Personal philosophy

These things are very important to me —

• How I treat other beings, including humans.
• Work is inseparable from ethics
• How I should act to leave the best possible future for everyone.

On other beings

I didn't use to reflect on how food ended up on my plate, let alone who lay there. Now I think about it every day, literally at every meal. More than 150 billion animals die by human hands to end up on plates around the world. That is more than the estimated 107 billion people that have ever lived on earth throughout all of history. Every Year!

Choose a life where you improve the lives of others, including animals. Eating something that came from someone else's body without consent is violence. Think about how cow's milk requires — involuntary pregnancy — taking the child's food — removal and many times killing the child right after birth.

We deny the animals imprisoned by us to become food so many things

• We deprive them the right to their own reproduction and sexuality — cows, sheep, and sows are inseminated
• We deprive them of their connection with their parents — calves are not allowed to drink their mother's milk, instead they're fed other types of milk
• Calves are separated form their mothers in less than three days — otherwise separation "becomes a problem". Insane!

On the software industry

There are compelling reasons to be aware of the conditions under which software is built. My goal is to avoid building software or hardware that contribute to involuntary surveillance or oppression. It's hard to know where to draw the line, and trying to follow recent developments is constant work.

I'm always in search of decentralized or paid systems that can replace the surveillance / advertisement based software I rely on. It's a long term plan, and some platforms are designed to be really hard to leave.

On the future

Too high is the cost of extracting the minerals required for our technological needs. How many pristine places have been dug up to build billions of pieces of electronics every year? Ever expanding modernity means ever shrinking places for everyone and everything else.

Cars are overrated as a means of transportation, and too many are still produced. Electric cars are similarly largely unnecessary. The only good electric car is a railroad car.

Riding a bicycle instead of driving a car improves your personal health, and the health of every other human, animal, and plant. This used to be the history of man, but it's very much the future as well.

Now

If you feel as I feel —

• Improve the lives of others
• Be aware of the impact of your work
• Act today, for the benefit of our future