Microessays

I’ve lately been thinking deeply about how I interact with my computing environments; when working, I’ve a
- an unrooted snapdragon ARM Android with Termux and Tmux for ephemeral vimmin & sshing around when on the move
- an Intel x86 FreeBSD home lab for some asynchronous compute that I don’t need right away and some redundancy for my important files
- a personal ubuntu VPS with a couple of intel x86 vCPUs for my self hosting endeavours and overall context orchestration
- several compute clusters (avx enabled x86s, ARM, “the propietary GPU driver guy on the street” GPUs, “the other open source GPU driver guy on the steet” GPUs, k8s orchestrated production & development playgrounds) for work
- an AMD x86 Tumbleweed with emacs as the daily driver where I actually “work” : this is desk where I dissect, analyse, reconstruct and dispatch for usage across the above

Emacs Lisp is Tetris Complete

• did not mean Turing Complete
• really did not

I’ve always maintained a philosophical appetite for the tooling that I use.

One of the core tenets of the Unix Philosophy¹ is that everything is a file…

Plan9² has caught my eye due to its more homogenous design than the usual unix you’re used to.

The footnoted-paper (~pre-mature book) is somewhat unhinged and doesn’t shy away from taking a jab at the Unix ecosystem and design.

Apart from the several points the author makes, what stands out the most for me is the idea of everything truly being a file: in hindsight, Unix only realizes a fraction of the principle.

I’ve started spending some time per day without the usual modern software engineering tooling (LLMs, the Internet, etc) to explicitly maintain my cyber-deduction skills (in the context of Unix-based systems (BSDs, Linux, yet to explore Plan9), mostly because they power the majority of the global compute infrastructure).

It’s fun: init your journey with a man man (I’m an info info guy myself) and be extremely skeptical of your usual modus operandi, ditching all assumptions and tumbling down the rabbit hole.

Fabric¹ is a collection of crowd-sourced prompts, exposed via a CLI tool. I used it for a while some time ago but never fully exploited it because I prefer Emacs.

Eshell buffers are an option, but I am principled in my tool usage and prefer to delegate longer-running CLI tasks to a combination of Alacritty and Tmux.

Maintaining my Emacs shell usage to ephemeral popups feels natural.

Gptel² is a versatile LLM client that integrates smoothly into my workflow (buffer/text manipulation and management) without disrupting my thought flow.

For a while, I’d limited my studying endeavours to be project oriented and not domain oriented. While I enjoy the pragmatism of the former, I also wish to build up my innate curiosity to get under the hood, disassemble the engine and be able to put it back together: no project (except the explicit choice of doing so) is going to help me fit that in my studies.

Consequently, I’m planning on getting started with a regulary habit of exploring domains with depth.

From time to time, I like to make minor tweaks to my blog based on the treasure trinkets I find around in different corners of the internet from blogs/works of personalities I follow/find interesting.

I got into the practice of logging updates in reverse chronological streams from one of my professors in my sophomore year.

I began personalized hex timestamps (today is 0x2360 for me) because I don’t intuitively gel well with the (Julian -> Gregorian) cycles. The combination of lunar, solar and planetary cycles is my most recent experimental initiative for calibrating long term efforts but that would be a little too chaotic for the part of the world wide web that I mostly interact with these days.

I’m using monitors again and it’s like consuming caffeine after a long time (last recorded usage circa mid November 2024).

I guess I need to cycle my dosage so that I don’t end up being too dependent.

I’m enjoying it though.

EDIT: as of <2025-01-27 17:50:30 IST>, I’ve given up again

I have a somewhat indifferent approach towards achievements(mine and others’): with tendencies to gauge the personalities based on how their conversations flow and in terms of the quality of the questions and problems they are working on.

Recently, I’ve began to grasp why they actually might be a necessary construct:

• when leading larger societal initiatives, simply claiming ethical superiority doesn’t pan out well (and it shouldn’t) with the need to gain the trust of masses.
• you need displays of competence for people to will their incentives to align with yours somehow (necessary for collective progress).
• claiming dignity is simply not enough and that is a good thing.
• of course, this opens up a whole bunch of societal games and dynamics that are too complicated for me to completely break down right now.

If you do wish to make a change, you will someday have to take the helm of larger groups of humans. This is when being competent and having proofs for it becomes indispensible.

I recently have moved on from using monitors and am working (professional and writing endeavours) only via a 13 inch laptop. It is definitely a different workflow than what I’m used to.

It has been around 10 days I’ve been doing this and here are some observations:

• I’m able to focus better as I’m forced to enlarge my context maintaining capabilities; for I don’t have the luxury to look back and forth with just my eye movements.
• I can work from anywhere. I change places and posture every 1.5 hours, 5 times a day.
• Given I move between a couple of meets during the day, I don’t have to adjust to differing window management mannerisms as I only ever work on the same screen now.
• I work in at most two splits now compared to the 5+ previously: it is all simpler and the monitor has started to seem like a vanity rather than essential accessory.
• I don’t have to switch keyboards between my desk and meets: I don’t mess enough as much now.
• I can start looking down upon people that are bound to monitors, thinking that they’re spoiled or aren’t minimal enough.
• I’ve started preaching about the spartan-ish effects of working only via your laptop
• I spend more time on screen, on my bed: consequently I’m writing more.

I definitely do miss reading papers and books on a larger vertically oriented screen but I’m going to stick to this for a while.