Life Update - September

This month went by really fast and was very stressful. I started my master's in Computer Science in the beginning of September and right away drowned in school work.

Learning

As I mentioned I started my Master's in Computer Science this month and because I had quite a lot of bridge studies, I drowned in school work right from the beginning. I started my studies with a major in data analytics, but quickly realized that it was a wrong choice. After 3 weeks I changed my major into interaction design with a thematic module in communication and cybersecurity engineering. This made a huge difference in my motivation and also the amount of bridge studies required.

Choosing the wrong major, admitting my mistake and correcting it made me reflect on growing as a person. I have always had really hard time admitting my own mistakes and shortcomings and it has limited my growth as a person both personally and career-wise. It is my constant focus nowadays to try and spot my mistakes early and admit them to myself and in public because it is the only way to actually learn and become a better person.

I have also always tried to escape using the tools and technologies that I don't enjoy. This is another thing that I have been foolish with and that I'm trying to fix nowadays. One of the things that I have been avoiding professionally is typed and compiled programming languages. I don't know why, but ever since I started programming I have stayed with JavaScript and Python, because they are dynamically typed and interpreted. I have had no interest in lower level, typed or compiled languages. This month I decided to make a change and started learning Rust. Rust feels like a sweet spot between JS/Python and C/C++. Rust was also interesting because a lot of my favorite open source projects are written in Rust and I would like to be able to contribute into those in the future. I started by following the Rust book and I have really enjoyed it this far. The Rust book explains the decisions in the design of Rust very well. I would highly recommend it to anyone just starting with Rust.

Reading

1984 - I have meant to read this for years and I finally made it. I don't read fiction that much. Actually I have not read fiction in 10-15 years. As a part of learning from my mistakes I decided to start reading more fiction too and it was one of the best decisions of this month. 1984 was by far my favorite book this far. It started slowly and quite boringly, but from part 2 onwards it sucked me in and I could not stop reading. I ended up reading the whole book over a weekend. As a privacy advocate I really loved the story of this book and the dystopian mood. I don't want to write too much about the plot of the book to not spoil it to those that haven't read it, but the picture that Orwell paints with this book is chilling and I can picture it happening in the future if we are not careful with technology.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century - Yuval Noah Harari has written 2 of my favorite non-fiction books this far, Sapiens and Homo Deus. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century continued with the same theme and was added to the books that I want to revisit every year. Harari has this amazing ability to write in a way that makes you question your own world view. Sapiens made me interested in history in a way that school failed to. Homo Deus made me think of the ethics and regulations in technological innovations and AI (together with Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark). 21 Lessons for the 21st Century made rethink social media and the society as a whole. Harari introduced new views on why religions and political systems have their places in society and where they fall behind. It made me also think about science and how we should communicate the scientific knowledge to fight fake news and misinformation/disinformation.

Privacy updates

Last month I wrote about my privacy situation. I did not yet find a solution for the iPhone situation, but luckily Apple postponed the photo-scanning feature for now. On the other hand I got rid of my Google Workspace and migrated my email and calendars to Protonmail. I still have one Google account for Youtube and things junk mail etc. I use it when I don't need to think about personal information too much and don't want to risk compromising my other email accounts.

While migrating from Google to Protonmail I bumped into this There is no such thing as privacy on the Internet and it made me rethink online privacy. I have had a hard time to decide on the level of privacy and anonymity that I want to retain online because there is always the balance between usability and privacy, you rarely can have both. When you think of browsing the internet the same way as going outside it is easier to draw the line between the things you want to keep private and the things where usability is more important.

A good example is school. We are required to use Zoom. Zoom is famously not too private. But using Zoom for school lectures and meetings does not really put my privacy in that much of a risk. It does not really risk my threat model that much.

Other stuff

I have used Arch Linux on my desktop for quite some time now. I have had a nice working system with the 13 window manager and a minimalist environment. I wanted to give desktop environments a chance though. It has been a long time since I have used a Linux with a desktop environment as my daily driver. I used KDE before, but it does not interest me. I tried Gnome on Arch, but it felt hard to use and there were too many parts of it that I did not like. I have fiddled with Pop!_OS a few times and it seemed to have a good potential as a distro and as a desktop environment with the Pop Shell. Pop is an Ubuntu-based distribution with Gnome-based desktop environment. Pop takes the good parts of Gnome and combines them with a tiling window manager which is similar(ish) to i3. Using Pop Shell requires a different attitude than using i3, but it does not require much time to get used to after i3. Resizing and moving windows is a bit weird on Pop Shell, but on my workflow I rarely move or resize windows. Pop Shell can be used with Arch and Gnome too, but I wanted to give Pop!_OS a chance. I have not used Ubuntu based distros in years, but I have always liked them. So far the experience with Pop!_OS has been almost only positive. Ubuntu and Arch have pretty much equally good package managers and they both have pretty much as many packages available. Pop Shell and Gnome do use more memory than i3, but with 32GB of total memory it does not matter if my system uses 3GB or 5GB of memory during normal use.

I also decided to make a bold change. I bought a Keychron K6 with an US layout. I rarely need the Nordic letters on my computer, but using the Nordic layout meant that all the keybindings used in programming (Vim, VSCode) and with Linux (i3, Pop Shell etc.) are really annoying to use. With the US layout all the keybindings make sense and my computer usage is much more productive. I also ended up buying a 65% keyboard, because I really like the layout of the Apple Magic keyboard and 65% is really close to that one. My Macbook still has a Nordic keyboard and when I need to write longer texts in Finnish (maybe once per week) I use my Macbook to do that.