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-Our server/intranet Tenma is currently underutilized, and it would be nice/fun/useful to open it up to select other people. This would only be available to friends, not a public service. -
--As of 23-06-2025, 4.6TB free space. Could start by reserving 1TB, which would provide enough storage for 20×50GB for guests users, which would be plenty for a long time. Tenma also hosts a copyparty instance that could be opened to the public to some extent or another. -
--Tenma has full web hosting infrastructure set up (hosting this blog among other things), so that would be easy to extend to other people as well. -
--In line with the previous 2 points; compute resources are currently underutilized. -
--Tenma runs a Wireguard VPN network. You can use this to, for instance, access services between two connected devices without having to open them up to the wider internet. -
--Tenma runs a fully resolving DNS server, with some local entries for devices on the VPN network. This should probably be automated in some way, and the service should be augmented with DNSSEC before opening. -
--Tenma has a Gitea instance -
--Tenma has infrastructure proven capable of restreaming 1080p video and high quality audio to at least ~100 people although this is CPU intensive and requires activating a high bandwidth restreaming VPS that is usually kept disabled to save costs. -
--Some other services that currently run on Tenma or have run there before: -
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-Every page should have a button that takes you to the org-mode source for that page, using the beautifully named org-org-export-to-org. This should interact properly with Access Control.
-
-The blog should have a form of access control. For instance, some things might be public, but other things I might only want to show to select people, or might contain other people’s semi-confidential information that needs protection. Also, some people might want to opt out/not care about certain types of content, or I might want to present a certain “view” of the content myself. -
- --As such, we need: -
--With one or more categories. This should definitely work at least on the section level. The most viable candidate feature seems to be org-mode tags. -
-
-Best place to start would be looking at EXCLUDE_TAGS. Should export to org file first and from there to HTML, in order to enable Source Exposure.
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-i.e., the actual permission system. I definitely want to at least be able to: -
--Maybe powered by bluesky? I’ve heard that’s a thing people do. -
--Good use case for AI -
-+Here I keep some memoirs of (mostly music) events I’ve helped organized, participated in, or attended; I’m putting trips I’ve gone on here as well. +
++A doujin music event in Paris which I helped organize! +
++I sorta-kinda was support crew here. Also includes general notes on my trip to the beautiful city of Wrocław, Poland. +
+This is a retrospective on Premier Impact, a music event we held on the 10th of May 2025.
A bit of context that’ll help illustrate some of the organisational difficulties involved in the event:
@@ -259,9 +259,9 @@ The observant reader might notice that this is a bit of a tight squeeze; it coulThe event theme was doujin music and generally J-core/breakcore/anison, though in practice we gave DJs complete free reign as to what to play and the event was better characterized as “we invite our friends to play good music”; it’s perhaps best understood in relationship to other similar events2. These events are already common elsewhere, but not aren’t yet established in France, despite there clearly existing a sizeable audience for them — our aim was thus to start putting this on the map here in Paris.
@@ -275,9 +275,9 @@ For the poster we ended up borrowing a lot from the -Since this was our first event3 we went into this without existing contacts and without a confirmed audience. Largely because of this4 we mostly committed to finding a venue that would let us host the event for free.
@@ -315,7 +315,7 @@ One place that was open to talks with us was the awesome -
We originally got a reply from Les Amarres on April 4th, so we were in communication with both them and Spot 13 in parallel, but we only got confirmation they’d be available on April 15th. They let us hold the event in their venue for free, so accepting immediately was a no-brainer. They even gave our staff free drinks and meals11!
Only now that we had a venue we ready to formally invite guest DJs and start putting publicity out. Promo went out on April 24th, less than 2.5 weeks until the event.
@@ -369,16 +369,16 @@ I want to give massive thanks to Ed for agreeing to take over the slot that my s
Those that were present around the end of the event might have seen Apt and I frantically faffing about with two DJ controllers, three laptops and a bass guitar. We ran into two kinds of technical issues during our set.
@@ -470,9 +470,9 @@ The GK-3B is pretty expensive so we had bought it with the intention of using itLooking critically, behind the scenes—and to some extend unfortunately also on the stage—this was an organisational mess. Some of this definitely could’ve been prevented – Apt and I take full responsibility for the original error of failing to secure a venue in time. Other hecticness in the planning wasn’t really preventable—there’s a reason this post opens with a description of our schedule—but will be avoided in the future. It was a learning experience for sure.
@@ -510,7 +510,7 @@ And You, The Reader, for bearing with my doubtlessly excessive wordiness.
Alex, apt-get, mercury.lamp, pachy and myself were in Wrocław1, Poland between April 30th and May <END DATE> for Millennium Strike Live WROC.WAV where apt and merc were performing (B2B, under alias Re;iwa Diabolik). Shout out to pachy for finding time and money to join us last minute; I am very very glad he was able to be there, it wouldn’t have been the same without him.
Basically all the time in Wrocław before the event was spent on… actually preparing the set, which hadn’t really been started yet, so we were mostly inside the hotel — this had much to do with apt and I being busy preparing for Premier Impact and everyone just generally being busy. Alex, pachy and I were technically free, but I was also trying to make stuff happen for Premier Impact still, and we all kinda hung around for moral support.
With us primarily being there for the event and it being a really busy period, I don’t think any of us had really read up on the city very much. Safe to say we were all very pleasantly surprised! Wrocław is an absolutely lovely city; real student town energy with lots of young people, very warm hospitality and a very homely, casual atmosphere in restaurants as well.
Wrocław has really cool architecture, a pretty eclectic mix of styles and old and new stuff. Lots of old defensive works that I believe were built after the Mongol invasion. Quoting Wikipedia:
@@ -378,7 +378,7 @@ Lots of beautiful brickwork which is a style of architecture I have not encounte
Overall Wrocławians made a strong impression on me as warm, hospitable, humorous and headstrong people. Wrocław had a very active anti-communist resistance that they are very proud of, and they’ve kept that history very alive, both visibly in the city scape but also in their endearing fashion sense.
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--This essay is a response to the degenerate and subversive position occupied by private sector “payment processors”1 generally. -
- --The root of this particular saga pertains to the delisting of a number pornographic video games by online video game marketplace Steam, in response to pressure by payment processors2, who themselves are acting in response to an open letter by nonprofit Collective Shout. A list of the banned games can be found on SteamDB, although it’s gated behind a login and not easily searchable. -
- --The catalyst for my writing this is an announcement by video game marketplace itch.io. -
--Before we can tackle the matter of oppression, we must first tackle the oppressor’s eternal trap head on: at any point in time, those visibly chosen to be victims will always be those least palatable to defend. We can be frank: looking at the list of things that got banned, it looks like a bunch of shovelware. None of it looks like it has any artistic merit, nor do I think anyone is better off interacting with the stuff. -
- --Focusing on this, though, inverts and subverts the fundamental principle of justice and rule of law: one’s freedom and sovereignty extend all the way up to where another’s begins. It is the limitation of one’s freedom which must justify itself. To fixate on whether this stuff is worth defending presupposes the aggressor’s right to attack it, and confuses the issue upon whom the authority rests to legitimately decide what is permissible. -
- --If I were in charge of Steam I wouldn’t have allowed this slop onto my marketplace, just as if I were Jeff Bezos I wouldn’t have accepted the fourth-rate junk one can find on Amazon Marketplace. This is utterly irrelevant to the matter at hand. It should also be said not allowing something in the first place differs from pulling something like refusing to award a building permit differs from taking a wrecking ball to someone’s house. -
--Open Shout’s mandate seems to be the usual “violent porn causes people to rape” — yes, the usual “violent videogames” bit. Their open letter doesn’t even actually go as far as saying this, but you can find it in their other writings on the matter. Is there even anything to say? The “violent videogames” bit is decades old. My personal stance is that I suspect that if all rape games were banned tomorrow, no scientist would be able to distinguish the effect on sexual abuse rates from zero. They’re entitled to their views and this is in no way a polemic against Open Shout — this essay doesn’t concern itself with whether these games should be banned; it is about who should be the judge on that — spoiler: I don’t think it’s MasterCard. -
--I was reading a little style guide on Slate Star Codex. Now truth be told, I generally find this kind of “don’t say this, say that instead” style guide somewhat patronizing and quite irritating (more of a testament to my own rebellious spirit than any indictment of any author) and unhelpfully unnuanced (a more practical complaint), and my first instinct was to want to argue this lack of nuance. On the other hand, Scott is a very skilled communicator and an examplar in how being an enormous dork need not be a barrier to popularity, and there is a more helpful general principle hidden in these rules. -
- --The principle here is that while reading (or listening, viewing, …), people are constantly predicting what will come next. If what they read is what they expect - all good, the reading flows smoothly, and people interpret the text as saying what they already thought it was saying, which is low effort and comfortable. If, on the other hand, they encounter something unexpected, this will stand out, draw their intention, be interpreted as meaningful. -
- --Staying on the level of single words and turns of phrase, in practice what this means is that when you use an unusual word or phrasing instead of a more conventional (to the reader! “normal speech” is audience-relative!) synonym, it will be taken as deliberate and specific; the reader will interpret your choice to use that word as you having searched for the right word to use because the specific meaning matters. -
- --Often, this is not what you want. In scientific discourse, precision is highly valued, and so scientific writing has a house style of using carefully chosen, specific words. In normal everyday prose, however, this amounts to information overload. Even if the length of the text ends up the same, by choosing unexpected “pokey” words, you are preventing the reader from rounding your message off to their own everyday working set of concepts. In effect, you’re making your message less compressible for them. Try and do this sparingly! All of this is simply a special case of the commonsense principles of getting to the point and avoiding extraneous detail. -
- --I am fairly sure this is all supposed to be strongly related to the linguistic principle of markedness, but the wikipedia page on markedness is too technical for me to care enough about parsing and I get the impression that “markedness” is a broad multi-dimensional idea of which this post is a specific instance and my perspective on the topic is too superficial to point at the specific thing I am thinking of. -
--Having arrived at a nice concise principle of communication, let’s take a step back and generalize a bit, because I think this idea of the brain as constantly predicting sensory input and responding to surprises is useful and interesting. Specifically, while writing this it called up something I have read about schizophrenia. In a nutshell, schizophrenics commonly experience something what is called “delusions of reference”, in which they interpret innocuous things (e.g. newspaper headlines, things said on radio) as having special meaning to them. In some theories of brain function, there is an explanation for this that goes as follows: the brain is constantly predicting upcoming stimuli. In people with schizophrenia, this sometimes goes awry in a way that makes the brain flag something innocuous as deeply surprising. To the schizophrenic person, this feels as though the stimulus in question is somehow deeply meaningful to them personally, presumably in the same way that choosing an unusual “pokey” word instead of a more common synonym feels deliberate and meaningful. -
- --This is all related to the neuroscientific paradigm of predictive coding. I am not articulate enough in this to write about it at length and since all I know about this is from SSC articles I have read, I will just link those: I got the bit about schizophrenia from It’s Bayes All The Way Up and for more in-depth state-of-the-art neuroscience stuff consider Scott’s excellent review of Surfing Uncertainty. -
--Enjoy various links and stuff I found working through hundreds of browser tabs and other piles of “I’ll deal with it later”. -
--General French learning FAQ -
--1GB of frogs and bread -
--This might conflict with the current system for collapsing sections. -
--And what about the (public) git repo for this blog? -
--right now I think things end up with stale caches all the time (like the sitemap); should be set with headers -
--i.e. one back end, multiple front ends -
-
Every page should have a button that takes you to the org-mode source for that page, using the beautifully named org-org-export-to-org.
static/ dirstatic/ dir+Here’s a list of projects I maintain or am currently working on. +
+Our server/intranet Tenma is currently underutilized, and it would be nice/fun/useful to open it up to select other people. This would only be available to friends, not a public service.
As of 23-06-2025, 4.6TB free space. Could start by reserving 1TB, which would provide enough storage for 20×50GB for guests users, which would be plenty for a long time. Tenma also hosts a copyparty instance that could be opened to the public to some extent or another.
Tenma has full web hosting infrastructure set up (hosting this blog among other things), so that would be easy to extend to other people as well.
In line with the previous 2 points; compute resources are currently underutilized.
Tenma runs a Wireguard VPN network. You can use this to, for instance, access services between two connected devices without having to open them up to the wider internet.
Tenma runs a fully resolving DNS server, with some local entries for devices on the VPN network. This should probably be automated in some way, and the service should be augmented with DNSSEC before opening.
Tenma has a Gitea instance
Tenma has infrastructure proven capable of restreaming 1080p video and high quality audio to at least ~100 people although this is CPU intensive and requires activating a high bandwidth restreaming VPS that is usually kept disabled to save costs.
Some other services that currently run on Tenma or have run there before:
@@ -308,9 +308,9 @@ Some other services that currently run on Tenma or have run there before:This is a reflective article on the time I spent working as a software contractor in the cryptocurrency sector between 2021 and 2022 (maybe 10 months total?). I did a variety of things including full-stack web development, blockchain integrations, as well as some smart contract development and general consulting.
This period was around the tail end of my passing interest/involvement in the cryptocurrency phenomenon, a time period that roughly spans from 2016 until the end of this gig in early 2022. I was interested in the technology, but wasn’t actively building on it until 2021 and being 23 years old and living off student loans I didn’t hold a significant financial stake in cryptocurrency. My connection to the wider crypto1 ran primarily through a good friend, and it was this friend that recruited me to this gig.
@@ -259,28 +259,28 @@ Given its central importance to the story I suppose I must detail exactly how mu