A few reasons why I started this blog.

Why this random blog

I’m an avid reader of blogs and it has been many years since I’ve had one.

I believe that the very best that the internet has churned out since its birth lies inside blogs, left undisturbed and unhindered far away from the fast-paced production and consumption of social media clutter.

It’s a world drastically different from the one of traditional social networks: this kingdom is ruled by long reflections and responses so slow they arrive late, when the party is over and the topic is not trending anymore (in my opinion a feature, not a bug).

Not many back and forth nor many inflamed discussions generating visceral and impulsive reactions. Some blogs provide a lot of stimuli (some of which might be superficial, whilst others might dig deeper), some are collections of experience, and others of solutions to problems that someone pledged to report for the benefit of strangers.

It’s possible that blogs are becoming less and less popular¹. Nevertheless I think that popular isn’t necessarily proxy of good.

I think that there exists an abundance of good reasons for which it may be worth still having a blog. Here I express mine.

1. Treasure hunting

I like this² attitude:

I believe that in most cases, whoever decides to write a blog, does so for it to be read. In reality, I want to do exactly that, yet for the opposite reason: I want to read, to discover.

Writing forces us to refine our knowledge, it forces us to read more and to be more selective with what we read. It’s a method to reach writings and people that otherwise, without a need acting as a stimulus, it would be impossible to reach: it’s a new stepping stone, it’s a bit of randomness that can lead us to treasures that we didn’t even know we were in desperate need to find.

2. To put my thoughts in order

Paul Graham³ expresses himself as follows:

Or, in other words, writing forces us to clean and refine our thoughts, in order to make them more presentable.

The moment we start writing we are obliged to freeze our thinking, to put under scrutiny our thoughts, to give them a name and a face and get to know them better. I believe that writing a blog - something public - forces us towards a reasoned introspection which is, in my opinion, valuable and constantly rarer during our hectic days.

3. The value of others' feedback

One of the best ways to correct our thinking process is by exposing what we think to others, so that we can adjust our ideas whilst challenging them.

And like most, I’m always in need of improvement.

Why isn’t there a comments section?

Right now I don’t deem it useful. Furthermore, not having it is a simple yet useful filter for meaningful interactions.

I prefer emails anyway: they are somehow slower; to be sent they require an extra bit of effort and a little more skin in the game⁴.

Moreover, they allow for a one to one relationship which is more intimate and profound; asynchronous conversations tend to be more reflexive and ordinate.

My email address is notes [at] kairosdojo.xyz.

4. Improve my written english

I also need an excuse to practice and ameliorate my written english. If you find errors in these pages (and it shouldn’t be that difficult), I would love if you could point them out to me: I would be most grateful!

Why kairosdojo?

Some years ago I decided to read some of the Greek classics that I crammed way too rapidly during high school. I’ve rediscovered their greatness and with it the concept of kairos (the opportune time, the right measure⁵), which is evanescently described by Euripides as that only, fleeting, moment in which it is appropriate to release an arrow in order to hit a target⁶.

Nietzsche⁷ refers to the kairos as something that must be «tyrannised» although that’s difficult, as it requires the tremendous force of «five hundred hands»:

And here comes to our rescue the concept of dojo⁸, which is a place where one can train to achieve a result.

Combining these two concepts we have, give or take, kairos-dojo: a continuous gym where to train ourselves to achieve the ability of catching the right moments.

I like it, so I made it my username :)

Technical details

Self-hosting

I’d probably be better off by opting for medium, substack or similar services. On the other hand, I don’t really have great ambitions for my ramblings: they are primarily for me, no one else. I don’t need complex backends or services to handle these pages. And I do not need social network integrations: a website and an email are more than enough to satisfy (and exceed) my needs.

Last but not least, in a world dominated by big tech companies handling almost everything for us, I really like the idea of having complete ownership of my data and managing completely the backend of this website (trivial details such as its domain and its hosting). If this website doesn’t work or it isn’t reachable, well, that’d only be my fault. It’s a simple yet efficacious way to put a bit of responsability on my side.

This website is created using Hugo and its theme LoveIt. Both of them are open source projects.

About that string of characters at the bottom of each post

It’s another method to keep myself responsible for what I write: to force me to think it twice before I publish a post.

Let me explain.

Every time I publish a post here I will take a snapshot of it using some sort of fingerprint (a sha-256 hash of the .md file that generated it in Hugo).

The sha-256 algorithm has an interesting feature: the string it generates, which has a constant lenght, changes completely when changing a single character of the string it receives as an input.

As an example, I want to create the hash of a sentence that represents the content of a post of this blog (like this page you are reading now).

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# Let's imagine that the content of my post is inside the variable file_md
file_md         = "This is my page content"

# then, the generated hash is
sha256(file_md) = "5df48b3ca3b3236ae33ae46ae6a1f085a8251957680e9ca891e6efffe9671bec"

Now, I just add a full stop at the end of my string.

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# I just add a "." at the end
file_md         = "This is my page content."

# the generated hash is completely different than the previous one
sha256(file_md) = "58a95917ff92085eb5228af839e794622a48ec7a9682a255f30165d8d355c405"

It’s almost impossible⁹ that two strings (or files) processed with this algorithm return the same hash.

When I then publish a post, each hash generated as above gets promptly (and permanently) recorded in the Ethereum blockchain¹⁰ showing (forever¹¹) when the publication occurred and what was published. For this scope I created a very simple and minimalistic smart contract: few lines of code but they should do the job. Of course it is open source; I’ve also verified its code against the bytecode deployed to Ethereum.

Given that data (even logs) written in the blockchain are immutable, no one can edit them after they are recorded¹²: I can still write more of course but I can’t hide the past.

This simple application of the blockchain is called notarisation and it’s all but new¹³. Its use for these posts entail the following consequences:

1. If we aren’t able to re-generate the hash present in the blockchain for a given post (using its .md file), then it means that the .md file has changed since it has been generated;

2. I can prove when I published something (I can’t back- or post-date it);

3. I can demonstrate the ownership of the content of a blog post (i.e. I can safely state that “I have written this post on that specific date”).

My minimalistic smart contract (Blogtary) has been deployed on the Ethereum MainNet, you can see it here. My public address is 0x07a64516bfa38f2f9c3d84fd75d4aba9b53274fb.

At this link we can appreciate the very first log (see Data):

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021adf127c84724dcc979aaab4b1b36b62d3f54894e5b0e19d56d78cdfd9e288

which is generated from the string representing the name of this website: https://notes.kairosdojo.xyz.

Editing

Evidently few things last in eternity, and these notes are no different.

Every time I’ll heavily amend a post (either because I found some errors or I changed my beliefs) I’ll have to generate a new hash, which will be once again registered through the Blogtary smart contract: the new hash won’t substitute the previous one, but it’ll be a whole new record / log. All the logs will always be visible.

What to expect from these pages

Absolutely nothing! The truth is that this blog is just a personal collection of:

1. practical solutions to technical problems that I face daily and that I would like share with others hoping to save them some time of online searching;

2. thoughts; a place where I publicly take notes on topics I find interesting; things like (biologically plausible) machine learning, cortical algorithms, python, rust, neuroscience, maths, the markets, various and sundry rants.

That’s all.

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