Hi, I'm Diego Cabello. I am a community college student, I work a part time job as a records assistant, and I sell apps. Previously I was a college dropout who worked professionally as a software engineer at a small company, but I decided to return to school. I know a considerable amount about computers and politics, and I write about both. I also co-founded Wonder Clothing before eventually departing.
This website was designed with a minimalist aesthetic, and more about those design choices are detailed in these essays. See previous biography blurbs here
Featured
My Heritage Cladogram
Date: 2025 Oct 13
Words: 2554
Draft: 1 (Most recent)
Recently I read the essay “How Dawkins Got Pwned” by Mencius Moldbug. Curtis Yarvin in his interviews repeatedly goes back to how his mother was a WASP and a very popular socialite in Nassau county, and his father was a Jew who worked in the State Department, and how 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 they could fester their strain was out in the woods. There are a few oth...
Projects for Clients
Digest
A Primer on Curtis Yarvin
Date: 2025 Oct 05
Words: 2432
Draft: 1 (Most recent)
To my readers: I am putting this out a bit prematurely because I am making Sunday my regular posting day. Because of this, there is a bit more material of this author I would like to read before I make claims about him (I have not finished one of his more well-known “books”, An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives). When I do finish this, I am going to post an other version of this article. You can see both this version and the updated version when it is published by clicking the arrows in the “drafts” section above. I am doing a short series about different authors influential in certain political circles. Next I am going to be writing about “BAP”, who is connected to Curtis Yarvin and is influential in the same circles. I have been getting into Curtis Yarvin lately. An author who I previously described as “junk food compared to, like, a book” and “having no grounding in reality whatsoever”. And this may be correct, but, for what it is worth, he is one of the only people out there proposing anything even remotely pragmatic of what there is to be done. He previously wrote as “Mencius Moldbug” on the blog Unqualified Reservations from 2007 to 2014, and currently writes on Gray Mirror on Substack, that’s “gray” with an a. If you take the time to read him periodically you will stumble across something and go like, “oh...
Alexis de Tocqueville — Democracy in America, Vol. 2
Date: 2025 Sep 22
Words: 2277
Draft: 1 (Most recent)
EQUALITY De Tocqueville had an egalitarian ideal of the United States, which would have been the view that naturally developed if his travel route was up around the Ohio River Valley and Kentucky. He expands countless pages talking about how there is no aristocracy in the United States, compared to a historical one in Europe that was then largely subsiding. But the irony of this was not lost to me. It was a strange thing that happened in history that de Tocqueville was describing, a land where the stratification of society was very limited for some time. The way he describes it, it seems that the citizenry really, seriously internalized the post-enlightenment ideals the founders had. But this condition seems to be a blip in history of barely a hundred years or so, because between the Gilded Age and the Wilson Era, a WASP elite aristocracy on the East Coast had taken control of the country. I suppose an egalitarian state of things cannot last long. The causes are outside the scope of de Tocqueville’s time, but it could have been predicted, in the same way he had incredibly accurate foresight and other predictions for America. If the white expansion was going to go all the way through the “second triangle”, there would have to be a powerful administration to rule over the filler-in-the-middle. But it probably didn’t occur to de Tocqueville because he was watching the aristocracies collapse in Europe, and was writing with tha...
Barry Lyndon
Date: 2025 Sep 14
Words: 1089
Draft: 1 (Most recent)
Barry Lyndon and the
Sins of the Father
A God compassionate and gracious, Slow to anger, Abounding in
loyal love and faithfulness. He maintains loyal love for thousands,
Forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sins. But he won’t declare
innocent the guilty. He will bring the iniquities of the fathers upon
the third and the fourth.
Exodus 34:6-7
By what means Redmond Barry acquired the style and title of
Barry Lyndon
Opening Title Card of Barry Lyndon
SPOILERS, if you care about those
things
—–
The sins of the father live on with the son.
Recently I watched Barry Lyndon written by Stanley Kubrick.
It came up on my recommended, I didn’t realize it was a Kubrick film
immediately, and I decided to watch it because I have always been
intrigued by the ways of life of Old Europe.
There seem to be some “unwritten rules” of what to
do in life. Things that are partially taught and handed down through the
generations, and partially instinctively encoded in the genomes (or some
superset thereof) of people. Things that are not things that are easily
“called forth” or spoken directly, and to do so requires much study and
self reflection. But Stanley Kubrick, if any writer and director, was
one who could “call forth” these things.
This story written by Stanley Kubrick raises important questions
a...
Blog
My Heritage Cladogram
Date: 2025 Oct 13
Words: 2554
Draft: 1 (Most recent)
Recently I read the essay “How Dawkins Got Pwned” by Mencius Moldbug. Curtis Yarvin in his interviews repeatedly goes back to how his mother was a WASP and a very popular socialite in Nassau county, and his father was a Jew who worked in the State Department, and how 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 they could fester their strain was out in the woods. There are a few oth...
Social Dynamics, Continued
Date: 2025 Oct 11
Words: 1332
Draft: 1 (Most recent)
FRAMING THIS POST I have written two or three posts analyzing social interactions before on this website attempting to come up with a coherent framework for it, this is the next in the series. one of the most harmful ideas i’ve ever encountered was at my last job, where my boss was consistently like “keep your users in mind, always be asking them what they want”. that is dumb stupid wimpy person advice. neither him nor i are native stock michigander. but aren’t we supposed to, like, try to fit in as much as possible without denying essential elements of ourselves? i eat tacos sometimes, he can go to the ethnic asian mart sometimes. 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 on that advice: this post isn’t exactly intended for academic audiences, nor is it intended for a mainstream audience. it is a secret third thing. this may post may go over ground that has already been tread before by other people, but bear with me, i am trying to articulate something difficult to pronounce here, so to speak. 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 am trying to make a car, not a faster horse. ...
The State of Classical Computing Hardware
Date: 2025 Oct 09
Words: 1759
Draft: 1 (Most recent)
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...
Coding
ENTS: Extendable Nested Tagging Specification
NetDoc
Date: 2025 Oct 30
Words: 684
Draft: 1 (Most recent)
AS YOU MAY BE ABLE TO TELL BY THE MARKDOWN STYLE, THIS WAS GENERATED BY CLAUDE. WAS A SUMMARY OF A BRAINSTORMING SESH. I AM CAPABLE OF MAKING MY OWN SPECIFICATIONS (SEE ENTS). THIS IS A Q-A-D (“QUICK AND DIRTY”. EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW WHAT THAT STANDS FOR) SPEC Vision NetDoc reimagines social platforms around documents instead of posts. It’s “Plan 9 for the internet” - everything is a document - combined with Project Xanadu’s vision of transclusion and bidirectional linking. Core Philosophy Profiles as Curated Wikis: Instead of activity streams showing “posted 3 hours ago,” profiles are enduring intellectual landscapes. Your profile is a wiki of “favorite things of all time” - what you think matters, what you’ve annotated, how you organize knowledge. Friction as Feature: Like Tor’s slowness encourages intentional browsing, NetDoc’s wiki-centric design encourages thoughtful engagement. Making a wiki requires investment, filtering out low-effort content. You don’t doomscroll wikis, you navigate them. No Likes, Only Substance: Without reactions, engagement must be substantial - write a reply document, fork and improve, annotate with commentary. Discovery becomes “whose canon do I trust?” rather than “what’s trending?” Live Feed Megawiki: All pers...
Glass
Date: 2025 Oct 13
Words: 54
Draft: 1 (Most recent)
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
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. ...
Essays
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 ...
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...