Brent - lesser daemon

25

Jun

I Want To Believe

I think it was when Eric Adams got elected that I lost faith in the system. It's kind of funny - you'd think it would have been Trump 1 or Trump 2 - but really it was Adams that broke me. Here was an obviously corrupt and incompetent candidate in one of the most progressive cities in America with two or three perfectly valid other candidates that by all accounts should have at the very least won in the later round of ranked choice voting. Instead we elected the vibes and bitcoin guy who naturally near-immediately started doing crimes and

4 min read

20

Jun

Home Assistant Is Astonishingly Easy To Set Up On Synology

Just a quick shout-out to Home Assistant, who have relatively easy-to-follow documentation for setting the app up on a Synology NAS. Just download the container, add your time zone, make sure it's set to use the "host network", and make sure port 8123 is open on your firewall. I'd been putting off setting this up given the usual amount of lift involved in getting something new runing on my homelab, but it only took me about 10 minutes. Finally no more fiddling with the Hue app, and K can purchase (some) smart devices without me getting all mad about proprietary software and security.

17

Jun

stopping 100 days

Almost a month ago I wrote about the slow decline in frequency of my attempt at a hundred days of blog posts. I think, given that I'm down to a less-than-weekly cadence, I cannot call this a hundred days project in earnest any longer. In the spirit of "learning in the open" and being honest about failing and doing things poorly I thought I'd officially declare that I'm throwing in the towel.

I'm not terribly torn up about this - if you've been reading, you are well aware that it's been a hell of a year. I took a long

1 min read

09

Jun

Rationality and Doubt

I've been reading Joseph Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason. It's a bit surprising I haven't read it before, given my whole deal, but I'm glad I'm finally getting to it. The book is primarily concerned with the ways that the rigid logic of computers reinforces the allure of behaviorism and physicalism (as well as making it easier for a certain type of compulsive person to come to conceive of themselves as godlike). The logic is thus: at its lowest level, a Turing machine is a symbolic system that can solve any problem expressible within that system. It follows naturally

4 min read

29

May

I don't like being on the computer anymore

I quit social media again. I do this every few years, deactivating or deleting accounts or abandoning platforms entirely after either the platform itself becomes too evil for me to justify my presence on it or I just see a post or a trend so bad that I decide being online is just bad for me. This time I just saw a Bluesky reply argument that was so stupid I decided to deactivate my account immediately. Bluesky has a bit of a problem with constant context collapse: leftists and irony posters are sharing a much more confined space with Maddow-loving

3 min read