Richard Stallman had a Marxian effect on technology in the 1980s. He started
the Free Software movement. His ideas mobilized a vast number of programmers
and the ideology he initiated still has a great gravity in the software
ecosystem. Since the year 2000, thousands of developers travel to Brussels
every February like pilgrims for Free and Open Source Software Developers'
European Meeting (FOSDEM). I am proud to be among the pilgrims for the second
year in a row.
Weekends feel busier than weekdays lately. Time flew, and I just noticed that I didn’t manage to finish this week’s post. This was bound to happen. It’s okay. Shhh… it’s okay. IT’S OKAY! Discipline is not punching yourself into the mold of a wireheaded soldier. Discipline is the ability to flow around, between, and through various slip-ups. Discipline is persistently looking at the horizon. Okay, I needed this pep talk.
I started my first bust this week. The number of details on a human face is crazy. And what’s hard about reflecting all those details on the clay is not the technique but actually noticing them. Making art requires a lot of noticing. Noticing requires giving a fuck. You need to give a fuck to create something. But too much of it can also paralyze you. There’s a fine balance between giving a fuck and letting go and allowing yourself to create something messy.
I finally did it. I finally found a tutor for sculpting. Actually, what I found is much bigger than just a tutor. I found a workshop, a collective, a mirage in the middle of the desert. Actually… in the middle of an industrial zone.
On Friday I went to OtonomArt for an introductory sculpting class. I made this relief with mud:
Starting next week I’ll go there twice a week. Finally I have a space for sculpting and hopefully will have a regular practice throughout the year. I am going to enter 2027 as a sculptor.
Why are vibes so bad when economic metrics don’t look that bad? Scott Alexander tries to find an answer to this question. Zvi too.
I have a great respect for Scott and Zvi. Their rationality and ability to deduce answers from the empirical data are important. However, I am not as rational as they are, so I can only talk about the “vibe” side of things.
Analyzing the “vibecession” —or the Great Vibepression—through the lens of empirical data presents a problem: data is necessarily historical, while the vibecession is about the future. The future is, by definition, uncharted and unquantifiable. One can only sense the future, and what we sense is impending doom.
2025 was a good year for me. After quitting my startup, which was going nowhere, at the end of 2024, I entered 2025 rejuvenated. As a result I read more, experimented more, travelled more, did more… I feel like 2025 was a stepping stone for 2026.
What I was up to in the first week of 2026?
hypersubject.net
My online presence is highly fragmented.
I have a personal and “professional” web site at https://ege.dev where I mostly post my technical writings. I also have a content type that I call “beats” which are unlisted, they only show up in the RSS feed. I was using beats to post short form updates that are usually personal. I have a photo gallery at that site as well.
The internet, with its hyper-fast communication flows, was meant to enable the
new golden age for humanity. We were promised to have a global village where
tribes transcend the limitations of geography. We could find our people
wherever they were. Our ideas, our niche interests were supposed to connect us
with others in the vast network of nodes. If, only if, we can discover them.
