Posts tagged "technology":

Land Value in the Digital Realm

Adam Smith divides the economic forces into three areas for, the profit obtained from labour, that from capital (or stock), and that obtained from land. The value extracted from land is here the natural resources of the earth, the sunshine and rain that lands there (allowing for agriculture), the timber that can be cut down, or the ore to be mined. But there is another value that can be obtained from the land. In the movie Up (2009) the protagonist Carl Fredricksen refuses to let his villa be demolished despite the large amount of development occurring around him. Since he owns the land that the house is built on, the construction companies can not develop it, even as it is surrounded by soon-to-be skyscrapers. Mr Fredricksen is offered “twice [as much as the] last offer”, showcasing the value of the land. But Mr Fredricksen has not exploited the land at all, he has simply continued living in his house as the area was developed. So where has this value come from? It has come from the labour and capital of others, in its proximity to services provided by the rest of society. This is the observation made by Henry George, one of the great (but quite overlooked) economists of the 19th century. The value of land is then partly the natural resources in and on the land, but the value of the land is also a social construction originating from how much the rest of society wishes to make use of that land.

Common lisp and Github workflows

Github has a functionality where the README file in a repository with the same name as your username will be displayed on your profile. Since I am a fan of the indieweb’s POSSE¹ practice, I’d like to use that space to advertise the writings on this website.

Deepseek is not a Chinese OpenAI

This is part of a series of posts written during or shortly after my visits to the mainland of the People’s Republic of China in the summer of 2025.

Functional Life Without Side-Effects

Programming languages (and their users) are often grouped into two main intellectual schools of thought: Object-oriented programming (OOP) and functional programming. These two schools both claim to offer ways to manage the increasing complexity that comes with the development of larger and larger programs. Functional programming states that this complexity can be managed by following these principles:

Email as a Revolutionary Medium

In an increasingly interconnected and technologically sophisticated world, our capabilities for communication and diversity of ways to do so also increases. This is often approached as a problem, with each method merely remaining due to network effects, but I believe that this multitude of means are a strength and not a weakness. I do however still see what I deem as a misuse of tools, and I shall endeavour to explain, and hopefully convince you of, my ways of structuring communication in different spheres.

About the website

I think every personal blog that is somewhat custom built should have documentation written on its design philosophy and implementation. I see this as an extension of the free-software ideal; you should not only be allowed but also able to extent and modify another program to your needs.

Diplomacy Today: A backstabbr and AI powered newspaper

Diplomacy Today is a python program and corresponding flask application that serves and hosts an early-twentieth-century-style newspapers generated from the turn orders of a game of Diplomacy hosted on backstabbr. The idea, and a large portion of the core code, are not my work, and I deserve none of the credit for it. But the original program seems to have been abandoned last year, and was perhaps only used for one game. But that is the beauty of free software, I have taken nraw’s original code and iterated upon it over the course of, so far, four games. It now contains more features and improved polish that builds upon the basic functionality of a GAI generated in-universe newspaper. I attempted to rewrite the program in chez scheme as a learning exercise, but ended up not using it as python has some nice libraries that I couldn’t bother to reimplement in scheme.