Hi, I'm Diego Cabello. Currently I am a student at some college somewhere. Previously I spent a couple years in the Silicon Valley startup world, with moderate success, before deciding to return to school. I also work on apps on the side.
This website was designed with a minimalist aesthetic, and more about those design choices are detailed in these essays. See previous biography blurbs here
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Proof of Transclusion
Introduction Transclusion was posed by Ted Nelson in 1980 in his book “soeghing”. It was key to his vision of an internet but was one of the things that slipped through.
My Heritage Cladogram
Recently I read the essay “How Dawkins Got Pwned” by Mencius Moldbug. Moldbug in his interviews repeatedly goes back to how his mother was a WASP and a very popular socialite in Nassau county, his father worked in the State Department, and his grandparents on his father’s side were members of the CPUSA. I think it a worthy exercise to do the same thing. Well, in his essay, Moldbug made a big point of tracing traditions into a cladogram. But I am not entirely sure where on the heritage cladogram I fall. My mother is what I would describe as a fanatic Catholic. Her beliefs can be characterized in this one pivotal moment, when she was going to go to Rice University in Houston for undergrad when she encountered the infamous “Rice Purity Test” at orientation week and got freaked out by its unholy inclusions and so left Rice and at the last minute enrolled in Thomas More College in New Hampshire, a fanatical, fundamentalist, even extremist Catholic bastion “in the middle of nowhere”, as she described it. A New Hampshire commune, but Catholic. Remarkably, even a non-papist Catholic bastion, as some there did not recognize the Pope’s authority since the Vatican II council from 1960, which “Protestantized” the Catholic Church. One of several of these Catholic educational outposts in this country, where the only place their strain could fester was, out in the woods. There are a few other places like that that can be ...
Social Dynamics, Continued
this post is the next in a series of posts exploring social dynamics. one of the most harmful ideas i’ve ever encountered was a phrase i was repeatedly exposed to, “keep your users in mind, always be asking them what they want”. to take some (alleged) wisdom from the greatest michigander of the 20th century, Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” riffing off that: i got some really good advice from a reader last week, that i need to explain what I mean more completely instead of going off things that I know what they mean but the reader might not. so this post is going to have a lot of explanations. i’m talking about a car, not a faster horse. IN CONTEXTU lets say iso and allo1 are in a conversation in isolation with eachother. meaning, they are aware of eachother and there is no one else observing or influencing them. actually before we get into anything else i want to get that sticky phrase “in isolation with eachother” out of the way. it does not roll off the toungue. fortunately, there is a real-life construct where two people can be “in isolation with eachother”, and that is a “room”. a room is a supremely useful construct for talking about what we mean here. for the sake of the schelling point here, let’s imagine four walls, a floor, roof, window, and door. it serves as a physical for...
The State of Classical Computing Hardware
Someone interested in financial markets recently commissioned me to write about quantum computing. Since quantum computing is at least 10 years away for practical usage, I am going to be doing an overview of current and near-future computer hardware right now before talking about quantum computing. This is meant to be a brief overview, but every sentence in this series is a gross oversimplification and could have its own thesis written about it. Lord help me writing this, for I am not really qualified to speak on the topic, and I don’t know if I am going to stay on topic either. 1. Intro Right now the US and China are in a race for computational dominance. Whoever gets the best computers faster will be able to make better computers to make better computers to take off and do God knows what. If one nation can build powerful enough quantum computers, it can lead to a “fast takeoff” (even more better computers to do something with), but until then, the war is still being waged on the classical computers front. It is impossible to talk about quantum computing without first being familiar with classical computers, and it is impossible to talk about computing at all without being familiar with the geopolitical connotations, so, I am going to be repeatedly touching back on the geopolitics. There are a few metrics that we measure computing hardware on, and in this list the thing after the comma is which is better Classica...
Glass
G.L.A.S.S. (Graphic List and Select System) is a TUI file browser
written in C with ncurses.
Commands
q - quit without saving
x - save and quit
t - toggle between tags and files
s - save changes
v - split screen
Shift - intensify selection by 10
Ctrl - intensify selection by 5
Enter - Select and move down
Space - Select
Epistylometry
a forger’s skill becomes their signature.
epistylometry, from the greek “epistos” for
“knowledge” and “stylos” for “style”, is the knowledge
signature of a person. what someone does demonstrates what they
know, possibly what they don’t know, and possibly what they are trying
to obscure they know. the term borrows from the commonplace word
“stylometry”, which is used to describe someone’s writing style based on
various metrics.
you know in “breaking bad”, where it should have been obvious to
agent schrader that heisenberg was walter white, due to the advanced
chemistry knowledge needed to make blue meth? that chemistry is walter
white’s epistylometric signature.
this terminology pulls together a few other
similar-but-disparately-named terms and concepts from various places
(see the need for a nomenclator),
including:
in stylometry, analyzing writing patterns to identify
authors. this is how they unmask anonymous writers - your word choices,
sentence structures, even punctuation habits form a signature
in cyber attacks, security researchers analyze malware techniques,
coding styles, and operational patterns to identify threat actors
in art forgery, forgers must study not just technique
but the knowledge limitations of the period. anachronistic knowledge
reveals fakes.
counterfeiting currency
Epistemic Sentiment Modeling
1. knowledge
1.1 sentiment annotators
we introduce three symbols: plus + for positive
associations, circle o for neutral associations, and
dash/minus - for negative associations. we call these
sentiment annotators
when a sentiment annotators between two people are denoted over an
arrow indicating directionality (mono-directional or bidirectional)
A→+BA \xrightarrow{+} B
reads “A likes B”
A↔+BA \stackrel{+}{\longleftrightarrow} B
reads “A and B like eachother”
1.2 epistemic logic
it is possible that two people like eachother but don’t know the
other likes them, orr iso knows allo likes them, but allo doesn’t know
iso likes them. this becomes important in the construction of
self-reinforcing social structures (“granules” as they are called later
in the text). we bring in concepts from epistemic logic.
Knowledge and belief are represented via the modal operators
K and B, often with a subscript indicating the agent
that holds the attitude. Formulas Kaφ and Baφ are then read “agent
a knows that phi” and “agent a believes that phi”,
respectively.
: Epistemic Logic, Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy
KA(B→+A)K_A (B \xrightarrow{+} A)
reads “A knows B likes A”
E{A,B,C}ϕE_{\{A,B,C\}} \phi
reads “everyone ...
How I Write Things
how i write using llms ethically it all stems from central two rules write every word, and if you have to paste from an llm, make it less then a sentence at a time and don’t do it more than two or three times per post. be respectful of your reader’s time in the bible there was a line about two great commandments. perhaps two rules is an irreducable. if these rules are followed, than using llms can greatly enhance your writing, primarily by making better use of the reader’s time. how can we do this? llms can be used to find objections and weakpoints in your posts, which can spur you to do more research and refine your idea. this saves the time that the reader might use to critique you and than rinse and repeat in a subsequent post. (this can also be used to steelman and so you shouldn’t steelman really bad positions) the new search tools in llms are very good for finding sources specifically relevant to your piece (again, can also be used to steelman) nomenclating – llms are exceptionally good at coming up with names for new ideas. especially if you don’t have a perfect knowledge of classical roots, or if you want to quickly find out about relevant terms from fields outside your own. llms can even be used in the proposed nomenclator perhaps your topic has been written about before and you just don’t know it. asking an llm about rel...
The Nomenclator
THIS POST IS AN EXPLORATORY POST the emergent problem with recent technological advances of the 2020s, the amount of research that researchers have had to pour through has never been higher.1 at the same time, certain stand-alone broader fields like physics have hit “dead ends” and haven’t had any major breakthroughs; while cross-domain researchers and programs have become of paramount importance for the emerging fields of the 2020s.2 the newer coding agents of the 2020s like AlphaEvolve3have yielded cross-domain breakthroughs and shown what can be possible with “agentic”-computer-assisted human research teams. cross-domain breakthroughs are increasingly becoming the main driver of academic progress in the 2020s. one of the main obstacles that actively prevent cross-domain breakthroughs is ambiguous terminology across disciplines. terminological chaos is becoming a bigger bottleneck. And if computer agents are getting better at cross-domain synthesis, humans need better coordination tools to keep up. so, to unlock the next steps in academic research methodology; to build even better computer systems such as AlphaEvolve; and also to keep humans on the same edge as these computer systems, resolving these ambiguities is crucial. this brings up the necessity for a nomenclator
Sculblog
Design
Sculblog is written in Python and built on top of
pre-existing technologies - Debian, Apache, HTML, CSS, PHP, SQLite,
browsers. These technologies are established, reliable, and easily
customizable, perfect for building a lightweight blogging framework on
top of.
Versioning
Sculblog 0.1.6 is for an Apache server running on Debian. Future
versions will support Nginx
Installation
On a fresh Debian instance, run install.sh,
or run curl https://diegocabello.com/sculblog/install.sh |
bash.
There are two ways to install the Sculblog Python package.
Create a Python venv in your home directory using
python -m venv sculblog; run
source sculblog/bin/activate to install and each following
time you start a session; and run pip install sculblog to
install in the venv
Install it with
pip install sculblog --break-system-packages. This way is
the suggested way
Features
Root Directory Structure
All posts are written in Markdown or HTML, are converted to HTML if
necessary, and put in the database.
The files in the server root directory /var/www/html/
are linked to templates stored in the ‘resources’ folder in the server
directory.
The templates connect to the database. ...
Advert for Publisher
To the publisher: I have much to write. I suppose the best approach is to simply write what I am thinking about. It is the end of the year. Last year (not the year ending today, the one before that) was a pretty crazy year and I had some pretty crazy thoughts then. Thoughts about good vs. evil and spirituality. These were all things that I thought everyone knew, more or less… things that I thought everyone went about life not talking about it, because it wasn’t the type of thing you were supposed to talk about except in moments of birth and death, or falling in love, or making a blood oath of friendship or marriage, or betraying a friend, or taking a life, or attempting to resurrect the dead. Because these were all things that everyone knew, on some baseline deep instructions on what to do, that are kind of a requirement for being alive, for the whole rest of being a human to follow afterwards. The type of thing that everyone knows, and goes through life aware of, but not really talking about, because they are reserved for those sacred moments. I haven’t really shared thoughts of those things to other people very much. Kind of because I am scared of the reaction I might get, of speaking the unspoken, and awake some kind of terror in them that I had articulated the things they knew all along, and thereby putting myself at risk from them; and on the other hand, getting a response of, “yeah, of course, everyone knows that, why are you thinking so much about it? Everyone...
Spotify Lyrics Scraper
During quarantine I wanted to see the lyrics to the songs I was listening to. This was before spotify added lyrics. I am keeping this in the portfolio even though I made it over four years ago because it was pretty inventive, for me being in high school. Github How it Works Get song I am listening to using offical Spotify API and auth Check if song has had lyrics saved before, if so then return those and break Send request to official Genius API with song title and artist Save text response and return
Twitter Tools
I am building a suite of tools to automate Twitter functions outside the paid API. Bookmarks Scraper (July 2024) Github I wanted to download all my bookmarked images and posts from Twitter and index them, but it costed $100/mo to do this with the official Twitter API. So, I built a cost-effective workaround. The Method Scraping the data log into twitter on the browser, go to the page you want to scrape from, and locate one of the GET method connections for https://x.com/i/graphql/$PAGE in the browser network tab copy the cookies and request headers and paste them as arguments for a curl command run the command in python using the subprocess library within a while loop write the JSON responses to a text file for later parsing extract the bottom cursor from the last response and then use that as an argument for the next iteration this will run about 90 times returning 20 posts each until it times out and blocks you Analyzing the data parse each response for all the information about the posts, their authors, and media content store parsed data in an sqlite database download the images or videos using the python requests library Areas for Expansion and Improvement This scraper is an ongoing project with potential research-level scaleability (as the paid API effectively limits a lot of researchers). Improvements include: improved cookie management and potential...
Sculblog Design Choices
My previous work with web development, including with React and Next.js, was not exhaustive, but it was enough for me to realize that what these frameworks are usually used to build is not what I think the internet should be. These “interactive web applications” that have been popular as of late have detracted from what the internet was originally intended to be: a codified protocol to share information and documents between computers.1 These “interactive web applications”, with their bells and whistles, fancy animations, scroll-hijacking, chatbots, and 3d effects, are a huge waste of effort and generate nowhere near as much economic value as much effort is poured into it. So, I want to build a framework that brings the internet back to what it was originally intended to be - a framework that focuses less on interactivity, and more on simply communicating information. I want to see people write. The internet for its existence thus far has been a catalyst for niche ideologies and groups to form and then spread into the mainstream (looksmaxxing, peating, microplastics awareness, to quickly name a few). (If I want people to write more, it might more worth my efforts to make a syntactical tool to make ideas expressed as concisely as grammatically possible without losing any information… And perhaps a suite to determine if something is “worth reading” or not according to some arbitrary criterion… to prevent pollution of the ...
Hue Adjuster in Uiua
1. Intro Uiua (docs) is a glyph-based array oriented language written in Rust language created by Kai Schmidt. I found out about it through this post. I decided to do a project to make an image one hue, something that photoshop does not natively support, to learn the language. Here is what happened. 2. Method I had an image, the lebron james pear image, that I wanted to hue shift. First I converted it into bitmap using an online converter. Using hex editor (ImHex by WerWolf), I determined where the header data stopped and the image data stopped. Bitmap files have a sign in the 9th bit position that tells where the image data starts and the rest of the header stops, and the image data is rgb hex values. (Wikipedia, BMP File Format) I wrote a function that shifts rgb by hue, and applied it to each pixel in the main function. The starting image The image was made with Dalle-3 with the prompt something like “Lebron james as a pear with jpeg artifacts”. Note: Uiua is read from right to left in R-P Notation. 2.1 Hue adjusting function In the hue adjusting function, I had to Convert RGB to HSV Change the Hue value in HSV Convert back to RGB 2.1.1 Convert RGB to HSV ...
What I learned from my First Startup
From November 2022 to September 2023, I was involved in a startup
Wonder Clothing while I attended LSU in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. So far,
I learned more in that experience than just about any other experience I
have had. Even two years removed from it, it is a lot to reflect on
holistically, so I will be writing about five things I learned from
Wonder Clothing.
1. Team
I recall this tweet by Paul Graham.
If you’re less than 23 and your startup has more than 4 founders,
the reason is probably not because you needed that many but because you
had a big group of friends and didn’t want to exclude anyone.
I met these two guys who said they wanted me to join their clothing
startup, I agreed, and then they recruited two more. I ended up being
the first co-founder to exit. With five, it became confusing what was
delegated to who, with multiple roles split up between people
such as social media presence. As a result, our social media presence
was lacking. It frequent where there would be a lot of talk of what was
to be done, but it would fall between the cracks between all the people.
Incorporation took a very long time because one of the co-founders was
located in another state. Design was split between me and another
person, but that actually proved to be a good thing because I think we
both learned a lot from each other about design.
2. Mission
Streetwear clothing was already an oversat...