I just learned about BBC’s iPlayer documentaries today, really quality content. I used to watch some of these when I was younger.

• [2025-09-27 Sat 00:04]
  Just remembered something funny that happened a long time ago too. Not very related to this story but I will put it here anyway, I was trying out some new themes for Emacs a long time ago, and most of the themes that you will try, would have this warnning shoutted out by Emacs that choosing this theme can actually execute Lisp code, which is correct and should be carefully considered. However, between switching to the new theme from your current theme, Emacs switches to the default Emacs theme. And I fell in love! I didn’t know that this was the default theme, I thought that this was the one I had just chosen then (the message was omitted for unkown reason). The next day I spent the whole day debugging why my theme is now black.

It’s always recommended to check what your vendors/origins provide before looking for third-party solution. I learnt that the hard way years ago when I was in the Digital Signal Processing class and trying to take math notes, I was new to Org-mode and the Emacs rabbit whole that time and I wanted to use Org-mode for this mission. I came across this program from reddit, it’s called “math-preview”, I thought that this was the utility I need to write LaTeX equations inside Org. I spent hours trying to install it (npm tragedy), and even after getting it to work, I was getting Elisp errors inside Emacs. I do not remember how it ended though, perhaps someone told me that Emacs does what I wanted out of the box? Anyway. It’s only a fun memory now :)

I got some emails about my last recent post The Prefect Programming Language that made me reconsider Common Lisp again. I really love writing Lisp, it’s different and I always wished if I could use it for many things, however, the problems I talked about (error handling, concurrency, static compiling) were always on my way. I will start by looking for an idiomatic way to handle errors, typically checking.Peter Seibel, Practical Common Lisp, Books for Professionals by Professionals; the Expert’s Voice in Programming Languages (Apress, 2011), https://libgen.li/file.php?md5=437b340478deaeaee940a90b655ddc55. Update: Yeah, sadly didn’t change my mind.

Salih Muhammed, [5/21/23 6:12 PM]
watermelon is a gift from God man
Especially in this hot weather.

Salih Muhammed, [5/21/23 6:13 PM]
https://imgur.com/a/LhzrBqf

Bell Pepper, [5/21/23 6:38 PM]
agree it's good

Bell Pepper, [5/21/23 6:39 PM]
not when you have a python exception on the background though

:)

• [2025-11-29 Sat 18:38]
  :). Still doing it.

Leaving Emacs splash image for Amor Fati. I think it looks much more lovely this way, forby a perpetual remainder of the most precious principle that I’ve ever learned; Amor Fati!

I find the ’books community’ (wherever it is, goodreads or some social network groups) to be one of the most asinine and silly ideas I have ever seen. Books are about ideas, not about books themselves. Who do you think might be responsible for that reducing of books into mere objects fixated upon themselves rather than their profound ideas? Those who were too indolent to comprehend the rudimentary fundamentals of them. “books did not work for me,” says some dropout from a preparatory school or whatever, they saw books merely as inanimate objects that contained some inconsequential material. This is the essence of the term ’bookworm,’ a decent description by an individual who was unable to grasp someone else’s discipline (some philosophical idea, mathematical branch, physic, or anything) that happened to be written in a collection of papers (book) and, therefore, reduced it to a level they could comprehend - that being books, not ideas on them. The reasons underlying the formation of these communities are purely pseudointellectuality. Books are not about books. It is the ideas contained therein that possess significance, not the books themselves. If those ideas were introduced somewhere else that have more features than the print text format, no one would read books.

A startup or the like would be vastly interested in having a name that is easy to remember and not necessarily expressive, such as viber, YouTube, Google, etc., which is understandable, what I can never understand why would a software library do so? Why having a library named glun or marmot, can you guess which one of these is the IMAP server and which is distributed SQLite replicator? This does not make any sense. Imagine if you are talking with your team about a workflow that involves a set of these application “the server runs oliva which uses palette to make the rain interface looks better”, a segment of my poor brain processing power would be already RIP processing what these strange words are supposed to mean before actually start thinking about the main statement. I believe that the domination of this type of naming (random names of mascots or anime girls) is relatively new, most old software had either a very meaningful name (cat-concatenation) or at least a name to which you can link (PostgreSQL). Now an assignment for you, try to guess what does the software named isso do? Please always give your software/library a meaningful name. Stop using anime girls names for naming utilities.

Update: try to tell what do these pieces do before clicking the link:

• quetz
• squoosh
• mamba
• pluto
• boa
• apheleia
• watermill

Those men who are in themselves destinies, and whose advent is the advent of fate, the whole race of heroic bearers of burdens: oh! how heartily and gladly would they have respite from themselves for once in a while!—how they crave after stout hearts and shoulders, that they might free themselves, were it but for an hour or two, from that which oppresses them! And how fruitlessly they crave! … They wait; they observe all that passes before their eyes: no man even cometh nigh to them with a thousandth part of their suffering and passion, no man guesseth to what end they have waited…. At last, at last, they learn the first lesson of their life: to wait no longer; and forthwith they learn their second lesson: to be affable, to be modest; and from that time onwards to endure everybody and every kind of thing—in short, to endure still a little more than they had endured theretofore.

People usually misunderstand the boundaries of computing i.e. what a computer is actually capable of. Due to the mediocre state of software industry that reinforces computing illiteracy, this is not going to change any soon. An example of this is ad-blocking, some people won’t bother checking whether it is possible to purge annoying ads from their experience, they just accept it as the way it works. This is true for other aspects too, there was a reason why people were surprised by the LLM thing. IMHO this is the main reason why federated social networks such as Pleroma and Mastodon will never become a thing, because it’s too complicated for normies to understand that such a thing is even possible. They already have their own understanding of how computing should be done.

ScienceDirect.om have some nice pages called “overview” that are created “using heuristic and machine-learning approaches to extract relevant information from our extensive collection of content”. I usually skip browsing the site itself and jump to the dio directly through some scripting shenanigans, I think this is why I missed it for very long time. It’s really useful that I wanted to let you know that it does exist.

“To purify himself, is still necessary for the freedman of the spirit. Much of the prison and the mould still remaineth in him: pure hath his eye still to become.” ~ Thus Spoke Zarathustra

A fake Jeff Bezos, a crazy Selma, a fake President Joe Biden and a fake Ukrainian Evgeny Chugunov. Very harmonic and civilized Facebook conversation.

• [2025-11-29 Sat 18:32]
  Reflecting on this now as a full time Safari user makes me feel weird.

I don’t use web history. I think it is one of the worst features that were included in the new standards of web browsers. When web history was a thing for the first time it was a little bit useful since there were no search engines to use, so you would either memorize the URLs that you are using or retrieving them from the history. Now it’s only included as a pretext for proprietary browsers to spy on you. However, I still believe it is a very bad idea to keep browsing history even if you compile your browser by yourself. Imagine keeping a camera on your ’safe’ room that records private shots of you, but it’s totally safe since your room is very safe place so none will be able to gain access to it. This seems fine but why even bother guarding such a thing that is even not that useful, but could be very dangerous too if someone seizes? This is the same way I treat (or used to treat) browsing history. Recently I was reading the nyxt browser specifications and found out that they are using tree-style-like history instead of linear history that other browsers use. I decided to give it a try (the tree history not nyxt, it’s a RIP already to me) to see how can it be useful. I noticed that I’m being a little more productive because I tend to browse less of shitty web content when I know that my history is recorded, perhaps thinking that someone will review my history and judge me :). I will update here later to inform you, dear readers, whether it does worth keeping this dangerous thing in your machine.

Composed c. 1700. First published 1717.

It makes me so curibus whatever happened in some era of software history that converted user from an intelligent adventurer that we have to consider their understanding, give them warnings and provide them with helpful logs; into a really stupid creature that live without a mind, and we have to restrict ane control. We have to hide error messages (not to “expose internals”) and popup a stupid so-called friendly “oh no, something went wrong, we are so sorry for that!”. The reason why I don’t understand the current situation of software industry is we already have been through it. Related: Computers Are No Longer Used

Okay I’ve to add context if you just read the previous entry (12 Feb 2023). So yeah, basically I worked on scrapping CSS from various places and mixing them to produce the most elegant blog you have ever seen, yeah it worked well and it was “fancy”. But you know what? CSS is a bloat, welcome to my new world area. Now I’m finally satisfied.

New look, what do you think? I realized recently how not doing a CSS web project when I was twelve had ruined or radically changed how my methods of using computers, I believe that it was in a better way, however I’m really curious to know about that Saleh who would be able to write some creative css, who wouldn’t alienate from visual development because he can’t stand writing CSS in XML. Obviously I didn’t write the css this time but used an inventive mix between my old style and simtemapping with something I’ve found on the internet. While I was doing this, I really wished if I had considered it thoroughly when I decided to migrate from hugo to emacs. Lisp is a great language to get your hands dirty with, but like mostly every language out there it requires some amount of periodic usage to keep your acme in writing master programs.

Anyway, have a nice week.

I love the ability of teleportation with our future-selves (maybe a one-way teleportation would be more precise); I used to do this since an early age when I was thinking If I’d be able to reach the light switch the next age, actually I remember when I did and I recall when I remembered that I would remember; time goes these timeline-challenges changed; I was wondering if some day I’d be able to read faster, talk in a different language, if I would memorize the whole Quran sooner; being able to solve math and logic problem more easily; even at the more recency, in school, I was thinking if I will solve problems faster: I had a list of codeforces problems that I collected when I was at my first-year, the hardest of them didn’t take more than 3 minutes to comprehend it which would take > 40 for the old me. No new year resolution; but I’d leave some messages to the future me that I wonder if you will satisfy my expectation for the coming age. It never gets easier, you get better.