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:
Vibe-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.
Continue ReadingThe Qualities of the Totalitarian State
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 regards even the twentieth), when living standards where many times more squalid than today, there was then a sense of progressiveness, of growth and change that — as long as channelled in the correct direction — would be transformed into a new and wonderful world. That spirit does not exist today. Instead we have the idea that we are “sliding” back into the darkest depths of mankind’s history and that we will — posed with some certainty if not clarity — see the return of fascism and of the oppression of the state.
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