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:

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:

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:

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. Worht 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.

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.

Here’s a good video from TikTok about setting boundaries in kinds of friendships: https://www.tiktok.com/@the3rdside/video/7479090078267231534. I find myself trying to explain this kind of boundaries people from time to time.

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 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 pandoc run:

pandoc 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"

FOOS restrictions are really harmful to the progress of software development. I advocate for the freedom of software, but I really dislike the way that other adherents use that freedom which usually conclude making the progress/development much slower. An average GNU fanatic user would require people to use some free git hosting, would refuse to make support for non-free systems, might discourage usage of non “fully free” licensed software packages. All of this result in making the progress really slow (and I’m not here talking even about the FSF signture stuff in the PR I linked above). Take for example the usage of a fully-free Git hosting, like codeforage and the whatnot, this is totally fine as in concept, but practically many people are just used to Microsoft’s github, many people (in fact the majority of people) don’t know how to use emails for patchs and issues (in the case of other forges like sourcehut), and many people just won’t be encouraged enough to do any of this (or even register at a new forge other than github).

• [2024-11-30 Sat 15:43] Related: Your PR Process Is Killing Morale and Productivity