This is catileptic. I move slow and fix things. I'm a tech activist, hacker, and a community-building person.
This is a fragment is part of an overall quest to practice writing fiction. We were aiming for the aesthetic of Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities". This piece is about Delft, a town in the Netherlands. Micro-Delft There was no space left for a city, but they built Delft anyway. A micro-city. A bite-sized collection of postal codes for the breadcrumb houses. Canals that overflow if more than…
This is a fragment is part of an overall quest to practice writing fiction. The prompt was to write a flawed character, through the eyes of an omniscient narrator. Amateur Arithmetic The rain wouldn't stop for another three hours. At the bottom of the slope, the water pooled cold around her ankles. A drain pipe gurgled above her head, louder than her stomach grumbled. The outline of a…
This is a fragment is part of an overall quest to practice writing fiction. The prompt is a video called There Will Always Be Monsters . The Monster / Master dialectic You aren't as happy as everyone else when the army lays down their weapons. You are even happier. On the morning when everyone is queueing to hand in their arsenal, you are the first in line. Outside, the snow is thawing…
This is a fragment is part of an overall quest to practice writing fiction. The prompt comes from the Solar Punk Prompts podcast , episode S02E04 – The Pharmacists . The Pharmacists A Medley of Glass I hate it when two glass bottles rub against each other. My toes curl at the sound. It makes me want to swallow my own tongue. I could avoid this sound forever, were it not for the dozens glass…
Metaphors of Fuck-Up Collision-Boxing In some 3D video games, there is an end of the rendered environment. Even in an open-world game, the implementation will not allow the character to walk endlessly, in any direction. Eventually, an invisible wall marks the end of what can be explored. The character in the game collides with the edge of what is possible. They are collision-boxed . If the edge of…
I believe generative artificial intelligence software should not be used as an educational tool , in schools, high-schools, universities, pre-schools and so forth. The Ministry of Education in Romania has published updated versions of the high-school curricula in November-December 2025. Around half of these proposals include references to using artificial intelligence as an educational tool. This…
A curated list of relationship anarchy articles, books, essays and interviews. If you'd like to recommend more such materials, reach out or DM me on Mastodon . Materials on polyamory, ethical non-monogamy and other critiques of normative relationships are not included here. I'm interested in curating a list that focused on relationship anarchy. Articles, posts, essays Andie Nordgren -…
Relationship Anarchy. Dreaming In the Belly of the Whale It's easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine [SPACE LEFT INTENTIONALLY BLANK]. It's hard to imagine. A lot of what passes for imagination is a small shift in perspective. It's taking the bird's-eye view on a personal confessional. Or, the other way around, it's practicing empathy when statistics are…
knobs-dials has made an improved version of the Cat Thermal Printer. This one doesn't randomly lose Bluetooth connectivity and it works flawlessly on Windows, MacOS and Linux (Ubuntu). An extra bit of exciting lore: this is the same person who wrote the helpful personal Wiki. Initial article from 2024-02-22 I came across one of these Bluetooth thermal paper Cat Printers . I initially tried it…
I would devour biographical literature of non-cis-men in tech. I crave a certain kind of perspective. I build my object of desire, this hypothetical book, from bits and pieces of already-existing literature. I also take certain things as references for what I don't want to ever read more of. If you have any suggestions for me, please slide them into my DMs on Mastodon or send me an e-mail…
" By treating ChatGPT and similar LLMs as being in any way concerned with truth, or by speaking metaphorically as if they make mistakes or suffer “hallucinations” in pursuit of true claims, we risk exactly this acceptance of bullshit, and this squandering of meaning. " The entire article titled ChatGPT is Bullshit and published in Ethics and Information Technology (2024) is extremely quotable. The…
I keep thinking about how we feed the monster. There is a story we tell each other, a story we're told in movies and books: that the authentic self is valuable and expressing it loudly and clearly is an act of political resistance. There is an industry that harvests walled gardens for profit. It used to be the targeted advertising industry that harvested content we created and meta-data about…
I have become interested in personal wikis as a way to curate one's own knowledge. I've asked folx to show me their own wikis or to personal wikis they know about. I was introduced to the electronic quill , which belongs to KatS . This quest for findind and exploring personal wikis was tirgged by my fascination with a subdomain called helpful on the website of a person I look up to.…
This essay was written as a piece of public policy research during the time I worked at the CTO of the civic technology non-profit organisation Code for Romania. This is the original form of the essay, in Romanian. It also exists on the Code for Romania blog . The title translates to On the Security of Electronic Voting Systems and it was written in the context of a debate around whether or not…