The Universe of Joshua Blais

Posting LLM generated writing is an afront to the intelligence of everyone that you want to read it, and a direct insult to humanity as a whole.

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell” Edward Abbey The modern world is built on a system in which we must “progress” in order to survive.

If you follow me for even five minutes, you will find my disenfranchisement with modern smartphones is palpable.

“In 6 months, programming will be solved!”

“You’re just nostalgic!”

For 6 years or so, I have been down the custom, split, ergonomic keyboard rabbit hole.

Building your own keyboard is a rite of passage for those caught up in the ergonomic rabbit hole.

In 2019, I started using DOOM emacs as my main emacs “distribution”.

“What we do in life echoes in eternity.”

Back in 2014, I was on a cruise with family (boomer parents, I don’t actually like cruises) - and I did not have my phone or internet access for 17 days.

As a heavy emacs user, Guix system seems to be the logical place to rest one’s head in the perpetual distro hop.

With the Pope’s Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas recently posted, I have seen some of the worst takes online: All from people that have not read the thing they are critiquing.

The Vatican has just released Leo XIV’s Encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, and I figured I would read through and give my commentary on such a pivotal document in the era of “AI” and the continual lockstep toward dehumanizing all of humanity.

I just got off the phone with my bank, wasting about 30 minutes of my ever-shortening life to be told that I need not worry about the email that came in this morning and nearly gave me a heart attack.

“All of man’s miseries stem from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” — Blaise Pascal When I think about the challenge of living in the modern world, the constant that continually crosses my mind is that we are so unable to revel in silence anym…

I never thought I would reach 5k subscribers on Youtube, so I owe everyone a massive thank you!

“The measure of love is to love without measure.” — St.

If you only use social media and video hosting frontends - getting fed by algorithms and visiting the same 5 sites everyday on constant doomscroll, then the internet has never been alive for you.

When people talk about the “internet dying” - what they are really talking about is slop overtaking the algorithm - of social media becoming unuseable because it’s all bots.

In my ever-increasing desire to use emacs as my sole computing environment, I have started to take browsing the web inside it far more seriously.

While Org-mode is fantastic in its core functionality, there is a lovely little extension that creates a way to build a wiki for all personal knowledge, ideas, writing, work, and so much more: org-roam.

I recently discovered Meow as a modal editing replacement for evil-mode, and it has become a mainstay in my recent vanilla emacs configuration.

I had the absolute pleasure to be joined by the great Protesilaos Stavrou for a conversation about emacs, minimalism, life philosophy, interconnectedness, and infinite depth.

A simple thing I’ve overlooked with NixOS is that I can create very different environments with a simple nixos-rebuild switch - effectively making my machine distraction free when I want it to be, or permitting some play in the off hours.

Apparently my RSS Feed was not displaying full post content - just the title - making people have to click through to the actual post on site.

As we go into another year, I have paired down even further as to what is allowed on my mobile device.

With the LLM hysteria seemingly without an end in sight, what is sorrowfully missing from the modern world is a push toward mastery.

While many would complain about the internet “dying” - the information is still out there for anyone to find - you just need to know how to look for it.

Look around you, and you will see so much noise.

I started the new year by getting kicked off Cloudinary’s free tier for image storage.

“I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.”

I logged into IRC this morning to see this message: “Don’t take this the wrong way but does anyone else find Joshua Blais’ blog posts and twitter feeds a rabbit hole?”

If you work in text, make everything you possibly can a git repository.

It feels as if 2025 has flown by.

Ah, programming language choices - the great philosophical debate of our time.

I had the pleasure to collaborate with tony-btw on a Christmas stream, where we discussed all things free and open source, Nix, Guix, BSD, programming languages, screens, philosophy and more.

As I write this, there is a retired couple sitting in the coffee shop across from me reading books together.

When choosing a machine, you face the Trilemma Of Choice: The Computing Constraint Trilemma# Portability - weight, battery life, form factor Performance - CPU headroom, GPU capability, thermal sustained load Economy - initial cost, maintenance burden, rep…

I recently took my old workstation out of storage, booted it and found it running Fedora 40 - so of course it was time to put NixOS on the machine and bring it into the fleet.

I’ve built and released my first colorscheme: Compline, with its companion light theme Lauds.

The other day on twitter, I saw the question posed: “What are your favourite drugs/escapes from reality?”

Emacs has holistically become my daily computing environment.

Table of Contents# For those of you with custom keyboards, the in-built laptop keyboard is and will always be a second class citizen.

I got the Supernote A6X2 Nomad almost a year ago, and have been using it off and on for that entire time, deciding if it has a place in my workflow.

I apologize for my absence in the blogging world as of late - as my last post showed, I have been going down the Nix/NixOS rabbit hole and working on some personal business projects that will be out in the coming months.

When you first start into the rabbit hole that is Linux, you see that there are hundreds if not thousands of distributions that you can pick to use.

If you are new around here, you won’t notice the changes I have recently made to my site - but if you’ve visited here before, things will be looking quite different!

Linkarzu had TJ DeVries, DistroTube, Gregory Anders and myself on a livestream to discuss Emacs Vs.

I recently took it upon myself to migrate dozens of email accounts off of a legacy server I was paying way too much for, and move over everything to MXRoute. $30 USD/year is a pretty good deal for unlimited mailboxes and ~400 sends per hour from each box.

Due to my use of ad blockers and PiHole I did not know that Disqus injects ads into your site if you use their comment section.