Get rid of the military - 2025-03-04
In my previous post I expressed my doubts on how military spending is presented to general public....
Percentage of GDP is NOT a unit of spending - 2025-03-03
There’s a lot of discussions happening these days in Europe about military spendings, since Russia is an aggressive neighbor who wages war against other countries, be it Georgia 13 years ago, Ukraine 11 and 3 years ago, and who know who’s next....
Life is not a sprint - 2025-02-10
Recently I had a nice conversation with my brother about retiring. Since we are in our 40s, there’s still a long way ahead, but we clearly share the same outlook on retiring: we won’t ....
Look up and down - 2025-02-05
Twenty-five years ago I began my studies, but it wasn’t computer science I always wanted to or physics which I ultimately ended up majoring in, but astronomy. Although I quickly abandoned it for physics, I still keep reading about related topics or simply looking at the stars. It still awes me how big the world is and how small we are. It makes me appreciate life more....
Couple thoughts on AI - 2024-10-06
Consider me someone with weird taste, but I love AI - the storytelling, the moral dillemas, finally the world of far future when the protagonist is awoken by an alien race. Of course I’m talking about the Spielberg’s movie, not the world wide hype of artificial intelligence. But let’s talk about the other one too....
On being pescetarian - 2024-07-31
End of this month marks 4 years since I went pescetarian - for those of you unfamiliar, that’s not eating meat except for that coming from seafood....
The way I build software - part 2 - 2024-02-19
Since I wrote the previous post on this topic not much has really changed. I’m still using my stack of choice and enjoying it more than ever. However from time to time I find a piece of techology that feels right too. Since some time ago, I have been using the following tech to slighly improve my day-to-day workflow....
All the time - 2024-01-11
Two weeks ago, on December 24th, we were hosting a traditional Christmas’ Eve dinner for 4. At 4pm in the afternoon, when we started preparing the dinner the electricity went out. The whole village was dark and many had the same problem as we did: how to prepare food when ovens and stoves are electric? Many postponed the dinner until late or next day as electricity only got back before 8pm....
Busy times - 2022-09-07
You haven’t heard from me in almost three months, but I’m still around, just very, very busy!...
De-christianization - 2022-06-16
A week ago I completed my quest to leave church. It’s a good feeling to have the quest behind me, and I wish everyone who want to do a similar thing should be able to do it easily....
God Syndrome - 2022-05-25
Recently I have failed miserably by planting some of my seedlings too early. The day after frost happened and I lost some peppers and tomatoes. I cried that day as I put a lot of effort into nurturing them, but the truth is they both don’t grow naturally in 50°N, so I was rightfully taught a lesson by Nature....
Windows vs Walls - 2022-04-13
Questions are like open windows, while answers are like walls....
Leverage it! - 2022-04-01
Everything in our lives can be a leverage....
Ideal Consumers - 2022-03-23
But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work....
Our biggest illusions - 2022-03-18
Whenever we recall something, our brains rewrite our memories changing them just a little....
Solving meta problems - 2022-03-11
Let’s face it, most of us solve meta problems....
Common enemy - 2022-02-27
Years ago I found this quote:...
RSS plugin for Serum - 2022-02-18
I use Serum static page generator to build this page, and it’s been a lovely experience so far (Elixir all the way, yay!). One feature that I’ve been missing though is a RSS generator....
On dying - 2022-02-17
I recently attended a funeral. The person who died was a 92 years old man who spent his last ~40 years fighting paralysis, then diabetes, which cost him both of his legs, then disability, then inability to leave this world on his own terms, then dementia interleaved with Covid-19....
The Internet I like - 2022-02-10
Let’s be honest: I’m not a person who grew up using the Internet....
Easier navigation - 2022-02-03
Since I sometimes look at my past log entries and I fancy keyboard navigation, I’ve added keyboard shortcuts to navigate the log, see the footer of this page....
Race to bottom - 2022-01-26
Yesterday, I saw “Take Your Pills” documentary which explores drug, mostly Adderall and Ritalin , (ab)use in USA. While the movie has its higs and lows when it comes to storytelling, it’s good at looking at the topic from different points of view. If you have a spare 1.5 hours then it’s an interesting piece of filmography....
Way upstream - 2022-01-25
“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.” — Desmond Tutu...
My Music - 2022-01-19
I grew up in a countryside in a house on the edge of a huge forest. As a kid I was spending my days out there picking mushrooms, berries, playing with my siblings and cousins. When at school I often spent hours coming back home through plains & woods, sitting under big old beech trees doing homework or reading books....
More is coming - 2022-01-14
As you may have noticed my site has changed recently. There’s certainly more focus on the “log” now, which is very intentional: I am going to write more....
RSS is back - 2022-01-12
In a spirit of reviving good things, the RSS feed of my posts is back. Just hit the RSS button in the navigation bar above to add it to your favourite RSS reader, if you have one....
Right to repair - 2021-01-08
Some time ago I yanked a USB-A port in my cheap ($30?) bluetooth headphones. I could just threw away the thing and bought myself new ones but instead I decided to repair them....
Less people - 2020-07-22
On the other day I read a BBC story about dropping fertility rates and how that’s gonna affect our society....
Unlinked - 2020-07-03
I long hesitated about removing my LinkedIn profile, but it has not proved useful in past few years, so I happily let it go....
Nomadic nature - 2020-05-17
Today I realised my true nature is nomadic....
Endless hacking - 2020-04-18
I feel like writing web software is endless hacking - it’s like bunch of different technologies glued together so they may work, but sometimes they don’t for no apparent reason....
Small things - 2020-03-30
I love the fact that in decimal notation you can change 0.5 into 0.25 by adding just one character, and the same goes for 0.25 -> 0.125 , 0.5 -> 0.75 , 0.75 -> 0.875 , etc....
Think about others - 2020-03-23
It’s year 2000-something. A white couple moves into a small village in a Japanese countryside. Days go one by one, seasons change, those two try to blend in, in the meantime they see how locals live close to the nature, children are born, elders die, time goes by....
Life is simple - 2020-03-08
Life is simple....
It's bloody disgusting - 2020-01-27
Disclaimer #1: My family is Polish, I was born in Poland and lived 35 out of my 38 years here, so this is my completely biased opinion about my home country....
We must change - 2020-01-23
I found an inspiring article on BBC News about climate change and how to tackle it, and the following part speaks right into my heart:...
Rewards - 2020-01-21
If you punish a child for being naughty, and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and finds that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds advantage to himself. — Immanuel Kant...
Hell is other people - 2020-01-20
Killing one’s creativity and motivation with uncertainty and doubt is a crime against life....
The Rise of Confusion - 2020-01-13
So I saw the Star Wars 9: The Rise of Skywalker a week ago and I have no idea if I like it or not....
Outer shells - 2020-01-12
Ask yourself couple questions:...
Opposites - 2020-01-10
A random morning thought: existence of one extreme view warrants the existence of the opposite one....
Thank you, Marie - 2019-12-11
I listen to your songs now, as I’ve been doing for the most of my life....
The patient fan (two years later) - 2019-11-22
As you know I called myself a patient fan two years ago. Guess what, I know almost nothing about Star Wars Episode IX!...
The way I build software - 2019-08-27
Throughout my career in IT I built software for the Web in many different ways - in HTML, (sadly) in PHP, (also sadly) as Flash animations, JSP pages, then MVC apps in Struts and Spring (Java days), Rails and Sinatra (Ruby days), countless Node.js frameworks, and eventually in Phoenix (Elixir days). I’ve seen a lot of different approaches, ones that worked well and others which were JavaScript-only single page applications ;-). It’s been over 15 years now and I think I have finally settled on what works best for me....
Craving for sugar - 2019-08-15
Last 3 months of my life were like a rollercoaster ride fuelled by couple of decisions back in May. I didn’t expect those would have such an impact on my life, so I welcomed them happily only to end up struggling to find any sort of balance. Only the last weekend I was able to afford first full 2 days of rest since April or early May. Phew, it’s already behind me....
Donating to the Open Web - 2019-01-16
And CLU, Tron, and I, we built the system where all information was free and open. Beautiful. — Kevin Flynn, Tron: Legacy...
Goodbye Twitter - 2018-09-24
It’s been almost a year since I last actively used Twitter, and honestly, I’ve never missed it much during that time. Sure, I check some of my favourite profiles from time to time, but that’s all, I don’t need Twitter account for that anymore. So I deleted my Twitter profile today, and I don’t see myself coming back....
Notes to future self - part 2 - 2018-02-16
Hello older Jakub. Since the time you wrote down that list there are couple more notes to be added. So I hope you still…...
New beginnings - 2018-01-14
“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” — C.S Lewis...
Christmas gifts - 2017-12-24
As far as I remember I’ve always had trouble getting presents for my family. As Christmas time approached I felt more nervous, looking for ideas everywhere, procrastinating it as far as I could....
The Last Jedi - 2017-12-22
Wow! I waited patiently and it paid off. The movie is stunning visually, built on a solid plot, well played, with lots of twists, and a good dose of humour. I wouldn’t mind if it was somewhat darker, but that’s too much to ask Disney for, isn’t it?...
From within - 2017-12-01
We’ve all heard that a lie repeated a thousand times becomes the truth, which in the “overconnected” world is more dangerous than ever. But if we go from macro scale of external world to micro scale of our own mind, we’ll find the statement equally true....
TV ads - 2017-11-26
Only those who screw people over their money can afford to advertise a lot: likes of pharmaceutical, food processing, or banking/lending industries....
The patient fan - 2017-11-22
The very first movie I saw at a cinema was “The Neverending Story” deep in the mid-80s. That’s one of the earliest memories from my childhood and also a very fond one. That event, or couple of them as I eventually saw the movie 4 times, started my love affair with the big screen....
Feedback loops - 2017-11-05
When people get into software development, sooner or later they figure out the concept of feedback loops. We start with writing some code, then follow with testing it - if it doesn’t work we go back to fix it, when it does we move on to write some more code. Then it goes like this until a piece of software is done. Luckily a single loop can be as short as few minutes, so we can iterate quickly and feel rewarded for what we do....
Dear older generations - 2017-10-08
I respect you a lot. You were the ones who raised us, who taught us by example how to work hard, who invested a lot of resources in making local and global environments better....
Notes to future self - 2017-10-04
Hello older Jakub. Here’s your younger self at the age of 35 who hopes you…...
Is it just a distraction? - 2017-09-21
What was the last time we gave ending the war in Syria a thought, where people are dying daily and major powers are directly involved in it (technically being at war)?...
Saying no - 2017-09-10
Over my career in IT I turned down many offers, sometimes based on location or technology, but mostly based on employer’s industry....
What we should be taught - 2017-08-25
From time to time I come across an essential skill no one ever taught me and I start to wonder why schools don’t teach it. Here’s the growing list of those:...
Fellow humans - 2017-08-20
Over the years I’ve built a folder with words of wisdom. I often reach them to find inspiration or moral guidance....
On happiness - 2017-08-11
Two years ago I learned about hedonic adaptation and it changed my life forever....
Goodbye Mac - 2017-08-04
I’ve been a Mac user since 2003, at the beginning a devoted, lately a more pragmatic one, but one nonetheless. As you may know I love simple things and Mac always filled that role rather well. However over the years (spanning way before 2003) I’ve always been a *nix user too, setting up servers, doing computation work on my University cluster, or working on Mac OS X. So the direction I took early this year was pretty straightforward: let’s switch to Linux....
The bit about myself - 2017-07-30
It’s only the second post on this log’s return, but I chose a truly hard topic to write about: something meaningful about myself. So let’s do it, there’s no try....
The log is back - 2017-07-23
The last time I wrote anything public and longer than 140 characters was years ago, so it’s good to be back to more proper writing. Every now and then I think “oh, if I only could write about that”, so here’s the place....