If you subscribe to the idea that making tons of poor choices will lead to poor outcomes, I think it only makes sense that you should also believe that making tons of good choices will lead to good outcomes.

I’m not a religious person, but this is the closest thing to faith that I have. It’s playing the numbers, isn’t it? Doing an act of kindness, or acting for good, or choosing to speak truth in the face of inconvenience, are all ways to stack the probabilities so that it’s more likely that good things happen in the long run than bad.

People say “death by a thousand cuts” but I can’t think of an equivalent phrase for improving things by a thousand tiny acts of caring.

I think “building brick by brick” is the closest phrase I can think of, yet it’s not exactly what I want because it’s more like consistently following a construction plan. The expression I want should suggest that even random, unplanned kindness eventually create goodness.

• #opinion

I’ve discovered one thing I love about commuting into the office:

The lunch group.

Commuting sucks; remote work is great, and everyone should embrace it.

Having said that, no one has successfully emulated lunch over the Internet.

Having lunch with a group of people in generally the same team/division/org, who are all wrestling with similar challenges, is a valuable, humanizing thing. I’ve learned much about the people behind the commits, built relationships with coworkers, and absorbed technical wisdom beyond mere documentation. I like to think that others have benefited from my opinions and experience as well.

But most importantly, lunch provides a zone of plausible deniability. This is a time when people can honestly air their grievances with no way for lawyers to later discover what was said. It affords taboos to be spoken, gossip to be spread, heresy to be shared, and value systems to be collectively and honestly applied to how the sausage is made, with little fear of retaliation. It allows us to be more fully human.

I haven’t found anything that replicates this. Not remotely.

• #opinion

My theory: kooky people have always existed, but kookiness was hard to spread, because kookiness is not conducive to reality-based survival.

But engagement-based media changed that. Kookiness became just another “personal interest” that the algorithm fed you more of. The path from well-adjusted person to full-time kook now had a digital Sherpa: the algorithm. Because the journey happened on a screen, the social cost of descending into kookdom was cheap; you could turn into a kook without anyone knowing. Along the way, con artists discovered that people on their way to kookdom were good marks. They created media specifically to be recommended to pilgrims on the road to kookdom. The more media they generated, the better paved the road became.

And finally, we have the political weaponization of kookiness. The GOP made being a kook part of the party’s identity. Not only was kookiness acceptable, it was a membership requirement. So yeah, it’s no surprise there are more kooks today than there were in the 80s.

Having said that, kookiness is still not conducive to reality-based survival, and having a mass of people being kooks reduces society’s chances of survival. GOP kooks (redundant, I know) in 2025 are getting away with their kooky beliefs because so much of the system remains based in reality, and works to protect them from the consequences of their kookiness. But the system can only withstand so much volume of kookiness in society before its safety margins are eroded.

Reality catches up to everyone, even kooks. Sooner or later, kooks will suffer the natural consequences of their decisions. Some of them will change their minds and abandon the kooky life, but many others will go even kookier by inventing rationales to explain away their suffering.

• #opinion

This post guides you through the installation of Deluge and Autobrr on a TrueNAS Scale storage appliance.

Motivation

Feel free to skip this section and go straight to the installation instructions.

My motivation for running these apps is to add another node to the swarm archiving the sciop.net scientific document collection. Since I have a TrueNAS appliance always connected to the Internet, I figured running a torrent agent on it will offer a low-maintenance way to use the attached storage to support this effort.

SciOP groups torrents into various collections, and each collection is published as an RSS feed. The use of RSS to feed BitTorrent clients is normally a tool for publishing episodic video. Because of that common use case, some RSS torrent clients (like Sonarr) require that the feed have publication dates, to filter and prioritize episodes to download. The SciOP feeds are static catalogs of documents without publication date fields, so such clients won’t work with them. Autobrr does.

The TrueNAS Scale OS offers certain ready-made Docker images in their “app store” that offer configuration interfaces that can be manipulated through their web UI. Both Deluge and Autobrr are available there, so I chose them for the simplest and most maintainable installation.

OK, on with the installation.

Read more…

• #howto

“Fairness” and “justice” are not the same thing.

Fairness has to do with playing according to the rules—someone wins a game “fair and square”—without considering whether the rules themselves are just.

Fairness in a game that is rigged is still unjust. Insisting on “fair admissions” for people whose families have vastly different histories of privilege or oppression is unjust. Insisting on “fair taxation” is meaningless without a larger, justice-driven goal of reducing wealth inequality. After all, it’s perfectly fair for a bilionaire to shield their wealth; they’re playing the game as written.

Striving for justice often initially upsets people who focus on fairness, because justice often demands breaking long-standing tradition. But justice is what moves societies toward enlightenment; fairness only keeps it firmly in the past.

• #opinion