

This introduction should help you – the reader – in being a good starting point for the coming posts. At the same tine, it will help me, in that – when I cam critiquing, lets say, utilitarianism – I won’t need to state in great detail that I am a virtue ethicist and that this clouds my judgment of the theory being discussed.

Consequentialism

Consequentialist theories look at the consequences of actions. Typically, the analysis of consequences is used pick a course of action which maximizes the presence of a certain value or set of values at the end. Utilitarianism for example aims to maximize utility, hedonism maximises for pleasure, Marxism for cultivation, etcetera.

Consequentialists – in my option – fall into two camps: the practical and the useless. The practical have actual means of calculating the relevant values in a given set of circumstances. While these calculations usually leave something to be desired -- thereby opening up the theory to more repugnant conclusions than most – they are generally useful in their ability to asses the world and potential courses of action. The useless (or theoretical) consequentialist states that we can assess morality by looking at the relative presence certain specific values in consequences, but does not outline how to measure these values. They are, in this way, much like a virtue ethicist who does not explain what virtues are, or which virtues we should embody.

While consequentialists (of the practical type) are great at analysing situations, assessing moral progress, and identifying potentially high-impact courses of action, they are not NECESSARILY great at bringing about these states. A consequentialist world would undoubtedly be quite nice to live in, though it is not necessary that the people in that world are moral, nor that the society as a whole is exactly because the means and reason of the action do not matter, only the consequence.

Deontology

Deontological theories are theories of duty where the moral course of action is the one which is in accordance with a person’s (or group’s) obligations. There is much debate on whether these duties are circumstantial or categorical. If a duty such as “do not lie’’ is categorical, then it is immoral to lie, even if it would save someone’s life. If the duty is circumstantial, then we may lie in certain – well defined -- circumstances (such as when lying would save a life).

Deontologists thus only look at actions when assessing the morality of behaviour, not at the consequences. However, the duties themselves do supposedly bring forth good consequences, perhaps even maximally good ones.

While deontologists can easily assess why a certain course of action was wrong – even if that action lead to a favourable outcome – they can not say anything against a person who followed their duty but achieved nothing. Certainly, there might be a duty to “try at least *this* hard’’, but trying and accomplishing are only loosely related. Furthermore, while a deontological world would be full of moral actions, it would – in my option – not be full of moral agents, because the agents acts in total disregard of the consequences of their actions.

Virtue ethics

Theories of virtue asses the character of people, groups, or systems. They generally define a set of traits which are good people (groups, or systems) embody. Importantly, good people do not just poses these traits, as they also act them out, and do so entirely without effort, as if it is the most natural thing to do. Classic examples of virtues are: Courage, wisdom, moderation, justice, etcetera.

There are many reasons as to why I am personally a virtue ethicist, rather too many to concisely put in this post, but let me cover some of the ways in which virtue ethics meets the challenges of consequentialism and deontology.

Firstly – contra deontology – virtue ethics looks at people, rather than mere actions. This sidesteps the problem of deontology mentioned above, where deontological people do not necessarily seem to be moral people. At the same time, since virtuous people act out their virtues, the resulting actions are also virtuous.

Secondly – contra consequentialism – virtue ethics’ instance on instinctive action rings more true with my intuitions on morality than a consequentialist cost-benefit analysis. For example, when meeting a beggar on the street, the virtuous person – acting in generosity, humility, moderation, or justice -- will take action to help them. A consequentialist will need to analyse whether any aid would increase the overall amount of good, and whether their, effort, money, food, etcetera might be better spent elsewhere where it would do more good.

Now a consequentialist might argue that a generous society does not necessarily imply a society effective at eliminating poverty, or similar evils which can be combatted with charity. A consequents society – they would say – is more effective at this because they analyse where, how, how much, and when to give. I would counter however that, the virtues cannot be taken in isolation. A generous person is not a virtuous person, though a virtuous person is generous. A virtuous person is furthermore wise, patient, and prudent, and will thus also act in a way which is maximally beneficial, even when these benefits do not show up on a cost-benefit analysis. Indeed, the virtuous sage may even employ consequents theories in their procurement of wisdom so that they can henceforth take the best courses of action.

A deontologist might argue that, while virtues make for good people, they do not make for good societies. A society where everyone follows their duties is a good society, but a society where everyone is virtuous might not be. I would retort however that virtuous people build virtuous societies, and that these societies run smoothly even in absence of duties. A virtuous society provides for its citizens even if there is no duty to “feed the hungry’’ or “clothe the cold’’. Virtuous people will built this society and work within it exactly because there is a unification of disposition, action, and outcome.

Personal opinion

As I have now mentioned many times, I am a virtue ethicist. I (admittedly rather unoriginally) take wisdom, justice, courage, and prudence to be the core virtues, with all other virtues being derived from these.

I believe that the following of one’s duty and the analysis of outcomes are useful, especially when one is still cultivating virtue.

I belie that many religions stress the importance of these values, and believe that self-described adherents to these faiths too often ignore them. This is especially frustrating in faiths which I have personal affiliations with.

For example: The bible – to me – seems quite clear on the duty/virtue of generosity, inclusion, forgiveness, humility, and impartiality. And yet, I know few Christians who actually sold everything they didn’t need and gave it all to charity. Amongst the Christians I know, there are many judgemental types, who care more about who is sleeping with who, than about following Christ’s example and lifting the world out of suffering. They boast about their ‘virtue’, their ‘purity’, proud of how long they have been ‘saved’ about how often they go to church, how long and often they fast, whether they have been baptized, re-baptized, whether it was in a pool, a lake, in the Jordan itself. They make claims about what type of people can an cannot be Christians, about what behaviours are entirely incompatible with Jesus’ message all the while they adorn themselves with cowardice, excess, foolishness, and inequity; treating the Church as nothing but a cult of mutual benefit.

If you read this paragraph and think to yourself “yeah he is right, Christians are awful’’, then you have not understood anything. If you came away thinking you are exempt from this judgement because you are not Christian, know that the above applies to people I have met of all religious and non-religious persuasions.

If you have made it this far then I assume you are either infuriated by how wrong I am, or you agree with me at least in part. In either case, this seems a suitable place for a little “recruitment drive’’. If you agree with me that we must act with wisdom, courage, justice, and prudence, then I urge you to donate to a charitable cause or other high-impact virtuous program in any way which you are able. If you disagree with me on morality, then prove me wrong by donating in total absence of virtue. Perhaps because it increases overall utility, because it is your duty, because it makes you feel good and powerful to give to people you consider inferior. If you donate to a credible organisation, get a receipt and send it to me at <blog.wester.digital>, I will match the first 100 euros of donations to the causes of your choosing.

For inspiration consider: - Giving what we can - Give well - Giving Green

Disclaimer

This post will be rather more technical compared to what I normally write about. I will be using a lot of technical jargon specific to the Linux desktop space. If you are not familiar with this world, then I suggest you skip this post, there are more coming soon (tm).

I recently migrated my (main and only) system from Alpine Linux to NixOS. In this post I will explain why I made the switch and why I consider Nix to be – currently – the best Linux distribution available.

Nix is a project that has been on my radar of quite some time now. It is a system designed around the principles of reproducibility, build-isolation, and declarative design, while also boasting one of the largest and most up-to-date software repositories in the Linux world.

Of course, there is a lot of hype around Nix, and this tends to be a dangerous thing. In fact, I switched away from Arch Linux a few years ago exactly because it was increasingly flooded with novice users drawn in by the hype who considered the forums their personal large-language-model[1]. Aside from the hype though, there were a number of aspects which seemed really attractive to me. Rollbacks, Software availability, and Reproducibility being the main ones. On their own, these were not enough to overcome the cost of switching, that is until I encountered some problems with my existing Alpine installation.

Alpine

When I initially switched from Arch to Alpine, I was very pleased for various reasons. The Alpine Package Keeper (apk) is -- to this day – the most pleasant, fast, and reliable package manager I have used, Alpine’s bi-yearly stable releases allowed me to have a more stable system, and the installer that came with my flavour of Alpine (PostmarketOS) allowed me to recover from catastrophic breakages faster than with Arch.

Out of these benefits, stability and recoverability were the most important ones. These values are important for two main reasons. Firstly, I only have one laptop at my disposal, and it is an arm laptop at that. If my OS breaks in some catastrophic manner, I will need to borrow someone else’s laptop, take out the EMMC storage, and re-flash the operating system. A process that could take several days if none of my friends’ laptops are available. Faster installations (that can be done from windows or mac) massively increase the chances that I will be able to recover my system in a reasonable amount of time. Secondly, I do not generally have a lot of time to tinker with my system outside of holidays. For this reason, I have gotten in the habit of only running updates every half year or so. If I would do this on Arch, everything would rather quickly break, and I would likely not be able to install anything in-between because there would be a dependency mismatch.

In other words: Alpine stable is perfect for me. There is one problem however: I can’t use it. ‘Can’t’ is a big word of course, and I must admit that I could theoretically live with a stable alpine release. But as it stands, I use a lot of software from Alpine’s ‘testing’ repository, which requires one to be on Alpine Linux ‘edge’, the rolling-release side of Alpine. In other words, almost the entire previous paragraph can be thrown out. I will say that Alpine’s apk handles infrequent updates better than Arch’s pacman, but it still is not ideal that I need to be ‘edge’ at all..

This leads us to today: the start of the winter holidays. I tried running an update and it did not go well. Firstly, apk updates itself, so far so good. Secondly it tried to instal ‘mesa-asahi’ for some reason. I have still not figured out which program introduced this new dependency. For those who do not know ‘mesa-asahi’ is the graphics driver for Apple’s arm-based macs which recently landed in alpine-testing. I do not have an arm-based mac, and so I don’t know why this should have been installed. The reasons are however meaningless because ‘mesa-asahi’ introduced a conflict with ‘mesa’ generally (the graphics drivers I actually need) because the former was already on version 24.3 while the rest was still on 24.2.

I tried running ‘apk fix’ which is generally a good idea when you encounter a conflict with apk. This command (for some reason) updated ‘qt6’ and nothing else. This meant that any app using qt6, like my web browser, document viewer, file manager, music player, video player, tormenting client, and others, would not work until they-too were updated.

Since I didn’t think I needed mesa-asahi in the first place (I never installed it up to that point, and I didn’t see why I should start now), I decided to simply tell apk to exclude the package and update as usual. This seemed to have... weird effects. Firstly, none of my graphical programs were working anymore. GTK applications gave some sort or error which I cannot at the moment recall while QT applications just segfaulted – a great start. Secondly, the system was incredibly slow: both in being sluggish to use and taking three times longer to boot than usual.

Now – clearly – I messed something up by telling apk not to include mesa-asahi in the update. Indeed these problems may be attributable to missing graphics drivers – with the system falling back to software rendering. However, the dependency introduction and version-mismatch were both out of my control, and the fact that ‘apk fix’ updated QT6 and broke all my graphical applications meant that I couldn’t just wait for the version conflict to be resolved[2].

I though for some time about what to do – re-installing Alpine-edge might work, or I could try Alpine-stable and make-do without half of my software – and ultimately decided that I could not stay on Alpine due to the simultaneous need to be on ‘edge’ while also needing a rock-solid system. Which brings us to Nix.

NixOS

I managed to download the NixOS installer ISO with ‘curl’ and install it to a borrowed USB-stick using ‘dd’ while still on my broken Alpine install. According to the wiki, I should just be able to use the graphical installer on my system. Easy peasy.

This was not the case. The graphical installer does not have a menu to select the bootloader, and nix’s default loader ‘grub’ does not work well on arm based systems. Luckily the wiki-page for installing NixOS on arm single-board-computers had the correct instructions for a manual install, and a few minutes later I had a fresh install of NixOS.

My initial impressions of Nix were rather positive. It was remarkably easy to learn, and there were a lot of resources available, notably the wiki and the forums. At first I had some trouble to get things working properly. Every time I ran an update, the updater itself would be broken on the new install[3]. Everytime though, I could just roll-back to the previous version and try again[4].

I spent some time getting my usual configuration set up using nix and noticed just how helpful the nix-rebuild command was. For instance, when I tried to install flatpak, nix informed me that for flatpak to be functional, I needed to enable the xdg-desktop-portal service. After doing this, it told me that I didn’t have an actual portal configured and/or installed. For context. If you do this on Arch or Alpine, you are pretty much left to your own devices in figuring out how to get these working, especially if you are not using a pre-configured desktop environment.

A second immediately noticeable difference was the sheer size of the nix repositories. Every piece of software which I use, with the exception of one[5], was in the nix repositories, and I use a lot of niche and obscure software. The only somewhat strange thing I noticed is that the font which I like to use for my desktop: droid, was not in the stable repository, but only the unstable one[6]. This didn’t matter though as nix allows me to add just this one package from the unstable repository while keeping my others on version 24.11.

Nix handily beats Alpine in terms of software availability. I think this is in large-part to to the fact that alpine requries more porting work due to its use of musl-libc and openrc, rather than the more standard glibc and systemd Nix also beats Arch if you look only at the main repositories. The arch user repository still has an edge over nix in some cases, but this is not so much as repository as much as it is a collection of build scripts which – in my experience – work about as often as they do not.

Lastly is recoverability. I already mentioned nix’s rollback feature, but even if my laptop dies in its entirety, if the drive gets corrupted, or if I want to move to a different system, I will be able to get back on track in no time whatsoever. This is because an entire NixOS install is essentially defined as a configuration file. I have this configuration backed up in a public Github repository[7] and can therefore recover my system in minutes, rather than hours or days.

All in all I am loving nix so far, and I will probably keep using it for quite some time.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

For more information about making a moral impact, search for “giving what we can’’, “give well’’, or “effective altruism’’.

We know from the Talmud and Torah that God is not present in his creation. That is not to say of course that he is absent, but rater that he permeates through it. God is reflected in every thing as all thing are built according to the celestial blueprint which is Adam Kamon. While all things are like God, all things are also by necessity unlike God. For if something would be entirely like God, then it must be God (which is heretical) or there must be two Gods (which is HIGHLY heretical).

We do know however of the existence of Metatron, who is called the lesser God. Indeed this too seems heretical, yet it is in the scriptures so it cannot be so. We must look deeper.

All things in creation are both like and unlike God, yet that does not mean all tings under heaven are equal in the measure with which they resemble God. Metatron namely is the entity which is the least unlike God as is possible within Malkuth on the highest branches of the Tree of life, Metatron represents the slightest difference from God himself, namely only one aspect must differ. Of course, god has no properties since God is One, it must therefore be that at the high reaches of heaven, Metatron is entirely like God except that he is not entirely untied. His disunity is found in him not being God.

It should now be obvious how Descartes was indeed a Kabbalist. Descartes explains that the soul does not reside in the body, but permeates through it. He explains furthermore that while, the soul permeates, there is one area which is the least unlike the soul, that being the pineal gland. For this reason, Descartes calls the gland “the seat of the soul’’.

Much as how calling Metatron “the lesser god’’ is nigh heretical, so too is it almost ridiculous to call one part of the body the seat of the soul, as it would imply that this is the area whereupon the soul acts. Yet what Descartes whishes to say is that, while the pineal gland is a part of the body, it is the part which is most like the soul (and therefore least unlike the body).

Being properly part of the body, it must be more than half physical. This might explain why so many fall prey to the passions of the body rather than following the divine spark within them upwards to its source in the God most high.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

For more information about making a moral impact, search for “giving what we can’’, “give well’’, or “effective altruism’’.

As a child in elementary school, I – much like most kids – went on holidays with my parents. My classmates of course did the same, and afterwards, when school started back up again, we would share stories. One concept which often came up in these stories was homesickness.

As a child, I didn’t understand homesickness. After all, what is so great about being home? And why would you miss it when there is so much to see.

Later in life, we would go on class trips over weekends. There would always be kids who missed home (particularly their parents) so much that they cried for hours. Once, again, I didn’t really understand their sadness. I got along fine with my parents, but the trip was fun and – all things considered – rather short.

Much later in life, after finishing middle school, I started traveling back-and-forth between my parental home in The Netherlands and the city of Frankfurt in Germany. After about a year of doing this, I started to understand a semblance of the pain of homesickness ("homesick" comes from the German heimweh, the second element of which translates to pain). I missed aspects of Frankfurt, the modernity and general cleanliness of the city[1]. The great metro system, and general access to the "big city" where all things I missed living in a slightly rural town in The Netherlands with nothing but infrequent bus service and a shopping area of about 20 stores.

However, this was not quite homesickness. I was longing for another place yes, but this place was not home. And it wasn’t its home-y-ness that I missed.

A few years later I moved to Oslo in Norway. Now was finally a good time to feel real homesickness. I moved by myself and went to live alone for the first time, I didn’t know anyone in Norway, and I had to figure out a whole new city, country, system, culture, and language.

Certainly, I was sad and lonely often during my first few weeks in Norway. I was uncomfortable with figuring out how to get around the city, needing to re-learn which stores sold what, adjusting to a genuinely disgusting shared flat, and needing to go out and socialize, they all weighed heavily on me. And yet, at no point did I want to go home. In fact, I almost had to go back as there was a problem with my paperwork, only then did I truly feel pain, and in that moment my being alone really hit home.

I lived in Norway never missing home, nor even feeling nostalgic about The Netherlands nor Germany. Nor did I particularly love Oslo either, but it was certainly the most enjoyable place I had lived thus far. Two years passed like this and I moved to Italy, which a brief two months of homelessness in-between.

That finally did it, the homelessness, I use this word lightly of course. In no way was I living on the street, but I had no place that I could call home, and that hurt. What hurt perhaps even more is that I had no home in Norway to which I would return. I was homesick, longing Oslo, knowing full well that I would not be going back.

Moving to Italy, I had the same difficulties as in Norway, of learning a new language, city, customs etcetera. Though now I also specifically missed parts of Norway. The vast forests where I walked on a nearly daily basis where a sore point to go without, and each stroll I took in Italy where I was forced to walk virtually on the highway added to my longing. I started to (pre-emotively) miss the cold and snow (in September). I missed my patterns: In Oslo I always knew a place where I could go. The location of every library, gym, church, where I could go and be more or less at home. And here I was, in a city where I barely knew my own house, and where I hadn’t even figure out yet how to get around save for walking.

As strong as my nostalgia and homesickness for Norway was, I also remembered that Oslo was by no-means a perfect place. Here there might be no woods, but at least there is sunlight. Restaurants are affordable and the historical city center is a delight to walk through (also: There is a historical city center, something which Oslo lacks severely, historical or otherwise). My apartment is larger and I pay less. I no-longer have to use the laundromat because I have my own washing machine. Summer is an actual season here And if nothing else, I am closer to family.

Leaving behind a home – not for a trip, but permanently – hurts. And the home – though gone – will stay with me. In case it was not clear, this post was nothing but a lengthily love-letter to Norway, as well as an attempt to trick myself into liking Italy. Though as much as I miss home, and as much as I am sceptical about Italy, I am excited to see what home I might make here...

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

For more information about making a moral impact, search for “giving what we can’’, “give well’’, or “effective altruism’’.

The code of Hammurabi is one of the oldest and most well preserved legal texts and at some point supposedly governed the ancient Babylonians. The laws of the code are inscribed onto basalt, and while the Babylonians may have had further laws to supplement these, it is safe to say that 282 inscribed ones were considered most fundamental, requiring the need for inscription.

Looking at what the ancient Babylonians considered to e fundamental gives us insight into changing attitudes regarding what ought to be legislated. The code for instance contains laws regarding the giving of testimony in court, laws regarding marriage, divorce, and adultery, as well as assault, robbery, and destruction of property. These topics are still regarded as rather fundamental in modern society.

However, the code also contains laws regarding wages and prices for goods and services. This sounds more peculiar to the modern reader. Certainly, most legal scholars are not in favour of entirely unregulated markets, though doubtless few would be in favour of a constitutional amendment putting a fixed price on the rent of freight vessels as the ancient Babylonians had.

We find similarly overly specific laws in the books of law of the Torah. Here, we are told what animals to eat, how to prepare them, what cuts are suitable for sacrifice, how the sacrificial altar should be constructed, and which transgressions require which sacrifices. These are interwoven with laws which we consider fundamental to this day, such as those regarding marriage, property, and crime.

It seems then that attitudes regarding legislation change with time. Certainly no modern western state would legislate in minute detail how one should worship or make amends to God. Yet we have kept many of the laws regarding marriage, property, and crime. Are these laws truly fundamental? Or are they just as arbitrary as the price and consumption of food?

Marriage

“Minimizing Marriage’’ is a book by Elizabeth Blake where she explores the various dimensions which marriage occupies. Marriage can simultaneously be a romantic commitment, a legal contract, a driver of moral legitimacy, and a religious act. The question remains whether marriage *should* occupy all of these dimensions, or whether certain ones are arbitrary. Blake writes extensively on decoupling romance and ethical/legal legitimacy. I similarly would like to ask the question whether states should be in the marriage business at all.

Several European countries do not recognize marriage between two people of the same sex. In some of these countries, such couples can enter into a civil union, which is the same in all but name legally speaking. Acceding to some however, civil unions lack the moral legitimizing force associated with marriage. Even outside of same-sex unions, I know of religious people who speak of “common-law marriage’’ as opposed to “christian marriage’’, where only the later is legal in the eyes of God.

Food, Drink, and other consumables

Many modern states regulate what substances citizens are and are not allowed to put in their bodies. No alcohol or tobacco before 16/18/21/ever, no marijuana, LSD, MDMA, etc. You are allowed to eat contaminated or expired food, but you are not allowed to sell it. Certain foods are out-right deemed to dangerous by certain counties, such as unwashed eggs and raw milk in the United States. Others are deemed immoral: human flesh, foie grass, veal, etc, and are legislated against accordingly.

To some this seems sensible, other such as Joel Salatin (author of “everything I want to do is illegal’’), argue that “the right to eat what you want’’ should be a constitutional guarantee on-par with the right to free-speech. Many of my friends and associates who do not write books but do consume, sell, or produce illicit substances, are of the opinion that, if everyone involved in the procurement process consents, then the government should “stay out of it’’.

Private property

Private property is named such because it is yours. It opposes public property which is owned by the state, or similar entities. If you are not on your own private property, you have to follow the rules of its rightful owner. Yet you are not entirely free to choose what you do with your property either.

The most obvious example is zoning regulations. These laws dictate which pieces of property are to be used for agriculture, commerce, or residential purposes. You may be the sole rightful owner of a piece of land, but that does not mean you may build a house on it. Even if you are allowed to do so however, the house must conform to certain standards set by the government. While these laws (and indeed all the ones mentioned in this post) are clearly designed to keep to populace safe, they also restrict our freedoms. So I ask once again, should the lawmakers be in the business of deciding what spaces you are allowed to live in?

I could keep going but I think my point has been made. There are various areas of legislation which at some point in the past were deemed sensible and important enough to be included in major legal texts. Today, there are various areas of legislation which seem sensible, but where an argument can be made that the lawmakers should have nothing to say about them. Attitudes surrounding these topics will change, and thinking about your stances on these topics is important if you wish to anticipate said change. What you consider fundamental today, may be unlegislated tomorrow. Likewise, freedoms which we currently enjoy in un(der)regulated areas may disappear some day soon, when governments decide that, yes; this too is our business.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

For more information about making a moral impact, search for “giving what we can’’, “give well’’, or “effective altruism’’.

I have, for some time now, been interested in developing some sort of machine which is only capable of writing. Those who have read my the previous iterations of this blog may remember the typewriter which onto which I wired a USB output. The typewriter itself is also such a system, one which allows me to record my tough’s onto paper without the possibility for further distractions. Today, I have developed a new system. It is by-far the most usable one, which I am proving by writing this very post on it (excuse the above-average amount of typos).

Before getting into how exactly this system works, let me outline what it needs to be capable of doing. Any system on which I write must of course have an input method as well as some sort of feedback to the user. A screen, a piece of paper, potentially even sound. Secondly, the system must be able to store the written files in some digital manner. Lastly, I want to keep the system as minimal as possible, preferably being able to run it off a battery ban. It goes without saying that the system also needs to be accurate and fast enough to keep up with my (admittedly modest) typing speed.

Having outlined the requirements, let us get in to the latest addition to my typing repertoire. This post is currently being written on a raspberry pi 400 with a 2*16 LCD character display attached. The raspberry pi 400, for those who do not know, is a small fanless computer built entirely inside of a keyboard. I will not go over all the specifications regarding the raspberry pi, but what is important to note is how you can use the device to driver various electronics The pi has access to 40 GPIO pins which can be connected to motors, sensors, lights, etcetera, which can then be controlled by software.

In this case, the object connected to the pi is an LCD character display, which is capable of displaying a total of 30 characters in beautiful black-on-green text. The display is driven by a small python script which is indeed so simple, that calling it a text-editor probably counts as a direct insult for anyone who has ever actually worked on one. The script is divided into two parts which operate independently of one another. This asynchronous nature of the script is perhaps its most complicated feature, which says a lot about how minimalist its feature set is. The first part simple listens for key presses and stores the keys in memory. If the backspace is pressed, the latest character is removed from memory. When the return key is pressed, the current line is saved to a file, at which point the program will proceed to forget about it.

The second part of the program updates the display. The display is rather slow and the driver will by-default wait for the display to finish drawing before continuing with the script. This is exactly why this part must be handled separately from the key recording. If these were handled on the same thread, then keystones would not be registered while the display was updating. The display code therefore simply looks at the current working string, formats it to fit on the 2*16 display, and sends it off to the drawn.

That is really the extent of the editor. I added in a slight quality-of-life addition in the ability to exit the program by simply writing EXIT on an empty line. After doing so, a new file will be created (its name determined by the date and time), and the user’s input will now be written onto that file instead.

Obviously, these files must be taken off the internal SD card of the pi and put onto an actual computer for editing and publishing. Alternatively, you can attach a full monitor to the pi itself and do all the work from there. It is after all a fully functioning computer running Linux. This current iteration of my “typewriter project’’ will probably be the host of a number of other blog posts. Writing on it gives a fun atmosphere, and the entire setup is light, power efficient, and even usable in bright daylight (unlike laptops or tablets). Unlike the actual typewriter which I gave a usb port; this version actually registers keystrokes consistently, is carry able with without a briefcase, requires neither ink nor paper, and is not loud enough to keep everybody in a 100 meter radius awake. I will miss the typewriter somewhat, though with the improvements OCR is making these days, I suppose I could just use it without the USB port.

Code as always is available on my GitHub [1], though keep in mind that this is largely untested, unoptimized, and uncommented code. If you have interest in building a system like this yourself though, feel free to send me an email at blog@wester.digital.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

For more information about making a moral impact, search for “giving what we can’’, “give well’’, or “effective altruism’’.

I have been living in Oslo for the past two years and there are many good things I can say about the city. It is generally clean, the people will largely not bother you, and it has great access to many nature areas for recreation. These nature areas are best reached by the public transport system which is largely excellent.

There are no gates, no complicated ticket types, subscriptions, and discounts, the metro, bus, and tram drive rather frequently, and you can even take the ferry with the same card. There are however also many, many aspects of Oslo’s public transport which rub me the wrong way. Instead of just listing my issues with the system however, I will highlight specifically why these matters are particularly detrimental to foreigners.

1. Tickets

Oslo’s public transport network does not have ticket machines. Instead, tickets are can be bought at various kiosks from four particular chains, or at the half a dozen official outlets. This is a huge problem for foreigners coming into the city for several reasons.

Firstly, it is confusing. Ticket machines are rather universal across Europe and most of the world. My process of visiting cities is simple. I go to the train or metro stop, buy a day pass, check out the map, and get on the next available train. In Oslo, you show up to the metro and see... well nothing. There is a small sign at most stops describing to you where you can buy tickets (only in Norwegian and English), though there is no map nor written instructions of the closest outlet. If you don’t know the city well, you might need to walk around for quite some time before finding one of these stores.

This leads into my second point. The ticket sale locations are not distributed uniformly across the city. In fact, you don’t even need to go very far outside of the commercial center before you are in a ticket-dead-zone. There are many places within the city where you need to walk at least an hour before encountering a point of sale, even assuming you take the shortest route.

At this point I should mention that there is an alternative: a mobile app. While it is great that you *can* use a mobile app instead of a physical ticket, it does not alleviate the problems listed above. You cannot assume that your passengers have mobile data plans to download and use the app (yes, you need an active internet connection in case of a ticket inspection, and there are no mobile hotspots on board the vehicles nor at the stations), you cannot assume that everyone has a smartphone with either google play or the apple app store, nor for that matter can you assume that all of your users have a credit card using either Visa or MasterCard to pay for these tickets. While all these elements are nigh-universal amongst the Norwegians, they are not universal worldwide, therefore placing a greater burden on tourists and other foreigners.

2. Times

The Oslo public transport system is very spotty when it comes to service after midnight. The metro and tram lines stop entirely around 1, and the regular buses switch to night buses. These night buses operate on different lines, with different times, and are usually overcrowded with drunk Norwegian partygoers.

This is of course especially problematic if you are making your way to or from the airport, placing yet another increased burden on tourists.

3. Where am I going again?

All stations and stops for the bus, train, tram, and metro use recognizable enough Norwegian names. These are rather well diminishable from another in most cases.

There are however some major accessibility concerns. Firstly, the displays showing the coming stops are very frequently broken, especially on the buses. This is a problem because you need to request the driver to stop at the next station by pressing a button for both the bus and the tram. If you do not know what the next stop is (because you are unfamiliar with the city), this obviously becomes more difficult.

The name of the next stop is also called out by over a speaker, however this system also has two problems. Firstly, and most obviously, those who are hard of hearing will have no idea where they are when the screens are non-functional (or if they also have poor vision). Secondly, for those not used to the Norwegian language, it can be very hard to put the sounds to words. Add to that the fact that there are plenty of people who did not grow up with the Latin alphabet, nor even a Germanic language, and you are – once again – putting an extra burden on foreigners.

4. Inconsistency and information sharing

It happens relatively often that the public transport network shuts down, most often due to weather conditions. This is perhaps unavoidable, but what makes this problematic is the sharing of information in such events.

Firstly, the information is often not updated. Rather, the next train will just be pushed back 10 minutes with every 10 minutes that pass. Locals have figured out by experience how to tell when a train is likely never arriving, but for tourists and immigrants, this is not the case.

Secondly, smaller stations will usually have a display simply reading: “check our website for updates’’. I mentioned above that you cannot assume everyone to be in the possession of a smartphone and an active internet connection. Bigger stations tend to have spoken announcements about the state of things, though these are only given in Norwegian.

And even if you manage to translate these messages, they usually only state something along the lines of “look for alternative transport’’. They do not broadcast the number for a taxi company, they don’t tell you how long you should expect to wait, whether you will be refunded, etcetera. Once again, these are things the locals have figured out by themselves over the years, and the companies in charge seem to use this acquired knowledge as a crutch of sorts, a crutch which falls apart when foreigners come in to the frame.

I have many more complaints about the way Norway disadvantages foreigner workers, tourists, and students, but I will leave things here for now. A country with the size and wealth of Norway should be concerned with matters of accessibility in public transport, and while I by no means believe Norway to be the worst country in the regard, she too fails to meet the mark of acceptable accessibility, at least for non-Norwegian passengers.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

For more information about making a moral impact, search for “giving what we can’’, “give well’’, or “effective altruism’’.

In Scott Alexander’s boom ‘Unsong’ [1], one of the protagonists gives an insightful analysis of the song “American Pie’’ and its relation to “Christian soteriology’s claim to supersede the Jewish conception of divine law’’.

While Alexander, through the proxy of a fiction character, provides an important addition to our understating of this ancient work, his analysis is ultimately left somewhat wanting. While the concept of Christian law superseding the law of the old testament is an obvious core theme, the work as a whole relates the histological development of Christianity as a religion.

Our story starts in the garden of Eden

Well, I know that you’re in love with him ’Cause I saw you dancin’ in the gym

As Alexander already pointed out, ‘gym’ is the Greek word for ‘naked’. This is a reference to Adam and Eve ‘dancing’ naked in the garden. Now, according to Alexander, ‘dance’ refers to divine judgement though the Hebrew ‘dan’. However, we should not understand this line as Adam and Eve dealing out divine judgement in the nude. Rather, to dance (in the context of this work) refers to the following of God’s commandment (his judgement). This is shown to us in the opening stanza:

And I knew if I had my chance That I could make those people dance And maybe they’d be happy for a while

The refrain shows us Israel before the arrival of Jesus.

Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry

‘Shevet’ is the Hebrew word for tribe, and ‘levee’ is therefore indicative of the tribe of Levi who constituted the Jewish priesthood. The tribe is found to be ‘dry’, they were too obsessed with law and thereby lost true faith. This is contrasted by new testament writings such as John 7

Anyone who is thirsty may come to me! Anyone who believes in me may come and drink! For the Scriptures declare, ‘Rivers of living water will flow from the heart of anyone who believes in me.’

We are also told in the very next line that

And them good ole boys were drinking whiskey ’n rye

‘Whiskey’ comes from the Irish “water of life’’. The fact that the “good ole boys’’ were still drinking this means that Israel has not gone completely off course. Notable characters who still held true faith were of course Jesus’ mother Mary, and his cousin John the baptist.

Now we get to the arrival of Jesus, and the song quickly moves on to his death. Jesus is the ‘music’, as pointed out by Alexander, the first three letters of ‘song’ spell ‘son’, but we also have lines like these:

Now do you believe in rock and roll? Can music save your mortal soul?

The belief in ‘rock and roll’ is the rolling away of the boulder from Jesus’ tomb, signifying his resurrection. This is one of the most core beliefs of Christians, and the is heavily contested by other faiths which believe in Jesus as a prophet, but not as God. Hence the next line: can Jesus save our soul?

But Jesus is not just called ‘music’ he is also the jester, the one who sings (therefore begetting the song), and later also ‘the voice’ this is indicative of the trinity.

When the jester sang for the king and queen In a coat he borrowed from James Dean And a voice that came from you and me

We are told how God took away the sins of the world in a line that also references the crown of thorns worn by Jesus before his crucifixion. The coat is a reference to Jesus immaculate coat which he wore on the cross and which was looted from him shortly after his death. James Dean refers to Jesus’ brother James the Just, as Dean comes from the Hebrew ‘din’ as mentioned earlier.

Oh, and while the king was looking down The jester stole his thorny crown

This also refers to the fact that Jesus was called “King of the Jews’’, but also that he is not the Messiah the Jewish people expected. He was in fact not a conquering king here to establish a Jewish state, hence he ‘stole’ the crown.

When Jesus dies on the cross, the sins of the world are forgiven, paid for by the blood of one free of sin.

The courtroom was adjourned No verdict was returned

However, the Apostles were distraught at Jesus’ death at first. They thought their teacher and messiah had died, and they did not have faith in his resurrection. They though the devil had won, working through the Jews and Romans.

I saw Satan laughing with delight The day the music died

The majority of the remaining stanzas are dedicated to the development of Christianity after Jesus’ death:

Now for ten years we’ve been on our own And moss grows fat on a rollin’ stone

Jesus has resurrected and we are now some time after his death, Christians are uniting and canonizing the Bible. There is one faith meant for all people, Jews and Pharisees alike (in the strictest sense of the world, this is a catholic faith).

Now the halftime air was sweet perfume While the sergeants played a marching tune We all got up to dance Oh, but we never got the chance

This period is referred as the halftime, because our story is far from over, in fact, it is only halfway done. “Sweet perfume’’ may be a reference to Mary’s anointing of Jesus’ feet with perfume in John 12:3. The people were ready for the day of judgement to come, they git up to dance (to be judged), but they never got the chance because the story is not done, the people are not united in the true faith of Jesus, rather, they have once again lost their way.

’Cause the players tried to take the field The marching band refused to yield Do you recall what was revealed The day the music died?

The players, common everyday believers tried to take the field, but the marching band (the church establishment) didn’t let them. This is a reference to the protestant reformists wanting to take biblical reading and contemplation to the common people, and sermons in local languages.

The day Jesus died, the temple veil was torn, this is where God reportedly resided, his face must remain unseen because gazing upon it would spell death for any person not free from sin. But when Jesus died, the face of God was revealed (it was the face of Jesus), and all could gaze upon it because all sins were forgiven. Thus, the face of God was no longer reserved for the highest priest (who could occasionally journey behind the veil to either emerge proven pure, or die trying), rather he could be seen by anyone.

The reformists therefore want religion to belong to all the players, not just to the marching band.

Now we come to the discussion of the end times. The time when Jesus will return to earth to judge everyone. Before this happens however, there will be many fake prophets and people promising salvation.

Oh, and as I watched him on the stage My hands were clenched in fists of rage No angel born in Hell Could break that Satan’s spell

When judged by Jesus, there is no going back. According to the Bible (at least to most common interpretations I am familiar with), Jesus’ return is the last chance to accept him. The protagonist of American Pie seemingly does not do so, and is thus left without music.

I met a girl who sang the blues And I asked her for some happy news [gospel] But she just smiled and turned away I went down to the sacred store [Jerusalem] Where I’d heard the music years before But the man there said the music wouldn’t play

In the following stanza, we are described the people who do make it into the kingdom of heaven, the great city described in the bible.

And in the streets, the children screamed The lovers cried and the poets dreamed

Jesus tells his followers that they must become like children in Mathew 18:3, that they must love the lord with all their heart in Mathew 22:37, and Jesus teaches us how to pray in the Gospels as well, proclaiming the glory of God like poets. These are the people who make their way into heaven.

But not a word was spoken The church bells all were broken

In this city, the people won’t be called to church because God will be amongst them. He will come to your house, not you to his.

The song concludes with the departure of the tripartite God to the kingdom, letting the meet inherit the earth.

And the three men I admire most The Father, Son and the Holy Ghost They caught the last train for the coast The day the music died

Importantly, this all happened “the day the music died’’, in other words, as soon as the sins of the world were taken away, the story was decided. Now we are just waiting for it to play out the way it was meant to.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

For more information about making a moral impact, search for “giving what we can’’, “give well’’, or “effective altruism’’.

Academic references and citations are notoriously finicky to handle. This is exactly why systems like biblatex exist to automate the process. For the uninitiated, biblatex allows you to define a reference in a file like so:

    @book{key, 
        author = {}, 
        title = {}, 
        date = {}, 
        publisher = {} 
    } 
				

This is a rather limited example, but there are more fields available. Now, by simply writing \cite{key} in your latex document, you get a nice inline citation according to your chosen style – for instance (author’s last name year) – and a bibliography entry containing all the relevant information at the end of your document.

I recently ran into a problem with this system however exactly because the author is cited by their last name, and Icelandic people do not have last names in the same way as most people do.

On Iceland, it is typical for people to receive as their “last name’’ the name of the parent matching their gender, plus the suffix ‘son’ or ‘dóttir’ or a variation on these two (it get’s more complicated, but this will do for now). Think of Lord of the Rings, where Thorin (oakenshield)’s full name is Thorin, son of Thror, son of Thrain. On Iceland he would be called Thorin Throrson, and his father would be Thror Thrainson.

To refer to these people by their last name is a little strange. “The king under the mountain is Thror’s son’’. Therefore, it is somewhat common to cite Icelandic people by their first name(s) instead.

Getting a citation like this in biblatex turned out to be a little tricky, especially when you don’t want to write a custom citation function. This post will detail what I did, for others to copy.

Firstly, In your .bib file you do the following:

    @book{key, 
        author = {{Thorin Throrson}}, % Mind the double braces 
        shorthand = {Thorin}, 
        keywords = {icelandic} 
    } 
				

The braces in the author field tell biblatex to cite the name in full, rather than separating the first and last parts. The shorthand tells it to use only ‘Thorin’ for inline citations. The keyword will be useful for separating out Icelandic names from other abbreviations.

Usually, the shorthand field is often used when citing several texts by the same author, especially if both texts are cited frequently. In a paper about Kant, it is not particularly helpful to constantly see (Kant 1781) and (Kant 1790). If on the other hand, we use the abbreviated titles (KdRV) and (KdU), the reader ends up much better informed. These abbreviations are then listed at the end of the document using

    \printbiblist{shorthand} 
				

If this list is used then – with the current setup – this would also include all of our Icelandic first names, which we defined as abbreviations. This is where the defined keyword comes in, which allows us to exclude these ‘abbreviations’

    \printbiblist[ 
        notkeyword=icelandic 
    ]{shorthand} 
				

There may be better ways of doing this in Latex. In fact, I can think of several ways to automate this process, but this is the most simple and portable way I found of doing things, and it importantly works with many versions of (bib)latex.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

For more information about making a moral impact, search for “giving what we can’’, “give well’’, or “effective altruism’’.

“Fierce Appetites’’ is a memoir written by Elizabeth Boyle, an Irish historian who relates her experiences of the past 4 decades to various writings surviving from medieval times.

There... was that so hard to put on the cover of the book?

This book was given to me by a friend when she had to move back to her home country after an exchange year at my university. This book, as I alluded to above, markets itself horribly.

The cover, which is what all of us judge a book on, contains four main elements:

1. The title “fierce appetites which does not really tell you much about the book at all. 2. A subtitle reading “Lessons from my year of untamed thinking’’, this is both uninformative and wrong, more on that later. 3. A medieval-style drawing of a man and a woman in reclined embrace. Given this, one might expect a book akin to the kama sutra, but no. Hence: uninformative. 4. No less than thirteen exclamations of praise with another seven on the inside cover.

Let me start with this last point. The 20 sentences expressing how much others enjoyed this book add absolutely no value. Firstly, I don’t recognize any of the names on the cover, and I would consider myself a moderately well-read person. Furthermore, all of the listed people seemed to be in a competition to write the least informative phrase possible while also showing off their own erudition.

“Pure nectar for the imagination’’ ... Uhm, okay. I wouldn’t consider a memoir to be the thing to read if you want to let your imagination loose, but I guess this is fine.

“Like nothing else you will ever read’’ This one made me think whether everyone listed on the cover even read the book. This is such a cookie-cutter response (and furthermore in all-likelihood just wrong, or at least over-the-top) that you can say it about any book without even taking the time to read it.

“I loved this luminous, radical book about bodies in time’’ This one made me wonder too. There is one chapter about bodies yes, but that certainly is not what this book is about. Did you do the homework Mr and Mrs EXAMINER

“Fiercely smart, strange, surmising, unsettling, and unflinching’’ Yeah, lets just cover all bases here, one of them has to apply right?

Other quotes contain words as informative as ‘interesting’, ‘good’, ‘intriguing’, and ‘wonderful’.

Let’s move to the title and subtitle. Firstly “fierce appetites’’, is that what this book is about? The first few chapters deal with the loss of a loved one... Nothing appetizing there. Substance abuse is covered, I suppose addiction is a type of appetite at least. Religion... If I squint this fits. But parenting, lockdowns, academia and war?

The subtitle is inaccurate. This book is in fact not “lessons from a year of untamed thinking’’. The book is laid out in twelve chapters with names matching the months of the year, but that about as far as the connection goes. Some months do correspond to events that actually happened in that year in that month, but most of them are just random events that occurred throughout the author’s life. ‘Untamed thinking’’ is not mentioned once, in fact the author reveals that she wasn’t approached about the book until later on in the year, even though the book starts in January. Lastly, there are no ‘lessons’. In fact, the author seems intent on not teaching any life lessons, but rather to point out how her life is falling apart and being held together only by medication, alcoholism, and unrestrained sexual behaviour.

So... The cover is not useful. The layout of the book is strange, and does not correspond with the content. The title and subtitle are just plain wrong (though the subtitle was changed to a more informative phrase in later editions). But why get so upset over it? I will tell you why: because this is a good book. Not a great book, but certainly worth a quick read. And I feel as though this is a great example of good writing being held back by horrible editing.

Clearly the editor had an idea. They read the book and the drafts and extracted from it ‘lessons’ about “fierce appetites’’. They decided to layout the book in a diary-format, with each chapter being one month, and fit the subtitle to that idea (or even worse: the other way around). I don’t feel as though these editorial decisions were made with the style of the author in mind. There are so many ways in which the content of the book and the editing could be made to fit better, but as it stands, the book is held back by the person in charge of selling the story inside.

It is a few days later now and I check some of the books I have with me for similar patterns. Certainly the proclamations by other authors often lack substance, but I would still say that Fierce Appetites is a particularly bad example. Not least because of the sheer number of quotations on the cover.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

For more information about making a moral impact, search for “giving what we can’’, “give well’’, or “effective altruism’’.

I keep occasionally running into disclaimers that profess something along these lines:

Before partaking in this exercise, please consult a physician ... It requires both mental and physical strength ... Ensure you are in good health ... Know your limits ... You are at risk of personal injury ... COMPANY NAME is not liable for any damages ... etcetera

Pretty intense right? The above is paraphrased from a 142 word disclaimer at the start of an exercise video on YouTube. What exercise was the video instructing on? Was it skydiving? Free solo rock climbing? Perhaps it wasn’t exercise in a traditional sense, but activities such as skin-hooking. Or maybe this was some insane strongman routine, including deadlifts, atlas stones, and other high-risk motions.

The truth is much more mundane. This video described a 10 minute stretching routine designed to be performed while laying down in bed. Excuse me? This required such a scary build up?

Another example:

Before making any dietary changes consult your doctor ... Unintended side effects ... Potential miscarriage ... Permanent health damage ... Is not liable for any damages ... Continue at your own risk ... and so forth

What warning was this for you might ask? Steroids? Super restrictive diets such as veganism or ketogentic diets? Foods aimed at diabetics? Pregnant people?

No, this was a article overviewing some herbal teas, notably nettle tea.

I see these disclaimers relatively often, especially on incredibly mediocre things. Whereas extreme exercise and diets are promoted without medical backing. I feel as though these disclaimers have lost track of reality, and in this post; I will complain about them.

Now, let me start with a disclaimer of my own: I understand why these walls of warning text are included in videos and articles. They simply wish to void any liabilities for damage because human stupidity knows no bounds, and because the United States legal system knows fewer bounds still.

But come on... Ten minutes of stretching? Herbal tea? Meanwhile there are no health labels on sodas or super processed foods which are proven to have health aversive effects. A sedentary lifestyle is *almost* guaranteed to be more damaging than one which includes light exercise or stretching.

Now, if this was just independent bloggers and small companies being overly cautious, that would be one thing, but unfortunately this all goes much deeper. I do a lot of rock climbing, mostly indoors. At all but one of the gyms I have been to throughout Europe, I needed to sign a waiver stating that the gym would not be responsible for injuries. Fair enough. In Italy however, I needed a certificate signed by a doctor that I was fit enough to exercise.

When I was asked to present this certificate I was baffled at first. I was later assured by many people that this is common for nearly all gyms in Italy, both climbing gyms and otherwise. How backwards is this? “You are not fir enough to exercise’’? Meanwhile you can try your best at merging with your sofa without any form of medical assessment as to the risk you are exposing yourself to.

I feel as though this is a worrying symptom of a much wider problem which can roughly be characterized as: “people can no longer take care of themselves’’. Simple, rather mediocre decisions, such as what tea to drink, must be made for you. You should never be within two meters of a body of water without a trained professional nearby. Careful with those stretches, you might just rip off your limbs altogether.

At the same time, everyone is self-medicating with actually harmful medication such as melatonin and painkillers, knowing nothing about how to actually use these drugs. When people grow sedentary and fat, that is within their freedom to do, but if you wish to live alternatively, you better ask the government official nicely first.

I am reminded of Aldous Huxley’s wonderful work “A brave new world’’. Where the totalitarian government aims to keep its citizens in a perpetually immature state. No one makes their own choices, and everyone drugs themselves up before any discomfort can reach them.

I hope that we can change our social-, and legal- structures in such a way that we can assume that those around us are responsible human beings capable of looking after themselves. So that we can share simple things such as recipes and exercises without needing to be afraid that someone manages to drown themselves in the soup we instructed them to make, or get horribly injured by following our closed-eye meditation instructions while driving. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the direction we are heading in... so in that light:

DISCLAIMER

I am not a lawyer, I am not a doctor, I am not a politician. This is not legal/medical/social advice. In the worst case scenario, my writings may even induce some semblance of independent thought which has been shown to lead to: - Social extrication - Political radicalization - Migraines - Death - An aversion to pine cones - A substantial drop in birth-rates - Self-harm - General life improvement and/or psychosis I am not to be held accountable for these – or any other – effects my writings inspire.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

For more information about making a moral impact, search for “giving what we can’’, “give well’’, or “effective altruism’’.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

For more information about making a moral impact, search for “giving what we can’’, “give well’’, or “effective altruism’’.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

For more information about making a moral impact, search for “giving what we can’’, “give well’’, or “effective altruism’’.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

For more information about making a moral impact, search for “giving what we can’’, “give well’’, or “effective altruism’’.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

For more information about making a moral impact, search for “giving what we can’’, “give well’’, or “effective altruism’’.

I studied French for five years (give or take one) in “middle school’’ (Dutch middle school combines the American middle school and high school into one, that is to say, I had French classes from age 11 till 16). I was allowed to drop French in the fifth year due to my dyslexia and would have otherwise had six years in total.

I – like most people how had any foreign language in school – remember very little of my French classes. Most of them focussed on grammar and literature, which are two aspects I know nothing about even in my native languages. The only knowledge I retained of French were the useful phrases picked up in the first year (my name is, I don’t speak French very well, can you slow down, where is the supermarket/hospital/pharmacy, etcetera).

Just in case anyone was wondering, this is the same for people who dropped French after two years in favour of German, Latin, or Greek, and for people who pursued French for the full six year program.

After graduating, i spent some time in France, and most of my actually useful French knowledge came from that brief period. Needless to say, when I encountered a potential source of my masters dissertation written in French, I was not exactly ecstatic about translating it. The paper seemed at first glance to be very useful however, so I made a cup of tea, grabbed my notebooks and tablet, and set off towards the study room in my village.

The paper I was translating is titled “Valeur critique de la mystique plotienne’’ by Jean Troulliard. This is a highly specialized work containing lots of Neoplatonic jargon and a fair amount of ancient Greek and Latin. Also, did I mention that ‘translation’ was a course reserved for 6th year Frech? The year I happened to drop?

Luckily, there are many tools these days to facilitate translation. Large language models are an order of magnitude more adept at translation compared to traditional digital methods such as google translate, and the availability of digital online dictionaries further facilitates the process.

The first problem I had to solve however was getting the document in a machine readable format. I possessed only a scan of the document which I put through an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program to get the paper in text from. This was actually fairly accurate. The program struggled slightly with the French quotation marks << and >>, and it completely botched the Greek, footnote markers, and occasionally interpreted a speck on the lens as a period or comma.

So I went through the entire document first in French, doing an instal pass on the spelling, punctuation, and transcribing all the Greek parts by hand.

I then fed this data in its entirety to Chat GPT (it is 2024 after all) and put that output into a latex document.

I went thought his document as I normally do, reading and annotating important parts whist making notes in my physical notebook for the sake of redundancy. Having already made a pass on the original French, I felt as though this went a lot faster than normal. While reading, I also improved the automatic translation here and there, mostly breaking up sentence structures which appeared rather obtuse in English, and fixing some mistakes the LLM made with philosophical jargon. For this step I was assisted by someone more versed in the romance languages and French in particular, which proved not entirely necessary, but certainly improved the translation at the end.

Whist reading, I noticed I was being a lot more critical. Usually when reading paper like these, I just take what the author says for granted while reading (unless it is particularly outrageous) and reflect critically at a later date. Now however, I found myself scrutinizing every line – primarily for translation errors, but therefore also picking out lines which did not seem in-line with what I knew of the Neoplatonic tradition.

At the end of the day, i spent nearly six hours reading 10 pages of text, only ~12 times slower than my usual speed. Great success.

What stood out to me most about this exercise is how enjoyable and educative it was. Wanting to actually read the paper did wonders for my motivation, whereas reading French “high literature’’ in middle school was always a drag. Furthermore, I learned more about French sentence structure in these six hours than in five years of classes, and I doubt the sixth year would have helped much either. Having to transcribe the Greek by hand did wonders for my comprehension of the alphabet (which used to be shoddy at best, but is now shoddy at worst), and the whole project made me much more excited about reading French texts in the Future.

All of that is to say: (middle) school language classes (and classes in many other areas for that matter) have failed me and almost everyone I know. They both fail to actually teach, and suck so much joy out of learning that people develop permanent aversions towards certain topics. I was convinced by my teachers that I was not good at languages. Now I am fluent in two, capable in two others, and a beginner in yet another pair, whist knowing phrases and basics for a handful of languages in various families.

I sincerely hope that the educational system has improved since I left, but given that its main focus currently seems to be ‘modernizing’ – id est: giving 4 year olds personal laptops and/or tablets, so they can stay glued to a screen even at school -- I am not expecting much.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

For more information about making a moral impact, search for “giving what we can’’, “give well’’, or “effective altruism’’.

Just the other day, I took a trip (less than 15 meters) to the local e-waste disposal site. Unfortunately, the screen of my ereader broke a while back. After letting my old friend collect dust for a month or so, I decided to finally put him to rest and commit him to the recycling bin.

While I was there however, something caught my attention from the corner of my eye: an Apple mac mini. It looked in pretty good condition, so I decided to take it home to see if I could repair it, or otherwise strip it for parts. Luckily, the previous owner had thrown away the power cord as well, so i took that too.

Upon getting home, I hooked the mac up to the only HDMI display in my house: The living room TV and pressed the power button. Much to my surprise, the machine started up straight away and I was greeted by Mac OSX snow leopard. Yea... This thing was pretty old, but I’ll get back to that later.

The system logged in automatically, and I was greeted by the classic purple galaxy background and a desktop filled with someone else’s personal files. I set my sights on factory resetting the mac, as I felt it rather unethical to dig through the other person’s accounts and files. Resting the mac proved rather difficult, as I had no password, and the recovery partition was missing.

No matter, I happen to know a little trick for breaking in to macs from the time when I used to have a macbook (which, much like this mac mini, was also from 2010). Simply enter the shell during startup by holding command+S, mount the disk and remove the file /var/db/.applesetupdone. This allows you to make a new administrator account on the next startup. Which, may I just say, is a stupidly easy way of bypassing password protections, especially on a product made by a company which prides itself on security. I will just assume that this exploit is fixed in later versions of OSX.

Anyway, now that I had an admin account, I could start exploring the OS. The first thing I noticed was that basically the entire internet was not working. Or rather https was not working. Safari gave me very helpful error messages such as “failed to establish a connection to ...’’ while Chrome told me the clock was set wrong (it wasn’t). The problem was of course that the certificates expired, since the OS was not updated in over a decade.

I managed to get the certificates from curl, and add to the keycain using a little shell script. At this point I did realize why the original owner thew the thing away though. This is not a problem that is easy to diagnose for a non-tech-savvy person, let alone fix.

Next, I started looking for a more up-to-date browser. The version of safari on this thing could not render most modern web pages (though of course my website and many other small-web pages loaded just fine). I found a number of discontinued projects before settling on Interweb. This one was also discontinued, though it was the most recently updated one.

After all of that the OS works... Not great exactly. It is remarkably snappy given how many animations and shaders the desktop environment has, but the software stack from 2010 is just not usable, at this point it is just a DVD player.

I will probably try to get Linux running, and I did see an some DDR3 ram sticks for sale second hand for only around 10 euros, so I might see if this could be a capable enough little media server. If not, a media server, I might set it up with ssh and just run the thing headless. Having a non-cloud based wireless backup for my thesis and other important documents would be nice, even if it is on spinning rust. Now that I think about it, that would be very simple to do, even under OSX.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

For more information about making a moral impact, search for “giving what we can’’, “give well’’, or “effective altruism’’.

I became a pescetarian at age 11, following in the footsteps of my older sister, who I though was rather cool for making the same choice just a few months earlier. Years later, at age 22, I followed in the footsteps of another rather cool woman and became vegan.

Now, due to my long history of eating a somewhat restricted diet, I do not have the problems most people report when switching to veganism or vegetarianism. I do not struggle with the desire to eat meat, nor do I consider vegan meals sad or unsatisfying. Also, even while I was pescetarian, I enjoyed most the flavours brought by the vegetables, though I did eat a considerable amount of cheese and eggs.

Regardless, switching to veganism was not that difficult for me. I couldn’t really afford to buy fish, this entire country is devoid of actually flavourful cheese, I use soy milk for its longer shelf-life, and I can live without eggs. Some difficulties arose when it came to eating out, or getting ready-made meals from the supermarket, though these were minor gripes compared to the thing I will complain about today: Vegan foods, are not energy dense.

Ever since I became vegan, my meal sized have doubled in size, and that is not an exaggeration. I try my best to include many energy dense items such as nuts, oils, and legumes, but I still find myself chewing down mountains of food.

All of this food is rather exhausting to prepare. For instance, I went from egg-cheese-tomato sandwiches and alike for lunch to cooked meals, as the only lunch-appropriate sandwich accoutrements are humus and vegetables. Furthermore, the sheer volume means more time spent chopping, frying, boiling, and roasting. Which does not even address the fact that vegetables generally just have longer cook times (you can of course eat them raw though).

Aside from energy spent preparing, the energy and time I spent eating and digesting has also increased quite drastically. And I frequently end up with a full stomach, whist also knowing full-well that I am not nutritionally satisfied.

At this point I should mention a few confounding factors. Firstly, I am trying to gain weight, which definitely exaggerates the portion problems. Secondly, I work out rather frequently and I work a rather intense manual labour job. All of this is on top of university work, and the brain is a rather calorie intensive organ.

However, when I bring these matters up to other vegans I receive many similar stories. At the end of the day, non-vegan foods are just more dense, and their general lack of fiber allows for easier digestion (and fewer toilet breaks) for better and for worse.

I will not be returning to Pescetarianism, not will I go full omnivore or vegetarian, I am happy with my choice, and I do generally feel better. I do however wish I knew about this problem before I made the switch. As such, for any prospective vegans out there: Consider how much time you have to cook, consider how much time you have to eat, consider how many bathroom breaks you can afford. Above all though, consider how I had to increase my time budget for all of these threefold and how I am still content with my decision.

Lastly, I will mention that there is a period of adjustment. In the first few weeks of vegan weight gain at maximum exercise and work, my body was destroyed and I could barely get up after a meal, even if I spread it out over several hours. Now though, my body seems much better adjusted to this way of life. I can eat a meal without needing to sleep right after. I have gotten better at cooking and incorporating energy-dense ingredients (boil your rice with yellow lentils and almonds *game changer*), and my digestive system seems to have adapted to the massive increase in fiber without a massive increase in flatulence.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

For more information about making a moral impact, search for “giving what we can’’, “give well’’, or “effective altruism’’.

An appeal to nature is a argumentative fallacy where something is assumed to be good because it is natural. For a long time as a young child and early adolescent, I have been guilty of employing this line of reasoning in many decisions regarding my lifestyle. I suspect this mode of thinking is something I inherited form my parents.

As I grew older and become a teenager, I started to question the teachings of my parents, and one of the things which was addressed were the many appeals to nature made in my life-choices. Now that I am yet-again older, I decided that, at age 14 – wile pumping hormones and sleeping 11 hours per afternoon – I was likely not smarter than my parents, teachers, government, etcetera. Since discovering this ground-shaking fact, I have made an effort to try an rethink every decision or pattern-of-thought which I started in that period, and as-such, the appeal to nature reared its head again.

Let me use an example: getting a cold. My parents would address this annual issue by making me take rest, hot-baths, much sleep, and otherwise letting my body take care of itself. This approach is contrasted by the alternative of using medication to squash the disease. Of course, there are many grades between these two, but that is not exactly relevant at the moment. As a child, I would not be given medicine unless a cold was sufficiently bad, I am sure my parents had various metrics for this, such as duration or fever, and I do not question their judgement as they are both smart people, and since my mother has extensive medical training.

As an adult, I am the one to decide whether I take medicine, hot-baths, or whether I afford myself an afternoon off. This problem is compounded by the fact that I have grown a lot more sickly these past few years, likely due an increase in travel as well as living in a student dorm with a rotating selection of international viruses. Now, I have never been a fan of taking medicine for minor illnesses like colds, though I am even less inclined to being sick, and I cannot stand bed-rest for more than 24 hours.

One thing which still remains in the back of my mind as I am deciding whether to opt for medicine or not, is the idea that I can just let my immune system handle it “naturally’’. The supposedly fallacious appeal to nature still has a strong pull, despite the fact that every learned person tells me this is wrong. Upon revisiting my stance on this, I came to a conclusion: an appeal to nature is not necessarily fallacious, though it must be understood in the proper manner.

I came to this conclusion because relying on “natural’’ things (as opposed to artificial ones) generally does a great job at keeping me safe. The reason for this is, I believe, the fact that natural things have stood the test of time. If research came out tomorrow stating that vegetables such as zucchini or pumpkin (which humans have eaten for generations) are actually unequivocally harmful, then I would doubt that research before I doubt the squash family. Likewise, I rather more distrust medicines which were invented recently and tested “only’’ for about a year, as opposed to natural remedies such as rest or herbal medicines which have stood the test of time. Of course, the artificial medicine is likely much more effective, though it is statistically more likely to have negative side-effects too.

Looking at appeals to nature in this manner, where they are really appeals to endurance, I think my choices become much more clear. Natural remedies have proven themselves over time to deal with colds just fine. At the same time, we cannot extend this to more serious infections such as bacterial meningitis, which has proven itself to be quite deadly when left to nature.

Taking this idea outside of medicine I think it also applies very well. Every day, I hear new research come out about processed foods, sugar, tobacco and about how damaging they are. While many of these products supposedly had scientific backing with peer-reviewed double-blind studies, we now know these studies are basically bought-off by large corporations. Things which have stood the test of time however such as vegetables, fruits, herbs, and such are unlikely to have been bought-off by some ancient conglomerate aiming to sell more nutrients.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

For more information about making a moral impact, search for “giving what we can’’, “give well’’, or “effective altruism’’.

Recently, I got a fairly sizable Christmas bonus from the restaurant where I work part time. This bonus came in the form of a so-called "universal gift card". This "universal" gift card was in fact not universal in any meaningful sense of the word. I know if the existence of actual universal gift cards which are just prepaid VISA or MasterCards which you can use at any store or even online. This gift card on the other hand is simply one which can be used in roughly 6000 stores throughout the country. They are not usable online, nor in other countries. To make long story short: they are not universal in the slightest.

Given then, the small selectional stores, combined with the fairly high value of the card, I started thinking about what to spend this it on. At first my mind went to clothing. The card is usable in H&M and many other clothing stores, though I quickly realized that most of my clothing is still quite adequate and I do not need to buy anything new, though I could potentially use another formal outfit. Secondly my mind went to home decoration. There are quite a few places on the 6000 "universal" list where I can buy candles, plants, picture-frames or any such items. Though my apartment is already adequately decorated. The card is also usable in various consumer electronic stores where I could buy things like wireless headsets, wireless earphones, or an android TV box for my living room. Once again, I realized that I would not I bought these things under any other circumstance and getting a gift card like this.

On the one hand that is rather nice. Getting this gift card allowed me to treat myself in ways I wouldn’t usually. In this regard the card is much the same as most other gifts I received this season. My family gave me a set of books, which I would usually not have bought, at the very least not in physical copy. On the other hand, I feel like this card is encouraging needless consumerism in much the same way as gift-giving holidays tend to do. Historically, whenever Christmas, Valentines, or my birthday came around, I set about the monumental task of coming up with a gift for myself. In recent years I have stopped doing this under the morale “if I have to think long and hard about what I want, then those are not things I need’’. I am lucky in the fact that my partner agrees with me on this matter, and as-such, we don’t give each other gifts at all, unromantic as that may seem to people. The wider family is however not yet on board, making the build-up to many holidays a question of what would be nice gifts which are also things we already would buy regardless (socks and underwear are frequent items).

Going back to the Christmas bonus then: If I had just received value of the card as an addition to my paycheck I would have spent the money in the more utilitarian manner. Though I don’t think that would have felt very much like a gift. For the same reason, I do not just want to sell the card for someone else and save up the money earned or invest it; I am really rather at a loss for what to to.

As a quick aside, I completely understand why my employer decided to give the Christmas bonus this way. There’s always the slight apprehension of people to give money. And furthermore I assume that this method has many tax benefits as opposed to increasing the paycheck for December.

While looking over all the eligible stores, I noticed that the gift card is also usable at select supermarkets. Using the card in this manner I can just use it to reduce my monthly expenses while staying roughly equally utilitarian. The supermarkets are of course the most expensive ones in town, rather than those I typically go to. And besides, I think it would be rather more fun to spend this gift on a singular big purchase which lasts some time, rather than a few weeks of ever temporary groceries.

Currently, the approach that I feel most strong towards is using the card itself for groceries while setting aside the value of the card in actual money for a purchase of my choosing at a store of my choosing in a country of my choosing. This would basically translate the gift card into an actual universal one by using it on something I would already spend money on. At that point, many more appealing options open up to me, including using the money to go out for dinner, take a vacation, or donate to charity.

I am open to suggestions though. I am particularly curious how others reconcile the notion that gifts must be “something nice’’ in contrast to a usual pattern of frugal-, utilitarian- spending. This goes for cards like these, but also for generic gifts such as those given for Christmas and birthdays. All thoughts are welcome: <blog@wester.digital>

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

For more information about making a moral impact, search for “giving what we can’’, “give well’’, or “effective altruism’’.

For the longest time (really since I started getting remotely serious about writing my own software, my language of choice has been POSIX shell. The shell is the environment through which one interacts with a unix-like operating system, and shell-script are simply combinations of interactions which combine to achieve pretty monumental things.

I always knew that shell scripting had its limitations. Though it was mostly fine for my purposes. After some recent issues with the shell however, I have switched away from it. My scripting language of preference is now python, though the transition is strange, as the two languages are designed for entirely different purposes. This post will detail the reasons I switched away from shell as well as the difficulties I have had switching to python.

The primary reason I moved away from shell scripting now, as opposed to earlier is that I cannot reliably run shell scripts on my current system. As I have mentioned in several previous posts now, my main computer interface is currently an iPad app called a-shell. a-shell uses dash for its shell processing, though the port is extremely buggy and lacking in some fairly basic features[1]. This is what finally propelled me away from shell scripting, but there were many problems I was already encountering beforehand, so let’s explore these too.

1. Standardisation

POSIX is a set of standards for various pieces of software which includes standards of how a POSIX-compliant shell should operate. One major problem with these standards is that they are poorly adhered to. The GNU project is particularly guilty of this, in that it extends POSIX software with many non-POSIX features. While these features are sometimes great, I cannot properly make use of them because I do not know if a system I am targeting is using the GNU-extended utilities or the base-POSIX ones.

This opens up to a wider point that I cannot write a shell script and expect it to perform reliably on any given system. Minor differences in the way a shell is implemented can cause an entire script to fail or output wrong data. I actually had this problem recently, where my shell wanted newline characters to be written as follows ’\\n’ whereas the system I was targeting wanted ’\n’. This meant I could not test the software locally before pushing it to the production server, which was of course highly frustrating and time-consuming. A more common case is the use of ‘echo‘. Echo has various switches in various shell implementations. Sometimes echo will interpret escape sequences, sometimes it will just print them literally, sometimes the -n switch makes it so echo does not terminate in a newline, sometimes it just prints the string ’-n’. Echo is virtually unusable in shell scripting targeting multiple systems for this exact reason and printf is often recommended instead.

2. Intended use

Why does echo work in such varying ways? Well because the shell was never intended for programming. It was intended for interacting with your system. This is also why bare-POSIX shells lack the functionality real programming languages have. At its core, the shell is meant to interact with other programs on the system, such as sed, grep, awk, cat, etcetera. GNU’s bash shell makes an effort to push the shell closer towards being a proper programming language by adding things like reading files and processing substring directly in the shell without needing to rely on cat and cut respectively.

3. External programs

What about these programs the shell is meant to interact with then? The way I see it, they are the greatest blessing and curse of shell scripting. Basically, it is incredibly easy to call upon a program installed on the system and equally easy to make it interact with other programs. However, if you are targeting multiple systems, you do not know exactly which programs are installed, and which versions. Here we once again encounter the problem of GNU-extended software and undefined behaviour.

Furthermore, because the shell can basically only do basic string manipulations, your programs will likely heavily rely on calling external programs (especially the core utilities) to achieve anything noteworthy. Your shell script will act more as glue to hold the various ’real’ programs together. With this being the case however, if there is no program to perform the task you need, you are basically out of luck. This once again goes to show, that shell is not (and does not intoned to be) a programming language.

If these problems were already always present in the shell however, then why did I choose to use it regardless? Well the answer is simple: I needed a lot of glue. I often found myself in situations where I had data of one format (usually given by a program) and I needed that same data in a different format for use in another program or for my own consumption. This is exactly what shell script excel at. I would still use shell script for this purpose if the dash port on a-shell was more stable.

Now I am using python for translating data in this manner, but this is often much more complicated. Getting input data from a command is doable in python, but nowhere near as easy as it is in shell scripts (where you literally JUST write the command you want the output from). Outputting data is also more difficult. In shell, one can use pipes or redirects to pass data to a command or file respectively, in python, there are several steps involved in either of these processes, in addition to the need of libraries.

The static site generator for this blog is now a little python script rather than a shell script. Honestly the shell script started out incredibly simple, relying really only on the standard utility ‘head‘. Things quickly grew complicated though, with me using several dozen regex strings in sed to get both html, gopher, and rss output working. While version 0.1 of my site builder was mush more simple in shell, the monster it grew into was much easier to understand in python, where it was also more flexible. As such, translating the script to python allowed me to make some quality of life changes, and it will also make future development easier.

Most importantly though. The python implementation is stable, and works in exactly the same way on any system running the same version. If you wish to see my current implementation, it is available on my GitHub page at user18130814200115-2/plain.wester.digital.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

For more information about making a moral impact, search for “giving what we can’’, “give well’’, or “effective altruism’’.

For the past week or so, I have had a quite delightful morning routine. Well I say routine, there is one particular item which starts my day, and that is building a fire. I am currently staying in Northern Italy, which is by no means as cold as my home town (at the time of writing, there is a 15 degree temperature difference, and the weekend there will reach around -20 Celsius compared to +8 here), but it is nevertheless cold enough to warrant heating the house. And in this particular house, this is done trough two wood stoves.

As such, every morning starts with cleaning out the ashes, brushing the hearth and wiping the glass. Afterwards, I head out into the back yard to gather some firewood from our stores. I have to pick a mix of sizes and types of wood: flash tinder, kindling, smaller sticks, branches, and logs. The fist to get the fire going, and the latter to keep it going without intervention every few minutes. At this point, I start constructing the fire, open up the vents for strong airflow and wait for some small flames to form. By the time the branches are on, coffee will be ready and the living room will slowly start heating up.

If all of this sounds incredibly tedious to you, well... in a sense you would be correct. Building a fire like this is rather more time-consuming on a day-to-day basis than a central heading system using radiators, or a heat-pump-system for that matter. Keeping the fire going also requires getting more wood from the stores and stacking it on every two hours or so. However, both building and marinating the fire are delightfully simple tasks, perfect to get my body moving in the morning and keep my brain snoozing for a little while. After the cleaning, I rouse my brain and start what is essentially a process of creative problem solving. Every day, the kindling is different, the airflow, heat of the stove, humidity of the tinder; there are simply too many variables to keep in mind. So: You just light your kindling and see if you can get and ember to turn into a flame. If something is not working: check the airflow, maybe the chimney, and more likely: the wood.

A central heating system (which heats my apartment in the freezing North) does not require such creative problem solving. But what if the system breaks? Well, at that point the complexity of the problem is likely so high that I cannot fix it on my own. Calling a mechanic is essentially my only refuge, and this becomes a tedious task, rather than a menial but enjoyable one as with building the fire and maintaining the stove.

After I realized this link between simple systems and the joy I have in using them, I started seeing these matters all around the house. The dishwasher? Tedious, especially when it breaks. There is a certain method to stacking the plates and bowls to ensure maximum cleaning, which is somewhat enjoyable at the best of times, but on the average day, it is just annoyingly time-consuming and inefficient on space. Washing dishes by hand in comparison is a largely mindless endeavour, but one I find myself enjoying more than loading-, unloading-, and maintaining- the dishwasher.

Nothing frustrates me quite as mush as a cold shower (when I want a warm one), or a clogged drain while I am already in the shower. On the other hand, in those cases where I have had to wash myself using a bucket of water, the process has been enjoyable in much the same way. A sort of rustic monotony where all problems are ones I can solve in the moment without any particular skills. Even those times where my bucket was filled with ice-cold water, placed outside, in -15 degree weather, the process was more enjoyable than those times that my shower refused to go those two degrees higher to where I wanted it.

At this point, I want to draw this idea of rustic monotony to another endeavour of mine, that being programming. I have been taking part in Advent Of Code 2023. For the uninitiated: Advent of Code is a typical advent calender for the month of December where each day introduces a new programming challenge which you can solve using whatever methods you please. I joined in midway through December, and as such am just on day 17 right now, though I do not think I will finish the entire calendar.

You see, the early challenges in this calendar were rather simple. I solved them using my usual tools (mostly sed actually) and it was an enjoyable 15-30 minute practice to give my brain something to chew on during winter break. As the days continued however, the problems became more complex. Fairly quickly, the performance and instability of shell scripts on my machine got in the way of the programming. These shortcomings of the dash port on my iPad are not problems I can solve, only ones I can work around. Alternatively I can call a mechanic (send a GitHub issue about my problem) and wait probably several month for it to be fixed (if at all). Instead I switched to Python. At this point, I was no longer solving little problems, I was writing full programs. The days continued, and now I am here implementing full scale algorithms such as Dijkstra’s, and troubleshooting each program for up to a full hour. For some of the problems, if my initial code did not work, I has literally no clue where to start fixing the problem (or even diagnosing it for that matter). It usually involves writing a lot of code to get more verbose output, slowing down that output to something manageable, and then squinting and making minor adjustments for up to one hour. What started as a 15-30 minute brain-teaser became a time sink several hours deep. Most frustrating where there problems where I got a working solution, only to be asked in part two, to run those calculations 1 000 000 times, a task the efficiency of my code was in no state to do.

I don’t find fixing problems like this fun, it is a frustrating and time-consuming task. The same goes for optimizing code. Whereas those first few days were building a fire, adding simple steps together one at the time, ended with me building a central heating system, drawing blueprints, researching algorithms, optimizing piping, and a lot of headaches.

I will be trying to make a greater effort to include rustically enjoyable things in my life, and I will be trying to replace as many painfully complex systems with human-sized ones. This likely won’t be easy and even making such transitions will be time-consuming and difficult (watch out for a future post titled "Make and effort to make it effortless"), but I think such transitions are worth it. Thinking back, this is the reason I originally became interested in the command line interfaces, old flip phones and feature phones.

This blog is in essence also a rustic-refuge. Writing post on here is dreadfully simple. And while my site-builder script is more complex than I would like (it was extended to deal with rss and gopher aside from html, accounting for the extra size), the writing of that script is now behind me. And I can focus on writing in plaintext, wrapped to 65 columns and decorating it with ASCII art and white space. Just what I need on an otherwise uneventful evening where my only task is to keep the fire going and the house heated.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

For more information about making a moral impact, search for “giving what we can’’, “give well’’, or “effective altruism’’.

I tend to enjoy many different types of fiction written by a variety of authors. One of the most interesting aspects of any fictional work is, in my opinion, the way it reflects the character of the author. If there is something the author deeply cares about, the it will undoubtedly show up somewhere in the story they are crafting. Likewise, if a character appears whose ideals are strongly contrary to those of the writer, the end-result is often that these characters feel shallow and dim. Good authors can feel the same passion for a given subject as the author does. An exceptional writer will also be able to arouse these feelings for subjects which the author is not personally invested in.

All of that is to say: Fiction can make one care about things which one would otherwise be entirely unconcerned with. In doing so, I think fiction can have an impact on the word at large that is powerful and unique. Fiction does not affect our beliefs in the same manner as a lecture, or an argument. Instead, it stirs our emotions to make us care about new things, or bring to our attention new perspectives which we previously had no emotional investment in. It is for this reason that I include many references to fictional works in my professional academic writing. It is for this reason also that I cannot politics in many works for fiction, let me explain.

In many works of fiction I consume, be they books, video games, movies or other side, there is this trend to present political opinions are a sort of lecture. Whenever a particular political viewpoint is brought up, the reader is assured of how commonsensical or normal it is. I tend to find that liberal authors are particularly persistent about this. Often lecturing the audience that homosexuality, abortion, egalitarianism, socialism, non-binary genders, sexual promiscuity, female power, black power, and other such concerns are to be supported as the entirely commonsensical and morally correct options. By telling the audience these points instead of showing them, the work becomes both less impactful and less realistic. I will first cover the realm point, as this is – by far – the less important of the two.

To demonstrate the point about realism, let me use an example: There is a series of books which has been slowly releasing over the past few years called: “Tales of a new world’’ by P.C. Cast. One of the things which stood out to me in this book is the treatment of homosexuality. In the first part of the series, a big point is made by one of the characters about how normal homosexual relationships are in their society, about how “love is love’’, and how the choice of one’s partner is only up to the two people involved. These statements only really make sense in a society where homosexuality is not yet full normalized. After all, if you consider something truly normal, then one would not really think to mention it.

For instance: I do not consider it exceptional enough to mention that I use toilet paper, as this is normal in my corner of the world. If I used a bidet, I would mention this as exceptional, though perhaps not if I lived in some Asian countries, where paper is the exception, and bidet’s the norm. Imagine a work of fiction where a character suddenly goes off on a two-page tangent about how normal it is for them to be heterosexual. You would find it strange that such an explicit mention would me made right? In fiction you can even make use of this strangeness.

In the aforementioned book, there is a scene where two people of different societies discuss relationships. We are told that their respective societies accept homosexuality as nothing different from heterosexuality, though homosexuality is given exceptional treatment in the dialog. However, one can make use of the feeling of surprise we feel when something we presume to be normal is not considered such by someone else:

“With us it is customary for the male to present the female with a gift to start a relationship.’’ “Oh, but what if two females enter into a relationship? Is there any gift giving then? And what of two males?’’

“I tend to use toilet paper’’ “Of course! Is there any other option?’’ “Well, in my country it is customary to use bidets’’

By using the notion of being surprised at a statement, shows that, for the relevant character, it is entirely normal that two same-sex people might enter into a relationship, or that one would use toilet paper. I bring up the example of homosexuality mostly because I grew up in an environment where homosexuality was considered very normal, and therefore did not warrant special coverage. Growing up, my mother would sometimes enquire whether I had a boyfriend or girlfriend yet. At school, we would talk about marriage; not gay-marriage and traditional-marriage, just marriage.

Now, let me cover the second problem: that lecturing your audience works against your intentions and detracts from the power of fiction. I mentioned how fiction can make us *care* in a way that other forms of media can not. When a story pauses to affirm an stance, make an argument, or otherwise lecture the reader, it takes away from this power, and to me it always feels like such considerations are shoehorned into the narrative.

I lost count of the sheer number of fictional works I have read which take time to affirm that the choice to terminate a pregnancy is the inalienable right of the pregnant woman in question. But simply affirming this will do nothing to convince anyone opposed to your view, and those readers who already agree will most likely just skip over this line. For me: I get annoyed every time it rears its head in a story exactly because fiction has the power to actually promote such beliefs!

Imagine if someone wrote a story which contained a young woman who was struggling with an unwanted pregnancy (if I wanted to convince as many pro-lifers as possible, I would make this a sub-plot of a side-character). Use whatever narrative you like here: she was young and did not oversee the consequences of her actions, she was coerced into having sexual relations, she was assured my a contraceptive agent which ended up failing, you name it. If you show her personal struggle coming to terms with her situation, allow the audience together with the character to realize the fact that she is not ready to raise a child, and show how this all impacts the girl’s physical and mental well-being, you might actually get typically pro-life people to *care* about the situation this girl finds herself in. You might show, with another supporting character the impact it can have on one’s well-being to have another person supporting them. This person does not need to agree with the girl’s decisions or feelings, but must simply refrain from judging or shaming her.

Such as story can bring to the eyes of the audience the real struggles involved in complicated moral issues. Struggles which -- due to being highly emotional in nature – are often not brought up in arguments, debates, or generalized statements. Bringing to light the sheer complexity of the issue will, at the very least, make some people think a little deeper and harder about their stance. The recipe above can also easily be adapted for a pro-life argument, which will have much more impact than forcing a statement such as “abortion is murder’’ into a work of fiction.

I started writing this post because I was reading the final part of Cast’s “Tales of a New World’’. In this final book, I found the lectured politics to be even more invasive than before. This book preaches especially heavily about the superiority of women as leaders. About how men caused the downfall of a society long ago, how women are better because they are caring, calm, and capable of bearing life, etcetera. Not only can I not detect any actual passion behind the words of the various characters who affirm these beliefs, I can in no way bring myself to care. If the author instead showed a thriving society where women ruled, one which thrives exactly because men are not allowed to rule, then one might begin to entertain the idea. In Cast’s book, one it TOLD that various societies thrive because of their female leadership, but Cast never SHOWS us this, thereby breeding no investment in entertaining this idea. Instead, I think lecturing like this just affirms the believes of radical feminists, and just angers conservatives and egalitarians, thus allowing more discord to breed between them.

Before I finish, I want to make one quick point of clarification: I realized why reading over what I have written so-far that this post sounds a lot like: “liberal politics are ruining fiction and I am upset about it’’. In truth, I am upset, but not because of the flavour of politics presented. I am upset exactly because I care about many of the topics I am lectured about in the books I read. It is because I care about these topics that I am so dissatisfied with the lecture-approach. Fiction has a real and unique way of influencing the world at large, but this is not the way to do it. Instead, liberal authors are cementing people in their beliefs, thus quite literally breeding conservative sentiment.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

For more information about making a moral impact, search for “giving what we can’’, “give well’’, or “effective altruism’’.

Magic is a large part of very form of fiction, and – for me at least – also a large part of getting enjoyment out of everyday life. ‘Magic’ in this case refers to a way of explaining certain phenomena in the world. Bad explanations go along the lines of: “its magic, now be quiet’’. The other end contains overly detailed explanations. Bordering on the edge of science, even if the science is fictional. When magic is well done in a work of fiction, it always fills me with the giddy sense of excitement. The explanations given dance just at the border of what I can understand, and this sets my imagination going like nothing else.

So then, let us look at some examples of magical systems in popular fiction, explain why must of them are terrible at intriguing me, and follow all of this up with some real world magic.

Harry Potter

On of the most popular fictional works containing so-called magic is probably Harry Potter. Love it or hate it, the Harry Potter franchise has been extremely influential to fiction as a whole, and I can think of few people who have not read at least one of the books, or seen a single movie.

That being said, the magic system in Harry Potter is terrible, truly amongst the worst, here is why: How does magic work in the Harry Potter universe? You say a spell, you flick a sick around, though sometimes you do not speak, and sometime you do not flick, oh and you need to be born a wizard, which is a largely random process. This system explains practically nothing, as most spell-based magical systems do. Harry Potter goes the extra mile in lack-of-explanation by not even explaining where the energy used to perform magics comes from.

Let me first address spellcasting more generally. Spellcasting, in its most basic form is the utterance of a phrase. The main question that arises when you implement a system like this is: Why that phrase? What is it about that combination of sounds that causes the big magic to happen? Is someone or something listening? If not, why must the sounds be vocalized at all? Spellcasting can be implemented properly however, and the systems that do are often among the most satisfying, but Harry Potter is not one of them.

Then there are wands and their movements. Magic, in Harry Potter, is seemingly an inherent trait you are born with, that much is explained to us. We know that wizards and witches can perform magic without a wand, though possession of a proper wand allows for the focussing of energy like a lens. This much I can accept, and I actually like about HP’s system. I would still like to know where the energy comes from, but this is certainly a start.

Thus wizards have or use energy through their wands, and making the right sounds either kills a guy, or makes him grow a bear. By not explaining the spells at all, there is very little room for the imagination to play. We know that mispronouncing the levitation spell can cause you to spontaneously combust, but there is not explanation as to why. Let us say we are speaking in a language where float and explode sound very similar, then we might have some room to fantasize. What if I used the hand motions of float, but instead I said boat, would that summon an aeroplane? That sort of thing.

Avatar the last airbender

Let’s look at a slightly better system: Avatar (the one with the tattooed monk, not the blue aliens). In Avatar, it is presupposed that every person has some sort of life force or energy flowing through them. Some people, called benders know how to shape this life force in order to manipulate the elements: water air, fire, and earth. This manipulation functions by moving one’s body and the energy within it, and we can see this in action both in the comics and the television show. If a fire-bender moves their weight forward and thrusts an open palm forwards, they might generate a large cloud of fire, whereas the same movement with two outstretched fingers generates a finely concentrated stream of fire, or even lightning.

This system works so well at its core because it uses fairly commonsensical concepts and combines them in a way you can grasp, even though it is still fictional. We know a thing or two about energy, we feel it when we become excited or angry, we feel its absence when we are tired. We also know a thing or two about manipulating the word through moving our limbs around. The fact that Avatar borrows from Chinese folklore and martial arts only aids in our understanding and the air of mystery surrounding it.

You can start to fantasise about certain motions combined with certain elements. The story even encourages this as certain characters use the motions of water bending with the energy of fire bending. You can envision your own moves and variations, you can think of synergies and strategies, either borrowing from martial arts, or simply letting your imagination run loose.

When it comes to explaining why only certain people can bend certain elements however, the magic falls apart for me. In essence, it has something to do with reincarnation and giant lion turtles who granted certain people the ability to bend at some time in their past lives. But if the system is all about learning to manipulate energy and moving your body, then why do we need to be imbued with this gift? To me, some of the magic is lost in this explanation, as it makes the whole bending idea much more otherworldly then it otherwise was.

Unsong

Now, let us turn to one of my favourite implementations of magic in all of fiction: Unsong. In the world of Unsong, there are two forms of magic: names of God, and placebomancy. In order to explain both of these, some background is needed. The world of Unsong adheres to the biblical story of creation for the most part. However, after a war between the hosts of heaven and the hosts of hell, one angel: Uriel, decided to reprogram the world into the probabilistic system of atoms and forces we know today. Before this time, everything in existence was a direct expression of God’s numerous faculties. After the restructuring of reality, history progresses as we know it, up until the space race. During one of the Apollo missions, humans attempt to orbit the moon and end up crashing into the crystal sphere that surrounds the earth. This sphere kept out the divine light and kept the world functioning probabilistically and all that.

With the sphere cracked, a tiny amount to divine light is let back in. This means that everything in existence is now a little more an expression of God than it was before. Words previously just expressed things in existence, but now they also express God. The things in existence these words used to refer to also express God, and so there is not a connection between the thing and its expression, between the map and the territory. These two influence each other in both directions. Founding a town will cause it to be put on a map, but putting a town on a map may just as well cause people to settle there.

In the world of Unsong, that certain phrases express God’s faculties more clearly than others. These are the names of God, and they have various effects, such as making you bulletproof, walk on water, or become invisible. They do so by clearly expressing God’s indestructible nature, His weightless, His obscurity, etcetera. A name of God is an expression of ultimate reality, and an expression of reality is no different from reality itself. However, this is – by far – the less interesting system of the two form of magic in Unsong.

The second system is called placebomancy and it neatly encapsulates all forms of magic. Spells? got those, potions? got those, Avatar-esque bending? yes sir. A placebomancer attempts to convince reality that a certain thing ought to happen. Placebomancers use the entire narrative for their acts, carrying a mystique, having mysterious backstories, and ensuring esoteric places to perform their rituals. The reason this works is that, since the sky cracked, reality is not as stable as it used to be, and if you can convince it somehow that what you are doing ought to make fire shoot from your fingers, then that is what will happen. The stories we tell each other are a part of reality, therefore: wearing a robe and waving a wand helps to convince reality that you are doing magic.

What is great about this system is that it simply uses a facet of the fundamental functioning of Unsong’s world: the way we express things is just as real as those things themselves. Furthermore, it is inherently limited, which explains nicely why everyone is not just placebomancing their way into paradise on earth. Sure you MIGHT be able to convince reality that the devil never existed, but the devil very strongly believes that he does, and so do many others. Then again, if you can find a convincing narrative, the world lies at your feet.

Both of these systems are things you can grasp, but not quite fully comprehend, thus leaving space for your imagination to fill in the blanks. This is the real magic at play here. No words on a page can make magic to the same extent your own imagination can. Thus, let us finally move on to real magic.

Magic in the real world

With real-word magic, I do not mean spells of ice and fire, nor ritual magic or elemental bending. I simply refer to those things which have a magical air about them. Things which we can understand just well enough for them to instill a childlike wonder in us and set our imaginations working. These things excite and intrigue us. Too-simple and they are not magical at all, too complicated, and it is science.

Let’s start with a personal example: audio cassettes. Audio cassettes work by putting air vibrations onto magnetic tape and retrieving them in the reverse manner. Now: I understand air vibrations, when listening to music (especially loud music) I can feel the speaker and the ground shake, I understand that this is the essence of sound. I also understand magnets. That is not to say that I necessarily grasp magnetic fields and such, but I know how magnets work, I have seen and felt them work. Expressing the vibrations of air linearly as thousands of little magnets on a tape, and spinning that tape to get the vibrations back is the essence of an audio cassette. The fact that we can do this is absolutely incredible to me, and, though I fully understand the parts, I still find it amazing that we can bend reality in this manner. In short, it is magical to me.

Staying on the topic of audio: I do not find digital music players magical in the slightest. I simply do not grasp flash-storage, digital-to-analogue converters, and transistors well enough. These are all elements squarely in the realm of science. You would not try to explain them to a child, and with an adult you would use complex theories, and a lot a math. This is neither exciting nor intriguing. Sure it is impressive, but impressive and magical are two entirely different things.

There are also systems which are too-simple to be magical. I find nothing magical about a classic gas-stove. Propane moves from the tank to the stove, it it seeps out slowly and constantly ignites itself. It is too-simple. Induction stoves on the other hand are too complicated. This also shows how subjective this magical feeling can be. To you, maybe a propane torch is magical, or maybe you grew up with so much magnetic field theory that induction stoves occupy the same space for you as cassette tapes do for me.

I honestly believe that keeping some of this magic in your life is a large part of being happy and curious about the world. These ‘magical’ things are the first places where you can learn more. You can turn your basic grasp into full understanding, at which point new magics open up to you. If you had to start your journey into electronic by understanding modern chip architecture, I am almost certain your search would never lead anywhere, it would simply be too-overwhelming. For me, magic can be found in audio cassettes, chemical photography, fermentation, pregnancies, seed germination, and so much more. For you the list might be different, but I think the effect is the same. Fiction is one way of keeping magic in your life at least. And if it is done well, it can instill a sense of wonder for the world as a whole, not just for the fictional universe where the magic originated.

I will close with one recommendation for a work of fiction, that being “The name of the Wind’’ by Patrick Rothfuss. It is the first book of a as-of-yet unfinished trilogy. And I enjoyed reading it very much. It has a great an innovative system of magic, which spiked my curiosity many time throughout the book, and the general storyline is very engaging. Above all though, it has been a while since a book managed to arouse my emotions so well. There were times I got so upset and angry at the main-character’s actions that I had to put the book down for a few days to read a different novel. There were many many times where I had to stifle a fit of giggling in the library or on public transport. And I even smiled on occasion, which is not particularly something I am known to do.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to send me an email at <blog@wester.digital>, I am especially interested in your thoughts about real-world-magic, as well as any book recommendations you might have, especially is they are works containing ~good~ magical systems.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

For more information about making a moral impact, search for “giving what we can’’, “give well’’, or “effective altruism’’.

Over the period that this blog has been offline, my tech setup has changed a lot. The devices I use, the software that runs on them, and the interpretation of my personal technology guidelines has all changed. What I think is very interesting to observe in this change is that my background ideas have stayed consistent, even though there are few similarities observable at first glance between by tech now and December of last year.

Let me first outline my principles for using technology. Electronics and I have a love-hate relationship, and we are only staying together for the kids (id est: because you cannot navigate modern society without electronics). My principles allow me to use tech in such a way that I not tempted to go full-Unabomber more than once a month (the live-in-the-woods type, not the letterbomb type). So, without further ado, here are my principles:

• The tech I use works for me, I don’t work for it
• Portability is key
• Environmental concerns trump usability
• Embrace digital minimalism

Now, I could go over every point in this list and explain exactly what I mean by it, but I think it is more interesting to display my application of these principles by looking at my old setup, and by new one. Both of these setups adhere to the principles, though to varying degrees, and with different interpretations.

The old setup

My old setup contained the following devices:

• A non-smart mobile phone (sometimes two)
• An android tablet
• A Pinebook pro laptop
• A USB webcam and Microphone
• A Lomo instant square polaroid camera
• A xDuoo 3II media player

There were some other items, such a set of cassette-walkmen (walkmans?), but those are not remarkably important to cover here. All of the items above filled a specific niche. The phones were in my pocket so I was reachable at all times by SMS and call. The android tablet was for reading books and annotating papers. The laptop was my university machine, meaning that I used it to run vim and LaTeX, follow online classes, hand in assignments, download study materials, and stay in touch with colleagues. The Lomo camera was to capture memories of various trips, hikes, and events. Lastly, the media player was there for my ever present love of music.

Now to cover the principles. With this setup, I interpreted the first principle as follows: Use simple software or build your own. If a piece of software worked against my way of doing things too much, I would modify it, or build a different system from scratch. During this period, I made various mobile apps for my Nokias including: weather info, bible reading, sudokus, tertris, Google authenticator, and other miscellaneous things. I wrote my own set of macros for the Troff typesetting system. I designed a plaintext to pdf calendar system. Lastly, I wrote basically an entire desktop environment for Linux, save for the window manager.

For portability, and environmentalism, a large consideration was battery life. The Nokias needed to be charged once per week, the xDuoo even less frequently. The camera ran on two 1.5 v batteries which lasted well over a year, and the laptop and tablet had such low power draw that I could charge them with my tiny 20w portable solar panel.

The setup was furthermore portable because I could decide exactly what to bring for every trip, carrying no more or less than I needed. This was also how I embraced digital minimalism at the time. Even though there were many devices in my daily rotation, every device was itself minimalistic, aiming to do no more or less than I required of it.

The new setup

As I said, my new setup has a very different daily rotation. I now use:

• A 6th generation iPad mini
• A 2017 Samsung galaxy A7 smartphone

Quite a shorter list eh? So what happened? When I returned to my home country over the summer, I met up with my grandparents who expressed a wish to video call me on occasion, something which was not possible with my devices at the time (because my grandparents insisted on using WhatsApp). I noted that I would consider getting an old smartphone for that purpose, though I tried to convince them to just use signal, zoom, discord, skype, or really anything that was not WhatsApp (even though I highly dislike all of these platforms). At this point, my grandfather pulled his ‘old smartphone’ from the shelf. A device which is still fully capable of performing the tasks a smartphone needs to do. The only thing that is aged about is is the USB micro-B charging port.

As such, I switched from my two beautiful Nokia flipphones to a one dual-sim- smartphone. The primary reason I fully switched, rather than just keeping the Samsung around for video calls, is that I really did not want to add yet another device to my rotation. The smartphone also came with some other benefits. Here in Norway, many, many things work using apps: Loyalty cards, public transport, banking, library cards, digital identification, two factor authentication, etcetera. For most of these services therefore, I had specific cards or devices issues by the bank, government, university, and so forth. Each of these cards and devices lived in my wallet, though switching to apps for these things, I have managed to completely get rid of my wallet, simply carrying a few cards in my phone case (cash is not a thing in Norway anyways). The smartphone also did away with the need for a separate media player and camera. Both of these devices still have their uses, one as a powerful DAC, the other for vacation pictures, but neither are now part of my daily rotation.

Thus far the story behind the smartphone, but what about the other items? Well, the android tablet started misbehaving, and it really was not suited anymore for everyday use. I decided to buy an iPad because – according to my experience with them – they last remarkably long, both in hardware and software. I furthermore wanted to try out the apple pencil for annotations, and perhaps even for notetaking during classes, rather than my paper/pen setup from back then.

While shopping for this iPad, I considered getting a slightly more capable one, such as the iPad air, and using it as my main computing device, in essence replacing my laptop. My conclusion from everything I read online at the time though, was that the software ecosystem was simply not mature enough to do this. Then, a few weeks after buying the iPad, my laptop broke down. It was not a major issue, requiring at most a day work of repairs and maybe 200 NOK in parts, but it was nevertheless annoying, and I had neither the time nor energy for the repair at the time. I decided then that I would try and see if I could get away with just the iPad.

I started looking around for apps. As I mentioned in the _old setup_ section, I used my laptop as a university device. The iPad was already capable of running all of the university software for assignments and communication, and I could access the library and remote systems without problem. The main holdup however was my writing setup. At this time, I was using LaTeX and vim. Luckily, by this time, I had stopped modifying virtually all software I used, and focused on portability by using standard and widely-available software. Nevertheless, I still needed a LaTeX compiler and a text editor for my iPad, preferably git as well, and preferably free (both as in freedom and gratis). I looked through the AppStore and tried nearly every free LaTeX app. Most of them handed the compilation off to a server, which was not suited for my purposes, and all of the ones I tried had VERY barebone-editors, there was no good-, free- git app, and really, I just wanted to go back to my comfortable tty.

It was while researching simply virtualising a Linux machine on the iPad that I encountered an app called ‘a-shell’. Not a LaTeX compiler, but a unix shell for iPad, which came with vim, git, and LaTeX. I said it in the previous post, and I will say it again: This app is THE SOLE REASON I can use the iPad as a laptop replacement. Over half of my daily screen time is spent on this app alone, and while it is clunky an limited, it is good enough for the work I need to do, that being writing. If you are a programmer, you will not be able to live on iPad OS, but if you are a writer comfortable with unix-like systems, then a-shell is the place to go.

So that is the new setup. It embraces minimalism in the number of devices (I see it as carrying around two multitools, rather than having a full toolbox), and it embraces portability, because I can bring all my tech everywhere as long as I have a small bag or cargo pants. As far as the whole ‘the device works for me’ thing, this is something which my perspective changed a lot on over the years. Previously I wanted to control everything on my devices. I did not want a single program to run without my knowledge and consent. This lead to much frustration with virtually all devices except for those running Linux, or single-purpose devices. Nowadays, I just let the device to whatever it wants as long as it does not get in my way. I use the skills I gathered in the past to modify, and manipulate my tech (especially the smartphone) to stay out of my way wherever necessary, but I no-longer care enough to do a full sweep and really clamp the device down.

That leaves us with the final principle: environmentalism. This is always a difficult topic when talking about changing what devices you use. The primary environmental problem with tech is e-waste, and I am contributing to the problem. I try to minimize my impact by giving most of my old devices new homes, and new purposes, but not many people are interested these days in a flipphone from 2005, with a glued-on keyboard and a broken display. At the very least, I used these devices to their limit, giving them use well after others had already thrown them away.

But after reuse and reduce, there is only recycle left, and I know that much of the rare-earth metals in electronic devices cannot be recycled. I hope to offset my damage a bit by donating to wildlife conservation organisations such as Mossy Earth (and I suggest you do the same), and other than that I will to keep my current devices alive as long as possible. At least the smartphone and keyboard were second-hand, though this seems a small drop in the bucket for the overall e-waste problem. One day I will likely write about the right-to-repair movement, and it impact on environmental concerns, but that day is not today.

If you have any questions or comments regarding my old-or-new setup, please send me an email. The address is <blog@wester.digital>. I would be especially interested in hearing your thoughts on breathing new life into my old devices, especially the unstable android tablet, and the old Nokias.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

For more information about making a moral impact, search for “giving what we can’’, “give well’’, or “effective altruism’’.

Hi, it has been a while hasn’t it?

For the uninitiated: I used to run a regular html/css blog on my personal home server. This ‘server’ was in fact just a raspberry pi stuffed in a shoebox which lived underneath my parents’ ISP-provided modem/router. I always knew that this system would fail some day, and living more than one thousand kilometers away, I would have no way of fixing things. This happened way back in May of 2023. I fixed the issue on a visit this summer, only for the SD-card to break itself again not a month later. All this time, I have add the itch to write, but there were two problems: First, my server was fried, and second, my static site generator was on that sever.

Yes you heard that right, I was a total [REDACTED] and kept the only version of my software on a device prone to breaking. I suffered and I learned. My old static site generator was an incredibly efficient Makefile, consisting of less than 50 lines of code. Despite its brevity, it handled: indexing, rss, styling, special pages, and more. Re-writing this system has been the main holdup for me in terms of writing.

Now, I hear you thinking: ‘it was only 50 lines of code, it could not take more than an afternoon to reproduce’. This is entirely true, however there is one other little snag: my laptop gave up life. For the record: I know what is wrong, and I know how to fix it, but the process is rather too-involved for my current schedule. As such, I have been reduced to my mobile, and the ipad I historically only used for annotating pdf’s, and dealing with modern society (in the form of banking apps, identification, loyalty cards, etcetera).

As you may know: ipads are not exactly great for programming. Granted, there are some really impressive apps out there such as ish which emulates a full x86 alpine environment, and a-shell which aims to bring a unix environment to the ipad (this is actually what I am writing this post on). These apps are incredibly impressive, and a-shell is the sole reason I can even afford to leave my laptop unimpaired for now. Nevertheless, the programmings-side-of-things is currently too clunky, making a re-write of the static site generator a much greater effort than it should be (For context, currently in a-shell, there is no way to loop over a file in it’s port of dash...).

All of this nasty weather comes with a massive silver lining though: not having access to my usual way of doing things has exposed me to many new systems which I wish to write about. That, and the fact that I have about one year worth of posts to catch up on should make for an interesting year.

With all of that preamble out of the way, let’s talk about the new blogging system. It is INCREDIBLY simple, and very scuffed, but I must say, I find it has a certain charm to it. Basically, I have a folder containing plaintext files. The first line is a title, the second the date, and the third the tags (though not even this is fixed, these three lines can contain whatever). These files are pushed to a GitHub repository where a small script is ran on them. I cannot stress enough: this script is SMALL. All it does is list the files in reverse chronological order, and grab the first three lines from each using unix head. I use some sed magic to get urls working in html, but that is it.

    ls -rc posts/* | xargs head -n 3 
    # the rest is commentary 
				

I was inspired to do things this way largely from my explorations of gopherspace. For those who do not know: Gopher is a very simple internet protocol which was around before the modern web. It essentially serves plaintext files much like this one, and has some special syntax to deal with links and such things. Gopher has been largely phased out by the growth of the web, though – as with all things – a bunch of stubborn nerds refuse to let it go. In case it is not clear: those are terms of affects, and I am such a suborn nerd.

I severely disliked gopher when I first learned of it. I saw no reason to distribute information over protocols which required specialized software to retrieve. That is not to say I liked the modern web mind you, but gopher (and gemmini for that matter) seemed like they would just require yet another application to exist on my system. This was especially frustrating because I read only one gopher phlog at the time, and I considered switching to a different application just for that a waste of time. I also hated that there were no RSS feeds (which I still consider the only saving grace for the modern web), thus separating these phlogs even more from my other content. (Just before anyone asks: yes I will eventually get rss working on this site as well, but writing is currently more important to me than programming).

All of that is to say: things have changed, and I now spent a significant portion of my internet time on gopher. I became inspired by gopher phlogs such as hoi.st by Luxeferre, someone I know from my days working on KaiOS – and gopher.black by James Tomasino, to create a very simple site so I could just focus on getting some of my writing out there again.

I might mirror or migrate this blog to gopher some time in the future. It certainly seems a lot better suited for that space, but for now: I just want to write again, and this is the easiest way to do that. Thus we have this weird https-plaintext, I assure you that it is as confusing to me as it is to you.

I will fill this blog with some actual content soon, now that it is up again, I expect I will be writing frequently, we have a lot to catch up on.

All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.

For more information about making a moral impact, search for “giving what we can’’, “give well’’, or “effective altruism’’.