Jan Malakhovski (oxij)

I am a Ph.D. computer scientist, software and DevOps engineer, and constructive logician/mathematician, on a quest to become a constructive polymath.

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Table of Contents

Things I like

Introduction

If you are new here, you might want to checkout the following pages first:

Contact me

Would I read your message?

Would I reply to your message?

Would I do what you ask of me?

E-mail

Related considerations

GitHub

Tox

What's that?

Tox is a protocol for end-to-end encrypted distributed peer-to-peer and chatroom messaging, voice/video calls, etc. See there for more info and the clients that support it. The protocol has issues and the experience of using the clients is frequently pretty buggy, but, on consideration, it’s still the best thing for doing the above things I’m aware of at the moment. Which is to say, other things might look and feel better, but they are objectively worse in ways that matter most to me.

Patreon

OpenPGP/GPG

What's that?

To import the above, you can do

gpg --keyserver hkp://keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 514BB966B46E3565050886E80E6CA66E5C557AA8

Encrypted email

Signing of git objects

Contribute

Tell me about the missing pieces in the things I make

If you think one of my software projects or notes has an issue, bug, or just misses something obvious, open an Issue on GitHub or write me an email about it. Even though my answer to any feature requests will likely be “eventually”, I’m trying my best fix any reported bugs ASAP.

Similarly, if you like something of mine enough to make a patch for one of my software projects or write and publish your own version of one of my more theoretical notes, please open a PR on GitHub or drop me an email about it. I’d love to see if I can adopt some changes back from your work, or maybe I’ll just link to it.

Tell me (and/or others) how you use the things I make

I will be especially thankful if you decide to write me a thoughtful email about how you use my things. In such messages, please specifically mention the parts you liked and the parts you didn’t. This is super-helpful for development. Many improvements to my software projects can be tracked to such email exchanges.

For example, several persons wrote me emails which could be summarized as

hoardy-web rocks, thanks for making it! But, re-queuing sucks. Can we have a different UI for this, please?

and thus, eventually, the re-archival machinery was born.

Also, I’m self-aware enough to notice that honest praise is the best motivator for me and that I spend most of my idle time thinking about things people wrote to me about.

Social media and etc

If you would rather praise or complain about my things in a blog post, podcast, or video instead, you are welcome to that too.

Though, in that case, I would be thankful if you would also kindly send me a link to it. Similarly, I would be implicitly thankful if you would, in good faith, mention my stuff where it would be relevant, both on social media and in non-spam private communication. Relevant gossip is the best advertisement, after all.

On alternatives

If you think you have a better solution to a problem mentioned in my notes or solved by a piece of my software or the software I use and mention in one of my notes, please inform me about it. I will probably link to the thing from the relevant page on this site and/or from the relevant project’s documentation, depending.

If you browse the docs and GitHub issues of my projects, you can find multiple examples of me doing this.

I hate how search engines apparently lower your search rank when you link to too many other useful things. Which, while they have a good explanation for doing it, I find it mightily suspicious that it also benefits them greatly, as now you have to go to them for alternatives and comparisons, instead of the original project pages listing those things, even though that’s actually the best place to host such things. This is normal and expected in academic writing. So, I refuse to obey stupid SEO rules and all my projects feature extensive list of alternatives and comparisons, like this, for example.

Help me get my sustenance by donating some coins into my tip jars so that I could devote more of my time to those personal projects instead of doing freelance work:

oxij on Patreon

Bitcoin (BTC)

bc1q6hlk9v2jkw86yarve67dsmny6yej7jyhgsypxl

Monero (XMR)

838KWx98i8o459fFqRSwzQaPdm7idUyASGujJqBbmUw2eHe541AaEnCKrk8GxrcJEwQCgTFMmZdD21q5C7Qo2ifJ7ydAsoa

Any other cryptocurrency converted to XMR via Trocador.app.

Also, its onion address.

For Trocador, Bitcoin over Lightning Network is the default, but it can be changed to almost anything after you click the link. No registration! No KYC! No JavaScript required!

Personally, I think everyone should have their own indie cryptocurrency tip jars. Allowing Patreon and GitHub to control future livelihoods of potentially everyone makes me feel very paranoid. I.e., if you are an indie developer, you should probably make such tip jars too! Personally, for tips, I would rather use Monero than anything else in existence.

Sponsor me, transactionally

Frequently Asked Questions

What does your nickname mean? Is it about oxidation? Drugs?

No, it’s a valid username made from “0 x i + j”, a playful way of saying “a Jan instance with no additional imaginary parts”, i.e., “just me, no role-play”.

Because most of those links aren’t citations, I mostly link to Wikipedia for disambiguation purposes, as if it were a dictionary, which is a perfectly fine use for it. For example:

The above is a post-hoc description of the technique. Meanwhile, its historiography shows us that it was invented for a completely different purpose, namely …

However, when I’m talking about the contents of Wikipedia articles, I cite those, as is proper.