Years ago, a meeting between Noam Chomsky and Episten was highly discussed on the r/Chomsky subreddit. I didn’t give it much attention because I know how Dr. Chomsky rarely does of the people he conducts interviews with. However, doing some research now I can see that Episten was kinda of an octopus of connections. Apparently, Epstein had a lot of philanthropy work, worked with MIT professors, funded multiple universities and had met with many figures in the scientific and intellectual community, Chomsky just happens to be one of them more on that here. Regarding the funds, Chomsky explained that it was from his own money “In response to questions from the Journal, Chomsky confirmed that he received a March 2018 transfer of roughly $270,000 from an Epstein-linked account. He said it was “restricted to rearrangement of my own funds, and did not involve one penny from Epstein”. Anyway, I think that Chomsky’s personal life matters or should be associated in consideration of his ideas or works.

A part of me wish it was there.

In this call there’s a discussion of the necessity of art realism in the digital world, which I personally have always questioned, and still to be frank. While I like how it was presented, I think it was not answered at all, if you are not able to tell whether the painting is a work of a human or machine, then how could it be different at all? I don’t find the argument for “the artist can fix or modify” helps either, if the artist modifies the reality, arguing that this is what he or she is seeing instead, is it reality any longer?

I admire Tarek a lot.

I wrote about exception handling before in my draft on programming languages, generally, I consider exception handling to be extremely distasteful, and before you relate this to me being biased toward functional states, no I had this feeling from the first day writing C#; I was always astonished by how the MS documentation was strictly telling us “hey be careful with this thing” and hopping for the best, and for the way my app needed a “global exception handler” that swallows everything, and I looked and looked for a way in which I could just know whether a function throw or not, I assumed that I’m getting something wrong, because I couldn’t believe that this is a standard practice and due to my insufficient experience back then, I couldn’t find any literature discussing this problem. I wrote about a similar concern in my old mentioned draft, but it’s far from complete in the regard of why throwing exceptions is generally a terrible idea. Here I’m sharing some of contributions that I found: 1. Exception Handling Considered Harmful I enjoyed that post a lot, and Patterson seems to be very thoughtful and thorough author, it’s sad that he is not oftenly writing anymore. I’m planning to go through the old posts that are still on that website. 2. 13 – Joel on Software 3. Exceptions Considered Harmful 4. Why Go gets exceptions right | Dave Cheney. From the other side: 1. You’re better off using Exceptions – Eirik Tsarpalis’ blog and I have a quick response for some issues it demonstrates; a. An Awkward Reconciliation: this assumes that the programming language you are using, library or other called functions are going to throw, which is invalid if you can never have this state in your language. b. Boilerplate: this is a style preference IMO, most of Go developers for example do not mind the infamous if err != nil for me it’s explicit and eloquent. c. Where’s my Stacktrace?: exporting the Stacktrace has nothing to do with throwing exceptions, it’s very possible to expose it in almost all languages (including Go) without exceptions. 2. Exceptions vs. status returns | Ned Batchelder Skipping commenting in this one, since the former source implicitly included all of its claims. .

Mindblowing work. I can’t find any good literature that explains it thoroughly. Might be worth investigating some day.

The painting shows Hagar standing pleading before Abraham, whose arms are open in a welcoming gesture, with a winged angel hovering above Hagar, touching her head in support. In the background, Sarah sits in a window looking on with disdain. The biblical context is that Sarah (Abraham’s wife) gave her Egyptian maidservant Hagar to Abraham to bear a child when Sarah was barren. After Hagar became pregnant with Ishmael, tensions arose between Sarah and Hagar, and Hagar fled into the wilderness where an angel told her to return and submit to Sarah. Hagar’s nervous or pleading appearance likely reflects her vulnerable position. she’s a servant returning after fleeing, uncertain of her reception, standing before her master Abraham while knowing Sarah (who mistreated her) watches disapprovingly from the window. The angel’s presence suggests divine intervention supporting her return, but her body language conveys the anxiety of someone in a precarious, subordinate position.

(title redacted). This is a very interesting assertion, and I generally agree with Kane’s views, he’s giving a counter argument from the same liberal ground base of ethics, which definitely should legalize the act. Unlike sodomy, which with some level of propaganda and normalization can feel “acceptable” around, incest has an innate part that’s a bit harder to manipulate (yet at least). You can notice how Kane B is always hitting points where he find that disallowing incest because it “destroys families” should be a bad argument, because law should has nothing to do with family matters. However, in what Kane B or liberals would call a “totalitarian system”, like Islam for example, family matter does concern the law. In fact, a lot of the conclusions that he reached and said “hence why don’t ban X or do Y too” you will find that in an Islamic society for example, it’s already the case for X and Y.

There’s that common idea in Nietzsche philosophy about how you can’t really do good if you never get the authority, power and ability to do harm. “Of all evil I deem you capable: Therefore I want good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws”. I’m reading currently about philosophy of consent, and the idea that power imbalance nullify consent, and I find many reasons to see Nietzsche’s view of power here connected, yet no one is mentioning it in literature I found.

I care about naming. I wrote recently about how I hate the way Microsoft names its products (see here). Seemingly, Microsoft champions have the same issue. There’s a common thing in the Microsoft Java++ (C#) ecosystem called “clean architecture”. I still remember hearing the term from my coworker for the first time and I thought she was talking “clean” as in an adjective not a term. Why the hell someone would call a design pattern “clean”, how clean is it?

https://lobste.rs/c/maodgw

Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love—that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one’s very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns. - Letter to Maria Lewis.

• [2025-10-01 Wed 00:22]
  I learnt about it while checking out Frank Cadogan Cowper, I’ve to say that his lady-focus art is questionably interesting.

Today was my first day reading La Belle Dame sans Merci (poem) (wiki). I have seen the paintings before, but I never knew about the poem. It’s amazingly beautiful. Here’s a beautiful reading of it, and an amazingly poetic Arabic translation.

There’s an uploaded video on YouTube on a channel that posts “unintentional ASMR”s, which are videos that can be used for an “ASMR purpose” but they were not intended to be so. One of these videos, is Chomsky speaking about surveillance. One commenter said: “If you actually listen to what he says, you won’t get any sleep.”

I really like this painting a lot, but I fail to properly interpret it. Do you know a good interpretation? Share it in the email please (this applies also if you’re reading this post in a distant future, I keep track of long old TODOs).

There’s an funny episode from SpongeBob that goes like this: Patrick falls off a cliff and his “brain” (actually brain coral) falls out of his head. SpongeBob finds it and puts it back, but accidentally places it upside down. This makes Patrick incredibly intelligent. He becomes sophisticated, well-spoken, and knowledgeable about science and literature. However, his newfound intelligence creates a rift between him and SpongeBob, as Patrick no longer enjoys their usual silly activities. Eventually, Patrick realizes that being smart isn’t worth losing his best friend, so he removes the brain coral to return to his lovably dim self, and he and SpongeBob happily resume their friendship. I think it’s a quite halirious that the smartest decision a smart Patrick could made is unsmarting himself.

The tree, the flowers, the look, the snake. Absolute art. ()

https://www.wikiart.org/en/hermann-david-salomon-corrodi/the-fountain-of-the-sweet-waters-of-asia-on-the-bosphorus/ this is crazy beautiful. Reminded me of an old game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metin2

• [2025-09-26 Fri 00:57]
  https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs/pull/8518

Why?

I spent last night rewatching Cast Away. The last time I watched it was when I was lost, my perception about it was alike the one I had to other mainstream films that his return to life was not respectful to everyone around him (i.e. main character delima). What I could remember before my watch was something like that her wife either stays with her new husband, or she leaves her new husband for him, both are equally awful. But the ending doesn’t show Kelly leaving her new husband. Instead, there’s a bittersweet final meeting between Chuck and Kelly where they acknowledge their love for each other, but Kelly chooses to stay with her current family. Chuck ultimately lets her go and drives away to start his new life. The film ends with Chuck at a crossroads (literally and figuratively), suggesting hope for his future as he decides which direction to take.

Rare times I have read good pieces on sadness like this.

Reading.Brian "Beej Jorgensen" Hall, Beej’s Guide to Network Programming (Beej.us, 2023), https://beej.us/guide/bgnet/. It has an interesting note for Windows programmers: “At this point in the guide, historically, I’ve done a bit of bagging on Windows, simply due to the fact that I don’t like it very much. But then Windows and Microsoft (as a company) got a lot better. Windows 10 coupled with WSL (below) actually makes for a decent operating system. Not really a lot to complain about. Well, a little—for example, I’m writing this (in 2025) on a 2015 laptop that used to run Windows 10. Eventually it got too slow and I installed Linux on it. And have been using it ever since. But now we have Windows 11 that apparently requires beefier hardware than Windows 10. I’m not a fan of that. The OS should be as unobtrusive as possible and not require you to spend more money. The extra CPU power should be for apps, not the OS! Additionally, Microsoft knows what you want, and what you want is more advertising! Right? In your operating system! Weren’t you missing that? Now you can have it with Windows 11. So… I still encourage you to try Linux , BSD , illumos or any other flavor of Unix instead of Windows.”. It’s a nice harsh punch for newcomers. I still think that MS Windows is one of the worst blocking obstacles in 21th computing. Perhaps one big factor that made mobile usage thrive they way it is, was the way MS made the desktop experience so bad, and the way Apple made it unaffordable.

I was recently introduced to the concept Emacs Bankruptcy (EB) by this cool video from Jake B. I have done EB maybe more than 10 times, I never knew the term though. I’m currently in the process of doing another one, hopefully the last.

The article missed how the educational framework, employment and rewarding obedience are also part of the social credit system.

These might sound extremely unrelated topics, and yes they are. Around 4 or 5 years ago I used to watch a YouTuber who started his channel with the pandamic, and I was learning some C# patterns then. He was making these nice videos about C#, and his way of explaining some topics was really fun. However, he started also giving some dating advices which was hilarious, because he looked like someone who would really make use of some , I stopped following him when he started doing all that dating stuff, but later he made a single one video on Ukraine war, it was about the tanks. The video went so popular and since then his channel got around 500K followers, I don’t recall him making any videos again on tech or dating and I’m unsure if he even kept them. The reason why I’m talking about him (and sorry if it will disappoint you), is that he keeps popping into my mind every once and a while, and I totally forgot about him and his name, and the story sounds very unfamiliar that if I tell anyone about it they might not believe me. So I’m putting this here, if you know what I’m talking about, even if you’re reading this 5 years later, let me know that I’m not the only person who remembers that strange phenomena.

• [2025-09-06 Sat 15:03]
  I still wish I could learn how to be a good teacher like Iroh was. My exeperience has teached me that I’m terrible at teaching, not exactly at transfering knowledge (in which I believe I’m outstanding) but in keeping my temper when my students do not get what I’m saying, or do not apperciate it. We call this in Arabic Holm.
• [2025-09-06 Sat 15:00]
  I learned a lot from this show as a kid. I learned responsability and sacrifice.
• [2025-09-06 Sat 02:16]
  I’m rewatching the show slowley for the fisrt time now, and I’m realizing how absurd was the reason that made Katara hate Jack a lot. I always remembered him as her cheater ex-boyfriend who lied to her horribly. I even remember believing that he tried to trade Aang with the fire nation at least (that’s how I was trying to understand why Katara hated him that much), founded that he just lied to her about destroying a settlement. I personally agree with views like his: there is no victories without some loses (can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs), and I think it was not that big of a reason to hate on Jack (well, maybe his dishonesty?). It’s a bit sad that we had to live with a leftover like Jack in the show.
• [2025-09-04 Thu 02:16]
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6FbPLEW_p4 I uploaded the scene.

In ATLA, the episode S01E03 ends in a way that I just noticed it in a rewatch I’m makign now. Aang is realizing that the world he knew and loved is no longer there again for him, however, the realization is not there yet until he is saying goodbye to his home, flying away from it, looking at it and contemplating his memories that will never be revived again, and thinking of how it is going to be a very long journey in this new world he spawned into. How ironic that I watched this as a kid, with memories that I yearn everyday to revive, but will never be able to. It’s really a spectacular scene. And a spectacular show.

Thomas Cole world is so different. I wish I could see the world the way he had seen it.

A nice one actually.

Haha.

While I don’t totally agree with his life perception, I really love how Louie is so consistant on his philosophy. I’m pretty sure that the show was written with an intense care for ideas and different philosophies, as it even discusses many moral issues as of the course of it. This same part that louie talks about here in the video reminded me of that episode (too lazy to reference the exact one) when his Hungarian girlfriend leaves, and he tells the doctor about it and the doctor tells him that what he feels now is “love”, or like he puts it in the linked reference: “Sadness is poetic, you’re lucky to live sad moments”.

The details on the painting are incridable, they were even difficult for me to comperhend. It reminded me of cartoon shows that I used to watch in my childhood of heros having adventures in a very big jungles.

Following is a good note on anger, mentioned in:Abdullah ibn Al-Muqaffa’a, Al-Durrah Al-Yateemah (Hindawi, 2019). اعلم أن من الناس ناسًا كثيرًا يبلغ من أحدهم الغضبُ — إذا غضب — أن يحمله ذلك على الكلوح والتقطيب في وجه غير من أغضبه، وسوء اللفظ لمن لا ذنب له، والعقوبة لمن لم يكن يهم بعقوبته، وسوء المعاقبة باليد واللسان لمن لم يكن يريد به إلا دون ذلك، ثم يبلغ به الرضى — إذا رضي — أن يتبرَّع بالأمر ذي الخطر لمن ليس بمنزلة ذلك عنده، ويعطي من لم يكن أعطاه، ويكرم من لا حق له ولا مودَّة. فاحذرْ هذا الباب كلَّه، فإنه ليس أحدٌ أسوأَ حالًا من أهل القدرة الذين يُفرِّطون باقتدارهم في غضبهم وسرعة رضاهم، فإنه لو وصف بهذه الصفة من يلتبس بعقله أو يتخبَّطه المسُّ أن يُعاقِب في غضبه غيرَ من أغضبه، ويحبو عند رضاه غيرَ من أرضاه، لكان جائزًا في صفته.

TIL that Karl Marx had some really bad romantic poems when he was a teeager. Love poems of Karl Marx : Marx, Karl, 1818-1883 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

The Late Show episodes from the Louie show are really interesting. They give me a deep gloomy vibe as they used to when I watched them for the first time. For some reason I believed that this really happened with Louie CK in the real life, but I think it might be symbolic to something else. Funny enough that I used to watch it when I started interviewing for the first time, so it was very relevant. It was also the reason why I stopped watching Louie. I remember asking Antar: “Hey, is it going to be depressive starting from season 3?”.

I’m watching “Louie” Daddy’s Girlfriend: Part 1. It’s so relatable to some people I knew. So funny.

This is an LLM written introduction into the theory of value. It’s easy to understand and I thought it might be useful for people who want to quickly understand how value works. “Workers don’t own what they produce. The products of their labor become commodities owned by capitalists and sold back to workers in the market.” for me, this part is the most painful, when I work under a capitalist system Unless in rare occasions my employer would decide it will be a GPL licensed software.

The Be Right There episode is probably the most heartbreaking episode of Black Mirror. I was rewatching it right now. I just noticed how Jack gave his mother a fake smile in that old photo, the girlfriend says “Well, she didn’t know it was a fake one”, “That makes it worse” he responded. Which is the whole point of the episode. I love this kind of symbolism .

• [2025-08-05 Tue 21:49]
  Another example is Souvenir of the Villa Borghese (1855).

I noticed how almost all Corot paintings are not very colorful, his era is the beginning of less vibrant art.

I spent some time today reading about the Maxist Internet Archive history. I used to contribute to the Arabic section back in the day before realizing that this was not really helpful I’m not talking here about Marxism, but contributing to Arabic translation, such contributions are not really helpful at this point, as you can not reach such an advanced point in learning something without mastering the lingua de franca. . Anyway, I found it quite funny that it didn’t take them much time to have their first fight: “ By 1996 the website, Marx.org, was hosted by a commercial ISP. This was followed by an increased activity from the volunteers. In the following years, however, a conflict developed between the volunteers working on the website and Zodiac, who retained control of the project and domain name. As the scope of the archive expanded, Zodiac feared that the opening toward diverse currents of Marxism was a ”slippery slope" toward sectarianism. The volunteers who had been undertaking the work of transcribing texts resented having little influence over the way in which the archive was organized and run. In early 1998 Zodiac decided that Marx.org would return to its roots and that all writers other than Marx and Engels would be removed.

Raksit Lelia’s music video is one of the best music videos I ever watched. It’s really impressive that Sinno contributed to such an amazing work when he was only 20 years old.

There’s an observation that I thought about as a kid watching that movie, powerful training montage where Mulan is struggling to complete the challenge of retrieving an arrow from the top of a tall wooden pole. The movie supposed to go in the theme that after some life-changing exercises, effort, and most importantly mindset, she is finally able to do this very hard challenge. But She actually were never able to, what happens instead is that instead of letting the weights drag her down, she uses them as tools. She loops the straps of the weights together to form a grip, anchoring herself on the pole. While this sounds smart and everything; it is not what the exercise is meant for, otherwise there would be many other smarter and easier ways to get the arrow, the exercise was meant for bare brute strength, not thinking differently.

I’m not sure if the author is aware of that, but this nice article up there is a really good critique of capitalism and how it ruined almost every small shred of goodness on the internet.

Using Intel processor for all these years, which is quite slow compared to Apple Chips, made me spend a lot of work to optimize my single-threaded favorite display editor. The experience was pleasant overall, but using it now on a very fast computer, it is not just pleasant it is blazingly fast. The difference is just unimaginable.

https://videos.lukesmith.xyz/w/gyPw6M5PcsLJhE3yQNJ1XR?start=1h16m44s

I found a claim that women in Middle Ages Europe used to poison their husbands to keep them close. I watched Phantom Thread (2017) a couple of months ago, which had a similar theme to this claim. I wounder if it was inspired by this myth. Phantom Thread is one of the movies that I don’t think I will ever have the courage to rewatch.

Whoever writes emojis inside code comments, has to be a very dumb LLM, or the happiest girl ever.

Cimabue and Cima da Conegliano works on Christian Art are very dedicated. I wonder how their lives were like.

• [2025-06-23 Mon 00:10] Today I thought of giving nhost a try. https://github.com/nhost/nhost/discussions/2498 Horrible. What’s the point of making such a project even open source if it is going to be useless to the community?

I had a terrible experience trying to self-host Supabase today. I have read on the community posts that the experience is usually not very pleasant, however, I found official maintainers responding to that saying that it was improved, with a video showing it running on a 2GB of RAM and 2vCPUs droplet. I had various problems with getting the docker-compose to work; apparently you can not really change the default passwords without running into an authentication issue (see here for example), and even if you fixed that you will go through couple of analytics issues. My biggest concern, however, was that I was never able to get anything to run on the very small droplet that the maintainer showed off, in fact, the only specifications that could provide the bare minimum performance (that is: the dashboard is loading) was 8GB of RAM, and two dedicated CPUs (yes, dedicated, not vCPUs), however, even with that a lot of problems persisted (many features are not working, and it is a hell to try to authenticate the CLI with that setup). I wonder if their development team is choosing deliberately not to make the self-host experience better to enforce people to use their cloud services instead of selfhosting it. I really do not get the point of having such a software to be open-source if it won’t be easy to self-host.

Alexandre Cabanel has a painting of this name depicting a black man with some North African features. What interests me that it has a name on the top right, it reads like: محمد بن الدبم. I wonder who is that and how the interaction between him and Cabanel went like.

Bradford (the artist) paintings of the sea are very moving. I wonder if Ivan Aivazovsky ever inspired him.

Form Papers and journals: “Encounter on 30 Nov., when they were doing Two Days, with an unknown but beautiful lady (she spoke German) – she was alone in the stalls with a little brother – she understood the music.” It’s an interesting remark. It’s really interesting to see someone who understands the music.

From Papers and journals: “An old saying, that the Anti-Christ would be born to a nun by a monk (was once used with regard to Luther’s marriage).”

A Young Girl Defending Herself Against Eros, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, that’s so cute.

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 My old post about math might be also related: A Prelude Over Mathematics.

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.

No water, no life. No blue, no green. – Sylvia Earle

• [2025-05-27 Tue 02:59] Just found out that flattenability of graphs are folklore too. Wondering if a lot of graph theories are like that.

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.

• [2025-06-16 Mon 00:43] I have a feeling that Frederic William Burton did the same thing.

I noticed how he is always painting the very same woman over and over. Worth checking later. investigating.

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.

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

TIL there’s a great website of Leonard Cohen legacy: https://leonardcohenfiles.com/.

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.

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.

My heart is a C-x C-b menu.

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.

This comment was actually hilarious.

I wrote about the Industry and Consumption of Pornography a while ago. Today I learnt that Jean Baudrillard has a related theoryFrederic Lenoir, Philosophy of desire (Dar Al Saqi, 2023), 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.

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}

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 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 [[https://pandoc.org/][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"

Basically almost every Lisp out there has a major downside that turns me off from using it to the extent I consider using Haskell’s s-expression tolerance (like (map odd [1,2,3]) (((.) fst snd) (1,(2,3)))) (which, obviously, would be a very bad practice): 1. Common Lisp: Classical OOP everywhere, very bad build automation and packaging (asdf), available implementations have low support availability, bugs are everywhere due to the limited teams who are working on those. 2. Scheme: Same as CL, in addition to the scarce language support in most editors (not sure even if it has LSP support), also it’s hard to find libraries/packages to build something on. 3. EuLisp, ZetaLisp, MacLisp, InterLisp, ISLisp, T, Arc, PicoLisp: I still find it hard to believe those are not in the museum of computing yet. 4. Guile, Racket: both look so promising but the lack of interest from community which results in an effect on the number of available packages to build on, makes it much harder to start a new project in any of them without reinventing the wheel. 5. Clojure: aside from the JVM dependency and the build system hassle, the language is just too big, still the most plausible option in this whole list though.