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Hi, I’m Piotr! 👋

I am a husband to a renowned philosopher, Karolina Krzyżanowska.
I work as a software engineer at HashiCorp.
I enjoy playing awful electronic jazz music and riding a bike in my free time.
I live in Warsaw Leuven Bergen Munich Amsterdam.

Recent

Stop using LaTeX, switch to MS Word

A hilarious article appeared in PLOS ONE recently (thanks for the link, Pim). StackOverflow already made some good comments, but here’s my two pennies’ worth.

“Where the Conflict Really Lies”

Since it’s Christmas, I feel it’s only appropriate to share some thoughts about a book on philosophy of religion I recently read.

“I went to jail for my cause”

Peter Sunde writes a guest post for Wired: Only a few activists left are actually doing things. We’re way underfunded, we’re getting older and we’re getting lazy.

“Shaka, when the walls fell”

Ian Bogost writes about a famous Star Trek TNG episode:

On stardate 45047.2, Jean-Luc Picard leads the crew of the Enterprise in pursuit of a transmission beacon from the El-Adrel system, where a Tamarian vessel has been broadcasting a mathematical signal for weeks. The aliens, also known as the Children of Tama, are an apparently peaceable and technologically advanced race with which the Federation nevertheless has failed to forge diplomatic relations. The obstacle, as Commander Data puts it: “communication was not possible.”

The funniest thing about this particular episode is how polarized opinions about it are. “Darmok” is by far the most controversial of all TNG episodes. While (as Bogost points out) the episode touches upon the very essence of Star Trek and Gene Rodenberry’s vision of utopian human future, most controversy that surrounds it concerns how… unserious it is. I think this might be the only TNG episode that I felt slightly uncomfortable watching, because of how silly it felt.