Weblog

So I don’t like “AI”, for various reasons. One being that the AI companies seem intent on destroying the internet by ingesting the things people have made and spitting out slop everywhere.(sidenote: For the latest example: https://pod.geraspora.de/posts/173421631 ) Garbage in, garbage out. Well I don’t want them to do that to my stuff too, so I want to make sure that if they want to soullessly gobble up what I’ve written, they will at least have to do some manual effort. ...

My distaste for the company Spotify has steadily grown over the years. It started with an annoyance over relying on a proprietary app for music, but since I stopped using the app my supply of distaste has come from the company’s hate for musicians. (sidenote: See this article for the latest example. ) With the Spotify Wrapped they’ve come up with a new way to get free advertising, and it has become hard for me to avoid the company. ...

Many who are into philosophy, myself included, like to make fun of famous scientists for not understanding it. It is the classic phenomena of experts in one field making bad statements about a field they aren’t familiar with.(sidenote: There’s even some philosophy about it: “Experts, Public Policy, and the Question of Trust”.1 ) When someone like Stephen Hawking says that “Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge” and that “Philosophy is dead”, I can’t help but wonder if his conception of philosophy is stuck in ancient Greece, when what we call philosophy and science were more closely linked together, when philosophers made unhinged statements about the physical nature of the world without any empiric evidence. ...

In How Jordan Peterson’s Suits Taught Me Fashion, CJ the X talks about libertarianism in a way I haven’t seen before. The video is about how fashion works as a means of communication, specifically how it communicates what groups you belong to. To overly simplify, it chronicles a history of fashion in the west (based on Derek Guy’s account) in three stages. In the first stage there is an objective understanding of beauty, the elites and nobles have an innate sense of beauty that the masses just don’t have. ...

In Sabine Hossenfelder is WRONG About Capitalism, Unlearning Economics (UE) criticizes Hossenfelder for getting the history completely wrong. In order to explain money, she makes up a fantasy society that functions exactly like ours, except it doesn’t have money. That of course makes it very inconvenient to not have money, so it would be natural for them to invent money. This is basically a circular argument that doesn’t take history into account at all, how money actually came to be (UE refers to Debt: The first 5000 years by David Graeber)(sidenote: Everyday Anarchism has an excellent read-through series on Debt: https://www. ...

Usually when I write a review, I try to talk about specific things that make the thing I’m recommending unique or interesting. I don’t want to resort to platitudes and very general statements like “engrossing”, “excellent prose” or “gripping plot”, because that you can say about almost any book you like. The reason I started reading Malazan for example, is because someone said that they are epic fantasy books that are written like short stories. ...

❗ Warning: This contains spoilers for the first season of Haikyuu. I have tried to hide the concrete stuff behind spoiler bars (that work when viewed from a web browser), but the text still deals with some core themes. C‍. Thi Nguyen uses a distinction between achievement games and striving games. Achievement games are games where the reason why you’re playing the game is because you want to achieve the goals of the game. ...

I listen to a lot of podcasts, maybe too many. I often want to share the episodes with friends, but it’s a bit tricky to do that with podcasts. I can send a link, but there are so many places to host podcasts on that it becomes a bit messy. And on the receiving side its also nicer to be able to listen to podcasts in your podcast player, which you can’t do if you get just a single podcast episode linked to you. ...

Idag var jag ute på en nattpromenad. Jag svängde in på ett typiskt villaområde som hade vanliga bilvägar och smala trotoarkanter. Om det här var en scen som utspelade sig för några år sen så hade jag valt trottoaren här, men idag så började jag istället fundera på varför jag var så ovillig att vistas på bilvägen. Den första instinkten jag hade var att det är moraliskt korrekt att göra så. ...

I think these thoughts are in some way a response to sentiments expressed in this Existential Comics: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/537. Basically it argues that magic in stories (that follows deterministic rules) isn’t really magic, it is just different physics since it is just how that world works. I don’t want to refute it because it makes sense to me when talking about the world; if people learned to make things levitate it wouldn’t be supernatural because it is actually happening in our natural world. ...

I’m doing a Link Party! The theme for this party is planned obsolescence and how we relate to the future. Planned Obsolescence Will Kill Us All by Unlearning Economics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz68ILyuWtA I’ve already summarized this one fairly thoroughly before, but it’s such a good introduction to planned obsolescence that it’s worth sharing again. This video is a great examination of planned obsolescence from an point of view of an economist, and finishes off by turning the criticism against capitalism. ...

English below. Okej, det här blir första gången jag ger mig in på blandbandsfredag! Temat är låtar av (klassiska) (hård)rocksband som står ut från resten av deras låtar. Inspirationen är att när jag försökte ta mig in i genren för några år sedan var det ganska ofta jag hitttade en låt som jag gillade, men att resten av bandets musik inte klickade alls. Det verkar finnas en trend av att banden gör en låt som är mycket längre än deras andra, och att de står över dem andra i dramatik och möjligen också kvalité. ...

Today I want to recommend the short story collection Changing Planes by Ursula Le Guin. It centers around a theme of world building, where she visits a new world with new societal structures for each story. Really, it is almost like it is a peak into her creative process as it feels like she is playing around with ideas and worlds, exploring them to see what kind of stories they contain. ...

❗ Warning: This contains spoilers for the plot of the movie Shoplifters and what the later episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion looks like. In Recommending Shoplifters I wrote that we as audience are trapped together with the mother in the interrogation scene towards the end. I think I really like things like that, where I’m trapped by the movie to sit through an intense and complex web of emotions. Neon Genesis Evangelion does that too with its last two episodes. ...

Today I’m recommending the movie Shoplifters by Kore-eda. The first bit is spoiler-free. A friend of mine described Shoplifters as being very human (“väldigt mänsklig” på svenska), which I think is apt. It is a story that feels more relaxed in a way that makes me feel like the characters are regular human beings, rather characters in a story. They are there on the screen, and we follow them around, but they don’t tell us everything they think or why they do the things they do — just like real people. ...

Productivity apps are scary. Some days you find one that looks interesting, and so you decide to play around with it to see how it works. From a first glance, it might actually be something that fits you perfectly, but you can’t quite tell from just the documentation, so you have to download it and try it out for real. It will only be a short-term thing, you tell yourself. An hour tops, you tell yourself. ...

A couple of years ago, zettelkastens and backlink-based note-taking applications that emphasize many interlinked notes became popular as the idea of zettelkastens became popular again. At least in the areas of the internet I frequent. I also jumped on the trend and started using one, which eventually became this blog: https://a-blog-with.relevant-information.com/posts/introducing_this_blog_thing/ I like plaintext stuff, partly because it makes everything very transparent. I can see the effect of an operation very clearly, and can do any manual intervention I like. ...

Sousou no Frieren is a very trope heavy story. The world of Frieren could be from basically any isekai or JRPG of the last decade. There is the party that defeats the demon lord (there is a demon lord), with the bearded dwarf warrior, the mage elf, the human priest, and the Hero. The setting mostly consists of classic medieval Europe inspired towns and villages, or generic forests and plains. At least it doesn’t have a RPG game system, but the magic itself is also pretty bland. ...

Today I want to write a blog post about my recent experiences with journaling. There are two reasons: 1) is that I feel like it has helped me with writer’s block so I want to share it, and two is that it is interesting and kind of funny that I got help from the novel Piranesi. I want to do it in a bit of a meta style, where I showcase what it is I’m doing by doing it, what I’m doing right now in other words. ...

If there’s one music recommendation I would give it would be the band The Dear Hunter. I don’t really know the genre words to describe them, but Wikipedia calls them a prog rock band. It’s really hard to pin them down since they are constantly changing. Their latest album for example, Antimai, is much more funky than the rest which took me aback. If you end up listening to this band I welcome recommendations for stuff that is similar. ...

I just read an article, The average AI criticism has gotten lazy, and that’s dangerous - Redeem Tomorrow, whose proposed solution to the AI situation is for everyone to have access to their own pattern synthesizer (their neologism for “AI”), instead of just a handful of companies controlling them. In some sense that is good, it would avoid enshittification I think. They argue this because there isn’t a way to remove the synthesizers from existence, since they only need commodity computing hardware to be produced. ...

Today’s plan was to post an old rant of mine, maybe doing some light editing to brush it up. I went through my notes to read it over, and it turns out I actually have more things to say than what is in the rant. I felt like I had written more about it in my notes, and sure enough, there is enough to turn it into a proper essay. Some day I will finish it up and publish on the Slog. ...

Today’s link is from Low Tech Magazine. I like this magazine because it challenges my assumptions on what kinds of technology is harmful and what kinds of technology is necessary. A throughline of the magazine is that it takes a low tech angle on various topics, informed by the goal of environmental sustainability. The article I want to talk about is called Keeping some of the lights on: Redefining energy security. ...

Today’s link is a philosophy paper. Don’t let that scare you though, it doesn’t really fit into the stereotypical notion of philosophy. This is a paper about philosophy of games (what makes something a game and how do we interact with them?) as applied to communication. It is incredibly accessible to read and easy to understand. The paper by C. Thi Nguyen is called How Twitter Gamifies Communication, and is about, well, how Twitter, and really any other social media with a point system, gamifies communication “by offering immediate, vivid, and quantified evaluations of one’s conversational success”. ...

Today I want to write about writing, specifically writing practices with a common place book. The links for today are pretty similar so you can read one or the other, or both — they are still different to each other. The core of Cory Doctorow’s writing method (the “Memex method”) is to write a blog post every day. This of course becomes really good practice for writing, as expressing what you want becomes easier and easier the more you write. ...

by Unlearning Economics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz68ILyuWtA An interesting video outlining the economics of planned obsolescence and what the problems are (beyond making us feel ripped off.) It concludes with, as far as I can tell, a solid argument against capitlism. In summary, he argues that planned obsolescence isn’t a bug of capitalism, it is happening because capitalism is working. It’s caused by companies wanting to make profit in a competitive environment. It is a phenomenon that is clearly not happening in just one part of the economy, but has been happening for a long time in virtually every sector. ...

Note to people reading this from browsers with limited css-capabilities: This contains spoilers for Life Ceremony that are hidden using css, consider reading it in a web browser. This is short story collection centred around norm breaking. Ideally you should read this collection with as little information as possible, so I will list some interesting things about it behind spoiler tags so you can choose how much you know before you feel like it’s enough. ...

https://www.brandonsanderson.com/outside/ In this heart warming essay on about why he writes, Brandon Sanderson says that he does it in order to let more people inside, to somewhere they feel like they belong. It is then not surprising that he writes in a way such that the prose doesn’t get in the way, he wants more people who feel left out to find a place where they can feel like they belong. ...