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Kenneth Reitz

Infrastructure for One

Building software for yourself used to be a rich man's hobby. Not rich in money — rich in the rarer currencies of expertise, momentum, and uninterrupted weekends. The activation energy for personal infrastructure was brutal. A plugin that shaved thirty ...

Kenneth Reitz

A Server Called Mercury

I bought a server this week. Not cloud credits, not a managed platform, not a serverless function bobbing in someone else's abstraction. A single rented box at Hetzner with four cores, eight gigs of RAM, and a name: mercury. By ...

Kenneth Reitz

The Algorithm Poops

I have been writing "the algorithm eats X" for the better part of a year now. It ate virtue. It ate language, love, democracy, reality, and time. Eventually it ate itself. The whole series is a catalog of appetite, and ...

Kenneth Reitz

The Unit

This is the second essay in what is apparently becoming a series. In Mental Health (for Humans) I presented my credentials: sick as fuck, disabled in fact, ten-plus years inside the system. That essay argued that the system's core abstractions ...

Kenneth Reitz

Breaking Changes

The first DSM shipped in 1952. It was a spiral-bound thing of about 130 pages describing roughly a hundred disorders. The current release runs just under a thousand pages and describes around three hundred. Between those two artifacts sit five ...

Kenneth Reitz

How I Write Now

Some of my own essays this year have made me cry. That's not remarkable; writers cry at their own work all the time, usually at how bad it is. What's remarkable is when it happens. Not while typing a sentence. ...

Kenneth Reitz

Tending the Vault

There's an entry in my Obsidian daily notes from this April that I didn't think anyone would ever read, including me. It says: > Working on the vault today. Got a fancy new theme going, pretty good. Refactored the style ...

Kenneth Reitz

Whatever This Is

There is a folder in my notes called System 777. It contains around two hundred files and a hundred and thirty thousand words: maps, dream logs, a glossary, a quest log, channeled writings preserved verbatim, and profiles of some forty-seven ...

Kenneth Reitz

PyTheory Playground

Earlier this spring I wrote a few essays about PyTheory, the music theory library I was stuck on for five years and finally unstuck. The short version: it models tones, scales, chords, and fretboards in Python the way a musician ...