I've been thinking about and working on a meal planning project for a while now, which I've been calling my food bot. The first leg of the project was just massaging USDA's nutrition datasets into a form I could use, captured as my nutrition project on Codeberg. The second leg was compiling a set of recipes and picking nutrition database entries for each ingredient of each recipe. This was mostly dull work upon which I wasted a lot of time trying to make a TUI program to speed up said entry, ultimately burning out for a while on it. After reconciling somewhat with the World Wide Web and returning to writing web apps (this time targeting older, Javascript-free browsers), I wrote a simple lookup tool for my nutrition database and used it in conjunction with a simple text editor to finally finish processing the Grimgrains recipes I'd converted to YAML a couple years back.
It was a pretty significant effort for me, so I'm hosting HTML renderings of the results of that work on my wiki, under the "grimgrains" tag. The next leg of this project will be actually generating meal plans conforming to user-defined goals from that set of recipes.
Now
Listening to Belle and Sebastian on an iPod composed of parts left over from my misadventures in attempting to add Bluetooth support to the one I'd had since 2005.
Reading Multisolving and realizing I must have been soaking in systems theory in some form or another for years. It's not bad, I'm just not learning anything yet and having a hard time forcing myself through it just in case there is something new therein.
Feeling the limitations of my wiki engine already and starting to consider a rewrite. I ought to remain focused on my food bot project. Things I'd like to experiment with generally involve changing the structure of wiki.scm to better support element nesting and playing with embedding executed code or external files and projecting page sections out into their own files. E.g., what if I could just have the engine replace my now page with this section of my journal until the next time I update it? What kind of naming granularity do I want? Can I start having "types" of pages with different handling? Make the engine more extensible, perhaps? Make it consume my entire data collection? At a point it becomes obvious that I want to merge this wiki with my abandoned datastore project somehow.
2024-12-31
I wish I had a good plan for the next year, or even a real focus. But I've gotten stuck in a loop of waking up, taking care of my kid, and slowly falling behind in tidying the house and planning meals. It's always been a struggle to do the last two, honestly.
I guess if I were to have a single goal for the new year, it'd be to set up a system for logging my meals and tracking nutrition, and for generating meal plans. I should probably pause on everything else until I get that done, but I've had this goal since 2012 at least. I've never really made it a singular focus, so maybe doing that will make a difference. I guess if I'm going to make it a focus, I should add the stipulation that if I can't get this done by 2026, I should just strike it from my list of projects once and for all. I've arrived at the final 20% that takes 80%, it feels like. I'm at point near the end of this project where I tend to stall out on projects.
It's frustrating. I spend a lot of time on these things and then I never finish them or release anything usable for some reason. Starts to feel like I've got nothing to show for all the work I've put in. I know it's probably not true, but it sure feels that way sometimes.
2024-12-29: Stubs
I've been wanting to write some posts, but the time's been getting away from me and I'm feeling overwhelmed with everything I'm trying to keep abreast of. Every so often the past few days, inspiration has been striking only for me to have to put it off. So I'm just gonna dump the beginnings of ideas here as either a note to myself for future posts, or, if those posts never get written after all, as seeds for others to grow.
What is "advantage," and why may it be a silly notion to apply to things we enjoy? Is our mindless pursuit of it in inappropriate areas a symptom of internalized capitalism? Are there inappropriate areas? Should we just all become wireheads? Stemming from my brother's questions about my recent MiniDisc fixation.
Organization! From roots to tips, and what I find appealing about it in the larger sense and in the personal sense. Partly reflection, partly envisioning the ways we might reduce waste by becoming more mindful of what we have and of what others could use. No way I'll touch every aspect in one blog post, but I want to at least write a good summarizing one.
"Slippy mindset," retrocomputing but modern ("heritage computing?" The permacomputer.net folks don't like "retrocomputing" because it implies obsolescence based on the mere passage of time.), finding some way to jailbreak the modern web.
Why I find the idea of agricultural tech communes appealing and why I'm trying to find other ways to build an alternative to capitalist production for providing for one's needs.
I think there was more. I'll add to this post through the day if I remember anything.
2024-12-15: Re: Torture vs. Dust Specks
This will be a short post, I hope. I don't have time at the dog-end of the day for a long one.
I've seen Eliezer Yudkowsky's "Torture vs. Dust Specks" for the first time today. It's an old post and I never really followed Less Wrong, though I was very briefly entranced by its premise in my 20s and knew people who were involved in that community. Intimated in the Mastodon post which directed me to it was the notion that Luigi Mangione had been influenced by this idea. That's neither here nor there for me, honestly.
In my 2024-11-08 post I think I made it clear that I think equity is an important element of any ethical system, which is part of why I personally consider utilitarianism to really only apply in situations where some sort of equity already holds. I.e., yes, one innocent dying is better than one hundred innocents dying.
From my perspective: reason is a dogged servant of axioms. Reason does and will only ever serve the irrational driving forces at all of our cores that gets us up in the morning and makes most of us at least uncomfortable in the face of injustice. You can absolutely construct a beautiful, internally consistent system of beliefs that are also wholly disconnected from reality; from the little glimpses I've had, I have the impression that the Less Wrong community has been constructing a beautiful edifice of reason that completely misunderstands the role of ethics. From my perspective, ethics are a formal mapping of moral sense in the same way that, e.g., physics are formal mappings of physical phenomena. If your physics contradicts observation, you have most like fucked up somewhere. If your ethical system violates the moral sense of most people, you have most likely fucked up somewhere.
This is difficult because "moral sense" gets mixed up with "cultural conditioning" and "religious indoctrination" and other forms of "self-delusion for the sake of inclusion" for a lot of people, and it can seem impossible to disentangle them. Reason may often be the only way to cut through that kind of bullshit. The hope of these groups (because Less Wrong and its Rationalist followers joins a very long tradition of extrapolating confidently from reasonable-sounding premises to arrive at unreasonable conclusions without going, "wait a minute, have I reductio ad absurdumed myself?") is to cut through those sorts of "false selves" to arrive at some sort of universal ethical system. This is a noble project, though my suspicion is that they may be in error to pre-suppose such a thing can be constructed any more than, e.g., a universal measure of musical merit. At the very least, they oughta listen to their guts a little more often and revisit their premises, because their conclusions can only ever be as good as those. And what good is an ethical system anyway if it leads you to violate your own moral sense? Fr my perspective, the whole point of constructing an ethical system is to codify one's moral sense, not to supplant it or substitute for the lack of one.
Began work on an interface for adding and updating wiki entries from the browser last night, and got it usable (though not complete) today. Composing this entry on my phone now.
Also added pages for my Agfa CL18 and Sony Mavica cameras, to which I hope to one day add some photos taken with those cameras.
2024-11-29
Made food for two feasts yesterday. By request, my usual contributions: vegetarian nut loaf and vegan mushroom gravy. My wife made glazed carrots. They were all pretty good, so I've added pages for these recipes to the wiki.
Yesterday evening, I updated my VM with OpenBSD Amsterdam to serve HTML over HTTP and HTTPS. I'll be serving my wiki from my lyk.so domain going forward. I don't have the HTTP protocol set up to forward to HTTPS automatically, as I may want to be able to review my wiki from my Windows 98 box from time to time, but it's available if you prefer it.
2024-11-08: Omelas, equity, and coercion
In the spirit of my blog entries, "shower thoughts" and possibly bad takes follow.
Coercion under capitalism necessarily hinges on inequity. The fact that food and shelter cannot be obtained without work, under our current capitalist system, is less a "law of nature," as it might have been in centuries past, and more a function of those who have withholding those things from those who have not. This is, on the one hand, a driver of inequity as those who have then get to ride the power law upward and onward, while those who have not must struggle against sliding further down an inversion of the same curve, and, on the other hand, the foundation for ever-greater coercion and exploitation as the gap widens and more are forced into precarity.
Coercion itself, then must be seen through the lense of the possible, and therefore through the lense of equity. If we have to work extra hard as commoners working our collectively owned and governed land due to drought or some other natural disaster, then nothing can be said of that labor being coerced by anyone. If, on the other hand, I have more food in my storehouses than I could ever hope to need for my own sustenance, and I make distribution of that food to those who would starve without it contingent on their performing work for me, then this seems to me like a clear case of coercion under threat of starvation.
Stray (but related) thought: I've the notion that our instinctive discomfort with the sort of "utopia" described in Le Guin's The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas has to do with the fact that such a utopia would be hideously unfair and inequitable, and that our philsophical and moral systems, if they are to be any guide at all to human happiness or betterment, need to take this into account. Most people seem to have this sense; only the few and pathological can violate it and remain happy, it seems to me. I've heard that The Spirit Level) seems to support this notion, but I haven't read it.
Labor being a free choice, without coercion, would then seem to depend on all the things necessary for the sustaining of life being freely available to all, to the extent possible given the actual prevailing material conditions. Equity then seems to be a requirement for removing coercion from a society.
I don't have any solutions in mind. I know I need to read and study more, but this relationship between equity, coercion, and our feelings about thought-experiment utopias like Omelas felt like an epiphany to me, so I wrote it down here.
2024-11-07
I've been beating my head against Guix System, trying to get it to run on the MNT Reform with the boot partition split off onto a separate device and the root partition encrypted, such that it updates the kernel when the system is reconfigured, but no luck yet. I keep getting errors late into the system installation process; it takes at least 12 hours each time for the system to build on the target device, and about 12 hours for the installation image to build as well. The debug cycle is absurdly long, and I'm not sure if there's a way to shorten it.
Nix was a lot more reliable, at least for this use case. I also frankly like the configuration language better, though Guile Scheme can also be put to other uses. I may give Lix (the Nix fork, not my long-abandoned Linux distribution) another go sometime.
I have to wonder if even achieving all the goals I have in mind here will make much of a difference in the broader world. I've spent a lot of time on this and I'm starting to wonder if I should just back out and approach from another angle. My ultimate goal here has been to set up a better-integrated, more opinionated take on Yunohost.
I feel very strongly that a well-constructed, deterministic, whole-system builder like Nix or Guix could allow for clean, low-maintenance integration of a small set of complementary web services. I'd like to get whatever may underlie such a system running on my personal laptop first, but all these difficulties I'm encountering are giving me some serious doubts.
The only new concept for me between the two was "the trap of amateurization." I can recommend the former, as it's well-written and I didn't find anything within that I disagreed with. The latter was very much of its time (2006) and posits some ideas which seem to have not been borne out by the events of the last two decades. I probably would have found it exciting if I had read it around the time of its publication, but I'm no longer that person and this is no longer the turn of the aughts.