2025-07-03

• [[Listened]]: [[Trip 49: Debt]].

  • Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger referenced favourably.

  • Debt is one of the key drivers of individualisation.

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

  • [[#ACFM]] is consistently excellent.

2025-06-30

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

2025-06-29

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

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

2025-06-28

• [[Listened]]: [[Trip 49: Debt]]

2025-06-25

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

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

2025-06-24

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

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

2025-06-23

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

2025-06-22

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

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

• [[Bookmarked]]:

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

• Happy!

2025-06-20

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

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

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

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

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

2025-06-19

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

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

As I we pass mid-June I am:

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

I now intend to:

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

2025-06-16

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

• [[Bookmarked]]:

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

2025-06-15

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

2025-06-14

2025-06-13

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

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

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

2025-06-10

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

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

2025-06-09

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

2025-06-08

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

2025-06-07

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

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

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

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

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

2025-06-06

• [[Capture ideas you disagree with]].

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

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

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

• [[Watched]]: [[Andor]].

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

2025-06-05

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

2025-06-03

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

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

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

2025-06-02

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

2025-06-01

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

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

2025-05-31

• [[Capitalism creates and shapes desires]].

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

• Jammed: Pretty in Plums by Shida Shahabi

2025-05-30

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

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

• Bookmarked:

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

• [[compost.party]] is fun.

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

2025-05-29

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