Marginalia
Viktor Lofgren
My name is Viktor. I’m a Swedish software engineer and hypertext enjoyer. Marginalia is a website I’ve built. It’s really almost a bunch of websites on a common theme. If you find yourself clicking a link and ending up on a page that looks completely different, that’s just how things are.
July 2026
Top Words
- marginalia
- search
- index
- software
- years
- grant
- crawler
- astrolabe
- internet
- query
All posts (137)
A question I often see asked is one along the lines of How do I motivate myself do (something) … where something may be eat healthier, go to the gym, work on some project, study hard, &c. This idea of motivation is interesting. I think it in part comes from the school system, where teachers and parents often talk...
@sdfgeoff asked an interesting question on station just a while ago How much of your lives do you spend living (or watching) someone elses? It reminded me of an interesting tool kit for understanding being. The neoplatonists describe a hierarchy of being. This is sometimes attributed to Renaissance enfant terrible...
So that IPCC report, huh. It’s provoked interesting behavior in people. I’ll skip over the minority that deny the findings, many people seem to agree that the report isn’t great news. Then they stop to look around and start pointing fingers. In summary: The producers blame the consumers for making the wrong...
The technological choices we make determine the rules we have to abide by. If every page load incurs hundreds of database calls on the server, and 30 seconds of javascripting on the front-end, then obviously you need to reduce the number of page loads to a minimum. They are frustrating for the user and expensive for...
I finally got around to moving @marginalia.nu off gmail. I’ve been planning to do so for a while, and vascillated between self-hosting and using a provider. I ended up going for the latter. Even though I do like to self-host my stuff as much as possible, email servers seem like a lot of work. And I got a VPS account...
Dece’s post “last times” made me associate to one of my favorite thoughts from Roman philosopher Seneca, who was counting his days having fallen out of favor with Emperor Nero. In the first of his moral epistles to Lucilius, he asks: Quem mihi dabis [...] qui intellegat se cotidie mori? Who can you show me [...]...
As I have mentioned earlier, perhaps the biggest enemy of PageRank is the hegemony of PageRank-style algorithms. Once an algorithm like that becomes not only dominant, but known, it also creates a market for leveraging its design particulars. Homogenous ecosystems are almost universally bad. It doesn’t really matter...
Early this winter, when I set up the server that would eventually become marginalia.nu, I did so in order to try out some technology I thought looked cool (proxmox, zfs), and stuff I was exposed to at work and didn’t really see the point of so as to see if we could get on better terms with if I had more control...
I stumbled upon the Memex, which is a spiritual predecessor to hypertext technology. It was supposed to be a sort of personal data store that allows the user to link and annotate various documents in order to produce a sort of external memory, a private knowledge bank that associates ideas in a similar way a human...
Maintaining links is difficult. My gemini server doesn’t have a lot of pages, but already maintaining links between relevant pages is growing more tedious by the page. It’s going to become untenable soon. In part inspired by Antenna, I had the idea of extracting local backlinks, and automatically appending them to...
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