thetangent.space

Weekly digest 56

theTangentSpace — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 23:59:59 GMT

Monday, March 2, 2026

0:20: Weekly digest 55: https://thetangent.space/2026/digest55/

19:16: In BeddyByes when MeMo and BaBa shrink down to the size of the Yummies and eat with them and then return to normal size does the food grow with them or do they now just have a really tiny meal inside them?

This bothers me every time #parenting

Tuesday, March 3, 2026

16:05: 🔗 some great haiku and senryu. Particularly the senryu, which hit harder and have more to say than the many senryu that illicit a smirk but have little lasting impact

https://confluencehaiku.com/18-sophia-conway-the-color-of-heartbreak/

(a senryu is like a haiku but about human affairs rather than nature)

Friday, March 6, 2026

18:43: 🎮 started playing Chrono Trigger (1995) for the first time. I got it emulated on my phone, and it is turn based so pretty easy to play on touch screen.

This is the best looking and sounding SNES game I've played. the music is just wonderful. The humour (which feels like Yoshinori Kitase's influence) really lands too

22:31: 🎵 For some reason, I once had this song as an MP3 on an old computer in like 2010. I'd looked for it on MySpace and stuff back in the day, but since it wasn't on Spotify (which I've now left) it completely fell off my radar. I just found it again on Bandcamp, it's so good, what a voice

https://its-a-secret.bandcamp.com/track/if-you

I wish I could buy it but I guess they're long gone

Sunday, March 8, 2026

9:29: Looking forward to a day with the family celebrating my biggest little man's birthday

9:35: Using mastodon via the Progressive Web App on android is actually pretty great and seems to avoid the rate limiting issues I've had with other clients

9:39: 🔗 https://matduggan.com/boy-i-was-wrong-about-the-fediverse/

Bookmarking for my blog

11:51: Interesting kind of person who gets an invitation to a small, at-home child's party 2 weeks in advance then RSVPs that they'll be coming half an hour before it starts

17:36: Little man's birthday was a success. turns out directing other people's kids around is quite a transferable teacher skill

18:11: I get my Pocket Reform back next week from repair. Excited to have it back as it really is my primary portable computing device

21:36: My wife calls the Pocket Reform "the chode"

Thank you for subscribing to my RSS feed. If you'd like to get in touch, even if just to say hi, please write to sayhi@thetangent.space. I'll be genuinely delighted to hear from you.

Weekly digest 55

theTangentSpace — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 23:59:59 GMT

Monday, February 23, 2026

1:05: Weekly digest 54: https://thetangent.space/2026/digest54/

19:40: Some new faces at my school haiku club today. Still no boys, just can't seem to convince them that a poetry club could be cool. Maybe I need to stand on the desks and stuff

Thursday, February 26, 2026

7:06: 🔗 As an educator, I can absolutely confirm we are not raising a generation of power users

https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/the-slow-death-of-the-power-user/

Friday, February 27, 2026

6:16: 📰 Green party wins Gorton and Denton by-election. This has properly brightened up my morning.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/27/green-party-wins-gorton-and-denton-byelection-in-blow-to-keir-starmer

Saturday, February 28, 2026

12:31: 🔗 The right-wing media are going hard fearmongering and trying to de-legitimise the Green victory in Gorton and Denton. See here for a thorough takedown of their talking points.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PeTsj-crwuw

21:22: Brit Awards on ITV just censored "Free Palestine" from an award winner during their acceptance speech

Thank you for subscribing to my RSS feed. If you'd like to get in touch, even if just to say hi, please write to sayhi@thetangent.space. I'll be genuinely delighted to hear from you.

Weekly digest 54

theTangentSpace — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 23:59:59 GMT

Monday, February 16, 2026

0:11: Weekly digest 53: https://thetangent.space/2026/digest53/

Tuesday, February 17, 2026

20:09: 🔗 https://www.404media.co/students-are-being-treated-like-guinea-pigs-inside-an-ai-powered-private-school/

A worrying look into the future of "education"

20:16: 🔗 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/17/europeans-are-dangerously-reliant-on-us-tech-now-is-a-good-time-to-build-our-own

Big tech = imperialism

20:53: 📖 Finished reading The Circle by Dave Eggers (after previously posting I'd never be able to finish it by the end of February, ha!)

It was okay. It's a satirical dystopia, clearly very 1984-inspired, but the surveillance overlords are a US big tech monopoly. If you're going in hoping for believable characters and plot, you'll be sorely disappointed. But like 1984, everything about this novel is silly and exaggerated, the characters are caricatures, and it is completely devoid of subtlety. if you can deal with this style, it can be pretty fun.

It's interesting in that it takes some of the utopian mission statements of actually existing big tech companies (Facebook's "make the world more open and connected", Twitter's "give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers", Google's "organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible", etc) to their dystopian extremes ("Everything must be known"), and it was doing this in 2013 before public opinion really soured on these companies.

The Circle captures the insanity of the hyper distracted and connected mode of life through its exaggerated numbers. Every day the characters are responding to thousands of messages, petitions, surveys, event invitations and friend requests. Political action is reduced to how many millions of "Smiles" or "Frowns" a cause gets, while the characters track dozens of metrics about their health and productivity. No one can hold a normal conversation.

20:59: The final quarter or so got a bit too predictable, the author-insert characters too didactic, and the evil nature of the Circle too heavy-handed. I guess the haters of the book just reached this point a bit earlier than me.

It's an easy-breezy read, on a constantly relevant theme in today's world "how much privacy are we willing to sacrifice for the benefits of increased surveillance (e.g. health monitoring, crime prevention)", so give it a go if that sounds like your kind of thing, but its flaws make it far from an essential read.

Wednesday, February 18, 2026

23:31: 🎮 I finally beat Sekiro, easily the hardest game I've ever beat (and the game with the best swordplay), after many months. I need a break.

Click here for a video of the final battle!

Thursday, February 19, 2026

11:46: 🔗 MPs call to halt Drax subsidies https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/feb/19/calls-to-halt-drax-subsidy-sustainability-doubts-wood-pellets

It's about time, this has been known for years. Drax claimed to be using sustainable wood pellets, but actually was importing tonnes of wood from wild woodland in Canada, making it far from "green" in both source and shipping.

Drax executives should go to prison for this.

Friday, February 20, 2026

7:00: 🏋️‍♂️ the worst part about morning gym sessions (apart from, you know, getting up in the morning to go to the gym) is the weights are like actual ice blocks

Saturday, February 21, 2026

10:52: 🍕 Always get so excited the morning of a pizza-making day. The dough has been proving for a few days, but even on the day it's pretty high effort: preparing the toppings, shaping the dough, getting the stone hot and so on, but it's such a nice way to spend an afternoon

14:51: 🔗 Nice knits

https://aalgar.tumblr.com/post/807179992952897536

18:00: Content warning:CW: vegan pizza

🍕 a successful bake. Garlic mushroom+spinach, BBQ tofu, and sausage+pineapple (mainly for the kids).

I sprinkle vegan cheese on at the end of cooking as it burns more easily than dairy. I'd like to move away from shop-bought vegan cheese altogether as it is mostly high-cholesterol processed crap, but it always feels a bit risky considering the sunk time and energy costs of making the dough and heating the oven

Sunday, February 22, 2026

20:18: 🔗 Why I email complete strangers
https://goodinternetmagazine.com/why-i-email-complete-strangers/

21:13: 🔗 cool page

https://henry.codes/writing/a-website-to-destroy-all-websites/

In fact the whole site (and his other sites) are just very cool

https://henry.codes/

21:16: Never sure if I place a parenthetical before a verb whether the verb should agree with the first subject as if the parenthetical weren't there

21:54: 📖 started reading You And Your Profile by Hans-Georg Moeller (Carefree Wandering on YouTube) and Paul J D'Ambrosio. It's about the philosophy of identity formation in the digital era

21:55: Well, this half-term break has basically been dominated by sick kids (hoping we're now at the end of sick season), so it hasn't felt like much of a break. At least I ate pancakes and made pizza.

Signing off for the week now, all the best

Thank you for subscribing to my RSS feed. If you'd like to get in touch, even if just to say hi, please write to sayhi@thetangent.space. I'll be genuinely delighted to hear from you.

Weekly digest 53

theTangentSpace — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 23:59:59 GMT

Monday, February 9, 2026

2:20: Weekly digest 52: https://thetangent.space/2026/digest52/

2:22: Really baffled as to why the enumeration isn't working on my digest posts. I'll have another look tonight, I guess

Tuesday, February 10, 2026

8:18: 🔗 https://novaramedia.com/2026/02/09/there-are-two-noam-chomskys-the-one-you-love-and-the-one-that-was-friends-with-jeffrey-epstein/

Article on the contradictions of Chomsky

Wednesday, February 11, 2026

8:27: 🔗🏋️‍♂️ https://youtu.be/j1bx0GMofYw?si=5TWk_kaKwGB89voj

I posted before about how I struggle to hit protein goals without GI discomfort. This video claims there's good research (that I have yet to properly dig into) that says I might not need as much as is commonly thought.

So now I'm thinking well, why not try it anyway? Everyone is different, and there are clearly some people who can get stronger without very high protein.

13:48: 🔗 Choosing living over documenting https://spasic.me/posts/i-choose-living-over-documenting

On the many apps and systems we use/feel we ought to use to track our lives.

To which I'd add "choosing curating over listing". While it may be impressive that Jamie Todd Rubin has logged every book he's read since 1996 https://notes.jtrwriter.com/reading/lists/reading-list, I'm far more interested in his curated lists of recommendations.

My site has a books list. I'm terrible at keeping it up to date anyway, and often recall books that are missing from it. It also isn't particularly interesting or representative of who I am today. I think I shall replace it with a selection of smaller, curated recommendations lists.

Thursday, February 12, 2026

10:47: Rambling thoughts on Non-things by Byung-Chul Han: https://thetangent.space/2026/non-things/

Saturday, February 14, 2026

0:25: Limped over the finish line to half-term break

6:59: Well, Mr Three has started vomiting this morning, as a complement to Mr One's diarrhoea. What a break this is shaping up to be

11:56: 🔗 Doctors union may yet save the NHS from Palantir

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/12/palantir-is-ice/#robo-mengele

Frustrating but hopeful reading

12:52: 🎮 Final boss of Sekiro is giving me imposter syndrome

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Rambling thoughts on Non-things by Byung-Chul Han

theTangentSpace — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 10:31:51 GMT

This was the first book in Jared Henderson’s book club, and I benefitted from having already this one. Here are my rough impressions.

This is the only Byung-Chul Han I’ve read, but I feel I now know what to expect from any of his works. He seems to have a lot to say, but he doesn’t really argue for anything or defend his points. He just kind of vibes and riffs on ideas from various philosophers in an idiosyncratic, poetic style that seems to delight in turning common words and phrases on their heads. When you are on his wavelength, vibing with him, so to speak, he’s great fun to read. But if you’re not already kind of there, he’s not going to be able to persuade you or help you see his point of view. It’s just vibes all the way down.

To be clear, his writing can be intriguing and evocative. Try

The handless human beings of the future use only their fingers.

for an example from the first chapter.

Things and non-things

Han’s central idea is that while we produce more physical stuff than ever, it’s taking a backseat to digital information, which he calls “non-things”, in a way that has destabilising effects on our psyche, memory, and freedom. In the opening chapter, he asserts that physical things provide stability, a sense of narrative and extended temporality, and give us the freedom to act via their use as tools. On the other hand, non-things give us informational chaos, a disjointed sense of time, and only freedom in the sense of choice and play. That is the sense of the above quote — we are free to tap away at choices with our fingers in a manner that feels like play, but not free to use our hands to create and act. He calls these playing handless humans Homo ludens, and our current stage, Phono sapiens, is a step along this path.

There’s much that feels truthy in that basic premise. We do spend a lot more of our time concerned with “non-things” on our screens than physical things around us. But it’s very difficult to pin Han down on details. For example, there is a sense in which digital information is highly stable, and can be highly organised rather than chaotic. What he seems to be concerned about then here is not digital information per se, but more to do with the designs of particular applications and the business models of their proprietors and the way this information comes to us in the form of content, and is extracted from us in the form of personal data.

I do think this opening chapter is strong (by which I essentially mean, I vibe with him) when it comes to the temporality of these digital apps and the kind of subjects they construct. Here are some quotes (all emphasis his, he loves a bit of emphasis):

When bits of information come in quick succession, we have no time for truth. […] Everything that stabilizes human life is time-consuming. Faithfulness, bonding and commitment are all time-consuming practices. The decay of stabilizing temporal architectures, including rituals, makes life unstable. The stabilization of life would require a different temporal politics.

and

Perception that latches on to information does not have a lasting and slow gaze. […] Lingering on things in contemplation […] gives way to the hunt for information. […] In this way, information develops a form of life that has no stability or duration.

While Han is talking about a form of life rather than a feeling, I certainly relate to this at the level of feeling. When I get sucked into content machine — when I cannot stand stillness and must always have something in front of my eyes or in my ears — it is profoundly unsettling.

Possessions

I’m also more or less with Han in the second chapter, which is on “Possession”. Here he discusses ideas related to the idea of possessing physical things. In his view, to possess something is not merely to own it, but to have made memories with it, thus becoming a thing “close to [your] heart” with an “intense libidinal tie”. However, possession in this sense, being of the “paradigm of the thing” (“thing” perhaps best read with a capital T, here), has been supplanted. We now want experiences and novelty. He claims that we now seek “things” for their “informational content” — through marketing, branding, and cultural cache, things now arrive with their own emotional content rather than the emotional bonds we build with things organically.

Today’s consumer goods are indiscreet, intrusive and over-expressive. They come loaded with prefabricated ideas and emotions that impose themselves on the consumer. Hardly anything of the consumer’s life enters into them.

It’s clear here he’s juxtaposing “things” with informational non-things here as in chapter one, but the sense of “information” has changed. He isn’t talking about digital information when he talks about the informational content of commodities — he’s talking about cultural information like brand recognition. This is again one of those things that makes Han hard to pin down and come to terms with. He is not fully consistent with definitions. Especially as a few paragraphs later, he’s back to contrasting things with digital information:

An e-book is not a thing, but information; […] Even if we have it at our disposal, it is not a possession. It is something to which we have access. An e-book reduces a book to informational value. The book has no age, place, craft or owner. […] One cannot have, for instance, a personal copy of an e-book. […] E-books are faceless and without history. They may be read without the use of the hands.

Smartphones and selfies

In the next two chapters, Han is curmugeonly about phones, and digital photographs.

Han really doesn’t like digital photography, especially selfies and other photographs that are used primarily as a messaging format rather than as art. That is the only take-away from the chapter about digital photography.

Han on AI

This chapter was actually interesting, once I understood what he was trying to say. He references Heidegger a lot here (whom I have not read). For Heidegger, the ability to generate concepts depend on our moods and dispositions.

Before capturing the world in concepts, thinking is emotionally gripped.

Han liberally uses the term “fundamental attunement” without explaining what it means (thanks, Han), but from what I can gather, a fundamental attunement is a basic emotional core that informs your entire worldview. An example might be depression or anxiety. If I am anxious, this will inform where my attention is drawn, which will inform the kinds of concepts and thoughts I am capable of constructing.

The world disclosed in a fundamental attunement is subsequently articulated in terms of concepts. Being gripped precedes comprehension, the work on the formation of concepts. […] Such being gripped however is possible only from out of and within a fundamental attunement […] “All essential thinking demands that its thoughts and utterances be newly extracted each time, like an ore, out of the basic disposition.”

But so Han’s argument goes (and this is probably the closest he gets to a substantial argument in the book!), since AI has no fundamental attunement, is incapable of attention, and incapable of forming thoughts and concepts. Hence, AI will never be intelligent. AI might be able to remix pre-existing facts given to it, but without the raw, essentially emotional, experience of being in the world, it can never generate new facts:

The affective totality that is given with a fundamental attunement is the analogue dimension of thinking that cannot be represented by artificial intelligence.

and

… artificial intelligence is incapable of thinking because it cannot access the totality that is thinking’s point of departure.

In his most poetic articulation:

Artificial intelligence is incapable of thinking, for the very reason that it cannot get goosebumps.

Views on things

This is the longest chapter, and also perhaps the most frustrating and meandering. It starts off with a section on the “Villainy of Things”, in which he seems to argue that things have lost their menace. We (apparently) used to imagine that things had a life and mind of their own, that when they presented a danger to us, it was because they were villainous. But no more

We are no longer maltreated by things. They are not destructive. The sting has been taken out of them.

The examples he gives are old slapstick comedies and cartoons, in which things take on the form of “infernal contraptions” and cause all kinds of mischief.

Doors, chairs, folding beds or vehicles can at any time turn into dangerous objects and traps. There are constant crashes. They are a permanent source of frustration.

Now things are portrayed as obedient. I will admit, this is something I have noticed in a lot of the media my eldest child watches. So many shows such as Paw Patrol, Firebuds, Go Jetters, Mojo Swaptops, and Octonauts portray technology and artifacts as perfectly obedient, making everything effortless and operating more-or-less flawlessly. In these shows, it is always technology that saves the day. In Firebuds, one of the characters can literally conjure new physical structures by using an app on his tablet, and the vehicles move like gymnasts, not like physical objects at all. In Han’s words:

In this way, children are fed the idea that there is nothing that cannot be done, that there is a quick solution, an app, for everything and that life itself is nothing but a series of problems to be solved.

What is frustrating about this section though is that it seems to contradict some of his previous feelings toward things. Things are supposed to be objects of stability and comfort, now he’s missing the days when they were perceived as agents of chaos and destruction?

He goes on, lamenting, essentially, that we no longer perceive things as being alive and having their own wills.

They no longer represent a counterpart to humans. They are not opposing bodies. Who, today, feels looked at, or spoken to, by things? Who perceives the countenances of things? Who detects a living physiognony in things? To whom do things appear to have a soul? Who suspects that things have lives of their own? […] Do today’s children still tiptoe around dimly lit rooms, their hearts pounding. while tables, wardrobes and curtains pull wild faces at them?

To which I can only reply “I don’t know dude, did you try asking any?” I have no idea whether what he’s talking about is a real phenomenon, or whether, like, Han is just an adult now and has noticed that he and the people he knows no longer imagine that things have faces! As I say: if you’re not vibing with him, he seems to be talking nonsense.

But then he goes on to say more that I do vibe with.

Today’s world is very poor in gaze and voice. It neither looks at nor speaks to us. The digital screen determines our experience of the world and shields us from reality. [The other, as a secret, as a faze, as a vooice, disappears. The other, deprived of otherness, is reduced to an available, consumable object.

He then links this lack of other — essentially loneliness — to the spread of depression. Not an original observation, perhaps, but he does frame it in some interesting ways:

Because it makes everything gapless, digital communication destroys both nearness and distance. The relation to the other requires distance. Distance ensures that the Thou is not reduced to an It. In the age of gaplessness, relation gives way to contact without distance.

But all this is mixed into a confusing, rambling chapter that seems to present no central thesis. We’re just back and forth through different ideas he seems to find interesting.

Stillness

As the book begins to wind down, we’re back to his thoughts on temporality, and how the fragmented fast-paced information we encounter every day is destroying stillness.

Stillness emanates from what is unavailable. What is not available stabilizes and deepens our attention; it brings forth a contemplative gaze.

Remember, for Han, availability is the overarching “good” of the information age.

Stillness is alien to information […] Information steals the silence by imposing itself on us and demanding our attention. Stillness is a phenomenon of attentiveness. Stillness is created only by deep attentiveness. Information, however, dissects attention.

Again, I do not find it clear here what is meant by “information”. All information? Or just the historically contingent form of information that arrives to us via “smart” gadgets? A library is packed with information. Yet the information therein could hardly be described as “stealing the silence” or as lacking “stillness”.

And yet, there can be no doubt, we are losing stillness. Endless feeds and streams of content, our attention never having to linger too long on any one thing.

Final thoughts

Anyway, perhaps this was a rambling post, mostly just getting some feelings out of my head. But maybe that’s because it’s a rambling book, that just kind of poetically meanders through different topics, rarely landing on an idea long enough to thorough dissect, argue, or explain it. I suppose it was an interesting text to kickstart a year of reading about technology because it touches on so many things. Truth, privacy, communication, loneliness, attention, artificial intelligence, stability… whether he lands on sound (or even coherent) points on these topics is one thing… but there’s no doubt that these are the anxieties of our age when it comes to our relationship with technology.

Thank you for subscribing to my RSS feed. If you'd like to get in touch, even if just to say hi, please write to sayhi@thetangent.space. I'll be genuinely delighted to hear from you.

Weekly digest 52

theTangentSpace — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 23:59:59 GMT

Wednesday, February 4, 2026

10:01: Parents evening tonight. God bless the über-TA for giving me some intel about some of my trickier students

18:49: 🔗 Enjoyed this podcast on Workers' Lit featuring Trevor from No Cartridge about Neuromancer, one of my favourite sci-fis https://anchor.fm/s/d93a8430/podcast/play/111334295/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2025-10-18%2F3d0e2f4d-5cb1-09ed-fcde-24dd894a78b6.mp3

Thursday, February 5, 2026

10:13: 🔗 wow Caves Of Qud is coming to Switch https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DisUBYdcFcM

I used to play a lot of Qud, as well as other dense trad roguelikes. Handheld pick-up-and-play anywhere would definitely persuade me to pick up Qud again

10:22: 🔗 Some criticism of the Australia social media ban https://criticaledtech.com/2026/02/05/dealing-with-the-educational-impact-of-australias-social-media-ban/

I have posted before about being broadly sympathetic to the ban, other than perhaps the privacy implications for adults. I don't find the article very persuasive because it seems to equate social media ban with a complete internet ban. "Social media have educational content"... well, so does Wikipedia, Khan Academy, and many many other sites. Same for facilitating social connection — it can be done without having to go through harmful apps

16:03: 🔗 long but interesting video on progress towards Audacity 4. I use Audacity for most audio tasks, which I don't do super often, meaning I'm definitely in the camp who lacks expertise and finds Audacity's clunky UI a stumbling block — I can nearly always achieve what I want, but often takes several attempts and I always feel I'm doing it inefficiently. All these changes look great to me, and I hope they're not too alienating to expert users. As someone who has never worked on a large software project, the breakdown of the design decisions and trade offs is fascinating

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QYM3TWf_G38

19:15: I know all the discourse is about how bad Windows 11 is but man Office is such a mess as well. So many weird behaviours and UI design leave me thinking "man that's fucked up" every day.

Friday, February 6, 2026

6:34: 🔗 vibe coding is killing open source as LLMs depend on open source as off-the-shelf solutions to vibe coding problems, but never give back

https://www.404media.co/vibe-coding-is-killing-open-source-software-researchers-argue/

Not only that, project maintainers are overwhelmed by a deluge of vibe coded "contributions" by people who don't understand, use, or care about the software and just want the prestige/CV fodder of having some of "their" code in well-known projects

6:35: Last week these digests didn't come out right because I screwed up the world's simplest regular expression.

12:23: 🔗 "If you are reading this it is because I’m dead: here’s what I want to tell you about how to live"

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/06/reading-this-i-am-dead-how-to-live

Thanks to my sis for sending this one my way

13:53: 🔗 A history of the Green Party and where the currents that led to Zack Polanski's leadership originated

https://theecologist.org/2026/feb/06/green-red

Saturday, February 7, 2026

8:49: 🔗 Comparing the top 100 books on Goodreads to the top X films on popular user-aggregated movie sites

https://woolgathering.bearblog.dev/i-cant-stop-thinking-about-goodreads-top-100/

15:00: 🔗 LLMs and the indie web

https://osteophage.neocities.org/essays/bots-bad-indie-web

I am also reminded how annoying it is that anti-bot measures are active on so many sites, it makes Wallabag (read-it-later service) so much less useful. I can no longer send most articles to my ereader via Wallabag

16:04: I get so little "focused" leisure time on the computer right now. Part of it is I don't have the convenience of the Pocket Reform as it's currently in Berlin for repairs. There's a lot I want to write, stuff I want to do on the site, and I want to work on my other web project

19:51: 🔗 Why You'll Never Be Cultured

https://www.amugofinsights.org/why-youll-never-be-cultured/

What the Chinese etymology for "culture" can teach us

Sunday, February 8, 2026

7:51: 🔗 The Centre Shrinks

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/february/the-centre-shrinks

> Centrism in Britain is less a set of principles than a style: a preference for triangulation over truth, ‘responsibility’ over morality, ‘electability’ over leadership. It treats politics as a stress test of optics rather than a contest of values. It confuses the avoidance of conflict with coherence. And it creates a vacuum, an absence of moral clarity, that the far right is delighted to fill.

[...]

> This is the deeper problem with centrism: it wants the prestige of professing values without the cost of acting on them. It’s allergic to taking moral risks. It will cheer international law when it flatters Britain’s self-image, but equivocate when it implicates an ally. Inconsistency is not a minor flaw in an era of authoritarian resurgence. It’s a structural invitation. Fascists thrive on the collapse of shared standards. They feed on the public recognition that rules are selective, that principles are mere branding, that justice is transactional.

11:26: Home is once again ravaged by toddler respiratory bugs. At least there's only one week until half term break

15:21: If you're suddenly following this, it's because I merged my personal account with the (much more active) account I use to generate weekly digest posts on my site, so, hello again!

19:56: 🔗 I got 173 animals on https://rose.systems/animalist

Surprisingly fun, lots of Easter eggs

19:59: 📖 I surprised myself by getting several days ahead of the reading schedule on The Circle, so I found time to read some Odyssey as well.

21:21: Well, I feel pretty rough today. Mild bug, chronic hiccups (I occasionally get this, and it's painful after a while), and just so tired thanks to snotty toddler. Signing off for the week to sleep all this off (hopefully)

Thank you for subscribing to my RSS feed. If you'd like to get in touch, even if just to say hi, please write to sayhi@thetangent.space. I'll be genuinely delighted to hear from you.

Weekly digest 51

theTangentSpace — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 23:59:59 GMT

Monday, January 26, 2026

6:37: 🔗 The decline of reading might not be as terminal as some of us are coming to think. Anecdotally, everyone I know spends less time reading than they used to or want to, and more time scrolling and streaming.

If this article is correct and we're passing peak social media, that's great. But I'm still a bit sceptical.

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/text-is-king

8:28: 🔗 https://cleantechnica.com/2026/01/23/catl-begins-commercial-production-of-sodium-ion-batteries/ sodium-ion batteries — better performance, long life, and more available than lithium

22:37: 🔗 https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/its-mental-illness-doesnt-do-that

> If there’s one thing I hate in this world, it’s moral convenience - moral judgements people develop because it makes life easier for them, practically or emotionally or socially, rather than because they’re actually correct.

Tuesday, January 27, 2026

6:07: One downside of this system is no formatting because Mastodon doesn't support html or markdown. I guess I could switch to an instance running a Mastodon fork, or switch to micro.blog, but then we really have come full circle...

20:29: 🔗 https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/paradox-of-tolerance/

I read Manu's initial post and some of the follow-up. Agree with everything said here, and while I like a lot of Manu's posts I am frequently frustrated by his "enlightened centrist" views. The bit about Harry Potter is also true for me of the Smiths.

Thursday, January 29, 2026

7:42: 🖥️ 🔗 https://github.com/christo-auer/eilmeldung I've been a Newsboat user for many years, and use it as a client for Newsblur, my RSS reader service. Not exclusively; often I just use the Newsblur site or mobile app. While I enjoy Newsboat's minimalism, it is a bit old-school, and is clearly designed primarily with a local feed list in mind rather than syncing with a server. I did not know there was another good TUI feed reader... but of course there's a Rust one. There's a good TUI everything in Rust (perhaps I'll make a post for how to install Rust apps sometime). Eilmeldung is great. Modern interface, designed for syncing, lots of configuration options. Thanks to https://82mhz.net for this one.

9:08: Not keen on today's Minute Cryptic. My view on misleading punctuation is it's ok to mix punctuation in with letters to be anagrammed or otherwise transformed, but you shouldn't have to ignore punctuation to make an instruction or indicator make sense

22:17: There is 0 chance I'll be able to read a 500 page novel in a month, at least a month when I'm in work. I bought the book and started it — seems good. But realistically it's just going to stress me out to try, and one of my reading goals was to not put pressure on myself to finish lots of books. I'll save it as a summer hols read, maybe get a head start on the next book, or read something else from my nightstand.

Sunday, February 1, 2026

14:35: 📖 Okay, maybe I was too hasty to make that last judgment. I picked the book up again yesterday and have since read 100 pages in under 24 hours (this is a lot, practically unheard of, for me). This is totally doable.

21:43: 🔗 https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ delightful site, everything you've ever wanted to know about tying your shoelaces. Found via https://unsung.aresluna.org/favourite-well-made-apps-and-sites/

21:56: 🖥️ trying out snacks.nvim, mainly for the picker and its great built-ins but I have to say I'm enjoying some of its other little nick nacks. Not looking forward to porting my custom telescope pickers over to snacks...

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Secular faith and the meaning of life

theTangentSpace — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 13:00:40 GMT

This post is a submission to this month’s IndieWeb carnival on “The Meaning Of Life”.

Growing up Christian, I would originally have said that my faith gave my life meaning. When I lost my faith around age 17, I was plagued by several anxieties — the fear of death, the fear of being wrong and thus condemning myself to hell, and the fear that life would become meaningless. While I was able to get used to my own mortality after a few years, the question of a meaningless life remained.

The messages of the New Atheists offered various salves to the problem of meaning. Usually they appealed to the wonder of the cosmos, and how fortunate we are to be around to enjoy it. Now, the wonder of the cosmos is cool and all, but it doesn’t really give my day-to-day life much meaning. “We’re all made of star-stuff, man” is pretty awesome, but it doesn’t really inform why I drag myself to work every day, or look after my kids.

The book that has most shaped my understanding of what makes life meaningful since then is This Life by philosopher Martin Hägglund, which I read in 2024. Hägglund presents two core concepts, which he calls secular faith and spiritual freedom. The former is most relevant to “the meaning of life”, so it’ll be the focus here, but I will briefly outline spiritual freedom toward, which is more of a political concept.

The first half of Hägglund’s book argues against religious faith being a source of meaning, and for secular faith as it’s true source. Hägglund’s definition of “religious” in this argument is fairly broad — what he means is anything that is supposedly eternal or invulnerable, such as a god, an afterlife, a reincarnation cycle, and so on.

The claim here is that once we introduce eternity, any possibility of meaning is dissolved. How can devotion to an eternal god be meaningful, since my devotion cannot possibly have any consequence for such a being? How can an eternal afterlife have meaning, since it literally does not matter what I do? — anything that could be considered important could be put off until tomorrow, forever. And what would it mean to care for my family, friends, and neighbours if they too were eternal, as in an afterlife? They would have no need for anyone’s care. In Hägglund’s words,

Far from making my life meaningful, eternity would make it meaningless, since my actions would have no purpose. What I do and what I love can matter to me only because I understand myself as mortal. […] The question of what I ought to do with my life — a question that is at issue in everything I do — presupposes that I understand my time to be finite.

Likewise, belief systems that promise some sense of invulnerability ultimately lead to meaninglessness. Buddhism promises that if we reach nirvana, we can let go of all impermanent things that cause us pain, and attain a state of “perfect rest and absolute permanence”. Stoics like Epictetus teach that we must let go of impermanent things (such as our own children) and have faith in an eternal, provident universe. But again we are left with the problem: what is left for us to value if it cannot be taken away or harmed?

My argument is that we should reject the idea that such a state of being is a goal worth striving for. A religious [(eternal)] redemption from loss — whether through an immanent detachment or transcendent eternity — is not a solution to any of our problems. Rather than making our dreams come true, it would obliterate who we are. To be invulerable to grief is not to be consummated; it is to be deprived of the capacity to care. And to rest in peace is not to be fulfilled: it is to be dead.

On the other hand, secular faith is defined as faith in finite, fragile things — our own lives, our loved ones, our projects, and our moral and political causes. Unlike an eternal god, these things literally depend on our faith to be sustained. If I lose faith in my marriage, then my marriage will fall apart. As Hägglund writes:

To have secular faith is to acknowledge that the object of our faith is dependent on the practice of faith. I call it secular faith, since the object of devotion does not exist independently of those who believe in its importance and who keep it alive through their fidelity.

A religious reader might read this and think “Hey, I believe in eternal life, but I still value my relationships”. But for Hägglund, in this capacity you are acting on the basis of your secular faith, not your religious faith. If you care about your relationships to other people — if you have devotion to them — it is because you understand their fragility.

Ultimately, I agree with the thrust of Hägglund’s point here. Maybe this is something I on some level already believed, but Hägglund articulates it well and rigorously. This life, the fragile life we have together, is all we have. Our actions take on meaning because we are vulnerable to failure, to things falling through, to losing someone or something. I go to work because I value the way of life I can provide for my family, which is fragile, and also because I value education, a collective commitment that is only sustained through the endeavour of everyone in the sector. I nurture my relationships because I could lose them. I look after my health because I am committed to continuing a good life for as long as I can, even though it is fragile and I will one day lose it.

The other idea in the book is spiritual freedom. He contrasts spiritual freedom with the natural freedom of an animal. An animal can in some sense choose what it does with its time. But humans have the (seemingly, but not necessarily, unique) capacity to question what we ought to do with our time, who we ought to be, and how we ought to live. Ours is the possibility of meaningfully questioning the direction of life is taking, to reevaluate what matters to us, and also to question the historical and cultural norms that govern our life, or as Hägglund puts it

the question of if I ought to do what I supposedly ought to do.

That is to say, spiritual freedom is not freedom from constraints and obligations. But it entails the capacity to question and challenge our constraints and obligations if we ultimately realise they’re not what we ought to be doing.

Our spiritual freedom comes in degrees. If we are a slave, or in such desperate poverty that every day is a fight for mere survival, the question of what we ought to be doing doesn’t carry much weight — we don’t have much spiritual freedom.

This is where the book’s political argument comes in. Hägglund argues that the goal of political and economic life should be the maximisation of spiritual freedom. Now taking a strongly Marxist turn, Hägglund summarises the arguments of Vol. 1 of Capital, and reinterprets the critique of capitalism in terms of its diminishment of spiritual freedom. According to Marx’s Law of Value, it is socially necessary labour time that produces value, surplus value, and hence profits, under capitalism. Hence capitalist societies are structured around compelling us to engage in as much socially necessary labour as possible to generate the most value.

Hägglund argues instead for a socialist society in which the socially necessary labour is minimised and distributed as efficiently and equitably as possible, leaving as much as our time as possible for us to exercise our spiritual freedom by pursuing our freely determined ends.

The exact structure of this argument is quite intricate and more than I can go into here, and how much you accept the details may depend quite a lot on how sympathetic you are to Marx’s Law of Value. Like many utopian visions, the question of quite how we will all negotiate to determine, minimise, and equitably share the socially necessary labour is also left underspecified. But regardless of these critiques, the overall argument is fascinating and stimulating, and don’t diminish my recommendation of This Life at all. I think any ex-religious person interested in “the meaning of life” without religion would find it interesting, as well as any leftist interested in a “spiritual” conception of why leftwing politics matter. The throughline of the book is the idea of finite time — it is our finite time that makes our life meaningful in the first place, and we are not spiritually free until how we use that finite time can be meaningfully questioned.

Thank you for subscribing to my RSS feed. If you'd like to get in touch, even if just to say hi, please write to sayhi@thetangent.space. I'll be genuinely delighted to hear from you.

Weekly digest 50

theTangentSpace — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 23:59:59 GMT

Monday, January 19, 2026

9:51: 🔗 I recently posted about how Europe needs to liberate itself from US tech https://thetangent.space/2026/infrastructure/. But in the UK we're signing new defense contracts with Palantir https://archive.is/0DKtb

Check out https://www.ianbetteridge.com/ten-blue-links-featuring-peter-thiel-again-edition/ for a link to the original article (and more on digital sovereignty in Europe)

19:48: 🖥️ I've been recording some video for some computing cover lessons. DroidCam is great! No webcam, no problem — just use your phone and stream it directly into OBS over WiFi.

Tuesday, January 20, 2026

19:35: ✒️ Subscribed to Presence, a British haiku journal. As Trump raises tariffs on Europe it's more important than ever to buy British haiku

Wednesday, January 21, 2026

11:24: 💼 Actually so stressed with work right now. Colleague is off so I'm setting/doing a lot of cover. I know I don't/shouldn't have to but to do otherwise would leave a GCSE class for several weeks without a teacher

22:10: My wife texted me at work today to let me know she'd adopted fish

Thursday, January 22, 2026

7:06: Mr Three has named them Clement and Clam.

His approach to naming things is to start with a C- or Cl- and improvise from there. We also have Cocono the invisible horse, and one time woke to the news that Cocono was having a baby. Called Clobe.

Friday, January 23, 2026

13:37: 🔗 Scientists discover women like tall, athletic men with large wangs https://www.404media.co/scientists-got-men-to-rate-penises-by-how-intimidating-they-are-this-is-what-they-found/

17:45: Latest issue of Unch Crosswords just arrived https://unchcrosswords.com/. Yet to look at a puzzle but beautiful design, type, and quality, as we've come to expect

21:57: Love Unch's editors are totally fine with cluing "X" as "far right platform"

Saturday, January 24, 2026

8:18: First Unch puzzle down: Catnip. A couple of clues I don't fully understand but there were some clever definitions and surfaces

13:34: Sending both boys to sleep at their grandparents tonight for the first time, our first night of actual freedom in... almost four years!

Sunday, January 25, 2026

9:15: Went out for lovely Japanese meal

11:44: 📖 Finished my rereading of Non-things by Byung-Chul Han.

17:41: 🖥️ Packaging up my Pocket Reform to send it off for repair again. I love the design of the device, its size, reparability, ortholinear keyboard, etc. But its reliability has left a lot to be desired... two issues now, intermittent boot failure, it sometimes takes up to five attempts to boot. And the keyboard/trackball keeps disconnecting. Sometimes it reconnects by itself after a few seconds, sometimes it reconnects after resetting the keyboard's controller device, and sometimes it won't reconnect at all after many resets, requiring a full reboot to reconnect.

18:31: 📖 Started reading The Circle by Dave Eggers. Trying to pick up a new reading habit of looking up everything I'm unfamiliar with. About 8 pages in, and I've learned about two designers (Calatrava and Calders), and learned a new word (burlap).

22:26: 🥘 Cooked Rasta pasta https://thehiddenveggies.com/vegan-rasta-pasta/

22:28: I guess this is me signing off for the week, and fingers crossed that my script successfully puts out a digest tonight.

Thank you for subscribing to my RSS feed. If you'd like to get in touch, even if just to say hi, please write to sayhi@thetangent.space. I'll be genuinely delighted to hear from you.

New format for digest posts

theTangentSpace — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 11:55:57 GMT

In my last weekly digest post, I mentioned a change in the format. Or at least, I’ll be trialling one.

I’ve not found the current format too conducive because it relies on me picking up the motivation to review my week and mention the stuff I’ve been doing and look back through my saved posts and history to see if there’s anything worth linking to. Often, I don’t feel like doing this.

So here’s the new way. I’ve started microblogging on a Mastodon account for this site (which I may merge with my seldom-used “main” account). I’ve set up a scheduled pipeline on Gitlab (where the source files for my site live) to automatically fetch these microposts and compile them into a Digest post. This means I can just post links as I find them, and writes notes on my week as things come up.

The downside is the notes will no longer be grouped by topic, but to remedy this, I’ll tag my posts with emoji to make it easy to skim and find anything you’re interested in such as 🎮, 🔗, or 📖. Emoji are ugly, but they might solve this issue.

We’ll see how it goes, let me know how it is (if you like digests/week notes of course). This is all assuming the script that automatically posts my digest works at the scheduled time.

Thank you for subscribing to my RSS feed. If you'd like to get in touch, even if just to say hi, please write to sayhi@thetangent.space. I'll be genuinely delighted to hear from you.