> Notes...

Over a month after this note, and I still continue to do it. I even caught myself conciously doing it. This lack of control over something so simple is driving me nuts. I might need to start meditating…

When it comes to encryption, I have always used PGP, now GnuPG. All my files, now stored on Apple’s iCloud, are encrypted with it. Using that tool has widthstood the test of time. Lately, mostly because of size (program and key), portability, and lack of dependencies, I have been considering re-encrypting everything with age. My only worry is, will age widthstand the test of time too?

Yeah… no. Call me skeptic, cynic, hopeless, non-believer, whatever you want, but I don’t think this is how is going to pan out.

“With trillions of digital workers and robots entering the economy, a tenfold increase in GDP represents a very conservative estimate of how much full automation could increase economic output. If this modest increase were reflected proportionally in US tax revenues, we could resolve all current Social Security funding shortfalls, lower the retirement age to 18, and increase the average payout to over $150,000 per adult per year.”

➝ Via Hacker News.

“It has become a tired adage, but nonetheless true. The world’s poorest countries will suffer the most from climate change despite being least responsible for it.”

➝ Via The New York Times.

Update: 07 Nov 2025 @ 11:33:06

Bill Gates agrees. In 2021 he, too, wrote:

“It’s deeply unfair that the people who contribute the least to climate change will suffer the worst from its effects.
[…]
Rich and middle-income countries are causing the vast majority of climate change, and we need to be the ones to step up and invest more in adaptation. The world’s poorest deserve our help, and they need more of it than they’re getting.”

Grokipedia. Created by Elon to “purge out propaganda flooding Wikipedia”. LOL. I mean, Wikipedia deserves competitors. Competition is good, but that one Grok-based one ain’t it.

Omoiyari is the Japanese concept of anticipating the needs of others and acting on them with genuine, selfless care. It’s more than just being polite. It’s a deep, intuitive form of empathy where you put yourself in someone else’s shoes, observe the situation, and take quiet, thoughtful action to ensure their comfort or happiness without being asked, thus creating harmony in your shared environment.

Wish I could find a book encompasing all the Japanese concepts. Reach out if you know of one you could recommend!

Itadakimasu, a phrase used in Japan before, and sometimes after, eating which translates as “to humbly receive”. It’s mean to thank, and show gratitude to, everything and everyone involved with the meal being consumed.

“It is meant to honor all: from the natural elements that supplied the ingredients, the people who grew the produce, to the ones who prepared and cooked the meal, etc.”

Generally it has no religious connotation today, but Buddhism is behind its origin.

Watching “Call me Chihiro” (★★★★★) for the third time felt like watching it the first time. I like that movie so much! It is sad but, at least to me, also hopeful, heartfull, sweet, and real. I strongly believe we all need a Chihiro in our lives.

“Romantics Anonymous” (★★★★★) was warm, sweet, without intrigues, suspense, nor sadness. It truly was a delight to watch. From it:

“Sarang: It’s the feeling of wanting to bring more happiness to the one you love.”

Though sarang (사랑) means “love” in Korean, they gave it the above meaning in the series. Anyway, watch it, and you will live that feeling too!

I told person A that I will be signing the papers later today but that, before I did so, wanted to know why two seemingly identical emails were sent to me by person B. The answer? “Person B accidently hit the send button twice.” What in the world?! How do you do that?

I came across Joey Yu’s blog entry today, which lead me to a 4 years old post on Reddit. I subscribe to r/Stoicism, but missed this post. That, though, is irrelevant; I have seeing it, and read it now. I share the OPs approach.

“Everything we see around will cease to exist one day. Everything. All those great historical names, all your colleagues, everyone you look up to, everything. Your lifetime is nothing but a microscopic speck of time when taking into account all of the Universe’s history. Don’t spend your valuable and finite energy and time on comparing yourself to others.”

More than 30 people arrested because sport’s betting, and rigged poker games. Some of the details are truly something!

“In some of the rigged games, the poker chip trays had hidden cameras that could read the cards on the table. Sometimes, the cards had markings visible only to people wearing specially designed contact lenses or sunglasses […]”

It’s Claudine’s birthday again, happy birthday, Claud 🎂🥳🎁🎈! I first wished her a happy birthday in 2022, and every year since. Time sure flies, yes? Cheers to many more to come!

It is the season of the “AI” backed web browsers (or should I say “Chromets”). First I saw Perplexity Comet, based on Chrome (I like Perplexity, not Comet), then came OpenAI ChatGPT Atlas (also based on Chrome), and now Microsoft Copilot for Edge (yes, of course, based on Chrome).

The iconic White House website, previously the symbol of the American government, has become—as a friend wrote to me—the “parody of a government”. I sure hope it is being archived to serve as a perennial testament of a government gone way beyond south.

As I finished the note on Crocker’s Rules, I came across Radical Honesty, which I think is pretty neat too.

“The Radical Honesty technique includes having practitioners state their feelings bluntly and directly, even if it may be in a way typically considered impolite. Avoiding all “white lying” is said to lead to a more truthful relationship with themselves and others.”

Having always liked/wanted a direct communication at work, that is, preferring that people “gets to the point” in the most efficient manner, coming across Crocker’s Rules is never too late.

“Crocker’s rules encourage being tactful with anyone who hasn’t specifically accepted them. This follows the general principle of being ’liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send’.”

I came across this on Hacker News. Am I weird for feeling “itchy” at the lack of consistency? I mean, Bash, Python, and Ruby scripts—for what I saw. I would have done them all in Bash or, say, Python. Ruby (eww!) would have never crossed my mind.

➝ Via Hacker News.

I really have no idea what Nelson was/is doing on his Hugo blog, that was causing a space to be added after a link. I am not doing anything out of the ordinary here, and such thing doesn’t happen.

Ugh? Well, this is the drop that overflows the cup. GM ditching Apple Carplay will stop us from buying any GM vehicles in the future. Oh, wait, we never buy GM. 🤣

The reason for the lack of JMAP “web mail client”, or any other kind, is that there at too few email servers that support JMAP. I say, if JMAP on servers makes it to the mainstream, clients will follow.

The corner radius alignment—or lack thereof—on macOS 26 has been bothering me from day one. Specifically for the two applications I run maximised at all times, Safari and Terminal. Will Apple fix it (my hope)? Is it behaving as intended (my biggest fear)?

“Leaving aside the idea of access to any form of content being conditional on the use of a proprietary browser, which is a particularly horrid 1990s throwback, I’m going to call this day 0 of an experiment in shifting the funding model of journalism from adtech to agentic AI.”

➝ Via Heather Burns.

Google Finance Beta, yet another Alphabet beta service that will have many adoring fans, and then one day be killed. Yeah, no thanks.

“… we are seeing declines in human pageviews on Wikipedia over the past few months, amounting to a decrease of roughly 8% as compared to the same months in 2024. We believe that these declines reflect the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information, especially with search engines providing answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content.”

I think this is actually good. That I know of, Wikipedia doesn’t serve advertising. Having a lower traffic means slightly less expenses, right? I am not stopping using it. Wikipedia is one of the few tools I use for research.

If anything “good” has happened from being mandated to come to office on Wednesdays that’s bagels. Today’s are still warm, and so delicious! I wrote good between quotes, because, well, carbs. 😅

Following what it can be considered a trend around here now, Horsie and I watched “Jason Bourne” (★★★★★) last Saturday night. Sad to say good bye to Matt Damon. We think he is, and will always be, the Jason Bourne.

OpenAI released ChatGPT Atlas today, or yesterday, I am not sure. I gave it a try, under macOS. Without watching their video—because, you know, “ain’t nobody got time for that”—I didn’t realise it is a browser. It wants to be your browser, the default one. That pretty much killed it for me. I still tried it, of course, that’s how I found out that it was a browser, with some “more”. I didn’t like the way it renders web pages, so another notch down for me.

Maybe it will work out for others; it didn’t for me. I am not moving away from Safari for anyone. I would have preferred it to be a Safari extension instead, but even though, I don’t feel like sharing that much with that company.

As a side twist to yesterday’s Amazon outage, and, perhaps, unrelated, I woke up this morning with an extra 127 unread old emails on my iCloud+ inbox. Emails I had already deleted, or archived. Not a warm fuzzy feeling, at all.

Eleven years (11!) after Google bought Nest they have finally integrated it on Google Home. There is no longer a need for having the Nest app installed, all can be done via the Google Home app now. Eleven years!

Last year we placed a bowl full on candies, and left the porch light on, as an indication that Halloween was “happening”. Not a single kid, or adult, showed up. All candies were donated to work. This year there will be no candies, and light will remain off. Halloween is off.

AWS was down, is down and it is taking half of the Internet with it. So much about resilience, eh? “Move to the Cloud”, they said. “You will seldom be down”, they said.

Horsie and I watched “The Treacherous” (★★★★☆) last night. Same king as the one on “Bon Appétit, Your Majesty”, different twist. First Korean movie I see that’s sexually explicit; it truly suprised me. Worth watching, it’s a good movie.

“Every single nine is a constant amount of work. Every single nine is the same amount of work. When you get a demo and something works 90% of the time, that’s just the first nine. Then you need the second nine, a third nine, a fourth nine, a fifth nine.”

This interview with Andrej Karpathy was interesting to see and hear. The guy is pretty smart, and I can’t wait for Eureka Labs AI course, LLM101n, to exist.

So far having a fairly bad experience while trying to get a PAP machine ordered after having gone through a sleep study. I received an email from them stating the order was sent, while neglecting to send it. At square one now, a month after receiving the email. Ugh!

Looking forward to iOS 26.1 with excitement and anxiety. Vietnamese has been added to Apple Intelligence, and thus it becomes possible to use it on Live Translation.

Now, that could be a total disaster if the person you are translating from Vietnamese to English doesn’t use the proper diacritics. 😬

I have worried a couple of times about the fate of Blue, a fellow stranger. They are still as they were; no new thoughts, a quiet place since end of May. Instead of thinking negatively, I am going to assume they found happiness, and peace, and love, in that beautiful archipelago that’s called The Philippines. Who, who lives in bliss, needs to write down thoughts?

When I grow up, or in my second life if I get unlucky to reincarnate as a human (aiming to be a bird, though, but I digress), I want to be like Ariel.

“Best recent change I’ve done to improve my health: starting the work week on Tuesday and ending it on Thursday.”

➝ Via @ariel.

It is 2025, and most Linux distributions do not ship exclusively i386 ISOs. Yet, people get their amd64 machines, and straight they go to install packages—and their libraries—within the i386 architecture. Currently adding around 1TiB of i386 to our mirrors. 🤦‍♂️

Rich Sutton’s debating notes on whether or not artificially intelligent robots could/should have the same rights as people.

“Ultimately, rights are not given or granted, but asserted and acknowledged. People assert their rights, insist, and others come to recognize and acknowledge them. This has happened through revolt and rebellion but also through non-violent protests and strikes. In the end, rights are acknowledged because it is only practical, because everyone is better off without the conflict. Ultimately it has eventually become impractical and counterproductive to deny rights to various classes of people. Should not the same thing happen with robots? We may all be better off if robot’s rights were recognized. There is an inherent danger to having intelligent beings subjugated. These beings will struggle to escape, leading to strife, conflict, and violence. None of these contribute to successful society. Society cannot thrive with subjugation and dominance, violence and conflict. It will lead to a weaker economy and a lower GNP. And in the end, artificially intelligent robots that are as smart or smarter than we are will eventually get their rights. We cannot stop them permanently. There is a trigger effect here. If they escape our control just once, we will be in trouble, in a struggle. We may loose that struggle.

If we try to contain and subjugate artificially intelligent robots, then when they do escape we should not be surprised if they turn the tables and try to dominate us. This outcome is possible whenever we try to dominate another group of beings and the only way they can escape is to destroy us.”