I found in the journals of Kierkegaard today an entry very similar to what I include in my homepage by René Descartes about the method of life: "Probably few fields of study bestow on man the serene and happy frame of mind that the natural sciences give him. Out into nature he goes, everything is familiar, it is as though he had talked with the plants and the animals beforehand. He sees not only the uses man can put them to (for that is quite secondary) but their significance in the whole universe. He stands like Adam of old – all the animals come to him and he gives them names." My old post about math might be also related: A Prelude Over Mathematics. #Kierkegaard #Modus Vivendi

I was reading What Would Kierkegaard Do?. This part made me laugh a lot: Did Kierkegaard offer anything on Muhammad and Islam? Hong predicts there won’t be much. Osama, if you’re reading this, now’s the time to turn the page. #Kierkegaard

TIL that Robert W. Floyd is not the real author of Floyd's cycle-finding algorithm: The algorithm is named after Robert W. Floyd, who was credited with its invention by Donald Knuth. However, the algorithm does not appear in Floyd's published work, and this may be a misattribution: Floyd describes algorithms for listing all simple cycles in a directed graph in a 1967 paper, but this paper does not describe the cycle-finding problem in functional graphs that is the subject of this article. In fact, Knuth's statement (in 1969), attributing it to Floyd, without citation, is the first known appearance in print, and it thus may be a folk theorem, not attributable to a single individual. I wonder if anyone asked Donald Knuth about that in an interview. #Programming #Representations and Implementations of Graphs

The art works of Aagaard are very touching, it reminds me of my old town, some obscure places in which you wold only notice such moments that are in his paintings. It is sad that most of them are not available in high quality online, probably purchased in some rich palaces around the world. #Art #Carl Aagaard

Alexey Bogolyubov had a very beautiful skies in his work. I spent my dusk looking into them while listening to String Quintet in E Major, G. 275: III. Menuetto by Luigi Boccherini/Orpheus Chamber Orchestra: Moonlit evening in Constantinople, Alexey Bogolyubov,The seashore, Alexey Bogolyubov, Castel Sant'Angelo, Alexey Bogolyubov, Italian Coast, Alexey Bogolyubov, Moonlit night. Grand Canal (Venice), Alexey Bogolyubov, Smolny as seen from Bolshaya Okhta, Alexey Bogolyubov, View of the Smolny Convent from Bolshaya Okhta, Alexey Bogolyubov, St. Petersburg. Sledging on the Neva, Alexey Bogolyubov, St. Petersburg at Sunset, Alexey Bogolyubov and Mosque in Istanbul, Alexey Bogolyubov #Art

#Poetry

The Massacre of the Monks of Tamond by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema origins – I liked this painting a lot and I felt the urge to learn more about its history, but looks like we do not know anything about what Alma-Tadema refered to there, he was 19 years old when he painted it. It's either: A fictional or imagined scene created by Lawrence Alma-Tadema early in his career, or a reference to a now-obscure historical or legendary episode—possibly medieval or religious in nature—that hasn't survived in mainstream records. #Art #Giuseppe Abbati

TIL that Constanze Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wife, was married latter to Nikolaus Von Nissen, one of the people who admired Mozart a lot and worked on writing a biography for him. I'm wondering if he liked the man that much to marry the same woman who lived with him, or did he just used her for his project, or, in fact, loved her. #Music #History

I just finished reading Leo Tolstoy's A Confession. One of the most beautiful books I have ever read. Definitely making my Godchild (if any) read that.

• [2025-06-05 Thu 16:08] ينهي تولستوي الاعترافات بحلم جميل. لا أعرف كيف لم يتحول لفيلم. يقول في نهايته "ثم تيقظت." ويختتم كتابه وكلامه. ثم تيقظت.

  All this was clear to me, and I was glad and calm. And someone seems to be saying to me, “Watch, remember.” And I wake up.

  إن قراءة هذا ليبث في جسدي القشعريرة. كثيرًا ما تمنيت لو كان لي أحد المناهج الثابتة التي ذكرها تولستوي في كتابه، والتي كما يبدوا أنه استطاع، وإن كان في نهاية الأمر، أن يلزم نفسه بواحدٍ منها. منهج ديكارت موجود على صفحتي الرئيسية ولكني سأكون كاذبًا لو قلت إني قدرت على الالتزام به لأكثر من ثلاثة أشهر. إني كما يقول سورين:

  One moment a child, the next an old man; one moment you are thinking most earnestly about the most important scholarly problems, how you will devote your life to them, and the next you are a lovesick fool. But you are a long way from marriage

I was never interested in Kierkegaard's personal life. Today I read this:

Kierkegaard told Emil Boesen, a friend since childhood, who kept a record of his conversations with Kierkegaard, that his life had been one of immense suffering, which may have seemed like vanity to others, but he did not think it so.

I downloaded his biography. Very interested to learn more about the man's life. #Kierkegaard

Giuseppe Abbati paintings are very touching, I feel like I want to live inside them; specifically his Country Road with Cypresses, Marina in Castiglioncello and The Window. #Art #Giuseppe Abbati

Carl Jung, “The Love Problem of a Student,” in Civilization in Transition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978, vol. 10 of the Collected Works), §§231-2, 111-112:

. . . Love requires depth and loyalty of feeling; without them it is not love but mere caprice. True love will always commit itself and engage in lasting ties; it needs freedom only to effect its choice, not for its accomplishment. Every true and deep love is a sacrifice. The lover sacrifices all other possibilities, or rather, the illusion that such possibilities exist. If this sacrifice is not made, his illusions prevent the growth of any deep and responsible feeling, so that the very possibility of experiencing real love is denied him.

Love has more than one thing in common with religious faith. It demands unconditional trust and expects absolute surrender. Just as nobody but the believer who surrenders himself wholly to God can partake of divine grace, so love reveals its highest mysteries and its wonder only to those who are capable of unqualified devotion and loyalty of feeling. And because this is so difficult, few mortals can boast of such an achievement. But, precisely because the truest and most devoted love is also the most beautiful, let no man seek to make it easy. He is a sorry knight who shrinks from the difficulty of loving his lady. Love is like God: both give themselves only to their bravest knights.

URL: https://thematamixta.blogspot.com/2024/12/let-no-man-seek-to-make-it-easy.html #Philosophy #Modus Vivendi

Henry David Thoreau, Journal, March 31, 1852 (emphasis mine):

Why the moaning of the storm gives me pleasure. Methinks it is be cause it puts to rout the trivialness of our fair-weather life and gives it at least a tragic interest. The sound has the effect of a pleasing challenge, to call forth our energy to resist the invaders of our life's territory. It is musical and thrilling, as the sound of an enemy's bugle. Our spirits revive like lichens in the storm. There is something worth living for when we are resisted, threatened. As at the last day we might be thrilled with the prospect of the grandeur of our destiny, so in these first days our destiny appears grander. What would the days, what would our life, be worth, if some nights were not dark as pitch,—of darkness tangible or that you can cut with a knife? How else could the light in the mind shine? How should we be conscious of the light of reason? If it were not for physical cold, how should we have discovered the warmth of the affections? I sometimes feel that I need to sit in a far-away cave through a three weeks' storm, cold and wet, to give a tone to my system. The spring has its windy March to usher it in, with many soaking rains reaching into April. Methinks I would share every creature's suffering for the sake of its experience and joy. The song sparrow and the transient fox-colored sparrow,—have they brought me no message this year? Do they go to lead heroic lives in Rupert's Land? They are so small, I think their destinies must be large. Have I heard what this tiny passenger has to say, while it flits thus from tree to tree? Is not the coming of the fox-colored sparrow something more earnest and significant than I have dreamed of? Can I forgive myself if I let it go to Rupert's Land before I have appreciated it? God did not make this world in jest; no, nor in indifference. These migrating sparrows all bear messages that concern my life. I do not pluck the fruits in their season. I love the birds and beasts because they are mythologically in earnest. I see that the sparrow cheeps and flits and sings adequately to the great design of the universe; that man does not communicate with it, understand its language, because he is not at one with nature. I reproach myself because I have regarded with indifference the passage of the birds; I have thought them no better than I.

URL: https://thematamixta.blogspot.com/2025/01/something-worth-living.html #Modus Vivendi

I wrote about the Industry and Consumption of Pornography a while ago. Today I learnt that Jean Baudrillard has a related theory(Lenoir 2023, p.45) that reminded me of the Social Learning theory in the sociobiological theories of rape: Jean Baudrillard wrote the following maxim: "Sexuality does not hide in tolerance, repression, or morality, it is certainly hidden in what is more sexual than sex itself: pornography." In Baudrillard's view, the global success of pornography is not a result of sexual liberation but rather the triumph of capitalism, which turns everything into a commodity, including bodies that lose their ability to enjoy and experience desire. Hans Blüher continued where Baudrillard’s works left off and tried to show that the transition from sexual desire to pornography marks the boundary of the "unforgivable violation" with absolute permission—driven immediately by the urge to fulfill expectations and fantasies. This, he claims, signals the end of otherness in sexual and romantic relationships. The body of the other is consumed and discarded as if it were a consumable and disposable object. The desire for the other becomes a desire for oneself alone. We now strive for comfort, safety, and ease in the field of unity and isolation. Today’s love is free of all excess and all sin (…). Eros aims for the other in an emotional sense, yet does not allow itself to recover in the system of the self. In this identical, increasingly homogeneous society, contradictions no longer exist, and hence no erotic experience. This assumes a state of both internal and external dissonance.

I found an interesting piece by Leo Tolstoy: https://www.marxists.org/archive/tolstoy/1900/slavery-of-our-times.html on wage labor: Slavery exists in full vigor, but we do not perceive it, just as in Europe at the end of the Eighteenth Century the slavery of serfdom was not perceived. People of that day thought that the position of men obliged to till the land for their lords, and to obey them, was a natural, inevitable, economic condition of life, and they did not call it slavery. It is the same among us: people of our day consider the position of the laborer to be a natural, inevitable economic condition, and they do not call it slavery. And as, at the end of the Eighteenth Century, the people of Europe began little by little to understand that what formerly seemed a natural and inevitable form of economic life-namely, the position of peasants who were completely in the power of their lords-was wrong, unjust and immoral, and demanded alteration, so now people today are beginning to understand that the position of hired workmen, and of the working classes in general, which formerly seemed quite right and quite normal, is not what it should be, and demands alteration. #Modus Vivendi #What is it to be done?

It's been said we are in the age of pricing. The Age of Commodity. I had a lot of thoughts about that when I was reading this paragraph from Harper's review (“Were all going to be dead soon.”): In the United States, it was reported that the Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the world's twelfth-richest person, secretly gave $50 million to an organization supporting the campaign of the Democratic presidential candidate; and that the Tesla and SpaceX co-founder Elon Musk, the world's richest person, had been warned by federal prosecutors of the potential illegality of his practice of giving $1 million each day to a randomly selected swing-state voter who signed a petition for his super PAC that backs the Republican presidential candidate. ^{1 2 3 4} In Moldova, where last month it was reported that the Russian government had paid at least 130,000 people more than $15 million to vote against joining the European Union, authorities announced that they had identified an additional $24 million also directed toward purchasing the votes of 20 percent of the entire electorate; violence erupted at polling stations across the country of Georgia, where international observers warned of Russian “vote-buying” in its parliamentary elections and whose president said that the elections' results “cannot be accepted” and should be opposed with protests in the streets; and police in Mozambique shot and killed at least ten of the thousands of demonstrators marching against the ruling party's claim that it had just won more than 70 percent of votes nationally. ^{5 6 7 8 9} Days before Uzbekistan's parliamentary elections, a would-be assassin fired five bullets at the car of the country's former head of communications, who was lobbying for reforms to protect press freedoms; and in Bulgaria, hackers published a list of more than 200 businessmen and government officials who are alleged to have bought votes under the direction of the former owner of 6 of the country's 12 largest-circulating newspapers. ^{10 11 12} It was reported that an internal battle in the Iranian government over the 85-year-old ayatollah's successor would likely be won by his second son, a former de facto commanding officer in the Basij who was accused of rigging the 2009 election in favor of the incumbent, who later accused him of embezzling money from the treasury; the Vietnamese parliament elected a military general to replace its president, who, while being investigated for bribery, resigned from the presidential office he'd taken over from his predecessor, who himself had resigned after 539 of his subordinates were implicated in multiple corruption rackets; and Tunisia's incumbent president, who last month arrested dozens of members of the nation's largest opposition party, was inaugurated for a second term. ^{13 14 15 16 17 18} “Vipers,” he said at his swearing in, are “circulating.” ¹⁹ #Politics

I told some people before about my conspiracy theory of Google making Chromium development experience completely difficult, requires many adhocs setups, extremely slow and difficult to fork it to customize the interface/behavior, as a purpose of them trying to limit the possible Chrome clones. I'm now considering that AWS (Amazon) is making services like CloudWatch so terrible to search and trace, so you have to use something much more expensive like Live Tail. I'm aware that such a behavior is common in product design, some apps will be more feature-rich on the mobile app rather than on the web interface (usually because the app is more profitable, data-collection-wise), but it's an interesting instance to see such a usage with cloud providers. #Programming

• [2025-10-24 Fri 13:29]
  Found a video of Messiri talking about his model and the incident. https://youtu.be/qs7Dp8ckFO8

[2024-10-17 Thu 18:27]

I was reading Messiri's "Rehlati al-fikriah", and he mentioned something very interesting there about Paul Fussell, the renowned literary historian, apparently he was one of his PhD external examiners. But that's not the interesting thing, it is what he mentions about him: being a homosexual pervert. I was shocked from the information that Messiri mentioned about him, that I quickly jumped to Wikipedia searching for anything with the keyword "gay", "homosexual", etc.. Nothing (surprisingly) was there, I started to think that Messiri might have linked to some other Paul Fussel. I then tried to search Google with keywords like "homosexual" "Paul Fussel", still, nothing there. I was finally certain that either Messiri is talking about someone else, or this information were discrete. Then I read a post on HN that was talking about Kagi, a less screwed (suckless) search engine, it quickly linked me to the information Messiri mentioned about Fussel (his wife article about their relationship and how he would like to enter a room full of guests naked) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnacdOIoTBQ I don't frequently post here, or anywhere, unlike past times. Lately I explored one of my friend's music library, he told me how it's extremely diverse, he was correct about it. I later wondered if that has anything to do with a disorder that he suffers from, which relates to his ear. I wonder if how his music changes has anything to do with how that acoustic disorder affect his music taste. I also wondered if there's anything about me that affects my frequency of writing here. Sometimes it's fascinating —even if you believe in free will— how unfree we might be. How we might have the wrong ideas because the search engine chooses not to be helpful enough, or have different views due to a biological state. Related.

I'm reorganizing my bibliography, found out that there are many titles that I felt nostalgic towards. Many titles are related to people I used to discuss with or phases in my life. Some of them are:

In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (Russell, B.)

one of the very first books I've ever read.

The Hero With a Thousand Faces (Campbell, J.)

I really miss that era of exploring Campbell and psychoanalysis… used to be in a very fun communities.

The Human Web (McNeill et al.)

It was a very hard job for me to get a paper version of this book, I remember reading it in public transportation, in winter.

Being Mortal (Gawande, A.)

Same as previous one, I read it in the same era.

The Naked Ape (Morris, D.)

I've some of the dearest memories with this book. I remember recommending it to somebody, they were too shy to discuss the sex chapter and I found that funny, we never talked or met again.

Your Inner Fish (Shubin, N.)

one of the first books ever that I read about evolution, recommended to me by my neighbor after he saw the documentary.

Totem and taboo (Freud, S.)

My first book to read by Freud, first book to get me very invested into the psychoanalysis theory as well. I even made infographics for this book. It also introduced me to many other European orientalists.

Group Psychology (Freud, S.)

Second book to read for Freud, was recommended to me by the same friend who recommended "Your Inner Fish".

Differential Equations for Dummies (Holzner, S.)

very bad memories with this one.

Algorithms (Sedgewick, R.)

This was my alternative for the common algorithms reference, I don't even remember the name of that reference anymore.

Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis (Shaffer, C.)

My first algorithms book, one of the books that I completed 100% of it. I truly loved it, I had a TODO note to thank the author, but I never did.

So many other memories with the rest of the list! خُلِقتُ أَلوفاً لَو رَحَلتُ إِلى الصِبا لَفارَقتُ شَيبي موجَعَ القَلبِ باكِيا.

• [2025-05-23 Fri 17:26] Sometimes I wonder whether that feeling is healthy.

#Modus Vivendi

I really like Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's PDFs (preview here), however, they do not allow you to download it without a subscription. It's actually good enough for a subscription if you compare it to the HTML. For someone like me, my HTML appetite can not hold more than few long articles, SEP average entry is about 50 pages or so, that's not a long article even. Here's how I get their entries as nice PDFs without subscription, simply save the article part of the HTML page into a file, and using pandoc run: vpandoc concept_of_religion.html --pdf-engine=xelatex -o concept_of_religion.pdf --variable=documentclass:book -V geometry:b5paper -V margin=3cm -V mainfont="Times New Roman" #Philosophy

I'd always prefer a Lisp. But ideally, Go wins (more at The Prefect Programming Language) by its unauthoritarian package manager and not using exception handling. As aforementioned @ A thought about Clojure, I think Clojure is the modern day Lisp that works very good for interactive programming and rapid development. But here's another killer feature of Go that roughly does not exist elsewhere: the great STD. With Go, I can feel very comfortable writing a Go application without the need of checking the internet for questions or 3rd-party libraries, eventually I might need to, but if compared to any other tool I've ever used, it's amazing (back in the day when I used C# I'd need a web browser always running alongside to my IDE). I do not have internet connection those days and while playing tracks I thought of building a simple CLI to handle my audio tracks synchronization, I know how to do it without reinventing the wheel in Go, with only using the STD, with Clojure, it's going to be unrapid developement. #Go #Programming

I wrote on The Prefect Programming Language my thoughts about what would be the prefect language out there, and what would be the nearest thing of it. It's C and this is not going to change (any far at least), however, perfect is not always practical. I still believe in Lisp-like syntax superiority and I love the flexibility of dynamic typing and dynamic loading, and C has both already. Still C lacks many things like a proper build system (that convince everybody) and packaging.

From the list on that article, I'd be left with Julia and Go, Julia has two downsides of the Centralized Package Repository and the use of Exception handling. And Go has the downside of not having a REPL. For me, when it comes to the real world, the issue with centralization does not matter more than the issue of getting the work done (i.e. REPL weights more).

Going more practically from there, I see a high potential with Clojure, it does not have the OOP trash like Common Lisp and it is a Lisp, it is not too new like Jack, and it can interlope with Java. Perhaps it's the go-to language for me right now. Displacing Common Lisp. #Clojure #Programming

I am considering reading Don Quixote. But I'm still unsure. I think there are so many books that are propagated around and everywhere merely because of pseudointellectuality. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy was one of those novels that I had a similar experience with. It's one of the most unreadable novels in my opinion, however, it's always considered either #1 or #2 best works by people who post book ratings on book communites. After I read it back then, due to the severe amount of recommendation, I was surprised that it's hardly a plain, and very long, novel, I tried to find later someone to discuss my view with him about the novel, I could only find people majored in literature who can discuss it, but theoretically only, and I found out that most of the people who recommenced it to me never actually read it. #Literature

I like thinking about names, they usually reflect people's dreams and values, many times I feel devastated when contemplating names, like when find a convicted thief named Ali I usually think that their parents did find great values in the historical character of Imam Ali that they wished to recall in their child, and how sad it went. I personally believe that names have a great effect on us. Which is not debatable [from a theory-of-complexity perspective]. But how can they shape our personalities? A study once showed that boys who are given names more common among girls are more likely to develop behavioral problems when they reach puberty(Figlio 2005), but the reason behind that itself is very obvious (likely to be). What about their effect on our innersole? I think there should be. The priming effect is one that proves it, however, it's very controversial, but let me tell you about it. Priming is the idea that exposure to one stimulus may influence a response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention. The stimulus itself can be a subliminal stimuli, for example, if someone were to read you an article about people in a retirement home, your subconscious recalls old people, who walk very slow, the Priming theorists believe that this might actually cause you to walk slightly slower as result of your subconscious thinking. And if you were to experience the same thing but with talking about top football players, you might walk faster. Interesting theory no? Unfortunately it has great problems in documenting the experiments(Bower 2012).

My friend sent me this episode from a pop-science TV series [Arabic]; https://youtu.be/CFeW61i_MLA it has English subtitle. I'd love to share Nietzsche view of the matter(Nietzsche 1998, no. 17): Goodness and malignity. At first men imposed their own personalities on Nature: everywhere they saw themselves and their like, i.e. their own evil and capricious temperaments, hidden, as it were, behind clouds, thunder-storms, wild beasts, trees, and plants: it was then that they declared Nature was evil. Afterwards there came a time, that of Rousseau, when they sought to distinguish themselves from Nature: they were so tired of each other that they wished to have separate little hiding-places where man and his misery could not penetrate: then they invented “nature is good.” #The Power of Understanding Human Nature

I think I've a nice tip on that, although it might sounds very naive, it really helped me personally. I think that the reason behind post-achievement depression is that we forget why we wanted whatever we achieved or that we no longer possess the same perspectives that made us want that thing, the reason behind that is usually the long period that is dedicated on achieving it, in which you are likely to change more. That's why it's most common in academia especially with people getting their Ph.D after 5 years of work or even more. So basically we forget why we want something and how we felt towards wanting it (think of it like someone working 2 years to earn an Ijazah believing it to be a great achievement, but they turn atheist in the second year). So my tip is basically a usage of intensive imagination in a different stages of what we want.

And this does not have to be a protection from depression to be honest, but it

can be used as a refreshing method to really understand our passions and what we "really" want (not what we ought to by collective consciousness or propaganda): think of yourself getting it and estimate your happiness or satisfaction.

• [2025-04-12 Sat 18:40] As of now, I'm not really sure if this method will work properly for most people, as most of us generate these delusional views about how things are going to be like after the achievement. See also: On Depression. #Modus Vivendi

• [2025-09-27 Sat 00:04]
  Just remembered something funny that happened a long time ago too. Not very related to this story but I will put it here anyway, I was trying out some new themes for Emacs a long time ago, and most of the themes that you will try, would have this warnning shoutted out by Emacs that choosing this theme can actually execute Lisp code, which is correct and should be carefully considered. However, between switching to the new theme from your current theme, Emacs switches to the default Emacs theme. And I fell in love! I didn't know that this was the default theme, I thought that this was the one I had just chosen then (the message was omitted for unkown reason). The next day I spent the whole day debugging why my theme is now black.

It's always recommended to check what your vendors/origins provide before looking for third-party solution. I learnt that the hard way years ago when I was in the Digital Signal Processing class and trying to take math notes, I was new to Org-mode and the Emacs rabbit whole that time and I wanted to use Org-mode for this mission. I came across this program from reddit, it's called "math-preview", I thought that this was the utility I need to write LaTeX equations inside Org. I spent hours trying to install it (npm tragedy), and even after getting it to work, I was getting Elisp errors inside Emacs. I do not remember how it ended though, perhaps someone told me that Emacs does what I wanted out of the box? Anyway. It's only a fun memory now :) #Programming

I've been experiencing random impulses of depression lately, perhaps a part of what's diagnosed as mood swings and mood disorders. While I can not decide precisely what's going wrong I'm trying to do my best to overcome it. I'm sharing my experience here.

I know so many literature descriptive anthology pieces about depression, however, I really like al-Ghazali's(al-Ghazali 2002, p.135):

For God put a lock upon my tongue so that I was impeded from public teaching. I struggled with myself to teach for a single day, to gratify the hearts of the students who were frequenting my lectures, but my tongue would not utter a single word: I was completely unable to say anything. As a result that impediment of my speech caused a sadness in my heart accompanied by an inability to digest; food and drink became unpalatable to me so that I could neither swallow broth easily nor digest a mouthful of solid food. That led to such a weakening of my powers that the physicians lost hope of treating me and said: “This is something which has settled in his heart and crept from it into his humors; there is no way to treat it unless his heart be eased of the anxiety which has visited it.”

فكنت أُجاهد نفسي أن أُدرس يومًا واحدًا تطييبًا للقلوب المتخلفة إلي، فكان لا ينطق لساني بكلمة ولا استطيعها البتة، حتى اورثت هذه العقلة في اللسان حزنًا في القلب، بطلت معاه قوة الهضم ومراءة الطعام والشراب: فكان لا ينساغ لي ثريد، ولا تنهضم لي لقمة؛ وتعدى إلى ضعف القوى، حتى قطع الأطباء طمعهم من العلاج وقالوا: هذا أمر نزل بالقلب، ومنه سرى إلى المزاج، فلا سبيل اليه بالعلاج، إلا بأن يتروح السر عن الهم الملم.

There's always something different in 1st millennium depression literature (check out Foucault's "History of Insanity"), perhaps it's the most non-casual (at least not from an intellectual perspective) form of depression ever recorded.

al-Ghazali depicted later what helped him survive this state, which was basically Sufism (Read the Sufism chapter of his book if you are interested in more details. Also check: Why a Sufi approach to healing mental illness is so powerful). I think that this approach might not be very helpful. Not specifically Sufism, but intellectual changes generally ([2025-04-19 Sat 14:00] although many will argue otherwise)

As I mentioned my depression was (is?) swinging, I got the feeling of "I'm alright now, that was it, it's overcame" many times before suffering a next wave.

The latest "solution" I've reached so far is routine, and I know that the recipe I'm going to put now is battle-tested because I've tried it when I was and was not in depression, that is; not just keeping self busy but with a purpose to get to the next level.

What I've been doing for example is setting a list of activities to do. I've a very (very) long bucket list myself, so it is not really about lacking organization but doing something at all. The list should be something doable, easy and not critical, most importantly it should be insulated from anything you would have in a normal to-do-list (i.e. do not add stuff related to you work, study or whatever). I believe it should be crowded as well but not too much. The mere purpose is to keep yourself busy, apparently one of the most naive advice for depression is the one that seems to work. The tasks need to be productive, do not add - play a a video game or whatever. Do things that next morning you will feel good about the fact you have done them.

When I get up feeling depressed and awful, I push myself into the list, simulating to myself that only after finishing this item, this pain is going to vanish, and before I even try harder I'd be occupied in getting the first item of the list done. Once I'm done with it I proceed with the next item on the list, and so on. By end of the day if I'm not feeling better already for all the things I have done, I know for certain that I will feel great the next day and I will have a severe desire to go into the same action list just like the day before.

The trade-off here is: 1. You can develop the routine regardless of your state, if you feel so good today you do it and if you do not you do it. 2. It produces something, so even if it does not help healing, at least you are getting things done (I say productive and depressed is better than unproductive and depressed). #Modus Vivendi

• [2024-02-11 Sun 05:38] I think this method still works fine after all these months, perhaps the only thing to focus on more is crisis management.
• [2024-04-04 Thu 15:34] Well for the most part now I can confirm that this works, empirically.
• [2024-08-05 Mon 23:08] I didn't mention that if you're suffering from some kind of clinical depression (major depressive disorder) you should seek professional help. I thought that was too obvious.
• [2025-04-19 Sat 14:02] Something else that I think I should have mentioned here is how different it is to have the willing not to be depressed. This is perhaps the most important step in healing from depression for me, and I really regret every time I was extremely depressed and decided not to help myself because I thought it wouldn't make that much of a difference, but it completely will. God helps those who help themselves. Always help yourself to get out of depression, like they say, be the one you always wished to have helping you. If you think having a cup of tea, a good workout, or a walk might even slightly change your mood, do it. Or even if you don't think it will, but you believe that you might like it, do it. For me, I found out that doing my favorite activities that are mostly about me and taking care of myself, and making sure that I am doing the best for me to have a good time, that was always the best way for me to get out of depression.
• [2025-12-22 Mon 22:02] Sports really help. As well as a good diet.
• [2026-02-17 Tue 22:22] Out of courtesy, I should write here when I'm feeling generally good (and alive) as I wrote here when I felt terrible. I can not tell what helped me to escape depression, because I absolutely have no clue. But I still believe that what was mentioned here, i.e. keeping the self occupied by state of trying to do good things, would have a great help on anyone. والحمدلله رب العالمين.

• [2025-12-28 Sun 17:47] I wrote about this here Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

A startup or the like would be vastly interested in having a name that is easy to remember and not necessarily expressive, such as viber, YouTube, Google, etc., which is understandable, what I can never understand why would a software library do so? Why having a library named glun or marmot, can you guess which one of these is the IMAP server and which is distributed SQLite replicator? This does not make any sense. Imagine if you are talking with your team about a workflow that involves a set of these application "the server runs oliva which uses palette to make the rain interface looks better", a segment of my poor brain processing power would be already RIP processing what these strange words are supposed to mean before actually start thinking about the main statement. I believe that the domination of this type of naming (random names of mascots or anime girls) is relatively new, most old software had either a very meaningful name (cat-concatenation) or at least a name to which you can link (PostgreSQL). Now an assignment for you, try to guess what does the software named isso do? Please always give your software/library a meaningful name. Stop using anime girls names for naming utilities.

Update: try to tell what do these pieces do before clicking the link:

• quetz
• squoosh
• mamba
• pluto
• boa
• apheleia
• watermill

#Programming

People usually misunderstand the boundaries of computing i.e. what a computer is actually capable of. Due to the mediocre state of software industry that reinforces computing illiteracy, this is not going to change any soon. An example of this is ad-blocking, some people won't bother checking whether it is possible to purge annoying ads from their experience, they just accept it as the way it works. This is true for other aspects too, there was a reason why people were surprised by the LLM thing. IMHO this is the main reason why federated social networks such as Pleroma and Mastodon will never become a thing, because it's too complicated for normies to understand that such a thing is even possible. They already have their own understanding of how computing should be done. #Programming #What We Lost #Computers Are No Longer Used.