Welcome to the hypomnemata and blog of Joar Alexander Pablo von Arndt.
My name is Joar von Arndt. The site you are currently on is my place for experimentation in writing, development, and the exploration of different ideas. I cover a lot of different topics, including my experiences with gnu Emacs, to graphic design, thoughts on industrial policy, and philosophy. If you enjoy anything written here (or disagree with me) feel free to tell me about it.
Want to know more about me?1 Check out my about page.
My own personal favorites are the following:
A Style Guide
One of the things I find surprisingly interesting is reading the style guides of different publishers or newspapers. Style guides generally cover how written content should be structured and presented. They help make single organisation seem coherent and help writers present what might otherwise be ambiguous. At the same time they can often be overly detailed, attacking the creative freedom of the author. Reading what decisions others have made regarding their styles allow me to pick and choose what to take inspiration from. Because I am in full control over what I publish here I can also make liberal use of Orwell’s sixth rule from Politics and the English Language: “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous”.
Continue ReadingOn an American Suez
A major Anglo-Saxon power begins a war far away from home with the help of Israel and without the support of its allies. The main objective is the control of one of the world’s most important maritime trade routes, but the aggressor may have to back down — partly from the rising oil prices at home. This could either describe the 1956 Suez crisis, when Britain and France invaded Egypt over their nationalisation of the Suez canal, or the contemporary Israeli-American bombing campaign and blockade of Iran (“Operation Epic Fury”). Is the war in Iran then an American Suez?
Continue ReadingHardening up
We are at war. There is currently a constant struggle between countless opposing forces to overcome the other’s defences. But this fighting is not immediately noticeable in the world around us — it is going on in the abstract world of digital communications called cyberspace. As more and more of our activities are impacted by what goes on in this domain of warfare, it becomes more and more of a target. The recent developments in artificial intelligence (ai) — and more specifically large language model (llm) — capabilities have had large headline impacts on the field of cybersecurity. Regardless of if Anthriopic’s Mythos has the capability to autonomously gain access to complex digital systems, it is inevitable that some other model soon will. Frontier labs have all invested enormous resources into training these models for cybersecurity tasks. What will the consequences be of such automated systems, and how will they impact the fundamentals of cybersecurity?
Continue ReadingFootnotes:
A totally reasonable thing to want to do; I am a pretty interesting person after all.
