I love when my face gets red and I feel warmth through my body when I'm engaged in intellectual activty, like a debate or a research about something, or even an interesting reading. As if my skin refuses to keep secrets and as if life insists on showing itself the moment it stirs within me. I love when I feel heated but not because of overstimulation or weather being hot, but just for being so filled with live and sensation, I love how a self that's full of life reminds itself how not untouched by the life it is, but responsive to it. Lit from within, unmistakably alive. My poetry:

#Modus Vivendi #Poetry

Apparently, the Arabic translator of (Hoffer 2010) found that Erich Fromm's interpretation about something is not pretty accurate from his point of view, so he decided to just remove it.

TIL about the #NoEstimates movement in software development:

• #NoEstimates, An Introduction. | Allen Holub
• The NoEstimates Movement
• How To Estimate Software Development Time - YouTube

#Programming

Today I looked deeply at the Courtyard of a Mosque at Broussa by Frederic Leighton, it's a 1867 painting;

I genuinely miss when mosques looked like this, simple and messy yet cozy and very beautiful. When I was young, my Dad used to take me to a mosque in our town were I used to do Hifz. It was called the Wastani mosque but this was only the colloquial name, as I grown up to learn that the name in the official government references is "The Antique Mosque" المسجد العتيق in Arabic. Although it didn't have a courtyard, that mosque had a very similar architecture and as similar dome. I never thought that it was beautiful when I was young (again, I used to go everyday for at least 4 years continuously, doing Kuttab with Dad), I just accepted it as a part of the town.

It had the same redness in the artwork, and sometimes a beautiful yellow vectors of light coming from the open fractals of the dome, that aging and its wither have produced. It was really beautiful. For some reason it reminds me of houses in Cinema Paradiso (1988).

Later, when I was in high-school, I found a book about the history of my town and other nearby towns, it was written by an agricultural engineer from the Ottoman empire, the book surprisingly mention the mosque by its name, and I realized how this mosque is old then and I decided that "once I get time" I will spend some time there again, preferably with my dad. However, I didn't expect to come back to town to find that people are happy that they demolished the mosque and are rebuilding it, by the help of an anonymous donor (it's been said that, that donor, is an ex-infamous drug dealer who was trying to repent to God, thus he rebuilt so many mosques around the areas and built new ones too, which is likely, I don't expect a lot of intellect from someone who builds a mosque instead of a school or any other utility needed much more than a mosque nowadays), and I felt sad for I couldn't find any pictures of the mosque. I know that some people filmed some places of it in some few occasions, but it never captured the beauty it had.

I learnt that I should never say "Once I get the time for it" again, for it may never be possible again. That being said, once I have the time, I will learn how to do good painting, and I will paint this beautiful mosque from my own memory.

TIL Lisp languages are one of the least with boilerplate. Maybe this also has to do with the fact that it's least languages that are token effective #Programming #Lisp Programming Language

قرأت الإخوة كرامازوف منذ حوالي 9 سنوات وكنت مغرمًا بشخصية إيفان فيدوروفتش من بداية القصة، وكان بداية غرامي بعقله في الفقرة التالية:

وأذكر جيدًا أني توقفت لوهلة عند قراءة هذه الفقرة منذ 9 سنوات، كما فعلت في قراءتي الثانية للرواية منذ عامين، وكما فعلت اليوم أيضًا. وأذكر أني في غير مرة حاولت أتخيل كيف كان هذه المقالة بتخيلي لشخصية إيفان. واليوم قد عزمت على أن أسرد هذا التخيل. كتب إيفان فيدوروفتش:

يحتج المدافعون عن السلطة الكنسية بأن الدولة، بوصفها مؤسسة زمنية محضة، عاجزة عن بلوغ ضمير المجرم، وبالتالي عاجزة عن إصلاحه إصلاحاً حقيقياً. فالسارق يُودع السجن ثم يُطلق سراحه، فلا يلبث أن يعود إلى السرقة، لأن السجن حبس جسده ولم يمس روحه. أما الكنيسة، بأسرارها ورعايتها الروحية، فهي وحدها القادرة على إحداث التحول الباطني الذي يمنع التكرار. وهذا الاحتجاج، في حدود ما يدعيه، صحيح تماماً. فإنني زرت كثيراً من السجون ولم أقابل مجرماً واحداً تحول فيها إلى إنسان صالح، بينما زرت كثيراً من الأديرة ولم أقابل فيها راهباً واحداً لم يتب عن ماضيه.

ويحتج المدافعون عن السلطة المدنية بأن المحاكم الدينية، إذ تنطلق من مقدمات ميتافيزيقية لا يقبلها جميع المواطنين، لا تستطيع أن تفصل في المنازعات بالحياد اللازم. فالمحكمة المدنية، حين تستند إلى العقل والبرهان وحدهما، تقدم العدالة للمؤمن وغير المؤمنعلى حد سواء. وهذا الاحتجاج أيضاً، في حدود ما يدعيه، صحيح تماماً. فإنني حضرت كثيراً من المحاكم الكنسية ولم أشهد فيها حكماً واحداً لم يتوافق، بطريقة عجيبة، مع ما تقتضيه المصلحة اللاهوتية، بينما حضرت كثيراً من المحاكم المدنية ولم أشهد فيها حكماً واحداً أفسدته اعتبارات ما وراء الطبيعة.

والآن، ما الذي يترتب على هاتين الحقيقتين اللتين يبدو أنهما تناقضان إحداهما الأخرى؟

يترتب عليهما أمر في غاية البساطة، وأعجب كل العجب كيف لم يلحظه أحد قبلي. إذا كانت الكنيسة وحدها قادرة على إحداث الإصلاح الأخلاقي الحقيقي، فإن كل مؤسسة تدعي إصلاح المجرمين هي بالضرورة إما كنيسة متنكرة في ثياب أخرى، وإما مؤسسة فاشلة تمارس الاحتيال على نفسها وعلى المجتمع. ولننظر إلى السجون الحديثة: فيها قساوسة يزورون النزلاء، وفيها برامج للتربية الأخلاقية، وفيها أخصائيون نفسيون يستمعون إلى اعترافات المذنبين ويسعون إلى تغيير قلوبهم. فما هذه المؤسسات إلا أديرة نست اسمها الحقيقي. السجان فيها رئيس دير، والأخصائي النفسي كاهن اعتراف، ومجلس الإفراج المشروط مجمع كنسي يقرر من استحق الغفران. كل ما فعلته الحداثة أنها أعادت تسمية الأشياء مراعاة لمشاعر من يكرهون المصطلحات الدينية.

وإذا كانت المحكمة المدنية وحدها قادرة على تحقيق العدالة النزيهة، فإن كل محكمة كنسية تدعي الإنصاف هي بالضرورة إما محكمة مدنية متنكرة في أثواب كهنوتية، وإما مؤسسة ظالمة تخلط بين السلطة الروحية والمصلحة الدنيوية. ولننظر إلى المحاكم الكنسية حين تنظر في قضايا الاختلاس أو النزاع على الأملاك: هل تستشير النصوص المقدسة أم تستعين بالمحاسبين والمساحين؟ الجواب معروف. فالكنيسة، في ممارستها القضائية الفعلية، مؤسسة علمانية ترتدي الجبة والإكليل. إذًاالمحاكم الكنسية والمحاكم المدنية هي المحاكم ذاتها، وكانت كذلك منذ البداية.

ستقولون: إذا كانت المحاكم متماثلة في جوهرها، فكيف نفسر اختلاف أحكامها؟ لماذا تحرم الكنيسة من تطرده الدولة إلى السجن؟ ولماذا تفرض الدولة الغرامة حيث تفرض الكنيسة الكفارة؟ والجواب أن الأحكام ليست مختلفة في الحقيقة، بل هي الحكم ذاته معبراً عنه بلغات مختلفة. فالحرمان الكنسي هو السجن في صورة روحية، إذ ما السجن إلا إقصاء المذنب عن المجتمع ومنعه من المشاركة في حياته، وهذا بعينه ما يفعله الحرمان. والكفارة هي الغرامة في صورة تعبدية، إذ ما الغرامة إلا انتزاع شيء ذي قيمة من المذنب لقاء ذنبه، وهذا بعينه ما تفعله الكفارة. القاضي المدني الذي يحكم على رجل بخدمة المجتمع قد أعاد اختراع الكفارة الكنسية من غير أن يستخدم اللاتينية. والأسقف الذي يمنع خاطئاً من تناول القربان المقدس قد أعاد اختراع الحبس الانفرادي من غير أن يبني جدراناً. كل عقوبة هي العقوبة ذاتها، وكل إصلاح هو الإصلاح ذاته، وكل محكمة هي المحكمة ذاتها. والتنوع الظاهري بينها ليس إلا خطأ في الترجمة بين لغتين تقولان الشيء نفسه. فإن قلتم: لكن الكنيسة تقدم ما لا تستطيع الدولة تقديمه، وهو الخلاص الأبدي. فالدولة قد تصلح الإنسان لهذه الحياة، لكن الكنيسة تعده لما بعد الموت. أقول: انظر إلى خطاب المصلحين العلمانيين. إنهم أيضاً يدعون إعداد الناس للأبدية، لكنهم يسمونها أسماء أخرى: الأجيال القادمة، مستقبل الإنسانية، حكم التاريخ، ذاكرة العالم. فالملحد الذي يعمل على تحسين العالم يؤمن أن ناتج عمله سيستمر إلى ما لا نهاية، وأن الأجيال التي لم تولد بعد ستذكره بالثناء أو اللوم. أي أنه يسعى إلى الخلود ذاته، ولكن بعد إزالة الغلاف الديني عنه. أورشليم الجديدة تحولت إلى اليوتوبيا، والملكوت تحول إلى التقدم، لكن التصميم المعماري واحد. فإن قلتم: لكن الدولة تؤسس نفسها على العقل، بينما تؤسس الكنيسة نفسها على الوحي. أليس هذا الفرق جوهرياً وحاسماً؟ أقول: ما الوحي إلا العقل منسوباً إلى الله؟ وما العقل إلا الوحي منسوباً إلى الإنسان؟ والفيلسوف الذي يعلن "أنا أفكر إذن أنا موجود" يزعم أنه تلقى يقيناً لا يقبل الشك من مصدر مطلق لا يخطئ، وهذا بعينه تعريف الوحي عند اللاهوتيين. الفرق الوحيد أنه يرفض تسمية هذا المصدر باسمه التقليدي. التنوير، في المحصلة، مسيحية بإضاءة كهربائية بدلاً من الشموع.

والآن أنتقل إلى التوصيات العملية. أولاً: يجب على المحاكم الكنسية أن تعترف رسمياً بأنها محاكم مدنية ترتدي أثواباً مختلفة. وأرى أن يُصدر البابا مرسوماً بذلك، يُتلى في جميع الكاتدرائيات صباح أحد الآحاد، ثم يُحرق فوراً بعد تلاوته حتى لا يبقى له أثر مكتوب. ثانياً: يجب على المحاكم المدنية أن تعترف رسمياً بأنها مؤسسات دينية تستخدم مصطلحات حديثة. وأرى أن يُصدر البرلمان قانوناً بذلك، يُنشر في الجريدة الرسمية، ثم تُسحب جميع النسخ من التداول في اليوم التالي. ثالثاً: يجب تشكيل لجنة مشتركة من رجال الدين والقضاة المدنيين، مهمتها الاجتماع مرة كل شهر للاتفاق على أنهم يفعلون الشيء ذاته، ثم الافتراق والعودة إلى التظاهر بالاختلاف أمام الجمهور. رابعاً: يجب إنشاء كرسي جامعي جديد، يُسمى "كرسي علم التماثل بين المتناقضات الظاهرية"، يشغله أستاذ لا يؤمن بشيء ولا يكفر بشيء، مهمته إصدار تقارير سنوية تؤكد أن كل شيء هو كل شيء آخر، وأن الخلافات كلها لغوية. أما التمويل، فأقترح أن يتشارك فيه الفاتيكان والجمهورية الفرنسية بالتساوي، على أن يدّعي كل منهما أمام أنصاره أنه يدفع أقل.

Reading (King 1944), such a fantastic book, I wish I read it earlier in my life, but I will still read again the future. I picked some from it here Interesting laws of Engineering but I stopped when I noticed that I was about to copy the whole book. A must read definitely.

will see as God might see, without a here and now, without hopes and fears, without the trammels of customary beliefs and traditional prejudices, calmly, dispassionately, in the sole and exclusive desire for knowledge, knowledge as impersonal, as purely contemplative, as it is possible for man to attain.

#Philosophy #Modus Vivendi #Bertrand Russell

Kant’s deontology starts from a simple idea: morality isn’t about outcomes, vibes, or damage control—it’s about duty. An action is moral only if it could be willed as a universal rule and if it treats people as ends in themselves, not as tools. This is where autonomy comes in. So respecting someone means respecting their capacity to choose rationally. The moment you lie, you’re not just bending the truth, you’re hijacking another person’s decision-making. You’re feeding them fake inputs so they act the way you want, not the way they would choose if they actually knew what was going on.

Take a concrete, uncomfortable case: you know a man is cheating on his wife, and one day she asks you directly whether it’s true. From a Kantian perspective, lying to “protect her feelings” isn’t kindness, it’s paternalism. By lying, you deny her autonomy, you decide, on her behalf, that she shouldn’t know, that she can’t be trusted with the truth. Even if the truth causes pain, telling it respects her as a rational agent who has the right to make decisions about her own life with full information. That respect outweighs consequences. The ethical failure isn’t the discomfort that follows the truth but the quiet arrogance of thinking you’re entitled to rewrite reality for someone else. #Immanuel Kant #Deontological ethics #Philosophy

Reading (Hoffer 2010)

My Hugo build was taking almost 10 minutes.

Today I finally sat down to fix it. Ran hugo --templateMetrics and the culprit was immediately obvious:

Template                          | Total Time | Calls
----------------------------------|------------|------
_partials/resolve-roam-links.html | 9m 15s     | 866
_partials/native-backlinks.html   | 6m 58s     | 630

I wrote these partials naively. Each one iterates through all pages to build a lookup table (ID → URL, ID → title), uses it once, then throws it away. With ~440 pages, this meant O(n²) complexity. Each page triggers ~440 iterations, so 440 × 440 = ~193,000 iterations just for the ID map. Catastrophic.

The fix was embarrassingly simple, Hugo's partialCached function. Build the lookup tables once, cache them, reuse everywhere.

Created three new cached partials:

• global-id-map.html — ID → URL map
• global-title-map.html — ID → title map
• bib-data.html — bibliography parsing

Then rewrote the slow partials to call these with partialCached.

The build now happens in 1770 ms. 300x faster.

Remember kids, never rebuild data structures you can cache. #Programming

George Orwell's writing rules are quite interesting:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

TIL I learn that the WannaCrypt incident was based on a exploit developed by the NSA:

In 2017, the NSA discovered that the software was stolen by a group of hackers known as the Shadow Brokers. Microsoft might have been informed of this and released security updates in March 2017 patching the vulnerability. While this was happening, the hacker group attempted to auction off the software, but did not succeed in finding a buyer. EternalBlue was then released publicly on April 14, 2017.

On May 12, 2017, a computer worm in the form of ransomware, nicknamed WannaCry, used the EternalBlue exploit to attack computers using Windows that had not received the latest system updates removing the vulnerability.: 1  On June 27, 2017, the exploit was again used to help carry out the 2017 NotPetya cyberattack on more vulnerable computers.

#Programming #Microsoft #CIA #I really hate Microsoft

Reading (Akash 2002):

It's strange what he is saying, John Chivington is not considered a "hero" at all.

TIL that early settlers used to call America "Israel" (Akash 2002).

#The right to sacrifice the other: the american genocides #Israel #Politics

#Herbert James Draper #Art

I need to suppress all these Scala suffering posts. Moreover I need to reply some emails, I also need to learn how to perform Etude, Op. 25 No. 11, and I generally need to do more good things.

Can we talk about how absolutely fucking ridiculous it is that I have to manually tell my language server to import a build that my build tool already compiled successfully? Like, SBT just sat there, downloaded all my dependencies, compiled my entire project without a single complaint, and then Metals (supposed to make my editor experience better, read this if you need to know my opinion about the name: read this if you need to know my opinion about the name) is over here acting like purecsv and shapeless are mythical creatures that don't exist. “Not found: object purecsv”? Really? Are you for real?? It's RIGHT THERE. You literally share the same project directory. Why do I need to remember some arcane M-x lsp-metals-build-import incantation every time I add a dependency or the moon enters the wrong phase? The whole point of LSP was to make this stuff seamless. #Scala

If Scala has a million haters then I'm one of them.

If Scala has only one hater then that's me.

If Scala has no haters then I'm dead. #Scala

RT: Software industry needs some standards:

Until software engineering adopts the same standards, certifications, consistency, and accountability as traditional engineering, along with real consequences, these arguments don’t hold much weight.

This entire modern industry was built on the opposite philosophy: agile. Move fast, break things. Ship iteratively with minimal design. Drop production? Just revert. Outage? Oops.

Software is still treated like a toy. It’s playdough in the hands of toddlers led by other toddlers. You might be among the 1% who do things properly.. but the other 99% don’t.

Related: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools #Programming

Part two of 21:02 About affairs.

So why is it a big deal whether it's punished structurally or not?

Because it actually has consequences. I will take forgiveness as a prime example, is forgiveness possible?. That question arrives too late and already assumes the wrong moral frame. The ethical question is not “can I forgive you?” but “what kind of world can exist after this?” And more precisely, who is now required to do the metaphysical labor of making reality continuous again?

So the person who breaks the structure gets to appeal to sincerity, remorse, growth, trauma, youth, confusion, loneliness, destiny. Meanwhile the person who was lied to is quietly conscripted into an ethical cleanup crew. If they forgive, they are mature. If they hesitate, they are bitter. If they refuse, they are cruel.

Let me iterate again over how affairs work, it does not just 'hurt', It reorganizes moral reality without consent. One person decides that continuity is optional and shared truth can be suspended temporarily and that another human being can live inside a partial fiction for an extended period of time aka unilateral world-editing.

And forgiveness is often proposed as a way to reverse that edit. But forgiveness cannot restore symmetry. It cannot un-know knowledge or make memory innocent again. At best, it offers a way to live with the fracture. At worst, it demands that the injured party perform moral theater in order to stabilize a structure they did not damage.

What people call forgiveness is often compliance dressed up as virtue. There is a strange ethical inversion at work. The one who violated trust is allowed complexity and their motives are examined, contextualized, humanized. The one who was violated is expected to be clean, generous, forward-looking, their anger is treated as a failure of character rather than a correct moral signal.

But doesn't refusing forgiveness keeps you trapped in the past? Well, being forced to live in a future built on unresolved falsity is not much better. Forgiveness that arrives before accountability is not healing, it is gaslighting with a moral accent.

There is no moral obligation to forgive someone who has restructured your world without consent.

Something that is often said also, is that, you gain "freedom" when you forgive, aka free yourself. freedom that requires denying the truth is not freedom but an amputation.

These are not tragedies because people feel too much or sensitive or love so much but ethical failures because someone decides that shared reality is negotiable. And once that line is crossed, the demand for forgiveness often becomes just another way to avoid paying the full cost of what was done.

Not every story needs reconciliation. Some need accuracy.

And accuracy, unlike forgiveness, does not care if it makes anyone comfortable.

One of the oldest jokes in compi-sci/engineering communities is Bjarne Stroustrup's "I Did It For You All…", which basically states that, Stroustrup made C++ the terrible language it is, for the sake that engineers can make money out of using it (I'm unsure what's this strategy is called, but I saw sometimes people picking very obscure tech at work that they're the only ones familiar with it, so they can secure job security):

Stroustrup: Remember the length of the average-sized ‘C’ project? About 6 months. Not nearly long enough for a guy with a wife and kids to earn enough to have a decent standard of living. Take the same project, design it in C++ and what do you get? I’ll tell you. One to two years. Isn’t that great? All that job security, just through one mistake of judgment. And another thing. The universities haven’t been teaching ‘C’ for such a long time, there’s now a shortage of decent ‘C’ programmers. Especially those who know anything about Unix systems programming. How many guys would know what to do with ‘malloc’, when they’ve used ‘new’ all these years - and never bothered to check the return code. In fact, most C++ programmers throw away their return codes. Whatever happened to good ol' ‘-1’? At least you knew you had an error, without bogging the thing down in all that ‘throw’ ‘catch’ ‘try’ stuff..

Interviewer: But, surely, inheritance does save a lot of time?

Stroustrup: Does it? Have you ever noticed the difference between a ‘C’ project plan, and a C++ project plan? The planning stage for a C++ project is three times as long. Precisely to make sure that everything which should be inherited is, and what shouldn’t isn’t. Then, they still get it wrong.. Whoever heard of memory leaks in a ‘C’ program? Now finding them is a major industry. Most companies give up, and send the product out, knowing it leaks like a sieve, simply to avoid the expense of tracking them all down..

Interviewer: There are tools…..

Stroustrup: Most of which were written in C++.

Interviewer: If we publish this, you’ll probably get lynched, you do realise that?

Stroustrup: I doubt it. As I said, C++ is way past its peak now, and no company in its right mind would start a C++ project without a pilot trial. That should convince them that it’s the road to disaster. If not, they deserve all they get.. You know, I tried to convince Dennis Ritchie to rewrite Unix in C++..

Interviewer: Oh my God. What did he say?

Stroustrup: Well, luckily, he has a good sense of humor. I think both he and Brian figured out what I was doing, in the early days, but never let on. He said he’d help me write a C++ version of DOS, if I was interested..

Interviewer: Were you?

Stroustrup: Actually, I did write DOS in C++, I’ll give you a demo when we’re through. I have it running on a Sparc 20 in the computer room. Goes like a rocket on 4 CPU’s, and only takes up 70 megs of disk..

Interviewer: What’s it like on a PC?

Stroustrup: Now you’re kidding. Haven’t you ever seen Windows ‘95? I think of that as my biggest success. Nearly blew the game before I was ready, though..

Interviewer: You know, that idea of a Unix++ has really got me thinking. Somewhere out there, there’s a guy going to try it..

Stroustrup: Not after they read this interview..

Interviewer: I’m sorry, but I don’t see us being able to publish any of this..

Stroustrup: But it’s the story of the century. I only want to be remembered by my fellow programmers, for what I’ve done for them. You know how much a C++ guy can get these days?

Interviewer: Last I heard, a really top guy is worth $70 - $80 an hour..

Stroustrup: See? And I bet he earns it. Keeping track of all the gotchas I put into C++ is no easy job. And, as I said before, every C++ programmer feels bound by some mystic promise to use every damn element of the language on every project. Actually, that really annoys me sometimes, eve. I almost like the language after all this time..

I'm starting to feel that the Scala authors did the same thing. They did it for us all. #Scala #Programming

If a programming language makes you feeling like it's necessary to use an IDE, then it's probably poorly designed, common examples are C#, Java, Scala. It's a lot of hassle to add a "dependency" for other project, for example, without doing a right click magic. In a good designed modular language, it's usually only an import statement #Programming

And then dying will be the end of something dazzling: dying will be one of the most important acts in my life. I’m afraid of dying: I don’t know what nebulae and milky ways await me ~clarice lispector

People who have affairs always speak as if they are the first humans to discover desire. I've mistaken novelty for transcendence a lot of time as a kid, but I'm surprised adults do it more often as if the shelves are not already heavy with the corpses of people who thought they were special. There's no criminal psychology to answer for affairs (i.e. why people do it?) but literature (as well as gossip, religion, court records and living memories, but I'm talking literature for this) answered it unironically many times. One of the greatest answers IMHO is Anna Karenina, it's rarely discussed in the context of exceptionalism, which is what I would like to do.

Exceptionalism is the belief that rules are for other people. That patterns exist until I arrive. IMO affairs are not driven by desire which is (IMHO) common and boring. What drives affairs (I'm tired of implying that this is my humble opinion, so take it as an implicit from now on) is the conviction that consequences are negotiable if your interior life feels sufficiently profound.

Anna Karenina is not a story about love but about a woman who mistakes intensity for transcendence and sincerity for immunity. Anna does not think she is immoral she thinks she is honest. She thinks her suffering sanctifies her choices and that because her feelings are real, the structure of the world will rearrange itself around them. I used to think something similar, until I didn't (plot twist; the world does not).

Tolstoy was so damn merciless because reality is indeed merciless. Anna stepped outside the social order not quietly but so loudly, it acknowledge her pain as justification. The punishment is not divine or some sort of magic it's literally structural, just like mechanics (I need to assure you society does have dynamics, but maybe I can elaborate on that somewhere else. Or never.)

She lost anything socially speaking. Doors close. Rooms go quiet. People do not scream at her anymore. They simply stop seeing her as human. Vronsky does not turn evil but he turns finite. His ambition and pride assert themselves because love does not abolish psychology and for Anna’s identity, it collapses inward. People do not scream at her anymore because screaming still acknowledges a human subject. They simply stop recognizing her as one.

This is what structural punishment looks like, aka ontological downgrade. Anna becomes an inconvenience in the social grammar. A disruption. Something that makes others uncomfortable by existing. And discomfort is always managed by distance.

Vronsky does not become a villain (my guess is that it's a fantasy belongs to sentimental readers). However, like I mentioned, he becomes something much worse, finite. Psychology (or mind, for the lack of a better word) does not evaporate in the presence of passion. It waits then it collects its debt.

Now let's restate the obvious; the affair does not free her from social structure. It expels her from it. And outside structure there is no meaning, only exposure. Every glance becomes a trial and every silence becomes a verdict. Without shared norms, there is no shared reality.

This is why exceptionalism always fails. Not because society is vindictive, but because systems do not tolerate permanent exceptions. Anna believes her feelings should count as a new law and sadly laws are not persuaded by sincerity.

People love to say she was punished for loving too deeply. That is a so biased analysis. She was punished for believing depth conferred exemption and that her interior life outranked external order. For believing that because something felt necessary, it therefore was.

It's untrue that love destroyed her. Love survives all kinds of bad decisions. However, she mistook love for sovereignty. And, again, sovereignty claimed without structure always ends the same way: isolation, paranoia, collapse.

Now imagine the counterfactual people love to hide behind. What if she cheats and nothing collapses? What if the affair is civilized and almost elegant?

Structure is not only social but also epistemic. The moment one person knows, the system is already unstable, not emotionally but ontologically (very smart face emoji), knowledge is asymmetrical FYI. And asymmetry is unstable.

The one who knows becomes a structural weight by existing (even if no acts). They carry a truth that cannot circulate and truth that cannot circulate does not disappear but curdles. And the relationship no longer has a shared map of reality.

The cheated-on partner becomes something new that destabilizes systems simply by remembering. They do not need to accuse but you can say that just their knowledge changes the gravitational field for others.

Meanwhile, the cheater must now manage two realities; public continuity and the private deviation. This requires constant cognitive partitioning. A divided self is not tragic yet, but it is expensive and life becomes logistical, memory becomes selective, language bcomes strategic. and all of that over time erodes coherence aka entropy.

But actually let's suppose none of this erupts. Suppose everyone behaves impeccably. No confessions. No slips. Still, the structure has already changed.

The cheated-on partner now lives in a world where their perception is unreliable by design. They are expected to trust a narrative that excludes crucial data. Over time, this produces one of two outcomes: hypervigilance or dissociation. Either the world becomes a crime scene, or it becomes numb, both states love can not survive them.

People think tragedy requires exposure. It does not. Exposure is usually just the visible ending. The real punishment happens earlier, in structure. In the fact that once one person knows, the relationship is no longer a shared reality but a managed illusion.

This is why the fantasy of “no one gets hurt” is incoherent (I already proven that it is not possible). Hurt is not the metric, integrity is. And integrity, once breached, does not announce its departure. It simply stops doing its job.

Later, if you want structure, it looks like this:

• First, asymmetry of knowledge.
• Then, asymmetry of power.
• Then, asymmetry of reality.
• Then, slow institutional collapse of trust.
• Then, either revelation or emotional extinction.

People expect a sudden strike, instead, things slowly wear away, and when that happens, no one feels guilty.

Most people do not know how to gift flowers. Fewer still know how to receive them. Men usually perceive it a something that women like. And most women don't like flowers actually or have a reason for loving them but they blindly follow mimetic activity of how romance was introduced to them and how they define themselves as receivers of it. I love flowers differently. For me, to give a flower is to acknowledge finitude. I believe that roses, or any kind of plant, is a lovely symbol of life, and maybe of death too. It lives, it decays, and in that decay it reveals what all presence truly is, something already in the process of leaving.

When I give someone a flower, I offer my presence in the same way; alive, fragile, and implicitly dying. Not as tragedy, but as truth. Life happens precisely because it does not last.

And life happens. Sometimes the symbol dies, sometimes the connection renews itself and another living thing appears between us (let that be you getting something else alive from me, like another rose), and this state of continuous maintainability of a relationship between two, is symbolized, to me, in the process of gifting, taking care, and reestablishing something that is alive.

To gift a flower, to care for it, to replace it when it die, this is how I run feelings towards anyone, or anything at all, sustained attention to something alive. #Modus Vivendi

A question that I had while reading Scala specs, is that why do we need Some at all? When we return an option of T, we are usually returning Some(T) or Nothing. But why not T or Nothing directly? I didn't see anything that makes Some make sense to me so far, other than it add an absence notation context (this is to say, that Some(T) means T in the context of the possibility of absence of T).

The reason that I found so far is that there is no runtime discriminator, which is basically a JVM limitation;

A runtime discriminator is data that tells you which alternative you have. Option looks like this:

sealed trait Option[+A]
case class Some[A](value: A) extends Option[A]
case object None extends Option[Nothing]

At runtime, an Option[A] value is either:

• an instance of Some, or
• the singleton object None

That class identity is the discriminator.

Pattern matching works because the JVM can ask:

isInstanceOf[Some[_]] ?
isInstanceOf[None.type] ?

Now remove Some and None

def findT(id: Int): T | Nothing

The issue here is that there is no value of type Nothing. It's compile-time only. I would even imagine that the type erasure in the JVM makes all the following equivalent:

User
User | Nothing
Option[User]

#Scala

Reading Aristotle’s 10 Rules for a Happy Life - The Atlantic (link). Why there's always that strange tendency for journalist to a reference study from a psychology journal or a a science journal after everything? I'm not expecting Aristotle's views to supported by the APA, moreover, most of the links are really irrelevant, it's almost like he/she just needed to have some blue-colored words.

The book Functional Programming with Scala mentions two main problems with exceptions:

• Exceptions are not type-safe. The type of failingFn, Int => Int tells us nothing about the fact that exceptions may occur, and the compiler will certainly not force callers of failingFn to make a decision about how to handle those exceptions. If we forget to check for an exception in failingFn, this won’t be detected until runtime.
• Java’s checked exceptions at least force a decision about whether to handle or reraise an error, but they result in significant boilerplate for callers. More importantly, they don’t work for higher-order functions, which can’t possibly be aware of the specific exceptions that could be raised by their arguments. For example, consider the map function we defined for List: def map[A,B](l: List[A])(f: A => B): List[B] This function is clearly useful, highly generic, and at odds with the use of checked exceptions—we can’t have a version of map for every single checked exception that could possibly be thrown by f. Even if we wanted to do this, how would map even know what exceptions were possible? This is why generic code, even in Java, so often resorts to using RuntimeException or some common checked Exception type.
• As we just discussed, exceptions break RT and introduce context dependence, moving us away from the simple reasoning of the substitution model and making it possible to write confusing exception-based code. This is the source of the folklore advice that exceptions should be used only for error handling, not for control flow.

If I'd name a single thing that turns me down from using a certain language, it would be definitely exception handling. #Exception handling #Programming #Scala

Interestingly, Scala will prefer LUB type of an expression instead of doing a type union or doing Either , so:

  val result = if (true) "what?" else 4

result type here is Any instead of a union or Either type (like String | Int). Scala 3 solves a bit of this with type unions:

  val result: String | Int = if true then "what?" else 4

#Scala

Scala the good the bad and ugly. Most of the mentioned problems in "bad" were radically solved by the way the Go programming language was design. It's strange that in the last two decades, no language designers were able to design something strict that prevents these issues, other than the Go designers. #Scala

My dear God. Was that really necessary?

Could we live without some 'magic'?

I just disabled liquid glass from my MacOS 26 machine, and I found out that Apple includes all the old features that were removed with apple glass, see for example "compact mode" in Safari:

Maybe a kind of Bug compatibility. #Apple Glass

Avoid writing the following form of recursive functions:

def fib(n: Int): Int =
  if (n <= 1) n
  else fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2)

This usually cause exponential time even when optimized. Imagine a call to fib(n) goes as follows:

fib(n)
├─ fib(n-1)
│  ├─ fib(n-2)
│  └─ fib(n-3)
└─ fib(n-2)
   ├─ fib(n-3)
   └─ fib(n-4)

• fib(n-2) is computed twice
• fib(n-3) is computed three times
• fib(n-4) is computed five times

Instead, you should use a local tail-recursive helper:

def fib(n: Int): Int = {
  @annotation.tailrec
  def loop(i: Int, prev: Int, curr: Int): Int =
    if (i == 0) prev
    else loop(i - 1, curr, prev + curr)

  loop(n, 0, 1)
}

Now, something important to note here, if someone changes anything in the function call, it will break, silently. Moreover, the meaning of prev / curr isn’t obvious from the signature, which is important in functional programming; the invariant is not enforced by the type system. This is usually acceptable because:

• loop is local → no external caller can misuse it
• The invariant is encapsulated, not exposed
• The outer API fib(n) remains clean and total

#Scala

"This is named after the mathematician Haskell Curry, who discovered the principle. It was independently discovered earlier by Moses Schoenfinkel, but Schoenfinkelization didn’t catch on." Lol. #Mathematics

RT: there's this kind of hilarious thing that happens where the people who I most want to hear from and would totally clear my schedule to talk to are very cautious about respecting my time, but often the people who I am least enthusiastic to talk to feel the most ownership over it.

When you buy pleasure. Posting a very strong letter from Tanjia Rahm to her old customers. I wrote before about the pornography industry, and I'm wondering whether the same message of degradation can be used for the former consumers. I doubt, however, that consumers of both kinds are moved at all by someone denoting that what they're consuming is, indeed, fake.

Multiple parameter lists are weird in Scala. I could only think of a good use of them as:

// by Knut Arne Vedaa
// Retrieved 2026-01-14, License - CC BY-SA 2.5

scala> def foo(as: Int*)(bs: Int*)(cs: Int*) = as.sum * bs.sum * cs.sum
foo: (as: Int*)(bs: Int*)(cs: Int*)Int

scala> foo(1, 2, 3)(4, 5, 6, 7, 9)(10, 11)
res7: Int = 3906

Scala author suggest it's useful with complex type inference situation, but I can't think of any. #Scala #Programming

Apparently Scala handles exceptions pretty well, and you can even have kind of a type-safe partial-functions using something like the Try call. #Exception handling #Scala

One of the things some websites add as a reason to use companion types in Scala, is that not having the "new" keyword is cool. Since when we drop language specifications on their level of coolness? #Scala

I'd have never known that reading about a president's private life will help me understanding the nonidentity problem. Also why Thomas Jefferson's privates are well documented like that? #Philosophy

I was inspired recently by the Clarice Lispector twitter bot to create something similar for Kierkegaard. For a non-anthology author like him (and her, Clarice, too in fact), it was a bit difficult to imagine how this will work, how can you cut sentences randomly so they make some context, not that full and not that ambiguous? The raw materials were three source files: a 594KB EPUB of Either/Or, an 825KB EPUB of personal journals and papers, and a 507KB text file of selected writings. Together, they contained over a million words. Not every sentence in a philosophy book is quotable. Chapter headings, footnote markers, translator notes, and incomplete fragments vastly outnumber the gems. A naive approach of random selection would produce mostly garbage: "See vol. II, pp. 234-256" or "Continued from previous section".

So I designed a relatively simple filtration,

private val philosophicalKeywords = Set(
  "soul", "despair", "anxiety", "freedom", "faith",
  "existence", "dread", "passion", "eternity", "infinite",
  "spirit", "silence", "god", "death", "suffering",
  // 180+ more terms...
)

def score(text: String): Int = {
  val keywordCount = philosophicalKeywords.count(kw => lower.contains(kw))
  val keywordScore = math.min(25, keywordCount * 4)
  
  val lengthScore = text.length match {
    case l if l <= 120 => 25  // ideal length
    case l if l <= 150 => 22
    case l if l <= 200 => 15
    case _ => 5
  }
  
  keywordScore + lengthScore + rhetoricalScore + structureScore
}

on top of which a kind of an intelligent quote (shall I call it IQ?) scoring;

• keywords (180+ terms like "despair", "anxiety", "faith", "existence")
• Rhetorical patterns (semicolons, em-dashes, contemplative ellipses)
• Length optimization (60-150 characters scores highest)
• Aphoristic bonus (short quotes with multiple keywords get extra points)

Shorter quotes with words like "existence" bubble to the top. After running this on all three source files, I got 15,455 quotes sorted by quality. Top score: 81. They're available in the source control if you are interested to have a look: https://github.com/larrasket/kierkegaard #Programming

Dorothy Day's letter to Forster Batterham. What can I say, it's just so beautiful. عتاب جمل: 10 Dec, 1932.

Dear Forster.

I got your letter Friday afternoon and I’ve been pondering since whether or not to answer it. It doesn’t seem much use, but still I can’t let some of your statements go without telling you what I feel.

As to my feeling about sex, I do indeed now feel that sex is taboo outside of marriage. The institution of marriage has been built up by society as well as the Church to safeguard the home and children as well as people who don’t know how to take care of themselves. Of course anyone who is sane and sound mentally will agree that promiscuity and looseness in sex is an ugly and inharmonious thing. You have always in the past treated me most casually, and I see no special difference between our affair and any other casual affair I have had in the past. You avoided, as you admitted yourself, all responsibility. You would not marry me then because you preferred the slight casual contact with me to any other. And last spring when my love and physical desire for you overcame me, you were quite willing for the affair to go on, on a weekend basis.

Sex is not at all taboo with me except outside of marriage. I am as free and unsuppressed as I ever was about it. I think the human body a beautiful thing, and the joys that a healthy body have are perfectly legitimate joys. I see no immediate difference between enjoying sex and enjoying a symphony concert, but sex having such a part in life, as producing children, has been restricted as society and the Church have felt best for the children.

I believe that in breaking these laws one is letting the flesh get an upper hand over the spirit, so I do not want to break these laws.

St. Augustine says, “If bodies please thee, praise God on occasion of them.” And I feel no sorrow for all the joys we have had in the past together.

When I laughingly spoke about many a young girl holding out—you should have understood what I meant. You seem to think that one should always succumb immediately to any promptings of the flesh, and you think of it as unnatural and unhealthy to restrain oneself on account of the promptings of the spirit. What I meant was that many people in the past have observed the conventions and rules, for the sake not only of convention but of principle. It is hard for me to talk to you seriously,—you despise so utterly the things which mean so much to me. I wish you’d read more of Aldous Huxley, and imbibe a little of his rational tolerance.

You think all this is only hard on you. But I am suffering too. The ache in my heart is intolerable at times, and sometimes for days I can feel your lips upon me, waking and sleeping. It is because I love you so much that I want you to marry me. I want to be in your arms every night, as I used to be, and be with you always. I always loved you more than you did me. That is why I made up with you so many times, and went after you after we had had some quarrel. We always differed on principle, and now that I am getting older I cannot any longer always give way to you just because flesh has such power over me.

Of course I understand your allusion to smoking and drinking and such indulgences, and as I said before, I do agree with you and would give them all up for you. I really don’t think I over-indulge very often. I consider drink only sinful inasmuch as it affects one’s health, and I’m most ashamed for every time I do over-indulge. Sex and eating and drinking may easily be put in the same class since they are both physical gratifications. Still, even the slightest sexual lapse may have terrible and far-reaching consequences and so these laws have been built up. Of course all intelligent people can say—Oh, I’m so smart this doesn’t apply to me, but I think that such laws, whether one considers them human or divine, have to be obeyed by all. It all is hopeless of course, tho it has often seemed to me a simple thing. Imaginatively I can understand your hatred and rebellion against my beliefs and I can’t blame you. I have really given up hope now, so I won’t try to persuade you any more.

Dorothy

Her words are so alive, so honest. (Usher 2016)

From: “Marcel Proust to Jacques Porel”

“I envy people who are capable of uttering such cries that, at first, I thought someone was being murdered, but I realized what was happening when the woman’s cries quickly resumed an octave below the man’s, and was reassured.”

Relatable.

Revisiting the Sara Higazy incident today. I was participating in the discussion of deleting her Wikipedia page. This was around 6 years ago. Back then, the whole story struck me with an intensity I can’t quite reconstruct now. I remember feeling genuinely shaken, moved in a way that felt deep and urgent. Today, the sadness is still there, but it’s quieter, more distant, almost abstract. What I can’t fully explain is why it affected me so strongly at the time.

The sexual rights movement, which once felt like a defining moral battlefield, feels to me now as a strangely disproportionate to the scale of suffering and disorder in the world. Not wrong, exactly, just small. Almost trivial when placed beside poverty, war, genocide, poverty again, and the quiet, grinding injustices that shape most human lives. I’m surprised, in retrospect, that Sara herself, someone from a relatively ordinary, middle-class background, would stake so much of her life, and ultimately lose it, over something that now feels so marginal.

There’s also something uncomfortable in admitting this: maybe what moved me then wasn’t Sara alone, but the version of myself who needed her story. A younger self, more eager for clean moral lines, more convinced that tragedy must always point toward meaning. Nietzsche taught me that this is not always the case.

Now, older and less certain, I’m left with grief stripped of narrative payoff. No lesson neatly learned, no cause vindicated—just a human life that encountered the full weight of cruelty and didn’t survive it. #Politics

#Music #Rafa't Lila al-Stora

Listening to #Ballade No. 1 in G Major, Op. 23 by Hélène Grimaud. What a battle #Music

#Music #Shaqiq Rrouh by Ghada Shbeir

There's an annoying bug in GitHub's "download raw file" feature, when I click download, nothing happens. Finally I had to replace my own parameters in a pattern I found online to resolve the bug and be able to download the file. Did I mention that I really hate Microsoft? #Programming

#Scala documentation gives me let over lambda vibes. #Relearning Scala