kebman

I wish Americans would stop conflating some small part of Europe with the entirety of Europe. Scandinavia is of course within Europe, btw. Things may be handled vastly different depending on where you are in Europe. One small part of it does not define the rest of Europe. This is why you can't really compare "the EU" to "the USA" (Norway, while being part of Europe, is outside the EU btw). Not directly, anyway. Maybe some day, Europe will be much more homogeneous, but for now it's a pretty culturally, politically and economically diverse continent. Some European countries have epic public toilets. Others, not at all. It all depends on which country or culture you visit.

From Cambridge Dictionary:

```markdown

abhorrent

/əbˈhɒr(ə)nt/

Abhorrent is an adjective that means morally very bad, hateful, or causing strong disgust and loathing.

```

I realise that this causes strong disgust and loathing in you, but can you please expand upon how it's morally very bad to prioritise speed and ease of use over undelete capability in Neovim? Are you unable to make backups or use Git?

I imagined one of those automatic lawn mowers on a very sunny day, going about its own business cutting the grass. Until it arrived on the non-shielded side, and it kinda sags a bit and keels over into the black-charred ground on that side. A clean shadow between the un-touched grass, and the ground in directly in the path of the blast. Or maybe the charred ground is for later. We need to see the nice, automated kitchen first. And only then the rest of the world. Would be a very interesting short film, I think.

HTML is a structured document format designed for publishing content online. It gives precise control over elements such as headings, links, images, sections, forms, styling hooks, and layout behaviour in the browser. But the cost is complexity.

Markdown is a lightweight document format that leans toward easy writing, reading, and sharing. It is much simpler than HTML, easier to edit by hand, and works well for notes, documentation, drafts, README files, and content that may later be converted into HTML, PDF, or other formats.

That's why I'll continue to use Markdown for most of my notes and documentation, while I'll only use HTML for "public facing" documents.

Just make your own RSS feed?

Stuff I like, I often store, or make notes of. I don't personally use RSS for it, but perhaps I should make a kebman's curated YouTube RSS feed? It'll be kinda AI heavy tho...

"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."

And so it began. The seed was sent into space. All going according to plan.

That tends to be the official narrative, but unsure if jet fuel burns that evenly. Though OTOH you're correct, it did start pancaking from the top, so there's that. Perhaps they were simply well-engineered skyscrapers? I guess we'll never know. Idk you're probably right.

This is probably a massive downvote waiting to happen, but I have more faith in 9/11 being a controlled demo. Not out of evil. Just to prevent New York turning into a giant domino show.

Going to Edinburgh Airport, I was reminded that the tiny water bottle I forgot in my bag could be a bomb. I just went "Oh jeez I'm sorry... Here, have some water! You look like you need it!" Then I opened the bottle and drank it. He grabbed it out of my hands and said it had to go to some lab. So I went "Ok then, the chemical compounds in there are ... H2O and perhaps some carbon...? Idk. I'm not a chemist, but I'm fairly sure the worst thing it'll do is make me burp."

ISP “choice” is mostly a meme, yeah.

But depending on local rules, you can sometimes route around the monopoly: trench your own last-mile (at least on private land), do a neighborhood co-op, connect buildings, etc. It’s sometimes expensive and you’ll hit permits/right-of-way bureaucracy, but it’s totally doable if you’ve got a few (rich) friends or a business willing to back it.

“the conduit is full” is often just BS and a super convenient excuse for incumbents to block competition indefinitely.

Romania is a good example of what happens when lots of small operators aggressively wire dense apartment blocks: brutal competition, low barrier to entry, and suddenly everyone has insane internet.

If digging is blocked, wireless works too. Point-to-point links, WISP stuff, even satellite. The main thing is: you don’t necessarily need your local ISP as your upstream, you just need a path out.

Not AI, but similar sounding incident in Norway. Some traders found a way to exploit another company's trading bot at the Oslo Stock Exchange. The case went to court. And the court's ruling? "Make a better trading bot."

South Africa is a sad example of this. And so systems are deteriorating country-wide.

Here's a funny story for you.

Did you know that porn was quite severely censored in Norway up until the 90's? But suddenly, the censorship stopped. Why? Because of the distributed quality of the internet.

While the Norwegian state may still wish to continue censoring porn in Norway, they deemed the task too difficult and too invasive to continue, so they just dropped it entirely (except of course for certain extreme fringe cases).

I was personally shown clips by the Norwegian Board of Film Classification in the early 2000's showing both grey zone depictions, and clearly illegal depictions of film violence per the law. I am still traumatized from seeing some of that s*t. Legally btw, since they are a state authority tasked to categorize and censor such media, and also educate people with the right degrees. Yet in that meeting, when I asked them how they're handling censorship now, they kind of just threw their hands up in the air and told me directly that "We only give advice on cinema films these days. Look, we can't very well censor the entire internet without also using either extremely invasive or unfair strategies. If you really want some violent or pornographic movie, you're probably gonna get it no matter what we try to do."

So, the morale of this story is, make something ubiquitous enough, or hard enough to censor, and some states might just give up. If you build a truly decentralized system, good luck censoring it. And that was pretty much it for Norway. They had given up on the idea of preventing people from seeing violent or pornographic contents on the internet.

Within political science we speak about effective ways to participate politically. Sometimes that's not screaming slogans outside some government buildings. Sometimes that's simply building resilient and forward secure distributed systems.

I beg to differ. As long as we have gentlemen like Pavel Durov getting arrested at French airports, it's definitively at technical question. A decentralized and distributed chat protocol with distributed devs and owners would make it impossible to arrest any one individual, and it would make it exceedingly hard to censor such a platform. But you are perhaps a fed? xD

Is this a good time to plug the creation of chat protocols running over distributed hash tables (DHT) (essentially a decentralized way of creating mini message servers) and with forward security and end-to-end encryption? I made a POF in Rust but I don't have time to dev this right now. (Unless angel investors to help me shift priorities lol...)

It's sad, but let's hope the UK blocks it. Perhaps someone finally understands the severity of this "law".

Here's the kicker: AI was supposed to automate the boring parts so we could “focus on high-leverage, strategic, needle-moving, synergistic core competencies.” Instead, we’re stuck in a recursive loop of prompt engineering, hallucination triage, output validation, re-prompting, Slack channel FOMO, and productivity theater. We’ve basically replaced “doing the work” with “managing the tool that kinda tries to do the work but needs babysitting.” Congrats—we’ve invented Jira for thought. And here's the kicker.

It isn't. But as a society, we voted for providing clean, affordable water to everyone was a public good. That's why municipal water exists.

The issue arises when that water is fluoridated against the will of a significant portion of the population. It effectively forces dissenters to either accept it or go through the hassle and expense of sourcing their own water — which defeats the original purpose of providing low-cost, universally accessible water.

Today, the marginal benefits of fluoridation are questionable, especially with fluoride available in toothpaste. So forcing it on everyone, despite objection, becomes harder to justify — and that's why some places have stopped adding it.

Yes, in the US associations are granted certain legal rights, including the right to political expression and collective action. That's a matter of legal precedent.

But law doesn't define philosophy — philosophy defines law. And from a philosophical standpoint, freedom is a property of individuals, not collectives. Only individuals possess consciousness, agency, and moral responsibility. Associations, corporations, and groups are abstractions — tools created by individuals, composed of individuals, and led by individuals. They cannot make free choices; they can only be directed.

Freedom of association means individuals are free to join or leave groups as they see fit. But the moment something is mandated, such as being forced to participate in a fluoridated water system, or coerced into accepting the political will of a corporate “person,” the individual's freedom is compromised in favor of an artificial entity.

Philosophically speaking, rights flow from individuals to associations, not the other way around. The association has no legitimacy that exceeds or contradicts the will of its participants, especially when it undermines individual liberty.

So yes, associations may have freedoms under law, but only because individuals granted them those freedoms. The moment those freedoms infringe on individual rights, they lose their moral legitimacy, regardless of legal precedent.

Then the community is exactly forcing people to seek other, and way more expensive and way more inconvenient, sources of water. That's the opposite of a freedom.

It's not a "freedom" to be forced to move away from a community just because you want pure water. Moral philosophy: A democracy should not act as the tyranny of the majority, and governments (local or otherwise) should not overreach their mandate with monopolistic policies that negatively affect individual freedoms.

Use the same argument on air and it falls apart. "The Free individual is also Free to not breathe air in a community that decided to add lead to their air supply." This was a big debate in the 70's btw due to car emissions.

For the rest of the world: 32 ounces is almost one litre of milk.

Personal freedom ≠ "freedom of communities"—there is no such thing. Freedom applies to individuals, not collectives. When a community makes a decision that affects all its members, that’s democracy, but democracy is not unlimited authority. A majority vote does not grant the right to infringe on individual autonomy, which is why safeguards exist against the tyranny of the majority.

Banning fluoride does not restrict freedom—it prevents government overreach. In contrast, forcing fluoride on everyone would violate personal autonomy. Protecting individual choice is a fundamental principle, backed by real-world safeguards like constitutional rights, judicial review, and bodily autonomy laws. The burden of proof is always on those seeking to impose a policy, not on those defending individual freedom.

Could you please substantiate that claim?

Yes, in bulk. If 100 people all mention essentially the same feature, it might be worthwhile. If just one person does it? Well, if it highlights something you never thought about, it can ofc be valuable, but it's not something I'd spend a lot of time on - especially if it's just adding to the overall feature creep.

I remember the the BBC would upsell on requests from artists visiting their studios in London.

Artist management: “Hey, can you fix XYZ beverage, towels, etc, in the stage ante room?”

BBC: “Sure! That will cost....”

Most would stop pestering at that time, but ever so often you got artists who were willing to pay for the extra service.

Conversion to the mentioned case:

Individual feature request: “Hey, amazing script, I rated it 5 stars! Can you implement the take profit levels for me?”

Generic reply: “Thank you for your interest in Project X! We get thousands of feature requests each week so sadly we cannot cater to individual ones. If you need help on setting take profit levels, I'm afraid you'll have to revert to TradingView's official documentation. Sorry for the inconvenience. Hope you have a nice day!”

Continued pestering: “Ok, but can you please put them for me? I follow this [insert some YouTube crypto day-trader], and he uses [some very specific take profit levels]. I would like the script to draw them for me.”

Up-sell: “I'm sorry, but we sadly cannot cater to individual requests unless you're a Diamond Member. But if you still want bespoke service you can sign up to the Diamond Member Subscription. Please bare in mind that it entails a 1000 monthly retainer with a 300 hourly consultation fee beginning after the first 15 minutes. Please inform me when you want to sign up, and I'll send you the details so we can get started right away!”

I think in terms of official correspondence, I don't think it's a good idea to ask criminals why they did a certain thing, ref the reply to the scammer about his access being revoked. Yes, it might feel good to berate him and ask "Why did you do that?" But what if he answers? Would you really entertain valuable business time arguing with a fraudster?

In general, I also think it's a bad idea to entertain feature requests, unless the person is showing willingness to pay hourly for that extra bespoke service. I personally prepare for eventualities like that, so I can answer in a polite and productive way. "No, sorry we don't offer that feature, but if you want to enter the Bespoke Service Subscription for $10000 a month, then I can do everything you wish and mow your lawn!"

Not only am I vocal about using Obsidian but I also use Arch btw. I'm not vegan tho, but I'm working on it.

My current phone is an iPhone 13 Mini. My next phone will also be an iPhone 13 Mini unless it's completely unusable at that point, or Apple haven't got back to their senses.

For many sections I'd ask myself "Why?" Sure, I know you can click on the links and do deeper research, but I'd love a quick "why" blurb for each section. Just a short "Why this is nice? Well, because..."