Bomoko and other nonsense words

 Short one, but I think one that I'll revisit again and again here. There is no shortage of suffering in this world. Indeed, unless we're very lucky, almost every one of us will experience extreme suffering and loss through our lives, if only at the end where we lose everything, including our-selves (whatever that may be). Think of the latter as the extreme of personal suffering. In the other direction, call it collective suffering, we are also on the precipice of, potentially, major global destabilization due to a number of things, not least climate change, which threatens to cause unimaginable suffering on a mass scale. This collective kind of unimaginable suffering is always almost with us, whether it be from war, weather, disease, or ideology, among a host of others. We tend to fear this kind of collective suffering more than personal suffering, but if you zoom out a little and pay attention, you'll see that the scale of personal suffering is really just a slow moving ...

November 12, 2023, Update to add: One reason to prefer Vagrant over docker is actually because of the mission involved in setting up projects running services. Since containers typically run single processes, systemd isn't necessary to coordinate these processes.    So I'm currently working through Jeff Geerling 's great book Ansible for Devops . However, I wasn't so keen on installing and running vagrant when everything should be doable (I believe) using docker-compose. At the same time, I'm going through his book so that I can better manage my few Raspberry Pis at home, and I'd like to be able to test my ansible scripts before running them on the live pis.   So what I decided to do was kill two birds with one repo and set up a docker-compose based test environment that can run my ansible scripts, but that mirrors my current ripi setup (mostly).   Home network My current homelab is nothing special. Three pis -- coffee, xray, and pizza -- each with a static add...

A while back, more than a decade ago (god), I had a friend who recommended blogging as a tool for thinking. Back then I was just getting started with graduate work in cognitive science (something I was new to) and was dealing with insecurity around whether I'd be able to cope etc. Life has changed, the degree got done in good time, I found I could mostly keep up with everyone around me (although, I also had the good fortune of meeting people who were way, way smarter than me - something everyone should experience as often as possible - more on this later, I'm sure) -- but I dropped the blog when I left my home country (South Africa) for my adopted one (New Zealand). I more or less got rid of all public channels of communication at that point - all social media, my blog, stopped doing philosophy, and stopped writing fiction. There were a few reasons for it, but mostly I think I realized that I didn't want to have to deal with the (imagined) pressure of putting myself out in ...