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Joined 6 years ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2019

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  • Hermeticism is a gnostic esoteric system and like all gnostic forms, it implies that there’s an “unknown” reality that can be disveiled through revelation. You have a perceived reality that is fake and a “real” reality that is hidden from you. This already sets the ground for conspiratorial thinking.

    The second element is that hermeticists in the 18th century were relatively rich and powerful men who met in secret societies, which was something everybody did, but they also had the money to build monuments and hide their symbols in plain sight. This created the trope of a secret congregation of powerful men into esoteric shit who plot to take over society.


  • the logic that sending messages alters political reality is part of the overall problem. Politics is a conflict of forces, not a conflict of ideas or opinions. A license is as powerful as the will of the state power behind it to enforce it. Otherwise, it is powerless.

    If you want to make sense of the political world, I invite to move beyond the idea of “taking stances” or expressing positions as a political act, and reason instead of what incentives and powers you’re altering with your political actions.

    What you describe just does not play out in real life: neither on a micro scale nor on a macro scale.


  • Baserow and n8n are good enough for me to use in a professional production setting. Nocodb could be good, but it has some very basic bugs and shortcomings that make it hard to use.

    Appflowy is getting there, but I would give it some more time.

    Appsmith is good, but complex. Worth investing some time into, but it cannot be picked up casually to play around.





















  • Licenses don’t stop bombs. In general, informational freedoms always benefits the stronger actor, because they already have the means to exploit the information better than other actors. Legal restrictions are just a bump in the road if what you produced is really really valuable for a corporation or a state entity: they can reimplement it, exploiting the design and “trial-and-error” work embedded in whatever you produced, or they can simply ignore licenses because nobody is going to ask the Israeli’s military to respect a license when they are slaughtering civilians.

    Social problems never have technical solutions.

    If you want to make software that is not captured by state or corporate power, you must create software that is incompatible with whatever they need to do. Embed a social logic that is worthless to their system but useful to our system. Anything else is eventually going to be captured. There’s a lot of literature on anti-capture design, and some of it manages to rise above the purely techno-optimist logic and provide something useful.








  • I know it’s a tough ask. In the meanwhile I’m exploring the possibility of embedding excalidraw into something else but I don’t know.

    I already contribute to wikis on this topic, like Activist Handbook, but they are not the right format for what I need. Linked documents have limited expressivity and visual people are currently underserved, hence the diagram approach.

    Another similar thing would be to use stuff like obsidian canvas which is something in between