Joar von Arndt
Earlier this year I wrote Vibe-coding Brings the Power of Emacs to Everything in a more positive manner surrounding this topic. This is the negative version. I am not a radical in either direction surrounding this debate. But the internet does not reward subtlety or nuance, as I also pointed out in Three Thoughts on Crypto and nft s . The debate surrounding llm -generated code is more intense than…
Figure 1: My view of Liberty Square (自由廣場), as well as the National Concert Hall (right) and National Theater (left) from atop the steps of Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall. Writing this, I have arrived at the island of Formosa, the adopted home of the Republic of China (中華民國) as well as the Taiwanese people. I intent to stay here during the fall term, as I complete part of my studies abroad. This…
Table of Contents Nuclear Strategy for Individuals Bellum Omnium Contra Omnes Diplomacy Studying at the Swedish Defence University gives you an odd way of thinking, where everything can be modelled through the lenses of nuclear strategy, international relations ( ir ), and the tactics employed in various contemporary and historical conflicts. These are also not only subjects for the lecture hall…
I have found a peculiar delight in encryption, and particularly in using pgp -based asymmetric cryptography. This is especially useful for securing email communications, but doing so requires remembering to run M-x mml-secure-sign or mml-secure-encrypt in Mail Utilities For Emacs (Mu4e) before sending the message. For this reason I have been wanting to write a quick method that automatically adds…
Fragments on Eccentricity The concept of fomo has always alluded me. Part of the reason is a persistent need for eccentricity, for growing against the grain. That is not to say that I am persistently rebellious, but that there is a natural aversion to doing things “the way everyone else does it”. The word eccentricity has for me always evoked a relation to its meaning within…
Table of Contents Two Definitions The Consequences of Digital Artworks Industrialised Production Two Definitions Figure 1: The Art of Painting by Johannes Vermeer Art has always been one of the most central aspects of human lives. It is not unique to the human experience, but it has become more important to humans than perhaps no other species on the planet. The history of Art is one of a…
Table of Contents What is post-historical society? Life under this régime Conclusion This is a continuation of a thought that I initially explored in my post The End of History. that I recommend you read before this. While that earlier post is regarding how the post-historical has come to be, this is rather an exploration of how this development has manifested itself. Post-scarcity is here. And…
Nuclear Fusion Will Not Give Us Infinite Power Table of Contents How Nuclear Power Works Why It Will (Not) Fail Conclusion, or Rather a Punchline Energy is perhaps the most important input of industrial society. Ever since the taming of fire, mankind has in some sense dreamt of a infinite source of fuel that could be used to drive all sorts of human activities — from cooking, transport, the…
Or the Liberating Fear of Betrayal What is trust? Choosing to trust is a decision that is much ridiculed today. It is in many cases easy to see with the benefit of hindsight that it was foolish to trust someone, but doing so in advance is of course much harder. In general we are moving in the direction of trusting less and less; exposure to betrayal is simply too high a price to pay. The…
Russia is not a great power. It is in no way a contender for the title, and treating it as one of the “power brokers” of the world benefits no one except the autocratic regime that hinges its legitimacy on it but that has simultaneously suppressed the abilities of the Russian people to attain such a status. One of my favourite comments on the geostrategic environment of the world (and…
Thus was written for Chinatalk’s Essay Contest on Economic Security , and was originally submitted in 2026-02-24 ad (and thus before the Iran war). The original submitted pdf can be found here . Introduction Back in 2024 I was part of the first class of a new course at the Swedish Defence University titled Economic Security in Competition, Conflict and War . Throughout that course it became…
One of the first use-cases I found for llm s back when Chat gpt first released was automating the creation of citations, or rather the transformations of citations structured in one way into .bib -files that can be used to create a wide variety of uniform citations in \(\LaTeX\) documents. llm s are fantastic for this sort of work, where some sort of messily structured data needs to be transformed…
This post contains spoilers for Apple tv ’s Pluribus , a really great show that you should ideally watch without having read anything about it. Pluribus — the newest show by Vince Gilligan (of Breaking Bad fame) — is a show that is refreshingly new in its ideas. After finishing it I discussed its themes with some of my friends and acquaintances, almost all of whom had quickly connected the…
Table of Contents Introduction Human Development The (Fourth?) Industrial Revolution Conclusion Introduction The subject of artificial intelligence ( ai ) 1 is one that has become hotly debated in recent years. That the growth of ai ’s capabilities has been partly driven by what is becoming increasingly clear financial engineering. These problematic elements has created a stark division of…
Writing this in 2026 ad (234 AdR), crypto is solidly in a “winter”. As valuations have fallen, so has the intensity of the debate surrounding the topic. I therefore feel it apt to use this opportunity to briefly write down my thoughts and opinions regarding this otherwise contentious topic. First of all I should make clear that I do have a (small) financial interest in the success of…
Table of Contents Introduction Early Developments and the Dictatorship The Totalitarian State Fascism and Totalitarianism Socialism Democracy Religion Conclusion Introduction The spirit of the age that we currently finds ourselves in is one of rapid change (and often times decline) in the economic, political, and technological order of the world. Compared to the nineteenth century (and in many…
Table of Contents Introduction Fonts Microtypograhy Improving the footnotes Embellishments Initials Ornaments Colours Paper format Conclusion Introduction As a political science student, writing is a daily activity. And like any serious writer who cares about their writing, I care about the presentation and look of my documents. This has evolved, particularly recently, into an interest in…
Table of Contents What are the qualities of text? Text and visual media Consciousness through text Programming Conclusion What are the qualities of text? Text, as a system of recording symbolic representation for communication across time and space, is likely one of the most important inventions of mankind — second only the the symbolic representations themselves made possible by language. The…
Table of Contents The Map and the Territory Moving around Hold Move Support Convoy Turns Country Strategies England France Turkey Russia Austria Italy Germany I hosted a game of the board game Diplomacy during December–January of 2025–’26, as usually hosted on Backstabbr , for students of the bachelor’s programs at sedu . Since there are new players wrote this short introduction to the…
My girlfriend recently bought a Framework 12 laptop 1 with a correspoding stylus and, influenced by my ravings about the power of gnu Emacs, wants to take handwritten digital notes on it for her engineering and mathematics classes and then organise them in org-mode . I see an earlier version of myself clearly in her, and of course want to help her attain the vision she has for her own Emacs…
Table of Contents Introduction Revolutionary Notes Implementation Introduction After initially starting to use Emacs back in high school merely for programming, I naturally began to use it for other tasks such as document preparation and note-taking. This introduced me to the surprisingly large overlap between Emacs users and people generally interested in “productivity” workflows.…
I have a few different computers. Those machines have different capabilities, form factors, portability, hardware, and software — and yet I still want to do roughly the same work on them. While most of the work I do is with text — reading, writing, editing, programming — Sometimes I want to work on one specific machine because I might need a dedicated graphics card or I need the machine to fit in…
I am not “on” social media. Both in the sense that I don’t have accounts on them, but even when I do I do not use them. As I have briefly mentioned earlier this has some minor consequences, but I will not discuss them here. Instead I want to describe how I have a healthy and positive (in the literal sense of the word) relationship with the internet, social media, and my…
Table of Contents The Question of Over-regulation Digital Protectionism? Capital Union Infrastructure A European Stack Conclusion Europe is in a bind. While we possess advanced manufacturing and research, we have somehow been unable to adequately transform these advantages into a prominent tech industry 1 . With the large investments in large language models ( llm s) since the release of Chat gpt…
Table of Contents Using business cards Designing the face of the card First draft Second draft Third draft Fourth draft Fifth draft Sixth draft Seventh draft Eighth draft Designing the back of the card Design one: Just keep it Design two: Adding some simple text Design three: Work in the crest Conclusion Using business cards I usually always carry a few business cards. This is quite uncommon in…
Table of Contents A definition What characterises technique? Should/can you do anything about it? Why is this not more studied? In recent time I have noticed a considerable number of academic, policy, and popular works that have all covered parts of the concept of technique , without naming it as such. At the same time I have encountered numerous older writers and thinkers who were very much aware…
I have recently read not just one, but two different blog posts arguing for roughly the same thing. To summarise them; You have a finite amount of time to learn new things, and so you should not only focus that time toward learning things that actually matter, but you should also only try and learn things that are easy to learn . I fundamentally disagree with both of these two things, but think…
Table of Contents What is the value of land? What is digital land? Taxing Digital Land Downsides What is the value of land? Adam Smith divides the economic forces into three areas for, the profit obtained from labour, that from capital (or stock), and that obtained from land. The value extracted from land is here the natural resources of the earth, the sunshine and rain that lands there (allowing…
Table of Contents Dynamically updating Github profile Creating the readme Using Github workflows Conclusion Dynamically updating Github profile Github has a functionality where the README file in a repository with the same name as your username will be displayed on your profile. Since I am a fan of the indieweb’s posse 1 practice, I’d like to use that space to advertise the writings on…
Table of Contents Why Chinese? How to Study How I Studied Thoughts on the Language The Future This is part of a series of posts written during or shortly after my visits to the mainland of the People’s Republic of China in the summer of 2025. Why Chinese? There are a multitude of reasons why I wanted to study Chinese. Being the language of the “workshop of the world” naturally…
Table of Contents Introduction Obstacles to Travelling on the Mainland Differing Technological Ecosystems The Scale of the Great Firewall Experiences of China Rules The Physical Environment Conclusion This is part of a series of posts written during or shortly after my visits to the mainland of the People’s Republic of China in the summer of 2025. Introduction In my musings on deepseek I…
The Weakness of American AI Strategy Table of Contents Introduction The General Economic Environment of the Mainland What is Deepseek? The Risks of American ai Strategy Conclusion This is part of a series of posts written during or shortly after my visits to the mainland of the People’s Republic of China in the summer of 2025. Introduction The thoughts underlying this thesis have been with…
Table of Contents Why would you want web browsing in a text editor? The Emacs Web Wowser (eww) w3m Non-text based Xwidgets eaf Why would you want web browsing in a text editor? Emacs has a tendency to try and absorb all user-facing interactions I have with a computer. Some people seem able to separate “Emacs stuff” — like programming or using org-mode for note taking — but Emacs’…
Table of Contents Introduction What is meant by the End of History? Russia The United States of America The People’s Republic of China Conclusion Introduction Francis Fukuyama is probably the person most connected to the concept of “the End of History”, but he is not the originator of it. Fukuyama’s intial article 1 (that was then later expanded upon to the book The End of…
Table of Contents Functions Side Effects Conclusion Programming languages (and their users) are often grouped into two main intellectual schools of thought: Object-oriented programming ( oop ) and functional programming. These two schools both claim to offer ways to manage the increasing complexity that comes with the development of larger and larger programs. Functional programming states that…
Table of Contents The nature of Email Email as a Social Medium The nature of Email In an increasingly interconnected and technologically sophisticated world, our capabilities for communication and diversity of ways to do so also increases. This is often approached as a problem , with each method merely remaining due to network effects , but I believe that this multitude of means are a strength and…
Table of Contents Why Emacs? Mathematics in Emacs Humanities and the social sciences Deliverables Group work Conclusion Why Emacs? I have been using gnu Emacs for about three years now. I initially began using it after completing a semester of introductory programming classes exclusively in gnu Nano, with a series of shell scripts to compile and run C# code, and to set up a trio of terminals; one…
Table of Contents Philosophy Fonts Inspirations Static website generation Sidenotes Small caps Hosting I think every personal blog that is somewhat custom built should have documentation written on its design philosophy and implementation. I see this as an extension of the free-software ideal; you should not only be allowed but also able to extent and modify another program to your needs. It is…
This post was written as an examination in the Premodern History of China , a course I took at Stockholm University, and is available as a pdf here . Throughout Chinese history, there have been two great divides. First, that of the east-west, and later the north-south. These two dynamics have been instrumental in how Chinese society looks today and of how the history of imperial and premodern…
Nuclear Weapons in International Security Similarly to this earlier post, this was written as an examination at the Swedish Defence University . It was written for the course Nuclear Weapons in International Security and as such is also available as a .pdf here . To answer the question of whether or not the invention nuclear bomb has been the most important event of human history is not an easy…
Techniques and Strategies Regarding Strategic Resources This text was originally written as an examination at the Swedish Defense University (Försvarshögskolan) for the course in Economic Security in Competition, Conflict and War and is therfore available as a pdf here . Throughout the history of human civilization, the characteristics of strategic resources and the methods of dealing with them…
I am by no means an expert on Ellul, I have merely read three of his books ( Presence in the Modern World , The Technological Society , and The Meaning of the City ) But in trying to communicate his influence on my thinking, I have inadvertently written many times about him, albeit at an all too basic level. There are many theories claiming to explain all of human history, or at least the…
Diplomacy Today is a python program and corresponding flask application that serves and hosts an early-twentieth-century-style newspapers generated from the turn orders of a game of Diplomacy hosted on backstabbr . The idea, and a large portion of the core code, are not my work, and I deserve none of the credit for it. But the original program seems to have been abandoned last year, and was…
Table of Contents How this page is structured Fiction Miscellaneous Bret Easton Ellis’ Works The Sprawl Trilogy Non-Fiction Miscellaneous Economics Philosophy Jacques Ellul Society History How this page is structured This is my current reading list, and contains books I’ve read, am reading, and want to read for fun during my commute. It contains books roughly from 2020 and onwards with…
An analysis of the depiction of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in Victoria 3 The video game Victoria 3 is a historical, and often times ahistorial, 4X grand strategy video game by Swedish developer Paradox Interactive. It is meant to depict the period of world history from 1836 to 1936, including events such as the middle and late industrial revolution, American civil war, the scramble for Africa,…
Your browser does not support the video tag. Notes This video is loosely based on Daniel Yergin’s book The New Map: Energy, Security and the Clash of Nations about the energy system, with some topical and relevant references to present day. The music is the intro the anime Cowboy Bebop , Tank. It was edited in Blender on a machine running Debian gnu /Linux.
Your browser does not support the video tag. Notes This video is an interpretation of Daniel Yergin’s second historical book on the history of the energy industry, The Quest: Energy Security and the Remaking of the Modern World . The music is from the first season of the Japanese anime Made in Abyss , titled Deep in Abyss by Kanade yuk and Masahiro “Godspeed” Aoki. It was edited…
私は石油・ガス産業が世界の政治を支配していたディストピアの世界に連れて行かれました。OP1 Your browser does not support the video tag. Notes This video is an interpretation of Daniel Yergin’s seminal Pulitzer-price-winning book on the history of the oil and gas industry, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power . The music is from the first season of the Japanese anime Oreimo , titled Irony by ClariS. Most of the footage is…