Hi, I'm Diego Cabello. I am a community college student, I work a part time job as a deliverables and records assistant, and I sell apps. I know a considerable amount about computers and politics, and I write about both.
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
A Primer on Curtis Yarvin
Date: 2025 Oct 05
Words: 2446
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...
Digest
A Primer on Curtis Yarvin
Date: 2025 Oct 05
Words: 2446
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
Epistylometry
Date: 2025 Aug 07
Words: 1563
Draft: 1 (Most recent)
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
Date: 2025 Aug 07
Words: 1612
Draft: 1 (Most recent)
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”
$A \xleftrightarrow{+} B$ 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
read...
How I Write Things
Date: 2025 Jun 09
Words: 1188
Draft: 1 (Most recent)
how i write using llms ethically it all stems from central two rules assume the reader is going to read every word (if you have an llm assist you write, read every word before you paste) 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 relevant projects before can save you the time...
Coding
ENTS: Extendable Nested Tagging Specification
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 source
.
Create a Python venv in your home directory using
curl http://diegocabello.com/sculblog/install.shpython -m venv sculblog
Run source sculblog/bin/activate to activate the
venv
Run pip install sculblog
Features
Root Directory Structure
All posts are written in Markdown or HTML, are converted to html if
neccassary, 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. Templates are written in php
by default
The database is stored in the ‘database’ folder in the server
directory.
Compared to alternatives like Hugo, this configuration is much
simpler and doesn’t require lear...
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...