Notes

I’ve been using Ghostty for a while. It is one of those tools I installed out of curiosity and just kept. It was created by Mitchell Hashimoto, co-founder of HashiCorp and the person (one of the people) behind Terraform, Vagrant, Vault, Consul and Nomad.

Ghostty is written primarily in Zig. The language itself is already focused on performance. It Ghostty to combine speed, modern features and a native UI without becoming complicated. Mitchell shared every step while developing the terminal. It supports GPU-accelerated rendering which I believe the most important feature, tabs, splits, ligatures, images and modern terminal protocols. A fast terminal matters more than it sounds: it sits in the feedback loop of almost everything we do, so tiny delays repeated thousands of times become noticeable. First users always express their excitement.

Once the terminal becomes fast, the bottleneck is often the shell setup itself. No flame war needed and zsh itself is not the problem. It is a shell, while Ghostty is the terminal emulator. What often becomes slow is a heavily customized zsh setup (Oh My Zsh, plugins, completion systems, hooks, etc) which can erase much of the snappy feeling you gained from a fast terminal. ; Even Oh My Zsh warns that too many plugins slow shell startup.

Mitchell has since co-founded Superlogical, where he is building a new terminal multiplexer on top of libghostty and continuing to rethink terminal-based developer workflows. Ghostty feels less like just another terminal and more like an attempt to modernize one of the oldest interfaces we still use every day. The interfaces which started to matter more nowadays. Because terminal interface is actually the most flexible and personlized interface so far.

See his latest pre-demo but very nice sneak peak video “A quick look into remote persistent sessions with Superlogical!” : https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2097424868203758046

References: Ghostty docs · Features · Source code · Hashimoto · Superlogical

I was born and raised in Imrahor, a valley neighborhood in Ankara that lived inside strange conflicted feelings. This entire neighborhood was abandoned, self built small houses, green, autonomous, forgotten yet so close to the historically bureaucratic and aristocratic center of the capital. A patch of wild area where wild birds stop by when I was a child. The neglect within walking distance of power.

For decades it existed in that liminal state: half-inhabited, half-erased from official memory. Also for decades this area was considered to be the lungs of the city and had great potential. Then one day it was demolished to be replaced by tall buildings. Not gradually gentrified, but cleared entirely. The valley opened for whatever the city’s next transformation demands.

Back in 2023 when the razoring of the neighborhood happening, I went back with a camera to freeze what remained: an entire neighborhood giving away its last breath, surrendering the last traces of memory still held in crumbling weak walls and scattered rubble. These photographs are not documentation of progress. They are a record of what urban transformation costs when the people who carry a place’s memory are not the ones who decide its fate. A record of the power of the state razoring what people build with their own hands.

I have the new photos as well. But that is too ugly to show. Simply tall buildings, typical Turkish urbanization.

The new city already waits on the edge of the hill, creeping in to greens. Below it, the valley floor is stripped back to earth, stone, and whatever could not be carried away.

Houses that once held generations reduced to weight and volume, waiting to be removed.

Photographs taken in Imrahor, Ankara - March 29, 2023 by Hasan Tayyar Besik

Previously: EIL August ‘26

August became an unexpectedly least physically active month. I broke my leg and had to slow down for at least a month, which left plenty of time for documentaries and my old archives.

Famous painter from a small town: Ivan Rabuzin

During a karate camp in Croatia (end of September), between trainings, I visited the home of Ivan Rabuzin, the internationally known painter from a village near Novi Marof. I love it there around Novi Marof.

Ivan Rabuzin is long gone and his son-in-law is working to preserve his house as a museum.

Rabuzin began as a dishwasher, learned carpentry, then turned to painting. A quick summary I learned from his son in law. I learned too many other things. They try to make the house a museum. He showed Ivan’s one of the early works was reportedly used as a chicken feeder before his work became famous. His paintings later found an audience as far away as Japan, where one was used as a theatre curtain.

Rodna kuća - the birth house - and Stara Klet, the old cellar, before the museum took shape.

The house is as interesting as the paintings. Rabuzin helped design it and made its furniture himself: chairs, cradles, benches, too many plates and ceramicware, and a huge dining table. It reminded me of the distinctive private architectural projects of old Ankara. The house also has spectacular but humble details to show the craftsmanship.

I started loving his unique style. Check out his work https://marilyncvitanic.substack.com/p/the-art-and-inspiration-of-ivan-rabuzin

Later in the area we have realized that there are his art work on top of the plastic water bottles as well. Apparently the water company made a deal during the socialist years for one time purchase of the usage rights from Rabuzin and still using that contract.

At the garden of the house there was a metal installation looks like a very big burnt match stick.

Barkley Marathon

I started watching documentaries a lot while recovering after my broken leg surgery. Among others this one was interesting. A docu about Barkley Marathon. I love the obsessed amateur spirit, ambitious community and hard trail and along all the fun historical elements that built the trail. The founder is himself has a great smile during the entire documentary. It was a feel good documentary for a person with broken leg in recovery :)

https://www.mattmahoney.net/barkley/

From the website:

The Barkley is considered one of the toughest “100 mile” races in the world. It has (67000 feet) 20 km of climb (and 20 km of descent), more than any other 100 mile race, more than the 33,000 ft. of climb at Hardrock, and more than the 45,000 ft. at Nolan’s 14. Since the race began in 1986, less than 2% of runners have finished within the 60 hour cutoff. Mark Williams of the UK finished first in 1995 in 59:28. Here is his race report. In 2001, after several failed attempts, Blake Wood, 42, NM, and David Horton, 50, VA, finished together in 58:21, only to be disqualified for inadvertently leaving the course to follow a parallel route for about 200 yards. This route (on the south side of the stream instead of the north side) has slightly better footing and had been the normal route until 2000.

Interesting facts: In 2024 the first woman finisher Jasmin Paris said a year before “I understand now why Barkley becomes an obsession; in fact, I suspect I’m already firmly in its grip”. She attended in previous years and built an obsession.

A newsletter done properly - The positive side of the internet

https://arnoldspumpclub.com/blogs/newsletter

I subscribed to Arnold’s Pump Club about a month ago and have been very happy with it. I don’t know why I thought like that but initially I was expecting very lean opinions on muscles but whaat I got was very positive, fact checked, hoax free and non-toxic. It is a rare example of online content that is useful without becoming an irritating life-coach feed.

It offers practical information on health and muscles, often challenges health myths, and begins with “Welcome to the positive corner of the internet.” Every email also explains how it was made: the editors involved, where and how AI was used, and why a sponsor/partners appears in the text. That kind of transparency should be normal.

Oak tree is edible apparently

Berlin is home to famous historical specimens, such as the Dicke Marie in the Tegel Forest, an English oak estimated to be around 800 years old. Older than the Berlin city itself. It’s a young city in Europe at the end.

Oak trees yield edible parts, but none can be eaten raw due to toxic tannins, which cause severe digestive distress. They require proper processing first.

• Acorns (Nut): High in fats and starches. Must be shelled and leached in multiple changes of water until the bitterness is gone. Processed acorns can be roasted, mashed into porridge, or ground into gluten-free flour.
• Young Leaves: Lower in tannins when pale green in spring, but still bitter and tough. Historically used for survival or herbal tea rather than as food.
• Inner Bark: Inedible as food. High tannin levels make it strictly medicinal (used as an astringent gargle or tea for diarrhea) or for leather tanning; ingesting it irritates the digestive tract.

Pferdetreppe

Some stairs in Berlin has a sing at their entrance saying “Staircase for horses”. At first I thought this as a literal translation of a non-typical staircase. But those were literally the staircase for horses. Here a picture from a hospital campus:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pferdetreppe

A horse staircase is a staircase with specially shaped steps to allow its use by horses . Unlike a riding staircase , it was used in densely populated and industrialized cities of the 19th and early 20th  centuries (when horse-drawn carriages were the main means of transport) to bring draft horses to the upper floors) of multi-story stables , thus enabling space-saving housing for the animals.

Prediction, language, and Markov chains

I revisited Noam Chomsky’s 2012 critique of statistical AI.

https://chomsky.info/20121101/

Chomsky’s 2012 reflection was prescient. While the statistical approach to AI achieved a level of commercial and practical success far beyond what many expected a decade ago, its core limitation persists: prediction is not comprehension. In both scientific inquiry and geopolitical implementation, treating statistical correlation as a substitute for deep structural understanding creates systems that are powerful, yet fragile and opaque.

That led naturally to Andrey Markov. In 1913, he analysed the first 20,000 letters of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, classifying them as vowels or consonants and measuring how one category followed another. It became the first empirical application of what we now call Markov chains. The Veritasium video is a good introduction.

In 1913, Andrey Markov conducted a study on the distribution of vowels and consonants in the first 20,000 letters of Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, treating the text as a sequence of symbols and analyzing the statistical relationships between them. By classifying each letter as either a vowel or a consonant and analyzing the probabilities of transitions between these categories, Markov demonstrated that chains of dependent events could be rigorously modeled. This was the first empirical application of what are now called Markov chains.

The same idea appears in Google’s original PageRank: think of pages as states and links as transitions, then find the long-run probability of a random surfer landing on each page. A small interactive workbook made the connection concrete.

Noam Chomsky, a highly respected linguist, joined with two colleagues in a critique of LLMs. In addition to the issues previously discussed, they noted that LLMs’ method of learning language-scraping huge text databases from the internet-is completely different from the way children learn language. We acquire language by being immersed in the conversations and practices of human communities. This means there is ultimately no way LLMs can learn language in the way humans learn and live language-no way they can overcome the problems mentioned earlier. After iterating with ChatGPT on questions around morality and ethics, Chomsky concluded: ChatGPT exhibits something like the banality of evil: plagiarism and apathy and obviation. It summarizes the standard arguments in the literature by a kind of super-autocomplete, refuses to take a stand on anything, pleads not merely ignorance but lack of intelligence and ultimately offers a “just following orders” defense, shifting responsibility to its creators. Chomsky worried that with all the enthusiasm to incorporate LLMs into many computer applications, we will infuse this technology into many other technologies, a situation we might regret and be unable to turn off

Quotes from https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3747356

Also checkout the exercise from a book from Grand Valley State University

Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers

Weird case but true

It turns out that the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that they and other manufacturers used.

Read here https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220816-00/?p=106994

Martial arts: Taido and Keysi

I started reading about Taido, a Japanese martial art founded by Seiken Shukumine in 1965. Compared with karate, its movement language feels more focused on mobility, off-axis attacks, spins, rolls, and changing levels. Instead of treating a stable stance as the default, it often turns the body into a moving target.

I also read about the Keysi Fighting Method, a close-range self-defence system built around survival in crowded, unpredictable situations. Its signature Pensador position uses the hands and elbows to protect the head and neck, while elbows, hammer fists, knees, and constant pivots become the main tools. Its visual influence is easy to spot in Christopher Nolan’s Batman films.

Also they have very cute drawings usually:

Taido (躰 道) is a Japanese martial art founded by Seiken Shukumine in 1965. The name “Taido” means “the way the body and soul” (internal and external). Taido had a relationship with Okinawa karate. First Seiken Shukumine Genseiryu karate founded in 1950, but in the 1960’s he found that the flow of martial arts, he was far away from karate, so he founded the new martial view the name of Taido

Quote from https://j2n-ma.blogspot.com/2012/08/taido.html

Key Technical Divergences:

• Movement Dynamics & Axis of Attack
  • Karate: Focuses on generating maximum power from a stable connection to the ground. Energy flows through the legs, hips, and core into strikes via solid, rooted stances.
  • Taido: Treats the human body like a gyroscope. Strikes are delivered mid-flight, mid-roll, or while bending the spine off-axis. A technique is rarely executed from a static upright position.
• Tactical Philosophy & Space Creation
  • Karate: Employs precise distance management (Ma-ai) to intercept attacks, block-counter instantly, or absorb pressure while maintaining control of the line of engagement.
  • Taido: Rejects static defense. Instead of blocking a blow, a Taido practitioner drops their torso to the mat or cartwheels sideways, using the attacker’s momentum against them while striking from a blind spot.

I also learned about Keysi Fighting Method (KFM). It is a self-defense system developed in Spain during the 1950s and 1990s by Justo Diéguez and Andy Norman. Built around street survival rather than sport, it assumes you are fighting multiple attackers at close range, often in tight spaces with no rules.

Unlike martial arts that rely on maintaining distance or standing long guards, KFM brings the fight into extremely close quarters (ultra-close range).

Things from before, and elsewhere

• The Spotlight Music Show, an Austrian youth music programme broadcast by ORF between 1968 and 1978, is full of excellent pop, rock, and folk performances. The recordings are freely available on YouTube.
• Bulgaria’s Pravetz computers were a Cold War technology story in miniature. Starting with Apple II-compatible machines and later IBM PC-compatible systems, they combined reverse engineering, state ambition, and industrial scale. For many Bulgarians, Pravetz was their first encounter with BASIC and personal computing, and remains both a source of nostalgia and a symbol of the era’s contradictions. It could be success but it couldn’t fight against popular chips after USSR fall.
• I knew roughly about Operation Condor, but did not realise how clearly its cross-border repression was documented after Paraguay’s Archives of Terror were discovered in 1992. I returned to it after translating the lyrics of “Latinoamérica” by Calle 13, Inti-Illimani, and Camila Moreno. Read more how this plan is revealed by a brave activist named Martín Almada https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivos_del_Terror
• Masha Ivashintsova was a Soviet photographer whose archive of more than 30,000 negatives was discovered by her daughter in 2017, seventeen years after her death. Her candid photographs of Leningrad, its underground artistic world, and ordinary urban life are extraordinary: mashaivashintsova.com.

Read this paper and like: “The AI layoff trap”

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.20617

If AI displaces human workers faster than the economy can reabsorb them, it risks eroding the very consumer demand firms depend on. We show that knowing this is not enough for firms to stop it. In a competitive task-based model of a transitioning economy, each firm captures the full cost saving from automation but bears only a fraction of the demand loss it creates in the product market; the rest falls on rivals. This demand externality traps rational firms in an automation arms race, displacing workers well beyond what is collectively optimal. The resulting loss harms both workers and firm owners. More competition and “better” AI amplify the excess; wage adjustments and free entry cannot eliminate it. Neither can capital income taxes, worker equity, universal basic income, upskilling, or Coasean bargaining. A Pigouvian automation tax can. The results suggest that policy should address not only the aftermath of AI labor displacement but also the competitive incentives that drive it.

Masha Ivashintsova (1942–2000) - a Soviet photographer recently revealed extensive photo archive

https://mashaivashintsova.com/

Masha Ivashintsova (1942–2000) was a Soviet photographer whose extensive archive of over 30,000 negatives remained completely undiscovered until 2017. Often referred to as the “Russian Vivian Maier,” she spent decades capturing everyday life, political atmosphere, and the artistic underground of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) without ever showing her work to the public.
• Underground Artistic Circle: Ivashintsova was heavily immersed in Leningrad’s non-conformist movement between the 1960s and 1980s. She had close relationships with prominent figures of the Soviet underground, including poet Viktor Krivulin, photographer Boris Smelov, and painter Boris Akselrod. • Involuntary Commitment: Because she did not maintain official state-sanctioned employment and lived outside Soviet societal expectations, she was subjected to punitive psychiatry and involuntarily committed to a Soviet mental hospital for ten years (1981–1991).
• Discovery of Her Archive: In late 2017, 17 years after her death from cancer, her daughter Asya Ivashintsova-Melkumyan discovered box after box of undeveloped rolls and film negatives in an attic. • Photographic Style: Her work features candid street photography, raw urban landscapes of Leningrad, intimate portraits of underground figures, and melancholy self-portraits. She shot predominantly on Leica and Rolleiflex cameras.

From CHI ‘08: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 5-10, 2008 · Florence, Italy

Paper https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/1357054.1357072

We performed an empirical study to investigate whether thecontext of interruptions makes a difference. We found thatcontext does not make a difference but surprisingly, people completed interrupted tasks in less time with no differencein quality. Our data suggests that people compensate forinterruptions by working faster, but this comes at a price:experiencing more stress, higher frustration, time pressureand effort. Individual differences exist in the managementof interruptions: personality measures of openness toexperience and need for personal structure predict disruption costs of interruptions. We discuss implicationsfor how system design can support interrupted work

Also kind of a related tool: Interruptions impact on deep work simulator

Ambient Strudel studies. Two tracks album. Inspired by broad characteristics of Rafael Anton Irisarri’s works. See track info for the generation code.

Below is a Ronin work. Ronin is an amateur open source procedural image processing tool by an inspriational creator.

Ronin is a procedural graphics tool designed to automate simple graphical tasks, like resizing, cropping, coloring, and generating algorithmic images. It interprets a minimal dialect of LISP, look at the examples to better understand how this all works.

The code below is evaluated via a Ronin js version https://hundredrabbits.github.io/Ronin/.

; RESIDUAL ORBIT
(clear)
(resize 2400 1600)

(def f (get-frame))
(def x 1069)
(def y 650)

; atmospheric field
(fill (rect 0 0 f:w f:h)
  (gradient (line 0 0 0 f:h)
    ("#03040b" "#101936" "#3b214b" "#070914")))

; distant horizon
(fill (rect 0 1040 f:w 560) "#070b19")
(stroke (line 0 1040 f:w 1040) "#e05691" 3)
(stroke (line 0 1052 f:w 1052) "#4fb9b0" 1)

; spectral atmosphere
(fill (circle x y 520)
  (gradient (line x (sub y 520) x (add y 520))
    ("#121636" "#512650" "#091126")))

(fill (circle x y 390)
  (gradient (line x (sub y 390) x (add y 390))
    ("#e55d91" "#ffb47e" "#23204a")))

; eclipse
(fill (circle (add x 8) (add y 6) 245) "#050610")
(stroke (circle x y 252) "#ff6e9f" 4)
(stroke (circle (sub x 9) (add y 3) 246) "#58cfc0" 2)

; orbital traces
(stroke (ellipse x y 570 170) "#24556c" 3)
(stroke (ellipse x y 510 118) "#7a3565" 2)
(stroke (arc x y 540 (rad 198) (rad 326)) "#ff6e9f" 6)
(stroke (arc x y 492 (rad 12) (rad 142)) "#61d6c0" 4)
(stroke (arc x y 430 (rad 214) (rad 304)) "#d8ffe9" 2)
(stroke (arc x y 358 (rad 42) (rad 154)) "#ff947d" 2)

; measurement rays
(stroke (line x y 80 1600) "#19405b" 2)
(stroke (line x y 240 1600) "#28556a" 2)
(stroke (line x y 400 1600) "#19405b" 2)
(stroke (line x y 560 1600) "#28556a" 2)
(stroke (line x y 720 1600) "#19405b" 2)
(stroke (line x y 880 1600) "#28556a" 2)
(stroke (line x y 1040 1600) "#19405b" 2)
(stroke (line x y 1160 1600) "#28556a" 2)
(stroke (line x y 1240 1600) "#28556a" 2)
(stroke (line x y 1360 1600) "#19405b" 2)
(stroke (line x y 1520 1600) "#28556a" 2)
(stroke (line x y 1680 1600) "#19405b" 2)
(stroke (line x y 1840 1600) "#28556a" 2)
(stroke (line x y 2000 1600) "#19405b" 2)

; floor bands
(stroke (line 0 1100 f:w 1100) "#1d3450" 2)
(stroke (line 0 1180 f:w 1180) "#1d3450" 2)
(stroke (line 0 1290 f:w 1290) "#23465c" 2)
(stroke (line 0 1435 f:w 1435) "#1b304e" 2)
(stroke (line 0 1580 f:w 1580) "#23465c" 2)

; signal crosshair
(stroke (line (sub x 670) y (sub x 310) y) "#4fb9b0" 2)
(stroke (line (add x 310) y (add x 670) y) "#e05691" 2)
(stroke (line x (sub y 670) x (sub y 310)) "#e05691" 2)
(stroke (line x (add y 310) x (add y 670)) "#4fb9b0" 2)

; central residual pulse
(stroke (circle x y 92) "#d8ffe9" 2)
(stroke (circle x y 76) "#e05691" 2)
(fill (circle x y 8) "#d8ffe9")

; CRT veil
(stroke (line 0 1090 f:w 1090) "#111b32" 1)
(stroke (line 0 1110 f:w 1110) "#111b32" 1)
(stroke (line 0 1130 f:w 1130) "#111b32" 1)
(stroke (line 0 1150 f:w 1150) "#111b32" 1)
(stroke (line 0 1170 f:w 1170) "#111b32" 1)

(export)

Karate kata is spatial. You turn, you step, you change facing, and the floor pattern (embusen) is half the work of remembering a form. Most of my notes after class were still paragraphs: technique names in order, with facing lost in the sentence if I remembered to write it down at all.

I wanted something I could read on a phone between sets, paste into a chat, or print without opening an app. That became Spatial Kata Notation (SKN): a plain-text tree for kata and bunkai. The site and generator live in an open repo here:

https://github.com/hasantayyar/spatial-kata-notation

Live docs and the tool: https://hasantayyar.github.io/spatial-kata-notation/

This is an early, working documentation site plus a generator for Karate teachers and students.

If you train, try writing one short section of a kata you know in SKN after class. If the facing line feels redundant, good: that means you already had it clear. If you keep correcting the facing line, the notation is doing its job.

A single move looks like this:

+-- [STEP → N] -------------- (Face: N)
|   ├─ Stance : [R] Z-D
|   ├─ Action : Right Age-uke (J)
|   └─ Key    : Rise under attack angle

Multi-beat transitions nest under one move:

+-- [MAWATTE → E] ----------- (Face: E)
|   ├─ Beat 1 : [R] Z-D
|   │   └─ Action : Right Gedan-barai (G)
|   ├─ Beat 2 : Pull back into [R] N-D
|   │   └─ Action : Right Tetsui Otoshi-uchi / Otoshi-uke (C)
|   └─ Note   : Distinct two-part transition

It is not a grading tool, a style authority, or a substitute for partner work in the dojo. Every sheet should name the school reading it follows (for example Shito-Ryu, or dojo-specific).

That sounds obvious. It is also the part most “systems” forget once they get a logo.

The kihon catalog is a practical vocabulary list with belt floors, not an official federation syllabus. Dojos differ. Again: sensei first.

Under the hood the useful bits are small TypeScript modules: an SKN parser for kata spines, a practice-plan generator, and the kihon catalog. No account system, no timer coach, no backend. Plain text in, plain text plan out, copy button.

Previously:

• EIL June ‘26

AWS Cert Manager updates

AWS Cert Manager (ACM) supports ACME protocol now. I will be fine with Lets Encrypt but good to know.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/automate-public-tls-certificate-issuance-with-acme-support-in-aws-certificate-manager/

Until now, ACM public certificates were designed to be used almost exclusively with integrated AWS resources (like ALBs, CloudFront, or API Gateway) because AWS managed the private key. If you needed public certificates for customer-managed or non-integrated infrastructure, you had to either mess with complex custom lambda/export scripts or look outside AWS entirely. Let’s Encrypt was almost the most preferred approach.

The new AWS cert manager ACME support includes:

1. Standard tools: Use Certbot, cert-manager, or acme.sh; private keys stay locally.
2. Centralized controls: Administrators pre-approve domains and restrict certificate scope and key types, without giving application teams DNS credentials.
3. Unified visibility: Certificates appear in ACM, with monitoring and audit trails through CloudWatch and CloudTrail.
4. Automatic renewal: Reduces operational work as certificate lifetimes become shorter.

Basically what ACME provides.

Money sellers

My two-year-old nephew called the people at the bank “money sellers.” Technically, he was right. Too obviously right?

At his age, a place where you get bread is a bread shop. A place where you get money must follow the same logic. We laughed, of course. Then I thought about all the correctness of this statement and found it slightly less funny. This is exactly how modern modey works. Private banks sells money to create new money.

Private banks create money when they issue loans. But that fact isn’t the same thing as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). It is an established feature of banking, explained by the Bank of England.

Suppose a bank lends you €10,000:

The bank creates the deposit alongside your promise to repay. It doesn’t need to transfer €10,000 from another customer’s savings account first. Money has been created, but you haven’t gained €10,000 in net wealth-you also owe €10,000. Repaying the principal reverses that creation. Banks remain constrained by capital, liquidity, regulation and lending risks. Bank of England

MMT makes a broader argument about governments that issue their own currency: their spending capacity is fundamentally constrained by real resources and inflation, rather than by needing to collect money first like a household. It incorporates bank money creation, but its policy conclusions go much further and are disputed.

Neo-Nazi Symbolism

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Words

Just learned a new numeric symbolism around neo nazis. “Fourteen Words” is a white supremacist slogan first used by American neo-Nazi David Lane. It frames racist ideology as protecting white people and their children. Neo-Nazis use the number 14 as shorthand, often combined into 14/88, where 88 can stand for “Heil Hitler.”

Every month I share the things I leraned and remembered to write down somewhere. Here are the June notes.

Berlin is serious about bats

I discovered a naturbelassener Park around Tempelhof nearby my apartment. Berlin quietly protects a lot of semi-wild spaces like bats.

NABU Berlin says that Berlin is the “capital of bats”: 18 bat species have been recorded in the city, and up to 11,000 bats overwinter in the Spandau Citadel alone. (NABU - Naturschutzbund Deutschland e.V.)

Nazi drug experiments

While I show a Nazi era concentration camp to my family during their visit to Berlin, I learned lots about the drug experiments in these camps.

Nazi doctors conducted radical medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners without consent. I knew it already but I didn’t know there were inhumane cocaine experiments and some psychedelics as well. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum groups these experiments into survival, drug-treatment, and ideological/racial categories. (Holocaust Encyclopedia)

More specifically, SS doctor Kurt Plötner is associated with mescaline experiments at Dachau, apparently connected to interrogation and “truth serum” research. These expreiments later mentioned on LSD researches. (Cambridge University Press & Assessment)

Eichenprozessionsspinner

I learned the story behind the German word that looks like a keyboard accident: Eichenprozessionsspinner, the oak processionary moth. the city was invaded, probabyl still is. Especially in the outer parts.

The adult moth is not the main issue. The caterpillars are. Their tiny hairs contain an irritating toxin and can cause skin, eye, throat, and allergic reactions.

Berlin is a good habitat for them because the city has many oaks in parks and along streets. (Berlin.de)

Plants that keep appearing

My father once pointed out a wild herb named (in Turkish) sinir otu to me on a Berlin sidewalk. He mentioned that it’s a medically important herb. I did not care much at the time. Now I keep seeing it everywhere.

The German name is Spitzwegerich, in English ribwort plantain, and its Latin name is Plantago lanceolata. The European Medicines Agency lists it as a traditional herbal medicine used for throat irritation, dry cough, cough with cold, and minor skin inflammation. (European Medicines Agency (EMA))

Also learned that blackberry tea is great for eye pressure apperently. I am not turning this into medical advice. It is just good tea actually.

Barry’s Berlin

Barry’s gymb Berlin gave me a small anthropology moment :/

Luxury gym, waiting list, strange people waiting outside, weird Google Maps energy, and a visible upper class snob culture fitness.

NUMA finally clicked

I learned more about NUMA, short for Non-Uniform Memory Access.

Small server:
CPU <-> RAM

Large multi-socket server:
CPU0 <-> RAM0
CPU1 <-> RAM1
CPU2 <-> RAM2
CPU3 <-> RAM3

Each CPU socket has memory that is physically closer to it. Local memory access is faster. Remote memory access still works, but it crosses the interconnect and costs more latency. Red Hat describes NUMA as a design where memory resources are allocated close to a CPU to improve access time. (Red Hat Documentation)

Linux exposes this topology nicely:

numactl --hardware
lscpu | grep NUMA
numastat
numactl --show

The practical lesson: big servers are not just “more CPU and more RAM”. Placement matters. Threads and memory should ideally live close to each other. Otherwise, a powerful machine can quietly waste performance by moving data across sockets.

Linux also has NUMA memory policy support, which controls from which NUMA node memory gets allocated. (Kernel Documentation)

Also read Jaana’s post on Numa.

Strudel and TidalCycles

I tried to configure Strudel and TidalCycles locally, then discovered that Strudel already works in the browser.

Strudel is basically a browser-based live coding environment that ports the TidalCycles pattern language to JavaScript. (Strudel)

Music rabbit holes

A great house track from Saudi Arabia:

Shoft Alhala, Radio Edit, by Vinyl Mode and Moayad

I also learned about Assa’d Khoury’s Electronic Touches Belly Dance, a 1978 Lebanese instrumental album built around funky electronic keyboards and Arabic melodies. It was reissued in 2026 after nearly 50 years. (WEWANTSOUNDS)

The most interesting part for me was the modified Farfisa-style keyboard world: electronic organs adapted for Oriental scales and quarter-tones. Arabic music needs pitches that standard Western keyboards do not naturally provide. This similar trend of tuning off the keyboards can also be observed other sub-cultures in North and central Africa.

AWS “What is” pages

I appreciated AWS’s “What is” pages.

The computer chip explanation is simple, direct, and mostly free of forced metaphors. It explains chips, silicon, etching, analog circuits, digital circuits, ASICs, SoCs, and AWS custom chips like Graviton, Inferentia, and Trainium in a clean way. (Amazon Web Services, Inc.)

Good technical writing does not always need storytelling.

Zirkus Mond

I went of the Zirkus Mond shows called “What is Zirkus”. It was fantastic.

One thing that surprised me was a handmade “robot” used during the performance. The presenter explained how circuses have always followed new technologies closely and turned them into art. In some ways, circuses have historically been early adopters of technology rather than followers.

Where Have All the Sparrows Gone?

Apparently Berlin’s sparrow population is declining rapidly and nobody is completely sure why.

One theory I found interesting is that while adult sparrows can eat seeds and crumbs, baby sparrows depend almost entirely on insects during their first weeks of life. With insect populations collapsing due to pesticides and increasingly manicured urban environments, many chicks simply don’t get enough food.

Urban colonies are also vulnerable to diseases such as Salmonella and avian malaria, especially when combined with pollution and noise.

The Gold Under an Indian Temple

I learned about the enormous treasure discovered in the vaults of an Indian temple.

The amounts involved are so large that estimates reach tens of billions of dollars in gold, jewels, coins, and artifacts accumulated over centuries of donations. The discovery triggered legal battles, security concerns, and debates about ownership and preservation.

One of those stories that sounds fictional until you realize it actually happened.

The Smithsonian on Unsplash

The Smithsonian has published around 1,000 images on Unsplash.

What surprised me is the scale of the institution itself. The Smithsonian isn’t just a museum-it’s 21 museums, libraries, research centers, and even a zoo.

Hundreds of years of art, science, culture, and history are now much easier to access and reuse.

Bromantane

I discovered Bromantane, a Russian drug originally developed for improving physical and mental performance.

It acts as both a stimulant and an anxiolytic, which is a strange combination. Unlike classical stimulants such as amphetamine, its exact mechanism is still not fully understood.

It’s sometimes described as an “adaptogen” or “actoprotector”, terms I had never encountered before.

Yogi Kazım

I came across the story of Yogi Kazım.

One of those unusual figures who seem to exist somewhere between performance art, spirituality, self-invention, and local legend. Definitely a rabbit hole worth exploring.

https://tam-museum.org/yogi-kazim

Yogi Kazim lived long and his own developed methods which are influced from Yoga and many other studies.