Time flows through us so quickly, like rivers and ravines; but also, like travelers, we’re advancing on its endless plains, mountains, and ridges. Aren’t we living contradictions, and embracing the elements. Let’s sit down and write about a few things that happened since the last time.

Life

It appears I’m still straddled in between Europe and Asia, my heart split and duties too. This traveling has had an edge this time since again, like the protests, covid, the economic crisis, and the port explosion, we’ve yet again faced a human crisis in Lebanon. So, we adapt to the unusual, which becomes more of the usual. We were back in survival mode, as prepared as we could: with our offgrid solar energy system, fresh water source, etc.. A major blocking point was the risk of an internet blackout. Hence, for work-purposes and business continuity, traveling is often the only backup option. Unfortunately, with the chaotic mess it becomes a nightmare to manage both ensuring a flight and getting to the airport. Let’s say that it was tense.
With every crisis, little by little, people disperse around the world more, and we’re left stitching relationships and situations. I try to keep positive, to be flexible, to make the most of every moment, to embrace life wherever it it takes me and wherever I take it.

Psychology, Philosophy & Books

I’ve read a bit less the past year, but have been more picky with the books I’ve chosen. I’m still fascinated by semiotics and its sociological implications. It requires a novel vision of the world to be understood, it needs us to take distance from some things we take for granted.

• Semiotics — Daniel Chandler
• Metaphors we live by — George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
• Saving Beauty — Byung Chul Han
• Rationality — Steven Pinker
• Tales of the Underground — Doestoyevsky
• The Iliad and Odyssey
• The Count of Monte Cristo — Alexandre Dumas
• Babel or the necessity of violence — R. F. Kuang
• The last unicorn & The way home — Peter Beagle
• The Subtle art of not giving a fuck — Mark Manson
• Men are from Mars, Women from Venus — John Gray
• The Legend of the Condor Heroes

Soon to read: Project Hail Mary, The Dark Tower series, and re-reading The Lord of the Ring.

As a spiritual continuation of a recurrent topic on this blog, and also on the topic of deconstructionism maybe, I’ve written about syncretism and how without it a culture loses its meaning.

Unix, Nixers, Programming & Articles

The newsletter is still going strong, but it’s getting harder to find interesting articles ever week as the internet zeitgeist gets monopolized by everything-LLMs. I try to keep my knowledge up-to-date on this: I’ve been to a conference the past summer which obviously had countless talks on LLMs, and I’ve also followed a few basic courses explaining the internal mechanisms: self-attention/transformers and tokenizers. I’m especially fascinated by tokenizers and vectorization and embedding in LLMs, as it is related to semiotics.

I’ve written two technical articles related to Unix-like systems. One about rtkit and scheduling, and another about certain software that have interesting features that aren’t exposed properly to end users, and thus lose their usefulness. In the article about scheduling I dived into realtime properties on Linux, and that led me to do a patch to PAM-Linux limits plugin, which I found was missing a param. It’s by digging deep that you end up discovering gold nuggets and learning the most, it leads you into unpaved cavernous territories where most people never step foot. Does that justify the mania on deep sea mining and rare earth minerals?

Arts

As far as ASCII art goes, my new series is about sea creatures. Indeed, as is the case for each series, it let’s me discover the world related to the scene and things I’m drawing. As a milestone, I’ve finished my 100th piece just recently.

Furthermore, my new cinema hobby, with its new page, is flourishing. I’m truly enjoying learning the different aspects of this craft and constantly discovering how intricate it is. The review page is also a way to force myself to take the time to not only passively consume but to reflect on what i’ve watched, to be deliberate. Additionally, one thing I’ve come to notice is that the most striking and inspiring movies, are the ones that linger and slowly percolate in the mind, making you wonder and ponder even days afterward, or to comprehend and remember specific scenes much later on. It’s the opposite of jokes, you might not get them right away, and that’s where the pleasure is. Sometimes, these are pieces that might not seem like much right away. As I’ve said: it makes us savor it even more.

Others

Many things have changed and others have moved forward.

For example, I was looking for a relatively small phone, something smaller than 6 inches. Hence, I initially got a Cubot KingKong Mini 3, but the screen broke and the device never got any software update. So I switched to a Zenfone, which appears to be the only up-to-date device on the market of that size. It’s as pocket friendly as you can today. I just don’t get the aversion to smaller phones, they’re very practical!

My cooking hobby is still strong. I’m enjoying cooking and experiment with food, especially fusion food and aroma pairing. On that note, I’ve update the recipe/food section on my blog, check it out.

As far as caring about myself goes, I’m still doing HIIT, cardio, lifting, and dancing, but I’m also back to swimming and I recently got a bike. I’m now learning Portuguese, that’s after attempting Latin and Mandarin. We always learn something new. I think I’m on a positive path!

Aside from all this, I’m dedicating time every week to teach myself some finance, so that I become more aware and ready to face the many uncertainties of the future and what this world has in store for us.

Overall, I think I’m striking a great balance towards personal growth when it comes to what I cherish.

Now

A lot has happened the past months, many of which I haven’t mentioned here. Yet, I’m hopeful for the future, eager to still and always move forward with optimism.
Writing this type of article is a good reminder to myself to focus on the people I care about and the activities that keep me alive: learning about cultures through different activities such as art and cooking, to write, learn, and share on philosophy and Unix-like system.

I’ll keep on brainstorming, planning, and sprinkling opportunities here and there!

This is it! As usual… If you want something done, no one’s gonna do it for you, use your own hands, even if it’s not much. You can do it!
And let’s go for a beer together sometime, or just chill.

See ya!

If you want to have a more in depth discussion I'm always available by email or irc. We can discuss and argue about what you like and dislike, about new ideas to consider, opinions, etc..
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