This post is a semi-followup to my post from yesterday: There are not good big tech companies left.

Ever since I was a child, people used to ask who is my hero, who do I look up to. And, since I was a nerdy kid, the answer was as clear as it was dumb: famous computer people. Be it Gates, Jobs, or other Musk. Even Zuckerberg! They seemed to be smarter than me, doing stuff which I wanted to do, having success I always wanted. Oh, how misguided I was.

One thing I've learned some time ago was, that I will never be rich. As a kid, I was sure this was a possibility, but with time came acceptance. For a long time, I assumed it is because I was not as gifted as those folks. Now, I see the problem elsewhere: I am not able to do what they do. I was never able to drop all of my believes, just to earn a buck. Or maybe it's because I had any believes?

The way I see tech CEOs now, is the same I see Scrooge McDuck. They have only one focus, only one goal, only one love: money. Nothing will ever stay in their way to get more of it. No morality, no law, no person is even worth noticing in this pursue. They have not changed since I looked up to them, but everything is different. It's clear as a day, that no billionaire is a decent person. Not one member of their club is worth looking up to.

The only thing they deserve is a complete disregard; because attention is what they crave. Love them, hate them; they will milk it to make more money. We can hate Musk all we want, but that will only make him more keen on destroying us. And I don't even live in the US!

Some of them are actively evil (like Musk or Zuckerberg), some are doing it as a byproduct (Nadella or Pichai), and some are just clowns (Amodei). They don't care. However we see them, it means nothing. They are too rich and to powerful. They live lives we can not even imagine and we live lives they couldn't care less for. For them, we are nothing more than a resource. However we interact, is only a toy for them.

The only resistance we can do is to not acknowledge their exitence, to not even come into proximity of their empires, as those empires were built on destruction. They destroy everything they touch, even it that thing is a human being. We know that Zuckerberg personally accepted the cost of supporting a genocide. He made some bucks, so he sees as fair trade. He destroyed the souls of companies he bought, as it brought him monero. He destroyed lives of dozens of thousands of former employees, because that's what the stock market demanded. Because it's always about the money, his only desire.

We can not luigi all of them, but we can try not to make them become more powerful. Never, ever buy anything from a company owned by billionire. They may have been my heroes, but now I see them as scum; the lowest of lows of humanity.

But we need heroes, we need someone to look up to. And there are people who are still worth aspiring to become. They are not rich, they are not fucking CEOs. For me, the heroes would be the people who love what they do, because this is (as I've learned) what I yearn. A simple life, full of love, without any worry for the future. And this is what the billionaires want to take from me.

A recent conversation on Mastodon made my remember how amazing Adobe Reader used to be. It simply opened PDFs. Adobe Photoshop was mind blowing when it was version 4. Office XP was good. The first bad Windows was XP (I will die on this hill. I used it on a low-end machine prior to any service patch. It was unusable). Apple made great software. So on, so on.

Now, all those good programs are gonde. All those companies making great software are effectively dead. If you were a fan of any of then, I bet you hate what is has became. We've seen everything good being murdered in the name of short-sighted profit.

We've just had two days of the biggest tech conferences out there. Microsoft and Google showed what their engineers were doing, what developers will be able to use. The result is a big, stinky nothing. Chatbots and porn generators. The only cool thing we've seen is a damn text editor for Windows, since Notepad became yet another LLM honeypot.

Those companies may be soaring in cash but they fail to create anymore. While we may have assumed that they had a worse period, and something good will eventually change - now we know it will never happen. Any company, after becoming big enough, becomes a shadow of it's former self. What was young and hungry, became old and boring - but stuffed with cash.

The worst part is, that their size will make it impossible for something good to come from someplace else (fingers crossed for breaking Meta and Google!) The only new idea is the GenAI craze, and I said good, so it doesn't matter.

There still are great, old tech companies out there and they have thing in common: someone decided that they are big enough. They don't need more money, they don't need more staff. They are able to exist and do their things. Most of them are in gaming (like Cyan or Spiderweb), but they exist. Similarly, newer indie developers are still doing amazing stuff (like Skald).

On the other hand there is (was) the za/um. They came ouf of nowhere with Disco Elysium, which may very well be the greatest game I've ever experienced. Sadly, they are no longer. Huge money created huge problems.

When I was a kid I believed that religion is the root of all problems. I should have believed those who said it was actually money. The bigger the money, the worse it gets.

What can we do? Never, ever buy from the big companies. Not a single dollar from my hands should fall in the hands of Altmans, Nadellas and so on. Download their software, look for alternatives, make fun on people who do. All of that is fine. But I will gladly pay anyone who is small and does their thing, hoping that they will know when enough is enough.

If you're a returning reader, you may feel deja vu. I have one as well, but this is l'esprit de l'époque. Our heroes became our foes. It used to sadden me, or make me angry. Now I don't care anymore about any of those companies. Big tech should die and be replaced by thousand smaller companies... like capitalism promised and failed to deliver.

If there is one things that unites Emacs users is the need to other Emacs user's configs. So, here I am showing mine: my emacs config. Other configs will follow as I do literate programming for such thing, but let's leave that for future.

Is the config interesting? Not really. But are the literate parts thoughtful? Also no.

As I've been migrating old-blog to new-blog (aka "sayonara Hugo and your breaking changes"), I've noticed that this blog is over 3 years old. That's quite a lot! This game me a bit to think about - about what this blog means to me, and I find so much joy in it.

The "version 1" (which was lost in the past) of my blogging journey was thought about as a way to self-promote. I wanted to do some cool programming stuff, write about it, and get as much social e-points as possible. So I started learning React Native (big mistake) and... nothing. There was nothing to write about. And then the site died with a million little "not today"s. Lesson one: I am unable to pretend to be someone who I am not. I will not do something, if I can't get any joy out of it. This also hinders my promotions at work, but well.

Also: English is my not first language. Far from it - as you see, I can barely write a coherent sentence. And you would not like to read the first draft - which the second thing I learned. I am unable to treat blog as stream of consciousness, as I need a certain level of editing and correction. But I hate that part! The longer the text is, the more pain I have to suffer. Therefore: my posts are bite-sized. I love reading more flowery writing, but this not my cup of tea. At the same time, I am able to cram more meat into a single sentence than some other bloggers into their first page, which is nice.

The third thing I learned is that having a site is as cool as writing one. So, I thinker with the inneworkings all the time. But, as I see, this is extremely common.

All of the above mean that this site is a way for me to find myself. Since I can not pretend, I need to be naked. If you read everything here (btw, over 400 notes!), you will learn things about me which I would prefer to keep out of sight. I try not to publish information that would put me in jeopardy, or about other people. However, from to time they slip out. I try to publish close to daily, so sometimes I put things here which I should not. Very rarely I delete old texts, as they are a statement of who I were at that moment. Every piece is a reflection of my state of mind. Sometimes there are also a statement of my ignorance: the older the text is, the bigger chance is that I disagree with it now. Heck, it would be scary if I was the same person who wrote them.

And the last thing: it's a way to connect. I am not the talkative kind, I rarely share with people around me. But we all have this need to let other know us on a deeper level, to create human connection. I think this the biggest driving force here: I want someone who is not related to me, to know me. Similarly, I feel strong connection with fellow bloggers who are not shy of writing about themselves. There is comradery in all of this which I love.

Btw, I wanted to put a picture of this site from "version 2" times - I have the code after all. Not with Hugo! There was a million breaking changes since then. Because Hugo hates us all.

My HUGE version of Earthesea puts this short stories collection as the last part, but everywhere else I've seen it put before the The Other Wind. Both were released in 2001, but Lars said that this book is Le Guin trying to discover where to go next. Who am I to disagree?

So, Tales... is a collection of a few short stories from the world of Earthsea. None of those expand on the story of prior books, but they expand the world... or rather our understanding. Sure, we hear about events that happen, but nothing here changes them or. Nothing here comes a shock, nothing actually new is added or old is recontextualized. It's just series of things that happened in this harsh world (especially, of course, to woman).

None of the stories stand out or are memorable, but none of them are bad. They are all interesting, and well crafted. Well worth to read to get the full experience, but with my zero knowledge of the last volume I'll guess it's skippable.

I've been using a mixture of multiple DNS providers, mostly due to laziness but also: money. I have static IPs on servers, and dynamic at home.

One of my favorites is 1984.is, an small Icelandic service. Today I noticed that they support DDNS!

The config for ddclient(1) is simple:

protocol=1984
use=web, web=ipv4.wtfismyip.com/text
password=[redacted]
sapka.pl

One more service in the Europe!

Here's something completely new about me: I completely stopped listening to music on the go. I had this article in my mind for quite some time, but Wouter published his thoughts so I feel it's time

I went the usual portable music player path of a Walkman ripoff, then an mp3 player, then a phone. However, after I dropped streaming in favor of owning music, I got an mp3 player again - and I wrote about it back in 2023 It was a used Sansa Clip which died a few months later.

It was close to a year ago, I think. Of course I started to look for an alternative (and Ruben is, as always, partly to blame). I created a list of things I want (buttons), and things I didn't want (android) and started the search. I found nothing that would fit the bill and not cost both arms, legs and a first born son. The search continued.

But in the meantime I noticed that I have zero need to it. I left the house listening to the street and it was ok. Now I do it more often (thanks, Mr. Doctor) and I actually enjoy the feeling of presence in the moment.

I was never into music as I have a hard time focusing on sound alone. I need some visual stimulation! At the same time I have lots (lots) of racing thoughts. Music was a way make them go away for some time, but what's the point? Those are my thoughts, and they are there for a reason.

I started to treat background music as the real noise. A car drives by? Cool. A bird is chipping? I'm all in. I would never focus on the music either way. It was just... there.

It's not that I stopped listening to music all together, but now I do what some call critical listening. When I want to listen to music, I listen to music. I try for it to be all that there is. It's like with movies: yes, you can watch them on the can, or with a smartphone connected directly to your brain, but that's not how it should be done.

So, now I listen to music much less. I listen to some during work, as why not? Coltrane is always great! But it's not longer that I need to do it - I'm not working in an office; there is no bonus noise (sans The Wife 50 cm to the right). What I need is some time for me to be with me. Guess they call it "mindfulness" now. I call it "let's process it now so I can sleep later".

After an hour long walk, with phone left at house, and no music, I feel relaxed. It's a great feeling.

The fifth movie was Kiki. I was afraid that The Kid will reject as a "chick flick", but I am happy to report: no such thing!

Kiki is an amazing movie about a little witch making her own place in the world.

I am out of words about how beautiful this movie is. Only Japanese can make European, pre-war cities so beautiful. If this what they are fed since childhood, it's no wonder they end with depression after seeing Paris. And it's a 1989 movie, which means: no soulless computers. Everything was hand drawn and looks breathtaking. Kiki jumped right to the top few of the most beautiful movies I've ever seen, even though it's Arietty which looks the best. But with the love towards imaginary euro city pouring off every frame and being hand drawn? That's the stuff the doctor ordered. Straight to the prettiest movies I've ever seen list. Even the few actions scenes here are a feat to behold!

The story is also great. No evil, bad guy (as most of the time when it comes to Ghibili) but a heart-warning coming out of age story. I'm not sure how I feel about forcing 13 year old to work, but it's something like Europe in the 50s - sans war. Kiki is lucky not to have died cleaning chimneys a few years earlier.

(all caps from Fancaps)

As I'm slowly migrating from Hugo to my own SSG, they continue to issue breaking changes. Just yesterday, I was unable to build it as partials folder changed name.

Things I didn't knew I can: lock pkg version:

pkg lock gohugo

And they won't break it for me again!