This is the site of Joar Alexander Pablo von Arndt. I write about a variety of topics, from coverage of GNU Emacs web browsing, to graphic design and critiques of industrial policy. You can subscribe here. If you enjoy anything written here (or disagree with me) feel free to tell me about it.
My own personal favorites are the following:
Russia is Not a Great Power
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.
Continue ReadingElements of Economic Security
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 clearer and clearer to me that the field of economic security has a central element that makes it fundamentally difficult to implement. The subject has only become more relevant as of late, with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) showing no sign of stopping its entrenchment into critical sectors of the economy and with ever-strengthening winds in the sails of protectionism everywhere from Warsaw to Washington. As such it is an issue that has continuously been brewing in the back of my mind these past years. But despite increased interest in the topic it has not become any clearer what constitutes economic security, and how it should best be attained and maintained. A crude definition might be the following:
Continue ReadingVibe-coding Brings the Power of Emacs to Everything
One of the first use-cases I found for LLMs back when ChatGPT 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. LLMs are fantastic for this sort of work, where
some sort of messily structured data needs to be transformed into some
other form that is then useful. As LLMs become cheaper and cheaper it
becomes easier and easier to make data become useful. The benefits of
this is obvious to the point of it being the main strength of what is
perhaps the world’s oldest continuously developed software project;
GNU Emacs.
Pluribus & Alienation
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 show with artificial intelligence (AI). But for me, continuing on an earlier thought that AI is not extraordinary, it was much more obvious that Pluribus is about “the internet” more-so than AI.
Continue ReadingExponentials and Artificial Intelligence
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 opinions that can generally be subdivided into the following categories:
Continue ReadingThree Thoughts On Crypto and NFTs
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.
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