================================
 Hobbes, Locke, LLMs, exercises
================================

Thomas Hobbes
=============

Finished reading the "Of Commonwealth" part of Thomas Hobbes's
"Leviathan", but skipped the last two parts, since those are mostly
religious. At first I thought he may be praising a religion as a
requirement of the time and place, but now it looks more likely that
he was genuinely into it. This is an instance of Poe's law, which was
originally stated on a religious Internet forum, too.

Most of what looks to me objectionable and unusual in it revolves
around his praise of a sovereign's absolute power: disapproval of the
rule of law (of making sovereign representatives subjects to laws), of
separation of powers, of judgment of good and evil by subjects
themselves (and acting according to their conscience), of civil
disobedience or other resistance to the sovereign, of private property
(not shared with the sovereign), of democracy. The extensive use of
metaphors, particularly the commonwealth-man analogy, looks awkward,
especially after he criticizes imprecise and misleading use of
language by others. Also accuses others of describing a popular
government--which they observed to work fine--as a good option, but
appears to do the same with an absolute monarchy. Compares a monarch
to both a father and a god, building such a vertical, with yet more
analogies. Describes everyone outside of a commonwealth as its (and
its subjects') enemy, apparently as a consequence of everyone being at
war against everyone else in the natural state, without a shared
commonwealth. Does not even consider use of a constitution (which
could have been DNA in his analogies), of creating a covenant based on
a structure other than a strictly hierarchical one. Dismisses
cooperation examples in other animals not quite convincingly. Claims
that monarch's private interests coincide with public ones in
monarchies, to which modern autocracies are
counterexamples. Describing peaceful living within a commonwealth, and
war of all against all among commonwealths, he depicts commonwealths
as islands of peace, but that does not work well when a total war is
an option. Seems to put much trust into the Golden Rule (and natural
law) working perfectly. Not to mention the religious bits (divine
law). Considers torture an acceptable tool.

While he apparently had a nice and flourishing monarchy in mind, now
it sounds like praise of autocracies, which do not have a good track
record. Multiple well-known ones closely followed what he describes as
a proper way, it seems. The book helps to better understand what the
local government and its supporters may have in mind, too, conveying
such a world view quite clearly, with some reasoning behind it. And as
other such major works, it is simply useful to read for the context.

It reminded me of centralized instant messenger advocacy. Not just
because of the concentration of power, or the advocacy of status quo
by the proponents, but also because of a few personal discussions on
that topic. Omitting the details, I notice that people tend to
describe every aspect of what they are given (or generally have) as
desirable, the alternatives as undesirable, and when what they are
given is changed, they change the declared preferences accordingly,
even to the opposite. Maybe it can be called loyalty, maybe similar to
(the worse kinds of, if one makes a distinction) patriotism or
nationalism, or plain conformity. It similarly happens with other
technology debates: black and white thinking, oversimplification,
probably mixed with preconceptions. But seeing preconceptions in
others, and not seeing them in yourself, is common as well; both in
such online arguments, and in the books. Preconceptions are supposed
to be mitigated by a more scientific approach, as many authors,
including Hobbes, aspired to employ, but that does not appear to work
well.


John Locke
==========

For a contrast, while continuing the theme of political philosophy, I
decided to read John Locke's "Two Treatises of Government". Discovered
that the first of those treatises is not the argumentation I expected,
but simply an interpretation of some religious texts, which supports
Locke's views, and this is how he answers Filmer's interpretation of
the same texts, which supported Filmer's views, of course. Both
finding a way towards their different (likely) preconceptions, and not
even from observable facts, but from works of fiction. Anyway, I
skipped to the second treatise after reading it for a bit.

The second treatise features a more optimistic view on the natural
state of people, their (our) self-organization and cooperation than
that of Hobbes, and a more negative view of an absolute monarchy. It
still has many religious references (often quoting Richard Hooker),
but the kinds you can ignore without altering the contents most of the
time, as if they were added on top as decorations. Learning to not
quite notice such bits feels similar to developing banner
blindness. Though it is also used as an universal filler, as an
explanation for everything unknown, such as evolution at the time.

As expected, Locke points at the lawlessness of an absolute monarch
being an issue. While still considering the social contract, but not
the kind where all the power is given to an absolute monarch to do as
he will.

The chapter "of the beginning of political societies", describing
people being born naturally free, joining commonwealths and consenting
to their rules by enjoying their land (having property, using
services), and becoming their subjects or members by an express
agreement, does not mention any consent from the commonwealth, does
not explain why modern states make a strict distinction between people
born to their citizens and to others.

The legislative power not being necessarily standing seems like an
interesting approach: akin to standardization committees forming from
time to time, yet the standards working all the time. People electing
its members occasionally sounds nice, too.

The separation of powers into legislative, executive, and "federative"
(foreign affairs, rather than judiciary) is unusual, as seen from our
times and common practices. Montesquieu may be nice to read someday,
as he covers this topic more extensively, and goes after Locke
chronologically.

While reading Hobbes, on multiple occasions I caught myself thinking
that it is roughly how things are here (except for pretenses that they
are not, and it not working out well), while with Locke, it is rather
how they should be (according to the constitution, to what we have
formally, or simply what seems sensible to me). Except for the last
three chapters: of usurpation, tyranny, and the dissolution of
government; those also sound similar to what is.

At times he speaks of public good as if it is easily determined,
though at other times takes into account that oppression may be
presented by a tyrant as public good. Still relies on people generally
sorting it out correctly, but democracy in general relies on that,
too.

The mentions of self-defense, including acting before it is too late,
made me to wonder about the distinction between a justified and a
premature self-defense: with both a government turning into an
autocracy, or even on the way to totalitarianism, and an individual
policemen visibly deviating from the laws in an already corrupt state,
resistance only puts a person resisting into a much worse position,
without attaining anything: it is simultaneously too late for useful
resistance, and too early for sufficiently many people to
join. Perhaps this is why people tend to emigrate instead, which is
something Locke did not write much about in this treatise.

With both Hobbes and Locke, as well as with other philosophers, and
with people casually speculating, it often sounds like they make
hypotheses and build models explaining how something might work, and
then apply them as if those describe how it does work. Even scientific
models are used this way, but more carefully, with more consideration
of alternatives, with more search for simpler and better-fitting
models, while some of these philosophy or casual speculation ones seem
quite lax. Though it must be hard to improve on that, and one may
still benefit from using some model, even a relatively poor one. A
more extreme example of that is making of conspiracy theories, or
explaining all sorts of things with malice, in some cases even
incorporating supernatural beliefs.


LLMs
====

I tried to avoid the topic of large language models (aka "AI", as of
the past few years), since I am annoyed by there being too much of it
around, and all those discussions do not seem to lead anywhere. But
been convinced to check out "AI agents" (i.e., LLM with added I/O) and
"vibe coding". Not convinced enough to run anything proprietary or to
pay for it (especially given that international payments are still
highly complicated here), but enough to run llama.cpp, Emacs's gptel,
and a couple of small models on my old CPU, in addition to poking
those at duck.ai more actively, and reading more on those.

The local models (DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B-Q4_K_M.gguf,
gemma-3n-E4B-it-Q4_K_M.gguf) seemed just as those on duck.ai: somewhat
impressive at first, especially for such small ones, but regularly
failing in various ways. At these speeds and with these failures,
Emacs integration did not seem very useful. The proponents of
programming with active use of LLMs, as those of various other
technologies, tend to explain others' poor experiences by wrong or
insufficient usage, and for LLMs there is also a recurring claim that
they used to be bad a few months ago, but the leading ones are much
better now. Which does not sound more convincing as it is repeated
over time. I plan to wait and see more evidence of their usefulness,
before trying to use them more extensively.

I value correctness, prefer statically and strongly typed languages to
check that the manually written code looks about right; like the idea
of Lojban aiming to reduce ambiguities in human speech, structured
information (RDF and friends), formal logic generally. People tried to
obtain (or sell) usage of a natural language for programming for a
while, and it always looked like the opposite approach. Likewise with
data retrieval: I recall having dreams in which I read a book, then I
realize that it is a dream, disappointed by the waste of time it is to
read what you just unconsciously made up. Generating texts with a
program, without a deterministic information lookup and references,
feels similar, though with a higher chance that there will be new
information.

At the same time, I see that some people are excited about it, being
able to compose projects they were not able to compose (as quickly)
before. Not sure how useful that is for technology learning, but if
such code generation is actually useful, it sounds like those
technologies may also benefit from better APIs and documentation.

Then I see polarization around LLMs: there is one along the political
polarization lines, as with most topics, but also a rather
technological one: in multiple instances I notice that those who are
big on LLMs now, were also active supporters of "blockchain",
everything in "the Cloud" (SaaS), proprietary and centralized
technologies; generally approaching computing not as hobbyists or
enthusiasts, but as business people. Maybe all those reflect political
views as well, but this polarization is a curious thing.

Aside form "vibe coding", "AI agents" made with LLMs can be handy for
self-hosted home assistants, combined with speech recognition (as
mentioned previously, Whisper works well for that) and speech
synthesis (that is easier, works well with much older projects, such
as Festival or eSpeak).

It is tempting to use them for grammar checking and general editorial
work, but I am worried about "sloppifying" texts that way.

The copyright infringement (and possibly other IP law violation)
issues around it are unsettling: those laws seemed quite harmful for a
while, yet we had to deal with them, which included all the arguing,
controversies, and incompatibilities about software licenses, while
now it seems to be ignored. Which would be a good thing if it was
because of the laws changed for everyone, but they were not.


Exercises
=========

I decided to finally learn more about proper workout planning and
scheduling. Previously I thought that avoiding it must be rather
counterproductive, just as so many people avoid improving the skills
in activities they (we) perform regularly, but wanted to keep the
exercising casual, not to spend too much time or attention on it, and
it seemed to work fine. But as I suspected, apparently there were a
few issues due to the lack of learning and planning: I used to focus
too much on the number of repetitions (endurance training), rather
than on proper form and proceeding to harder exercises (strength
training, and fun new exercises, their progressions), and now I am
more convinced that rest days at least deserve a try.

Acquired a few books, started with "Overcoming Gravity", which
contains what looks like a good coverage of fundamentals and routine
planning. Other than that, the book aims usage of gymnastic rings,
which I do not have at home, so it is not a great match for a home
workout, but I have a few more bodyweight strength training books
queued, including those aiming no-equipment workouts. And some on
stretching, too.

Will see where it will take me, but rather excited about working
towards (and practicing) those new exercises now, and about observing
how it works. The workout now includes: burpees (with push-ups and
jumps), a quick stretching/mobility routine, planks (1 leg 1 arm,
regular, reverse, both sides), hollow hold, arch hold (superman), crow
pose (straight-arm frog stand), L-sit progression (holding it properly
just for a few seconds, so practicing mostly with either one or both
legs bent, or on handles/parallettes), pull-ups with legs bent at
knees (working towards L-sit pull-ups), push-ups (regular, pike,
diamond), attempts at pistol squats (falling most of the time right
after sitting down though, but at least practicing "negatives"), wall
sits, hanging leg raises, followed by my regular "cardio" routine
(which includes 25 minutes of HIIT exercises, which are not strictly
cardio, so I probably should not do it on rest days; although they
feel more like cardio, so I am unsure about that). This does not
perfectly follow the workout routine recommendations, but it is a step
towards them, and something I can try rather easily, while including
the exercises I want to try (or practice). Going to adjust it after
reading more and acquiring more experience. This new routine
(including "cardio") takes 2 to 3.5 hours, which is about the same as
it used to be with fewer daily exercises, but with some computing
(work, light reading, videos) stuffed between them.

I try to walk on the newly introduced rest days; fortunately the
weather tends to be fine in the summer, there is no mud. I used to
view solitary walks as boring and a waste of time, but enjoyed the few
I had recently. It is rather relaxing, though slightly spoiled by the
ubiquitous surveillance cameras.


Other
=====

- The local government keeps maintaining a slowly unfolding
  disaster. This month, among other things, there were more of
  regional mobile Internet blackouts, WhatsApp and Telegram voice call
  blocking started with little warning (in the form of rumors about
  major mobile network operators asking to do so, so that people would
  use their voice call services more). Informal organizations
  (arbitrarily defined groups of people) now can be declared extremist
  without a court order if a single member of those is declared
  so. Speedtest.net is blocked as well, apparently to protect Runet
  from data throughput measurements. The Reporters Without Borders
  organization is now declared "undesirable", while rsf.org was
  already blocked. Also Satanism is declared an extremist
  movement. More of citizenship revocations and other migrant
  oppression happened. Not to mention the high inflation and other
  routinized background news, and this keeps going for years.

- There are people who used to be fine with (or supportive of) the
  oppressive laws, while often being convinced that those will only
  affect terrorists. Now that those clearly affect virtually everyone
  (as with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Cloudflare, Signal, Viber,
  hosting companies, and many smaller service blocks before, Telegram
  and WhatsApp voice call blocks now, temporary Wikipedia and GitHub
  blocks in the past), I notice that the same people, though rather
  predictably, switch to either supporting that or not
  caring. Apparently it is a common tendency, showing up in various
  places and areas, to persist in the general views, even as the
  previously employed premises turn out to be clearly false.

- YouTube, in addition to being blocked here, now occasionally asks to
  "Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot". I have no Google account,
  which makes it tricky to sign in. It still works most of the time,
  but it is unfortunate that it is quite close to not working: there
  are many useful and entertaining videos.

- The information security theater at work grows sillier. ViPNet
  routers (for a proprietary and expensive VPN) are being set,
  "fatherland operating systems" (rebranded Linux distribution forks
  with proprietary components) are on the horizon, a message
  originating from an unknown source was forwarded by a manager,
  calling for "necessary emergency (extremely urgent) security
  measures" and listing outdated, vague, and routine security
  practices, without anything warranting the urgency. And we will have
  to figure out how to work with a local and mandatory government CERT
  next, which asks for "files in the '.excel' format" to sign up,
  hinting at the layered lameness that is to follow. Observed some of
  this silliness outside of work, too: service companies require
  "signatures", which are created by sending a picture of your
  passport and some other government identification numbers to a third
  party, following which they can "sign" electronic documents for (and
  as) you. Plenty of material is generated around here for absurdist
  comedies, though it is not that fun to live in one.

- My ClouDNS account was unexpectedly suspended, without a warning or
  an explanation. Fortunately I have only used it for a backup domain
  name, which I have not used for anything.

- There was quite a wave of email spam, making it past DNSBLs and the
  usual postscreen checks (on both my mail server and thunix.net). I
  started using postfix's body_checks to block at least the e-bike
  spam.

- Upgraded Debian to 13 on my laptop and on a server. Out of expected
  breaking changes, there were a few minor Dovecot configuration
  changes. Out of unexpected ones, something changed in Prosody, so I
  had to rebuild my rexmpp-based Emacs interface, to get SASL channel
  binding working. Also InspIRCd changed the default casemapping from
  "rfc1459" to "ascii" and removed that option, so I had to change it
  to ASCII in the old InspIRCd version connecting to that server. And
  now it requires TLS for non-local server connections, which
  unnecessarily complicates connections over VPN or LAN; reported it
  as an issue, which was promptly resolved by adding an undocumented
  option for setting networks that should count as local (which looks
  rather wrong to me, at least in naming, since those are trusted, but
  not necessarily local, but it is fine). It is also now suggested to
  use at least 768 MB for the boot partition, while I had 500 MB for
  it on the laptop, no space to grow it to, and a single partition for
  home and the root (system), to use the space more efficiently, but
  the downside of it is that reinstalling the system would probably be
  tricky (or risky, at least: unsure how the installer will handle it,
  whether it can reuse an existing encrypted partition like that,
  keeping the old /home on it, but installing the system) without
  wiping it all (and I have my music collection there, so that would
  be quite a bit of unnecessary overwriting). Fortunately I also had
  512 MB for the ESP, which was unnecessarily spacious. Prepared a
  rescue USB stick, backed up /boot/, unmounted /boot/efi/ and /boot/,
  reduced the ESP size, recreated the boot partition, created file
  systems with old UUIDs on both, mounted them back, restored the
  backed up files, then--just in case--ran grub-install and
  update-grub, rebooted, and it booted back fine. Now I have a 800 MB
  boot partition, which should suffice for the time being.

- Apparently WHATWG is about to remove XSLT from its standards. Which
  seems to be in line with the HTML's XML (XHTML) syntax deprecation,
  HTTP versions 2 and 3, and general tendencies around web
  development. While it is unfortunate, it seems relatively
  insignificant to me now, compared to the other happenings; it is
  nice when news like that are the most worrying kinds.

- Discovered that newer Android versions do not have the regular USB
  mass storage mode anymore, but use the Media Transfer Protocol (MTP)
  instead. To mount it on Debian, one needs something like jmtpfs. And
  it appears to be quite slow then. I had to use that, since Termux,
  which I used for file transfer between a phone and a computer
  before, fails to access the file system now (apparently due to the
  newer Android security policies).

- I keep trying to use offline services, including stores, and running
  into their reliance on semi-broken online ones, or at least pushing
  for their usage by customers (such as common discounts for
  registering and/or installing some proprietary cellphone
  software). It seems that technologies grow increasingly less usable
  and reliable, more restricted, yet everything around grows more
  dependent on them. Perhaps it is a disappointment or
  disillusionment, to observe this after being quite enthusiastic and
  hopeful about advancement and adoption of those technologies. I
  think I am still hopeful that it will improve eventually, but now it
  looks like a much longer way until that can be achieved. Apparently
  this story is similar to those of adoption and usage of older
  technologies: junk occupies considerable portions of print, radio,
  and TV, for instance; at best the sensible uses remain
  possible. Though in this case they also hinder other activities.


----

:Date: 2025-08-20