Recent content in PILLED TEXTS WEBLOG on Pilledtexts.com
“Going Internal” or “Being in the Black” are an informal term used in the USMC when a marine stops paying attention to things and people around him due to him being internally overwhelmed. It is a worrying situation as a marine “in the black” prevents the marine from responding and reacting properly to the situation at hand. This internalization can be caused by…
Hyperstition is a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies. Superstitions are merely false beliefs, but hyperstitions – by their very existence as ideas – function causally to bring about their own reality. Capitalist economics is extremely sensitive to hyperstition, where confidence acts as an…
I’ve been wearing a PRW2500T-7 Casio ProTrek watch on-and-off for roughly seven years now. I wore it on my adventures in Boy Scouts, through my experimentation with university in New Zealand, and is now my most used watch being in the Marines. I have a lot of memories with it and I’m impressed with it still working with the abuse I put it through. The two features I most enjoy in the…
Below is how I generate preview cards for this Hugo static-site on my home page. How the template works is by parsing every page in my site (unless a page is marked with list="never" in the head section) to grab the title, date, tags, a preview image, and the description of the page to generate the preview cards. I don’t always set the preview image or a description for my pages, so I have…
JULES I just been sittin‘ here thinkin‘. VINCENT About what? JULES The miracle we witnessed. VINCENT The miracle you witnessed. I witnessed a freak occurrence. JULES Do you know that a miracle is? VINCENT An act of God. JULES What’s an act of God? VINCENT I guess it’s when God makes the impossible possible. And I’m sorry Jules, but I don’t think what happened this morning qualifies. JULES Don’t…
This article is a stub. Wrote it to quickly link to someone. A “weaker dollar” means a US dollar is buying fewer units of foreign currency than before. Many people assume that this “weak dollar” is bad news because of the word “weak”. But what this really means is that American goods are cheaper abroad. A depreciation in the dollar can strengthen rather than…
In this example I'm using the second script to add in an image to this article. Adding images to my blog posts used to be a chore: Take a screenshot. Resize the screenshot to a web-friendly size using GIMP Export the image in the correct file type to the correct directory. Hand-write the Markdown or HTML having to remember the name of the file path of the image. This often took me over five…
I physically write my notes and schedule down as opposed to typing them out. I remember things better when I physically write them out. I can bring a notebook/pen anywhere — as opposed to my computer/phone. I’ve tried switching to note taking software like Obsidian and writing my own note taking script to do note taking and scheduling for a period of time, but have not found much success.…
I have been enlisted in the Marines for fourteen months now. First four of those months I was in bootcamp and Marine Combat Training (MCT). This basic training was followed by seven(ish) months in my ‘schoolhouse’ where I specialized into my job in the Marines. After I finished my schoolhouse I got orders to Okinowa Japan which is where I am currently. I’ve been holding off…
If a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years. But, and that is the main difference, if it survives another decade, then it will be expected to be in print another fifty years. This, simply, as a rule, tells you why things that have been around for a long time are not 'aging' like persons, but 'aging' in reverse. Every year that passes without…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly changing how we interact with information, offering impressive capabilities from brainstorming to summarization. But behind this convenience lies a growing privacy concern, one that echoes the issues we’ve long faced with search engines. Just like when you type a query into Google, when you interact with an LLM through an API (like those offered by…
Stop Bringing Your Phone Everywhere! The sheer amount of sensor data modern smartphones collect is staggering. They continuously log your precise GPS location—even when apps aren’t actively open—while simultaneously scanning for Wi-Fi networks and Bluetooth devices to triangulate your whereabouts . In addition, microphones and cameras can be activated (sometimes without explicit user awareness) by…
What my social media cards looks like for my article on Tolstoy when shared on different platforms. Have you ever shared one of your blog posts on social media only to see a bland, generic preview appear? Or worse, no image at all? If you’re running a Hugo website, there’s a simple solution that can transform how your content appears across social platforms. Social media cards (those…
Ladybird is an early-stage browser project that stands out due to its use of a custom engine, independent from major frameworks like Chromium (Google’s engine for Chrome), WebKit (Apple’s engine for Safari), and Gecko (Mozilla’s engine for Firefox). Unlike other alternative browsers such as Brave (uses Chromium), Orion (uses WebKit), or Librewolf (a skin of Firefox), which depend…
In the 19th century, many historians embraced the Great Man Theory, which claims that a handful of extraordinary leaders dictate the course of events through their intellect, charisma, or cunning. In War and Peace, however, Leo Tolstoy vigorously challenges that notion. Rather than portraying history as the product of singular genius, he shows it emerging from the intricate interplay of countless…
Ranger file manager inside a tmux window, with image preview shown in the right. What Is Ranger. Why Use it to Preview Images? : Ranger is a terminal-based file browser that uses key vim bindings. It’s a fast keyboard-driven way to manage files within a terminal. Unfortunately, One feature that ranger lacks ‘out of the box’ is the ability to preview images. This makes managing…
I use nginx as my webserver. It’s fast and has a tone of features. However, for me it’s been a process to learn how to set up properly redirecting, caching, secure, and compressed static webpages with it. I’m not web developer. It’s been slow for me to discover all the useful things it can do for me. Anyhow, over the past few years I’ve started to get a grasp on what…
Daily & General Notes Script: Previously I was using the Obsidian Application as my Journaling and “To Do List” software. Obsidian has vim integration and a button to quickly make daily notes which I enjoy. But for my use case I don’t need any of the extra features that comes with the Obsidian software, so I starting looking at a way to quickly make notes in the terminal. For…
What is SearXNG? SearXNG is a fork of the original SearX project, actively maintained to provide a modernized and efficient meta-search experience. It functions by aggregating results from multiple search engines (like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc.)—but crucially, it does so by using an API. As a result, you get diverse and comprehensive search results without ads and javascript tracking. Why Use…
Bottom line up front: For my hardware I use an Apple laptop with third-party peripherals that can be easily transported. I try to use open-source software when possible because opens-source software is more transparent and secure, but I find that if a piece of open-source software is limiting my productivity I will reluctantly use proprietary software. I utilize the command line extensively for my…
Bottom line up front: A lot of the tedious work of linking together webpages, maintaining consistency across pages, implementing RSS, etc. can by automated by using a static site generator. I was being stubborn for insisting to hand-code my website for so long, and hand coding my website kept be from implementing those features sooner. When I first started building my website, I hand-coded all my…
Bottom line up front: Wealth is rarely held as cash or physical currency; instead, it is tied to commercial capabilities represented by stocks, assets, and equity. There exists no large pile of money that extremely wealthy people possess that can be taxed or confiscated as their 'net worth' is effectively just a (hard to transfer) ledger that represents how much organizational power they have in…
§ 0 Leisure in Classical Antiquity: The Foundation of Intellectual Life Men must be able to engage in business and go to war, but leisure and peace are better; they must do what is necessary and indeed what is useful, but what is honourable is better … If it be disgraceful in men not to be able to use the goods of life, it is peculiarly disgraceful not to be able to use them in time of leisure—to…
Poem Aye Sir Running Marching Yes Sir Pushing Screaming No Sir Eating Sleeping Picture of me at the 'confidence course' courtesy of MCRD April 2024
1 This is a bash script to generate a full RSS feed from a directory containing simple webpages. The script works by pulling out the text between a few html tags to fill the needed information for a rss feed. It utilizes awk and sed to accomplish this. To use this script change example.com with your domain name and /blog for with your web page directory path. 2 The script generates most of the RSS…
Poem free–speech & free(d)–men pro–union & pro–unions shake–hands & shake–downs frontier-man & gangster-man … lost–boys & lost–men Illustration of Abraham Lincoln wrestling hometown bully Jack Armstrong
I’ve asked my Priest about the frequent usage of domes in Orthodox architecture. I was told the domes have to with how the Orthodox view divinity. With a dome the walls come down to us from above as the heavens come down from above. It’s a different message than the architecture of spires. Spires ― beautiful also ― place an emphasis on the transcendent and perfect nature of Christ. The…
1 The proper use of language can be found through but never prescribed by editors, lawyers, judges, or other authorities under English common law. Under this tradition, there is a high emphasis on maintaining coherency with how people have applied words and the law in the past. The way to settle a dispute about the application of words and the law in this tradition is by the common community (e.g.…
1 Part of human agency ― and the human experience ― is the ability to choose to do bad acts and them having to deal with the pain and consequences caused by doing them. Not letting people suffer for their actions implies that they are slaves that can have no input on their environment around them. I disagree with the notion that being evil is more inhuman and discrediting than not being able to be…
1 Many journalists (especially the social media ‘independent’ variety) intentionally produce content to emotionally agitate their watchers/readers/listeners. Often this is because journalists want to maximize exposure and interest of their content for the benefit of their personal carrier: emotional agitation is a tried and true method to get people to share a story and to pay…
Unlocking Unicode Symbol Input on MacOS If you’re using MacOS, enabling Unicode symbol input is straightforward. Here’s a step-by-step guide to set it up: Open System Preferences : Navigate to your Mac’s “System Preferences.” Go to Keyboard Settings : Search for “Keyboard,” then edit “Input Sources” Add Unicode Hex Input : Click the…
Poem Four boys and two men A van filled with supplies Driving west across the plains Towards A beautiful fading sun Ready for an adventure! Nebraska, 2018
§0 A Black Box 0.0 When anything happens there is a tendency to immediately give the occurrence an explanation and then to say “it was obvious wasn’t it, we should of done this or that and it would have all turned out very differently”. But but when building off of these explanations for predicting future events we often find ourselves surprised on how things actually play out.…
Poem Petal to the metal Windows open Radio blasting A telescope in the back A book to the side Not to be back until morning Illinois, 2020
Loyalty is bedrock. Knowing that a person (or a people) will protect you gives peace of mind that thugs can’t come in and take everything you have built without trouble, or that you won’t be completely left stranded if anything else unfortunate happens to you. But the trade-off for a person (or a people) to care for you from birth is that you should show some appreciation, leniency and…
Poetry Not affection nor expression But invasion and infection Acts of war and will Alive Dancing to Music Breaking at a smile Watching a sunrise Shine Not how long but how bright Love The conjunction of stories Heartbreak The death of a story The American 🇺🇸 Stupidly optimistic Unjustifiably friendly Filled with garrulity Mistrust of authority… LOUD I’ve seen this before Macro and…