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The meaning of life

2026-01-18T00:00:00Z

Now that’s a grandiose title for a blog post! Blame Jeremiah Lee, who selected it as the theme for January’s IndieWeb Carnival. I’ve not taken part in this before, but it’s basically a shared writing prompt. One person selects a theme, other people write about it on their own sites, and then the host does a round-up linking to all the various responses. I’ve come across it a few times before, but the topics have never really engaged me; they don’t feel like the sort of thing I’d write about. But… why not?

A Guide to the Good Life

The thing that actually tipped the scales for this particular topic was a book I was reading: A Guide to the Good Life by William B. Irvine. It’s basically a modern introduction to Stoicism. Not only is there a strong overlap between that and the meaning of life, one particular idea resonated with me:

In ancient Greece, when schools of philosophy were still prominent features of the cultural landscape, there were any number of schools to which parents could send their children. Suppose we could travel back in time to 300 bc and take a thinking person’s walking tour of Athens. We could begin our tour in the Agora, where Socrates a century earlier had philosophized with the citizens of Athens. On the northern side of the Agora we would see the Stoa Poikile, or Painted Porch, and holding forth there might be Zeno of Citium, the founder of the Stoic school of philosophy. This “porch” was actually a colonnade decorated with murals.

The idea that you could just wander around a city and come across people giving their considered opinions on philosophy is… something. Do we have any actual equivalent of that in the modern ages? Obviously you do get people espousing their views on the street, but they tend to either be proselytising or grinding a particular axe. And even if there was a modern day Socrates talking in Speaker’s Corner, would anyone actually stop to listen? We do have books, and speaking engagements, and so on, but they feel a lot more impersonal, and in a lot of cases motivated by money or politics or some other agenda. The philosophers of ancient Greek and Rome seemed to actually practice what they preached; as well as talking in public, and instructing in their schools, they’d write letters helping and advising people, or debating points of philosophy.

Some of that behaviour exists in academia, I’m sure, but it’s not really accessible to the person on the street in the way that it once was. But we do have personal websites and blogs. People just exchanging ideas, speaking out in public, with (generally) no expectation of reward or recognition for it. Is the “IndieWeb” the modern Agora? Probably not, but maybe it gives us some aspects of it that we otherwise wouldn’t have?

The Stoic approach to life

The Stoics believed in living a virtuous life; living as we were designed to live, in accordance with nature. A lot of those terms might be a bit loaded to the modern ear, and “designed to live” is awfully vague. I think this quote expands on it pretty well, though:

And for what function were people designed? To answer this question, the Stoics thought, we need only examine ourselves. On doing this, we will discover that we have certain instincts, as do all animals. We experience hunger; this is nature’s way of getting us to nourish ourselves. We also experience lust; this is nature’s way of getting us to reproduce. But we differ from other animals in one important respect: We have the ability to reason. From this we can conclude, Zeno would assert, that we were designed to be reasonable.

And if we use our reason, we will further conclude that we were designed to do certain things, that we have certain duties. Most significantly, since nature intended us to be social creatures, we have duties to our fellow men. We should, for example, honor our parents, be agreeable to our friends, and be concerned with the interests of our countrymen.

It all seems eminently reasonable. But in a world of fake news, social media, culture wars, and everything else, our ability to reason often seems forgotten. Hell, even being agreeable seems like it’s out of vogue at the moment. Would the Stoics despair if you transported one of them to the present day? Probably not. One of the other tenets they held was, well, being stoic. There was a concept of tranquility:

Stoic tranquility was a psychological state marked by the absence of negative emotions, such as grief, anger, and anxiety, and the presence of positive emotions, such as joy.

To get to this magical state, you need a form of detachment. Not in the sense of being completely passive and impartial as you float through life; that’s not how we’re “designed to life”. But in the sense of not letting outside events influence your inner state. When someone says something horrible, they don’t have the power to actually make you feel bad; that’s something you do. And I fully accept that it’s very easy to say that, and very hard to actually practice it.

This is actually a concept shared with many other religions and philosophies. Buddhism has the idea of Nekkhamma, Jainism and Hinduism have Vairāgya, and so on. Even if you don’t put any stock at all into religious teachings, it’s interesting that this concept comes up again and again.

If you’re like me, you probably have thoughts on all this. Sure, anxiety-free, anger-free life is probably nice, but how does that relate to the meaning of life and, anyway, shouldn’t you be angry about some things? The Stoics (particularly the Roman ones, who tended to not be so into physics and ethics) believed that this tranquility made it easier to focus on being virtuous. That makes sense to me; if we manage to get off the hedonistic treadmill of wanting shiny new things, of hoping people like our posts, and so on, then there’s surely more time in life for other pursuits. As for anger, I think the point is you don’t let the emotions drive your behaviour. There’s a difference between getting angry at what someone is saying and punching them in the face, and hearing someone, calmly and rationally assessing matters, and then punching them in the face. Maybe it’s best for society to punch certain people in the face. The Stoics were certainly not pacifists. Marcus Aurelius is one of the most well known, and he was Emperor of Rome. He’s hailed as one of the few good emperors, but you can bet he had an awful lot of blood on his hands even so.

Putting it into practice

It’s all well and good going on about not letting things bother you, but it’s very much easier said than done. The book introduces the concept of “negative visualisation”: imagining the negative things that could happen in your life, and thus starting to accept them. It also helps you to appreciate things that you do have, that you otherwise taken for granted. I’m sure everyone’s imagined what would happen if you lost your home, or your job, or so on… but what if you didn’t have your favourite mug? A particular tool? A certain piece of art?

I’ve heard of gratitude journals before. I’ve even tried keeping one for a while. There’s science showing it’s beneficial for mental health. But I always faded off after a short while. Once you tick off the big things: friends, family, food, etc, it feels like a stretch. Negative visualisation feels like a much better approach to me. I’m about to eat an apple; at the end of the day I’m not going to think back and write about an apple in a gratitude journal. But I can think briefly, in the moment, about not having the apple. Do I need to prepare myself for an apple-less life? Not really. But do I now appreciate the apple a little bit more, and take it for granted a little bit less? Yes. Does that make me a bit more tranquil? A bit less likely to wish I had something tastier than an apple? Also yes.

This process dovetails into the concept of impermanence, another concept found in Buddhism and elsewhere. Each apple could be the last one you ever have. If you knew that in advance, how would it change your approach? You’d probably savour it a bit more, appreciate it a bit more, and most of all not take it for granted. There’s a lot of pithy sayings about treating each day as if it’s your last, but at that level they’re a lot more nebulous than helpful; appreciating an apple, though? That’s something I can do.

It seems at first glance that thinking about negatives should be depressing or anxiety inducing. There are only so many reasons that this could be my last apple, and most of them involve something pretty unideal happening to me. But I don’t think it’s actually that glum. You don’t dwell on the negative, instead you use it to inspire a positive. And the alternative is to just sleepwalk through the process, not really paying attention, not gaining any enjoyment from it.

Bringing it back

Thanks for sticking with me on that tangent. You’ll be glad to know I’ve finished eating my apple now. The topic for this post was meant to be “the meaning of life”, not “thoughts on eating apples” or “living a Stoic life”, so allow me to try to tie it all together and pretend that I had a plan.

Life has no inherent meaning, it’s just a biological process. But that doesn’t mean we can’t seek to have a meaningful existence. The Stoics believed that involved being reasonable, and one of the approaches to give the reasoning room to happen is to strive towards an inner state of tranquility.

Obviously the Stoic approach isn’t the only one. And I’m not sure I did their philosophies any justice in my writing here. If it sparked your interest, though, I highly recommend picking up the book. If not, other approaches to life are available…

Be excellent to each other… and party on, dudes.

Upgrading the RAM in a Dell G15 laptop

2023-07-29T00:00:00Z

The Dell G15

I currently use a Dell G15 laptop for work. It has served me well for a little over a year, but recently it has been struggling a little with my day-to-day workload. It came with 32GB of RAM — the highest possible specification at the time¹ — but that is apparently no longer enough for me.

For a recent project, I was working on a Rust library used in an Android app. That meant running the usual glut of Android tools (Android Studio, an emulator and at least one Gradle daemon) alongside a normal IDE (IntelliJ IDEA). Throw in a web browser and a couple of electron apps, and I often managed to use all 32GB.

When you start swapping memory out to an encrypted disk — even an SSD — it doesn’t make for great performance. At first, I tried to work around this by enabling the Linux out-of-memory (OOM) killer, but it turns out that it’s not too good with Electron apps: it will kill the large browser process, but then the small Electron wrapper will just respawn it.

Can it be upgraded or not?

The obvious solution to not having enough RAM is to add more RAM. A quick look in the manual showed this might not be possible, though. The manual includes the following “Memory specifications” table:

Description	Values
Memory slots	Two SODIMM slots
Memory type	DDR5
Memory speed	4800
Maximum memory configuration	32GB
Minimum memory configuration	8GB
Memory size per slot	8GB or 16GB
Memory configurations supported	8 GB, 1 x 8 GB, DDR5, 4800 MHz 16 GB, 1 x 16 GB, DDR5, 4800 MHz 16 GB, 2 x 8 GB, DDR5, 4800 MHz, dual-channel 32 GB, 2 x 16 GB, DDR5, 4800 MHz, dual-channel

That unambiguously says that an upgrade from 32GB is not possible. I gave up.

Later though, I was complaining about memory issues to a friend, and he pointed out a Dell forum thread where a couple of people claim to have successfully installed dual-channel 32GB modules. Since the alternative was getting an entire new PC after only a year, I decided to give it a go.

The upgrade attempt

I ordered a pair of Crucial 32GB DDR5-4800 SODIMMs, and after they turned up dismantled the laptop. The G15 comes apart pretty normally: there are uncovered screws on the bottom holding the lower part of the case on. With those removed and some gentle prying, it pops off, and you get access to the battery, GPU and motherboard.

The first thing I saw was this:

The G15 motherboard adamantly proclaiming that it doesn’t want 32GB SODIMMs

Not one but two labels that indicate it will only accept 8GB or 16GB modules. Oh well, what’s the worst that can happen?

Oops?

I dutifully installed the new modules, reconnected the battery and put the case back together. I pressed the power button, and… nothing. None of the usual garish lights that immediately come on, no screen output, just a dead laptop. After reading some more of the user manual, I found that there is a tiny status LED on the side next to the ethernet port. Forcing the laptop to power off and back on again, the status LED blinked a distress code at me: 2 amber blinks, 4 white blinks. The manual says that is — unsurprisingly — a memory fault.

I figured at this point that the manual and labels on the motherboard were probably right. I took the laptop apart again, reinstalled the original 2x16GB modules, reassembled it, and pressed the power button. It didn’t boot. I don’t spend a lot of time fiddling inside computers, but I’ve done it enough that I’m reasonably confident I can’t entirely break a computer while swapping some RAM modules. I took to Googling², and found an interesting article that said Dell laptops don’t like to boot after RAM changes unless you clear the CMOS by popping out the battery for 15 minutes.

I opened the laptop up, and looked around for the CMOS battery. There wasn’t one. Turns out they don’t exist any more. I left the main battery disconnected for a while to see if it would help, and it didn’t.

Unexpected success

I started to get worried: if I couldn’t fix this, I wouldn’t be able to work until I got a new PC, and that wasn’t really in my budget at the minute. I sat reading old forum threads and help guides³, none of which were actually useful. Out of nowhere, though, the laptop booted up.

Naturally, I immediately shut the laptop down again, opened it up, and switched back to the new RAM modules. Then I turned it on again and sat waiting. After about 15 minutes of it looking totally dead, it turned on and showed a BIOS warning about the hardware configuration being changed. It then booted perfectly normally, and all 64GB of RAM was visible and usable.

My theory is that the forum threads were right: Dell laptops are funny about RAM upgrades. But somehow in removing the physical CMOS battery, they’ve kept the same “you have to wait 15 minutes” behaviour just without any indication that’s what’s happening. Regardless, I now have enough RAM even for the greediest of IDEs and Electron apps.

Bizarrely, the maximum spec has decreased to 16GB since then. ↩︎
In the generic sense. I use Kagi these days. ↩︎
On my phone because, y’know, the laptop was busted. ↩︎

Why you should be using HTTPS

2016-06-17T00:00:00Z

The EFF’s HTTPS Everywhere logo

One of my favourite hobbyhorses recently has been the use of HTTPS, or lack thereof. HTTPS is the thing that makes the little padlock appear in your browser, and has existed for over 20 years. In the past, that little padlock was the exclusive preserve of banks and other ‘high security’ establishments; over time its use has gradually expanded to most (but not all) websites that handle user information, and the time is now right for it to become ubiquitous.

Why use HTTPS?

There are numerous advantages to using HTTPS, both for the users of a website and for the operator:

Privacy

The most obvious advantage is that HTTPS gives your users additional privacy. An insecure (HTTP) request can potentially be read by anyone on the same network, or the network operators, or anyone who happens to operate a network along the path between the user and the server.

Users on shared WiFi networks (such as those in coffee shops, hotels, or offices) are particularly vulnerable to passive sniffing by anyone else on that network. If the network is open (as is frequently the case) then anyone in radio range can see exactly what the user is up to.

Integrity

HTTPS also helps to maintain the integrity of your site. With a plain HTTP request, there’s nothing to stop anyone in between the server and the user from modifying the content of the request or the response. This is a frequent tactic used by annoying WiFi gateways (such as the ones you’d find in a hotel), dubious ISPs who want to serve you extra adverts, or just plain old nefarious attackers.

If you’re trying to convey some kind of information to users (and if you aren’t, why exactly are you running a website again?) it seems beneficial to both you and them if the information arrives as you intended, rather than in a modified form due to someone or something tampering with it.

Security

If your website has any kind of authentication, or session identifiers, it becomes extremely vulnerable to an attacker monitoring the traffic and stealing the credentials. This was starkly demonstrated in 2010 when Firesheep was released. This tool allowed anyone to quickly and automatically hijack social media accounts of anyone on the same network who was using HTTP to access them.

Even if your login pages are served over HTTPS, if you send a single session ID cookie over HTTP (such as a page you decided wasn’t particularly ‘important’) then an attacker can probably spoof the user’s session and gain full access to their account. Again, in the case of open WiFi networks that could be anyone in radio range.

Search engine rankings

Some search engines use HTTPS as a signal in their ranking algorithms. Google announced in 2004 that it was using the presence of HTTPS as a small positive signal, but that it may strengthen that signal over time as more and more websites switch to using a secure transport. It’s not unthinkable that at some point in the future there will be HTTPS-only search engines.

But… But… But…

There are lots of excuses for not implementing HTTPS. Most of them are either misguided or outdated.

It’s too expensive and/or complicated

In the past, getting HTTPS certificates was a pain. A number of free suppliers have existed for a while but the process for getting their certificates wasn’t particularly straight forward, and many imposed arbitrary restrictions on the certificate parameters. Even once you had the certificate, you had to fiddle about with your HTTP server configuration to make it work, remember to manually get a new certificate when the old one expired, and lots of other annoying busywork.

With the arrival of Let’s Encrypt, all that changed. You can retrieve and deploy a free HTTPS certificate with two or three commands. Renewal can be handled completely automatically with a single command executed by cron.

There’s no point; nothing on my site is sensitive

You might not think your content warrants privacy, but can you speak for everyone who accesses it? Even content that seems mundane to you — such as travel advice, or technical writing — could be used to build up a profile of a user. If an attacker is monitoring traffic in a coffee shop and sees a user looking at travel advice and weather forecasts for a foreign country, he could use that information to plan a burglary knowing that the user will be away. Similarly, some content which is perfectly mundane to you may actually be very sensitive in other countries with repressive governments. HTTPS makes it much harder for these people to snoop on traffic.

From another angle, if you’re offering any kind of information, instructions, or especially file downloads, there’s a severe risk to users if the content is modified on its way to them. An evil sysadmin could rewrite your travel advice to suggest visiting the local drug dealer’s hangout, or replace your download with a malware-infested version.

HTTPS is slower, uses more resources, etc

Back in 1995 this might have been a valid argument. Enabling HTTPS on a modern server will make an almost negligible difference to performance. If you also enable HTTP/2 (which most implementations only support over HTTPS), it’s likely to actually use fewer resources, and result in a faster, smoother experience for your users. HTTP/2 was designed to work with HTTPS, and designed with modern requirements and networking techniques in mind.

CloudFlare have an excellent demonstration of the benefits of HTTP/2, and it can show speed improvements of 2-3x in a typical environment. On top of being faster, HTTP/2 uses fewer connections which results in less resource overhead on both the server and the client.

So what are you waiting for?

If you run a website and aren’t using HTTPS, give it a try.