Daily post hello world

I’m not sure what I’m going to write about yet. Let’s see…

I published the first of my “shame” series, inspired by my friend Delia, yesterday (to my substack). I love how much of a non-event it feels like. I feel, with this and with finally hearing back re: the work trial I did (after 23 days), suddenly very light and free. It’s the weekend too – even though I’m unemployed so weekends don’t really mean anything, they still feel very real, and I like preserving them as non-main-work days.

It’s 5pm already somehow, I don’t know where the hell the day went. I watched a John Vervaeke talk in the morning (him at at a conference organised by a philosophy AI app that he endorses - I forget the name but I’ve downloaded it and had a 6-minute call with an AI version of a Greek Philosopher today. I’m excited to use it more – I take a Vervaeke cosign very seriously, I think he is a brilliant man).

I’ve spent a big chunk of time tweaking my Arch Linux laptop (did I mention I use Arch Linux?). I’ve had a few instances now where I write a blog post on my Arch laptop, and because it’s so incredibly basic (by personal design!), I can’t access relevant links, so once I’ve pushed the changes via git, I have to remember to edit the code from my Macbook, so I can add links. This is silly because no one will read this, but also because it’s redundant, so now I’ve made my Arch laptop more elaborate.

Adding functionality to the laptop

As of this morning, all this beautiful 13 year old hunk of plastic had on it was the Linux TTY (I forget what it stands for but basically, a barebones terminal), and git.

Now I have an actual desktop setup, the i3 Window/workspace manager, firefox so I can get to links if I need to e.g. grab a link to a blog post by someone else, and Obsidian. I may remove Obsidian if it poses a distraction, but I figure it might be nice, maybe, to be able to access my notes. I’m wary of Sasha Chapin’s Notes Against Note-Taking Systems here - I don’t want Obsidian to distract me and detract from the beautiful turbo-basic setup I had this morning. So we’ll see.

Oh god, currently I can’t copy-paste from Firefox (e.g. the URL for that Sasha post) into this Neovim instance in Alacritty. Let’s see what AI has to say about this…

Ok, time to peace-out from Neovim and install some shit. Gimme 5…

Ok, I’m back.

Ok look, I admit it. Arch Linux is an absolute pain. I just had to spend 10 minutes installing a package and tweaking some config files to make it the case that I can copy-paste from an app (like Firefox) into Neovim. I think if I was trying this out a few years ago, before AI, I may have thrown in the towel. But now AI is here and it’s totally fine and actually fun to do, if you don’t mind the setup cost.

I can now talk to Gemini 2.5 from my Arch Linux laptop

Now I have i3, I can actually open apps other than the command line, which is exciting (for me – I really hope no one is reading this, lol).

This still feels like a nice stripped-down laptop. Sure, I can browse the internet now, but it’s relatively slow, the screen is small, the trackpad is abysmal. I could learn Vimium to browse Firefox without having to use the trackpad (or the famous ThinkPad nipple), but… I imagine the slow speed will keep me using this as a “90% neovim, 10% searching for links/checking my github build” machine. Nice and simple, still.

MathAcademy

I want to do a big chunk of MathAcademy.com today. I have my beeminder goal set to 15 mins of MA per day, but I’d like to do maybe 1 hour today. It has me working through very embarrassingly easy prealgebra, because I did so badly on the placement exam. 90% if stuff that I vaguely remember learning and can just intuit, 10% is stuff that I’ve forgotten or never touched. So it feels pretty damn inefficient, like they’re making me do a huge amount of stuff that I can just intuit, but I definitely see the value in making sure I have 100% of these foundations in place before progressing. It’s going to be absolutely ages before I’m doing anything actually useful… I have a vague sense that maths is an important thing that I missed out on, that maybe linear algebra or calculus will help me understand the world better, somehow… we’ll see. Will I stick to it long enough to see benefits? I hope so. But I’m definitely doing far too much right now.

Why do I care about this stuff?

I find this laptop to be wildly charming. Especially when it was literally just the terminal (TTY) and vim. I just absolutely love the “basic as hell terminal from the 1960s/1970s/1980s” aesthetic – it’s so insanely vibe-y to me. I think it’s partially from playing Fallout 3 as a teenager – in that game, you’d have to “hack” computers sometimes (an actually truly pathetic mini-game involving guessing the right word via pattern matching, a kind of proto-wordle), and the computers in the game had the iconic black and green terminal theme. Also I remember in Call of Duty Black Ops (this memory has literally just come back to me now after probably 12 years!!) – there was an easter egg where, in the main menu, you have the POV of someone strapped to a chair, a prisoner of war, and if you spammed the shoulder buttons on your controller you’d break out of the chair, and you could explore the room you were in, and you could go over to a computer terminal and play the game… I forget what it’s called, but it’s an old-school text based game where it says like “you are in a room, you can see xyz, what do you do” and you try out different typed commands like “leave room” or “open box” and that’s the game. There was a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy one and it was actually super fun playing a game that engaged your imagination so much. Anyway, what was I talking about?

Oh yeah, so I don’t know, for whatever reason, the act of interfacing with a computer in a very barebones way (i.e. the terminal) just feels sick to me. I think, in addition to the aesthetic of it, the nerdiness that I for whatever reason find appealing, there’s also the sense of mastery, of arcane knowledge. Of making your family’s brains boggle at what the fuck you’re doing, what kind of wizardry is this? I shocked my sister yesterday by telling her that Netflix is made of code (my family are deeply tech illiterate). A large part of my identity, especially as a kid, came from being smart, the gifted one, so I do think there’s an echo of that in learning stuff that I know is niche and arcane and special.

There’s also just a very very clear sense of progression and learning in programming. It’s one of the most concrete places (probably maths is similar), where you can be like “wow, I knew nothing about xyz a week ago, and now look at me”. Be that a programming language, Linux terminal commands, a key Obsidian community plugin, extensible open source software, creative software like Ableton/Photoshop/Final Cut Pro. Computers just give you this incredible flow state experience, a very tight coupling to the “environment” (which is key to flow, John Vervaeke uses the example of rock climbing). Very clear feedback loops, very clear progression. And this is why video games are so compelling - they take this stuff and put it on steroids, as they’re not hard work (mostly) – you can totally hit a wall with programming, but a game like DOOM Eternal or Call of Duty is designed to keep you in flow. (It’s funny how talking about Call of Duty makes me feel like a boomer - do people still play it? I imagine it has been supplanted by Fortnite/Apex Legends etc).

Anyway, my point is - computers are cool. I wonder if I should have done a computer science degree – I have a friend who told me that we are considered the “lost generation”, because computer programming was briefly removed from the curriculum in English schools when we were attending them, so that we didn’t get exposed to programming in a reliable way. I think if we’d had coding at school I would have loved it - when I finally had my first coding-based assignment (during my Masters, in MatLab, I loved it but go an incredibly poor score because I completely missed what functions were about so ended up with insane copy-pasted code instead of using functions, lmao). And I thought myself Python and SQL and got a job as a data analyst (as did my 3 friends from school who all did Physics degrees - they’re still data analysts now. One of them asked me recently if I’d ever return – I love coding, and I’d love to learn proper software engineering, I keep hearing the siren call of Rust, but I definitely won’t be a data analyst again.

Ok so anyway. this is great - I have obsidian open in my second i3 workspace, Firefox in workspace 3, but this still feels like a very pure writing experience. Good stuff. I love this setup so much!!!