All Posts
Decentralized Personal Computing
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 my pocket. The solution to this is to have work sync automatically between my machines.
Continue ReadingHealthy Media Habits
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 smartphone.
Continue ReadingOn Attaining European Technological Sovereignty
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 industry1. With the large investments in large language models (LLMs) since the release of ChatGPT a number of years ago have been increasing pushes for Europe — to the extent that Europe can be considered a single entity — to do something. What exactly to do is of course in contention, otherwise it would likely already have been done, but the discussion regarding the lack of a European tech industry compared to the USA has been occurring for much longer — especially since China has proven that it is possible to build such an industry without American help.
Continue ReadingDesigning Business Cards
I usually always carry a few business cards. This is quite uncommon in this day and age, with the need for remembering phone numbers having disappeared and with the ubiquity of social media for creating, sharing, and maintaining contact. But I reject the use of mainstream social media, partly for ideological reasons but also for practical ones1. This inevitably requires making certain sacrifices when it comes to what events I can participate in, on how learning about what people I know are up to, and on how I can communicate with the people in my life around me. There are some drawbacks that you might expect — you can not DM someone on instagram if you do not have instagram yourself — but there are hidden drawbacks that may not be immediately obvious.
Continue ReadingEmail as social media
It is apparent to everyone that social media is distinctly a different experience today from how it initially developed. It has become a form of mindless consmption instead of a social space where one interacts with other genuine individuals. The concept of content, once merely used on Madison avenue, has become so ingrained in the social media environment that those who would otherwise call themselves enternainers, artists, or journalists have now come to regard their field as mere content creation, as producing things merely meant to get you hooked so that you will look at more advertisments. This has been accelerated due to LLM’s ability to quickly create things that are “good enough” to look at, read, or otherwise consume. Consumption has become the only reason to interact with social media. But it is becoming increasingly clear that alternatives are not only necessary, they are already here.
Continue Reading