==================== Nicomachean Ethics ==================== I have finished (re-)reading Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics", this time more slowly and thoroughly, and with more context, than on the first reading (or skimming) a while ago. As expected, much of it is about "good" and "evil", but there are many interesting speculations, and it is simply interesting to consider older perspectives, to observe both how the prevailing views change, and how people do not seem to change much. As with Plato, there were ideas that I imagined to be more modern: e.g., "I think, therefore I am" (though noticed that Wikipedia lists Aristotle in predecessors to the Descartes's "first principle"), and references to (in the form of arguments against) Protagoras's relativism ("Good man, in that he is such, is the measure of everything"). And a worrying proposal for states to be more involved in citizens' personal lives towards the end. All in all, as with many older texts, it looks like a decent effort to build a model, using the information and resources at hand: coming up with something usable and a fine approximation, even if it is not the final one. And it is a useful book for discovery of connections between major materials and ideas, for the context. I have also recently read or re-read chunks of a few other major philosophical works from different times; such an overview makes it all the more apparent how those lean on their contemporary scientific theories and models, not to mention the evolution of views. Even though I was somewhat familiar with most of that before, as I guess it is hard to miss major ideas completely these days, adding the details and checking out the primary sources (well, mostly translations) is still interesting: like reading a book or watching a movie, rather than its plot summary. In addition to those, I decided to check out another introductory book, "Introduction to Philosophy" from OpenStax. Unlike some other introductions, it is not a teaser or a summary, but a textbook, with good suggestions on how to approach texts: explaining cognitive biases, suggesting to "steelman" arguments, to keep in mind that many philosophy books were written by smart people, but living in a different world, even including a section on information literacy. Those I would include into an introductory text as well. Following my mention of a history book in the previous post, agk of sdf.org shared a list of history-related books, one of which I have read then. A fictional one, which was easier and quicker to read, as a break between more involved reading: Aitmatov's "The day lasts for more than a century" (but in Russian: "И дольше века длится день"). Enjoyed its mixture of a rural life with drama in a historic context, fictional mythology, and science fiction. The science fiction bits apparently had an issue: mentioning sentient beings from another galaxy, who can travel at the speed of light, but somehow the flight to Earth taking them mere 26 to 27 hours, and the communication seems to take no more than that. While Andromeda is millions of light-years away, even Proxima Centauri is a few light-years away. But the accuracy in that was not the point of the book, since as the spoiler placed in the introduction said, it was included for the sake of a metaphor; it is not a book to help with daydreaming of interstellar travel. Other news ========== - Acquired an OpenWrt One router. Checked that it works, but did not play with it yet. Planning to use it primarily as a small network-connected computer, to move some services there, and as a backup router. - I have set biboumi (an XMPP-to-IRC gateway), which seems to work well, though did not use it much. Also have set XMPP and IRC servers, along with biboumi, at work, to have a backup communication channel, as well as a more secure one, but they are unused. And finally tried out poezio (picked it as a client to have on the server, so that an SSH connection alone is sufficient to join a chat, over either IRC or XMPP), which looks like a fine XMPP client (standalone TUI, akin to irssi or WeeChat). - Other work adventures included a bureaucratic push for security, complete with many weird documents, translated CVE and CWE databases, and bastardized standards, which threatened to be a waste of time, but allowed to do actually useful things: to update the systems on servers, and to work on other system hardening, following some suggestions produced by a scan with lynis. Though I guess that it is common in such systems to have a few major custom-made vulnerabilities, which by far outweigh any hardening: the latter is like reinforcing sections of a wall that has a few large holes in it. - LLMs reached my day job: we are hiring a junior developer to work on making an LLM-based interface, as if the regular broken and JS-heavy web interface does not make it hard enough to retrieve information. Both as a user and as a developer I usually wish that reliability and accessibility were prioritized over a stream of new features, especially over incorporation of hyped technologies. While struggling to think which projects actually benefit from addition of LLMs: it seems that those are simply bolted on everywhere only to be there, as distributed ledgers and SPAs were before. And then there also are the technologies that developers themselves like to incorporate for no good reason, such as external message queue systems, unnecessary databases, microservices, excessive containerization and orchestration, and just about anything shiny and new. Meantime, the accumulated accidental complexity already leads to loss of needed functionality: in the past few days I had to direct one person to a direct interaction with a database instead of a JS-based web UI, and another one to either an API or finding somebody who can debug an SPA that does not work for some. - Worked a little more with Python and GraphQL (FastAPI and Graphene, to use packages from Debian repositories). Python does feel wonky, compared to Haskell, even while I think I am quite open to liking it. I would prefer SPARQL over GraphQL myself, if anything like that was needed at all in the first place, but used it here for an integration of a small service into a website that uses it. - Looked more for languages usable and practical for implementing an efficient and portable proxy server using their standard libraries alone, went through the D language's tour. It looks more like a "better Java" to me, rather than a "better C": a pile of language features, far from minimalistic, but a neat pile at that. I think it can be nice to write in, though did not try it yet. But its "fibers" are not quite like lightweight threads, and its functions are blocking, the polling it has for sockets uses plain select(), so it is not easily usable for an efficient proxy server without dependencies, either. Then I looked into Python, which does support asynchronous and efficient networking out of the box. Quite a contrast between the language itself being slower than all the others I have considered, and the tools it provides out of the box being more efficient. - Local Internet censorship keeps worsening. Mobile Internet had been temporarily shut down a few times, before and during the military parade (for the first time, without a warning), unsurprisingly leading to numerous disruptions. All websites behind Cloudflare are blocked if ECH is enabled (which is the default in Firefox). SSH connections from a remote continuous deployment runner to one of the work servers fail during authentication now, possibly also blocked. While the censorship is just a part of the overall situation, which exhibits similar tendencies. - I heard of Collapse OS before, and recently learned about Dusk OS. Those are interesting projects, which I plan to look more into. I cannot help but to think that for actual post-apocalyptic scenarios, similarly to state-imposed isolation ones, it would be more useful to focus on gathering and making freely available documentation, textbooks, and information generally, rather than systems and code, but those projects still look fun, and it generally seems to be a good approach to educational projects to make something simple, imagining such a hypothetical scenario. ---- :Date: 2025-05-17