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.

Wow on this:

#Modus Vivendi #Kierkegaard

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:

• Knowledge about the “East” is not neutral.
• It is produced by powerful institutions.
• These authorities define reality in ways that serve their interests. So whoever has authority doesn’t just describe the world; they construct how it is understood.

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.

#Modus Vivendi #I'm not consulting an LLM

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).

• [2026-04-18 Sat 19:30] I found that yeah, indeed he was the author of that channel, I found a reference to the pages in his website (archive link), but looks like he deleted them, maybe in the hope of it helping his release.

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:

  • https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/tinyogg
  • When he became a GNU contributor: https://www.fsf.org/working-together/profiles/osama-khalid. He was only a highschooler, which is very impressive. I feel even more sad that such a brliant kid is being in prison. His GitHub: https://github.com/osamak

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:

• Medicine: ~12% uncited.
• Natural sciences: ~27% uncited.
• Social sciences: ~32% uncited.
• Humanities: ~82% uncited.

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.

See: The limits on the (allowed) freedom of speech

>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;

• Commits made on weekends are 8% less likely to introduce vulnerabilities, but those vulnerabilities take 45% longer to fix.
• Saturday commits have the highest vulnerability rate (9.55%), while Sunday commits have the lowest (6.99%).
• The Linux kernel is primarily developed by individuals (50.1% of commits), with Intel being the largest corporate contributor (8.4%).

#Programming

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

• [2026-03-16 Mon 15:15]
  Same did Hal Finney, who was also in the group.

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

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)

Maybe relates to: Notes of Works of love #Leo Tolstoy

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).

#Programming

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

(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

#Music #Clarice Lispector

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

Jonny:

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

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:

• [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

#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 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

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. #hisotry #United States of America

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.