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View of the Pont au Change from Quai de Gesvres by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot

[2025-07-24 Thu 19:17]

I noticed how almost all Corot paintings are not very colorful, his era is the beginning of less vibrant art.

Marxists Internet Archive

[2025-07-20 Sun 23:59]

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 Leila

[2025-07-19 Sat 23:31]

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.

Mulan (1998)

[2025-07-05 Sat 19:15]

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.

The rise of Whatever

[2025-07-05 Sat 04:32]

This section was labeled under, or is related to Capitalism

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.

Emacs M4 Experience

[2025-07-05 Sat 02:54]

This section was labeled under, or is related to Emacs

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.

I don’t want to say Jewish but Jewish

Phantom Thread (2017)

[2025-06-28 Sat 14:28]

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.

Emojis in Code Comments

[2025-06-24 Tue 12:22]

Whoever writes emojis inside code comments, has to be a very dumb LLM, or the happiest girl ever.

Cimabue and Cima da Conegliano

[2025-06-23 Mon 19:10]

This section was labeled under, or is related to Art

Cimabue and Cima da Conegliano works on Christian Art are very dedicated. I wonder how their lives were like.

Supabase

[2025-06-21 Sat 21:49]

This section was labeled under, or is related to Programming

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.

Portrait of a North African (1870)

[2025-06-20 Fri 12:37]

This section was labeled under, or is related to Art

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.

William Bradford

[2025-06-16 Mon 00:29]

This section was labeled under, or is related to Art

Bradford (the artist) paintings of the sea are very moving. I wonder if Ivan Aivazovsky ever inspired him.

She understood the music

[2025-06-13 Fri 14:51]

This section was labeled under, or is related to Kierkegaard

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.

Katharina von Bora

[2025-06-13 Fri 14:48]

This section was labeled under, or is related to Kierkegaard

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 and Eros

[2025-06-07 Sat 18:21]

This section was labeled under, or is related to Art

A Young Girl Defending Herself Against Eros, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, that’s so cute.

Kierkegaard on the Joy of Natural Science

[2025-06-06 Fri 20:40]

This section was labeled under, or is related to Kierkegaard and Modus Vivendi

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:

Probably few fields of study bestow on man the serene and happy frame of mind that the natural sciences give him. Out into nature he goes, everything is familiar, it is as though he had talked with the plants and the animals beforehand. He sees not only the uses man can put them to (for that is quite secondary) but their significance in the whole universe. He stands like Adam of old – all the animals come to him and he gives them names.

My old post about math might be also related: A Prelude Over Mathematics.

What Would Kierkegaard Do?

[2025-06-06 Fri 20:23]

This section was labeled under, or is related to Kierkegaard

I was reading What Would Kierkegaard Do?. This part made me laugh a lot:

Did Kierkegaard offer anything on Muhammad and Islam? Hong predicts there won’t be much.

Osama, if you’re reading this, now’s the time to turn the page.

No blue

[2025-06-01 Sun 14:13]

No water, no life. No blue, no green. – Sylvia Earle

Floyd’s tortoise and hare

  • [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.

[2025-05-27 Tue 02:56]

This section was labeled under, or is related to Programming and Representations and Implementations of Graphs

TIL that Robert W. Floyd is not the real author of Floyd’s cycle-finding algorithm:

The algorithm is named after Robert W. Floyd, who was credited with its invention by Donald Knuth. However, the algorithm does not appear in Floyd’s published work, and this may be a misattribution: Floyd describes algorithms for listing all simple cycles in a directed graph in a 1967 paper, but this paper does not describe the cycle-finding problem in functional graphs that is the subject of this article. In fact, Knuth’s statement (in 1969), attributing it to Floyd, without citation, is the first known appearance in print, and it thus may be a folk theorem, not attributable to a single individual.

I wonder if anyone asked Donald Knuth about that in an interview.

TODO Sandro Botticelli Symbol of goodness   @check @later

[2025-05-17 Sat 00:43]

This section was labeled under, or is related to Art

I noticed how he is always painting the very same woman over and over. Worht investigating.

Works of Carl Aagaard

[2025-05-10 Sat 04:13]

This section was labeled under, or is related to Art

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.

leonardcohenfiles.com

[2025-05-04 Sun 06:16]

This section was labeled under, or is related to Music

TIL there’s a great website of Leonard Cohen legacy: https://leonardcohenfiles.com/.

The Massacre of the Monks of Tamond by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema origins

[2025-05-03 Sat 08:12]

This section was labeled under, or is related to Art

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.

Constanze Mozart and Georg Nikolaus von Nissen

[2025-05-03 Sat 00:31]

This section was labeled under, or is related to Music and History

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

[2025-04-08 Tue 01:44]

My heart is a C-x C-b menu.

Good video on setting boundaries

[2025-03-28 Fri 16:24]

This section was labeled under, or is related to Modus Vivendi

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

[2025-03-27 Thu 23:36]

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.

Nietzsche’s view of reflection.

This section was labeled under, or is related to So Many Unmarried Men

This comment was actually hilarious.

Abdel Wahab al-Messiri, Paul Fussell and Kagi

[2024-10-17 Thu 18:27]

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.

SEP Friendship

[2024-08-03 Sat 03:14]

This section was labeled under, or is related to Philosophy

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"

Fix: (org-ql-view.el) Adjust priority for agenda elements by anpandey

[2024-08-22 Thu 12:50]

This section was labeled under, or is related to Programming

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).

Archive

  • [2025-06-28 Sat 20:04] 2024-2025 was a heavy time. I will probably organize it in the archive after I get over it.

December 2023-February 2024 | September 2023-November 2023 | June 2023-August 2023 | March 2023-May 2023 | December 2022-February 2023 | September 2022-November 2023

How does this page work

[2022-09-23 Fri 20:15]: If you are an old reader (if such a thing exists) of this blog, you should know about my old attempts of creating a stack-like posting that works within my editing environment (Emacs) which has always failed. I’m very good at Elisp, suck at writing Elisp packages \*Sigh\* life doesn’t give everything. Anyway I thought that everything I need to implement such a workflow, is only a program that appends an entity top of a string, and I started to implement it as a separated program. However, while doing it I recognized that (org-caputre) already does it, just needed a simple custom configuration:

(setq +org-capture-journal-file "~/blog/content/stack.org")
(setq org-capture-templates
      '(("j" "Journal" entry
           (file+headline +org-capture-journal-file "Posts")
           "* %<%A, %d %B %Y>\n%?"  :prepend t)))

I also found a predefined way of doing it that build a full hierarchy date for the entity, but I decided to go simple this time.

Cons;

  • I’ve to archive it myself, no pagination.
  • [2022-10-05 Wed 20:18]: I figured out a workaround to archive, and I don’t think I really need tags. Everything works great.
  • [2024-02-15 Thu 20:19]: I do not find this workflow very good as of now, I do not think that archiving is necessary either. I wil try to think of something else soon.

Footnotes:

1

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.


I seek refuge in God, from Satan the rejected. Generated by: Emacs 30.1 (Org mode 9.7.31). Written by: Salih Muhammed, by the date of: . Last build date: 2025-07-25 Fri 01:39.