Essay


Aiming toward a mix between essay and blog, with a substantial amount of levity: not academic, not a diary, just useful to someone, somewhere, sometime.

2024

CEOs may be tough, but cleaning is tougher.

Household cleaning is the toughest job I have ever done. It should not exist.

2023

What if I paid for all my free software?

I've always felt guilty by taking for granted the rare breed of virtuous humans that provide free excellent software without relying on advertising. Let's change that and pay, how much would I “lose” anyway?

Running away from love.

Tragic is facing love and not recognizing it, unconsciously suppressing reciprocity. All You Need Is Love, The Beatles sang. Not quite. When the reproductive organs do the “thinking” all one needs is lovers. Like alcohol or money, it is prone to addiction, beyond distracting, destructive, and eventually leads to sadness.

To consider antireligion instead of atheism.

The harm of religion is historically evident whereas the presence or absence of gods is not. Ultimately, the continued existence of religion is predicated on the indoctrination of children and suppression of rational thought. Therefore I am against religion but not necessarily against the idea of gods. For all we know gods are computer scientists and we are in their video game.

Temperature temperance wins wars.

Not using heating shortens the war, and all one needs is a onesie and hot tea.

“Is it okay to live with my parents at age n?”

If you're regularly asking “should I move out?”, chances are your life will improve significantly after doing so. I've convinced myself for years that it wasn't worth it, but living alone has been nothing but nourishing.

2022

“Belgium's little Einstein”, isn't, yet.

In response to “‘Belgium’s little Einstein’: The 11 year old boy who is the world’s youngest science graduate”, The Brussels Times, Monday, 14 March 2022.

Einstein's theory of antiwork.

From antiwork in the USA to “tang ping” (躺平) or “lying flat” in China, people are fed up with the grind. Could it be that we shouldn't live to work, but work to live? That we shouldn't serve the economy, but the economy should serve us?

Prime 997 and the significance of 1.

Divisible only by itself and one. Remarkably simple, but simply amazing.

N‑FT: Non-Functional Tower.

Unable to sell my unused but physically useful PC for $450, I'm selling it through 101 imaginary useless Non-Functional Tower tokens: N‑FTts.

2021

Web4 should run on LaTeX.

The World Wide Web is broken: it is dominated by a handful of websites, nearly everything is financed by ads, bloated tech needlessly slows down surfing, NFTs and blockchain are digital cancer, et cetera. Stop it. Just stop it.

The folly of pride.

Winning necessarily comes down to luck or the defeat of an inferior. Both are nothing to be proud of. Therefore, we should not compete for the sake of being better than others, but only to improve ourselves and help others do the same.

Running shirtless at -3 ℃.

On curing sadness with cold showers, excess with Cynicism, and madness with veganism. And if you can't go vegan, eat the rich.

Crypto Cult Science.

Money corrupts; bitcoin corrupts absolutely. Disregarding all of bitcoin's shortcomings, a financial instrument that brings out the worst in people—greed—won't change the world for the better.

Google couldn't sign me in, so I signed out, indefinitely.

How Google's insidious behavior led me to find superior alternatives.

2020

I wish I never bought bitcoin.

Bitcoin incentivizes greed. It robbed me from my childlike curiosity and fascination for science. Bitcoin is the biggest inadvertent pyramid scheme ever and blockchain is snake oil. Take your spam elsewhere.

Ad blocking, or how to use the Web properly.

Because marketing and advertising has ruined the World Wide Web.

2019

Quit Facebook.

A list of good reasons to quit social media.

Work less, play more!

People should do less buying, working, littering, and more reading, exercising, enjoying nature. We all demand change, but we aren't prepared to change ourselves.

An article originally written for the magazine zoeklicht. I omitted one paragraph about bitcoin because I now strongly oppose crypto“currencies”.

Wasted my life on distractions.

This struck me at the age of 28 while attending my lifelong friend’s public doctoral defense. What follows is a mishmash of events that got me here.

Shout-outs

Mowing the lawn is a plague upon society, humanity, and yourself. Stop the madness.

Sharing this because I couldn't agree more, and to save the content since I think the hosting website is due for failure [blockchain nonsense].

Why search for prime numbers?

Found these articles to be remarkably inspirational. Since one of them has been accidentally deleted before, because the site became unmaintained, I decided to save them for posterity. My suggestion got it featured on the main website again.