Mark my words: The greatest domestic policy achievement of the second Trump presidency will be the changing of the national anthem to "God Bless the U.S.A." by Lee Greenwood.
The United States of Roy Cohn
- Rule one: attack, attack, attack.
- Rule two: admit nothing; deny everything.
- Rule three: no matter what happens, you claim victory and never admit defeat.
Brute Force One
It seems that "drugs" is now officially the new "weapons of mass destruction". Too bad we didn't get to see Reich Minister of the Reichswehr, Herr Peter von Hegseth parade a vial of cocaine in front of the United Nations.
Of course, we all know what this is really about. What's the matter Donny, "drill baby drill" turned out to be a dud?
Just what we needed to start the new year - more war. The Kremlin will issue official statements of condemnation, but I guarantee you Putler is popping bottles of Cristal again tonight. And Chairman Xi is taking notes. You may think you've won the battle for Caracas, but you have just surrendered in the war for the rule of law. Do you really think China will now buy their oil from you? Fat chance (pun intended). Mark my words - this invasion will only strengthen Russia-China ties. And now it may be too late to do anything about it.
You think the Monroe Doctrine gives you the right to do whatever the hell you want in Latin America? What's your argument going to be when China does the same thing in the South China Sea? Or Russia in Eastern Europe? Do you have any idea what shitstorm you just unleashed?
FUCK YOU VERY MUCH, PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP! And yeah, "thank you for your attention to this matter".
"America is respected again"? How about you go suck ass you miserable, thin-skinned, warmongering piece of shit. How's that for respect? The whole world has been laughing at you and your merry gang of Mar-a-lago-faced bootlickers you call an administration.
You're a liar, an immoral moron, an uncultured nepo-baby and a pathetic excuse for a human being. Corrupt, narcissistic assholes like you who will sell their own mother for a million dollars should be nowhere near levers of power. I hope you choke on your next cheeseburger, you bloated orange goblin.
The whole world is talking about the attack on Venezuela. Fox News? Somalis in Minnesota. Funny how that is. Will be interesting to see how they spin this one.
American conservatives - TIME TO WAKE THE FUCK UP! Your enemy is not the left or the media or the government bureaucracy. It's kleptocrats like Trump and their cronies who are robbing you blind and then blaming everything on the poorest, most defenseless members of society - including yourself.
You call yourselves Christians yet you idolize a man (!) who is the living embodiment of every single deadly sin - lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and hubris. Shame on you.
Looking Back at 2025
After all said and done, 2025 has been kind of amazing. I was really hoping for some forward momentum after a period of what I can only describe as struggling to find my footing in life and this year really delivered.
In 2025, I gave 20 concerts with three different bands, recorded a bunch of material at two studios and still managed to participate in dozens of jams with probably hundreds of people. I even played some tentative drum solos without blacking out! 🤣🙈
Made so many new friends, read more interesting books and research than ever before and discovered enough amazing music and literature to keep me busy for years to come.
I graduated from journalism school and was featured in two podcasts - including one of the most popular ones in Estonia (titled Girl Talk, no less).
Completed all my remaining courses at TalTech - including an ambitious internship project - more successfully than I could ever have hoped (just 0.55 grade point average short of graduating with honors). Figured out what my thesis is going to be about and it is now the only thing left on my journey towards an MA in Social Sciences. I'm now more convinced than ever that I'm precisely where I want to be in my career and wish to pursue a PhD to one day become a professor. Not yet exactly sure of what or where, but definitely something to do with the history and ecology of technology.
In the middle of all that, I was accepted to the masters program in jazz drumming at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre! The first semester at the academy has been challenging, to say the least, but has already made me a better musician and I am humbled by the privilege of being a student there. Words can't express how grateful I am for being given a second chance to deepen my understanding of and relationship with music.
Didn't find my One True Love yet, but after a long process of self-reflection, was able to let go and move on from past regret. I'm more at peace with my solitary existence and realise that perhaps this is precisely where I need to be in order to better understand myself and human relations before I can find that special person I've longed for all my life.
I want to thank all the wonderful people that have touched my life this past year. I could not have accomplished the above without you. I hope your 2026 will be filled with love, joy, good health and many great adventures and successes. 💖
Truly Yours,
-Yours Truly
The Sustainable Podcast
This past summer me and my good friend and colleague from the Technology Governance and Sustainability programme - Max Peacock - spent five days in an underground recording studio at TalTech discussing everything from AI to education and gaming:
I had an absolute blast and Max is one of the most well spoken, clear-headed people I have ever met. Talking to smart, young critical thinkers like him gives me great hope for the future.
I don't know how I feel about the podcast format in general though. Most of them are just people voicing their opinions so in the end I'm not sure what their long term educational value is. For me personally, they're almost more fun to create than to consume. They're hard to index, take up more space and bandwidth, don't make for great reference material and people usually "listen" to (more like hear) them while doing something else so the whole thing seems more like a form of ephemeral enternainment or background noise. In other words, radio.
I also wonder how much their popularity detracts from writing which is still the superior medium for intellectual discussion. Or how many articles will be left unread just because there's a podcast episode about that topic somewhere and what long-term effects all of this will have on literacy.
But it's been interesting to follow their resurgence. I was really into podcasts in around 2005 with shows like TWiT and FLOSS Weekly and I remember subscribing to some really niche ones about Cocoa development. Carrying them around on an iPod really felt like tuning into a radio station dedicated just for your specific kinks. And then a lot of them just kind of disappeared and I lost interest. And now it seems they're all the rage.
A big thanks to Max, my co-host and editor and TalTech for providing us with the facilities.
Let Static Be Static
I've been using the Django framework for all sorts of projects since version 1.9 and think it's an exceptionally well crafted system for building web applications. Django is so versatile, easy-to-use and well-documented that it's all too easy to reach for it even for uses cases that don't really call for it. Like Servo's documentation site - which is really just a collection of static pages.
Without Django, it would have been much more tedious to maintain the structure of the site and Django's nifty admin-interface gave me all the CRUD I needed out-of-the-box. But in the long term, running that entire Python stack was complete overkill and a waste of resources. It was also quite fragile:
So after years (actually, over a decade) of running that app, I spun it up one last time in dev mode (./manage.py runserver) and set wget on it (with a helpful hint from T0nylombardi on SO):
$ wget2 -m -k -K -E -l 7 -t 6 -w 5 https://docs.servoapp.com/
Uploaded the resulting directory to my web server, updated my virtualhost config, shut down the dev server et voilá - I had the whole thing running just as before for a fraction of the cost.
Todays web could use a tsunami of migrations like these. We have way too many sites out there running on massively complicated stacks just to serve static pages. The MVP trophy for this belongs of course to WordPress. There's just no justification for all the added complexity, maintenance, energy use, compute resource strain, monetary cost and security risks of a dynamic web app when all you want to do is publish some HTML pages. Especially when those pages update once a year (yes, I'm looking at you again, WordPress).
I've always thought that the real dystopia wasn't about machines replacing humans as workers, but machines replacing humans as customers. Looks like we're getting there...
When hackers scrape Spotify, it's "anti-copyright extremism", but when OpenAI scrapes the planet, it's "fair use". Funny how that is...
"Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years."
Toffler saw it coming 55 years ago...
"Sharp differences would quickly emerge between the society that presses technological advance selectively, and that which blindly snatches at the first opportunity that comes along. Even sharper differences would develop between the society in which the pace of technological advance is moderated and guided to prevent future shock, and that in which masses of ordinary people are incapacitated for rational decision-making. In one, political democracy and broad-scale participation are feasible; in the other powerful pressures lead toward political rule by a tiny techno-managerial elite. Our choice of technologies, in short, will decisively shape the cultural styles of the future.
This is why technological questions can no longer be answered in technological terms alone. They are political questions. Indeed, they affect us more deeply than most of the superficial political issues that occupy us today."
Here's an idea...
Instead of those useless energy efficiency classification stickers, how about we mandate manufacturers to include a digital ammeter in every home appliance?
They could give it some standard interface for extracting that data enabling customers to see exactly how much electricity the device is using and how efficient it is in our own use. The geekier of us could could even post the results online for analysis and comparison.
Come to think of it, every electrical appliance should keep and expose both a current and cumulative record of the amount of resources it consumes.
Companies should be thrilled about this considering their obsession about stuffing computers with online connectivity into every single damn thing.💡
"You can't hide behind your instrument."
"If you can be comfortable playing a wrong note, then you're going to be making great music all the time. Never let a note rob you of playing good music."
"There are two Great Events in one's life.
One is being born
and the other
is knowing why."
"Mass production is profitable only if its rhythm can be maintained—that is if it can continue to sell its product in steady or increasing quantity.… Today supply must actively seek to create its corresponding demand … [and] cannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda … to assure itself the continuous demand which alone will make its costly plant profitable."
"Every single one of us, every single day, make some impact on the planet. And we have a choice as to what impact we make. What we buy, what we wear, where did it come from. And if enough of us make ethical choices and start thinking in a new way then business will have to change because of consumer pressure and governments will just have to obey the will of the people if there's enough of us willing."
"The difference between the mathematical mind (esprit de geometrie) and the perceptive mind (esprit de finesse): the reason that mathematicians are not perceptive is that they do not see what is before them, and that, accustomed to the exact and plain principles of mathematics, and not reasoning till they have well inspected and arranged their principles, they are lost in matters of perception where the principles do not allow for such arrangement. /.../
These principles are so fine and so numerous that a very delicate and very clear sense is needed to perceive them, and to judge rightly and justly when they are perceived, without for the most part being able to demonstrate them in order as in mathematics; because the principles are not known to us in the same way, and because it would be an endless matter to undertake it. We must see the matter at once, at one glance, and not by a process of reasoning, at least to a certain degree. /.../
Mathematicians wish to treat matters of perception mathematically, and make themselves ridiculous /.../ the mind /.../ does it tacitly, naturally, and without technical rules."
"When we use generative AI, we consent to the appropriation of our intellectual property by data scrapers. We stuff the pockets of oligarchs with even more money. We abet the acceleration of a social media gyre that everyone admits is making life worse. We accept the further degradation of an already degraded educational system. We agree that we would rather deplete our natural resources than make our own art or think our own thoughts. We dig ourselves deeper into crises that have been made worse by technology, from the erosion of electoral democracy to the intensification of climate change. We condone platforms that not only urge children to commit suicide, they instruct them on how to tie the noose. We hand over our autonomy, at the very moment of emerging American fascism."
"It's a giant feedback loop. The media watches kids and then sells them an image of themselves. Then kids watch those images and aspire to be that mook or midriff in the TV set. And the media is there watching them do that in order to craft new images for them and so on..."
A Mere Appliance
"The full power of the computer is not available to an individual who owns one until he or she can program it. This opinion is rapidly becoming a heresy. The trend is [towards] more and more packages that do specific tasks. This trend is not to be deplored, as software packages fulfill a useful role. Another trend is toward fill-in-the-form or pick-an-item-on-the-menu customizing of programs. This trend, too, is to be encouraged. Nonetheless, unless extended far beyond what is now being done (say, to the point where the menu consists of all possible program statements) it does not give the user the full power of a computer.
This is not the place to discuss techniques for easing the average user into programming (and it certainly will not be done with BASIC, Pascal or FORTRAN), but it can and must be done. If not, the computer will become a mere appliance--at best performing a small number of possibly related tasks. What is desired is for the computer to become an appliance, but not a mere appliance. Its presence must be taken for granted by its user, but in the long run, the act of programming itself must be taken for granted as well.
In the short run it will be, if successful, an information appliance."
A Better iTunes Music Store
I used to be a big fan of the iTMS, but it started turning to shit right around the time Apple Music came out - search results being ordered in some stupid order, losing state when clicking on an item, etc etc.
Luckily, the store still has a working API so I put together this little UI. It's far from perfect, but serves my needs so much bettter than the native app.
Just another example of how important it is to have open APIs of web services. We all have different needs and preferences which no single entity can ever satisfy. With open APIs and relatively little code we can serve a limitless number of different use cases while also learning and having fun along the way.
"Anarchy is democracy without the beuraucracy."
A neat trick for dealing with filenames in HTML documents. Like an uploaded screenshot name with spaces that need to be converted to %20. I've seen some editors do this kind of thing automagically, but this is a consistent approach that works anywhere you can read standard input (in this case copy and paste).
I like to wrap it in a "do shell script" and stick it in my Scripts menu:
pbpaste | php -r 'echo rawurlencode(stream_get_contents(STDIN));' | pbcopy
The "puter" in "computer"
Networks connect, platforms divide.
"Tomorrow's illiterate will not be the man who can't read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn."
"Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.… We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate."