Posts tagged “technology”:
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.
Exponentials 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 ReadingMaking Beautiful Documents in LaTeX
As a political science student, writing is a daily activity. And like any serious writer who cares about their writing, I care about the presentation and look of my documents. This has evolved, particularly recently, into an interest in typography — the art of formatting and shaping text. The source of this interest was originally my discovery of GNU Emacs’ ability to convert org-mode documents into \(\LaTeX\) ones back in high–school and even today this is still the basis of my process. It was accelerated by my increasing tinkering with this very website, having to design its appearance largely from the ground up.
Continue ReadingOn Text and Language
Text, as a system of recording symbolic representation for communication across time and space, is likely one of the most important inventions of mankind — second only the the symbolic representations themselves made possible by language. The general text, opposed to the specific form of writing, is useful primarily because it is a survivable and storable form of information that above anything else functions as lossy compression. These qualities make working with text more powerful than most other human inventions.
Continue ReadingHandwritten notes in Emacs using Xournal++
My girlfriend recently bought a Framework 12 laptop1 with a correspoding stylus and, influenced by my ravings about the power of GNU Emacs, wants to take handwritten digital notes on it for her engineering and mathematics classes and then organise them in org-mode. I see a younger version of myself clearly in her, and of course want to help her attain the vision she has for her own Emacs system. At the same time I am a strong believer in that you should not try and learn Emacs, but that it should be molded to your own personal desires. For that reason I try to act in merely an advisory capacity, while helping whenever she asks.
Continue ReadingProductive Note-taking
After initially starting to use Emacs back in high school merely for programming, I naturally began to use it for other tasks such as document preparation and note-taking. This introduced me to the surprisingly large overlap between Emacs users and people generally interested in “productivity” workflows.
Continue ReadingDecentralized 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 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 there 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 ReadingLand 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.
Continue ReadingCommon 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
The thoughts underlying this thesis have been with me some time, and have been slowly been crystallising more and more clearly as time goes on and I realise that the rest of the world is seemingly diverging more and more with my own thoughts on the subject. This is not a fully formed proposal, and I will not attempt any detailed plan of action. As always, it is instead an attempt to try and formulate my own thinking on the subject, as well as to offer the reader a perspective on the Chinese economic philosophy that is heavily overlooked in the west. While informed by reading scholarly material and following the ongoing discussion about China, it is prompted mainly by my visit there and getting an idea of how the country works. That idea may be incorrect, and so feel free to e-mail me your thoughts on the subject.
Continue ReadingFunctional 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:
Continue ReadingEmail 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.
Continue ReadingColophon
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.
Continue ReadingDiplomacy 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.
