We must break with the totally erroneous perception that it is everyone’s civil liberty to communicate on encrypted messaging services.

This was the quote of the quote of the former Danish Minister of Justice, when speaking on online communication, and the expectation of online privacy.

Without getting too ideological, I firmly believe that, if you want current liberal democracy to prevail, the limitation of government power on what can and can’t be surveilled is the only way to achieve that. Current technology, be it cheap BT or Wifi beacons that can easily pepper entire cities, or LLM-enabled stylometry attacks, are antithetical to organising against abuses of power.

On this front, I believe that Mullvad is one of the only companies that is ideologically committed to the preservation of online privacy and anonymity. They should be considered an indispensible ally by anyone that takes seriously the right to secrecy of correspondence as well as wanting to fight against mass surveillance.

Why a VPN? Why Mullvad? Why now?

No, this isn’t your stupid NordVPN pitch. For people living in liberal democracies, using a VPN, and a public one, rather than your self hosted instance helps with mainly two things: mixing your traffic with others’, and preventing your ISP from logging your DNS queries. Check the Mullvad checker page to see your current level of protection.

What Mullvad does really well

Identity minimization at signup. Random account numbers instead of email/username. No recovery flow means no identity anchor to subpoena.

Cash in envelope and Monero are both first-class payment paths. No billing relationship as a persistent identifier. Fungible payment options provided. No churn/upsell dark-pattern surface at all.

Server architecture designed so there’s nothing to seize. Mullvad claims RAM-only VPN infrastructure, with all traces of disk use removed. It doesn’t prevent logging, but it minimises the risk of accidentally retaining something retrievable.

Works via Wireguard-only. Don’t want to use their app? Don’t, just set up a Wireguard tunnel instead.

Open source clients since founding. Also, repeated third-party audits with reports published in full

Mullvad Browser. Tor Browser’s fingerprinting resistance without the Tor network.

Not just a company and a product. Activism

This is the part that I wish more people would appreciate Mullvad for. Gettting your voice amplified by a company that has a large megaphone in the online privacy space is not insignificant. Mullvad ran sustained, specific campaigning against Chat Control specifically, not vague “we support privacy” noise. They were early (and correct) at identifying that age-verification was identity-infrastructure dressed as child protection. Their London tube ads genuinely went viral and brought the topic of online privacy from the niches of Mastodon to the commutes of millions.

I believe Mullvad is genuinely one of the few companies that do it right. They’ve got my full-throated support.

My first original piece on the company blog, aimed at understanding how blending autoregressive generation and symbolic programs not only boosts the effectiveness of AI Agents on long-horizon tasks, but is also a free test oracle for steering Agent trajectories.

I’m instinctively appalled by news like this, but I’m also wondering, to what extent is the content inside these rare books made effectively useless to humanity, mainly due to the amount of gatekeeping that access to these kinds of materials enjoy.

When I started using Obsidian, it was a niche tool for people that were into Zettelkasten and Dark Mode. The Obsidianmaxxing scene seems to have migrated from Second Brainers to the AI technorati, given my mates were chatting about connecting Claude Code to Obsidian via MCP¹. I blame this on Obsidian’s file-over-app philosophy that works out of the box with tools like Claude Code, and Karpathy’s LLM Wiki concept.

I will personally never let AI roam around my Vaults. I think the best thing about the use of Obsidian is curating the content and notes I’m taking the way I want it. Letting LLMs draw connections between concepts defeats the purpose of learning and structuring things the way they work for YOU.

There are multiple, hour-long videos on Youtube teaching you how to Zettelkasten, but here is what I do:

Completely ignore folders.

Don’t try to create folder ontologies around your concepts. Use folders them purely for your workflows. Link concepts together via the [[]] Obsidian links instead.

How I structure:

.
├── 0 - Rough Notes      - scratch
├── 1 - Source Material  - web-clippings, book reports, ...
├── 2 - Topics           - topic-pages (more on this later)
├── 3 - Indexes          - Dataview Indexes
├── 4 - Blogs            - My blogposts (rsync-ed to Hugo repo)
├── 5 - Main Notes       - Everything, all my notes
├── 6 - Organization     - Obsidian Canvases, Bases, Dashboards
├── 9 - Attachments      - anything inserted / pasted
├── 9 - Scripts          - JS scripts (like translation)
└── 9 - Templates        - all templater templates

The numbering helps with ordering.

Use topic pages

I have 2 - Topics/Backpropagation for example. Whenever I create a new note, I can simply add

---
topic: [[Backpropagation]]
---

and this note will now appear as a Linked Mention at the bottom of the 2 - Topics/Backpropagation file. (you need to turn on backlinks in the config)

When these notes get developed enough, they can also hold their own text, which I find to be a better way of doing things compared to the MOC concept.

Make Obsidian a database

Use the builtin Obsidian Bases + the Dataview plugin.

If you pair it with Templater, you can create Templates like this:

TASK
FROM "5 - Main Notes"
WHERE !completed AND due = date("<% tp.date.now("YYYY-MM-DD") %>")

which evaluates to

TASK
FROM "5 - Main Notes"
WHERE !completed AND due = date("2026-06-25")

and effectively gives you a “Tasks due today” view in your Daily Notes.

Hope this helps. My full config is available here: bogdan/dotfiles