Dr John Mew had his dental licence revoked by the General Dental Council in 2017, and Dr Mike Mew was dropped from the British Orthodontic Society in 2019 for his beliefs and claims about Mewing.
It's interesting how you can never know this information from TikTok. #Pop-* Rekt
Yesterday and this afternoon I sat down and enumerated, via the YouTube Data API, the entire uploads playlist of AJA Arabic's main channel (twenty thousand video IDs) and the entire uploads playlist of @aljazeeradocumentary (five thousand eight hundred and thirty seven). For each item I fetched duration and view count, and threw out anything shorter than twenty minutes or below two hundred thousand views. What's left is two thousand one hundred and seventy nine videos from the main channel and three hundred and forty six from the documentary channel. Two and a half thousand videos out of roughly twenty six thousand. A bit under ten percent. The rest of that channel, by mass, is shorts, teasers, three minute clips of a longer interview re-cut for the feed, and the kind of vertical-format content that exists because the recommendation system rewards it, not because anybody at the desk thought it would be worth keeping in five years.
I want to be clear about why I bothered, because the obvious read is that this is some kind of Al Jazeera fandom and it is not. I am, if anything, increasingly hostile to the way that organisation has chosen to publish in the last decade. The complaint is upstream of any politics. A channel that runs /شاهد على العصر/, hour-long interviews with people who watched the second half of the twentieth century happen in places like Algiers and Baghdad and Tripoli, is sitting on what is, in archival terms, oral history that you cannot reconstruct from anywhere else. The interviewees are dead, mostly. The interview is the artifact. And the artifact lives on a third party's playlist endpoint, accessible only as long as a content-moderation policy team in San Bruno decides it should be. The same is true for the long documentary work the documentary channel did from roughly 2014 through 2019, on the Ethiopian highlands, the Atlas mountains, Indonesian island peoples, the Western Desert in Egypt; the kind of slow ethnographic-leaning film work that no streaming service today commissions because the unit economics are bad. Six, seven, eight million views on episodes from 2016. People watched it. The point is that people, plural, watched it, and one company decides whether they can keep watching.
What I have on disk is a list. The list is not the videos. I have not pulled the videos themselves; that's a different problem and a much larger one. The earliest item in the Arabic main results is from June 2007 and the earliest in the documentary results is from December 2008, which is already past the period that I keep going back to mentally, the period I wrote about in that brief diary entry about the old Aljazeera Arabic portal back in November. That portal, in its 2002 to roughly 2008 form, was not a news site in the present sense. It was a directory, with real navigation, real internal links, a working forum, polls, separate sub-portals per show, embedded Real Player streams that no longer play, and a sense that you were entering a place that someone had designed for you to spend time in.
So the censorship piece. AJ+ Arabic was suspended from YouTube in 2022. Individual videos from the main channels have been removed under various pretexts over the years, including the very long-running practice of removing speeches by people the State Department considers designated, which means a non-trivial slice of late twentieth century Arab political history is now harder to study than it was in 2009. I am not interested in arguing the rights and wrongs of any individual takedown. The structural point stands without it: there is no public ledger of what has already been removed from these channels. I have a list of what is up today. I do not, and cannot, have a list of what was up two years ago that is not up now. Nobody does. YouTube does not publish takedown logs at video granularity, and even the Lumen database, which catches a fraction of the legal removals, will not see the policy-based ones. We talk about the open web losing its archive function as if it were a passive process, files quietly bit-rotting on some neglected server, and it is not that. A meaningful portion of the long-form Arabic-language video record of the last twenty years is being actively curated, by a company that has no stake in Arabic-language posterity and every stake in advertiser relations, and the result is invisible attrition. You only notice when you go looking for something specific and find that the link 404s, and by then the question of when it was taken down and why has been engineered to be unanswerable.
What the filtration also showed, less polemically, is the brutal asymmetry between what they make and what survives the recommendation funnel. Of twenty thousand uploads on the main channel, only about two hundred from before 2010 cleared the filter. That is not because they uploaded little back then; the entire archive of سري للغاية and شاهد على العصر and the early الاتجاه المعاكس episodes is in there. It is because the channel was used differently then, as a video dump for an existing TV programme, and the long-form material was published as full episodes with thumbnails that no longer get clicked. The view counts on the 2008 to 2010 cohort are mostly two hundred thousand to a million; the recent cohort, the podcast-format material from 2023 onward, runs to several million per episode. The platform rewards the new format and the old format slowly recedes. That is not censorship in the legal sense. It is the slow form of it, the one that does not need a takedown request because the product manager's quarterly metric is sufficient.
Now the practical part. The filtration outputs are sitting under /aja/ on this site, both as readable markdown tables and as machine-friendly CSV and JSONL. The grand total is well under a megabyte; trivial for anybody to mirror. Direct links:
If you want one file:
curl -LO https://lr0.org/aja/results.mdThe columns are the same across all three formats: video ID, title, publish date, duration in seconds, view count at the time of the scan (mid May 2026), and the canonical YouTube URL. If you want to pull the actual videos using the URL list, yt-dlp is what to use, ideally with --write-info-json --write-subs --write-auto-subs so you keep the metadata and subtitles, because the subtitles will outlive the audio in any future archival use case. The Arabic auto-subtitles are not good, but they are searchable, and searchable is most of the value.
The list itself is not a preservation effort, it is an index of one. But it is useful in the way that an index is useful: if any of these URLs goes dark next year, somebody, somewhere, will have a row that says this title existed, this long, with this many views, on this date, at this ID. That is the smallest non-zero amount of archival metadata. It is the minimum you would want to have if you were going to argue, later, that something was removed. The thing I keep coming back to, and the reason for the slight edge in this entry, is that this minimum should not be something an individual has to assemble on a weekend out of API calls. It should be a property of a healthy public information layer, and it is not, and the people who would have built it twenty years ago when the old portal was still alive have mostly moved on or been laid off, and what we have instead is one company's playlist endpoint and the implicit hope that the company stays interested. #Propaganda #Politics
It is a bit of surprise to some that Marx already had a name for what most programmers describe when they describe the worst part of the job. He called it alienation, and in the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (Marx 1975) he sketched it in four senses that map almost directly onto contemporary software work. You are alienated from the product because it is not yours: the codebase belongs to the firm, the data belongs to the platform, the patents belong to the legal entity. You are alienated from the activity, because you do not decide what to build or how. You are alienated from your fellow workers, who are reframed as collaborators during planning and performance during reviews, and against whom you are stack-ranked at year end. You are alienated from your species-being, your capacity for free creative work, because that capacity has been rented to the firm for forty hours a week and asked to express itself in OKRs. The 1844 Manuscripts are sometimes accused of being too humanist for the older Marx of Capital, but if you have ever watched a senior engineer move tickets across a board for ten years and then admit, on a quiet afternoon, that he no longer remembers what he wanted to build, you will recognize the description. The second useful surprise is Marx's account of surplus value in Capital, Volume I (Marx 1990) is the one most wave away, on the grounds that it does not apply to people earning two, three, or four hundred thousand dollars a year. Surplus is a claim about the relation between what the worker is paid and what the worker's labor produces for the owner. A programmer at Google is paid handsomely because his marginal output is enormous, and the firm captures the rest. The fact that the slice you keep is large enough to buy a house in some neighborhoods does not change the structure of the relation. It only means that, for now, the ruling class has decided it makes sense to pay you well. The same firms that paid generously in 2021 laid off hundreds of thousands of these well-paid employees in the years that followed, while reporting record profits.
There is also Marx's chapter on machinery and large-scale industry, which contains the most directly relevant passage in the entire corpus. Marx noticed that machinery, under capitalism, does not simply substitute for human muscle. It is also a way of disciplining workers, deskilling them, and shifting the bargaining power of the firm. Replace machinery with the contemporary stack, CI/CD, autoscaling, observability platforms, the whole SaaS layer, and now the layer of LLM tooling being inserted into every IDE, and the analysis is uncomfortably current. Each of these tools is sold to you as freeing your time for higher-value work, and each, at scale, also has the function of standardizing your output and monitoring your performance, and lowering the cost of replacing you. Harry Braverman picked this thread up in Labor and Monopoly Capital in 1974 and pushed it into the white-collar professions long before software was a profession in our sense. Read Braverman alongside Marx and the typical post-2020 software workplace, with its dashboards, sprint metrics, engineering excellence rituals, and aggressively monitored Git histories, looks less like a craft community and more like the late phase of a process Marx described in the textile mills of the 1850s. #Politics #Programming
Two eagles find each other somewhere above the treeline and decide, without words, to fall. They lock talons and drop, question there is: will you hold on when holding on costs everything? Every load tester knows you learn nothing at safe capacity. You have to push past the threshold, past comfort, past the instinct to survive alone, and see what remains. The spiral is the test. The ground is the deadline. And somewhere in that plummet, before the pull-up, before the sky returns, something either breaks or it doesn't. Most things break. These two don't. That's what love is, maybe. Not the choosing, but the falling, and the finding out.
In July 2024, I read the 3 volumes of (Al-Bahai 1990), which was a very interesting read. I noticed how almost all Arab mathematician, including al-Amali himself. I enjoyed his poetry on number theory, and I felt too lazy to translate things that he felt okay to write in Parisian while being in an Arabic context. What's interesting though, other than the whole book (which consists of just a random set of notes) is really fun to read, is that it contains a lot of poetry that's so nice, but not locatable outside of this book, the author cites it to poets that he calls by name, but whenever I try to search their names, the results only redirects me to the book itself. I tries to hold a grasp on the math theories introduced in the book, but it was too difficult for me to understand properly. I plan to export these poems one day.
Reading Joseph Mossad's article on the Arab Spring from 2012, shapes an interesting view of that naming. I was learning recently about Edward Said's view on how authority affects shaping of knowledge,
His argument was as follows:
Massad’s critique of the term “Arab Spring” is a textbook example of Said’s theory: Western governments/media (the authority) coined and popularized the term. The label frames the uprisings as: Liberal and Pro-Western. Similar to European “Spring” movements. This framing filters out: Economic struggle, Anti-neoliberal demands Class conflict, and even anti-western demands (like connections to Israel). This is not just naming but also producing knowledge that aligns with power. #Propaganda #Politics
From a reddit comment:
The point of college is to index everything, not to understand it. You'll only understand it for a while after your exams, and after that, you will just have your index and a vague sense of what is true and what is preposterous.
So if someone says they've invented a perpetual motion machine, you'll quickly be like, "Hang on, that sounds crazy," even though you don't actually remember the laws of thermodynamics. A quick search, and you'll be able to explain it again.
All your education will end up in this state. You'll know what smells right and hopefully still retain some keywords to find what you are after.
You'll know what's simple and what's complicated. You'll know all established facts from current areas of research. You'll know who the authorities are in your field.
You don't need to know everything in financial math, BTW. You can know there are formulas for options on options without knowing what they look like. You'll internalise things like delta and vega changes with the market without remembering the exact formulas.
Sheikh Ewis was a very close friend to my Father, whose life was a complete tragedy. I don't remember his look very well, but I can say he looked like Tolstoy, and I remember him as a fakir, just like Leo Tolstoy, and just like my father himself. Maybe that's why they were friends. I was told that he donated some of his Land for the Azhar school in which I studied at. And I'm also aware that he built the Sheikh Ewis Masjid (that's how me, and my father, used to call it), which talks about how he valued his faith, knowing that he was a poor person. All of his kids were also very hardworking, his wife was (is) a hardworking woman. In fact, she very hardworking, I still remember seeing here everyday at her work, in the morning when I was walking my way to Azhar. My dad also used to love the mosque there, I'm unsure why. And my dad does not like to express a lot, and I find it hard to ask him (I hope I do soon, along with the many other questions I want to ask him before his death). Back to the story, Sheikh Ewis had one of the most tragic lives I have ever read, heard, or seen in my life. I always felt sad when I thought about him. Funny enough, when I was thinking about the Prophet Ayoub, I always imagined someone like him. My dad still goes to the mosque there, a lot of the times when I'm back to the town and I can't find him anywhere, my mother tells me to go look at the Ewis Mosque. I asked my mum recently why he always go there (instead of going to nearer mosques around the house), she said that this one is never closed. I like to think that the reason has to do more with him, recalling death in the place of one of his ever closest friends, alone, reading Quran and praying for hours and nights.
I was going through one of the YouTube channels that I used to browse as a kid, called "video translator". I wondered who was behind it. I found that it's handel is OsamaKhalid. I suspect that it refers to Dr. Osama Khalid, MD, who is arrested by the Saudi regime. While looking, I also found that he's a GNU maintainer too, which is surprising. I found this moving page on his website:
حينما أعجز…
أنشئت هذه الصفحة على نهج مجتمع الخارقين الذين كانوا يتنادرون: "من سيعتني بالكود الذي كتبناه حين نموت؟" (مثال: آرون سوارتز وإِرك ريموند).
هذا الموقع: أن يبقى هذا الموقع (وبدون تغيير) طالما كان ذلك ممكنا. في حال وجدت مسودات أو كتابات غير منشورة، ينبغي نشرها.
المشاريع: نادرًا ما أعمل على المشاريع وحيدًا. ثمّة دائمًا شركاء/شريكات لديهم وصول لكلمات السر مثلا. الأصل أن تلك المشاريع لابد أن تستمر. ولذا أوصي أن تسند الإدارة التقنية للمشاريع التي أدرتها لمن تستطيع/يستطيع مواصلة ذلك.
أن يُقسم ثلث ما أملك من أصول يمكن تسييلها (أموال، استثمارات) بين أرشيف الإنترنت ومجلس رعاية حريّة البرمجيات ومؤسسة الجبهة الإلكترونية.
الكود: أن يُصدر كل ما يُعثر عليه من كود كتبته بآخر نسخة من رخصة غنو أفيرو العمومية وما تلاها.
هذه الصفحة: أن تُحدّث بما حدث.
التوقيع. كُتب في يوليو 2020.
I feel very sad for him because he's still arrested, I find a lot of similarities and interests between myself and him (the obsession of translating Chomsky to Arabic and being into FOSS).
I've been trying to go though his website in the waybackmachine, however, getting:
This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.
I hope that he gets his freedom sooner, and I get to learn more about him. And I hope too that prison won't kill his fine soul or make it wither.
[2026-04-18 Sat 19:58] some mentions of Osama online that I found:
I don't see him being a very active person, but perhaps his work on Wikipedia was what got the government interested in him.
I found a connection between OsamaK and Khaled Hosny. I never interacted with Khaled, but I remember that he shared a post of mine on his mastodon account.1 Anyway, it's no surprise that both might have interacted with each other, but what's interesting is that I found out that both studied medicine. I knew that Osama was a doctor, but I was surprised to know that Khaled too studied medicine. I wonder if Khaled practices any medical work anymore.
From (Remler 2014):
Citation rates vary significantly by discipline:
Actually it was the egylinux project: https://typo.social/@moftasa@mastodon.online/116306788876942894
UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese described in a lengthy interview with The Guardian the consequences of the US sanctions imposed on her by Trump in July 2025 following her report “Anatomy of a Genocide” on Gaza. She described the impact as “civil death”: her family’s apartment in Washington was confiscated, her accounts were frozen, and she was cut off from any global credit card system since most transactions pass through US-controlled networks.
Her family was not spared either. Pro-Israel activists led a campaign that resulted in her husband being pushed out of his leadership position at the World Bank. In Tunisia, she received anonymous phone threats of her 13-year-old daughter being raped and kidnapped, with callers even naming her school. In Germany, authorities sent riot police and threatened her with arrest on charges of “trivializing the Holocaust.”
So this is what “freedom” looks like when you step out of line.
You write a report the wrong people don’t like, and suddenly your life gets erased. Bank accounts gone. Home gone. Career gone. Even your family gets dragged into it. And not quietly either, but with coordinated pressure and public smearing.
And wow to how normalized this has become. The US still sells itself as the global referee of human rights, but the moment someone uses that same language in a way that’s inconvenient, the system turns on them completely. Financial infrastructure becomes a weapon. Institutions fall in line. Allies follow suit.
People talk about sanctions like they’re some abstract foreign policy tool. This is what they actually look like on a human level. Not “accountability,” not “values,” just total suffocation of a person’s ability to exist normally.
And somehow this is still branded as defending freedom.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris
He is a longtime friend and collaborator of Paul Graham. Along with cofounding two companies with him, Graham dedicated his book ANSI Common Lisp to Morris and named the programming language that generates the online stores' web pages RTML (Robert T. Morris Language) in his honor. Graham lists Morris as one of his personal heroes, saying that Morris is "never wrong."[21]
In Philosophy obscurantism is defined as the practice of "deliberately presenting information in an abstruse and imprecise manner that limits further inquiry and understanding of a subject". Apparently many philosophers and authors have found a good use of obscurantism. Karl Popper has criticized Hegel of using it when he talked about sound (Popper 2013). And John Searle says that Foucault used to do it to make sure he will be sound to the French intellectuals.
Today, I read this post Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity, which talks about an attitude similar to Foucault's with the French intellectuals, that is, designing complex over simpler one, so mangers can say that your intellect has merit to it, since simple design, although sometimes so difficult to achieve, might be perceived naively. Generally, I'm interested and curious about the sociology of knowledge, that's how I call it because I'm unaware of a good term, but I define it as the field that ask questions like, was a subject of knowledge affected by utilities? Like a novelist making their novel different to serve commercial purpose, or a moviemaker changing the story because they can not afford an actress to cooperate, or in this case, an engineer creating complexity out of no-where to ensure credibility.
Looks like obscurantism seems to be a social strategy in any place where recognition depends on appearing profound. The simple solution looks trivial, while the convoluted one looks intelligent. In such environments, complexity becomes a signal rather than a necessity, and obscurity a currency of prestige. Maybe then we should really question our measures of what counts to be profound. #Philosophy
From Who Writes the Bugs? A Deeper Look at 125,000 Kernel Vulnerabilities;
There are two aspects to this. The desire to learn and the utility of learning. These are two very different things. Arguably the best programmers I have known have been explorers and hopped around a lot. Their primary skills have been flexibility and curiosity. The point here was their curiosity, not what they were curious about. Curiosity enabled them to attack new problems quickly and find solutions when others couldn't. Very often those solutions had nothing to do with skip lists or bubble sort. Studying algorithms is useful for general problem solving and hey, as a bonus, it helps sometimes when you are solving a real world problem, but staying curious is what really matters.
We have seen so many massive changes to software engineering in the last 30 years that it is hard to argue the clear utility of any specific topic or tool. When I first started it really mattered that you understood bubble sort vs quicksort because you probably had to code it. Now very few people think twice about how sort happens in python or how hashing mechanism are implemented. It does, on occasion, help to know that but not like it used to.
So that brings it back to what I think is a fundamental question: If CS topics are less interesting now, are you shifting that curiosity to something else? If so then I wouldn't worry too much. If not then that is something to be concerned about. So you don't care about red black trees anymore but you are getting into auto-generating Zork like games with an LLM in your free time. You are probably on a good path if that is the case. If not, then find a new curiosity outlet and don't beat yourself up about not studying the limits of a single stack automata.
by jmward01. Although I disagree a bit, I believe that cs fundamentals are very essentials to programming and can be never replaced, we had software libraries and STDs out there much before having agentic models, but I like the emphasize on curiosity #Modus Vivendi
TIL that, not only K. Eric Drexler was a part of the Extropians mailing list, he also "arranged to be cryonically preserved in the event of legal death". My man is really not into death.
From YOU JUST REVEIVED:
Before I continue, I will answer the obvious question: Did I actually receive 999999 minutes? Yes, indeed I did. But unfortunately, I was only given 7200 minutes to spend my 999999 minutes and I could only spend them 1 minute at a time.
In fact I feel a bit revived knowing that the Vodafone's bs is not something that goes on in my country. #Egypt
Noticed today that I had a playlist from a year ago called: "No. 2". It includes all the music I enjoy with "No. 2". I used to think of 2 as a favorite number too, as a kid. #Music
Last week I had an argument with my Mother of which I was righteous and she was in error. In the end, I managed to convince her of my points. She accepted them. But then she said, “Okay, what about mercy?”. She told me then about a man from town who once had a serious argument with his distant brother. Time passed. And when he finally saw him, he chose to forgive everything. That story stayed with me. After the discussion was over and the house grew quiet, I began thinking about moments in my life, times when I insisted on being right, when I held onto pride, when I could have been softer but wasn’t. And I cried.
I was also reading recently Aristotle’s 10 Rules for a Happy Life (See 07:10 Rules for a happy life from Aristotle) and I thought that the missed one thing mercy. When I was young at the Kutab, there was that activity we used to do when we were learning about a new Hadith or Nathr, we called it practical activities, for example if we were reading today a text about being kind to someone who is ill, visiting the burial grounds, or doing some kind of prayers, we would go outside and try to do these things (it was very fun activity to look for someone who is ill and to make them a good visit, I remember doing my first open-source intelligence activities in a similar situation). I decided to do the same thing with the virtues that Aristotle presented, and to add mercy to them. Everyday, I will read these questions, and contemplate how much of these I've implemented throughout the day, and how can I do more of them tomorrow. #Modus Vivendi
Have you practiced one of these today?
Not as performance.
But quietly, the way good things are done
when no one is watching but yourself.
✦ After Aristotle ✦
"Name your fears, and face them."
What frightened you today? Did you walk toward it, or away from it?
"Know your appetites, and govern them."
Where did desire pull you? Did you hold the reins, or let them slip?
"Be neither a miser nor a fool with what you have."
Did you give freely today? Of money, time, or attention?
"Think how nobly it may be done, not merely how cheaply."
Was there a moment where you chose generosity of spirit over smallness?
"Turn your eyes from the trivial; dwell on what endures."
What occupied your mind today, the shallow or the deep? The passing or the meaningful?
"True strength is a temper well-kept, not freely vented."
Did anger visit you today? How did you receive it?
"Never lie, and least of all to yourself."
Was there a moment you were tempted to embellish, diminish, or look away from the truth?
"Let go of what is owed to you; take the smaller share with grace."
Did you clutch at fairness today, or release it?
"Forbear the faults of others as you would have yours forgotten."
Who wronged you today, real or imagined? Does the grievance still live in your chest?
"Define your morality. Live up to it, even behind closed doors."
In the moments when only you were watching, what did you do?
"To notice what is given is the beginning of wisdom."
What graced your day that you almost let pass unremarked?
"To be elsewhere while here is to forfeit the only life you have."
When were you truly, fully here today, not somewhere else in your mind?
"The unexamined life is not worth living, but neither is the unexplored one."
What surprised or puzzled you today? Did you lean in?
"What cannot be rushed must be endured, and endurance, practiced well, becomes grace."
What tested your patience today? Did you meet it with steadiness?
Who needed mercy from you today, a stranger, a friend, yourself? Did you offer it?
And so the day closes. Whatever was not practiced today
is not lost. Only deferred to tomorrow's account.
In a few words: what kind of person were you today?
As long as sorrow is quiet and humble, I do not fear it; if it becomes vehement and passionate, sophistical so that it deludes me into despondency, I arise, I brook no rebellion, I will have nothing in the world cheat me of what I have from God’s hand as a gift of grace. ~Kierkegaard #Main Principles
I have but one prayer, I will throw myself to the ground and implore the eternal power that governs the world for one grace, early and late, that I be allowed to repent. ~Kierkegaard
Any specific reason why the left is so into hosting this book?
From (Tolstoy 1927)
From (Tolstoy 1927)
To love means to desire that which the beloved object desires. The objects of love desire opposing things, and therefore, we can only love that which desires one and the same thing. But that which desires one and the same thing is God.
Man beginning to live, loves only himself, and separates himself from other beings in that he constantly loves that which alone constitutes his being. But as soon as he recognises himself as a separate being, he recognises also his own love, and he is no longer content with this love for himself and he begins to love other beings. And the more he lives a conscious life, the greater and greater number of beings he will begin to love, though not with such a stable and unceasing love as that with which he loves himself, but nevertheless, in such a way that he wishes good to everything he loves, and he rejoices at this good, and suffers at the evil which tries the beloved beings, and he unites into one all that he loves.
As life is love, why not suppose that my “self,” that which I consider to be myself and love with a special love, is perhaps the union I made in a former life of things which I loved, just as I am making a union of things now. The other has already taken place and this one is taking place.
Life is the enlargement of love, the widening of its borders, and this widening is going on in various lives. In the present life, this widening appears to me in the form of love. This widening is necessary for my inner life and it is also necessary for the life of this world. But my life can manifest itself not only in this form. It manifests itself in an innumerable quantity of forms. Only this one is apparent to me. #Leo Tolstoy #Modus Vivendi
I was trying today to hide the notch on my M4 Macbook. I tried to use topnotch.app before, it has the problem of not being open source, but moreover it does not work nicely with dynamic wallpaper or folder wallpapers (whoever there's another reason not to use it even with single wallpaper). Another app I tried was only-switch. Which didn't work as well. I gave up and decided to (ask Claude to) write (generate) a script that will add black padding to my wallpapers. Code. #Programming
I wonder if Artemisia Gentileschi was the one who agreed to the marraige of Tassi, and not her father:
As was typical of the time, the major issue of the trial was the fact that Tassi had violated the Gentileschi family's honor, and not the fact that he had violated Gentileschi herself. In the words of history professor Elizabeth S. Cohen: "The law gauged damage to economic and social assets rather than suffering and psychological trauma."
Overall, I didn't find her art so interesting.
I read before that Reddit does not allow users to change their usernames for a technical difficulty (or that's what they claim), they say that they've made the bad design decision of coupling usernames to their database scheme so bad. I was trying to work with mutlipass recently and found out that it does not support renaming instances, which I found strange, the issue has so much activity, anyone could have implemented that simple feature right? Well I decided I'm the one.
However, it turned to be much harder than letting users to clone and delete instances. Here's why from my comment there:
For anyone wondering why this was not implemented so far, it's actually a lot more invasive than just changing a label. I decided to have a look on the codebase and try to implement it myself. It looks like Multipass was built with the instance name acting as the primary key across the entire stack.
To safely rename an instance today, we have to atomically touch: 1. The Daemon's memory, swapping the key across 5+ different state maps while ensuring no race conditions. 2. On-disk storage i.e. renaming the actual vault/instances/<name>/ directory where the VM image lives. 3. Updating the internal JSON databases where paths are hardcoded to the old name. 4. the guest's etc/hostname is baked into the cloud-init ISO at creation time. We have to regenerate cloud_init.iso and rely on the instance picking up the new hostname on its next boot (which isn't always reliable depending on what the user has modified inside /etc/cloud).
The desktop app for Apple Music is so good, but also so buggy. I assume that this has to do with the fact that it's a system app, probably linked with many dynamic libraries or NSs so updating or releasing it is not as easy as the weekly spotify release. #musql
ef-dark from ef=themes great again(defun salih/fix-ef-dark-modeline (&rest _)
(when (eq (car custom-enabled-themes) 'ef-dark)
(set-face-attribute 'mode-line nil
:background "#0000"
:foreground nil
:box nil
:inherit nil)
(set-face-attribute 'mode-line-inactive nil
:background "#0000"
:box nil
:inherit nil)
(set-face-attribute 'doom-modeline-bar nil
:background "#000000")
(set-face-attribute 'doom-modeline-bar-inactive nil
:background "#1a1a1a")))
(add-hook 'enable-theme-functions #'salih/fix-ef-dark-modeline)
(setq ef-themes-variable-pitch-ui t)
(setq ef-themes-variable-pitch-ui nil) ; variable pitch for UI (mode line, tabs, etc.)
(setq ef-themes-mixed-fonts t) ; mix variable + fixed pitch (great with org)
(setq ef-themes-headings
'((1 . (variable-pitch extrabold 1.4))
(2 . (variable-pitch bold 1.25))
(3 . (variable-pitch semibold 1.15))
(t . (variable-pitch 1.1))))
(salih/fix-ef-dark-modeline)No more purple modeline #Programming #Emacs
William-Adolphe Bouguereau has two interesting paintings: A Young Girl Defending Herself Against Eros and Elegy. What's interesting is, in the former, it looks like a girl is fighting against love in a very joyful way, she is smiling and having fun in saying no, so does Eros enjoying her slight resistance of love, it's almost like he is saying I know you want love. The latter painting, I would believe, takes place in the same location, years after, the angel looks haggard, exhausted and almost depressed, the girl looks heartbroken and sad, it's like Eros had won his first battle in the former painting, and here we see how it ended. #Art
I was reading Anonymous' message to Scientology right now. I love how literate their messages are, it's sad that you can no longer write like that without people thinking you are GPTing. #LLMs
A shared The Sweet Siesta of a Summer Day, John William Godward with a girl, and she observed the tiger mat. Since then I can not unsee it in all of his paintings. And I noticed it today in the The old, old story. Here are my favorite details from it so far.
TIL that if you have a directory called “internal” in Go, and you try to import it from another package that is outside of the root, the Go compiler will return an error. All this time I thought that “internal” is a convention but turns out it’s also a compiler rule #Go
How I'm feeling towards Clarice Lispector:
Clarice Lispector on music:
Music belonged to the same category as thought, both vibrated in the same movement and species. It possessed the same quality of a thought so intimate that upon hearing that music, the thought itself was revealed
RT: it should actually be illegal for me to a) see richard hanania post an article by nicholas decker about how sex trafficking is fake and b) recognize both those people’s names
Because there is also a great beauty in animals. And in any case, all that exists is beautiful, error as much as truth
Kevin Boone shows an interesting reason of why Linux might never become popular; making Linux more consumer-friendly would likely strip away the power, configurability, and culture that attract technical users. #Programming
What you may not realize is, you’ve actually signed up to be unpaid tech support for Microsoft’s “Visual Studio Installer”. You might notice GitHub Issues becoming less about your code and more about broken builds, specifically on Windows. You find yourself explaining to a contributor that they didn’t check the “Desktop development with C++” workload, but specifically the v143 build tools and the 10.0.22621.0 SDK. No, not that one, the other one. You spend less time on your project because you’re too busy being a human-powered dependency resolver for a 50GB IDE.
Oh God. This touched a part in me. #I really hate Microsoft #Programming
Just a kind reminder that this is because in number arithmetic theory, every number can be broken down into a unique product of prime numbers; if 1 were considered prime, you could multiply it endlessly into any factorization and that uniqueness would disappear. #Mathematics #Prime Numbers
My favorite quotes from the Clarice Lispector bot.
All of a sudden, in a first experience of the shame, he felt inside him a horribly free and painful movement, a vague urge to shout or cry, some mortal thing opening in his chest a violent clearing that might have been a new birth
What I write is more than mere invention, it’s my obligation to tell about this one girl out of the thousands like her. And my duty, however artlessly, to reveal her life.
Writing — I tear things out of me in pieces the way a harpoon hooks into a whale and rips its flesh…
Her perfume is a crazy mystery. When inhaled deeply it touches the intimate depth of the heart and leaves the inside of the entire body perfumed
Needing is always the supreme moment. As the most daring joy between a man and a woman comes when the greatness of needing is such that we feel in agony and fright: without you I could not live
I could not understand and you could not understand that dispensing with hope — really means action, and today
Every day it will be the same thing: right at dusk I start to get melancholy and thoughtful. I know that the first drum on the mountain will make the night, I know that the third will already wrap me in its thunder.
Now I shall write you everything that comes into my mind with the least possible amount of policing. Because I feel attracted to the unknown
Hell, because the world held no more human meaning for me, and man no longer had human meaning for me
How ingenuous Joana seemed. She spoke of love in such a clear and straightforward manner for it was certain that nothing had been revealed to her so far through love
And so I ask you questions and these will be many. Because I am a question.
Through the living roach I am coming to understand that I too am whatever is alive. Being alive is a very high stage, it is something that I only reached now (Related to 02:43 alive, lit from within)
But all that was too refined for my human hoof. And I, I wanted beauty.
I could not understand and you could not understand that dispensing with hope — really means action, and today
Music belonged to the same category as thought, both vibrated in the same movement and species. It possessed the same quality of a thought so intimate that upon hearing that music, the thought itself was revealed
The cold runs down her back with icy feet but she is in no mood to play, she huddles up, wounded and unhappy. She dries herself without love, humiliated and miserable, wraps herself in the dressing-gown as in a warm embrace
Its essential quality was not to have any quantity, not to be measurable and divisible because everything which could be measured and divided had a beginning and an end. Eternity was not that infinitely great quantity that exhausted itself; eternity was succession.
I want inside this night that is longer than life, I want, inside this night, life raw and bloody and full of saliva. I want this word: splendidness, splendidness is the fruit in its succulence, fruit without sadness
Because there is also a great beauty in animals. And in any case, all that exists is beautiful, error as much as truth
Because what I suddenly found out is that the moment had come not only to understand that I must no longer transcend, but the instant had come to really no longer transcend. And to have now what I used to think should be for tomorrow
You will never read what I’m writing. And when I’ve noted down my secret of being—I shall throw it away as if into the sea
And I have no fear of failure. Let failure annihilate me, I want the glory of falling
Through the living roach I am coming to understand that I too am whatever is alive. Being alive is a very high stage, it is something that I only reached now
And if the whole business really is based on invading my privacy, then they should pay for it. They say that’s how it’s done in the United States
Sorry for asking, does being ugly hurt?
— You sound like a mute trying to sing
I have to add a little something that’s very important for understanding the narrative: that it’s accompanied from beginning to end by a very slight and constant toothache, something to do with chipped enamel
I've been, proudly, attributed many times that I do have the God-gifted attribute of having really good mornings. And every day, I do my best to also have the attribution of being a person who is able to have good evenings, and good days, good weeks at some point. I'm take pride of being able to achieve that in my lifetime. And I will hold the hope of having, eventually and after my wither and death, the attribution of being able to have a good, exceptional and extraordinary life.
Andromache in Frederic Leighton's painting does not look very sad, however, the surroundings of her look extremely sad, and the whole story too. Leighton shows her standing alone, dressed in dark clothing. My feeling is, the parts that hurts or supposed to be sad is how everyday life continues around her. Not caring much about her war or tragedy, and she herself have to carry on to continue living, she can not even stress enough sadness, you can't maintain genuine sadness for a long time, even if you wanted to. Related: Oh fuck, you're still sad?
I love when I red and feel warmth through my body when I'm engaged in intellectual activity or when doing an interesting reading. As if life insists on showing itself the moment it stirs within me. I love when I feel heated but not because of overstimulation 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:
I redden, heat finds me, like a small flame remembering its nature.
My skin answers life, quick to color, as if something bright within me refuses to stay unseen.
And in that quiet heat, I know I am filled with live.
[2026-02-17 Tue 20:30] Found this from Clarice Lispector:
Through the living roach I am coming to understand that I too am whatever is alive. Being alive is a very high stage, it is something that I only reached now
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:
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 Father 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.
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.
#The Brothers Karamazov
These notes were extracted from Emacs org-noter file of (Kierkegaard 1995) which I've been reading since the 3rd of Jan and until 4 days ago. Few of the are so based off the book, and I don't attribute them to be my genuine thoughts. #Modus Vivendi #Philosophy #Love
Some interesting findings in (King 1944):
Strive for conciseness and clarity in oral or written reports. If there is one bane of an executive's existence, it is the man who takes a half hour of rambling discourse to tell him what could be said in one sentence of twenty words. There is a curious and widespread tendency among engineers to surround the answer to a simple question with so many preliminaries and commentaries that the answer itself can hardly be discerned. It is so difficult to get a direct answer out of some men that their usefulness is thereby greatly diminished. The tendency is to explain the answer before answering the question. To be sure, very few questions admit of simple answers without qualifications, but the important thing is to state the crux of the matter as succinctly as possible first. On the other hand, there are times when it is very important to add the pertinent background or other relevant facts to illuminate a simple statement. The trick is to convey the maximum of significant information in the minimum time, a valuable asset to any man
Be extremely careful of the accuracy of your statements. This seems almost trite, and yet many engineers lose the confidence of their superiors and associates by habitually guessing when they do not know the answer to a direct question. It is certainly important to be able to answer questions concerning your responsibilities, but a wrong answer is worse than no answer. If you do not know, say so, but also say, ”I'll find out right away." If you are 'not certain, indicate the exact degree of certainty or approximation upon which your answer is based. A reputation for dependability and reliability can be one of your most valuable assets. This applies, of course, to written matter, calculations, etc., as well as to oral reports. It is definitely bad business to submit a report to the boss for approval without first carefully checking it yourself, and yet formal reports are sometimes turned in full of glaring errors and omissions.
This is a corollary of the preceding rules: An executive must know what's going on. The main question is: How much must he know—how many of the details? This is always a difficult matter for the new man to get straight. Many novices hesitate to bother the boss with too many reports, and it is certainly true that it can be overdone in this direction, but in by far the majority of cases the executive's problem is to extract enough information to keep adequately posted. For every time he has to say, "Don't bother me with so many details," there will be three times he will say, “Why doesn't someone tell me these things?" Bear in mind that he is constantly called upon to account for, defend, and explain your activities to the ”higher-ups," as well as to co-ordinate these activities into a larger plan. In a nutshell, the rule is therefore to give him promptly all the information he needs for these two purposes
Never invade the domain of any other division without the knowledge and consent of the executive in charge. This is a very common offense, which causes no end of trouble. Exceptions will occur in respect to minor details, but the rule applies particularly to:
(a) Most people strongly dislike having anyone “muscle” into their territory, undermining their job by appropriating their functions. (b) Such interference breeds confusion and mistakes. The man in charge of the job usually knows much more about it than you do, and even when you think you know enough about it, the chances are better than even that you’ll overlook some important factor. (c) Nine times out of ten when you’re performing the other fellow’s function, you’re neglecting your own. It is rarely that any engineer or executive is so caught up in his own responsibilities that he can afford to take on those of his colleagues.
There is a significant commentary on this last principle which should also be observed: In general you will get no credit or thanks for doing the other fellow’s job for him at the expense of your own. But it frequently happens that, if you can put your own house in order first, an understanding of and an active interest in the affairs of other divisions will lead to promotion to a position of greater responsibility. Many a man has been moved up primarily because of a demonstrated capacity for taking care of other people’s business as well as his own.
In all transactions be careful to “check in” everyone who has a right to be in. It is extremely easy, in a large corporation, to overlook the interests of some division or individual who does not happen to be represented, or in mind, when a significant step is taken. Very often the result is that the step has to be retracted or else considerable damage is done. Even when it does no apparent harm, most people do not like to be left out when they have a stake in the matter, and the effect upon morale may be serious.
Of course there will be times when you cannot wait to stand on ceremony and you’ll have to go ahead and “damn the torpedoes.” But you cannot do it with impunity too often.
Note particularly that in this and the preceding item the chief offense lies in the invasion of the other man’s territory without his knowledge and consent. You may find it expedient on occasions to do the other man’s job for him, in order to get your own work done, but you should first give him a fair chance to deliver the goods or else agree to have you take over. If you must offend in this respect, at least you should realize that you are being offensive.
Promises, schedules, and estimates are necessary and important instruments in a well-ordered business. Many engineers fail to realize this, or habitually try to dodge the irksome responsibility for making commitments. You must make promises based upon your own estimates for the part of the job for which you are responsible, together with estimates obtained from contributing departments for their parts. No one should be allowed to avoid the issue by the old formula, “I can’t give a promise because it depends upon so many uncertain factors.”
Consider the “uncertain factors” confronting a department head who must make up a budget for an entire engineering department for a year in advance! Even the most uncertain case can be narrowed down by first asking, “Will it be done in a matter of a few hours or a few months—a few days or a few weeks?” It usually turns out that it cannot be done in less than three weeks and surely will not require more than five, in which case you’d better say four weeks. This allows one week for contingencies and sets you a reasonable bogie under the comfortable figure of five weeks. Both extremes are bad; a good engineer will set schedules which he can meet by energetic effort at a pace commensurate with the significance of the job.
As a corollary of the foregoing, you have a right to insist upon having estimates from responsible representatives of other departments. But in accepting promises, or statements of facts, it is frequently important to make sure that you are dealing with a properly qualified representative of the other section. Also bear in mind that when you ignore or discount another man’s promises you impugn his responsibility and incur the extra liability yourself. Of course this is sometimes necessary, but be sure that you do it advisedly. Ideally, another man’s promises should be negotiable instruments, like his personal check, in compiling estimates.
Cultivate the habit of “nailing matters down” to their simplest terms. The faculty for reducing apparently complicated situations to their basic, essential elements is a form of wisdom that must usually be derived from experience, but there are marked differences between otherwise comparable individuals in this respect. Some people seem eternally disposed to “muddy the water,” or they “can never see the woods for the trees,” etc. Perhaps a man cannot correct such an innate tendency simply by taking thought, but it appears to be largely a matter of habit—a habit of withdrawing mentally to a suitable vantage point so as to survey a mass of facts in their proper perspective, or a habit of becoming immersed and lost in a sea of detail. Make it practice to integrate, condense, summarize, and simplify your facts rather than to expand, ramify, complicate, and disintegrate them.
Many meetings, for example, get nowhere after protracted wrangling until somebody finally says, “Well, gentlemen, it all boils down simply to this …,” or “Can’t we agree, however, that the basic point at issue is just this …,” or, “After all, the essential fact remains that …”
This sort of mental discipline, which instinctively impels a man to go down to the core to get at the crux of the matter, is one of the most valuable qualities of a good executive.
SCHEDULED:
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 | 630I 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 mapglobal-title-map.html — ID → title mapbib-data.html — bibliography parsingThen 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. #hisotry #United States of America
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