I’m tired of the libertarian culture on the internet
Big tech social media, Mastodon, blogs. They all have inherited from the libertarian culture of the internet. And I'm tired of it.
Everything!
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Fragmentary Writing
I’ve seen this advice for creative pursuits multiple times that you should practice finishing your projects. I think it is great advice so I thought I’d share some reflections on what has worked for me. In retrospect, it is somehow both in the spirit of this advice, and a complete inversion of it at the same time.
Godspeed New ! Genres and Mastodon
Another year, another slew of advertising campaigns masquerading as year-end summaries, and another blog post in protest from me.
Poisoning LLMs
So I don’t like “AI”, for various reasons. One being that the AI companies seem intent on destroying the internet by ingesting the things people have made and spitting out slop everywhere. (sidenote: For the latest example: https://pod.geraspora.de/posts/17342163 1 ) Garbage in, garbage out. Well I don’t want them to do that to my stuff too, so I want to make sure that if…
2024 in music
My distaste for the company Spotify has steadily grown over the years. It started with an annoyance over relying on a proprietary app for music, but since I stopped using the app my supply of distaste has come from the company’s hate for musicians. (sidenote: See this article for the latest example. ) With the Spotify Wrapped they’ve come up with a new way to get free advertising, and…
Trial by Fire Philosophy
Many who are into philosophy, myself included, like to make fun of famous scientists for not understanding it. It is the classic phenomena of experts in one field making bad statements about a field they aren’t familiar with. (sidenote: There’s even some philosophy about it: “ Experts, Public Policy, and the Question of Trust ”. 1 ) When someone like Stephen Hawking says…
Libertarian Culture
In How Jordan Peterson’s Suits Taught Me Fashion , CJ the X talks about libertarianism in a way I haven’t seen before. The video is about how fashion works as a means of communication, specifically how it communicates what groups you belong to. To overly simplify, it chronicles a history of fashion in the west (based on Derek Guy’s account) in three stages. In the first stage…
What would I do if I were a horse?
In Sabine Hossenfelder is WRONG About Capitalism , Unlearning Economics (UE) criticizes Hossenfelder for getting the history completely wrong. In order to explain money, she makes up a fantasy society that functions exactly like ours, except it doesn’t have money. That of course makes it very inconvenient to not have money, so it would be natural for them to invent money. This is basically a…
Recommending Momo
Usually when I write a review, I try to talk about specific things that make the thing I’m recommending unique or interesting. I don’t want to resort to platitudes and very general statements like “engrossing”, “excellent prose” or “gripping plot”, because that you can say about almost any book you like. The reason I started reading Malazan for…
Achievement vs Striving games, and Volleyball games
❗ Warning: This contains spoilers for the first season of Haikyuu. I have tried to hide the concrete stuff behind spoiler bars (that work when viewed from a web browser), but the text still deals with some core themes. C. Thi Nguyen uses a distinction between achievement games and striving games. Achievement games are games where the reason why you’re playing the game is because you want to…
I curate podcasts now
I listen to a lot of podcasts, maybe too many. I often want to share the episodes with friends, but it’s a bit tricky to do that with podcasts. I can send a link, but there are so many places to host podcasts on that it becomes a bit messy. And on the receiving side its also nicer to be able to listen to podcasts in your podcast player, which you can’t do if you get just a single…
Varför undviker jag bilvägen?
Idag var jag ute på en nattpromenad. Jag svängde in på ett typiskt villaområde som hade vanliga bilvägar och smala trotoarkanter. Om det här var en scen som utspelade sig för några år sen så hade jag valt trottoaren här, men idag så började jag istället fundera på varför jag var så ovillig att vistas på bilvägen. Den första instinkten jag hade var att det är moraliskt korrekt att göra så. Att gå…
Musing on magic in stories
I think these thoughts are in some way a response to sentiments expressed in this Existential Comics: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/537 . Basically it argues that magic in stories (that follows deterministic rules) isn’t really magic, it is just different physics since it is just how that world works. I don’t want to refute it because it makes sense to me when talking about the…
This Link Party is Obsolete
I’m doing a Link Party! The theme for this party is planned obsolescence and how we relate to the future. Planned Obsolescence Will Kill Us All by Unlearning Economics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz68ILyuWtA I’ve already summarized this one fairly thoroughly before , but it’s such a good introduction to planned obsolescence that it’s worth sharing again. This video is…
Blandbandsfredag: Unrepresentative
English below. Okej, det här blir första gången jag ger mig in på blandbandsfredag! Temat är låtar av (klassiska) (hård)rocksband som står ut från resten av deras låtar. Inspirationen är att när jag försökte ta mig in i genren för några år sedan var det ganska ofta jag hitttade en låt som jag gillade, men att resten av bandets musik inte klickade alls. Det verkar finnas en trend av att banden gör…
Recommending Changing Planes
Today I want to recommend the short story collection Changing Planes by Ursula Le Guin. It centers around a theme of world building, where she visits a new world with new societal structures for each story. Really, it is almost like it is a peak into her creative process as it feels like she is playing around with ideas and worlds, exploring them to see what kind of stories they contain. This…
Refusing to cut
❗ Warning: This contains spoilers for the plot of the movie Shoplifters and what the later episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion looks like. In Recommending Shoplifters I wrote that we as audience are trapped together with the mother in the interrogation scene towards the end. I think I really like things like that, where I’m trapped by the movie to sit through an intense and complex web of…
Recommending Shoplifters
Today I’m recommending the movie Shoplifters by Kore-eda. The first bit is spoiler-free. A friend of mine described Shoplifters as being very human (“väldigt mänsklig” på svenska), which I think is apt. It is a story that feels more relaxed in a way that makes me feel like the characters are regular human beings, rather characters in a story. They are there on the screen, and we…
howm
Productivity apps are scary. Some days you find one that looks interesting, and so you decide to play around with it to see how it works. From a first glance, it might actually be something that fits you perfectly, but you can’t quite tell from just the documentation, so you have to download it and try it out for real. It will only be a short-term thing, you tell yourself. An hour tops, you…
A generic application for visualizing networked notes
A couple of years ago, zettelkastens and backlink-based note-taking applications that emphasize many interlinked notes became popular as the idea of zettelkastens became popular again. At least in the areas of the internet I frequent. I also jumped on the trend and started using one, which eventually became this blog: https://a-blog-with.relevant-information.com/posts/introducing_this_blog_thing/…
Sousou no Frieren uses tropes well
Sousou no Frieren is a very trope heavy story. The world of Frieren could be from basically any isekai or JRPG of the last decade. There is the party that defeats the demon lord (there is a demon lord), with the bearded dwarf warrior, the mage elf, the human priest, and the Hero. The setting mostly consists of classic medieval Europe inspired towns and villages, or generic forests and plains. At…
Learning to rubber duck my life with Piranesi
Today I want to write a blog post about my recent experiences with journaling. There are two reasons: 1) is that I feel like it has helped me with writer’s block so I want to share it, and two is that it is interesting and kind of funny that I got help from the novel Piranesi. I want to do it in a bit of a meta style, where I showcase what it is I’m doing by doing it, what I’m…
The Dear Hunter Recommendation
If there’s one music recommendation I would give it would be the band The Dear Hunter. I don’t really know the genre words to describe them, but Wikipedia calls them a prog rock band. It’s really hard to pin them down since they are constantly changing. Their latest album for example, Antimai, is much more funky than the rest which took me aback. If you end up listening to this…
My ultimate solution to AI garbage is degrowth
I just read an article, The average AI criticism has gotten lazy, and that’s dangerous - Redeem Tomorrow , whose proposed solution to the AI situation is for everyone to have access to their own pattern synthesizer (their neologism for “AI”), instead of just a handful of companies controlling them. In some sense that is good, it would avoid enshittification I think. They argue…
Godmorgon världen
En dikt
Thoughts on bad art
Today’s plan was to post an old rant of mine, maybe doing some light editing to brush it up. I went through my notes to read it over, and it turns out I actually have more things to say than what is in the rant. I felt like I had written more about it in my notes, and sure enough, there is enough to turn it into a proper essay. Some day I will finish it up and publish on the Slog. There are…
Keeping some of the Lights on: Redefining Energy Security
Today’s link is from Low Tech Magazine. I like this magazine because it challenges my assumptions on what kinds of technology is harmful and what kinds of technology is necessary. A throughline of the magazine is that it takes a low tech angle on various topics, informed by the goal of environmental sustainability. The article I want to talk about is called Keeping some of the lights on:…
How Twitter gamifies communication
Today’s link is a philosophy paper. Don’t let that scare you though, it doesn’t really fit into the stereotypical notion of philosophy. This is a paper about philosophy of games (what makes something a game and how do we interact with them?) as applied to communication. It is incredibly accessible to read and easy to understand. The paper by C. Thi Nguyen is called How Twitter…
Commonplace book writing
Today I want to write about writing, specifically writing practices with a common place book. The links for today are pretty similar so you can read one or the other, or both — they are still different to each other. The core of Cory Doctorow’s writing method (the “ Memex method ”) is to write a blog post every day. This of course becomes really good practice for writing,…
Planned Obsolescence Will Kill Us All
by Unlearning Economics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz68ILyuWtA An interesting video outlining the economics of planned obsolescence and what the problems are (beyond making us feel ripped off.) It concludes with, as far as I can tell, a solid argument against capitlism. In summary, he argues that planned obsolescence isn’t a bug of capitalism, it is happening because capitalism is…
Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata
Note to people reading this from browsers with limited css-capabilities: This contains spoilers for Life Ceremony that are hidden using css, consider reading it in a web browser. This is short story collection centred around norm breaking. Ideally you should read this collection with as little information as possible, so I will list some interesting things about it behind spoiler tags so you can…
I think prose has become more important to me when reading books, and an essay by Brandon Sanderson
https://www.brandonsanderson.com/outside/ In this heart warming essay on about why he writes, Brandon Sanderson says that he does it in order to let more people inside, to somewhere they feel like they belong. It is then not surprising that he writes in a way such that the prose doesn’t get in the way, he wants more people who feel left out to find a place where they can feel like they…
Living at the speed of spiders
Phenomenology is the study of the phenomena we experience. Taking a step back from the way we normally perceive the world, the filters and abstractions that make it possible to live in it, phenomenologists try to perceive the information their senses provide as directly as possible. This makes it a very subjective study with findings that are hard to generalize, and that’s part of the point.…
A Malazan halfway retrospective
My thoughts after reading half of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series
Castle
A poem about abstraction
A roaring dragon
It was the second spring of the year, or perhaps third. I can’t remember. Where I live the transition from winter to spring doesn’t go smoothly, it is a tug of war and spring has to try multiple times in order to succeed. (sidenote: This was not the last spring of the year. In a feint to tug at our collective hearts, the spring decided to yield to winter one last time. Only days after…
Trash Dialectics
How much trash do we produce every day? How and where do we notice trash? When do we find trash disgusting? How could we become more conscious? And, finally: What is trash at all? The Unconcious The Disruption The Synthesis
All lights red
A poem about traffic lights
Herds of ice calves leave the arctic
A poem about ice
Managing an Antilibrary in a network of notes
Nassim Taleb often says crazy things (like saying that mathematics is bad because economists misuse it), but sometimes he says something useful. One such thing is the Antilibrary: the collection of books in your library that you haven’t read. He values these books more than the read books because they are a reminder of how much you don’t know, a form of intellectual humility before the…
Summary: Democratic Theory and Border Coercion: No Right to Unilaterally Control Your Own Borders
Sometimes there are papers that are interesting, have a simple core argument, but are nevertheless hard to approach (perhaps because of added nuance or rigour requirements). “Democratic Theory and Border Coercion: No Right to Unilaterally Control Your Own Borders” by Arash Abizadeh is one such paper that I will attempt to distill down to it’s core below. For more details, elaborations and…
Unabstracted Magic
I think there is something special about The Malazan Book of the Fallen’s magic. It’s honestly hard to put it into words, but I think it is something to do with how inseparable the magic is both from the world and from the text itself. The magic doesn’t feel like a system, it isn’t just the physical effects that affect the world. No, the whole world is magical and…
Teknokratisk effektivisering och elektrifiering
Hur har synen på teknik förändrats över tid? Det är förstås en väldigt bred fråga som jag inte har plats, tid, eller kunskapen att besvara. Istället har jag valt att rikta in mig på två idéer som som jag observerat bli uttrycka: elektrifiering som lösning på bilars (alla) klimatproblem, och effektivisering som medel för att minska utsläpp. Vad finns det för historisk bakgrund för dessa idéer?…
Defeating Haikyuu's hidden villain
A spoilerfree exploration of a hidden villain in the volleyball manga Haikyuu.
War, Peace and Sleep
In order to improve my sleep schedule I’ve picked up the habit of reading a bit before going to bed. It becomes a ritual that helps me ease into sleep. This however, places some constraints on the book as getting excited is counterproductive to the goal of relaxation. The book can’t get too boring either as the goal is to be able to read a book, and boring books are no fun to read.
A story about story telling
This is a translation of my other post: En berättelse om berättande I don’t think I’ve had a reading experience like the one I had with Lev Tolstoy’s War and Peace before. (sidenote: The version I have isn’t the one that is most widely known. Tolstoy apparently completely rewrote the book and it is that version that was published in 1867. It wasn’t until 2000 that the…
En berättelse om berättande
A translation of this post exists here: A story about story telling Jag tror inte jag har haft en läsupplevelse som liknat den jag haft med Leo Tolstojs Krig och Fred förrut. (sidenote: Den versionen jag har är annorlunda från versionen som är mest känd. Tydligen skrev Tolstoj om romanen och det är den som sen blev publicerad i 1867. Det var inte förrän år 2000 som den ursprungliga versionen blev…
An Empire Full of Metaphor
Invisible Cities The first time I stumbled upon the book Invisible Cities , when it was used in the video essay “Searching for Disco Elysium”, I didn’t really take notice of it. [1] [1] , [2] The book played a secondary role, it was used to highlight an aspect of the titular game Disco Elysium, so it was perhaps unsurprising that it didn’t strike me as something remarkable.…
Constraint Programming: Solving Hard Problems with Intelligent brute-force search
In this tutorial I will go through the ideas that underpin constraint programming, a technique for solving hard algorithmic problems. It is a pretty advanced technique and is an active research area, but despite this the core ideas are actually surprisingly easy to understand. After reading this tutorial hopefully you’ll understand the principles of how a constraint programming solver works.…
Dune, Exposition, Education
Note to people reading this from browsers with limited css-capabilities: This contains spoilers for Dune that are hidden using css, consider reading it in a web browser. I’ve been reading Dune and it’s shaping out to be one of my favourite books, but one thing in particular stood out to me: the characters are boring. How can a story be this good with boring characters? For me the…