# rss_item

title: 50+ products to make your life easier and our planet cleaner
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
guid:
https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/home/editors-favorite-sustainable-products?iid=CNNUnderscoredHPcontainer

url:
https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/home/editors-favorite-sustainable-products?iid=CNNUnderscoredHPcontainer


guid: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/17/tech/google-ai-search-engine-stock-drop/index.html
title: Google-parent stock drops on fears it could lose search market share to AI-powered rivals
url: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/17/tech/google-ai-search-engine-stock-drop/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
content:
Shares of Google-parent Alphabet fell more than 3% in early trading Monday after a report sparked concerns that its core search engine could lose market share to AI-powered rivals, including Microsoft's Bing.


guid: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/17/business/mcdonalds-burgers/index.html
title: McDonald's is upgrading its burgers
url: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/17/business/mcdonalds-burgers/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
content:
McDonald's, which has been focusing on upgrading its core items to boost sales, is rolling out a series of changes designed to improve its signature burgers. 


title: Even when wives make as much as husbands, they still do more at home
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
guid:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/16/success/husbands-wives-earning-division-of-labor-pew-survey/index.html

url:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/16/success/husbands-wives-earning-division-of-labor-pew-survey/index.html

content:
• Four out of the five US metro areas with the lowest unemployment are in Florida. Here's why
• Opinion: The overlooked problem with raising the retirement age for Social Security


guid: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/17/economy/china-gdp-q1-2023-intl-hnk/index.html
title: China's economy is off to a solid start, rising 4.5% in Q1 2023
url: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/17/economy/china-gdp-q1-2023-intl-hnk/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
content:
China's economy is off to a solid start in 2023 following its emergence from three years of strict pandemic restrictions.


guid: https://www.cnn.com/style/article/marilyn-minter-artist-elder-sex/index.html
title: Erotic images of seniors show sex and intimacy in new light
url: https://www.cnn.com/style/article/marilyn-minter-artist-elder-sex/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
content:
What does intimacy look like for seniors? There's no end to sex scenes and other steamy content featuring the young and unwrinkled, but past a certain age, popular culture largely draws a blank — or treats sex as a punchline. 


title: These ships disappeared in Lake Superior a century ago. Watch as they're found again
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
guid:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/travel/2023/04/18/century-old-shipwrecks-lake-superior-discovery-contd-orig-zt.cnn

url:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/travel/2023/04/18/century-old-shipwrecks-lake-superior-discovery-contd-orig-zt.cnn

content:
The Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society has found two of three ships that sank in the same Lake Superior storm more than a century ago, locating one in 2021 and the other in 2022.


guid: https://www.cnn.com/style/article/ai-photo-win-sony-scli-intl/index.html
title: Artist rejects photo prize after AI-generated image wins award
url: https://www.cnn.com/style/article/ai-photo-win-sony-scli-intl/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
content:
A German artist has rejected an award from a prestigious international photography competition after revealing that his submission was generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI). 


guid: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/worlds-longest-cycling-tunnel/index.html
title: 'World's longest' purpose-built cycling tunnel opens in Norway
url: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/worlds-longest-cycling-tunnel/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
content:
There are many ways to explore the seven mountains that surround the picturesque UNESCO World Heritage city of Bergen on Norway's fjord-studded west coast. The newest, however, might well be record-breaking. 


guid: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/17/opinions/us-tax-system-wealthy-disney-pearl/index.html
title: Opinion: Why millionaires like us want to pay more in taxes
url: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/17/opinions/us-tax-system-wealthy-disney-pearl/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
content:
Tuesday is Tax Day in America, one of the most stressful days of the year, when many taxpayers will finally end their procrastination, file their federal returns, and hope for a refund from the IRS. But for many of the nation's wealthiest, it's just another Tuesday. 


guid: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/success/tax-day-2023-file-irs/index.html
title: Here's what you need to know if you haven't filed your return yet — and even if you have
url: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/success/tax-day-2023-file-irs/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
content:
It's April 18, the official deadline to file your federal and state income tax returns for 2022. (It is also, apparently, National Animal Crackers Day for those who celebrate.)


guid: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/politics/fulton-county-trump-fake-electors/index.html
url: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/politics/fulton-county-trump-fake-electors/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
title:
Fulton County DA says fake Trump electors are incriminating one another and wants lawyer disqualified

content:
The Fulton County District Attorney's office said some fake electors for Donald Trump have implicated each other in potential criminal activity and is seeking to disqualify their lawyer, according to a new court filing.


guid: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/politics/gilday-defends-non-binary-sailor/index.html
title: Top US Navy admiral defends non-binary sailor amid some Republican criticism
url: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/politics/gilday-defends-non-binary-sailor/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
content:
The top US Navy admiral ardently defended a non-binary sailor on Tuesday amid some criticism from Republican lawmakers, saying he is "particularly proud of this sailor." 


guid: https://www.cnn.com/videos/travel/2023/03/17/pilot-lands-on-dubai-helipad-cprog-orig-aw-ao.cnn
title: Pilot makes history after landing on top of a 56-story hotel
url: https://www.cnn.com/videos/travel/2023/03/17/pilot-lands-on-dubai-helipad-cprog-orig-aw-ao.cnn
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
content:
Polish pilot Lukasz Czepiela made history after landing a plane on a helipad at the top of a 56-story hotel in Dubai.


guid: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/sport/damar-hamlin-cleared-to-train-nfl-spt-intl/index.html
title: Damar Hamlin cleared to resume football activities after January cardiac arrest
url: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/sport/damar-hamlin-cleared-to-train-nfl-spt-intl/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
content:
Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin, who has been cleared to resume football activities, said Tuesday his cardiac arrest during an NFL game in January was caused by commotio cordis.


guid: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/southwest-airlines-flight-delays/index.html
title: Southwest says flights resumed after delays caused by 'tech issues'
url: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/southwest-airlines-flight-delays/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
content:
• Delta Air Lines reports record bookings for summer travel
• Air France and Airbus acquitted in trial over 2009 plane crash


guid: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/us/maine-shooting-bowdoin-yarmouth/index.html
url: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/us/maine-shooting-bowdoin-yarmouth/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
title:
Maine authorities detained a person of interest after 4 people were found dead in a home and 3 others shot while driving

content:
Maine authorities have detained a person of interest and continue to investigate after two shooting incidents that appear to be connected left at least four people dead and three others injured, state police said. 


guid: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/health/fda-bivalent-booster-additional-doses/index.html
title: FDA clears the way for additional bivalent boosters for certain vulnerable individuals
url: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/health/fda-bivalent-booster-additional-doses/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
content:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration amended the terms of its emergency use authorizations for the Pfizer and Moderna bivalent vaccines on Tuesday, allowing people ages 65 and older and certain people with weakened immunity to get additional doses before this fall's vaccination campaigns.


title: Repeated gunshots fired on live TV as ex-lawmaker shot by assassins
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
guid:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2023/04/18/india-ex-lawmaker-atiq-ahmed-assassination-sud-pkg-contd-ovn-intl-hnk-vpx.cnn

url:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2023/04/18/india-ex-lawmaker-atiq-ahmed-assassination-sud-pkg-contd-ovn-intl-hnk-vpx.cnn

content:
Atiq Ahmed, a former lawmaker in India's parliament, convicted of kidnapping, was shot dead along with his brother while police were escorting them for a medical check-up in a slaying caught on live television on Saturday. CNN's Vedika Sud reports.


guid: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/politics/us-warns-russia-zaporizhzhia-nuclear-plant/index.html
title: US warns Russia not to touch American nuclear technology at Ukrainian nuclear plant
url: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/politics/us-warns-russia-zaporizhzhia-nuclear-plant/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
content:
The US has sensitive nuclear technology at a nuclear power plant inside Ukraine and is warning Russia not to touch it, according to a letter the US Department of Energy sent to Russia's state-owned nuclear energy firm Rosatom last month.


title: McCarthy slams Biden in handling of US debt
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
guid:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2023/04/18/kevin-mccarthy-wall-street-speech-debt-ceiling-biden-economy-vpx.cnn

url:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2023/04/18/kevin-mccarthy-wall-street-speech-debt-ceiling-biden-economy-vpx.cnn

content:
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy traveled to Wall Street on Monday to deliver a fresh warning that the House GOP majority will refuse to lift a cap on government borrowing unless Biden agrees to spending cuts that would effectively neutralize his domestic agenda.


guid: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/politics/schumer-senate-feinstein-vote-cardin/index.html
title: GOP prepared to block vote to replace Feinstein on Senate Judiciary
url: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/politics/schumer-senate-feinstein-vote-cardin/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
content:
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Tuesday that he hopes to replace Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein on the Senate Judiciary Committee with Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland and aims to set up a floor vote on the issue this afternoon, which Republicans are expected to block. 


guid: https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2023/04/18/desantis-disney-competition-panel-reax-pt-vpx.cnn
title: 'My stomach is hurting from laughing': Hear panelist's reaction to DeSantis' threat to Disney
url: https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2023/04/18/desantis-disney-competition-panel-reax-pt-vpx.cnn
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
content:
CNN panelists react to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis floating the idea of building a competing theme park next to Disney World in Orlando.


guid: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/17/europe/wagner-commanders-russia-kill-children-intl-hnk/index.html
url: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/17/europe/wagner-commanders-russia-kill-children-intl-hnk/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
title:
Two Russians claiming to be former Wagner commanders admit killing children and civilians in Ukraine

content:
Two Russian men who claim to be former Wagner Group commanders have told a human rights activist that they killed children and civilians during their time in Ukraine. 


guid: https://www.cnn.com/europe/live-news/russia-ukraine-war-news-04-18-23/index.html
url: https://www.cnn.com/europe/live-news/russia-ukraine-war-news-04-18-23/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
title:
Russia is 'going backwards' in equipment and deploying post WWII-era tanks, according to Western officials

content:
• Jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich denied detention appeal in Moscow
• Putin visits Russian troops at military headquarters in Kherson
• Watch moment WSJ journalist appears in Russian court


guid: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/politics/clarence-thomas-ethics-democrats/index.html
title: Democrats bash Justice Clarence Thomas but their plan to investigate ethics allegations is unclear
url: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/politics/clarence-thomas-ethics-democrats/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
content:
Senate Democrats railed against Justice Clarence Thomas on Tuesday amid reports that the Supreme Court conservative failed to disclose luxury travel, gifts and a real estate transaction involving a GOP megadonor, but their plan to investigate the conservative jurist remains unclear.  


title: Apple CEO was presented with an original Macintosh. See his reaction
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
guid:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/tech/2023/04/18/apple-store-mumbai-india-ceo-tim-cook-vedika-sud-ovn-biz-ldn-vpx.cnn

url:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/tech/2023/04/18/apple-store-mumbai-india-ceo-tim-cook-vedika-sud-ovn-biz-ldn-vpx.cnn

content:
CEO Tim Cook personally welcomed customers to the new Apple store in Mumbai as the tech company opens its first retail stores in India. CNN's Vedika Sud reports. 


guid: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/health/teen-misuse-adhd-meds-wellness/index.html
title: ADHD medication abuse in schools is a 'wake-up call'
url: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/health/teen-misuse-adhd-meds-wellness/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
content:
At some middle and high schools in the United States, 1 in 4 teens report they've abused prescription stimulants for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder during the year prior, a new study found. 


guid: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/17/health/rise-type-2-diabetes-global-wellness/index.html
title: Eating too much of these foods is driving the rise in type 2 diabetes, study says
url: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/17/health/rise-type-2-diabetes-global-wellness/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
content:
Gobbling up too many refined wheat and rice products, along with eating too few whole grains, is fueling the growth of new cases of type 2 diabetes worldwide, according to a new study that models data through 2018.


guid: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/tech/lina-khan-ai-warning/index.html
title: FTC chair Lina Khan warns AI could 'turbocharge' fraud and scams
url: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/tech/lina-khan-ai-warning/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
content:
Artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT could lead to a "turbocharging" of consumer harms including fraud and scams, and the US government has substantial authority to crack down on AI-driven consumer harms under existing law, members of the Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday. 


guid: https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2023/04/18/pizza-guy-trips-perp-moos-cprog-orig-bdk.cnn
title: See pizza delivery guy take out suspect fleeing police
url: https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2023/04/18/pizza-guy-trips-perp-moos-cprog-orig-bdk.cnn
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
content:
Pizza guy delivers more than a pie, taking out a fleeing suspect. CNN's Jeanne Moos shows him putting his best foot forward.


guid: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/us/benadryl-tiktok-challenge-teen-death-wellness/index.html
title: A 13-year-old dies after participating in a Benadryl TikTok 'challenge'
url: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/us/benadryl-tiktok-challenge-teen-death-wellness/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
content:
A 13-year-old in Ohio has died after "he took a bunch of Benadryl," trying a dangerous TikTok challenge that's circulating online, according to a CNN affiliate and a GoFundMe account from his family.


guid: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/17/entertainment/jamie-foxx-remains-hospitalized/index.html
title: Jamie Foxx remains hospitalized nearly a week after 'medical complication'
url: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/17/entertainment/jamie-foxx-remains-hospitalized/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
content:
Jamie Foxx remains hospitalized in Georgia nearly a week after his daughter revealed the actor experienced a "medical complication," a source with knowledge of the matter told CNN on Monday.


guid: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/politics/white-house-toddler/index.html
title: Toddler crawls through White House fence, prompts Secret Service response
url: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/politics/white-house-toddler/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
content:
A tiny intruder infiltrated White House grounds Tuesday, prompting a swift response from the US Secret Service.


title: Jake Gyllenhaal and Jamie Lee Curtis spent the Covid-19 lockdown together
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
content: It's sourdough bread and handstands for Jake Gyllenhaal and Jamie Lee Curtis.
guid:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/entertainment/jake-gyllenhaal-jamie-lee-curtis-pandemic-living/index.html

url:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/entertainment/jake-gyllenhaal-jamie-lee-curtis-pandemic-living/index.html


title: Newly released video shows scene of Jeremy Renner's snowplow accident
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
guid:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2023/04/18/jeremy-renner-snowplow-accident-bodycam-nc-melas-contd-vpx.cnn

url:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2023/04/18/jeremy-renner-snowplow-accident-bodycam-nc-melas-contd-vpx.cnn

content:
Newly released body camera footage shows firefighters and sheriff's deputies rushing to help actor Jeremy Renner after a near-fatal snowplow accident in January. The "Avengers" actor broke more than 30 bones and suffered other severe injuries. CNN's Chloe Melas has more. 


guid: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/us/kansas-city-ralph-yarl-shooting-tuesday/index.html
url: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/us/kansas-city-ralph-yarl-shooting-tuesday/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
title:
White homeowner accused of shooting a Black teen who rang his doorbell turns himself in to face criminal charges

content:
• 'A major part of Ralph died': Aunt of teen shot after ringing wrong doorbell speaks
• 20-year-old woman shot after friend turned into the wrong driveway in upstate New York, officials say


guid: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/politics/mccarthy-biden-debt-ceiling/index.html
url: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/politics/mccarthy-biden-debt-ceiling/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
title:
Millions in the US could face massive consequences unless McCarthy can navigate out of a debt trap he set for Biden

content:
• DeSantis goes to Washington, a place he once despised, looking for support to take on Trump
• Opinion: For the GOP to win, it must ditch Trump
• Chris Christie mulling 2024 White House bid
• Analysis: The fire next time has begun burning in Tennessee 


title: 'Difficult to say with a straight face': Tapper reacts to Fox News' statement on settlement
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
guid:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2023/04/18/jake-tapper-dominion-lawsuit-settlement-fox-news-statement-lead-vpx.cnn

url:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2023/04/18/jake-tapper-dominion-lawsuit-settlement-fox-news-statement-lead-vpx.cnn

content:
A settlement has been reached in Dominion Voting Systems' defamation case against Fox News, the judge for the case announced. The network will pay more than $787 million to Dominion, a lawyer for the company said.


guid: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/media/fox-dominion-settlement/index.html
title: Judge in Fox News-Dominion defamation trial: 'The parties have resolved their case'
url: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/media/fox-dominion-settlement/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
content:
The judge just announced in court that a settlement has been reached in the historic defamation case between Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems.


guid: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/17/media/dominion-fox-news-allegations/index.html
title: Here are the 20 specific Fox broadcasts and tweets Dominion says were defamatory
url: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/17/media/dominion-fox-news-allegations/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
content:
• Fox-Dominion trial delay 'is not unusual,' judge says
• Fox News' defamation battle isn't stopping Trump's election lies


feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
guid:
https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/fox-news-dominion-trial-04-18-23/h_8d51e3ae2714edaa0dace837305d03b8

title:
Dominion still has pending lawsuits against election deniers such as Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell

url:
https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/fox-news-dominion-trial-04-18-23/h_8d51e3ae2714edaa0dace837305d03b8


guid: https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/fox-news-dominion-trial-04-18-23/index.html
url: https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/fox-news-dominion-trial-04-18-23/index.html
feedurl: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
title:
Some on-air claims about Dominion Voting Systems were false, Fox News acknowledges in statement after deal is announced


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/updates/testing-out-the-odysee-livestreaming-check-it-out-now/
title: Testing out the Odysee Livestreaming; Check it out NOW!
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/updates/testing-out-the-odysee-livestreaming-check-it-out-now/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>As the title says, see here:
<a href="https://odysee.com/@Luke:7/nginx-restream-luke-smith-test:b">https://odysee.com/@Luke:7/nginx-restream-luke-smith-test:b</a></p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/updates/odysee-stream-over-worked-well/
title: Odysee stream over, worked well!
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/updates/odysee-stream-over-worked-well/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>Just finished by first stream on LBRY/Odysee. If you missed it, don't
sweat it, we didn't talk about anything too interesting, just trying
Odysee's new streaming abilities.</p>
<p>There was some bandwidth problems on my end, but Odysee itself seemed to
handle the stream very well.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/updates/i-appeared-on-monero-talk/
title: I appeared on Monero Talk
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/updates/i-appeared-on-monero-talk/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>I was invited to be interviewed on Monero Talk and it's just been
released. Monero Talk is a podcast on, well... Monero the actually
private cryptocurrency, which <a href="monero-maximalism-or-how-bitcoin-is-a-coin.html">I've
written</a> and <a href="https://odysee.com/@Luke:7/bitcoin-will-be-regulated-to-hell-monero:6">done
videos
on</a>
in the past.</p>
<p>See the full interview on one of the following:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIMw_cI4UsA">Monero Talk's YouTube
channel</a></li>
<li><a href="https://odysee.com/luke-smith-on-monero%27s-unique-self:0d9aba4153a9998177f676adfb40c16f8c58f199">Odysee
Repost</a></li>
<li><a href="https://videos.lukesmith.xyz/videos/watch/897210b1-0ac6-4dbd-8df8-35b174365db4">My PeerTube
instance</a></li>
</ul>
<p>We discuss a lot of topic on private and free/open source monetary
technology and dab on Boomercoiners. Some topics of discussion:</p>
<ul>
<li>The difference between truly decentralized self-propelling
cryptocurrency projects and companies that use blockchains just for
crowdfunding.</li>
<li>The generally overlooked problems of the blossoming cyberpunk
surveillence dystopia we are coming to live in.</li>
<li>The various issues with Bitcoin, including the imaginary Layer 2
coping mechanism as an excuse for not fixing obvious problems.</li>
<li>Even Ted Kazynski and technology</li>
</ul>
<p>I might post segmented clips of it later if I find something notable
when I watch it.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/updates/late-livestream-on-youtube-asap/
title: Late livestream on YouTube ASAP
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/updates/late-livestream-on-youtube-asap/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>Link is here: <a href="https://youtu.be/OU84HrX8D8Q">https://youtu.be/OU84HrX8D8Q</a></p>
<p>I'll begin before the top of the hour.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/updates/the-classical-book-reprinting-site-is-live-lindypressnet/
title: The classical book reprinting site is live! LindyPress.net
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/updates/the-classical-book-reprinting-site-is-live-lindypressnet/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>For a while, I've hinted that I've been contributing to a project to
reprint out-of-print classical and medieval texts that are of hidden
value, sometimes even in their original languages. I've worked on this
project for a while and now it's live and you can browse the first five
books available.</p>
<p>See the site at <a href="https://lindypress.net">https://lindypress.net</a>. All works have been
reformatted in XeLaTeX so that the text is grade-A in readability and
has nice little flourishes to make it a little more elegant. A lot of
other reprinting companies have their work done with less care.</p>
<p>Here are a list of the books available now:</p>
<ul>
<li>Marcus Aurelius's <em>Meditations</em> (in English): a personal log that
Emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius kept. This is still
commonly read as a kind of a book of proverbs and motivation, and is
the only book of these where you can commonly find other reprints of
this book, but they usually have textual errors and aren't as nice.
This is a pocket book, making it easy to port around and read
leisurely.</li>
<li><em>Antimodernist Papal Encyclicals</em> (in English): A collection of six
major Catholic writings against liberalism, modernism, communism and
for the chastity of marriage and the economic model now called
&quot;distributism.&quot;</li>
<li><em>The Books of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees</em>: Hard to find
extra-Biblical books on the esoteric life and ascension of Enoch,
the Nephilim, the true story of the Flood and much more, all
well-formatted, translated from Ge'ez, Slavonic and Hebrew and in
one volume.</li>
<li>Isidore of Seville's book on Etymologies (in Latin): an
encyclopedia was used as a textbook for centuries in late antiquity
and the middle ages. It's a great compendium of information on
every topic and is a 400+ page hardback which can still be openned
and read at any point. I recommend this even more strongly for
Latin-learners because it's written in the simplest and clearest
prose and is instructive in nature and will help people acquire
vocabulary while practicing the language. Might even be a good
choice for an intermediate Latin class.</li>
<li>Roger Bacon's <em>Compendium Studii Theologiae</em> (in Latin): It's
extremely hard to find any prints of Roger Bacon's philosophical,
theological or alchemical works, so this is the first I've prepared
for reprinting. I'll soon finish his <em>Opus Tertium</em> as well. CST is
a another portable pocket book.</li>
</ul>
<p>Check out the site for more information.</p>
<p>The site accepts either credit cards or Bitcoin/Monero/Ethereum for
payment. It works with the lightning network too.</p>
<p>(Note that this uses a print-on-demand service, so you might take a
couple days to print your books.)</p>
<p>I will make this site known on my YouTube channel in several days, but
for now, you can browse and get what you want.</p>
<p>There are many other books already in the works, but email me with
suggestions for more if you have them.</p>
<p>I really want to focus on things that are nearly impossible to find in
print in a presentable way. Compilations are also possible, similar to
the encyclical compilation.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/updates/youtube-stream-now/
title: YouTube stream now
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/updates/youtube-stream-now/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>I'll be streaming on YouTube momentarily:
<a href="https://youtu.be/Aj6-ASqhSEY">https://youtu.be/Aj6-ASqhSEY</a></p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/updates/important-lindypress-undergoing-some-updates/
title: Important: LindyPress undergoing some updates
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/updates/important-lindypress-undergoing-some-updates/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>Although I haven't announced in a video on the YouTube channel yet,
I'm glad that there's been a lot of interest in
<a href="https://lindypress.net">LindyPress.net</a>. I haven't done a video on it
just because there are some details in the site coding we're still
figuring out, but books are already printing, shipping and arriving at
some of your houses.</p>
<p>Just a couple technical notes:</p>
<ul>
<li>I switched the Stripe backend of the site over the weekend. This
makes no changes for you, but if you have site cookies from a
previous visit, it will cause the site to break on checkout. Clear
your cookies for the site or use a private browsing instance to
solve this problem.</li>
<li>We've had a couple errors processing some, but not all
cryptocurrency payments. If you bought books with BTC, ETH or XMR,
just shoot me an email and provide the transaction ID (and exact
amount as well if XMR) and I'll check for you. There's a small
chance that your payment went through, but did not queue an order.
In that case, I will promptly refund your fundos to the whatever
address you'd like.</li>
<li>Have people been receiving tracking number emails? If you have, say
so. You should get an email right after placing the order, then one
several days later after the book is printed with the tracking
number.</li>
</ul>
<p>In general, the site is working great, and once we're sure it's
bugfree, I'll announce it on the channel and start adding more and more
books. I have many underway already.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/updates/bringing-back-oldschool-web-pins-and-buttons/
title: Bringing back old-school web pins and buttons
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/updates/bringing-back-oldschool-web-pins-and-buttons/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>Back in the not-quite-as-bad-old-days (at least as far back as the
90's), every good website had a small &quot;ad&quot; gif that fans of the site
could use as a colorful link. These are called &quot;buttons&quot; or sometimes
&quot;pins.&quot;</p>
<p>You can see sites that collect these internet artifacts (both the good
ones and boring ones)
<a href="https://anlucas.neocities.org/88x31Buttons.html">here</a> and
<a href="http://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/">here</a>.</p>
<p>Most people would have <strong>dozens</strong> of these at the bottom of their site,
linking to all their favorite sites, back when people actually linked to
things because search engines hadn't taken over the internet.</p>
<p>The only rules are:</p>
<ol>
<li>It has to be 88 by 31 pixels.</li>
<li>It has to be a .gif.</li>
<li>And it <em>should</em> be animated, colorful or memorable (but some people
do the gray ones to be ironic or boring).</li>
</ol>
<p>Since we're all trying to Reject the Modernity of the current internet,
I figure I should do my part to bring these back.</p>
<p>I made a little button for LARBS, which you can see here:</p>
<p><img src="https://larbs.xyz/pix/larbs.gif" alt="LARBS"></p>
<p>Nice, simple, noticeable and memorable. Best of all, at 88x31, it's
very small. Adding dozens of these to your site is a great way to link
creatively without using more than 90's bandwidth. After I get a good
collection of them, I might link my favorite sites with them.</p>
<p>So I encourage you to make some of these for sites you like. You're
even welcome to make some for my sites:
<a href="https://landchad.net">LandChad.net</a>, <a href="https://notrelated.xyz">Not
Related</a>, heck, even
<a href="https://based.cooking">Based.Cooking</a>, or even my personal website for
that matter.</p>
<p>I might talk about these things in a video later because it's one of
those aethetical niceities that has been lost to time.</p>
<p>(PS: GIMP can make gifs, look it up, and remember to &quot;Optimize for
gifs&quot; after you're almost done to make the filesize super low.)</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/updates/important-notes-for-larbs-users/
title: Important notes for LARBS users
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/updates/important-notes-for-larbs-users/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>Two notes for <a href="https://larbs.xyz">LARBS</a> users:</p>
<ol>
<li>Xorg went through some updates last week that changed how it
calculates dots-per-inch (DPI) on screens. There's a chance that
you might update and find your font extra large or small. If so, you
can just manually add <code>xrandr --dpi 96</code> to the beginning of your
<code>xprofile</code> to set the DPI to the typical 96 (or whatever number
looks best).</li>
<li>I have no switched new installs of LARBS from using Pulseaudio to
Pipewire as an audio backend, although it will also come with
<code>pipewire-pulse</code> to maintain compatibility with Pulseaudio programs.
If you would like to update the dotfiles, remember to install the
<code>pipewire</code> and <code>pipewire-pulse</code> packages. There should be no major
difference in user experience, although using Pipewire will avoid
some silly Pulseaudio bugs.</li>
</ol>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/updates/based-cooking-hugo-search/
title: Based.Cooking has become more grandma-usable.
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/updates/based-cooking-hugo-search/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>Over the past month, I&rsquo;ve taken some off-time to tinker with
<a href="https://based.cooking">Based.Cooking</a>, the cooking site I/we made a year or so
ago as a proof of concept for a simple and unintrusive recipe website. There
have been over 250 recipes submitted, but the hobbled-together static site
generator originally used proved unable to keep up and with all the
submissions, there was a big issue of content organization.</p>
<p>There have been two big changes. Firstly, I ported the entire site to use Hugo,
which I believe I mentioned already. Hugo is just a very fast static site
generator written in Go, and I particularly liked it for the ease of tagging
articles. Originally, the only content sorting on Based.Cooking was a tagcloud
at the top of the main page and &ldquo;Related&rdquo; pages at the bottom of each page.</p>
<p>Secondly, there had been a PR a while ago to add a search filter for the
mainpage with a few lines of Javascript. I think it&rsquo;s actually a fantastic
illustration of the few actually useful times to use scripting in a webpage,
and it allows users to instantaneously to search existing recipes by title and
tag without extra page loads and with handy responsive CSS.</p>
<p>Note also that tags now can be assigned emojis (via CSS, weirdly enough). I&rsquo;m
just playing around with this. It might be visually jarring for some, so I
might change it.</p>
<p>I might make some more strides to make the site more normie-friendly, since I
see it more than a proof-of-concept. Keep in mind that the <a href="https://github.com/lukesmithxyz/based.cooking">Github repo is
here</a> if you want to add recipes
or suggest other changes. I had said earlier that I wanted to cut down on the
acceptance of new recipes for fear of crowding the main page. This is less of
an issue with the search filter, so feel free to submit whatever you think it
worthy.</p>
<p>If you cook something on the site without a photo (or at least without a <em>good</em>
one), feel free to submit that as well.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/updates/linuxfest-2022-announcement/
title: I will be at Southeast Linuxfest 2022 (June 10-12) in Charlotte, NC.
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/updates/linuxfest-2022-announcement/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>Title says the gist.</p>
<p>In 2018, I went to <a href="https://southeastlinuxfest.org/">Southeast Linuxfest</a> and gave a presentation <a href="https://videos.lukesmith.xyz/w/uxiCWDTRHYstoeTQfCg2Fa">which you can see here</a> or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnCXJn2cRf4"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/yt.svg" alt=""></a>.
It was nice meeting the (shockingly normal) people who knew me from the interest last time.</p>
<p>I&rsquo;m going to be attending again this year, as the title says June 10-12 in Charlotte, NC.
I&rsquo;ve already had one talk confirmed (and might actually be giving two).</p>
<p>If you are interested in going, <a href="https://southeastlinuxfest.org/">see their site</a>.
The conference itself is at the Sheraton near the Charlotte Airport and <a href="https://www.marriott.com/event-reservations/reservation-link.mi?id=1650480861787&amp;key=GRP&amp;app=resvlink">they still have some rooms on their block left now</a>, but order ASAP if you want to stay in the building. Obviously there are many other hotels to stay at nearby too (I stayed elsewhere last time).</p>
<p>Last time, I went with a group of others and skipped the presentations on Sunday morning to go to church services.
I&rsquo;ll <em>probably</em> do that again, although obviously this time we&rsquo;ll attend an <a href="https://www.assemblyofbishops.org/directories/parishes?radius=15&amp;search_address=charlotte%2C%20nc&amp;search_coordinates=(35.2270869%2C%20-80.8431267)&amp;search_error=OK&amp;searchType=proximity">Orthodox church TBD</a> so come with some reverent attire.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/updates/retiring-fiat-donation-portal/
title: Retiring My Fiat Donation Portal
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/updates/retiring-fiat-donation-portal/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>I&rsquo;ve decided to retire my fiat donation portal at <a href="https://donate.lukesmith.xyz">donate.lukesmith.xyz</a>, where people could donate to me via debit and credit cards.
<strong>This will happen by the end of this calendar year.</strong></p>
<p>It&rsquo;s more in keeping with my principles of free software, self-ownership and everything else to only allow cryptocurrency donations.
This also is a subtle nudge to people who want to donate in streams to get into Bitcoin and Monero, as opposed to using fiat online.
You have no excuse now that they are cheap again!</p>
<p>So the fiat donation portal will open for a couple more weeks.
It still works if you want to give a &ldquo;good-bye&rdquo; donation, but you might want to get some Bitcoin/Monero first if you don&rsquo;t. 😉</p>
<p>Note that I now have my Bitcoin and Monero addresses in the footers of this site now.
Much more minimal than running a payment gateway on a server!</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/updates/greece-albania-montenegro-2023-summer/
title: I'll visit South-East Europe (Greece, Albania, Montenegro, Constantinople) this Summer
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/updates/greece-albania-montenegro-2023-summer/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>I&rsquo;ll be in south eastern Europe this summer (of 2023) in late June and early July.</p>
<p>Specific plans are still in the air, but I&rsquo;ll be visiting Greece, Albania, Montenegro and possibly the European side of Turkey.
I&rsquo;ll also be in Kosovo, and while I know I have some fans in Serbia, I&rsquo;m not sure I can cross into Serbia proper easily since the US accepts Kosovo as independent, but I believe that being there would be an illegal entrance into Serbia in the eyes of the Serbian government.
Not sure about the specifics. You can elucidate me, but either way I&rsquo;ll be in the region.
If you guys start shooting each other, either way, that leg of the journey will be canceled so play nice until after this summer! 😉</p>
<p>I do know some people who live in or frequent the region.
Now is your time to <a href="https://lukesmith.xyz/contact">contact me</a> if you&rsquo;ll be there then.
People I don&rsquo;t know are welcome to contact me if they want to arrange a small public meet-up, which I am theoretically open to.
I will be with other people in a group though, so don&rsquo;t expect to separate me from my group for too long.
I&rsquo;m sure they&rsquo;d come along if you&rsquo;re not creeps.</p>
<p>I have a short list of Orthodox Churches and monastaries I intend to visit
(although this is not a pilgrimage, and the people I&rsquo;ll be with are not Orthodox),
and also some other attractions.
Suggestions of places to go, whether natural or man-made, religious are secular are welcome.
Hints for good and cheap living in the region are invited as well, since I&rsquo;ll again be with several people and I want to economize for everyone since we may be around several weeks.
I think for a good portion of the time, we&rsquo;ll just be hanging out in the area.</p>
<p>Contact me quick though, because we&rsquo;re about to start buying tickets and making concrete plans and such.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/updates/lindypress-bug-fix/
title: Lindypress Bug Fix
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/updates/lindypress-bug-fix/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>Just a brief note that for the past couple of days, you might&rsquo;ve been unable to buy books on <a href="https://lindypress.net">LindyPress.net</a> if you are in the United States, Canada or Australia (which is a lot of you). <strong>This has now been fixed, so you can place your orders now!</strong></p>
<p>The issue was that there was a silent API update that kept addresses from validating states and provinces. <em>Note that if your order placed, it&rsquo;s all okay, this is only for people for whom the site would not let place an order.</em></p>
<p>There&rsquo;s a chance that there might&rsquo;ve been another country which might not be validating correctly, so if you input your entire address and get a non-descript error message, just tell me. I&rsquo;ve tried most countries we get the most orders from and they validate fine.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-do-i-so-rarely-talk-about-politics-on-my-channel/
title: Why do I so rarely talk about politics on my channel?
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-do-i-so-rarely-talk-about-politics-on-my-channel/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>It's not a huge secret that I'm somewhere in the high echelons of the
red-pill, however you define it. I'll openly talk about pretty any
topic that people organically bring up in streams, or that I'm asked
about, but I've never really made any kind of political content on my
channel, aside from jokes and memes. That might be surprising because
especially three years ago before the mass-bans and algoritm tampering,
right wing political channels were a dime-a-dozen and an easily way to
get views. <strong>There are two main reasons</strong> I never took part. Arguably
&quot;fear of being ZUCCed from YouTube&quot; could be a possible third, but I
have a kind intransigence that makes me relish me being banned. I'm
also pretty tired of YouTube, and am increasingly questioning if using
it is even a reasonable compromise...</p>
<p>So why do I not do political videos? Why do I not have a set list of
deep facts that will blow you away and red-pill you? The two reasons:</p>
<ul>
<li>Reason one: 道可道，非常道。名可名，非常名。</li>
<li>Reason two: You will need politics less than you think.</li>
</ul>
<p>Okay, reason one there is just the first line of the Daode Jing. The
Daode Jing is the basic book of Daoism (Taoism), and <em>Dao</em> (literally
&quot;Way&quot;) is an amorphous concept in Chinese thought that could be
crudely comparable to Western concepts of &quot;natural order/law&quot; or maybe
even &quot;spontaneous order.&quot; <strong>&quot;Sounds gay,&quot;</strong> you say. So what does
this famous first line mean and how is it relevant to why I don't talk
about how to get red-pilled? I <em>would</em> say it's hard to translate, but
even saying that would sound even more pretentious as if I actually know
classical Chinese as a native language, but here's a rendering.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>The <em>Dao</em> (way) that you can follow isn't the true eternal <em>Dao</em>. A
name that you speak, isn't its true name.</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>An aside, it should be a capital offense to translate classical Chinese.
It is so perfect and terse and everything autisitically limited to four
elegant syllables that it's just criminal to mutilate it into another
language, but we'll forgive it this time.</p>
<p>So what do I mean by quoting this? I mean that the journey to getting
red-pilled is not something that can be explained. If I could just
explain it, tell it to you, it wouldn't be the true story. It is a
varied, and in each case, personal journey, that one goes on.</p>
<p>Although you've been lied to, it's not the lies that's the problem.
As an adult, you can a lot of the times tell when the media is
manipulating you, especially in the last past decade it's gotten so
obvious even a Boomer could see it. But what you don't see is how when
you were lied to (or told selective truths) as a child, you didn't have
the same BS-detector, and that allowed a lot of deep-seated impressions
about the world to be formed. So a lot of people who don't believe
anything the media says now (rightly) are still mind-cucked. They accept
the programming and differ on the details.</p>
<p>I will give you this hint. Basically all of your programmed emotional
responses are your enemies. There was an old Moldbug blog post where he
talked about even far after &quot;awaking from his dogmatic slumber,&quot; he
still was surprised that if he saw a group of Nazi LARPers, he would
reflexively have a pang of emotional stress, but if he saw Stalinist
LARPers, he wouldn't have the same kind of emotional reaction. I think
everyone raised in the West has that same programmed reaction. You might
know with your head that the communist death count is supposed to be
higher and the suppression wider, but it doesn't click because you
weren't made sensitive to it.</p>
<p>A good heuristic is whenever you see one of these emotional responses,
especially an emotional response to a political term: democracy,
equality, racism, feminism, literally all of them actually, <strong>your
Pavlovian conditioning is telling you to avoid an intellectual area
specifically because it is the ideological weak spot of the background
propaganda of modernism.</strong> If it was not a weak spot, there would be no
harm in you being allowed to calmly investigate it. People's thoughts
are regulated in liberal democracy not by laws, but by psychological
programming that goes off when someone is tempted to evaluate an idea
they're not supposed to. Okay, actually I guess in Europe they're
regulated by that and laws, and it's coming to America very, very soon
now.</p>
<p>All of this is to say that breaking out of this programming is not so
much of an issue of me or anyone else explaining a series of facts to
you. 道可道，非常道。 That's what Laozi said. As cringe as it sounds,
it is primarily a battle against yourself, or at least the part of
yourself that has eaten up the tacit assumptions of modernism. <strong>Before
you own the libs, you must own yourself.</strong> Laozi said that too.</p>
<p>In case quoting classical Chinese and talking in floating, general terms
isn't getting across, I'll say that getting red-pilled is sort of
mystical... literally. Of course, &quot;mystical&quot; in the old, original
Greek sense. A &quot;mystic&quot; in Greek is just a synonym for an
&quot;initiate.&quot; Many cultic religions of two millennia ago where like
modern Freemasonry: not a ideology one could just go and read about on
Wikipedia, but one where people were slowly initiated in the thought and
mindset of the religion over time. While people were born into Paganism,
they were <em>initiated</em> into Gnosticism, Hermeticism or even early
Christianity. The only difference is that you are being initiated <em>out</em>
of the cultural bubble of modernism. Into what? It can vary person to
person, experience to experience. You'll always be in some bubble, so
don't be arrogant, but you will be out of the big bubble that's going
to pop everywhere and is dominated by liberal cat-ladies, professors,
sanctimonious NGO-members and journalists.</p>
<p>All of this is to say that it is simply impossible for me to provide you
direct direction. Even direction might sound stupid before or after.
Maybe I can lay out some random disorganized recommendations.</p>
<ul>
<li>Years ago as young college student, I remember reading <a href="https://www.ebay.com/sch/steven+pinker+blank+slate">Steven
Pinker's <em>Blank
Slate</em></a>
(<a href="http://gen.lib.rus.ec/search.php?req=blank+slate+steven+pinker">dl</a>)
and thinking I was finally red-pilled. Now I think Steven Pinker is
a moron (that book and only that book of his is good, the rest is
beyond garbage). I've actually met many people for whom this book
was the first step away from basic boomer-tier progressivism. I
suspect that Pinker almost regrets writing this book because he's
actually very basic in politics. He wrote it back before the elite
recognized any threat of a resurgence of energy on the right.</li>
<li>I think everyone knows that <a href="https://lukesmith.xyz/files/unabomber.pdf">Uncle Ted's
manifesto</a> is another
favorite on my channel. I never read it until long after I needed
it, but since it's a meme now I should recommend it explicitly.</li>
<li>If you're prepped for harder stuff
<a href="https://radishmag.wordpress.com/archive/">Radishmag</a> has it. This
one <em>tries</em> to evoke that programmed emotional response in a
devilish way, but it might be exactly the next step with plenty of
actual original sources on historical articles to follow up with.</li>
<li>Everything <a href="https://www.ebay.com/sch/nassim%20taleb">Nassim Taleb</a>
has written is good. He might be the only living author worth
reading now in fact, which isn't saying <em>that</em> much considering our
age, but Taleb is pretty based and has attracted a constellation of
non-retarded people who employ the very useful concepts he's
popularized: antifragile, Lindy, buttercuck... (okay maybe the last
one he didn't coin himself, but I'm buttercucked and proud). Read
his books before you even look up videos of him or shadow him on
social media. His books are lucid, but you won't get it based on
mere social media. He also has no patience for brainlets.</li>
</ul>
<p>Also, you can be red-pilled too quickly and end up like that guy in the
Matrix who looks like me and betrays his friends so he can be put back
in the matrix to have nice juicy steaks again. Did he make an appearance
in Runescape as well?</p>
<p>Anyway, I wrote more of this than I thought I was going to, and <strong>I
never got to reason two!</strong> I'll write it tomorrow after church. You can
read it once you get back from church providing it isn't banned where
you live.</p>
<p>Speaking of church, for those interested in early Christian theology, or
frankly Greek philosophy generally, notice how similar 名 <em>name/word</em>
&quot;míng&quot; in the Chinese above is equivalent to <em>logos</em>. In fact, 名 is
even used both in the particular sense &quot;the name that you speak&quot; as I
render it, and in the universal abstract sense of <em>logos</em>. This pun,
which doesn't exist in English without some explanation, does exist in
both classical Chinese and Greek. More on that later.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/politics-matters-most-to-slaves/
title: Politics matters most to slaves.
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/politics-matters-most-to-slaves/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>Now onto the second point I didn't get to <a href="https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-do-i-so-rarely-talk-about-politics-on-my-channel">in my post
yesterday</a>:
politics only matters so much when you're a slave. Or as I put it
there, &quot;You will need politics less than you think.&quot;</p>
<p>That is to say that if you live in a city where your every action is
watched, if you use proprietary software and communicate only via social
media services, if you have no marketable skills because you have some
inert degree and questionably productive and definitely replaceable job
and a large company, you need politics quite a great deal.</p>
<p>Your entire existence in the system is based on being a good boy within
the established boundaries of what is deemed by the mass media to be
socio-politically appropriate. <em>Maybe</em> you've gone into debt, but you
<em>definitely</em> rely the whole &quot;system&quot; for all the basics. If you don't
think you do, just ask yourself whether your life has changed for the
better after the Coronachan Panic of 2020.</p>
<p>What's the alternative? Well, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRVmfx4EWI0">boomer rants viewers might see some of
this coming</a>...</p>
<p>The fact of the matter is that both the daily ins-and-outs of politics
and the overarching trends of politics matter very little the more
independent your are of the system. Earlier, I always mumbled about how
conservaboomers seemed a little too apathetic about the cultural changes
being forced on them. This social engineering still is the most serious
problem in all technologically-complex mass-media societies, but I must
admit for people who choose personal independence and independence for
their families and local communities, it is much less of a problem.</p>
<p>When I was plugged into the system, minorly red-pilled and generally
peeved because I actually paid attention to the media as something other
than to laugh at, I found the idea of Political &quot;Exit&quot; pretty cucky.
How much sense does it make to leave the &quot;political process&quot;
altogether? Sounds like giving up.</p>
<p>It sounds like giving up because the &quot;political process&quot; is something
internal to the media system at large. That's why even when the
political process does something the media doesn't like (like electing
the Orange Boomer, for example), its actions are immediately rendered
inert by fakery.</p>
<p>The actual solution is creating and participating in organic society,
which still very much exists outside the purview of the media and NGOs
and the like. People still need plumbers. No one is going to fire a
plumber because he says trannies are mentally ill men in
dresses&mdash;otherwise there'd be no plumbers. Or electricians, or
builders or anyone who actually does anything productive. It'd just be
HR, journalists and professors left... and some open source developers
who write more codes of conducts than they do software. Do you think
they'll be able to feed you?</p>
<p>Exiting the system is actually the opposite of surrender. Why would you
think the solution is something like voting or even &quot;owning the libs&quot;
or something publicly advertised as a solution? The actual solution is
building an alternative. Or maybe <em>rebuilding</em> the alternative.</p>
<p>Do you really want to make your boss rich if you think he'd turn around
and betray you because of a media witchhunt? It's better for you to be
doxxed and fired now rather than wait 20 years for it, getting more
ensconced in the insanity. Start becoming more independent now.</p>
<p>A lot of people LARP about what they're going to do when they take over
&quot;the system&quot; by revolution. Revolution, the idea of abrupt enforced
change, however, is fundamentally their idea and if you buy it, you're
going to keep running your head into a wall.</p>
<p>Being independent, living out of the city and the Matrix, however, is
simultaneously like transporting yourself back in time to when things
were saner, but at the same time, transporting yourself into the future
where &quot;the system&quot; has already collapsed and we're already
rebuilding. Be a part of it now rather than later.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/hedonism-asceticism-and-the-hermetic-answer/
title: Hedonism, Asceticism and the Hermetic Answer
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/hedonism-asceticism-and-the-hermetic-answer/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>The modern world more or less gives you the philosophical choice of
either <em>Hedonism</em> or <em>Asceticism</em>. You never really hear it
in those terms, but that's how it is.</p>
<p><strong>Hedonism living for pleasure.</strong> Your default lifestyle is eating
whatever, watching Netflix and playing video games irrespective of how
late it is. You watch porn, masturbate, have sex as much as you can and
any consequences of any of this are just facts of life which you view as
either out of your control or worth the suffering. You might not use
drugs because you are worried of the hedonistic damage it can cause, but
you're at least &ldquo;chill&rdquo; with people who do. At a basic level, modern
society is hedonistic because it more or less openly holds as highest
moral value what can stimulate people the most. You know this is the
case because anyone who <em>condemns</em> hedonistic behavior will immediately
be judged as &ldquo;judgemental.&rdquo;</p>
<p><strong>Asceticism is supposed to be the &ldquo;smart&rdquo; alternative.</strong> Asceticism is
rejecting pleasure, normal life and anything else enjoyable in the world
as morally inferior to some higher non-physical ideal. Buddhism, which
rejects the physical world, has become a popular meme philosophy in the
West and is highly acetic. Vegans are acetic: they abandon basic life
for their own principles and intense vegans will eventually start
talking about &quot;transcending&quot; and &quot;vibrations&quot; and non-sense. Look at
the anti-global warming movements and they fall perfectly, almost
neurotically into this category. Asceticism come in many forms nowadays,
but it is always a reaction to the indulgences of hedonism.</p>
<h2 id="the-poetic-worldview">The Poetic Worldview</h2>
<p><a href="https://renaissanceastrology.com/hermestrismegistus.html"></a></p>

<figure class="resright"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/hermes.png"><figcaption>Hermes Trismegistus, author of the Hermetic Corpus</figcaption></figure>

<p>The Poetic Worldview is the solution. Don't worry, it has nothing to do
with poetry.</p>
<p>The Greek word that <em>poetry/poetic</em> comes from actually is just a
generic word for <em>make, create, produce</em>. The word &quot;poetry&quot; originally
just meant something like &quot;creative output.&quot;</p>
<p>This view is tied into early Platonism and monotheism. The physical
universe is a creation or manifestation or &quot;the One&quot; or &quot;the Source&quot;
or really [God]{.dfn}. God is the ultimate creator, and an individual is
<strong>good</strong> insofar as [he reflects this creative tendency of God]{.dfn}.
We see it expounded in the Hermetic Corpus:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>&ldquo;The other name of God is Father, again because He is the
that-which-maketh-all. The part of father is to make.&rdquo; <a href="http://www.gnosis.org/library/grs-mead/TGH-v2/th205.html">To
Asclepius</a>
(17), from the <a href="http://www.gnosis.org/library/hermet.htm">Hermetic
Corpus</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the Poetic Worldview, <strong>the highest moral goal is creation</strong>. That
can be:</p>
<ul>
<li>affecting the world,</li>
<li>improving what is around you,</li>
<li>having children,</li>
<li>making money not to spend it on pleasures, but to make something new
and great with it,</li>
<li>writing or making something useful or edifying for others,</li>
<li>clearing up misconceptions that get in other people's way in
accomplishing these things.</li>
</ul>
<p>From the Poetic worldview, hedonism is evil because it is expending
otherwise creative energy into nothing of consequence. Racking up
video-game achievements that no one will ever know or care of but you,
watching pornography, pursuing fleeting relationships, impulsively
wasting time browsing the internet and fiddling with social media.</p>
<p>This passive and impulsive pleasure-seeking reduces someone's ability
to live as intended, instead, they are prisoners to their lusts and
conveniences:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>&ldquo;But whatsoever human souls have not the Mind as pilot, they share in
the same fate as souls of lives irrational. For [Mind] becomes
co-worker with them, giving full play to the desires towards which
[such souls] are borne,&mdash;[desires] that from the rush of lust
strain after the irrational; [so that such human souls,] just like
irrational animals, cease not irrationally to rage and lust, nor ever
are they satiate of ills. For passions and irrational desires are ills
exceeding great; and over these God hath set up the Mind to play the
part of judge and executioner.&rdquo; <a href="http://www.gnosis.org/library/grs-mead/TGH-v2/th225.html">About the Common
Mind</a> (4),
from the <a href="http://www.gnosis.org/library/hermet.htm">Hermetic Corpus</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Hedonism is additionally harmful because <em>it isn't even hedonistic</em>.
It's clumsy and self-destructive. Spend your life from ages 16-23
playing videogames, masturbating and smoking weed and you have destroyed
your capacity to enjoy life, sex and have normal interactions with
normal people. Your capacity for enjoyment ends and you fall into
asceticism as a cope.</p>
<p><strong>Asceticism is just as evil</strong> because it sees this issue with the
hedonistic lifestyle and tosses up its hands in surrender. It
internalizes the lie that wasteful and sinful living is somehow
obviously funner&mdash;when they see they aren't actually having fun, they
throw the whole world away.</p>
<p><strong>Most ascetics are liars anyway.</strong> They pretend to reject pleasure and
worldly things, but they often just seek it in perverted or
unconventional ways. There are men who call themselves MGTOW (Men going
their own way) who &quot;swear off&quot; women. In reality, most of them are
just desperate porn-addicted men who just can't get the girl they want.</p>
<p>Contrary to all of this, having a Poetic view proposes that the more
moral and also most enjoyable life is one where one is constantly
creating something new out of what he is given. In Hermetic thinking
(and, well, Christian thinking) man must hold God as the idea to
emulate. Since God's principle feat is creation from nothing, our goal
is to celebrate that creation by making something new and productive
from the raw materials we have.</p>
<p>Asceticism views the material world <em>as a mistake or illusion</em> which
leads people to reject life itself. The Poetic view is that the physical
world is a <strong>reflection of its spiritual state</strong>, and what you do in the
physical world reflects your spiritual stature.</p>
<p>The Poetic view is <em>somewhat</em> similar to Nietzsche's <em>Will to Power</em>,
which was an attempt to unite both human and material
sciences under the idea that the ideal is maximizing one's output on
the external world. Will to Power is a little more morally ambivalent
though; it can include destruction, while Poeticism merely values
creative power.</p>
<h2 id="distractions-are-literally-evil">Distractions are literally evil.</h2>
<p>This is why <em>I highly condemn wasteful activities like videogames and pornography and social media.</em> They are principally habits that
divert your natural energies into something absolutely sterile. <strong>Many
people ask me &ldquo;What can I do to be more productive?&rdquo;</strong> and I have to say
that the most important thing is to <strong>remove inert distractions and
habits</strong>.</p>
<p>Due to bureaucratic workplaces and bureaucratic education, there are
many modern people who <em>just don't know what it means to be
productive</em>. Most of their lives might be someone trying to fill their
day with busywork. Since the normal enjoyable ritual of creative output
is unknown to them, this causes a kind of aimlessness and the <a href="../files/unabomber.pdf">feelings
of inferiority</a> that comes with that.</p>
<p>But in truth, you live at <strong>an ideal period</strong> in that you can have a
highly impactful and ergo <em>poetic</em> effect on the world using internet
technology and the higher material standard of living. The only trick is
to sidestep the distractions of hedonism that turns you into a passive
consumer and the apathy of asceticism.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-i-use-the-gpl-and-not-cuck-licenses/
title: Why I Use the GPL and Not Cuck Licenses
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-i-use-the-gpl-and-not-cuck-licenses/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>Every piece of software I write I license under the <a href="https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html">GNU Public License
Version 3</a> (GPLv3)
unless I have forked it from something else.</p>
<p>The GPLv3 is the premiere <em>copyleft</em> license, meaning that it not
only allows users to run, modify and distribute their own versions of
what I write, but it also requires that no one in that chain of
development restrict and close-source that software: it and software
deriving from it must forever remain open, usable and sharable. Richard
Stallman, one of the minds behind the GPL has described it as a &quot;hack&quot;
of the copyright system because it uses the legal infrastructure of
copyright to ensure software is free rather than restricted.</p>
<p>But occasionally I get asked why I don't use so-called <em>permissive licenses</em> like BSD or MIT. These are free software licenses, but
they <em>do not</em> require that forked versions of the code be free and open
source software. In other words, you can take something written with a
BSD or MIT license, put it in the next version of Windows and no one
will ever know. If you did that with GPL code, you'd be in for big
legal trouble if found out.</p>
<p>I and others have recently taken to calling these permissive licenses
<em>Cuck Licenses</em>.</p>
<h2 id="why-cuck-licenses">Why &quot;Cuck Licenses?&quot;</h2>
<p>Why be mean and bully BSD and MIT licenses calling them &quot;Cuck
Licenses?&quot;</p>
<p>Quite simply, using them is precisely analogous to being cuckolded. When
you really look at it, the similarity is uncanny.</p>
<p>I understand GPL free software and its ethical vision for software. I
also understand that desire for people and businesses to <em>not</em> release
their source code for commercial and monetary benefits. What I don't
understand is simultaneously releasing free code with no requirement
that it remain free. It can now be used against you and others&mdash;if you
had moral qualms about that, you could've <em>at least</em> made money off of
it yourself.</p>
<p>Using a Cuck License <em>especially</em> for &quot;ethical reasons&quot; or &quot;because I
like open source software&quot; is beyond absurd. You're simply writing
code and effectively abandoning the privileges of intellectual property
while allowing any large corporation to come and close-source and
monetize your software and sell it back to you without any other
obligations. You have also abandoned your ability to ever complain about
IBM, Microsoft, Apple or any other tech giant because <strong>you are
literally writing their proprietary software</strong>. These companies even
sometimes take very simple code from minor projects and use it to save a
buck and a little effort.</p>

<figure class="resright"><a href="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/timnolet.png"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/timnolet.png" title="&#39;Noooo! You can&#39;t use my heckin&#39; code that I legally gave you the right to use!&#39;"></a><figcaption>When you license with a permissive license, you don&#39;t have a say anymore.</figcaption></figure>

<p>At the end of the day, using a Cuck License is little different from
either releasing software in the public domain or just not licensing it
(in some jurisdictions, at least). It has the pretense of a license, but
for no real function. I suppose depending on which you use, you at least
get your name on the license, but I hardly think that that's how
internet fame and glory is actually distributed anyway. As far as I'm
concerned <strong>using a Cuck License is worse for user freedom than just
releasing it in the public domain</strong>. This is because at least public
domain software can be taken and later additions can be protected by the
GPL. The legal case for doing that with a Cuck License is not so clear.</p>
<h3 id="no-whiners">No whiners!</h3>
<p>The funniest thing is when Cuck Licensers <em>complain</em> that people are
abiding by their licenses. They will <em>complain</em> that people took their
code and made money off of it. They will <em>complain</em> when they don't get
some social credit they feel like they deserve when their code is used
in a project. They will <em>complain</em> if people fork their project and it
becomes more popular than the original. They will <em>complain</em> when some
tech giant takes their code and makes spyware out of it.</p>
<p>If they were serious about stopping any of this, <em>they easily could've
by licensing their project as anything other than a code giveaway</em>. If
you want praise for some contribution, put it in the license. If you
don't want your software used for proprietary software, use the GPLv3.</p>
<h2 id="a-cuck-licenser-gets-what-he-deserves-and-we-all-pay-the-price">A Cuck Licenser gets what he deserves (and we all pay the price).</h2>
<p>One of the funniest and saddest horror stories of Cuck Licenses I can
think of is Andrew Tanenbaum, who released MINIX, an operating system,
under a BSD license. Intel silently took this software (thanks to its
license) and unbeknownst to him, used it for their Intel Management
Engine, <strong>making it the OS of the spyware microprocessor/backdoor now
running in all Intel CPUs</strong>. We all have a permanent NSA backdoor
because of the Intel Management Engine&mdash;all made possibly by Cuck
License cuckery.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/">Only many, many years later was this even revealed to
Tanenbaum.</a> Read that blog post of his
as he slowly externalizes his mixed feelings, tinged with guilt. After
all, on the &quot;bright&quot; side, he says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>&quot;I guess that makes MINIX the most widely used computer operating
system in the world, even more than Windows, Linux, or MacOS.&quot;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Wow, what a proud achievement. But regardless, Tanenbaum already feels
some regret about the fact that his permissive license allowed Intel to
withhold this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>&quot;This was a complete surprise. I don't mind, of course, and was not
expecting any kind of payment since that is not required. There isn't
even any suggestion in the license that it would be appreciated.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>&quot;The
only thing that would have been nice is that after the project had
been finished and the chip deployed, that someone from Intel would
have told me, just as a courtesy, that MINIX was now probably the most
widely used operating system in the world on x86 computers. That
certainly wasn't required in any way, but I think it would have been
polite to give me a heads up, that's all.&quot;</p>
</blockquote>

<figure class="resright"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/cia.png" title="A glow-in-the-dark CIA gamer"></figure>

<p>You can feel the regret. <strong>With Cuck Licenses, you get the worst of two
worlds:</strong> You get no credit for your work, nor money for licensing fees
like other proprietary software and your software will be used to
violate your and other users' privacy when it is used in closed-source
environments. Oh, no... copes incoming:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>&quot;Many people (including me) <strong>don't like the idea of an all-powerful
management engine in there at all</strong> (since it is a possible security
hole and a dangerous idea in the first place), but that is Intel's
business decision and a separate issue from the code it runs. A
company as big as Intel could obviously write its own OS if it had
to.&quot; <em>emphasis added</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>If Tanenbaum had released MINIX under the GPL, we <em>wouldn't be</em> at the
mercy of Intel's business decision. They would've had to release the
source code for the microprocessor, keeping user privacy ensured and
irradicating the permanent spyware liability all computers have
nowadays.</p>
<p>If they wouldn't want to do that, they'd have to just write an
operating system themselves. Tanenbaum is right, they obviously
<em>could've</em> taken the time and money to write an OS themselves if they
had to, but they <em>didn't have to</em>, <strong>because a BSD license cuck wrote
it for them</strong>. Thanks a lot, sucker! Now our computers are being
monitored at a lower start-up cost and we have you to thank. It
would've been a lot <em>more</em> respectable to <em>not</em> use a permissive
license and instead license it proprietarily if he has no moral issues
with proprietary software: he could've <em>at least</em> gotten Intel to pay
him to use his operating system. Heck, if he had used the GPL and if
they took it anyway, he could become an insta-millionaire by suing them
right now.</p>
<p>The moral of the story is perhaps lost on Tanenbaum, who finishes up his
blog post with:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>&quot;If nothing else, this bit of news reaffirms my view that the
Berkeley license provides the maximum amount of freedom to potential
users.&quot;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>&quot;Maximum amount of freedom to potential users&quot; is somehow
mass-surveilance of every computer user thanks to the BSD license.
Thanks for your contribution to &quot;freedom.&quot;</p>
<h2 id="the-freedom-that-cuck-licenses-preserve">The Freedom that Cuck Licenses &quot;preserve&quot;</h2>
<p>&quot;Freedom&quot; is an incoherent buzzword if you don't define it. There are
some people who might argue that the fact that they can't kill and
steal freely is a violation of their &quot;freedom.&quot; That's very true in
some sense.</p>
<p>In the same way, the GPL (unlike Cuck Licenses) &quot;violates&quot; the freedom
of all people to close-source code and hide it from the public and (in
effect) do annoying or privacy-violating things with it.</p>
<p>The goal of the Free Software Movement, defended by copyleft licenses
like the GPL is for all software writers and users to live in an
environment of publicly auditable, editable and exchangable code. The
goals of the Open Source movement have a similar goal, albeit often
guided by practical considerations.</p>

<figure class="resright"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/janny.jpg" alt="Cuck-licensers write proprietary software for free."><figcaption>He does it for free.</figcaption></figure>

<p>Cuck Licenses, however, undermine those goals. They will <em>say</em> that they
maximize freedom by placing no requirement on those who distribute When
you release any code under a Cuck License, you are simply writing free
commercial code for corporations that will inevitably use it against
you. You might as well just <em>actually get a job with them</em> so you can
get paid for what you do instead of just getting cucked. When you
release code under the GPL, you write free software that benefits other
people who write free software.</p>
<p>The Free Software Foundation and the GPL people have correctly realized
that just being &quot;permissive&quot; with licenses is unworkable in the
current environment. The legal infrastructure incentivizes and defends
proprietary software and gives it a systematic financial advantage. The
GPL is a viral antidote to that. Obviously if all software were free and
no laws protected &quot;intellectual property&quot; in publicly obtainable
software, <em>everything</em> would be &quot;permissively licensed.&quot; We don't
live in that world. The GPL and other &quot;copyleft&quot; licenses are ways of
undermining and disincentivizing and making impossible the
close-sourcing of software. Not using the GPL and using a cuck license
is just the same as writing proprietary because <em>you literally are</em>
because all of your software can be snatched up and proprietarily
licensed.</p>
<h2 id="bbuut-the-gpl-isnt-enforceable">&ldquo;B...buut the GPL isn't enforceable!&rdquo;</h2>
<p>I've heard some people pass around the idea that somehow the GPL is
unenforceable. After all, if you have close source software, how can
anyone really tell what's going on? In some cases, that might be true
if you have perfect op-sec. That wouldn't be the case for the Intel
Management Engine above, and that wouldn't be the case for Windows XP,
whose source code recently leaked.</p>
<p>I have known people in industry writing proprietary software and
worrying about the GPL is real. The &quot;virus&quot; of GPL taking over
everything and making it free is something people have to take heed of.
I'm sure there is some level of GPL-violation going on in some places
at least, just because lifting simple routines or copy-and-pasting some
things from GPL with significant enough changes could go unseen even if
leaked, but integrating larger GPL programs would be nearly an
impossibility.</p>
<p>At the end of the day, though, what does it matter? What is a totally
unenforced GPL? It's just a Cuck License&mdash;Isn't that what license
cucks want? So why should they care? At their very best, BSD and MIT
licenses are only what GPL might be at its very worst.</p>
<p>The GPL is a permanent liability for any company that crosses it. Some
companies might be so bold to lift GPL code and hide it, but there is
always a risk and a worry that prevents its general violation.</p>
<h2 id="addendum">Addendum</h2>
<h3 id="are-copyleft-licenses-always-best-even-for-freedom">Are copyleft licenses always best even for freedom?</h3>
<p>No!</p>
<p>Here's a question I got about this article that I'll reproduce here
because it touches on something good.</p>
<blockquote>
<pre><code>[personal details omitted for anonymity]

However, I read your article, and I can see your point. I have an idea for an
Operating System and due to your arguments, I would definitely license that
under the GPL, as well as any new programs I write. I might even change most or
all of my current programs to GPL, with the exception of that bc, which needs
to remain BSD since it is default in FreeBSD now.

That said, I have a library I am working on, and my experience is that
libraries under the GPL do not get used, unless a commercial license is offered
as well, and often, not even then. You can see this with glibc, which has a
special linking exception and the fact that the LGPL is fairly popular for
libraries.

First question: what is your opinion on the linking exception and the LGPL? Are
they Cuck Licenses? I mean, they do require that the library and any
modifications be put under the LGPL, which means that the library remains libre
software. However, they can also be put into proprietary code, which is the
entire reason you call MIT and BSD licenses Cuck Licenses.

Basically, it seems as though you are correct when it comes to licensing
programs themselves. But it gets murkier when talking about libraries.

[other personal details omitted]
</code></pre>
</blockquote>
<p>This was my response to this email explaining this finer point.</p>
<blockquote>
<pre><code>Yeah. There are sometimes times when it is tactically better to license
things under a permissive license if for institutional reasons:
mass-adoption is required and companies and such might be unnerved by
the GPL. Libraries might often be like that. So it's not necessarily a
purity-spiralling point.

RMS actually advised that ogg/vorbis should use a cuck license to
maximize adoption (it originally used the LGPL, but switched to BSD):

https://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3

It's thanks to this that it has now become a usable and wide-spread
format, used now on nearly every proprietary web service because of its
small-size, good fidelity and general superiority.

So yeah, if you're writing a standalone program, I'd use the GPL, but I
would choose licenses ultimately in terms of which would maximize the
possibilities for users of using free-software. In some circumstances,
that means using a cuck license. Same is true of the LGPL. I think
GNU/FSF recommend LGPL only to be used when it is competing with a
proprietary library, and if that's usually what you are writing, you
might end up writing a lot in the LGPL.
</code></pre>
</blockquote>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/the-parable-of-alien-chess/
title: The Parable of Alien Chess
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/the-parable-of-alien-chess/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p><em>A parable on the Logical Positivist &ldquo;interpretation&rdquo; of scientific models.</em></p>

<figure class="titleimg"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/alien_pepe_small.gif" title="Save before they delete it again..."></figure>

<h2 id="the-parable">The Parable</h2>
<p>Suppose an alien race comes to Earth and wants to observe our games.
They are very interested in chess, despite the fact that they have eyes with properties that make it impossible to make out what actually happens on a chess board.
(The whites and blacks of the squares and pieces all blur together.)</p>
<p>They can still learn about chess experimentally, they know they can sit two players (a so-called &ldquo;white&rdquo; and &ldquo;black&rdquo; player) down to play it, and they can tell behaviorally who at the end wins.</p>
<p>After extensive experimentation, they realize this: 50% of the time, the white player wins and 50% of the time, the black player wins (we&rsquo;ll ignore draws and any first-move advantage for the example).</p>
<h3 id="the-best-model">The &ldquo;best&rdquo; model</h3>
<p>A logical positivist alien thus creates the ultimate, long-term model of chess as an iterated game:
half of the time white wins and half of the time black wins, therefore we can model chess with a simple simple coin flip.</p>
<p>Obvious any coin flip doesn&rsquo;t not necessarily necessarily predict an individual chess game, but over time and iteration, the coin-flip model of chess matches the data perfectly.
While this statistical technique might not be useful for predicting a single game, over the long run and over iterated games, <em>it is the most efficient and parsimonious possible model</em>.</p>
<p>The model is so parsimonious it has no place or need for concepts like chess pieces or opening strategies (or strategies generally).
It is as effective and simple as a model can be.</p>
<h3 id="inferior-models">&ldquo;Inferior&rdquo; models</h3>
<p>Suppose, however that a &ldquo;crank&rdquo; scientist of the alien race posits that &ldquo;God doesn&rsquo;t play dice&rdquo; and that chess is a more complicated game, despite the fact that the aliens cannot observe it.
Suppose even he asks around and determines from humans that there are actually pieces on the board with functions, and he even devises a machine that allows his alien eyes to see the first move of the game of chess.</p>
<p>Seeing this move allows him to create a new theory and model of the game, one that takes into account the first move made and he tries to generate a new set of probabilities of victory based on that move.
The model he makes, is of course highly arbitrary, stipulated and <em>ad hoc</em>. In fact, this model is inferior on many inevitable accounts. For
example:</p>
<ol>
<li>It is less predictive over iterated games than the coin flip model.</li>
<li>It is not as parsimonious/minimal as the coin flip model.</li>
<li>It adds new variables to the theory (chess pieces) that are suspect.</li>
<li>There is no known causality behind how the moving of a piece has anything to do with victory in chess. Supposing that moving a piece somehow relates to the victory of a player is a novel kind of metaphysics, one that seems constantly disproven considering a certain first move does not always guarantee a loss or victory.</li>
</ol>
<h2 id="which-model-is-right">Which model is &ldquo;right?&rdquo;</h2>
<h3 id="which-model-is-closer-to-truth">Which model is closer to truth?</h3>
<p>Unlike the aliens, we are not prevented by congenital defect from observing chess.
We know that the second, &ldquo;inferior&rdquo; theory of chess is truer in the sense that it is aware of piece and understands that how a player moves a piece contributes to victory.
We also know that the &ldquo;better&rdquo; model of iterated chess games: the coin-toss is only accidentally accurate and the statistics of a coin-toss has nothing whatsoever with how the victor of chess is determined.</p>
<p>The new model&rsquo;s theoretical categories, such as the concept of chess pieces and moves, if apparently arbitrary in the eyes of the aliens, are getting at the actual underlying mechanics of chess.
Even if the model is less effective, it is certainly <em>righter</em>.</p>
<h3 id="which-will-cause-fruitful-scientific-inquiry">Which will cause fruitful scientific inquiry?</h3>
<p>The coin-flip model is a scientific dead-end. Firstly, the coin flip model is constructed statistically, which presents the underlying mechanism to be randomness, and thus unworthy of inquiry.
This isn&rsquo;t statistics hoisted above random variation we know to exist, instead, it&rsquo;s utterly blind statistics that covers over whatever principles underlie it.</p>
<p>Secondly and more importantly, in order to actually improve that model, it has to <em>lose</em> or at least <em>jeopardize</em> empirical solvency and/or parsimony: embracing the abstractions of chess pieces means introducing mess and deviating in some way from the empirical generalization that half of all chess games are won by white and half by black.</p>
<h3 id="this-is-not-an-abnormal-circumstance">This is not an abnormal circumstance.</h3>
<p>The parable here, really an <em>example</em>, is not abnormal. In most affairs in science, whether that be physics or neuroscience or economics or chemistry, we are exactly like the partially-blind aliens.</p>
<p>This presents a very clear contrast between a simple and parsimonious theory that works and a radical theory that adds new and questionable content at the price of both effectiveness and simplicity, but is nonetheless closer to the truth.</p>
<h3 id="but-science-isnt-about-truth">&ldquo;But science isn&rsquo;t about truth!&rdquo;</h3>
<p>Yeah, it is dude.</p>
<p>Even if you are pretending that science is about &ldquo;models&rdquo; or just fitting equations and the like, again, the well-fit 50-50 statistical model of chess made by the aliens is impossible to perfect, while the flawed, yet more true to reality model does have a potential over the long-term to be a superior one as an alien researcher learns more.</p>
<p>After exhaustive inquiry, an alien race might not only discover the chess pieces and the full set of rules behind chess, they might be able to predict what moves are good or bad and predict individual chess games.
Even on the standards of mere instrumentalism, the mindless positivistic theory is still actually inferior.</p>
<p>In this case, can the positivistic alien scientists bear to tolerate an alternate &ldquo;metaphysical&rdquo; theory until it gradually acquires the descriptive adequacy that the preexisting theory have?</p>
<h2 id="local-maxima">Local maxima</h2>

<figure class="resright"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/maximum.gif"></figure>

<h3 id="the-plot">The plot</h3>
<p>One way helpful to think of scientific truth and model accuracy is to visualize an optimization plot&mdash;a three-dimensional surface peppered with various mountains and valleys of various heights and depths.
&ldquo;Truth,&rdquo; is upwards and the goal of science is to get further that way&mdash;or if you deny truth as being &ldquo;metaphysics,.&rdquo; how about &ldquo;accuracy in data&rdquo; or &ldquo;well-fit equations.&rdquo;</p>
<p>At the point you&rsquo;re at, you can tell which direction is &ldquo;up,&rdquo; you can tell which incremental changes to your theory or equations move you upward, or, which little changes you can make to improve your model.
That is what incremental science is, after all: don&rsquo;t change assumptions and just fine-tune your equations.
The continued fine-tuning is sometimes thought of as &ldquo;progress.&rdquo;
Of course I don't think that this is <em>bad</em>, but it is a very minor and scientifically less important part of science as a whole.</p>
<p>But the reality of incremental science is that once you&rsquo;re at a local maximum, a peak on the plot&mdash;once you&rsquo;ve fine-tuned your equations about as perfectly as possible, it&rsquo;s over!
Science is completed, but you might not actually be at the absolute maximum of truth, but you might be languishing on the peak of a local maximum, thinking nonetheless that you are the smartest guy in the universe.</p>
<p>Everything next to you <em>looks</em> like a disimprovement.
It <em>looks</em> just like those inferior theories of alien chess that posit the existence of chess pieces.
From that, you might erroneously conclude that you have found the <em>global</em>/<em>absolute</em> maximum, which due to the nature of the complexity of the universe and the multiplicity of possible answers and theories, you flatly haven't.</p>
<p>Logical positivism is kind of theoretical lobotomy that implicitly tells scientists that they should never, ever, ever change foundational assumptions: tweaking equations like an oblivious autist is Science<sup>®</sup> and everything else is &ldquo;philosophy&rdquo; or &ldquo;metaphysics&rdquo; or &ldquo;pseudoscience.&rdquo;
This amounts to keeping each scientific field on whatever local maximum is closest, utterly unable to extricate themselves from it even when they see on the horizon abberant data.
<strong>If you want to understand the stagnation of science or any other specific field, this is where it comes from.</strong></p>
<h3 id="purposefully-bad-science">Purposefully &ldquo;bad&rdquo; science</h3>
<p>In <em><a href="https://notrelated.xyz/#02.01">Against Method</a></em>, Paul Feyerabend, in what an unreflective mind might misinterpret as a &ldquo;troll,&rdquo; says that it is important for science that people have biases, financial interests, interfering religious and political doctrines and the like in science.
Looking at the plot, you might now see why.
When we are stuck on a local maximum, every new data keeps our already-optimized model where it is no matter how low that maximum actually is.
What you need to shake it up is an external shock that totally moves our theoretical position somewhere new on the plot where we can try to optimize at another point, and then compare.</p>
<h3 id="basic-assumptions">Basic assumptions</h3>
<p>A prudent person should be able to question, &ldquo;Am I even on the right track or am I playing with some model that has a fundamental flaw?&rdquo;
I can guarantee you, optimizing for data and fitting math and equations is easy.
<strong>All theoretical programs are wrong because they make incorrect core assumptions.</strong>
This is very hard for the ego of scientists because it means:</p>
<ol>
<li>Possibly illiterate dilettantes on the internet might see and bring to attention legitimate theoretical flaws.</li>
<li>All the years you spend in graduate school counting angels on pinheads in your respective theoretical framework is mostly a waste of time.</li>
<li>The borders of science are borders more of a sociological club than being the border of raw rigor.</li>
<li>Most of the scientific work is not meaningful outside of the theoretical framework that gave rise to it.</li>
</ol>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/the-fragility-of-physics/
title: The Fragility of Physics
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/the-fragility-of-physics/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>Physics has a reputation of being a uniquely &quot;scientific&quot; field. In
other fields, you might hear of the concept of &quot;Physics Envy&quot; which is
supposed to be a deep-seated desire of academics of other disciplines
for the rigorousness and elegance of physics. Only physics, so the
popular understanding goes, is truly able to abstract away from the
messiness of detail and create truly beautiful and solvent models of
their subject matters. Physics is thus the queen of the &quot;hard
sciences.&quot;</p>
<p>I object to the very idea of &quot;hard vs. soft sciences&quot; for reasons that
will soon be clear, but I think it is most important to remember that
for all its pretensions, <strong>physics is the most fragile science</strong>. That
isn't necessarily <em>bad</em>, but it's true.</p>
<h2 id="why-fragile">Why &quot;fragile?&quot;</h2>

<figure class="titleimg"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/purity_theology.jpg" title="The purity of theology"></figure>

<p>Put simply, physics, partially due to its somewhat abstract nature, is
exactly that domain where our interpretation of the universe is <em>most
likely</em> to change <em>radically</em> in the event of any kind of theoretical
sea change. That is, while in other more terrestrial sciences, the data
is well-known and the theory is in debate, in physics, the opposite is
arguably true. In astrophysics, quantum mechanics, the study of gravity
or relativity, this should all be obvious.</p>
<p>Even without departing the cuddling embrace of mainstream physics, we
can actually see this clearly. What is the ultimate fate of the universe
to be? A continuous expansion of the universe until heat death? Perhaps
gravity or some other force will pull everything back in a Big Crunch?
The correct alternative is a statement of very specific and tendentious
data which changes quite a great deal with any kind of new
interpretations of what we see.</p>
<p>It's worth it to remember that for most of man's history, including
the initial development of what we nowadays call physics, the &quot;normal
state&quot; of the universe was assumed to be the state of affairs we're
familiar with on the surface of the Earth: everything falls down to the
ground and things propelled in space will slow down until they stop.</p>
<p>But modern physics now looks at the nature of our life on Earth as an
exception to the general rule of frictionless and continuous movement in
the vacuum of space. A valid question to ask is <em>how much more that we
take to be normal is a special case of reality?</em> As we encounter more
and more abberrant data, such as quantum mechanics, we might soon find
ourself unifying seemingly disparate forces in the same was that Newton
in a novel and seemingly absurd way the fact that objects fall to the
ground with the apparent fact that the Earth orbits the Sun into one new
concept: <em>Gravity</em>. Such a unification religates all our universals to a
special case.</p>
<h3 id="does-light-really-go-the-speed-of-light">Does light really go the speed of light?</h3>
<p>Physics is fragile because it is like a game of Jenga. Pull out or
change one piece and the whole thing is either reordered or simply
collapses.</p>
<p>As an example, say that within several years, we realize that the speed
of light, for some known or unknown reason, doesn't function with the
universality we assumed. Suppose that there is some kind of interaction
of light and gravity such that light is faster in some parts of the
universe. The reason isn't important. Or suppose we merely find out
that in the past, there has been a systematic principle (similar to the
Heisenberg Principle) that has miscalibrated all of our measurements of
light.</p>
<p>Even if we have minutely mismeasured, the Jenga piece of light will
radically alter everthing: our ideas of how old the universe is, our
relationships with other planets, the solvency of general relativity,
etc. You might say that there is a &quot;concordance of evidence&quot; that
attests to our single known speed of light, but another way of putting
that is that we have many other things tied into our interpretation of
light that will have to change if we realize our models of it are
flawed.</p>
<h3 id="poverty-of-data">Poverty of data</h3>
<p>Especially in the astronomical domain, it's worth remembering exactly
how circumstantial our ideas of space are. We sometime speak of the
traits of other solar systems' planets as if we've been there. But in
reality, astrophysicists guess the chemical compositions of foreign
planets based on their light frequencies and other fragile data. Any
systematic error in observation over those thousands or millions of
lightyears and we have been counting angels on pinheads the whole time.</p>
<p>People have the idea that because astrophysicists make extraordinary
claims about planets, galaxies and time periods far beyond our mortal
ken that they must have extraordinary evidence for them. That is frankly
not the case. We have a piece-meal and jury-rigged set of circumstantial
reasoning leading us to these claims. Seeing them computerized in full
color in a science documentary doesn't make them more real. It just
makes them look more official.</p>
<h2 id="physics-vs-soft-sciences">Physics vs. &quot;soft sciences&quot;</h2>
<p>I remember talking to someone over the internet who accused me of having
a low view of institutionalized science and being a dreaded
epistemological anarchist because one of my degrees is in the &quot;soft
science&quot; of linguistics. While I have a lot of bad things to say about
the current state of linguistics, as a field, it is substantially more
advanced and its findings are substantially more solid than physics. At
that, formalizing ideas in math doesn't just make something a better or
a more rigorous science anyway, which is the assumption of many people
have.</p>
<p>While linguistics undergoes theoretical changes every several
generations, the <em>data</em>, or really more importantly <em>the phenomenology</em>
of linguistics is as secure as ever across all theoretical frameworks.
That is, we know how language works. We can see abstract relationships
between morphemes and syntactic structure. Even if we totally rewrite
our narratives and theories about linguistic basics, there is no debate
about the structure of language and how basic data relates to other
data. This is absolutely the opposite of physics.</p>
<p>Physics is pretty solid on earth, and solid when you are running objects
at each other in a vacuum, but once we broach the territory of
astrophysics, relativity, gravity and more or less <em>anything else that
we as humans lack direct intuition of</em> most of the &quot;facts&quot; of physics
are theory-internal facts, and will fade away or be rendered obsolete
when the next theoretical fad comes around.</p>
<h2 id="my-standard-for-theoretical-frameworks">My standard for theoretical frameworks</h2>
<p>I think any serious scholar needs the ability to operate cognitively
with multiple different theoretical frameworks in mind.</p>
<p>For example, (on linguistics) I don't really take Generative Grammar
very seriously, in fact, despite it being on of the most well-funded
dialects of linguistics nowadays, it's pretty inert. Despite that, I
view it as very important for me to be able to process linguistic
problems within Generative Grammar and word explanations within its
ideas. It's nice to be able to say to someone &quot;this alternation is
accounted for if this DP occupies the spec of CP.&quot; I don't <em>believe</em>
in CPs or specifiers as being psychologically real, but I can recognize
the language as communicative.</p>
<p><strong>A good theoretical framework is one that can produce facts and
observations that can be recognized and explained outside of its
framework as well.</strong></p>
<p>That is, a framework should cue us in to finding utterly novel
observations and thus a new <em>phenomenology</em>. This goes against the
egocentric motivations of a lot of scientific frameworks whose
practitioners are trying to edge out &quot;the competition.&quot; Fields that
spend most of their time trying to formalize previous observations
within their own theoretical language are mostly a waste of time (this
is Generative Grammar, frankly, although due to historical ignorance,
many people in GG do not know they are re-treading steps).</p>
<p>One of the biggest issues of modern post-war institutionalized science
is that the funding and peer-review mechanism is self-reinforcing: all
fields converge to be &quot;unipolar&quot;: only one methodology or framework is
deemed &quot;scientific.&quot; This creates a community of &quot;scientists&quot; who
are more an more incestuous and generally oblivious not just to other
possibilities of inquiry, but don't even have to be aware of their own
priors or assumptions.</p>
<h2 id="the-blinders-of-positivism">The blinders of positivism</h2>
<p>As I've interacted with physicists more, I'm often <em>surprised</em> by how
irrelevant they think even the most basic theoretical awareness is.
That's &quot;philosophy&quot; for them. It's not uncommon to hear zingers like
these:</p>
<ol>
<li>&quot;Science isn't about truth, it's about creating models.&quot;</li>
<li>&quot;Physics is about fitting equations.&quot;</li>
<li>&quot;We don't do philosophy.&quot;</li>
</ol>
<p>Things like these are said as if they are some kind of statement of
universal and well-consented-to truth, when in reality they are absurd
Zen koans of the positivist religion. This was a loony opinion a hundred
years ago and people saying these things now <em>know</em> that they are
ludicrous. They have just become identifying marks of the social club.</p>
<p>Yep, science is about creating models... models that replicate reality,
i.e. <em>Truth</em>.</p>
<p>A scientists who doesn't do philosophy isn't a scientist: he's a
meter-reader. A philosopher who doesn't do science isn't a
philosopher: he's just a stoner. The attempt to sever these two words
from each other is part of the problem.</p>
<p>Physicists seem to be particularly touchy on this point. On one hand,
they insist that philosophy is &quot;not their thing&quot; and &quot;not related.&quot;
On the other hand, they get incredibly angry when <em>anyone else</em> dares to
either put the methodology of modern physics to any kind of
philosophical tests <em>or even</em> to look into philosophical ramifications
of their work.</p>
<p>In reality, modern scientists and positivists have their own
metaphysics, it is just an <em>implicit</em> one that they advertently or
inadvertently sneak into their theories. They can only do it because its
clumsy sterile &quot;materialism&quot; is the background-radiation of the modern
world.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/science-vs-soyence/
title: Science vs. Soyence
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/science-vs-soyence/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<figure class="titleimg"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/soyence.jpg"></figure>

<p>There's nothing necessarily <em>wrong</em> with science, reason, knowledge
etc. To some degree, they're fundamental for survival in this world in
one way or another. But one of the more worrisome problems which have
arisen since the Enlightenment, and especially in the past several
years, is the fact that whenever scientific knowledge has increased,
human arrogance has accelerated even faster. This isn't a metaphysical,
moral arrogance; it's one that is more and more jeopardizing the human
cosmos.</p>
<p>We live in a pop-scientific and pop-technological world. Because common
people are constantly weighing themselves down with new gadgets and
state-of-the-art genetically engineered food, there's a tendency to
want to pay homage to the amorphous blob of &quot;knowledge.&quot; Of course,
much like the Greek Gods, we cannot seem to speak to &quot;knowledge&quot;
directly, or to mentally murky academics, but only to official
mediators: journalists and &quot;science communicators&quot; and the like.</p>
<p>The religious metaphor is intentional. Of course the actual view of
Popperian science is that scientific &quot;advancement&quot; is less of an
increase in knowledge than a decrease in falsity. We can never be sure
of what is true, but we can gradually establish what is false and
contradictory; science does exclusively the latter. Real scientific work
refutes and calls into question established fact and is in a constant
self-regeneration. Facts mean nothing in themselves.</p>
<p>And scientific models, from our models of the atom, to models of the
Earth's weather and climate, to models of our body are highly
circumstantial, and as a rule, will nearly all inevitably be proven
false. Theories are the narratives we cast over facts which have not yet
been ruled false. We know nearly nothing of how the brain works. Sure,
we know there are synapses, and we know what brains end up doing in some
circumstances, but we haven't begun to scratch the surface of how a
brain is actually engineered (computational models be damned). The same
is true of the human body and is especially true of human society.</p>
<p>Now Neil deGrasse Tyson has the annoying mantra that he repeats at every
possible opportunity, which goes something like: &quot;the good thing about
science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.&quot; First
off, I don't know what's good about that; it'd be pretty damn
convenient to live in a world where we could imagine away gravity or CO2
or cancer, but aside from this, science, actual science as a critical
methodology is manifestly <em>not</em> true and is <em>not</em> the truth. Science is
a way of marginally approaching truth by discovering falsity, and in
most endeavors, this approachment is so marginal as to be inert in all
our daily lives. There is nothing to &quot;believe in&quot; in science anyway,
because it's an exposer of <em>non</em>-truth.</p>
<p>But in pop-science, Science<sup>®</sup> is &quot;knowledge&quot; and deviation from the
scientific catechism is &quot;irrational.&quot; It's not just irrational to
dispute consensus, but irrational to <em>fail to implement it in your
personal life</em>.</p>
<h2 id="in-practice">In Practice</h2>
<p>The greatest danger of pop-science is the unquestioned assumption that
life should be led &quot;scientifically.&quot; That we should &quot;look for
evidence,&quot; &quot;question everything,&quot; and universally &quot;challenge
authority&quot; (unless that authority is a professor). The problem should
be blatantly obvious in hindsight.</p>
<p>An obvious example: in the 20th century, Western societies had to deal
with the very real problem of a bizarre increase in lung cancer rates.
We &quot;know&quot; now that smoking tobacco and other substances apparently
cause drastically higher lung cancer rates, but this was lost on the
people at the time.</p>
<p>The relationship between smoking and cancer was highly circumstantial;
there were some statistical correlations established, but as any
pop-science guru will tell us &quot;correlation is not causation!&quot; For
decades, scientifically minded people looked for evidence while millions
more died. Smoking companies took refuge in the fact that there was no
<em>mechanism</em> understood behind how smoking could cause lung cancer. With
all scientific rigor, they insisted for decades that the increase in
lung cancer was due to something else, or merely an increase in
diagnosis capacity. And <em>they were on the side of scientific
skepticism!</em></p>
<p>Only now that there is some understanding of how carcinogens in smoke
can damage the lungs can we say that the &quot;scientific consensus&quot; is
that smoking causes lung cancer. Cute, but if people had been
<em>&quot;irrationally&quot; cautious</em>, the human tragedy would've been
substantially mitigated.</p>
<p>The problem is that &quot;looking for evidence&quot; before acting or non-acting
is personally and socially dangerous. In nearly all circumstances, our
intuition (crafted by millions of years of evolution) or social norms
(which keep us to established safe routes) are much better guides to
life than the scientific consensus, despite them being &quot;irrational&quot;
(and sorry, religion is part of this too). When someone guzzles down
some newly fabricated energy drink or gallons of soda, they're nearly
certainly damaging their bodies in ways science does not yet understand.
Don't wait 40 years for some longitudinal peer-reviewed study to prove
that eating plastic is bad for you. Trust your instincts before you give
credence to some YouTuber who says inane things like &quot;There's no
evidence that...&quot;</p>
<p>My favorite little &quot;irrationality&quot; that we all commit is of course,
sleep. After millennia of trying to understand it, there is no
established scientific reason or justification for why humans &quot;need&quot;
sleep. Sure there are hypotheses (memory processing, repair, maybe even
something Freudian), but none close to common currency. In the words of
one of the world's most prominent sleep researchers, William Denent,
&quot;As far as I know, the only reason we need to sleep that is really,
really solid is because we get sleepy.&quot; Of course the absence of
logical evidence to the necessity of sleep keeps no NdGT fan from
wasting their time on the &quot;Bronze-Age Myth&quot; of the importance of
sleep.</p>
<h2 id="not-mis-understanding-complex-systems">(Not) (Mis-)Understanding Complex Systems</h2>
<p>The human body is a complex system in which every &quot;system&quot; is
overlapping, somewhat redundant, all-affecting and fundamentally beyond
linear analysis. Our scientific studies can find binary variables that
correlate with a low <em>p</em> value, but that tells us nothings about what's
actually going on and nothing about the underlying mechanisms. Again,
the same is true of the human brain and the same is true of human
<em>society</em>. Nothing is a simple input-output system.</p>
<p>What this means is that basically nothing from the world of pop-science
can <em>ever</em> affect the basics of our lives because the interaction of our
component parts are just non-amenable to any kind of generalizations
that make intuitive sense to us. Everything we do affects our bodies in
ways we can't predict so the proper strategy is always an
&quot;irrational&quot; precaution and avoidance of novelty.</p>
<p>Things, of course, get especially touchy when talking about the
&quot;rational&quot; management of society. Every good denizen of the
post-Enlightenment world, even most of those on the &quot;Right&quot; have the
idea that the economy and social relationships are simple one-to-one
hydraulic systems that can be managed like a little steam engine. Now
we've been rationally managed to hell and not back (and the solution is
always more rational management).</p>
<p>The terrible truth is that traditional social norms are <em>irrational</em> and
<em>still do</em> exist for a reason in the perennial gale of social evolution.
Social change and social progress (note the lack of scare quotes) have
always been happening, but only now do we have the naive idea that the
units of society (people) have the competence to design and contribute
to an otherwise unconscious evolution of social memes.</p>
<p>Anyway, I'll give the last word on this issue to Noam Chomsky, who
somehow manages to say something clear and admirable on the subject:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>&ldquo;Science is a very strange activity. It only works for simple
problems. Even in the hard sciences, when you move beyond the simplest
structures, it becomes very descriptive. By the time you get to big
molecules, for example, you are mostly describing things. The idea
that deep scientific analysis tells you something about problems of
human beings and our lives and our inter-relations with one another
and so on is mostly pretense in my opinion&mdash;self-serving pretense
which is itself a technique of domination and exploitation and should
be avoided. Professionals certainly have the responsibility of not
making people believe that they have some special knowledge that
others can't attain without special means or special college
education or whatever. If things are simple, they should be said
simply; if there is something serious to say that is not simple, then,
fine, that's good and interesting. We can perhaps find deep answers
to certain questions that do bear directly on issues of human interest
and concern, but that is rarely true.&rdquo;</p>
</blockquote>
<h2 id="science-communicators">&quot;'Science' 'Communicators'&quot;</h2>
<p>One of the worst aspects of all of this is that this understanding of
pop-science encourages people to distrust what they know or can judge of
the world in favor of the caricature of the consensus of
institutionalized academics. People have this idea that there are these
intellectual, peer-reviewed demigods in universities who discover the
secrets to the universe and communicate them through their messengers
stationed at BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post. Betraying their infinite
wisdom would make you &quot;irrational&quot; or a &quot;fundie.&quot; The reality is
that these demigods really just went to graduate school because they
were lazy and initiativeless, and even in the abstract, most of their
real work has nothing to do with your life whatsoever. It's only the
messengers that convince you of that because it stimulates their power
trip.</p>
<p>Science journalists, much like journalists generally, are people too
incompetent and emotional to work in the private sector, too dumb to be
academics (and the standards are abysmally low these days), too full of
themselves to work in charity and too bumbling, weak and arrogant to
work in a blue collar or manual occupation. Journalism is an attractive
career to many because it demands the least rigor and honor and promises
the greatest power and influence.</p>
<p>Their self-ordained duty is to overwhelm the public with a confusion of
&quot;studies&quot; that increasingly seem to micromanage a neurotic person's
life. &quot;Studies show that&quot; classical music may help infant brain
growth, or that gluten ravages the intestines, or that simply owning
more books causes higher scholastic achievement, or that Vitamin C or
antioxidants or kale or whatever health-food <em>de jour</em> solve all the
world's problems.</p>
<p>At the end of the day, the worst part is that we talk about &quot;science&quot;
as if it's some kind of anthropomophic creature with desires and
feelings and a plan for us all. It's a uniquely modern flaw to say
things like, &quot;Science tells us that...&quot; &quot;Science is about..&quot;
&quot;Science is against...&quot; Does this not strike anyone else as creepy?
The interpretation of science forced on the public is a scriptural one,
where law to live life by are codified in &quot;peer-reviewed&quot; journals and
communicated by intermediaries. 'Science's' purview is infinite and
any failure to conform is some congenital failure or reason.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/reviews-of-all-linux-distros-that-matter/
title: Reviews of All Linux Distros (That Matter)
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/reviews-of-all-linux-distros-that-matter/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>Firstly, once you reach basic competency in Linux, different
distributions don't matter. A lot of newbies analyze distros based on
what they look like when you install them, often not realizing that
it's a pretty simple affair not just to change superficial things like
your theme and setup, but entire desktop environments. <strong>Basically all
distro reviews online are wastes of time for people who know what
they're doing.</strong> When I came to YouTube, all Linux YouTube was was
people constantly installing distro after distro in a virtual machine
and critiquing minutiae. It was a bleak and boring world. One of my
first and greatest achievements on YouTube was making this video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zpgQpdy_fI">How
to choose a Linux distro: Stop
Thinking!</a>, which went
semi-viral and sort of put a damper on distro reviews. Either way, I'll
say what I think about different distro minutiae here.</p>
<h2 id="things-that-matter">Things that matter</h2>
<ul>
<li><strong>Free software.</strong> If you are switching to Linux, there is no point
of you just using junk proprietary spyware &quot;apps&quot; that you used on
Windows. Any distribution that advertises proprietary software as a
feature should be viewed as suspect. You can always <em>install</em>
proprietary software if there is some particular need (usually the
only &quot;need&quot; is a lack of knowledge of free software that is more
extensible and performs the same tasks and more).</li>
<li><strong>Up-to-date software.</strong> This matters because if you want to install
a program, you're often going to need recent
libraries/depencencies. This is especially important if you want to
use software in active development: say software for video-game
compatibility on Linux.</li>
<li><strong>No gimmicky additions.</strong> Probably the worst thing you can do is
install a distribution that puts a giant wall between you and the
system itself. One of the biggest advantages of using Linux is the
ability to understand what's going on on your computer and optimize
it. If you use a distribution that hand-holds basic things, it might
seem convenient at first, but as time goes on, you won't have a
clue when that fragile system fails.</li>
<li><strong>Consistent and reliable maintainence.</strong> Lastly, you'll want to
make sure that your distribution has humans on the development side
that are at least fixing basic problems. As programs change and are
updated, it often requires some changes in your distro's
repositories and more. Unmaintained distributions are usable, but it
becomes annoying to deal with as time goes on if you want to install
software with the distribution's package manager.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="ubuntu">Ubuntu</h2>
<p>Ubuntu is a common distribution because it is the distribution shilled
by the company Canonical. Canonical has probably had a positive effect
on making GNU/Linux more widely used and accessible, but Ubuntu has a
lot of long-term headaches that will plague users.</p>
<p>That said, <strong>Ubuntu is nearly the worst distribution for new users</strong>. It
is maintatined at least, but fails on all the metrics above:</p>
<ol>
<li>It advertises proprietary software in its software center and
encourages users to use programs because they are &quot;familiar&quot; from
Windows.</li>
<li>It releases slowly and you'll run into problems if you try to
install something out of the box.</li>
<li>It is full of gimicks, the elephant in the room being the Snap
system, but Canonical has thrown in a lot of junk features in the
past and a lot can break.</li>
</ol>
<h2 id="debian">Debian</h2>
<p>Debian is just a more reasonable version of Ubuntu: it separates free
and non-free software clearly&mdash;it has a optional version that allows
unstable and testing packages for some recent software and it has so few
gimmicks it's probably the most boring distro!</p>
<p>I haven't used Debian much as a desktop system (I do use it on my
servers), but the package manager and even the release speed of the
testing versions isn't quite fast enough for me personally.</p>
<h2 id="artix-and-arch">Artix and Arch</h2>
<p><a href="https://artixlinux.org">Artix</a> is the distribution that I use and have
been using for a while. It is really the same thing as
<a href="https://archlinux.org">Arch</a>, except for Artix allows the usage of
different init systems (I use runit).</p>
<p>Arch and Arch-based distributions are &quot;bleeding-edge&quot; in their release
time and have access to the Arch User Repository (AUR) allowing the
single widest software library of all major Linux distributions.</p>
<p>Artix offers many installable desktop-environment ISOs for newbie users,
but thankfully they don't over-bloat them with gimmicky features. Arch
itself only has an official minimal installation, and that's kind of
its thing.</p>
<p><strong>If I had to choose, Artix is the distribution that I recommend for
both novice and most veteran users.</strong></p>
<h2 id="manjaro">Manjaro</h2>
<p>Manjaro is another Arch-based distro. I've even recommened it before
for new users in the past and installed it on many people's computers
in real life, but I will admit that my view on it is souring. They have
definitely started to go the way of Ubuntu by adding lots of extra
features, directly people to rely more on flatpak and &quot;harmful&quot;
systems and generally adding more layers of abstraction between the user
and the system.</p>
<p>All the good things that can be said about Manjaro can also be said of
<a href="https://artixlinux.org">Artix</a>, which also has easy to install ISOs, so
I consider Artix the superior system.</p>
<h2 id="parabola">Parabola</h2>
<p><a href="https://parabola.nu">Parabola</a> is the FSF-approved, all-free software
version of Arch Linux (it also has an OpenRC version for
soystemd-haters). In the abstract, Parabola is my optimal distribution,
but I don't actually use it anymore for two reasons:</p>
<ol>
<li>It uses the Linux-libre kernel, which is all free software, but
networking will not function with laptops with proprietary wifi
cards.</li>
<li>It is not quite as well maintained as Arch and Artix, and you'll be
a little more likely to run into package breakage.</li>
</ol>
<p>The second problem isn't the end of the world, but it can be annoying.</p>
<h2 id="gentoo">Gentoo</h2>
<p><a href="https://gentoo.org">Gentoo</a> is one of the best distributions and excels
in all of the 4 requirements I give. Not only is non-free software
obviously separated, but it isn't too difficult to have your Gentoo
install with a Linux-libre kernel if you want.</p>
<p>Gentoo is also unique because it is a source-based distribution: you can
set basic compilation settings for your programs and have a lot of
control over them. While Gentoo is very well maintained, <em>you</em> actually
end up with a good bit more control over your system. That is a
responsibility that has some prerequisite knowledge of course, so Gentoo
has a reputation of being difficult to install.</p>
<p>If you want to look into Gentoo, you should first be familiar with Linux
and what specific kind of system you want. When you first install
Gentoo, because you can customize it so specifically, it obviously helps
to know what exact network backend you're comfortable with, whether you
want to use GTK or QT, or many other little things that a Linux noob
might not know too much about.</p>
<h2 id="void">Void</h2>
<p><a href="https://voidlinux.org">Void</a> is another great distribution. It's
notable also for using runit instead of soystemd, having a musl version,
and having a package system reminiscent of Arch, but in many ways more
minimalist and extensible. It again separates free and non-free
packages, and has a wide repository of them, included even more
installable via the <code>xbps-src</code> system which is somewhat analogous to the
AUR, although unlike the AUR, I don't believe it's quite as easy to
update packages.</p>
<p>Void has had a somewhat tumultuous development culture. It was
originally the brainchild of one man, one man who went missing for a
year... After he returned, drama eventually caused other member of the
team to encourage his retirement. Either way, while I used the distro
for a while and was one of the first people advertising it online, I
never remember this translating into any downstream problems on my
computer.</p>
<h2 id="distro-not-here">Distro not here?</h2>
<p>This is only a list of distributions that I've used for a bit. I don't
do &quot;distro reviews&quot; or just install random distributions just to test
them, so if it isn't here, I'm not going to have an experience-based
opinion.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/only-use-old-computers/
title: Only Use Old Computers!
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/only-use-old-computers/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<figure class="titleimg"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/dream_thinkpad_small.gif" title="If only ThiccPads were this THICC!"><figcaption>The ideal ThiccPad</figcaption></figure>

<p>If there is a single point of advice I can offer novice computer users,
it is <em>stop using modern computers</em>.</p>
<p>If you look at &quot;technology YouTube,&quot;  by which I mean the massive multi-million subscriber channels, nearly all of
it is devoted to constantly reviewing and comparing every new computer,
processor, graphics card and product. There's big money in it because
obviously all of these companies put money in it, but also if you're a
normal person, you automatically assume you need the &quot;best&quot;
technology.</p>
<h2 id="do-you-need-a-modern-computer">Do you need a modern computer?</h2>
<p>Absolutely not. More than 95% of people could be using a computer from
2008 or before without any problems. Needing a recent machine is limited
to people who:</p>
<ol>
<li>Do extreme, professional, processor-intensive video-rendering.</li>
<li>Compile massive programs and operating systems with severe time constraints.</li>
<li>Play recent triple AAA video-games on high settings.</li>
<li>Use many massive Electron apps and other inexcusably bad software
written by soydevs and other people who shouldn't be writing
software.</li>
</ol>
<p>The last two reasons aren't really real reasons at all because they are
totally unnecessary and avoidable things.</p>
<p>But to the point, watching YouTube videos and using a word processor
does not require last month's new release.</p>
<p>Every video I upload, I transcode for settings optimal for YouTube,
meaning I render each video I record. On my computer from a decade ago,
that still takes only a couple minutes. A fancy $5000 computer might be
able to do it in less than one, but it is honestly not worth the pain
associated with modern computers.</p>
<h3 id="how-much-should-a-computer-cost-a-normal-person">How much should a computer cost a normal person?</h3>
<p>Either nothing or just around $200, I say. I use a ThinkPad X220 I got
for $90 on eBay. Before that, I used another ThinkPad X220 I also got
for $90. Like anything else, <strong>if you are buying things on Amazon,
you're doing it wrong</strong>.</p>
<h2 id="the-pain-of-modern-computers">The Pain of Modern Computers</h2>
<h3 id="modern-computers-are-more-breakable">Modern computers are more breakable</h3>
<p>As computing has become more and more popular, companies have started to
realize that a consumer's first reaction on having their $5 wifi card die is
immediately buy a whole new computer. This means two things: (1) they don't
bother to make computers easy to repair, in fact, they make it more difficult
and (2) there is absolutely no need to make computers durable at all. In fact,
it's probably better to let computers break so you'll get yet another sale.</p>
<p>Apple is by far the most anti-social computing company because of this.
I'll let the larger tech channels show you the specifics, but every
Apple product is brilliantly designed to make it difficult to fix very
basic and otherwise fixable problems. They have quite a racket licensing
out the ability and tools to companies that want to fix their terrible
hardware. Apple even used pentalobe screws just so normal people
couldn't open their computers up with a typical screwdriver. Of course
nowadays every other computer manufacturer imitates the Apple style
where apparent &quot;sleekness&quot; is supposed to be a signal of high quality.</p>
<h3 id="modern-computers-are-increasingly-monitoring-devices-and-come-with-proprietary-junk">Modern computers are increasingly monitoring devices and come with proprietary junk.</h3>
<h4 id="the-management-engine">The Management Engine</h4>
<p>You might've heard that all Intel i3/i5/i7 processors (that is, after
the Intel Core 2 Duo) have an onboard alternate processor that is meant
to function as spyware. This is called the Intel Management Engine. It
can view your memory and connect to the internet: basically all modern
computers have this permanent back door. In older computers, say the
ThinkPad X200, you can, with a little hardware action, remove the other
processor and replace the proprietary BIOS with
<a href="https://libreboot.org">Libreboot</a> or <a href="https://coreboot.org">Coreboot</a>,
but that is <em>not possible</em> on more modern computers (you can install
Coreboot on a more modern machine, but not all of the components of the
Management Engine are removed).</p>
<p>More recent computers, however are non-removable spyware by design and,
yes, the NSA can monitor any machine with a Management Engine. There are
actually even rumors that one of the taps that the FBI under the Obama
administration put on Trump during his campaign was a Management Engine
bug.</p>
<p>Note that AMD (Ryzen) processors have what they call a &quot;Platform
Security Processor&quot; that is equivalent to the Intel Management Engine,
so you're not escaping the issue by using one of them.</p>
<h4 id="nvidia">NVIDIA</h4>
<p>Again, unless you play modern videos alone all day, you literally have
no reason to have a modern computer, especially one with an expensive
graphics card. NVIDIA is a great example because they make graphics
cards and develop proprietary drivers for them to make it harder and
harder to use them on machines that aren't running whatever the most
recent spyware variant of Windows 10 is. Linux works perfectly on all
computers ancient and modern, but if you plug some NVIDIA thing up to
it, you might lose your screen or not be able to boot. A lot of gaymers
whine about their NVIDIA products &quot;not working&quot; on Linux without
realizing <strong>that is by design</strong>. NVIDIA and other companies and all CPU
designers go out of their way to keep their source code and standards
private which makes their products tangibly worse because it is harder
for other parties to write drivers for them. Why? Because most of them
have partnerships with Microsoft.</p>
<h3 id="the-problem-of-windows">The Problem of Windows</h3>
<p>How many times have you heard a normie explain to you that their
computer is slow because it's &quot;really old&quot; and they bought it &quot;way
back in 2015?&quot; It's an absurd statement of course. Computers don't
just get magically slow... <strong>...unless they've been running
Windows.</strong></p>
<p>In the future, once even Microsoft has switched over to a purely
Unix-based backend for their operating system, we're all going to have
a good laugh about how Microsoft Windows, <em>literally the worst and least
functioning operating system ever devised</em>, was the largest consumer
market share for decades.</p>
<p>I might go into how Windows is poorly designed in another page or video,
but I want to be clear that there is no such loss of speed on any Linux
distribution, which is what you should be using. I am one of the first
to complain about the feature bloat of the Linux kernel and Linux
software, but compared to Windows, it's no contest: <strong>Linux runs fast
on old hardware</strong>. You'll know from some of my videos, however, that
I'm not <em>big</em> into &quot;Linux Evangelism,&quot; mostly because it's sort of
strident and doesn't really work with a high success rate. Using Linux
is just something that normies have been immunized against (mostly
because &quot;It's what smart people do&quot;), but I always find myself in a
position where someone's Window installation has permanently crashed
and they're at the awkward decision of having to <em>buy a license</em> to
reinstall the dysfunctional and slow operating system they've grown to
hate.</p>
<p>There is quite literally no problem that normal people have with
computers that is not immediately alleviated by installing Linux.</p>
<h2 id="why-do-people-use-thinkpads">Why do people use ThinkPads?</h2>
<p>As I said above, I use a X220 ThinkPad. Older ThinkPads are fairly popular among people who think and care about doing things effectively and economically on a computer. Why is this?</p>
<p>ThinkPads were always designed for enterprise environments, meaning the financial incentives for the manufacturer are not always planned obsolesce, but a long-standing reputation among large companies of having durable, fixable and expandable machines.</p>
<p>To replace a hard drive on the X200 requires unscrewing just a single screw. Same to replace the memory. To replace a spoiled keyboard is no more than three screws.
Modern laptops, including the degraded modern ThinkPad have abandoned this simplicity and opt for the Apple-Mac/cell phone design technique of making batteries, memory and the rest functionally soldered and irremovable.</p>
<h3 id="how-far-can-500-go">How far can $500 go?</h3>
<p>Over the years, I&rsquo;ve had many things break on my laptops, but since I&rsquo;ve been using ThinkPads, it is incredibly easy to keep a working computer even after rough use. I estimate that I have never spent more than a combined total of $500 on computers, which is usually a bare minimum for what someone can buy a &ldquo;modern&rdquo; laptop for nowadays.</p>
<p>When the keyboard on my ThinkPad breaks, I can just buy a replacement keyboard for $30 or $40 and replace the old one much easier than any other model. That&rsquo;s the modularity of these computers.</p>
<p>Even in the worst case scenario when something on the motherboard makes the computer unbootable, I still get to keep my &ldquo;broken&rdquo; ThinkPad and repurpose the memory, wifi card, keyboard and everything else. I still have some parts of every laptop I&rsquo;ve had just because they do come in a lot of use. The other month, a friend&rsquo;s wifi on his desktop went out and I could replace it with one of my old ThinkPad modules.</p>
<p>This is the kind of thing you lose with modern computers. This is purposeful on the part of manufacturers, and it&rsquo;s important not to pay them huge amounts of money to incentivize this behavior. It&rsquo;s very easy to live off of 10 year old computers nowadays. The eBay-and-etc resale market is massive even thought many of us have gotten wise to the value of these old computers.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/notes-on-learning-languages/
title: Notes on Learning Languages
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/notes-on-learning-languages/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>I get asked a lot about learning languages, so I have a few comments
about it here. Hopefully I can awaken you from some dogmatic slumbers
about language.</p>
<h2 id="vocabulary-is-the-least-important-part-of-learning-a-language">Vocabulary is the least important part of learning a language.</h2>
<p>This is hard for people to understand because I think most monolingual
people think that languages are just different word lists that people
use. As a result, 101 students will manually look up every word in the
dictionary to translate. This actually increases the mental load of
learning a language because people have the idea that to speak it, they
have to think of something in English, then translate the sentence word
by word, then say that. What a pain.</p>
<p>So what is a language if not words? It really is a set of constraints as
to how words can go together: what order they go in when modifying each
other, but also languages are morphology. Verb endings and tenses and
such are literally the most important part of a sentence. If you don't
have a productive and reflexive use of verbs, you are literally just
going to be reciting nouns you know like a monkey.</p>
<p>This is actually why I recommend people learning Romance languages or
German to <a href="learning-european-languages-michel-thomas.html">use Michel Thomas's
audio</a>. Thomas doesn't
lecture at all about what he's doing, but he focused only on using
verbs and building up basic expressions from the bottom up until it's
understood reflexively by students. To actually learn any language, this
is more or less what you are going to have to mentally do anyway in the
process.</p>
<p><strong>I would say it's actually possible to fluently speak a language
knowing only about 50 words.</strong> If you understand the &quot;grammar&quot; of a
language, you can basically get by anywhere anytime with a couple dozen
words only. What words you don't know can easily be figured out, but
you <em>can't</em> wing it with grammar and you <em>can't</em> wing it with
morphology.</p>
<h3 id="computer-metaphor">Computer metaphor</h3>
<p>Granted, the same is true of programming &quot;languages&quot; as well, weirdly
enough. No one would think &quot;knowing a [computing] language&quot; means
just knowing all the function and variable names. The important thing is
knowing the syntax of how you put functions (loosely verbs) and
variables (loosely nouns) together. After all, variable names are always
different and functions can be easily invented too or called from some
obscure library. Someone who knows a language is someone who can use its
syntax to produce novel expressions. If you take a Python script,
replace its functions with C functions, it's still Python, just calling
a bunch of undefined functions. People can only get away with even sort
of believing this in the domain of human languages if you just don't
know enough and end up assuming that all languages just work the same.</p>
<h2 id="then-what-is-a-language">Then what is a language?</h2>
<p>So really when you learn a language, you can't look at it as new words,
but new patterns of speech that interconnect in a logical way.</p>
<p>Speaking fluently in that language means being able to use and combine
its basic constructions into complex thoughts put in words. This is why
I'm really against &quot;translating in your head.&quot; If you're doing that,
you're not actually using the language. You're teaching yourself a
silly English-word-replacement game. I know it's very hard for
word-thinkers not to think in words, but if you can't stop doing that
for a second, you're not going to be able to learn a new language.</p>
<h2 id="you-will-not-learn-a-language-by-consoooming-media">You will not learn a language by consoooming media.</h2>
<p>There's this lazy idea that somehow if you passively sit around and
watch people using a language this will somehow endow you with the
ability to flexibly produce a language in the same way you see others
using it. People want to believe it because they want to be able to
watch TV or play a cell phone game like Duolinguo or valueless Rosetta
Stone-like software and somehow gain competence in a language.</p>
<p>It's not going to happen ever. <strong>Learning to play a boring computer
game using words from a different languages is not the same as learning
to speak the language.</strong></p>
<p>You might say of &quot;just listening to speech&quot; that &quot;that's what
children do,&quot; but that's not true at all. Children try pretty hard to
participate and understand conversation. They sometimes have a desperate
personal need to understand each passing sentence and hear the language
they are trying to learn for hours a day for years. You watching some
forgettable movie in the background as you play with your phone don't.</p>
<h2 id="are-you-actually-thinking">Are you actually thinking?</h2>
<p>If you want to know if you are actually learning a language, ask
yourself that. People are weirdly afraid against actually thinking
through things and making new expressions in other languages when
that's exactly how you learn them.</p>
<p>A lot of language nerds love to email me about their Anki cards or their
harebrained schemes for mass-memorizing words as if they're an Asian
studying for a chemistry test. Given what I've said about &quot;learning
words,&quot; you can guess my opinion on that. Once people abandon the lazy
route, sometimes they take up the <em>via dolorosa</em>: the route of suffering
and assume that training themselves like a Pavlovian dog will help them
become fluent in a language.</p>
<p>In reality, the only question that matter is: &quot;Are you actually
thinking?&quot; Are you actually going through the mental process of
creating new sentences in a new language?</p>
<p>When I was learning Latin obviously I had no Latin-speaking friends and
could barely get my hands on anything Latin-related. But after I learned
the basics of the language I started thinking in it constantly. First
that starts in my always implicitly translating English song lyrics or
ads in my head into Latin. That's actually difficult if you're dealing
with something modern and idiomatic. Not as bad with church songs. As
time goes on, I would overtly remember things in Latin sentences instead
of English. If I mumbled something under my breath I would make sure it
was Latin. At all points in time, I was thinking about how the language
was structured and what it meant to produce sentences in it.</p>
<p>The sad fact is that most people who &quot;learn&quot; languages in school treat
them as advanced cross-word puzzle like games where they don't
<em>actually think</em> in the language, but have hilarious mnemonic devices in
their head for relating what they want to say in English with something
in the language they're learning.</p>
<h2 id="translating-is-a-bad-habit">Translating is a bad habit.</h2>
<p>If anything, you should become <em>worse</em> at translating the further you go
on and the more independently you can stand on your own in another
language.</p>
<p>Latin is a good example. I can read and comprehend Latin very well, but
if asked to translate what I'm reading, I find that more and more
difficult the better I read Latin. Now it's easy for me to report the
meaning of a passage, but phrase-by-phrase translation is something you
have to think through because Latin and English are structurally very
different. This isn't just word order, but even how a Latin speaker
approaches expressions and the kinds of phrases they use can translate
only very delicately into English.</p>
<p>The problem nearly doesn't exist between English and Spanish, which are
basically the same language. I'm sure someone who only knows Spanish
will feel like English and Spanish have many differences, but in the
context of other languages, like Latin or Chinese or Japanese, it's
hard not to view English and Spanish as having basically the same kind
of syntax 95% of the time. That actually goes for most modern European
languages.</p>
<h2 id="you-sound-stupid-if-you-dont-sound-stupid">You sound stupid if you don't sound stupid.</h2>
<p>Every language has its own set of phonological rules that determine what
particular sounds are said how and where. Phonological rules give us
&quot;our accents.&quot; When someone speaks English in an accent, they are
really just speaking English using the phonological constraints of
whatever language they're more familiar with. If they speak English
competently, there's at least some extent to which they are abandoning
their native phonological rules.</p>
<p>When you first start learning a language, you might read something aloud
and say &quot;I sound stupid.&quot; This is because your natural way of speaking
is obviously to say everything with an accent consistent with English.
You can probably remember the apathetic jock in Spanish class or
whatever who religiously pronounced every Spanish word he mindlessly
read with an almost intentionally non-Spanish accent.</p>
<p>To actually speak another language is to adopt the phonological
tendencies and even the prosodic and tonal traits of that language. When
you initially do that, you will probably sound very stupid to yourself
since violating phonological rules you're familiar with always sounds
wrong. If you do overcome that illusion of felt stupidity, you <em>won't</em>
sound stupid when it counts. If you refuse to improve your accent
<em>immediately and from the beginning</em> you will sound like an utter moron
forever.</p>
<p>There's actually a trick too: when you imitate a foreign accent, you
are actually implicitly adopting the phonological rules of their
language that you have noticed in real life. My suggestion is when you
are starting out, <em>read the other language in what you'd guess would be
a stereotypical accent of the person speaking the language</em>. If your
imitation is good, you're speaking their language without an accent.</p>
<h2 id="the-critical-period-is-fake">&quot;The Critical Period&quot; is fake.</h2>
<p>That reminds me.</p>
<p>There's an idea in academic and clinical linguistics as well as popular
culture that children have a magical plasticy of the brain that makes
them uniquely good at learning languages. This is supposed to be the
reason why children learn languages &quot;fast&quot; and adults don't. <strong>I
think this is a myth.</strong> You don't have to send me all the &quot;proof&quot;
about this (don't worry, the Universities of Georgia and Arizona
would've failed me totally if I hadn't seen it for my linguistics
degrees there). I sort of assumed that this was true for years, but on
further thought, I think it's just a conspiracy of irrelevant data and
copes... or at least, it's not nearly as true as people pretend it is:
adults are just about as capable of learning languages in most senses.</p>
<p>After all, think about it, children actually take several years to
function in a language, which is often much longer than an adult that
knows what he's doing. The Michel Thomas style tapes which I alluded to
above are good at giving an adult a passable diving-board for a language
in about 8 hours. It can be done. You can also give an adult a
crash-course in phonology and articulatory phonetics that will make it
easy to understand and with practice produce the sounds children take
years to master.</p>
<p>The motivation of a child and adult are utterly different. A
language-less child has lots of reasons to invest most of his mental
life in attention to language. Apathetic adults don't.</p>
<p>What I really get sick of is doomer adults who cope with their laziness
by talking about how hard it is to learn a language as an adult. Many
adults still learn languages all the time. There is some circumstantial
evidence that infants cue into some acoustic cues and other things
quicker than adults, but I think in most cases we're just looking at
infants semi-consciously honing in on what details they've acknowledged
to be linguistically relevant. In reality, developed humans have huge
institutional and intellectual advantages to learn.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/making-free-money-off-credit-cards/
title: Making Free Money off Credit Cards
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/making-free-money-off-credit-cards/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>While I've done a video on this topic before
(<a href="https://videos.lukesmith.xyz/videos/watch/72cc673c-e2d8-46fc-8c26-d56b9011b874">PeerTube</a>,
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8F9JbUQlWQ">YouTube</a>), some people
asked me for more information, so here it is.</p>
<h2 id="arent-you-glad-to-be-an-american">Aren't you glad to be an AMERICAN?</h2>
<p>In America, people are so <strong>notoriously dumb</strong> with credit and money
that credit card companies can <em>literally give out free money by the
hundreds</em> to attract new customers. For brainlets who don't bother to
understand the basics of credit and debt and the fact that you
apparently have to pay back the money you spend, this is like a fly
trap. For non-retarded people it is what it is: <em>free money</em>.</p>
<h2 id="intro">Exploiting introductory offers: &quot;Churning&quot;</h2>
<p>Many credit cards have introductory offers like this: &quot;If you spend
$500 on this card in the first 3 months, you'll get a free credit of
$200.&quot; That would be a cool offer in the first place, but since there
are <em>so many</em> cards that have offers like this, a pattern emerges:</p>
<ol>
<li>Open a card with an introductory offer, for example: &quot;Get a $200
credit when you spend $500 in 3 months.&quot;</li>
<li>Use it for your normal daily life until you spend that $500 which you would be spending anyway.</li>
<li>Get/redeem/spend the credit/cashback/points on that card. Literally
free money.</li>
<li>Lock away the card and don't use it anymore unless it has some
other extremely good offer or cashback perk.<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup></li>
<li>Rinse and repeat, this time with a new card and new offer.</li>
</ol>
<p>This cycle is often called &quot;credit card churning&quot; and some people like
me don't mind living off of it.</p>
<p>Every year I go through a couple cards like this, making a couple
hundred or a thousand dollars back. <strong>If you do the math, it can be like
living with a permanent 20-25% off coupon that you use on literally
everything.</strong> Individual cards will have even more perks to
pump-and-dump for extra cash back.</p>
<p>I recommend especially young guys to try this out: it's a way of saving
money, while improving your credit by paying off many lines of credit,
and once you're done churning, you have a wide selection of credit
cards to use for their various normal features.</p>
<h3 id="cards">Cards to churn</h3>
<p>Here's a brief list of some cards whose introductory offers I've taken
advantage of. This is just an example list, there are many more.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.referyourchasecard.com/18a/HM1OKNKXSA">Chase Freedom Flex</a></li>
<li><a href="https://refer.discover.com/s/LUKE645">Discover It</a></li>
<li><a href="https://americanexpress.com/en-us/referral/LUKESvEnf">American Express Blue Business Cash</a></li>
<li><a href="https://americanexpress.com/en-us/referral/LUKESt5dz">American Express Blue Business Plus</a></li>
</ul>
<h4 id="links-to-more-cards-per-company">Links to more cards per company:</h4>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.bankofamerica.com/credit-cards/">Bank of America</a></li>
<li><a href="https://creditcards.wellsfargo.com/">Wells Fargo</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.citi.com/credit-cards/home">Citi Bank</a></li>
</ul>
<p>That's it! That's all you need to know, to take advantage of this, but
the rest of this page is just details that people ask about. Read on for
more!</p>
<h3 id="how-credit-card-companies-try-to-mitigate-this">How credit card companies try to mitigate this</h3>
<p>As I said, introductory offers exist primarily to get dim-witted people
who don't know how credit works into using cards unwisely or at least
normal people into switching to a different company. They know that
high-agency people can exploit this system, so there are some rules they
put in place to mitigate the extent to witch you can take advantage of
their offers.</p>
<p>Chase, for example, will not approve anyone for a credit card who has
gotten five other cards in the past two years. Wells Fargo will not
allow you too open cards with introductory offers without a 18 month gap
in between. Those are the main ones; other banks like Bank of America
don't bother preventing it at all, but it's possible that they will
start something like this soon.</p>
<h3 id="cautionary-note-for-credit-brainlets">Cautionary note for credit brainlets</h3>
<p>I suppose it goes without saying that credit cards are not magical money
devices and everyone who has a credit card should only spend what they
have the account that autopays their card or even better, do what I do
and <strong>never let my head hit the pillow before paying off all debts</strong>.
This might sound like a condescending thing to say, but obviously some
people out there don't understand how credit cards work and are going
into debt for no good reason. I know everyone who follows me is smart of
course, but I say this rhetorically.</p>
<p>When I did a video on this I was surprised to learn that there are
<em>also</em> people that resist and detest credit cards but <em>still</em> don't
understand them. Some people have this strange idea that merely
possessing a credit cards causes debt to occur in some cultic fashion
outside of your control. And for people who can't know better, maybe
it's better for them to think of credit cards as essentially magical
objects if it means they aren't misusing them. For everyone else,
credit cards are easy to use and exploit and benefit from.</p>
<h3 id="other-advantages-of-having-multiple-cards">Other advantages of having multiple cards</h3>
<p>It's actually nice to have a number of rewards cards from different
companies. I will occasionally check the bank or card's web interface
and there will often be additional perks especially for points-based
cards. It can often mean 10% in addition to everything else from buying
from a hardware store or grocery store. There are many niche businesses
and I don't recommend into getting roped into buying something you
wouldn't be buying anyway, but I keep tabs on if there is anything
familiar.</p>
<p>Similarly, it's nice to have &quot;rotating category&quot; cards that offer
say, 5% on a certain <em>type</em> of buy for a period of several months. The
<a href="https://www.referyourchasecard.com/18a/HM1OKNKXSA">Chase card</a> I
mentioned above, for example is giving 5% cash back on every purchase
made on PayPal as I write this in Q4 of 2020 (it looks like they do
PayPal every year or so). I've actually been deliberately making all
purchases I would be making anyway over PayPal, just so I can maximize
earnings. I'm even going to be paying bills in advance with PayPal so
when they are actually due next year, they'll be paid, and I'll have
the extra cash back.</p>
<h2 id="faq">Common questions about exploiting introductory offers</h2>
<p>A lot of people hear this and think, &quot;sounds too good to be true.&quot;
Makes sense, but <strong>we live in a complex world which again is primarily
targeted to the unwise</strong>. I've been doing this for years and have made
back a lot of lot of money and even increased by credit score.</p>
<p>Let's talk about some of the concerns people new to credit card
churning might have:</p>
<h3 id="but-what-about-muh-credit-score">&quot;But what about muh credit score?&quot;</h3>
<p>I'm not entirely sure why people think this, but there's this idea
that somehow you're scamming or defrauding credit card companies by
doing this. You aren't. You're just obeying their terms of service.
You're certainly not neglecting payment or proving yourself a bad
investment for a loan, which is what a credit score is actually about.</p>
<p>Opening new credit, including credit cards, will mean an inquiry on your
account and for a time being, you'll be marked as &quot;looking for
credit.&quot; This will decrease your credit score by a small amount; it's
normal. But over time, <strong>having lots of credit which you have paid off
is good for your credit score</strong>. That's, like, what a credit score is.
Having more credit cards and properly paid off is a great plus on your
account.</p>
<h3 id="bbut-thats-unethical">&quot;B...but that's unethical!&quot;</h3>
<p>You gotta be an extreme simp to see these companies massively ripping
off retards and nickel-and-diming people and say something stupid like,
&quot;I mean is this really ethical?&quot; You're an idiot. You don't deserve
free money. Why use your principles to defend people who obviously
don't share them?</p>
<p>A lot of these companies even charge people <em>to have checking accounts</em>.
Just in case you don't know how banks work, they make money loaning out
their reserves. They are already making money off of every account.
Charging you extra so they can make money off you is just more icing on
the cake for them. There are many banks who are less shills who simply
don't do this because it's totally unnecessary.</p>
<p>People who think this, do you go to the grocery store and chide people
who get free samples as unethical? It quite literally is the same thing
except for the store never makes money off people who just take samples.
A bank whose offer you exploit still might make a lot of money loaning
out money you put in a checking account there or even on the credit card
transaction fees they charge merchants. And if they didn't, who cares?</p>
<h3 id="do-i-need-a-checking-account">&quot;Do I need a checking account?&quot;</h3>
<p>If you get a bonus from, let's say, a Chase credit card, do you need a
Chase checking account to redeem your bonus or points? <strong>Usually not.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Every credit card company I've used allows you to set up automatic
payments from another bank.</strong> So you shouldn't have to worry about
remembering to paying your bills, although I usually pay everything
manually anyway just to be careful.</p>
<p>If you get an account credit, that will appear as a negative number on
your card and you will be able to spend it without paying it off. If you
get points, it might be that you need a checking account to redeem it as
cash, but you can also usually redeem previous purchases or sometimes
receive your bonus in the form of a bunch of gift cards.</p>
<p>This is an important question because some companies like Chase or Bank
of America will <em>charge you</em> several dollars a month to have a checking
account open, which I find utterly ridiculous. In both cases, you can
waive the fee if you have either direct deposit into the account or if
you just have a certain amount of money in the account (I think it's
$1,500 in the case of Chase). Either way, you can avoid this problem as
having a checking account is not usually necessary.</p>
<h2 id="advice">Three important notes on Credit Cards</h2>
<h3 id="the-psychology-of-spending">The psychology of spending</h3>
<p>One aspect of human psychology is that people are more likely to be okay
with spending or wasting money if they're using credit or debit cards
rather than paper money. It makes sense. If you have to part with a
physical object to spend something, it can hurt. It doesn't hurt as
much to use a card.</p>
<p>I find that the antidote to this is actually in introductory offers. If
I get a card that gives me a bonus for spending $500 in 3 months, I
treat that $500 as my absolute budget no matter what. Bills included if
possible.</p>
<p>Additionally, I started pasting sticky slips on the back of my cards
where I keep track of the exact amount of money I use on each card so I
know when I hit the required amount for the bonus. Each time I spend, I
deduct that amount from the original number. This actually serves the
double purpose of making the money-spending more real to me. I'm not
just swiping my card, but subtracting the amount and can feel what I'm
spending.</p>
<h3 id="dont-use-cards-with-annual-fees">Don't use cards with annual fees.</h3>
<p>Or at least if you do, be smart about it.</p>
<p><strong>None of the cards <a href="#cards">I recommended above</a> have any annual
fees.</strong> So you can get them and not worry about canceling them. You can
logically exploit the offers of cards with annual fees and cancel them
afterwards to avoid paying the fee, but I don't do this myself.</p>
<p>Firstly, annual-fee cards are usually targeted to big spenders: their
offers will be something more like &quot;spend $4000 in the first 3 months
and get $750.&quot; If you're making a big purchase, that might be worth
it, but I personally am the kind of guy who feels guilty for spending
too close to $300 a month. I would definitely contemplate one of these
if you know you're going to spend some massive amount of money though.
Don't forget to cancel it later!</p>
<p>The bigger issue with annual-fee cards because they are used primarily
for <strong>social engineering and corporate sponsorships</strong>. That might sound
strange, for example, but some cards which cost several hundred dollars
a year might give you a big free annual credit on their favorite
airlines or on Uber or Lyft or Amazon or some other godless corporation.
That makes them work for people who are loyal consooomers of their
chosen affiliates, but for most people, getting the benefits of those
cards requires you to <em>use the products they want</em>.</p>
<p>I've seen some cards that give you bonuses for using them 30 times a
month or something else. Sure you can juke the system, but I feel like
the incentives they put forth are too strong and will probably
manipulate you into spending more than you usually do. The reason I
recommend <a href="#cards">the other cards I do</a> is because you can easily spend
that much if you're an independent person without feeling like you have
to spend more.</p>
<p>If you do want referral links to a couple annual fee cards I&rsquo;ve used, look at these:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.referyourchasecard.com/19j/H3DOZSVH9I">Chase Sapphire Reserve</a></li>
<li><a href="https://americanexpress.com/en-us/referral/LUKEStddT">American Express Blue Cash Preferred</a></li>
<li><a href="https://americanexpress.com/en-us/referral/LUKEScZpJ">Hilton Honors Business Card</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Only apply to them if you are sure you can utilize them profitably and without significant opportunity cost.</p>
<h3 id="minimizing-privacy-exposure">Minimizing Privacy Exposure</h3>
<p>Now if you're someone principally concerned with privacy, there are
ways for you to take advantage of these kinds of offers without exposing
your daily purchases. Obviously opening a credit card does require some
basic information, like who you are and where you live (other things
your bank already knows). But you can minimize your exposure by using
the money on the card for a single recurring payment credit.</p>
<p>For example, let's say you pay an electric bill every month. Many power
companies/co-ops allow you to prepay or accumulate a credit, so if you
open a spend-$1,000-get-$250 card, you can immediately prepay $1,000,
wait for your free $250, then prepay that amount as well.</p>
<p>In that, you've got your free $250 (and you can forget about paying
bills for a year or so) and the only new thing the credit card company
knows is your power supplier (which they could probably guess anyway
from where you live). You could do the same with other recurring
payments.</p>
<p>A lot of people I've talked to plan on using these offers to by
over-the-table cryptocurrencies. That works too.</p>
<p>Additionally if you make a large purchase like a car that is going to
have to be registered with &quot;the system&quot; anyway, it might be a good
time to get one (or maybe more) of these cards.</p>
<p><strong>The most important thing, however, is that <em>you</em> are the one ripping
them off and never the reverse. Do not spend more or waste more because
you feel richer because you have something that feels like a free money
card.</strong></p>
<h2 id="daily-drivers">&quot;Daily drivers&quot;</h2>
<p>When not pumping-and-dumping a credit card for an introductory offer,
there are also generally good cards that you can keep to maximize idle
cash back. <strong>Obviously the true red-pill is using cash</strong>, but if you'd
rather get bonuses from cards, here are some options I use with links:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.usaa.com/inet/wc/bank-credit-card-cashback-rewards-plus-american-express">5% on gas and purchases on military
bases</a>
(unfortunately USAA is very exclusive (you must have family in the
military), but great for members)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.referyourchasecard.com/18f/AR8H2DIPP8">5% on groceries</a>
(only for first year, but there are multiple cards that do this can
can be cycled (or get your wife to get it next year))</li>
<li><a href="https://www.usbank.com/credit-cards/cash-plus-visa-signature-credit-card.html">5% on
bills</a>,
specifically, you get 5% on rotating categories and home utilities
is one of them.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.wellsfargo.com/credit-cards/propel">3% at restaurants and on travel
expenses</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/credit-card/2-percent-cash-back-mastercard">2% on everything
else</a></li>
</ul>
<p>It should also go without saying that you should have fixed costs/bills
set to charge credit cards just for the free cash back. I mean if you
have $250 dollars in bills a month and hook them up to a 2% cashback
card, that's $60 back a year. It adds up over the years.</p>
<p>Again:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>&quot;The NEET will work harder than the wagie to stay out of a job.&quot;
&mdash;Nullennial (YouTube comment)</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>&quot;I'm Jewish and I find this video Jewisher&quot; &mdash;shiran (response to
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8F9JbUQlWQ">my original video</a> on
this)</p>
</blockquote>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Note: Never <em>close</em> a credit card. It looks bad on your record, while having many credit cards over a period of time which you pay off looks good. Just store your old cards away and you can often disable them on their websites.*&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/learning-european-languages-michel-thomas/
title: Learning European Languages (Michel Thomas)
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/learning-european-languages-michel-thomas/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<figure class="titleimg"><a href="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/hensel1741.jpg"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/hensel1741-small.jpg" title="A language map from Hensel&#39;s 1741 Synopsis Universae Philologiae." alt="From Gottfried Hensel&#39;s 1791 *Synopsis Universae Philologiae*"></a></figure>

<p>I've said on a couple livestreams that the ideal way for an English
speaker to begin learning or excel in learning other major European
languages (Spanish, French, Italian and German) is to use <strong>Michel
Thomas's audiotapes</strong>. They can be found for free on Pirate Bay and
other sites, but you can also buy them <a href="https://www.michelthomas.com/">on his official
site</a>.</p>
<p>This style of audiotapes is so far above any other, it's hard to even
put it in words. They make really exceptional promises: &quot;learn a
language in 8 hours&quot; and in some sense I'm inclined to agree.</p>
<p>They certainly give a reflexive foundation that makes learning anything
else about a language very easy. There are multiple courses and they're
worth listening to multiple times until it's a totally internalized.</p>
<h2 id="explanation-of-the-method">Explanation of the Method</h2>
<p>The tapes all have Thomas locked in a room with two people who don't
know the language, one male, one female. Thomas simply teaches and
illicit basic responses from the two students, teaching them as they go.
As the listener, your part is to say the proper responses to yourself
before the example students. At all points in time, the students are
creating novel sentences, combining basic concepts.</p>
<h3 id="lack-of-vocabulary">Lack of vocabulary</h3>
<p>Probably the most important part of the tapes is the <em>lack</em> of
vocabulary taught. You don't get 20 irrelevant nouns with each lesson
to memorize that you don't even now how to use. What new words you
&quot;learn&quot; are mostly shared in common with English. The goal is to make
you fluent before you have to memorize words.</p>
<p>Thomas, instead, <em>actually teaches the language</em> and how to be
constructive in it: the verbs, the verb inflections, how to combine
them, basic pronouns and the like. Only once the students understand
them does he move on to the words for real-world objects. Thomas will
sometimes explain why he does this in the course, but it amounts to what
I've said <a href="learning-languages.html">in other places</a>: you can guess or
figure out nouns or talk around them, but if you don't know how to put
verbs together, you just don't know the language and you can't even
fake it. <strong>It is much easier to learn nouns after you actually learn the
structure of the language and can actually use them.</strong></p>
<h3 id="lack-of-comprehension">Lack of &quot;comprehension&quot;</h3>
<p>You're never told to &quot;listen to this passage and think about what it
means&quot; in the Thomas method. The Thomas method is entirely productive:
<em>you</em> make the sentences and <em>you</em> have to put yourself in the mindset
of how the language works.</p>
<p>A lot of other audiotapes, say Pimsleur, have you sit and listen to text
and implicitly ask you to &quot;translate&quot; it. This in essense, keeps you
thinking in English, or thinking in translating mode. The also keep you
chained to canned responses in a single dialog. When people do this,
they ignore the actual structure/grammar of the language, listen for big
noticable nouns, and then piece together what the sentence means. This
is always a bad idea.</p>
<h3 id="michel-thomas-actually-just-knows-what-hes-doing">Michel Thomas actually just knows what he's doing.</h3>
<p>It's honestly rare that you even ever see a &quot;good teacher.&quot; By that I
mean someone who can easily keep track of what his students know and can
devise questions perfect to pry their knowledge. Thomas is just honestly
good at this and it goes a long way. In the tapes, if he notices that a
student repeatedly messing something up, he knows how to elicit better
responses and remind them of what they need. This is 99% of teaching,
despite the fact that it's a really rare skill.</p>
<h2 id="dont-bother-getting-the-tapes-without-michel-thomas">Don't bother getting the tapes without Michel Thomas</h2>
<p>After Michel Thomas's death (or perhaps a little before) the company
running his website above put out tapes for many other languages:
Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, Japanese, etc. under his name. They are done
&quot;in his method&quot; theoretically, but they are no good. They do weird
things like have two different teachers: one who instructs the students
and one who is a native speaker of the language to say the sentences in
it. I think the idea behind it was to make sure you hear a &quot;perfect&quot;
accent, but it's a total waste and the sponteneity required for actual
teaching is lost because you have these two different people trying
organize among themselves. I think the teachers lack the introspective
skill to keep tabs on the students' learning that I mentioned above, so
all-in-all, I think they're awkward and fake.</p>
<p>Donovan Nagel (you may know him from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk9NvmsPBC3lTn_L9kFaylA">his YouTube channel on
BSD</a>) gave
Michel Thomas <a href="https://www.mezzoguild.com/michel-thomas-review/">a negative
review</a> after using
the &quot;Michel Thomas&quot; Arabic tapes. I listened to part of the Chinese
tapes and they were not worth it (if you want to learn Chinese <a href="chinese.html">I've
written about what I recommend</a>).</p>
<p>But the <em>real</em> Michel Thomas tapes: Spanish, French, Italian, German,
done by the man himself, are the best for all their respective
languages.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/learn-latin/
title: Learn Latin
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/learn-latin/
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content:
<figure class="titleimg"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/romanpep.gif"></figure>

<p>Latin was the first language I learned and has probably been the most
useful. Here I'll talk about some of the things it's gotten me and
some recommendations for how to learn it well.</p>
<h2 id="what-ive-gotten-out-of-learning-latin">What I've gotten out of learning Latin</h2>
<h3 id="you-get-multiple-languages-for-one">You get multiple languages for one.</h3>
<p>Latin, as you probably know is the ancestor of Italian, French, Spanish,
Portuguese, Romanian, etc. Once you know Latin, it is quite literally
downhill learning any of these. In college, I decided to take Spanish
for a degree specialization (I was doing an international business thing
and required a foreign language). Merely based on my knowledge of Latin,
I just tested into fifth-level Spanish and figured it out from there. I
don't even remember learning Spanish, but I can speak it and still do
every once in a while.</p>
<p>In grad school I took classes taught in Spanish and French. I can
basically read all Romance languages. I even read Rhaeto-Romance poetry
for fun (the languages of Switzerland). All of this is nearly free stuff
when you learn Latin.</p>
<h3 id="latin-will-unironically-red-pill-you-on-many-subjects">Latin will unironically red-pill you on many subjects.</h3>
<p>Looking to other cultures in the world might change your view of things
in some superficial way, but looking into the past will revolutionize
how you see it. A recurring point I make in many contexts is that <strong>the
past is literally an alien civilization</strong>. Most of what people pretend
they know about it is repeatedly cited modern rumors about it. Seeing it
in its own words is very different.</p>
<p>It's insane the amount of writing done in Latin in the medieval period
and antiquity, so much of which isn't even on the mind of translators.
A lot of historians just cite modern historians. Theologians cite modern
theologians. Scientists cite modern scientists. Once you crack open a
traditional book on any of these subjects you realize the provinciality
and oblviousness of modern &quot;frameworks.&quot;</p>
<p>In generative linguistics, people who have never read anything written
before 1950 pat themselves on the back for all the &quot;problems&quot; they've
solved not knowing they are only retreading paths long established by
Stoics, Modistae and early Indo-Europeanists. There are a lot of
theologians and philosophers who are trapped in modern citation circles
because they don't have the power of Latin that can bring them in touch
directly with Aquinas or Augustine or other philosophers of the early
periods.</p>
<p>Knowing Latin is like an academic superpower and supposed intellectuals
will fear you. Latin used to be the bare minimum of a respectable
intellectual... actually... you know what, it still is. Now is your
chance to have an actual one up over more pompous people whose only
function is writing lit reviews with a disability to read original
sources. Being privy to an original and long-neglected source will be a
continuous content mill which will unironically be the envy of others in
academia.</p>
<h3 id="knowing-latin-is-better-academically-than-an-undergraduate-degree-in-linguistics">Knowing Latin is better academically than an undergraduate degree in linguistics.</h3>
<p>The process of learning Latin and the lore around you will equip you
with all the terminology and principles to make you superior to someone
who just studies &quot;linguistics&quot; without any actual application. I
really mean this. When I was a grad student in linguistics, all the
brightest undergrads had one thing in common: Latin. I actually came to
judge people based on how they first got interested in linguistics. The
smartest ones always started with Latin, the biggest plebs always
started because they liked some Steven Pinker book (sorry Pinkucks!
Those are the honest facts!)</p>
<h2 id="how-to-learn-latin">How to Learn Latin</h2>

<figure class="resright"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/magister.jpg"></figure>

<h3 id="what-i-used">What I used</h3>
<p>When I learned Latin, all I had was a copy of <a href="https://www.textkit.com/learn/ID/113/author_id/41/">this
book</a>: Collar &amp;
Daniell's <em>Beginner's Latin Book</em>. The truth is that most <em>old</em> Latin
books are good (old being at least 70 to 100 years old). After language
learning became commercialized, it all became dismissable. You can see a
list of downloadable Latin textbooks and other materials here
<a href="https://www.textkit.com/latin_grammar.php">here</a>.</p>
<p>The only other source I used in the past to learn and read Latin in a
biglottic Latin/Greek New Testament (i.e. Greek on the left and Latin on
the right). This is probably actually the single most significant book I
own, now that I think about it. I learned Greek from it too and I've
had it for around 15 years now.</p>
<h3 id="lingua-latina-per-se-illustrata">Lingua Latina per se Illustrata</h3>
<p>Although I didn't know about until later, there is another very unique
and excellently made Latin series called <em>Lingua Latina per se
Illustrata</em> &quot;The Latin Language Illustrated by Itself&quot; by <a href="https://lingualatina.dk/wp/">Hans
Orberg</a>. You can see an English publisher
<a href="https://www.hackettpublishing.com/lingua-latina-per-se-illustrata-series">here</a>,
but you can also find them on eBay or pdfs on Library Genesis or Pirate
Bay (along with audio for the books).</p>
<p><em>LLPSI</em> is unique and really stands out. <strong>The entire book, including
explanations is in Latin.</strong> Latin words and grammatical concepts are
explained by illustration and example. This sounds absurd frankly: how
are you supposed to learn a language from a book written in that
language? But the design is so perfect that it works.</p>
<p>I recommend to get <em>LLPSI</em> <em>and</em> some classical grammar primer like
<a href="https://www.textkit.com/learn/ID/113/author_id/41/">Collar &amp;
Daniell's</a> because
I think especially for newbs, it might be necessary to have explicit
instruction about grammar points in English.</p>
<h2 id="read-this">Read this</h2>
<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190123041418/https://wcdrutgers.net/Latin.htm">Read this article: &quot;Latin by the Dowling
Method.&quot;</a> It's back from the early
internet and its recommendations have stood the test of time and I agree
with them.</p>
<h2 id="latin-links">Latin links</h2>
<p>You may've known about these already, but they're worth noting.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/">The Latin Library</a> &ndash; Massive
collection of classical and
<a href="https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/medieval.html">medieval</a> Latin
works</li>
<li><a href="https://www.textkit.com/">Textkit</a> &ndash; Greek and Latin resources and
forum</li>
</ul>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/learn-chinese/
title: Learn Chinese
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<figure class="titleimg"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/qing.gif" title="The Chinese flag back when it was more based before being subverted by communists and democrats."></figure>

<p>Chinese is the hardest language to learn according to normies who have
never tried to learn it.</p>
<p>In reality, Chinese is really easy. It has literally no complex
morphology: no tense, plurals, gender. It doesn't have irregular verbs
or nouns because it has no verb and noun endings whatsoever. It's
almost difficult to explain how easy Chinese is.</p>
<p>The only different thing is the writing system which is I hesitate to
say anachronistic. The Chinese character system is more structurally
similar to Sumerian cuneiform than to English morphophonemic writing.
That presents a unique hurdle, but one if properly tackled is not too
difficult and also edifying. It's important to realize in any case that
<em>learning a language and learning its writing system are two separate
things</em>.</p>
<p>Knowing this is important for mastering or even beginning Chinese.</p>
<h2 id="these-are-the-best-chinese-books">These are the best Chinese Books</h2>
<p>The Yale series by John DeFrancis is not just the absolute best for
learning Chinese, but they are an eternal exemplar of basically the best
you can do for any language. The books all have generic names and
they're linked below with audio. The books are <strong>massive</strong>. Even if you
just get &quot;Beginning Chinese&quot; and &quot;Beginning Chinese Reader, Part 1,&quot;
you'll know around 4 semesters worth of Chinese compared to your
average university course. They have free audio too. Remember that if
you get nervous about their price tags, which might be as high as $50.
These books are severely worth it though.</p>
<p>There are actually two parallel book series in the DeFrancis/Yale
series: the <a href="#green">green books</a>, which cover the spoken language (in
Romanization) and the <a href="#red">red books</a> (the readers) that cover
characters. It might sound strange to cover the language itself and the
characters separately, but it is <em>massively</em> superior.</p>
<h3 id="green">The Green Books (for the language)</h3>

<figure class="resright"><a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300020588/beginning-chinese"><img src="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/sites/default/files/styles/book_jacket/public/imagecache/external/478b0744626b90030043cff06649da88.jpg?itok=GNVvraEn"></a></figure>

<p>The great thing about the main series is that <em>they come with many, many
exercises and drills</em> which are actually good for individual use. Books
that expect you to read something once and internalize it are
irreparable.</p>
<p>Links are to the official Yale site. Probably better to buy on eBay or
something though. Worth the money even when they are expensive.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300020588/beginning-chinese">Beginning
Chinese</a>
(<a href="https://archive.org/details/podcast_beginning-chinese_705335764">audio</a>)</li>
<li><a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300000641/intermediate-chinese">Intermediate
Chinese</a>
(<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/intermediate-chinese/id714087247?mt=10">audio</a>)</li>
<li><a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300000566/advanced-chinese">Advanced
Chinese</a>
(<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/advanced-chinese/id716758957">audio</a>)</li>
</ul>
<p>You can get .pdfs of all these books on Library Genesis. I have physical
copies, except some an ex-girlfriend borrowed and never gave back. If
you read this, you better send them back!</p>
<p>Note that I've also linked audio that was recorded for these books,
which is great. They used to cost a lot too, but now they're free!</p>
<h3 id="red">The Red Books (for characters)</h3>

<figure class="resright"><img src="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/sites/default/files/styles/book_jacket/public/imagecache/external/2e28a044fcf820cc8a8624c30530e31c.jpg?itok=rEV2_fKY"></figure>

<p>The reason the language in transliteration and the characters are in two
books is because learning them is really two different processes. The
green books are more typical language learning books. The red
books/readers are different.</p>
<p>Every chapter, they teach you 10 characters, but with those 10
characters, you might learn to combine them into 50 new words based on
them. The pacing here is for only learning the essential and most used
characters as simply as possible as you advance. The readers do not
explain grammar and expect you to be advancing in the green books to
understand grammatical things.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300020601/beginning-chinese-reader-part-1">Beginning Chinese Reader, Part
1</a>
(<a href="https://archive.org/details/podcast_beginning-chinese-reader_712302997">audio for parts 1 and
2</a>)</li>
<li><a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300020618/beginning-chinese-reader-part-2">Beginning Chinese Reader, Part
2</a></li>
<li><a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300000658/intermediate-chinese-reader-part-i">Intermediate Chinese Reader, Part
1</a>
(<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/intermediate-chinese-reader/id716628737?mt=10">audio for parts 1 and
2</a>)</li>
<li><a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300000665/intermediate-chinese-reader">Intermediate Chinese Reader, Part
2</a></li>
<li><a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300010831/advanced-chinese-reader">Advanced Chinese
Reader</a>
(<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/advanced-chinese-reader/id716763840">audio</a>)</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="the-blue-books">The Blue Books?</h3>
<p>I won't link them because they sort of the defeat the point, and I
don't have them, but there is also a blue series which is just the
green series but with the language in characters. I think it's intended
more for classes that can't do the DeFrancis method due to bureaucratic
constraints. If it has the exercises of the green books, that's good
and all, but really the value of the system is the fact that when you do
the spoken language in the green books, you don't have to worry about
unknown characters and when you do the characters in the red book,
that's all you need to pay attention to.</p>
<p>I'm not dismissing the blue books, because the quality of the
Yale/DeFrancis series is still light-years ahead of all other series,
but I'd stick with the classics here.</p>
<h2 id="notes-about-chinese">Notes about Chinese</h2>
<h3 id="the-tone-cope">The tone cope</h3>
<p>I remember having normalfriends in my Chinese class (which was a waste
of time, just get the DeFrancis books) who would say that Chinese
wasn't too hard &quot;except for the tones.&quot; Mandarin Chinese has four
tones that distinguish words. If you've sat through your first day in
Chinese class or even seen a YouTube video on Chinese, you know this.</p>
<p>Normies see this alien concept of having tones and they turn their
brains off. There were kids in my class who said they'd &quot;just not
learn&quot; the tones. Which is sort of like saying you're going to learn
English, but not the vowels &quot;because they're too hard.&quot;</p>
<p>Actually around half of the world's languages have tones. They are not
bizarre or highly &quot;marked&quot; in an objective sense. They are much more
common that the &quot;th&quot; sound in English. You can bear it.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/hating-brave-is-cool/
title: Hating Brave is Cool!
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<p>I like and use the Brave Browser. It's a <strong>free and open source
browser</strong> with features like:</p>
<ol>
<li>Ad-blocking by default.</li>
<li>Tracker-blocking by default.</li>
<li>Anti-fingerprinting mechanisms to prevent you from being monitored.</li>
<li>Built-in Tor windows.</li>
<li>Run by a based Christian and not furry leftists.</li>
</ol>
<p>As far as I'm concerned, Brave is indisputably the best out-of-the-box general-purpose
browser out there. There are other okay browsers, and I'll mention
things about Brave I don't like, but Brave is especially good because
it comes with all of these sensible features out of the box (you don't
have to go install an ad-blocker), so this makes it very good for
installing it on your grandma's computer. The anti-fingerprinting
abilities are even unique among power-user browsers.</p>
<p>Despite that, there is a loud clique of anti-Brave agitators and Brave
skeptics. Whenever I do a video on Brave, I can expect at least 20%
dislikes and a torrent of comments from people with anime avatars
calling me a &quot;shill&quot; for &ldquo;recommending&rdquo; this browser.</p>
<p>This, I suspect, is because Brave has an optional extra feature: Brave
Rewards, which is &quot;too good to be true.&quot;</p>
<h2 id="brave-rewards">Brave Rewards</h2>
<p>By default, Brave blocks all ads, but users can turn on &quot;Brave
Rewards&quot; to voluntarily view occasional ads and will receive a small
amount of Basic Attention Token (BAT), Brave's cryptocurrency. The ads
don't mess up webpages by appearing in them, but appear in their
computer's notification system.</p>
<p>Brave's entire motivation is to replace traditional ads that fill up
webpages with these kind of ads that share revenue directly with the web
page owners and the people browsing the sites themselves. Ad companies
disappear, the internet debloats and users and actual sites get a direct
cut.</p>
<p>This ad feature is not just <em>optional</em>, but is <em>disabled by default</em>.</p>
<h3 id="the-archetypical-brainlet-brave-skeptic">The Archetypical Brainlet Brave Skeptic</h3>
<blockquote>
<p>&ldquo;The fact that brave has exploded on the scene so quickly make me
suspicious. There's money involved somewhere.&rdquo; &mdash;Comment on a
YouTube video of mine</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yes. Because <strong>Brave users literally get money to browse with it.</strong> Duh.</p>
<p>So there is no conspiracy theory about this. <strong>Brave just does
everything right as a browser and they give you free money.</strong> In the
Basic Attention Token system, companies buy ads and the revenue is
shared directly by the owners of sites and the people who view the ads.
This cuts out the middleman ad-companies from the internet. It removes
and disincentivizes bloat in webpages. This is a drastically more
effective and bloatfree way to monetize the internet than old-school
ads. <strong>Or,</strong> you can just keep <em>the default functionality</em> where there
are no ads.</p>
<p>I literally have people post on my videos constantly about how Brave is
a big scheme and &quot;you'll never see a cent of that money.&quot; Meanwhile,
literally every Brave user, including me, gets a monthly payout. You can
even receive your payout directly in US dollars if you want! Even if the
Basic Attention Token framework totally flops, it's not like you're
putting any money into it. The worst that can happen is you saying, &quot;Oh
no, all I have left is the browser with the best out-of-the-box
functionality!&quot;</p>
<p>It reminds me of the joke of two economists walking down the street. One
says, &quot;Hey look, there's a $100 bill on the sidewalk!&quot; The other one
replies, &quot;That's not possible, if there were, someone would've picked
it up already.&quot;</p>
<p><strong>The anti-Brave crowd's argument is always some form of &quot;it's too
good to be true.&quot;</strong> In reality, you don't realize how inefficient and
wasteful the previous way of internet ads was. Why pay an ad agency with
employees to pay website developers to put ads into the actual code of
websites, contorting it all into a mess? The BAT system and Brave just
cuts out the middle man and keeps webpages clean by allowing ads to only
be shown when wanted in the user's already existing notification
system. The goal of the BAT project is to universalize Brave and perhaps
similar browsers which block ads and trackers by default, thus cutting
off the very lifeblood of that inefficient and anti-social system.</p>
<p>If you still don't trust the BAT project or think it's gimmicky,
great. <strong>By default, the &quot;Brave Rewards&quot; system is off.</strong> Complaining
about Brave because it has an optional feature to make money is like
complaining about another browser because it has an add-on you don't
plan on using.</p>
<h3 id="tactical-ignorance">Tactical Ignorance</h3>
<blockquote>
<p>&ldquo;I use to love brave. NOT anymore.. I'm sure that they are
fingerprinting and using my browsing habits and even search queries
and shows relevant ads. It is not like they are showing some random
pop up for ads. I get ads for NordVPN if I search for best vpn 2020. I
instantly get pop up for lenovo laptops as soon as I search for
laptop. Obviously, with all the utm source and other tracking stuff. I
am making around 15 BAT/month. I don't need those pennies. Back to
Firefox with Ublock Origin and Privacy Badger.&rdquo; &mdash;Comment on a
YouTube video of mine</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This guy is literally talking as if how Brave works is some kind of
mystery, as if its <em>entire code base</em> isn't openly auditable. No, Brave
doesn't take or &quot;fingerprint&quot; your browsing habits, instead, if you
are enrolled in Brave Rewards, you browser pulls the entire list of adds
from the system, then <em>locally</em> decides on your own computer what ads to
serve.</p>
<p>On <a href="https://brave.com/faq/">Brave's FAQ</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>&ldquo;Only the browser, after HTTPS terminates and secure pages are
decrypted, has all of your private data needed to analyze user intent.
Our auditable open source browser code protects this intent data on
the client device. Our server side has no access to this data in the
clear, nor does it have decryption keys. We do not run a MitM proxy or
VPN service. We provide signals to the browser to help it make good
decisions about what preferences and intent signals to expose to
maximize user, publisher and advertiser value. Each ad request is
anonymous, and exposes only a small subset of the user&rsquo;s preferences
and intent signals to prevent &ldquo;fingerprinting&rdquo; the user by a possibly
unique set of tags.&rdquo;</p>
</blockquote>
<h2 id="is-brave-bad-for-privacy">Is Brave bad for privacy?</h2>
<p>A popularly linked Neocities site <a href="https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/brave.html">Spyware
Watchdog</a> ranks Brave
as having a rank of &quot;High&quot; spyware. The information on the site is
generally good, but a little context-less: if you compare their Brave
article to <a href="https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/index.html">their articles on other
browsers</a>, this bad
ranking for Brave is utterly out of place.</p>
<p>Many people who read things and lack basic critical thinking skills
wanted me to either admit or refute this page. Again, the website's
information is good, but there is that same implicitly more skeptical
standard held to Brave than other browsers.</p>
<p>As a point of comparison, take the browser Pale Moon. On their site, the
Spyware Watchdog <a href="https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/browsers.html">classifies Pale Moon as being &quot;Top Tier&quot; in privacy,
while Brave is &quot;Low
Tier.&quot;</a> But if
you look at <a href="https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/palemoon.html">their own
analysis</a>, on
<em>nearly every point</em>, <strong>Brave is superior to Pale Moon</strong>.</p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Issue</th>
<th>Brave&rsquo;s Flaws</th>
<th>Pale Moon&rsquo;s Flaws</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Trackers</td>
<td>Brave blocks ads and trackers, but whitelists Facebook and Twitter to not break cross-site logins for normies. Users can still choose to block these sites in the settings menu.</td>
<td>Pale Moon does not block any ads or trackers at all, so tough luck. Go find an extension that works well with it.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Forced incompatibility</td>
<td>None.</td>
<td>Pale Moon ships with a blocklist of add-ons that the developers don't want you installing. This includes NoScript and Ad Nauseam.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Auto-updates</td>
<td>Brave checks for updates on startup. (I'm not sure if this is the case on Linux too). There is no menu option to disable this but you can block connections to the update site in your hosts file.</td>
<td>Pale Moon automatically checks for updates, add-on updates and changes to the add-on blocklist on start-up. In the <code>about:config</code> some of these can be disabled.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Analytics on the Start Page</td>
<td>Brave connects to a free/open source Piwik service to get the number of ads/trackers blocked for the startpage. This can be disabled on the start page.</td>
<td>Pale Moon <strong>connects to Google analytics</strong> on the start page. This can be disabled by changing the start page.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Other bad connections</td>
<td>If ads are enabled, Brave makes connection to a site to get ads. It also checks a HTTPS ruleset on an <strong>Amazon server</strong>.</td>
<td>Pale Moon makes a OCSP request for <strong>every website you connect to</strong> to verify their SSL with a third party. This can be turned off in the options.</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>On pretty much all of these points, when Brave is lacking, Pale Moon is
much worse (that isn't to say that Pale Moon is a bad browser either).
So it doesn't really make sense to me why Brave, which also comes with
additional privacy features like fingerprint-blocking, should be
classified as <em>lower</em> than Pale Meme. That site also claims that Brave
uses the Google search engine as default. If that was ever true, it
isn't now, or at least not on any version of Brave I've used. Brave
asks the user on the first start up which search engine he would like to
use as default. Google is among the choices though.</p>
<p>Note that in their articles they admit that Pale Moon has
&quot;auto-updates,&quot; but complain that Brave has &quot;shitty auto-updates.&quot;
Okay. I wonder what the difference is aside from personal emotion. In
the last paragraph or so, they do mention, if not skirt around all the
<em>actual features</em> of Brave:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>&ldquo;and the fingerprinting protection I don't think is found in any
other browser (but I didn't confirm if it actually works).&rdquo;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It does (of course it's an arms-race). But this is an acknowledgment
that Brave is fighting on a level that no other browser is. While other
honorable browsers like Ice Cat are committed to free software, Brave is
also committed to an internet free from ads enmeshed in web pages and
the people who simp for them.</p>
<h2 id="brave-for-normies">Brave for normies</h2>
<p>Aside from nit-picking different browsers, if you want to install a
browser on a computer for a normie relative or friend, <strong>there is no
debate that Brave is the best</strong>. Again, Brave is <em>built</em> with ad and
tracker blocking. Browsers like Pale Moon or Firefox are bad browsers
that <em>can become</em> okay browsers after you manually disable their junk
features and download a bunch of add-ons, but Brave comes as it should
be. Even Brave's token feature of viewing ads to get paid is not on by
default. As it ships, Brave is just a good browser.</p>
<p>This is why I have Brave ship with <a href="https://larbs.xyz">LARBS</a>: it's a
pain to hosts a repository and edit browser settings via dotfiles, while
I can just have Brave installed and that gives a passable, ad-free
experience for users.</p>
<p>So if you want to make a normie's life easier, install Brave. They will
be able to do everything they could do on Chrome, but now they have
decreased their Google liability and no longer have to put up with ads.</p>
<h2 id="grasping-at-straws">Grasping at Straws...</h2>
<h3 id="chromium-based">Chromium based</h3>
<p>When you corner an anti-Brave aggitant, they usually mumble something
about how Brave is bad because it's &quot;Chromium-based.&quot; I've never
seen people use this argument about, say, qutebrowser or other minor
Chromium-based browsers, but I think it's just become &quot;that reason&quot;
for Brave. I honestly, really can't get worked up against a free and
open source software project just because it's been spearheaded by
Google. The ability to fork it always remains if the code goes south or
if it does degenerate stuff.</p>
<p>I think it's especially absurd to place your trust in Mozilla FurryFox
and their team of stereotypical SJWs and soydevs as a functioning
alternative. Remember Mozilla spends its money <a href="https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/regrets-reporter/">developing fun add-ons
like
this</a> to
&quot;protect&quot; people emotionally from scary &quot;conspiracy theories&quot; and
&quot;alt-right content&quot; on YouTube. I consider Google just as insane and
dangerous, but not necessarily so much <em>more</em> insane so that I for some
reason trust the judgment of Mozilla developers over Google ones.</p>
<p><strong>EDIT:</strong> Here's another one from Mozilla FurryFox: <a href="https://archive.is/hzS8G">&quot;We need more
than deplatforming&quot;</a> Moreso than Google,
Mozilla's openly stated goal is an internet totally controlled by
stereotypical dyed-hair SJWs with bad physiognomy.</p>
<p>What I mean by this is, sure, I'd <em>like</em> some browser with an
independent engine. Pale Moon does sort of has that. That's cool. But
that is not enough to make a difference for actual usage. Again, look at
the list of benefits of Brave at the top of this article, all of those
are hard to replicate or find in other browsers. I could go into it
elsewhere, but there are a million little reasons why I don't use Pale
Moon (but you might like it).</p>
<h3 id="affiliate-links">Affiliate links</h3>
<p>Twitter users/Redditors went apoplectic several months ago when they
realized Brave had included affiliate links to some sites whose names
are filled in in the url bar. <a href="https://lukesmith.xyz/blog/le-shill-lion">I have already written on
this.</a> It's literally
nothing. As I say there, this is what affiliate links are for. I've
never heard the same crowd through a fit that DuckDuckGo <a href="https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/advertising-and-affiliates/">does exactly
the same
thing</a>.
You could even actually see the Brave affiliate links fill in, which is
<em>not</em> the case when clicking on a DuckDuckGo affiliate site link. Still
took these guys months to even notice... This is only something
&quot;controversial&quot; to people who are trying their damnedest to find
something to not like about Brave.</p>
<h2 id="actual-good-complaints-about-brave-and-bat">Actual good complaints about Brave and BAT</h2>
<p>Since most visceral anti-Brave agitators just have a kind of general ax
to grind, I want to take this time to voice my actually annoyances with
Brave and the BAT project. I consider all of these ultimata: I only use
Brave with the expectation that these issues will be fixed in the
future.</p>
<h3 id="get-rid-of-uphold">Get rid of Uphold!</h3>
<p>Actually, let me say that in &lt;h1&gt;...</p>
<h1 id="get-rid-of-uphold-1">Get rid of Uphold!</h1>
<p>So you can get BAT from viewing ads, and people with websites and
YouTube channels can receive donations, great. The annoying thing
however is that you can't just get payouts to a random Ethereum wallet,
instead, you have to use the company <em>Uphold</em>. This is probably
because of legal issues and because I'm sure they have some financial
arrangement, but the BAT project cannot be considered to be a universal
and private solution if users are funneled into some site that requires
a real-world identity.</p>
<p>Legally or technologically difficult to do otherwise? Maybe. But that is
one of the goals of cryptocurrencies anyway and it should be met. Build
the technology so that it's impossible to legally constrain. Most
blockchain technology <em>is already</em> like that.</p>
<p>Users should just be able to give a public Ethereum/Token address and
receive BAT there. That should be it. If you want to offer a
normie-friendly partner service like Uphold, fine, but that should not
be either the default or required. Uphold, I should say, is definitely
not normie-friendly anyway. Since they did a redesign late
September/early Ocotober, I admit I literally cannot figure the site out
and how to transfer my BAT out efficiently.</p>
<p>I should say, in development Brave has had some suboptimal or
non-private features in the past before better solutions were devised. I
mentioned the fact that Brave pulls a non-personalized ad list, but that
wasn't always the case to my understanding: when Brave was starting
out, the browser did request specific ads, giving the central service
some information about user browsing habits. So that at least indicates
that Brave is open to reevaluating methods that are exploitable.</p>
<h3 id="bat-as-a-coin">BAT as a 💩coin</h3>
<p>Let me state it again though, <strong>if the BAT system requires Uphold for
basic functionality, it is not a serious long-term service</strong>. That's
it. I only use and recommend the BAT system under the expectation that
this is a temporary situation that they are actively seeking to remedy.
If anti-Brave shills want to shill about something <em>that actually
matters</em>, <strong>this should be it!</strong></p>
<p>Like most 💩coins, BAT is not decentralized in any meaningful sense. It&rsquo;s KYCed
into oblivion and relies on a significant number of platforms in bottleneck
positions, including in particular the BAT Project itself. I wouldn&rsquo;t say I
even support the BAT Project itself for this reason, I just don&rsquo;t mind using
Brave since you can dip your fingers into it without getting KYCed.</p>
<h3 id="auto-updates-and-integrations">Auto-updates and integrations</h3>
<p>I agree strongly with the argument from the Spyware Watchdog site above
that Brave should not make any unsolicited requests to sites, especially
auto-updates, and if it has a reason to, it should have some menu option
to disable it. Any connections a browser makes in the background for
these purposes or for analytics <strong>should be disabled by default</strong> too.</p>
<h3 id="the-browser-should-be-neutral-and-decentralized">The Browser should be neutral and decentralized.</h3>
<p>Somewhat related to the above, if Brave is actually serious about
becoming the commonly used system not just for browsing, but for
internet monetization, it has to be as neutral and decentralized as
possible. Brave has added a lot of optional features for different
services and other little annoyances. Obviously, you can immediately
disable them, but if you want to have a personalizable and universal
browsing experience, Brave should be absolutely blank when you pull it
up on a fresh install.</p>
<h3 id="general-little-features">General little features</h3>
<ul>
<li>The ability to not keep track of history but to still keep cookies.
All Chromium browsers lack this menu feature which exists in
Firefox. I'm not sure why this isn't an option because it has
always seemed to me the most sensible way to browse. I don't want
sites I've already seen filling in my url bar!</li>
</ul>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/command-line-bibles/
title: Command Line Bibles
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/command-line-bibles/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<figure class="titleimg"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/deadsea-small.jpg" title="Where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found."></figure>

<p>I've made a couple very useful command-line accessible Bibles for a
quick and scriptable lookup of Bible verses and passages. They exist not
only in English, but for Latin and Greek as well.</p>
<ol>
<li>English King James Version (including Apocrypha) &mdash;
<a href="https://github.com/lukesmithxyz/kjv">Github</a>,
<a href="https://gitlab.com/lukesmithxyz/kjv">Gitlab</a></li>
<li>Latin Vulgate &mdash; <a href="https://github.com/lukesmithxyz/vul">Github</a>, <a href="https://gitlab.com/lukesmithxyz/vul">Gitlab</a></li>
<li>Greek Septuagint &amp; New Testament &mdash;
<a href="https://github.com/lukesmithxyz/grb">Github</a>,
<a href="https://gitlab.com/lukesmithxyz/grb">Gitlab</a></li>
</ol>
<h2 id="installation">Installation</h2>
<pre><code>git clone https://github.com/lukesmithxyz/kjv.git
cd kjv
sudo make install
</code></pre>
<p>Or just replace <code>kjv</code> with <code>vul</code> for the Latin version or <code>grb</code> for the
Greek.</p>
<h2 id="usage">Usage</h2>
<h3 id="single-run">Single run</h3>
<p>Run the program name followed by a passage. The text will appear to you
in your pager. Arrows or vim-keys to scroll, <code>q</code> to quit.</p>
<pre><code>kjv rev 3:9
Revelation
3:9     Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are
        Jews, and are not, but do lie; behold, I will make them to come and
        worship before thy feet, and to know that I have loved thee.
</code></pre>
<p>Note that you may also give whole books or chapters. <code>kjv genesis</code> will
give you all of Genesis. <code>kjv mat 1:1-10</code> will show only Matthew 1:1-10.
Note also that you can usually abbreviate books.</p>
<h3 id="searching">Searching</h3>
<p><code>/</code> searches for patterns. For example, <code>kjv /offering</code> will search the
whole Bible for the word &quot;offering.&quot; You may specify a book/location
before it to search only that book.</p>
<h3 id="interactive-mode">Interactive mode</h3>
<p>Just type <code>kjv</code> (or <code>vul</code> or <code>grb</code>) alone to enter interactive mode. You
can then just type verses/books without prefixing them with the command
name each time if you prefer.</p>
<h2 id="origin">Origin</h2>
<p>I forked the original software from <a href="https://github.com/bontibon/kjv">this
repository</a> which is an incomplete
English King James Version (without the Apocrypha). With the use of
coreutils and vim, I found online texts of the Apochrypha, Vulgate,
Septuagint and the <a href="http://sblgnt.com/download/">SBL New Testament</a> and
formatting them to function with this program.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/other-langs/
title: Advice on Some Other Languages
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/other-langs/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>This page is just for minor pointers on lesser studied languages that I
don't have enough to have on their own pages.</p>
<h2 id="gothic">Gothic</h2>

<figure class="resright"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/lambdin-small.jpg"></figure>

<p>Gothic is a dead language and the only thing existing in it is a
partially translated New Testament by Wulfila. It still is a very
important language for the study of Germanic and Indo-Europeanism
because it is the only language of &quot;Eastern Germanic&quot; so well
attested. Eastern Germanic languages are distinct from other Germanic
languages in their lack of umlaut and some other characteristically
Germanic features, while Gothic still retains some earlier Indo-European
inflectional categories.</p>
<p>I mention Gothic only because one of the best ever language learning
books I've ever seen is written for it, and that is Thomas Lambdin's
<em>Introduction to the Gothic Language</em>. I actually took a Gothic class
flippantly in graduate school, but the book stuck out to me as being
perfectly designed for the typical target audience of Gothic in
historical linguistics.</p>
<p>The book has very well designed lessons and activities, but I think
greatest is that in the back of the book, for each chapter there is a
corresponding lesson on the historical grammar of the content learned.
It goes through what conjugates of each word exist in English, Latin,
Greek or Sanskrit or other Indo-European languages and provided
comparative paradigms of noun and verb inflections. No word or concept
is left without a <em>real</em> mneumonic device, not a fake one fake from some
joke about the word, but one tied into the actual historical facts of
the word.</p>
<p>I've said before that one of the reasons I never use things like <em>Anki</em>
and &quot;spaced repetition software&quot; is that the real way to retain
information is to understand how it fits within a wider web of
information. In historical linguistics, you have an ideal of this
because the more you learn, the easier it is to &quot;remember:&quot;
remembering that the Gothic word for &quot;field&quot; is <em>akrs</em> is incredibly
simple when you realize it's the same as Latin <em>ager</em>, Greek <em>agrós</em>,
Sanskrit <em>ájra</em> and English <em>acre</em>.</p>
<h2 id="sanskrit">Sanskrit</h2>

<figure class="resright"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/devavanipravesika-small.jpg"></figure>

<p>Sanskrit is the crown jewel of Indo-European languages and there are
very few resources for it. Luckily, there is <em>Devavanipravesika</em> by
Goldman and Sutherland, which again is a star in terms of language
books.</p>
<p>I do recommend you have some of these abilities before attempting
Sanskrit:</p>
<ol>
<li>Some grammatical knowledge of a classical inflected Indo-European
language like Latin or Greek.</li>
<li>Knowledge of the Devanagari script which is used for Sanskrit
nowadays (also the script of Hindi and many other modern Indian
languages).</li>
</ol>
<h3 id="sandhi">Sandhi</h3>
<p>In English, if you say the sentence &quot;What are you up to?&quot; it usually
comes out closer to &quot;Whatchu up to?&quot; This kind of phonological
compression is a natural and systematic process in all languages. What
is interesting is that when written language was younger, it was very
common to express these phonological changes in the writing system
itself. It looks slangish in modern English to write &quot;whatchu,&quot; but it
is more accurate after all.</p>
<p>Sanskrit overtly writes every alternation like this, including when
words seem to combine together into a single prosodic word. The term for
this is [Sandhi]{.dfn}.</p>
<p>The tricky thing that newbies to Sanskrit must understand is that
knowing the principles of Sandhi are the first priority in knowing
Sanskrit because it's impossible to even parse a basic sentence before
you understand it. Phonemically, many Sanskrit words end in an -s, but
one of the first rules of Sandhi is that words <em>are not allowed to end
in -s in most cases</em>. So -s might show up as -h or -o or something else
depending on the phonetic context.</p>
<p>I say this because before you get excited about diving into Sanskrit,
you have to make sure you know the basics of Sandhi or it will all be a
mess.</p>
<h2 id="classicalkoiné-greek">Classical/Koiné Greek</h2>

<figure class="resright"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/biglot.jpg" title="One of the books I&#39;ve gotten the most use out of."></figure>

<p>Greek, much like Spanish, I never really sat down to learn. Greek is
close enough in form to Latin that I learned it from reading a biglottic
Bible in both languages. Its grammar presents very few concepts alien to
Latin, the only big hurdles probably being the novel uses of the article
and if you want to learn classical Greek like a pro, the pitch accent
system.</p>
<p>What I mean is that I only read very little of Greek grammar before I
could pick up my Latin-Greek Bible and start reading the Greek with the
aid of the parallel Latin. This was also a nice experience because you
can see the similaries between the two languages, but also how the
expressiveness of Greek is sometimes lost in translation.</p>
<p>Greek, for example, has such a complete and elegant paradigm of
participles that many of them are unstranlatable in Latin. Latin has
only passive perfect participles and active present participles, while
Greek has participles for the whole spectrum of voice, tense and aspect.
What that means is that Latin has to talk around some common Greek
expressions, often utilizing Latin deponents (which can have perfect
active participle) to get the meaning across.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-its-bad-to-have-high-gdp/
title: Why It's Bad to Have High GDP
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-its-bad-to-have-high-gdp/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<h2 id="to-put-it-in-other-words">To put it in other words...</h2>
<p>The common way of looking at Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is that it's
a metric of economic success: more GDP is more wealth. Wealth is good.
&quot;Poverty&quot; (meaning low <em>per capita</em> GDP) is bad. Nowadays, pretty much
everyone talks about &quot;economics&quot; like this as if this truism was
scribbled on the back walls of the cosmos.</p>
<p>This is just looking at one side of the ledger in a kind of global
double-entry accounting book. A logically equivalent way of looking at
it is that <strong>GDP is a metric of economic exchange required for survival
in society as it exists</strong>. You can say that some area &quot;produced&quot; $1
billion of output (sounds good), but you can just as easily say that $1
billion was required for that area to sustain itself (sounds bad). These
two are simply logically equivalent.</p>
<h2 id="living-on-1-a-day">Living on $1 a day</h2>

<figure class="resright"><a href="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/ivanov01.jpg"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/ivanov01s.jpg" title="(((They))) don&#39;t want you to know about this."></a><figcaption>Antediluvian Hyperborea. GDP: $0 per year.</figcaption></figure>

<p>Let's dive into the Gestalt: when you hear that a family of eight lives
on less than a dollar per day (PPP adjusted), you might wonder how they
manage! To <em>actually</em> do such a thing would require buying large bags of
rice for the whole family, eat only that and live in free cardboard
boxes.</p>
<p>The reality is that that often uttered phrase means that they use less
than $1 a day in the general economy, while the rest of their
livelihood is &quot;off-the-grid&quot; or self-sufficient. They may grow food in
a family farm, hunt for food, and most of their daily needs from cooking
oils, to plates, to pottery, to soap are often made at home as well.</p>
<p>There is still &quot;an economy&quot; but often one that is barter based or
<em>socialist</em> in the real pre-socialist sense of the word: mediated by
direct face-to-face social tit-for-tat between neighbors and friends,
none of this mediated by currency being exchanged, thus it is not part
of the GDP.</p>
<p>If you read about some Bangladeshi village where the only product is
&quot;textiles&quot;, that doesn't mean that everyone there makes textiles all
day and, without a textile company, everyone would've starved to death.
It means that the only on-paper, measurable global industry practiced
there is textile manufacturing. Other villagers might farm, hunt, even
do some kind of gathering in some places. They will produce the arts and
crafts and live the way people live when you leave them alone. If your
view of the world is mediated by GDP, you're only seeing the extremely
small sliver that pops into existence when people exchange something
involving legal tender.</p>
<p>This is extremely difficult for us modern bugpeople to understand
because to be a bugman in a large city is to produce absolutely nothing
on one's own and buy literally everything you need from the store. To
us non-productive people, GDP means income which means survival. But the
further out of Bugmanville you go, the clearer the vacuousness of GDP
becomes. When you realize that most of human wealth is unmeasured by
GDP, you realize that Whig History and Steven Pinkerism is based on
shaky foundations.</p>
<h2 id="example">Example</h2>
<p>A minor example. We had a large Thanksgiving feast near my uncle's
house in very rural Florida. As it got cold in the night, we had a fire
in a repurposed old sugar cane cooking vat artfully standing on used
symmetrical cinderblock pieces. A bugman hipster might pay two hundred
dollars or more for a similar looking &quot;authentic&quot; piece of equipment.
Those $200 would be counted in the GDP. A bugman hipster might have
also bought or rented chairs for the event, &quot;contributing&quot; more to the
GDP, but my uncle, as part of the local wholesome church community,
simply borrowed some from the church. Thus our event produced basically
no GDP output in goods or services, despite being functionally
equivalent to some similar but expensive and ergo &quot;productive&quot;
&quot;Friendsgiving&quot; practiced by urbanites. In reality <em>we</em> are richer
than the bugmen hipsters who blew hundreds of dollars on a faux-folksy
party. In this case, we owned the firepit and had easy access and
permission to the chairs, thus we are more economically flexible than
they are. That GDP that they produced/expended is evidence of deeper
reliance on the economic system. That GDP output is a marker of
<em>fragility</em>, reliance on the conditions of the outside economy in the
same way that a village of Bangladeshis who abandon their traditional
way of lives to work on textiles are more fragile, despite being able to
save up for iPhones.</p>
<h2 id="what-gdp-really-measures">What GDP really measures</h2>
<p><strong>Most of the increase in GDP across the world is simply the movement
from local partially-social partially-under-the-table economies to
economies mediated by taxable currency.</strong> An economically
self-sufficient village with close social relationships and a barter
economy has 0 GDP. A township of entrepreneurs and artisans you
partially barter and partially use currency which they don't report has
0 GDP. All of these people are &quot;in poverty&quot; and &quot;earn less than a
dollar a day&quot;. And if you want to be truly self-sufficient, that means
having a personal GDP of zero.</p>
<p>More than that, pretty much everywhere, GDP is a strong indicator of
social upheaval. If you think that GDP is some eternal goodness,
remember that <em>everything &quot;good&quot; about industrialization shows up in
the GDP</em>, while at the same time, <em>everything bad about it will not show
up</em>. Or, sometimes bad things are registered as positive economic
growth: urbanization has caused mass-disease, and if that means a market
for new medical services and pharmaceuticals, great! The GDP just went
up! The Ganges is polluted due to the textile plant? That just means
more opportunities for local entrepreneurs to sell bottled water! The
GDP just went up! Are people being pushed out of fishing or other
subsistence occupations because of it? Even better! Now they have no
choice but to contribute to the GDP! With every passing year, in fact,
more and more of the GDP is produced by dealing with the problems that
our higher level of GDP have caused.</p>
<p>At the end of the day, <strong>GDP is only a measurement of how reliant a
place or country is on the global economy</strong>. Self-sufficiency has a GDP
of 0. Wasteful consooomerism has an extremely large GDP.</p>
<h2 id="planned-obsolescence">Planned obsolescence</h2>
<p>I have one of my great grandfather's early electric circular saws. It
has a bunch of gunk in it, but it still works (although I recently took
it apart to replace some old screws and springs and other little parts
to be careful). They literally do not make circular saws like it; it's
all metal, while even the fancy modern stuff is mostly plastic.</p>
<p>The &quot;unfortunate&quot; thing about it and other durable tools is that it's
&quot;bad for the economy,&quot; especially the GDP. Since that thing has been
around since maybe the 50's or 60's, that's as long as 70 years the
economy has gone without the &quot;stimulation&quot; of us having to buy another
saw.</p>
<p>Viewers of my technology videos: Which would be better for the world, if
everyone used the material equivalent of a classic American-made IBM
ThinkPad, or some Apple Laptops that are unfixable computers made of
mostly batteries designed to conk out right before the new version comes
out? Regardless, the Apple Macs that cost thousands a piece are much
better for the &quot;economy.&quot;</p>
<p>That's what I mean. If you have quality tools and do not need to
constantly throw money at the system to buy things, fix things and
otherwise waste money, you are going to be having a lower GDP. That's
just how it is.</p>
<h2 id="the-propagandistic-role-of-gdp">The propagandistic role of GDP</h2>
<p>When you don't think things through like this, GDP is supposed to
appear as an objective measure of economic goodness. You're supposed to
be looking at those GDP charts and saying, &quot;Wow, my life might be
terrible, I am not free, I am subject to forces out of my control, and I
am told I have to participate in mass-consumerism to survive, but these
charts are the facts[!], and the facts say that things are better now,
so I believe them!&quot;</p>
<p>It's legitimately surprising to me how big of a boon the idea of
increasing GDP is for Whig history and NPCs of many different
ideologies. People of the Left and Right will matter-of-factly tell me
that a plastic based economy taking over the world is still good because
the line is going up. I've heard it as a justification for everything:</p>
<ul>
<li>Don't like globalization?
<ul>
<li>You're wrong, the GDP is going up.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Don't trust state-funded institutionalized science?
<ul>
<li>You're wrong, the GDP is going up.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Don't want child drag queens?
<ul>
<li>You're wrong, the GDP is going up.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Don't want everything to be made of plastics and other petrochemicals?
<ul>
<li>You're wrong, the GDP is going up.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Don't want mass pornography?
<ul>
<li>You're wrong, the GDP is going up.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Don't want free sugary drinks since infancy?
<ul>
<li>You're wrong, the GDP is going up.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<p>When you abandon the illusion of GDP, you are suddenly able to ask
whether massive technological &quot;progress&quot; has <em>actually</em> been good for
real human life and human pychology.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/veganism-is-the-pinnacle-of-bugmanism/
title: Veganism Is the Pinnacle of Bugmanism
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/veganism-is-the-pinnacle-of-bugmanism/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>People have quoted me as saying that. I forget where it comes from,
probably a livestream, but I definitely stand by it. Since a lot of
people labor under the assumption that my channel is about &quot;Linux,&quot;
I've accumulated a lot of subscribers that are variously nerds,
furries, degenerates, coomers, libertarians, communists, trannies and
among them are vegans. Some of them (I assume) are good people.</p>
<p>There's a stereotype about vegans that they are annoying and can't
talk about anything but Veganism. This hurtful stereotype comes from the
fact that it's true.</p>

<figure class="resright"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/grill.gif" title="I just wanna grill!"></figure>

<h2 id="bugmanism">Bugmanism</h2>
<p>Firstly, what is Bugmanism? How do Vegans fit the bill?</p>
<p>Long story short, a bugman is someone who rejects the purpose and role
of humans in their natural environment. They reject tradition, religion,
their family, gender roles, the expectation that a person should
contribute to their community, etc. They might do this for their
personal convenience (usually they just wanna coom outside of marriage)
or for apparently rational reasons, but the effect is the same.</p>
<p>If you want to sum up the esoterically evil goals of &quot;modernism&quot; or
whatever you want to call it, it is destroying the countervailing power
of tradition and in its place, new social engineers attempt to dictate
human values top down. If you separate people from their families, their
races, their traditions and <em>who they actually are</em>, you can engineer TV
shows, sports teams, activist movements and a million other things for
them to identify with and worship. <strong>Modernism pretends to liberate
people from arbitrary traditions and authorities, when in reality is
substitutes natural, emergent morals with controlled authorities.</strong></p>
<p>Veganism has always been one of the most radical examples of this logic.
Esoterically, <strong>Veganism forces one to abandon not just their own
traditions, but every human dietary tradition</strong> and leaves them at the
whims of processed grains and pharmaceutical supplements for a meager
survival.</p>
<p>That is, Veganism is highly disruptive: You can't have a normal life.
You can't have a normal meal. You can't wine and dine with people and
must make it an affair. You can't use traditional hand-made leather
products. You can't hunt or trap for food or raise animals, even for
eggs.</p>
<p>You become a nag at war with your family, the world around you. <strong>You
are trapped</strong> <em>within</em> urbanite bugman society: you can't even eat in
most non-urban places or foreign countries because the insane concept of
not cooking with animal fats and eating and using animal products just
doesn't exist. You have to survive holding your breath from one hipster
downtown area to the next.</p>
<p>On every point, you become more reliant on macro-society. Vegans try
very hard to give off &quot;organic&quot; vibes, but it's just a lie. Even
people on the internet who &quot;advertise&quot; their Vegan lifestyle spend
hours processing a basic meal and of course predigesting indigestible
plant matter with a blender. Try and find a non-urbanite Vegan in real
life. They exist, but they are an aberration.</p>
<h2 id="the-larp-of-vegan-for-health">The LARP of &quot;Vegan for Health&quot;</h2>
<p>Vegans sometimes pretend to advertise Veganism because it's allegedly
healthy. This is just public relations; any true Vegan, when you really
pin them down thinks that Veganism at its core is a moralistic belief.
Vegans are Vegans because they believe that not being Vegan is morally
deficient: killing/eating animals and using their bodies is bad. That's
it.</p>
<p>So you have your moral principle and run with it. What magical force
then is making that moral principle necessarily good for your health? If
Veganism <em>were</em> actually a good diet for humans, that would actually be
a massive coincidence. &quot;Vegans for health&quot; have to grapple with the
bizarre claim that meat, exactly the food that has been viewed in all
human cultures as superior and more desirable is somehow nutritionally
deficient.</p>
<h3 id="the-standard-american-diet-sad-is-plant-based">The Standard American Diet (SAD) is Plant-based.</h3>
<p>The weirdest thing is when Veganism is held in opposition to the
Standard American Diet, as if the American diet somehow represents
traditional or non-Vegan diets. <strong>The SAD is just Vegan-lite.</strong> SAD is a
post-Vegan invention of the diet industry take over the past decades has
been leading people into the most harmful parts of vegan diets: unstable
plant-oils, processed grains as meat substitutes, etc.</p>
<p>The pop-cultural idea of &quot;health&quot; is simply &quot;being skinny.&quot; Veganism
is <em>great</em> at making people skinny because it is slow moving starvation
(I have met some carbo-loading exceptions who fatten up).</p>
<p>Veganism is just to starvation what waterboarding is to drowning. If you
stick with it, you <em>will</em> eventually die, but it's so painful in the
meantime, you'll probably give up.</p>
<h2 id="veganism-is-rational">Veganism is rational.</h2>
<p>Vegans are exceptionally &quot;rational&quot; in that they adopt the moral
framework of modern society and follow it to its logical conclusion.</p>
<p>When you're given for your acceptance some inane religious platitudes
like &quot;equality&quot; and &quot;rights&quot; along with vaguely Marxist notions of
&quot;exploitation&quot; and &quot;slavery&quot; and &quot;oppressed classes,&quot; it seems
perfectly reasonable to expand that language to the relationship between
predators (humans) and their prey (many animals) (or maybe pets too).</p>
<p>If you're raised in a time of extreme moral nihilism except for not
liking the several historical events you're told that matter (usually
slavery and the Holocaust), obviously you're going to glom on to what
looks most like them: chickens in chains and sheep being led to
slaughter like sheep to slaughter.</p>
<p>Honestly, Veganism by their own logic might not be far enough. There is
some circumstantial research to the effect that plants have nervous
systems that might feel pain as well: you could go one step further and
simply eat nothing living. The <dfn>Ctistae</dfn> of ancient Thrace refused
to eat anything alive, eating only by-products/foodstuffs like milk and
honey. The Ctistae also refused to have sex, which might be something to
consider since Vegans eventually lose sexual function anyway.</p>
<h2 id="veganism-is-rebellious">Veganism is rebellious.</h2>
<p>Veganism has the same kind of &quot;rebellion&quot; that all other forms of
leftism share. It &quot;rebels&quot; against the system by perfectly
internalizing the system's values, extrapolating them to their logical
conclusions and thus fighting the system when it fails to meet those
obviously unworkable conclusions.</p>
<p>Corporations started shilling vegetable oils (which originally were and
frankly still are just industrial by-products) as workable replacements
for butter and lard. Seventh-Day Adventists lobbied for them because of
their own religion beliefs. Jews lobbied for them because they hate
unkosher lard. Years later, now we know that vegetable oils are highly
unstable and have contributed to the massive rise in heart disease.</p>
<p>Veganism is a leftist phenomenon. The psychological type of a leftist is
such that they will always subordinate their direct experience to
ideology. It doesn't matter if not eating meat or wearing leather or
using animal products sounds hard, their suffering is more proof of a
greater moral superiority.</p>
<p>Non-leftists can simply not become Vegans for longer than extremely
brief periods. Even if a Vegan wins an argument with them, a normal
person is just going to say, &quot;I'm sorry, I like animals and all, but I
can't not eat them, that's just crazy.&quot;</p>
<h2 id="veganism-only-makes-sense-in-a-bugman-environment">Veganism only makes sense in a bugman environment.</h2>
<p>Ask a vegan why he doesn't eat eggs. He will probably tell you a spooky
story about how terrible it must be for a chicken to live in a coop
laying eggs all day. That might even bring a tear to a sentimental
person's eye.</p>
<p>Out where I live, people have their chickens wandering in their yards
and garden pecking scraps. They return to their coops at night to be
safe from coyotes. Is there really something &quot;unethical&quot; in the mind
of a Vegan about picking up an unfertilized egg lain by one of these
chickens and eating it?</p>
<p>A lot of the moral logic behind Veganism falls flat outside of bugman
capitalism. Fundamentally, it's another manifestation of general angst
from lack of connection to the real natural world.</p>
<p>I say this because most Vegans are Vegans because they are softies who
have literally no connection to animals whatsoever until as a teenager
they watched a PETA documentary with chickens getting their heads buzzed
off or pigs walking around in their own poop.</p>
<p>Literally think about the animals. When wild animals die in nature, they
don't slowly slip away in the night surrounded by their family. They
die of starvation, or by being ripped apart alive by packs of coyotes.
Would you rather die by getting your brains blown out instantaneously or
die a &quot;natural&quot; death <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg9_ZnojxmU">like
this</a>?</p>
<p>But to the original question, it really makes no sense even for a Vegan
to not eat or distribute the eggs a chicken lays... You're going to
have to get deep into Marxist analysis to think that's somehow
unethical. And once a chicken has living a long life of egg laying, why
not quickly and painlessly <a href="https://poultrykeeper.com/general-chickens/how-to-kill-a-chicken/">dislocate its
neck</a>
and eat it for dinner? If you don't, your cat will eventually gore it
and it'll be a mess.</p>

<figure class="resright"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/kill_chicken.gif" title="Boomer attempts to kill chicken."></figure>

<h2 id="animals-live-to-be-eaten">Animals live to be eaten.</h2>
<p>This isn't even a metaphysical claim. Domesticated cows and pigs and
chickens do not and cannot live as they exist in the wild. They have
evolved symbiotically with us as sources of food. They can go feral and
breed with wild boar and the like, but their composition is based on
their domesticated state.</p>
<p>Wild game like deer have lived alongside human hunters for centuries.
Their breeding habits and evolutionary development is based in the fact
that a <a href="http://archive.jsonline.com/sports/outdoors/study-sheds-light-on-top-causes-of-deer-mortality-b99190938z1-241992741.html">sizeable
portion</a>
of their population will be hunted by humans every season.</p>
<p>If you actually care about &quot;the environment&quot; (1) you would care for
humans, whose natural diet is meat and (2) you would be terribly worried
about the unintended consequences of severing one of the most important
links in the food chain.</p>
<h2 id="dumb-vegan-sayings">Dumb Vegan sayings</h2>
<h3 id="you-wouldnt-kill-it-yourself">&quot;You wouldn't kill it yourself!&quot;</h3>
<p>They say this whenever someone turns their eyes away from an animal
being killed in one of their Vegan propaganda videos.</p>
<p>Guess what, I also might turn away if I see a video of a sanitation
worker wading through human feces it in a sewer. That doesn't mean that
I'm a hypocrite for taking dumps in a toilet connected to city sewage.</p>
<p>I turn away when I see depictions of amputations of gangrenous limbs in
movies too. That doesn't mean I don't think it's not medically
necessary.</p>
<p>Killing animals is actually a bad example of this because while all
cultures are disgusted by feces and amputations, in most times and
places (including this country before Bambi), killing animals was
nothing any self-respecting grown man would react to. It goes without
saying that there are many countries where people recreationally torture
dogs and cats.</p>
<p>I don't say that to say that I'd be okay with killing dogs and cats,
merely that the trained moral responses we have for them are very
localized and subjective in our own modernist viewpoint. But Millenials
have now been raised in a Disney fantasy-land where animals think and
talk like us and therefore must share the same feelings. Vegans absurdly
&quot;imagine what it'd be like&quot; to live in industrial farming as if a
chicken's birdbrain is having an existential crisis while living in a
cage.</p>
<h3 id="veganism-is-minimal-or-more-self-sufficient">&quot;Veganism is minimal or more self-sufficient.&quot;</h3>
<p>Vegans have been fruitlessly trying to meme this one on me for forever.
Starvation and death is minimal, I suppose, so it is at least true in
that sense. <strong>Veganism is ultimately the diet of only eating inedible
garnish that looks &quot;good&quot; on Instagram.</strong></p>
<p>Raising most animals is easier and more efficient than raising
vegetables. If it's too hot, potatoes don't naturally know to go move
to the shade. Yams don't eat your overgrown grass. Onions don't poop
out fertilizer. Tomatoes can't pull a simple tractor. You can't skin
dead okra and make leather out of it. You can't grind up old mustard to
make bonemeal (that's not just something in Minecraft, by the way).</p>
<p>Animals are an absolutely necessary portion of any homestead in life and
death. Listen, I like growing stuff. I like growing vegetables. But
vegetables are just not real food... They are garnish. They are sides.
They are only enjoyable insofar as they elevate your enjoyment of real
food: meat.</p>
<h3 id="veganism-is-more-efficient-or-environmental">&quot;Veganism is more efficient or environmental.&quot;</h3>
<p>People say that eating plants is more &quot;efficient&quot; because they saw an
energy pyramid diagram as a kid, which shows how many prey animals are
needed to maintain carnivorous animals. If we actually lived in a place
where there was a calorie shortage, like a desert planet where greens
couldn't grow, that might be an issue. It frankly just isn't here.
We're not exactly running out of grass to feed cows. Most people are
mowing their grass and throwing it away.</p>
<p>There are people who make really absurd environmentalist arguments
against meat as well, for example, methane from cows warms the globe.
Okay. Fine. So what does Veganism do about that? Are Vegans going to
kill the cows for us? Should we just let them starve in the woods since
we can't harvest them for meat or even milk? What about all the game we
won't be hunting? Those 50% of deer annually that we won't be
killing&mdash;won't they me causing pollution with the huge amount of
calories they need to frolic in the woods all days? Same will all other
game. Most of those arguments are cute just-so stories and they fall
apart after examination. Anyone can play that game.</p>
<h2 id="lets-just-laugh-at-this-for-a-minute">Let's just laugh at this for a minute...</h2>
<p>Alright class, look at this commonly posted vegan meme and tell me why
it's retarded:</p>

<figure class="titleimg"><a href="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/vegan_protein.jpeg"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/vegan_protein.jpeg"></a></figure>

<p>&quot;Per 100 calories&quot; shows a deception so insane you should laugh.
Whoever made this image wants you to <em>believe</em> that the piece of steak
on the fork is equivalent to the tiny broccoli head on the right.</p>
<p>You can compare the nutrition of both
<a href="https://www.calorieking.com/us/en/foods/f/calories-in-fresh-or-dried-vegetables-broccoli-raw/uhZAljTASPuU9YnkyCZdFA">broccoli</a>
and
<a href="https://www.calorieking.com/us/en/foods/f/calories-in-beef-ground-beef-80-lean-20-fat-pan-browned/MJPo9HnUSnGiV2-9eBsCBw">beef</a>
at those links yourself.</p>
<p><strong>In order to get the protein in a single large bite of steak, you'll
have to eat more than half a pound of broccoli.</strong> Good luck. Now you
know why those poor impressionable girls who go vegan bloat up. And
that's only 100 calories. 2000 calorie diet? Have fun. If you're
famished, it's pretty easy to eat a big steak with 2000 calories
(around a pound and a half of matter) and it will fill you up without
any bloating or stomach pains. You'd have to eat <em>twelve pounds</em> more
or less of broccoli or equivalent greens for that. And with all that
fiber, you're going to just be pooping it all out.</p>
<p>Honestly, the human disgust response will stop you way before that.
It's easy to eat a juicy steak without or without sauce, salt and
pepper, but you'd nearly have to put a gun to someone's head to make
them eat their daily 13 pounds of indigestible garnish.</p>
<h2 id="noootruits-dont-actually-matter-anyway">Noootruits don't actually matter anyway</h2>
<blockquote>
<p>&quot;Plants don't have over fifteen micro-nooootrients...&quot;
&mdash;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/TheGenreDoesntMatter">sv3rige</a>, at
the end of every video</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A lot of Vegan autism gets focused on replicating the consumption of
known nutrients and minerals using only plants. The image above, in
addition to being deceptive is based on a flawed idea that human
nutruition is about <em>consuming particular amounts of particular
substances</em> as if we are a perfectly predictable machine or a videogame.
This <strong>isn't just a Vegan problem</strong>, basically everyone implicitly has
this idea.</p>
<p>The reality is that those nutrients on the Nutrition Facts are a narrow
realm of what might actually be relevant for the complex organ of our
bodies. Additionally, there are many types of proteins and vitamins and
minerals that the back-of-the-box doesn't account for. The Vegan game
of saying, &quot;we can get that too&quot; is utterly pointless when you realize
we have nowhere close to a full idea of how the human body works, only
some plausible theories about the relationships between certain
nutrients and what they seem to do. As in the case of some nutrients,
like the falsely-maligned cholesterol is a good example of something two
generations of people were told to fear and reduce only for us to later
realize that our ideas about how it interacted in the body were arguably
literally backwards.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/wanna-learn-latex/
title: Wanna Learn LaTeX?
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/wanna-learn-latex/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<figure class="titleimg"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/animalibus.png"></figure>

<h2 id="table-of-contents">Table of Contents</h2>
<ol>
<li><a href="#intro">What is LaTeX?</a></li>
<li><a href="#install">Installing LaTeX</a></li>
<li><a href="#tutorials">LaTeX Video Tutorials</a></li>
</ol>
<p><strong>I have a full video tutorial series on learning LaTeX, broken into
small sensible parts,
<a href="https://videos.lukesmith.xyz/videos/watch/playlist/48a02be8-115a-4842-9ebf-6e3c6245f290">here</a>.</strong></p>
<h2 id="intro">What is LaTeX?</h2>
<p>Basically, it's how big boys write and format documents. Every public
brief, scientific article, book, cryptocurrency whitepaper or even
outline written by people who know what they're doing is written in
LaTeX.</p>
<p>If you want to see examples of documents made with LaTeX, you can see
<a href="https://lukesmith.xyz/dox/luke_thesis.pdf">my Master's thesis here</a> or <a href="https://lukesmith.xyz/dox/prelim2.pdf">another
paper here</a> that shows some diagrams and
other features you can have in LaTeX. Of course, LaTeX documents can be
infinitely customized.</p>

<figure class="titleimg"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/write.gif"></figure>

<h3 id="is-it-hard">&quot;Is it hard?&quot;</h3>
<p>No. It's sort of like learning vim. People complain about how hard it
is until they take the bare minimum of time to learn it and realize how
much more effective they are with it. The return on investment is
massive. I wrote the thesis above in LaTeX in around a week of learning
from the bare minimum.</p>
<h3 id="how-is-latex-different">&quot;How is LaTeX different?&quot;</h3>
<p>LaTeX is a markup language, meaning that you write documents in whatever
text editor of your choosing and instead of manually moving margins and
placing things yourself, everything is optimally placed when you compile
the document into a .pdf.</p>
<p>Markup languages are great because they separate the task of writing
from the task of formatting. It's somewhat similar to the difference
between HTML (a markup language) and CSS (which does styling) and
Javascript (which does scripting). LaTeX does the equivalent of all
three, but it allows you to do them all separately so you can easily
extend documents.</p>
<h3 id="why-is-latex-better-than-microsoft-word-and-friends">&quot;Why is LaTeX better than Microsoft Word and friends?&quot;</h3>
<ul>
<li>Bibliographies are done <em>totally automatically</em>. For all the
research papers I've written in the past 5 years, I have never
written a bibliography page. You just tell LaTeX, &quot;Oh, APA style,
please&quot; and it's done.</li>
<li>Section/page numbering and cross referencing is done automatically.
That means if you refer people to a chart on page 52 multiple times
or figure 5 or chapter 4, then you move pages or figures or chapters
around, the references continues to refer to the page, figure or
chapter you originally meant. That also means you can literally copy
and paste text out of your document into a larger document and LaTeX
will automatically reconfigure all cross-referenced numbers to be
correctly referring to what you actually want them pointing to.</li>
<li>Text can easily be copied to a new format. I've written many term
papers that latter became monographs or books and with LaTeX, you
can just copy the raw text and it takes on the formatting of the
document it is inside of.</li>
<li>It is scriptable. You can use coreutilities and other programs to
search, modify and move text. This seems <em>useless</em> if you've never
done it, but it makes a world of difference when you realize you
can. You could use this, for example, to automatically take customer
information on your computer and automatically-generate professional
itemized invoices in LaTeX or the like. Also, being able to use
<code>sed -i</code> and <code>grep</code> with <code>.tex</code> files is fantastic.</li>
<li>For more advanced users, LaTeX is more than a markup language too:
and also has basic logic and tests (if statements and the like) that
allow you to react dynamically to unknown content.</li>
<li>You can write LaTeX in literally anything. I write it in vim for its
extensibility, but you can easily design your own workflow, instead
of having to rely on the ever-changing idiosyncracies of Microsoft
Word.</li>
</ul>
<h4 id="but-word-has-some-of-those-things">&quot;But Word has some of those things!&quot;</h4>
<p>Niche features that basically no Word-user uses. Also they change with
every new update. This is the primary operating structure of LaTeX.</p>
<h2 id="install">Installing LaTeX</h2>
<p>The core LaTeX package (<code>texlive</code>) is fairly small, but I highly
recommend you download <em>all</em> the LaTeX packages out there at the
beginning (a big download). This is nice because as you learn more
things, you won't have to manually download new packages. You'll be
able to experiment with new LaTeX abilities through new packages
seamlessly. Here's how you get them:</p>
<ul>
<li>GNU/Linux
<ul>
<li>Arch-based (Artix, Manjaro, Parabola):
<code>pacman -S texlive-most texlive-lang</code></li>
<li>Debian-based (Ubuntu/Linux Mint): <code>apt-get install texlive-full</code></li>
<li>Some distros (like Void) use <code>tlmgr</code> to install TeX packages
instead of the main package manager.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Windows:
<a href="https://miktex.org/download/#collapse264">Here</a>.
(Choose the net install to be able to install all packages.)</li>
<li>MacOS: <a href="https://tug.org/mactex/">Here</a>.</li>
</ul>
<p>Once you've downloaded and installed that, you have a fully-featured
LaTeX engine on your machine! You can make lots of amazing things that
you don't even fully realize yet.</p>
<h2 id="tutorials">LaTeX Video Tutorials</h2>
<h3 id="basics">Basics</h3>
<p>First thing to learn is how to compile documents with <code>pdflatex</code> and the
basic principles of the TeX lanugage. In this first video, I talk about
how basic text, paragraphs, titles, headings and more work. This in
itself is enough to make a professional write-up.</p>
<details>
    <summary>Click to reveal video.</summary>
<iframe src="https://videos.lukesmith.xyz/video-playlists/embed/48a02be8-115a-4842-9ebf-6e3c6245f290?playlistPosition=2"
        loading="lazy"
        sandbox="allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-popups"
        allowfullscreen frameborder="0"
        class="embvid"
        title="Embedded Video">
</iframe>
</details>

<h3 id="numbering-and-cross-referencing">Numbering and cross-referencing</h3>
<p>As you make more complex documents, you'll want to automatically number
and interrelate section, figure and other numbers together. LaTeX makes
this super simple, and make it even easier to copy your file into a new
file where it will automatically update all cross-referenced numbers.</p>
<details>
    <summary>Click to reveal video.</summary>
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<h3 id="bibliographies-with-biber-and-biblatex">Bibliographies with Biber and BibLaTeX</h3>
<p>Bibliography management is a huge plus in LaTeX through biber. I
haven't written a bibliography in more than half a decade due to the
fact that LaTeX only needs a bibliography file of metadata and
autogenerates citations for any needed source.</p>
<details>
    <summary>Click to reveal video.</summary>
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<h3 id="images-and-figures">Images and Figures</h3>
<p>TeX isn't all text either. You can insert and nicely format images in a
way that they are optimally placed without too much human interference.</p>
<details>
    <summary>Click to reveal video.</summary>
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<h3 id="macros-to-make-things-easy">Macros to make things easy</h3>
<p>As you do more specific things, you might want to make your own macros
and functions. This really makes things easier, and you can do very
complex things very elegantly.</p>
<details>
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<h3 id="slide-presentations-with-beamer">Slide Presentations with Beamer</h3>
<p>LaTeX isn't <em>just</em> for printable documents either. You can change your
document into a Beamer presentation, allowing you to present it as a
slide show similar to Microsoft PowerPoint's.</p>
<details>
    <summary>Click to reveal video.</summary>
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<h3 id="making-a-professional-résumé">Making a Professional Résumé</h3>
<p>Here, I also give some extra pointers while I make a résumé.</p>
<h4 id="part-1">Part 1</h4>
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<h4 id="part-2">Part 2</h4>
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guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/we-want-our-4-causes-back/
title: We Want Our 4 Causes Back!
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/we-want-our-4-causes-back/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<figure class="titleimg"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/aris_med.webp"><figcaption>Artistotle, a medieval depiction.</figcaption></figure>

<p>Aristotle, in his <em>Physics</em> argued that there are four causes behind
everything that exists. These causes answer the question of &quot;How&quot; or
&quot;Why&quot; something is the way it is.</p>
<dl>
<dt>The Material Cause</dt>
<dd>The material from which something is made. E.g. the stone of a
statue.</dd>
<dt>The Efficient Cause</dt>
<dd>The external force that causes something to be made. E.g. the
artisan and his tools who make a statue.</dd>
<dt>The Formal Cause</dt>
<dd>The form or plan of the thing made that define it. E.g. the
artisan's written or thought blueprints or sketch of plans for how
to make the statue.</dd>
<dt>The Final Cause</dt>
<dd>The goal and reason of the thing. E.g. the purpose for which the
artisan is making the statue.</dd>
</dl>
<p>If the statue lacks any one of the four causes, it will not be made.</p>
<h2 id="the-demise-of-the-formal-and-final-causes">The Demise of the Formal and Final Causes</h2>
<p>If you want to point your finger at a single philosophical change that
defines the shift from the Aristotelean worldview of antiquity and the
Middle Ages to the materialism of modernity, it is the rejection of the
Formal and Final Causes in the early Enlightenment.</p>
<p>Just ask your modern brain: &quot;Does everything <em>really</em> have a purpose?&quot;
You will probably reflexively think back &quot;No,&quot; therefore, you do not
believe in a Final Cause to everything. The same is true of the Formal
Cause, both of them seeming to assume that there is a kind of conscious
agency behind the action. That isn't strictly speaking how Aristotle
intended them, but that's how they are interpreted through modern
goggles.</p>
<p>You can see their rejection as early as the 1600's: Francis Bacon in
<em>Novum Organum</em> pushed aside the Final Cause as only being only suitable
for inter-human behavior. The Formal Cause, he dismissed merely as
<em>desperata</em> &quot;hopeless.&quot; He actually dismissed the vocabulary of the
other two causes as being superficial and an irrelevant distinction too,
but philosophically, they are still retained in his philosophy by other
terms.</p>
<p>In any case, modern people do not believe in Final and Formal Causes, or
if they do, not for everything in the cosmos. For Aquinas and others in
the Aristotelean world, the question of whether the universe has a
purpose or a formal plan is a kind of tautology. Of course it does!
Everything non-random does in Aristotelianism.</p>
<h2 id="the-final-cause-in-nature">The Final Cause in Nature?</h2>
<p>Now our post-materialist view of the Final Cause is sort of different
from Aristotle's original view. We have to remember that Aristotle
viewed grammar and cognition as something that in some way was directly
reflective of reality itself. Compare this view shared with the
so-called &quot;Speculative Grammarians&quot; of the Middle Ages,
&quot;speculative&quot; coming from the Latin word <em>speculum</em> &quot;mirror&quot;, since
grammar reflects reality. This common strand stretches from Aristotle to
those influenced by his work like Priscian and Bacon (Roger (who was
based), not Francis (who was p. cringe)).</p>
<p>Nowadays we atomize questions like &quot;Why&quot; to the point that even
causality itself doesn't mean anything and is a mere human cognitive
convention, but for Aristotle, the linguistic existence of &quot;Why&quot;
questions means that there is a legitimate logical equivalent to &quot;Why&quot;
in reality.</p>
<p>Aristotle originally had argued that it is appropriate to refer to the
Final Cause of something whenever it is not due to randomness or
spontaneity. The example he uses is the growth of human teeth: there is
no variance in where the molar and incisors grow within the human mouth.
Everything appears where it's &quot;supposed to&quot; and we can assume that
there is some kind of Final Cause behind this.</p>
<p>If different shapes and sizes teeth grew in different locations of the
mouth, then it would be appropriate to talk of them as lacking a Final
Cause. Things that appear randomly and inconsistently do not necessarily
have Final Causes, but if something happens invariably, we can trust
that it has a Final Cause.</p>
<h2 id="darwin-got-it-wrong-too">Darwin &quot;Got It Wrong&quot; too?</h2>

<figure class="resright"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/wdgw.jpg"></figure>

<p>So how far are moderns willing to take the rejection of the Formal and
Final Causes?</p>
<p>One of my old Ph.D. advisors, Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini wrote a book
with Jerry Fodor called <em>What Darwin Got Wrong</em>. You can withhold your
kneejerk reactions; it's not a creationist book or anything, but it
almost ended up being as controversial&mdash;it's a critique of Darwinian
natural selection on &quot;philosophic&quot; grounds.</p>
<p>I will stultify one of the main arguments for brevity's sake: &quot;How can
we reasonably talk about evolution as a goal oriented process when we
have admitted already that speaking of Final Causes is illegitimate?&quot;
Massimo and Fodor do not use the Aristotelian terms, (instead they talk
of Gould's spandrels) but that's what they mean.</p>
<h3 id="evolution-would-only-have-been-scientific-in-medieval-europe">Evolution would only have been &quot;scientific&quot; in Medieval Europe.</h3>
<p>Darwinian natural selection is actually a kind of cheat idea for
materialism. In order to understand how humans have arisen from common
descent with other animals, we <em>want</em> to have a narrative of why we
speak, why we are bipedal, why our bodies are mostly hairless, etc. etc.
Natural selection offers an answer without reference to a conscious
incremental designer (God), but it smuggles back in the Final Cause:
&quot;<em>This</em> evolved to do <em>that</em>.&quot;</p>
<p>But if we actually limit ourselves from talking in
purpose-driven/Final-Cause statements, the most communicative
&quot;scientific&quot; thing we can say is &quot;Humans share a common ancestor with
other animals, but we became different.&quot; The issue of &quot;Why&quot; is
dreaded &quot;metaphysics.&quot; In truth, <strong>we actually <em>need</em> a Final Cause to
understand anything.</strong> The Final Cause, as Aristotle notes, is really
the most important cause, because understanding it is key to
understanding something in its greater context. <strong>Understanding
something intuitively largely amounts to knowing its Final Cause.</strong>
Darwinism came to be accepted as a theory because it cleverly smuggled
in illegal metaphysics that we were having withdrawal symptoms for. When
you really think about it, this totally withdraws Darwinian selection
from the ledger of supposedly scientific topics if you took such
standards seriously (I don't).</p>
<p>The funny thing is that people can easily be made to become
hyper-material anti-metaphysicians or lax on everything depending on
circumstances. Fodor and Massimo partially wrote their book as a critic
of &quot;adaptationism&quot; and evolutionary psychology, which were and still
are bugaboos to the political left because they seek to explain minutiae
of human social life, including hot-button issues like gender
differences and race, in the light of Darwinian natural selection.
Leftists like Gould and Lewontin would dismiss such explanations as
&quot;just-so stories,&quot; as would science-popularizers and the press, but
Fodor and Massimo argue that this is an argument you cannot avoid
generalizing once you make it. It applies to all of evolution: if it is
philosophically illegitimate to talk about human sexual dimorphism
because that reads a Final Causes into evolution, then it is equally
illegitimate to talk about any other kind of change as being purpose
driven by &quot;selection.&quot;</p>
<p>This book was received with mostly hostile confusion by the mainstream
press and I suspect most biologists which mostly missed the argument and
were languishing in the culture wars of the Bush Years. Mind you, I
don't <em>agree</em> with the book, but it's mostly because I don't care to
endorse this kind of materialism, but most people do indeed at least
claim to abide by it, so these arguments would be important to address
for them.</p>
<h3 id="just-a-linguistic-argument">Just a &quot;linguistic&quot; argument?</h3>
<p>At the end of it, any evolutionary biologist will be tempted to throw up
their hands and say &quot;So what‽&quot; to that philosophical objection. After
all, it sure feels like some kind of technicality or argument from the
way we linguistically <em>talk</em> about evolution. <strong>And they're right!</strong> In
truth, Darwinian evolution is a useful theory <em>specifically because</em> it
is a method of giving us a Final Cause for gradual evolutionary changes.
That's the whole point afterall. If it didn't give us a Final Cause,
it wouldn't be an explanation. Striking the Formal Cause from
scientific vocabulary is only a recipe for the typical postivistic
science status quo of denying any &quot;metaphysics&quot; to your science while
just tacitly assuming it all.</p>
<h2 id="return-of-the-formal-cause">Return of the Formal Cause?</h2>

<figure class="resright"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/jellyfish.jpg"></figure>

<p>What about the Formal Cause? That is, what about the idea that
everything must have a form/plan behind its creation? If we are willing
to concede that a <em>Final Cause</em> can arise from natural selection, what
about a Formal Cause?</p>
<p>While I'm on Fodor and Massimo's book (who again, are not talking in
Aristotelian terms themselves), they actually do end up resuscitating the
Formal Cause as well, albeit in a more purposeful way. While the book
beats around the bush, I can say that in my conversations with Massimo
at Arizona, he really does think of evolution as not being an issue of
natural selection. Instead he (and Noam Chomsky as well) has the view
that complex features in biology evolve from in-built genetic parameters
whose complex interactions can also produce fully-formed design. This is
the kernel of Minimalism in linguistics.</p>
<p>Now in presentations, Massimo always loves to talk about those species
of jellyfish which with a single simple genetic change, develop highly
complicated proto-eyes even without a direct need. <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/107/32/14263">One minor genetic
development</a> can produce
structure as complicated as a primitive eye. This is not uncommon in
biology because many complex structures are simple derivatives of simple
principles. The general name for this is <em>emergent properties</em> and
are said to be based on so-called <em>Laws of Form</em>.</p>
<p>Laws of Form are actually a big topic of conversation in linguistics
nowadays, Chomsky's idea approaching the idea that one single and very
simple cognitive change could be enough to produce the human language
faculty. (This is totally contrary to the pop-idea of language abilities
slowly arising from behavioristic cave-man grunting complexifying over
centuries).</p>
<p>It should be obvious that Laws of Form, Fibonacci spirals, golden
ratios, apparent ordering and other emergent properties arise naturally
from the universe without the obvious need of conscious planning. This
is not a rejection of the Formal Cause, but states the truth that it is
universal. &quot;Form&quot; needn't just be a conscious plan like the
sculptor's plan for a hunk of marble, but a form that emerges from
natural principles.</p>
<h2 id="even-a-materialistic-universe-generates-formal-and-final-causes">Even a Materialistic Universe Generates Formal and Final Causes</h2>
<p>In trying to escape the Formal and Final Causes, modern science has
really made them more irreplaceable. Laws of Form emerge from very
simple computational operations and define the formal structure of
things that arise in nature. At the same time, any kind of selective
pressure or survival mechanism like Darwinian selection will naturally
produce structure arranged to a goal. Understanding anything is quite
impossible without referring to its Formal and Final Causes.</p>
<p>For the Aristotelian up until Newton (the last of the magicians in J.M.
Keynes' terms), this is us <em>uncovering the Mind of God</em>. While words
like &quot;God&quot; make moderns queasy, it's legitimate to ask why the Formal
and Final Causes as concepts should. Final Causes are by definition
universal where unchecked spontaneity occurs. A conscious human mind is
not a prerequisite for them, neither for Formal Causes.</p>
<p>You actually can keep even a very clumsy materialism while accepting
these traditional notions. Indeed, to understand something's Final and
Formal Causes is to truly understand it such that the Material and
Efficient Causes seem like mere details.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/monero-maximalism-or-how-bitcoin-is-a-coin/
title: Monero Maximalism: Or, How Bitcoin Is a 💩coin
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/monero-maximalism-or-how-bitcoin-is-a-coin/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<figure class="titleimg"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/xmr_maxi.webp" title="You have one goal and one goal only: Buy and hold Monero!"></figure>

<h2 id="the-biggest-problem-with-cryptocurrency">The Biggest Problem with Cryptocurrency</h2>
<p>Most normal people hear the word &quot;cryptocurrency&quot; and assume that
means that they are &quot;cryptic&quot; or &quot;private,&quot; but that's actually a
huge, perhaps the hugest misunderstanding of our time and it has some
big consequences. The &quot;crypto&quot; in <em>cryptocurrency</em> merely comes
from its cryptographic nature.</p>
<p>When it comes to actual privacy, cryptocurrencies are an unmitigated
disaster: All transactions and wallet balances are easily viewable on
the necessarily public blockchain.</p>
<p>This might not <em>seem</em> like a problem to some, and there are also some
who will retort with &quot;Well, I'm not doing anything illegal so it
doesn't matter to me.&quot;</p>
<p>But here's the thing: <strong>Every currency in human history has been
totally private, so we have no other similar disaster scenario to even
compare this to.</strong></p>
<p>American dollars are centrally financially controled, but we can
transact without that being public information. Even when using a Visa
or Mastercard with your bank, Visa or your bank might know of the
transaction, but it <em>isn't</em> broadcast publicly to the entire world like
Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.</p>
<p><strong>Bitcoin is therefore a unique privacy disaster that we can't even
anticipate.</strong> No cryptocurrency is widely used enough as an actual
currency for people to really feel the burn of this, but this opens up
huge liabilities for every human on the planet. You might think the
American dollar is a NWO/Satanic/Mark-of-the-Beast currency that will
take away your freedoms, but let me tell you that Bitcoin as it is <em>is
far worse!</em></p>
<h3 id="the-disaster-of-the-bitcoin-future">The Disaster of the Bitcoin Future</h3>
<p>Here's some of the things we can expect in a world running on Bitcoin:</p>
<ul>
<li>Your personal budget, income and bank account is necessarily public
information.</li>
<li>Every business's expenditures and payroll are now necessarily
public information. Everyone in the world knows how much everyone
makes and know what suppliers each business transacts with. Trade
secrets are a thing of the past. Employee privacy is a thing of the
past.</li>
<li>Consumer privacy is a thing of the past. Everyone knows how much
money everyone spends everywhere else.</li>
<li>Even giving money to friends for favors or help is visible to the
IRS. This makes easy micromanagement and taxation of even minor
things that might not be plausibly taxable now.</li>
<li>Nearly every privacy law is rendered unenforceable and useless by
Bitcoin.</li>
</ul>
<p>No sane person would volunteer to reveal all their bank accounts,
transaction histories, spending habits and thereby physical movements
for no reason to every government and business in the world. But if you
use most cryptocurrencies, that is exactly what you're doing.</p>
<h3 id="it-will-be-even-worse">It will be even worse.</h3>
<p>Losing personal privacy is one thing. Maybe you don't even mind a world
where eveyone is continuously &quot;doxxed&quot; and bombared with perfectly
targetted ads <em>a là</em> Minority Report.</p>
<p>More important than that is <em>systemic privacy</em>. In a system with glass
walls like Bitcoin, criminals, governments, corporations and regulatory
agencies realize that it is very easy for them to abuse and exploit
people. Expect the maximum amount of extortion, the maximum amount of
taxes on increasingly mundane things and the maximum amount
micromanagement.</p>
<p>While you might not be able to imagine in your mind's eye all the
terrible things that might happen with a fully monitorable currency,
needless to say, it will contain what are, in effect, indescribable
Lovecraftian monsters from the blackest Stygian depths. Bitcoin is the
opposite of freedom. It is giving a <em>carte blanche</em> to all the world's
worst people to prey on innocents.</p>
<h2 id="the-solution-monero">The Solution: Monero</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.getmonero.org/"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/xmr.svg" alt="monero icon">Monero</a> (also
known by its ticker &quot;XMR&quot;) is an exception to this.</p>
<p>Monero is a digital currency that has the blockchain technology of
Bitcoin, but has in its core very smartly designed tech to keep the
transactions on this public blockchain totally opaque. It takes what
we've learned from Bitcoin and makes a complete project that can
function, in fact <em>is functioning</em> in real life.</p>
<p>Firstly, the technologies which make the Monero blockchain private:</p>
<ol>
<li><em>Ring signatures</em> to protect sender privacy. All transactions
are jointly signed by not just the actual sender, but ten other
addresses. Security by obscurity and plausible deniability.</li>
<li><em>Stealth addresses</em> to protect receiver privacy. Instead of
one address on the blockchain, you technically have a different
address for every single transaction and only by your private view
key can you see that they are yours.</li>
<li><em>Ring confidential transactions</em> to obscure the amount sent.</li>
</ol>

<figure class="titleimg"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/satoshi_monero.webp"><figcaption>The creator of Bitcoin really intended to create what Monero would later become. Bitcoin itself is incomplete.</figcaption></figure>

<p>None of this means any complication for the user. Monero works just like
any other cryptocurrency and if you use the <a href="https://www.getmonero.org/downloads/#gui">default graphical Monero
wallet</a>, it's just as easy to
use Electrum or something else for Bitcoin.</p>
<h3 id="monero-is-for-normal-people">Monero is for normal people</h3>
<p>Monero is often portrayed as being subversive because it is coming to
totally replace Bitcoin on the dark net for illegal transactions. It
often has a reputation associated with those potentially criminal
purposes it could be used for (same thing with Bitcoin before blockchain
monitoring became a science). Monero is not doing anything illegal that
cash couldn't do beforehand, but there's a more important point:</p>
<p><strong>Much more evil can be done with public transactions than private
transactions: they can cause blackmail, rumors, gossip-mongering,
witchhunts, stalking and targeted robberies and attacks.</strong> Seasoned
criminals know how to juggle Bitcoin and other non-cryptic
cryptocurrencies to avoid compromising privacy; normal people do not and
can fall prey to some of the worst things just by using Bitcoin for
normal things in normal ways.</p>
<p>At the end of the day, <strong>it's not Monero that's weird or subversive or
niche, it's Bitcoin and all other cryptocurrencies</strong>. Privacy is a bare
minimum for any functioning currency. Currency users deserve that and no
currency could function without it. The dollar, the euro, the renminbi
and every other currency by definition has the same privacy features as
Monero. Bitcoin just doesn't have that.</p>
<h3 id="monero-solves-all-of-bitcoins-other-problems">Monero solves all of Bitcoin's other problems.</h3>
<p>Bitcoin also has other drawbacks:</p>
<ol>
<li>Bitcoin block size is limited to such a small size that spenders
have to compete with massive fees to get their transactions
processed. It often takes $10 of Bitcoin to send $5 of Bitcoin.</li>
<li>It is unclear if the Bitcoin have incentives to continue once all
Bitcoins are mined.</li>
<li>Bitcoin mining is increasingly centralized and requires extreme
specialty ASIC hardware to compete.</li>
</ol>
<p>All of these pale in comparison to the privacy issue, and a lot of smoke
is generated by random coins trying to solve these issues, but Monero
has a solution for them all.</p>
<h4 id="1-monero-has-low-transaction-fees">1. Monero has low transaction fees.</h4>
<p>Monero has variable block size that avoids this issue as well, as long
with a disincentive for large blocksizes to prevent spurious
transactions (that could otherwise be theoretically used in an attack to
compromise network privacy).</p>
<h4 id="2-monero-will-be-mined-forever">2. Monero will be mined forever.</h4>
<p>The second issue is the big question mark behind the whole Bitcoin
system. Once all Bitcoins are mined, will miners continue to process
transactions if they are paid by fees only?</p>
<p>This isn't an issue for Monero because there is never a point where the
block reward for mining is zero. It will eventually stagnate at 0.6 XMR
for eternity, which is a supply inflation which approaches zero over
time and avoids the issue of no block rewards. This is called <em>tail emission</em>.</p>
<p>Note also that any solution to Bitcoin's first problem above, will
necessarily exacerbate the second problem. If you solve the fee problem,
you make the mining incentive problem worse. If there is the Lightning
Network or something else that reduces Bitcoin's fees dramatically, the
chance of those lower fees maintaining miners will decrease
dramatically.</p>
<p>I will say, if you think that the capped supply of Bitcoin will work out
fine and might be better, you can still have the benefits of Monero with
<a href="https://wownero.org"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/wow.svg" alt="">Wownero</a>, which is a Monero fork
with a capped supply and doge-tier memes (it also has a higher ring
signature size of 22 which might theoretically be better for privacy (or
overkill)). <a href="https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/wownero/">(See on
Coinmarketcap)</a> They also
have <a href="https://suchwow.xyz/">a meme site</a>.</p>
<h4 id="3-monero-stays-decentralized-by-avoiding-mass-mining">3. Monero stays decentralized by avoiding mass-mining.</h4>
<p>Monero is specifically designed to avoid allowing specialty hardware
(ASICs) participate in mining. This makes individual mining on consumer
computers more possible for longer and makes it hard to farm Monero.
They use a technology called
<a href="https://www.getmonero.org/resources/moneropedia/randomx.html">RandomX</a>
to do this.</p>
<h3 id="other-monero-perks">Other Monero Perks</h3>
<p>In short, Monero is cryptocurrency done right. Bitcoin was a great proof
of concept, but Monero fixes all the issues that the Bitcoin project
brought to attention.</p>
<p>There are yet more good features of Monero that are worth mentioning:</p>
<h4 id="optional-transparency-with-private-view-keys">Optional Transparency with Private View Keys</h4>
<p>In some cases, you might <em>not</em> want privacy, but transparency with
Monero. Suppose you're running a kind of non-profit that want's to
proudly show all their financials to potential donnors. Monero allows
this too with <em>Private View Keys</em>. You can publish your private
view keys on your website for your transactions to visible to whoever
has them.</p>
<h4 id="monero-is-actively-developed-and-improved">Monero is actively developed and improved.</h4>
<p>Monero users and developers are constantly trying to improve, break and
stress-test the technology. A lot of the features I've mentioned here
have been added to Monero since its founding. If you want to have an in
depth look at the history of Monero's development and technology, you
can see <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsSYUeVwrHBnAUre2G_LYDsdo-tD0ov-y">this video series &quot;Breaking
Monero&quot;</a>
where some guys overview how Monero has overcome previous issues to
become the prime privacy coin of today.</p>
<h2 id="using-and-holding-monero">Using and Holding Monero</h2>
<p>If you're reading this, I'll assume you're at least superficially
familiar with cryptocurrencies and probably have some Bitcoin. Even if
that's not so, just follow the links and you're smart enough to get
started.</p>
<h3 id="wallets">Wallets</h3>
<p><a href="https://www.getmonero.org/downloads/">Get a Monero wallet here</a> from
their main site. Write down and store your wallet seed where you will
never lose it.</p>
<h3 id="getting-monero">Getting Monero</h3>
<p>The first thing I recommend everyone should do is put your public
address on your website for donations and produce high-quality writing
and other website content. Monero users will usually be more likely to
send small Monero donations since transaction fees are low. This also
increases the profile of Monero in the eyes of anyone who sees it, which
is a good costless investment for you now. Cryptocurrencies are driven
by networking effects. Note that you can make a QR code with <code>qrencode</code>
or an online generator if you're a true-blue normie.</p>
<p>The unofficial site <a href="https://www.monero.how/">Monero.how</a> lists many
exchanges where you can exchange Bitcoin or Ethereum for Monero and
store it on your private wallet, including many that don't require KYC
(sending in an ID).</p>
<p>The site <a href="https://localmonero.co/">Local Monero</a> is even an anonymous
service where you can mail in cash to exchange with a trusted Monero
vendor or vice versa.</p>
<p>I also recommend using <a href="https://bisq.network/">Bisq</a> for the highest
level of privacy. It is a peer-to-peer and totally anonymous exchange
which even creates its own Tor service automatically. You can exchange
XMR for BTC there too.</p>
<p><a href="https://localmonero.co/nojs/knowledge/monero-atomic-swaps">There are also Bitcoin/Monero atomic swaps in the
works.</a> This
is something very new, but when it happens and goes fully public, you
might expect a lot of value in Bitcoin moving over into Monero.</p>
<h3 id="use-now-or-to-hodl">Use now or to HODL?</h3>
<p>They also keep a small list of <a href="https://www.getmonero.org/community/merchants/">the growing number of services that
accept Monero</a>.
Everything from online services, to houses, to computer parts and more.
I also keep a <a href="../crypto.html">Monero donation address</a> public and
recommend others to do so as well. Since Monero transaction fees are so
low, microtransactions and small donations are easy.</p>
<p>Although if you're persuaded by my case here, you might just want to
HODL Monero for the most part and expect that it will rise. As I'm
writing this (April 21, 2021) Monero has increased a lot recently in the
ongoing bullrun, but it is still proportionately far lower than it was
in comparison with Bitcoin in the 2017 run. I have no clue whether it
will moon or crash hard at the end of the bullrun or anything, all I can
say is that I think the technological fundamentals are far better than
Bitcoin and all other currencies and its only getting scarcer.</p>
<p>What separates Monero from everything else is that it is a gimmickless
currency that has all the bare minimums of privacy. It is Bitcoin
perfected. It's what Bitcoin should've been. That's it.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/monero-and-other-privacy-coins/
title: Monero and Other Privacy Coins
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/monero-and-other-privacy-coins/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>As I said <a href="https://lukesmith.xyz/posts/monero-maximalism-or-how-bitcoin-is-a-coin">in other writings</a> and
<a href="https://videos.lukesmith.xyz/videos/watch/8ba38c94-e8c2-421f-bb5f-47f4169fa804">videos</a>,
no serious cryptocurrency can function <strong>in real life</strong> which is not
also a <em>truly private</em> cryptocurrency.</p>
<p>By far, the most popular of all these is Monero, which has already
become the <em>de facto</em> currency of the dark web, but also of <em>all</em>
cryptocurrency users <em>who actually use cryptocurrency for purposes other
than a mere investment</em>.</p>
<p>Monero, however, is not actually the only private or pseudo-private
crypto-currency, and while I talked about its competitors in a recent
stream, I think it's worth putting in words for a reference.</p>
<h2 id="moneros-competitors">Monero's Competitors</h2>
<h3 id="zcash-is-trash">Zcash is Trash</h3>

<figure class="resright"><a href="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/zcashy_owned.png"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/zcashy_owned_small.png"></a></figure>

<p><strong>Optional privacy is no privacy at all.</strong></p>
<p>Zcash (ZEC) is often shilled as a Monero replacement. On the surface it
actually sounds great and unambiguously better: it has a clever a
zero-knowledge proof technology called zk-SNARKs which can store and
prove transactions in the blockchain in a private way. zk-SNARKs are
generally superior to Monero's somewhat ragtag triad of ring
signatures + stealth addresses + ring CT to anonymize transactions and
they are more scalable.</p>
<p>zk-SNARK is short for &quot;Zero Knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARgument
of Knowledge.&quot;</p>
<ul>
<li>Zero Knowledge &ndash; It is private.</li>
<li>Succinct &ndash; Referring to computation time.</li>
<li>Non-interactive &ndash; In some earlier implementations of the
technology, the interacting parties must exchange information and
negotiate in turns, while zk-SNARKs can occur instantaneously.</li>
</ul>
<p>Zcash, however, has two major problems, one substantial and one
accidental (in the Aristotelean sense).</p>
<p>The substantial problem is that zk-SNARKs <em>are not fully trustless</em>:
they require a trusted setup where public parameters are generated and
if not properly disposed of, the initial developers could use that
knowledge to produce infinite money without anyone knowing. This sort of
defeats the purpose of having a decentralized cryptocurrency and while
the rest of the currency is decentralized, that gaping hole certainly
isn't.</p>
<p>The accidental problem (or maybe <em>incidental</em> problem in modern English)
is that Zcash is only <em>optionally private</em>. The vast majority of ZEC
transactions are not &quot;shielded&quot; with the zk-SNARK technology, but are
as public as a Bitcoin transaction. <strong>This allows a third-party to
uncover the &quot;private&quot; transactions by a process of automatic process
of elimination.</strong></p>
<p>Zcash, while is created valuable technology, is simply not a private
currency and is not a valid competitor to Monero.</p>
<h3 id="pirate-chain">Pirate Chain</h3>
<p>Pirate Chain (ARRR) is a minor privacy coin that has mooned
significantly recently popping up from 30 cents to 14 dollars or so
(it's halved since I started writing this article though). Pirate Chain
uses the zk-SNARK technology, but unlike Zcash, uses it mandatorily
(with optional transparent transactions like Monero via the private view
key).</p>
<p>Pirate Chain has two big issues though. The first is what I mentioned
before: zk-SNARKs as they have been implemented in ZEC and ARRR are
<strong>not trustless</strong>. They require a setup in which theoretically, if the
public parameters of the system were known to some inside party, they
could print an infinite amount of the currency with absolutely no way
that any other people could know.</p>
<p>Even if you <em>trust</em> the Pirate Chain developers, Pirate has another
pretty undeniable problem: <strong>90% of ARRR has already been mined and is
in circulation!</strong> Yep, you heard that right: A minor niche alt-coin
which has existed for only three years was put together in such away
that now as big of a proportion of it has been mined as has been mined
of Bitcoin in over ten years!</p>
<p>That means that that 90% is highly aggregated in the wallets of the two
and a half people who knew of ARRR in this period, and anyone adding to
the market cap is mostly just contributing to these people's bags. Even
if Pirate Chain had great trustless technology (which is doesn't) it
has not been set up equitably, but in a way that enriches early adopters
to an extreme degree. Expect to get dumped on if you buy this stuff.</p>
<p>Honestly, if you want a better, more honest cryptocurrency, you could
just take the Pirate setup and give it a slower and more sane emission.
That would be a better choice than ARRR itself.</p>
<h3 id="monero--dogecoin--bitcoin--wownero">Monero + Dogecoin + Bitcoin = Wownero</h3>

<figure class="resright"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/nowow.jpg"></figure>

<p><a href="https://wownero.org">website</a> &ndash; <a href="https://suchwow.xyz">meme site</a></p>
<p>Wownero is a joke currency. It's literally a fork of Monero with
Dogecoin aesthetics and some minor additions. Like Pirate Chain, it also
has surged significantly recently (from 2 or 3 cents to more than a
dollar&mdash;beating out Dogecoin as a pump-and-dump for sure).</p>
<p>Weirdly enough, Wownero is probably the best of the alternative privacy
coins that I've mentioned so far. It's trustless, unlike the zk-SNARK
coins, but also has some nice features.</p>
<p>It was created somewhat as a satirical response for another privacy
💩coin, MoneroV, which was just Monero with an initial coin offering and
forked from the same blockchain (which ruins the privacy of users on
both chains because it becomes easier to triangulate on when outputs are
actually spent).</p>
<p>Since Wownero is a &quot;joke,&quot; it actually has integrated new technology
and helpful additions <em>before</em> Monero has, since the Wownero developers
are doing it all fast and loose. Ironically, that can be good.</p>
<p>One principle division between Monero and Wownero is that Wownero is
more like Bitcoin in that it has a totally fixed supply, while Monero
has tail emission. Some people have criticized Monero for tail emission,
arguing that it is unnecessary and inflationary. I am not sold on either
side: the game theoretics of this has never truly played out, but
Wownero might actually be something to look into if you like Monero, but
think it's &quot;inflationary.&quot; Regardless, Wownero's whitepaper and
roadmap on their website are something that everyone should read and
take seriously.</p>
<p>Again, the currency is sort of a meme, but it is what it is. I decided
to start taking <a href="../crypto.html">Wownero donations</a> on my site a while
ago, just for fun.</p>
<h3 id="suterusu-and-the-suter-token">Suterusu and the Suter Token</h3>
<p><a href="https://suterusu.io/">website</a></p>
<p>Now the ideal private currency would have the simple and scalable
zk-SNARK technology implemented in a fair way and hopefully started in
some novel manner that is truly trustless. Suterusu is one potential
candidate for this kind of system. Behind it is a novel idea of
zk-conSNARKs which can be read about in their
<a href="https://github.com/suterusu-team/suterusu-documents/raw/master/Suterusu_whitepaper.pdf">whitepaper</a>,
their
<a href="https://github.com/suterusu-team/suterusu-documents/raw/master/Suterusu_yellowpaper%20V%200.2.pdf">yellowpaper</a>
and a document on <a href="https://github.com/suterusu-team/suterusu-documents/raw/master/Suterusu_architecture.pdf">Suterusu
architecture</a></p>
<p>This technology hasn't been extensively vetted, but it has the
potential to solve all the issues in privacy coins.</p>
<p>Suterusu isn't quite meant to be an analog of Monero. The token itself
is actually just an Ethereum token. In fact, this might be the
interesting part: Part of its system is that it can provide zk-conSNARK
shielding <em>to other currencies</em> that support smart contracts. You can
use Suter to transact with Ethereum privately, for example.</p>
<p>The Suterusu system, however is not perfect as far as I'm concerned. It
isn't a self-propelling decentralized system in the way that Bitcoin or
Monero is. That makes is regulatable and subject to human whim in a way
a cryptocurrency should not be. It is a designed system with dev taxes
and even <a href="https://medium.com/suterusu/regulation-compliance-of-suterusu-625abc752eb9">regulatory compliance that includes
blacklisting</a>.</p>
<h2 id="zk-snarks-vs-zk-starks">zk-SNARKs vs. zk-STARKs</h2>
<p>In addition to the zk-S<strong>N</strong>ARK system used in Zcash and Pirate, there
also exists zk-S<strong>T</strong>ARKs, which like zk-conSNARKs allow for a trustless
setup. <a href="https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/046.pdf">Whitepaper</a>.</p>
<p>To repeat, zk-SNARK stands for &quot;Zero Knowledge Succinct Non-interactive
ARguments of Knowledge.&quot; zk-S<strong>T</strong>ARK stands for &quot;Zero Knowledge
<strong>Scalable Transparent</strong> ARguments of Knowledge.&quot; [Scalable]{.dfn}
because it scales better than zk-SNARKs and [transparent]{.dfn} because
it has a trustless setup.</p>
<p>I do not know of a currency project that uses this technology now. Like
zk-conSNARKs, it's only a couple years old.</p>
<h2 id="the-ideal-privacy-coin">The ideal privacy coin</h2>
<p>Would be one that:</p>
<ol>
<li>Is actually private.</li>
<li>Is trustless.</li>
<li>Is highly scalable.</li>
<li>Is truly decentralized and unmanaged by a singular entity.</li>
<li>Has reasonably fair emission/mining schedule.</li>
</ol>
<p>Monero gets only half credit on 3, but full points on the rest. Wownero
is the same, although perhaps it should be taken less seriously as a
Doge-tier joke. Zcash fails on 1 and 2. Pirate Chain fails on 2 and 5.
Suterusu has great tech, but flounders on 4.</p>
<p>So the recipe for an ideal currency is here. It is one that implements
the zk-conSNARK technology of Suterusu or zk-STARKs (provided that such
technology is appropriately vetted), but does so in a way without
centralization, dev taxes and other self-refuting silliness.</p>
<p><strong>This ideal currency might just be Monero itself</strong>, to my understanding
Monero has contemplated integrating zk-STARKs as they become more
well-travelled. Such an addition, if it works, would drastically improve
the scalability of Monero even if it might require somewhat of an
overhaul.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/the-problems-with-utilitarianism/
title: The Problems with Utilitarianism
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/the-problems-with-utilitarianism/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>I originally wrote this essay in 2014 or 2015 in a Chinese buffet in
Athens, Georgia. I've changed some of it and am re-adding it here. I
talk about the issues with Utilitarianism and a bad book by Sam Harris.</p>
<hr>
<h2 id="utilitarianism">Utilitarianism</h2>
<p>At a dumb intuitive level, the &quot;ethical&quot; idea of
[Utilitarianism]{.dfn} in principle gets pretty close to what most
people reflexively want from social-political affairs: the greatest good
for the greatest number of people&mdash;who doesn't want that?</p>
<p>The problem is that that intuitive idea is <em>incoherent</em>. It sounds good,
but there's not really such a thing as &quot;the greatest good for the
greatest number of people.&quot; If there were, it wouldn't even be
actionable.</p>
<h2 id="maximizing">&quot;Maximizing&quot;</h2>
<p>So the first problem is one any mathematician will realize right off the
bat: it's rarely possible to maximize a function for two variables.</p>
<p>If we had the means, we could maximize (1) the amount of good in society
or (2) the number of people who feel that good, but nearly certainly not
both (if we can it's a bizarre coincidence).</p>
<p>It's sort of like saying you want to find a house with the highest
available altitude and the lowest available price; the highest house
might not have the lowest price and vice versa, the same way the way of
running society which maximizes happiness is nearly certainly not be the
way which maximizes all individuals' happiness.</p>
<p>There are some classic moral puzzles that bring this out: Let's say
there's a city where basically everyone is in absolute ecstasy, but
their ecstasy can only take place if one particular person in the city
is in intense and indescribable pain. Or to put it another way, to
maximize <em>my</em> happiness, we might need to make everyone in the world my
slave and allow me to rule as I please. Although this might maximize my
happiness, it might not maximize anyone else's (if it does however, we
might want to consider it).</p>
<h2 id="the-well-being-of-conscious-creatures">The Well-being of Conscious Creatures</h2>
<p>So I recently read Sam Harris's <em>The Moral Landscape</em> which is either a
failed attempt to bring Utilitarianism back to life or a misguided book
simply ignorant of what the problems with it were. I don't actually
recall Harris using the term &quot;utilitarianism,&quot; although that is really
just what he's arguing for.</p>
<p>Harris repeats one mantra basically every paragraph of the book: &quot;the
well-being of conscious creatures&mdash;the well-being of conscious
creatures&mdash;the well-being of conscious creatures.&quot; In addition to
being repetitive, the term is problematic for important reasons. So
Harris wants our Utilitarian engineers to maximize &quot;the well-being of
conscious creatures,&quot; but the problem is we can't <em>just add up</em>
enjoyment in the first place. There's no way of taking my enjoyment of
candy, subtracting the pain of a broken nose and adding/subtracting an
existential crisis or two.</p>
<p>Now his hope is eventually we'll understand the neurology of the brain
enough to do just that. I don't take Harris for a fool, and he <em>does</em>
have a Ph.D. in neuroscience (obviously I am being sarcastic), but I
think he's ignoring all the important problems either to appeal to a
public audience or just to convince himself. We <em>can</em> study the
neurology of feelings and get readings of neural activity, but objective
neural activity is certainly not subjective experience. Twice as much
neural activity doesn't mean &quot;twice&quot; the subjective experience.</p>
<p>We can no better look at brain activation to understand subjective
experience any better than we can look at the hot parts of a computer to
see what it's doing.</p>
<h3 id="you-cant-do-math-with-feelings">You can't do math with feelings</h3>
<p>Of course one of the problems of qualia/subjective experience is that
they are necessarily unquantifiable: imagine how you felt the last time
you got a present you really enjoyed&mdash;now imagine yourself feeling
exactly <em>twice</em> as happy&mdash;now <em>1.5</em> times as happy&mdash;now <em>100</em> times as
happy.</p>
<p>You can't do it, and even if you could, you couldn't compare that
experience with other experiences&mdash;you can't really understand what it
means to be as happy as you were sad a month ago, and that prevents us
from actually adding up your experiences into one number to be
maximized.</p>
<p>But again <em>even if we could</em> it would be impossible to add that number
up with someone else's experience. Humans have different subjective
experiences: caffeine affects me demonstrably different than other
people, but I can't quantify that; some people are more affected by
pain (to my understanding, women seem to have a neurology more
pain-prone than men), but how can we precisely relate the precise ratios
of every individual person?</p>
<p>And of course, although Harris wants to maximize &quot;the well-being of
<em>conscious creatures</em>,&quot; we have no <em>clue</em> what kinds of conscious
experiences define animal life, or how many animals are &quot;conscious&quot; in
any recognizable sense. As Thomas Nagel noted, we can't even begin to
imagine what it's like to be a bat, but to quantify their experiences
and compare them to our own? Forget about it!</p>
<p>Douglas Adams in his <em>Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</em> presented the
idea of a genetically engineered cow which not only was made to be able
to speak, but to enjoy the prospect of being eaten and encourage others
to kill and eat him. Experience itself is not some kind of thing arbiter
of morality. Pain, in fact, might be a negligible or incomplete guide to
what is not good. Children have to put up with being drug around to do
many things they don't enjoy. That doesn't mean some immorality in
anything.</p>
<p>The philosophical problems here are so endless as to make any kind of
objective application of Utilitarianism based on neuroscience far beyond
even fancy. I will be so bold as to say that this will simply never be
possible, regardless of what chips Elon Musk wants to put in your brain.</p>
<h3 id="to-repeat">To repeat:</h3>
<ul>
<li>We cannot quantify any particular feeling.</li>
<li>On top of that, we cannot compare the values of different feelings.</li>
<li>On top of that, we certainly not weigh the subjective feelings of
all humans or beasts against other humans' feelings.</li>
<li>On top of that, even if we could do that, we can't maximize for
utility in such a way to maximize all individual happiness and
collective happiness simultaneously.</li>
</ul>
<p>Utilitarianism isn't just impossible, it's impossible every step of
the way.</p>
<p>To be clear, these are not technological problems that a future
totalitarian government might be able to &quot;solve.&quot; There really is no
coherent sense in which we can put a number to a certain feeling of
happiness and subtract from that another person's feeling of
unhappiness. Qualia are qualia. It's like subtracting the sound of an
airplane from the color blue.</p>
<h2 id="what-utilitarianism-really-is">What Utilitarianism really is</h2>
<p>Anyway, the tradition of Utilitarianism was always a failure, but it's
an interesting sign of the times. The Enlightenment was a time of some
(less than usually thought) scientific advancement and the idea was that
as we began to understand the nature of the body and the stars and
everything else, we could fully understand too human society.</p>
<p>Eventually we could engineer and control them all. But as fast as we
learn things about the world, even faster do complications arise and we
end up &quot;[restoring nature's] ultimate secrets to that obscurity, in
which they ever did and ever will remain&quot; in Hume's words.</p>
<p>The only really unfortunate thing is that the ruling class of the West
either doesn't know or does care. There's a cynical sense in which
they are attempting to re-engineer or &quot;Build Back Better®️&quot; the world
on Utilitarian principles where every decision is determined to be
acceptable by some centralized utilitarian calculus.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/conspiratorial-thinking-and-multiple-outs/
title: Conspiratorial Thinking and "Multiple Outs"
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/conspiratorial-thinking-and-multiple-outs/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<h2 id="how-to-do-magic-tricks">How to do magic tricks...</h2>
<p>Magicians have this concept called &quot;Multiple Outs.&quot; It's actually how
you can do simple magic tricks. Suppose you have a person pick a card
and say you will guess the suit of their card.</p>
<p>They pick a diamond card and announce it, and you tell them to check
underneath their chair to reveal a slip of paper that says, &quot;You will
pick a diamond card.&quot;</p>
<p>That might sound like a nice trick, but if they had picked a spade, you
have another piece of paper under the fruitbowl that says, &quot;You will
pick a spade.&quot; If they pick a club, you unbutton your shirt to reveal a
giant club written on your undershirt, etc.</p>
<p>In essence, for any possible outcomes, you have a response planned that
seems natural and predictive. This is one of the ways that magicians do
what they do, often with more complicated mechanisms.</p>
<h2 id="applications">Applications</h2>
<p>Multiple outs are actually real magic.</p>
<p>You've heard the expression &quot;hope for the best and plan for the
worst,&quot; but the concept of multiple outs is that one should be planning
for <em>all possible</em> outcomes, including those that you yourself might not
even anticipate now.</p>
<p>Every business plan should have multiple outs. Your major life decisions
should be planned with multiple outs. You should even tacitly plan dates
with multiple outs, so that unexpected events can be met with a
confident, perhaps even better replacements.</p>
<h2 id="multiple-outs-in-political-power">Multiple outs in political power</h2>
<p>Any longstanding group in political power is by the mere fact of their
survival sure to have mastered the sleight of hand of &quot;multiple outs.&quot;</p>
<p>This serves not only to continue in political power, but to cement their
power further by the appearance of inevitability. A ruler or ruling
class puts themselves in a position to benefit from any possible
occurrence: be ready even to use disaster to your benefit, as Obama's
chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel put it succinctly: &quot;You never let a
serious crisis go to waste.&quot;</p>
<h3 id="conspiracy">Conspiracy?</h3>
<p>People skeptical of the state sometimes devolve into thinking that every
major political event is in one way or another is planned in advance.
This is because they don't understand and apply the concept of multiple
outs. They see that their rulers are good at benefiting from any chaos
or unforeseen events, so assume these events must've been engineered.</p>
<p>Look at the corona virus: it's a great example of an event that has
hugely benefited a small elite: it has bankrupted small businesses in
favor of Amazon, destroyed churches and mom and pop stores in favor of
passively consooming digital infotainment from curated social media
sites and more. It is a rationalization of state location and contact
monitoring and things far beyond what anyone dreamed of. It was a
rationalization for sending out unsolicited ballots to unverified voter
rolls which had very obvious beneficiaries. It has produced a cult of
doomsday believers crying for the state to lock them in their houses and
make them wear fetishistic masks.</p>
<p>Seeing all this and asking who benefits, &quot;Cui bono?&quot; might lead you to
think that the whole thing was planned: perhaps the disease itself is
fake, or maybe it was real, but spread on purpose, or perhaps it was
engineered. You've probably seen stuff like this, and while I won't
dismiss this kind of thinking out of hand, it's unnecessary.</p>
<p>In reality, the ruling classes of the West have openly prepared to
benefit from a pandemic scenario. COVID19 was deemed &quot;closed enough&quot;
to a pandemic, and the momentum of the system took over. It's not even
that they <em>wanted it to happen</em>, but they were prepped to benefit from
it as a contingency plan if it might occur.</p>
<h3 id="the-conspiracy-rabbit-hole-and-the-omnipotent-cathedral">The Conspiracy Rabbit Hole and the Omnipotent Cathedral</h3>
<p>There are some people who see how the ruling class is in a position to
benefit from every school-shooting, police encounter, foreign
entanglement, dissident politician and everything else and thus assume
that everything they see must be arranged in advance. There is a logic
behind believing this: it does seem <em>way</em> to convenient for all of this
to happen at what retroactively seems to the best time, but this leads
people to the much more uneconomical idea that the System is so
omnipotent that it controls every event and every reaction to every
event.</p>
<p>In reality, our rulers just know how to use multiple outs. When you know
how to do that, it seems like you are always in control, and by nature,
people attribute a kind of magical power to you. All you have to do is
stay cool and play it off like you predicted it all.</p>
<h3 id="this-is-why-the-system-always-seem-to-win">This is why &quot;the System&quot; always seem to win.</h3>
<p><strong>The system knows how to play with multiple outs.</strong></p>
<p>There is a canned response, or at least a reasonably ad-libbed response,
for every event and every possible event. They are in a position of
antifragility and can gain from nearly any possible event. When they
can't, the media can at least throw enough mud on public perception to
inspire apathy or confusion.</p>
<p>There are certainly portions of the System which are &quot;conspiratorial.&quot;
Major news organizations usually coordinate on what editorial line to
publish, but in general, their entrenched power comes from a detached
ability to be flexible in new events.</p>
<p>The omnipotence and permanence of the Soystem is illusory. It comes from
that flexibility.</p>
<h2 id="multiple-outs-in-your-life">Multiple outs in your life</h2>
<p>Even aside from politics, it's important to behave yourself in a way
that allow yourself to have multiple outs. Business, social life, major
decisions and in everything else. Never tether yourself to one option;
that's when you lose. Have a smart response to co-opt anything that can
happen, no matter how good or bad.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/modern-freedom-means-being-a-slave-to-impulses/
title: Modern "Freedom" Means Being a Slave to Impulses
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/modern-freedom-means-being-a-slave-to-impulses/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<h2 id="what-does-freedom-mean">What does freedom mean?</h2>
<p>See this article in video form
<a href="https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/modern-freedom-means-being-a-slave-to-impulses">here</a>.</p>
<p>Which of the following two people is more free:</p>
<ol>
<li>A drug addict.</li>
<li>A average man who is only not a drug addict because he lives in a
country where drugs are regulated or shamed in a way to make them
hard to obtain.</li>
</ol>
<p>Most modern people will have a kind of cognitive dissonance, a kind of
glitch in their matrix here. In the modern view of freedom, freedom
means the ability to do what you want without the government or society
telling you what to do, so (1), the drug addict, should be more
&quot;free.&quot;</p>
<p>But at the same time, this feels wrong. (2) probably lives a better
life. He is more suited to make more and better decisions. Someone
addicted to drugs is highly constrained in the kind of life they have to
live to fulfill their addiction.</p>
<p>Even extreme libertarians will probably say (2) is in a better place,
but might chalk things up to (1) needing to have more discipline and
they'll make up some just-so story as for why unambiguously bad drugs,
or pornography, or dangerous things should be allowed anyway.</p>
<h2 id="classical-freedom">Classical freedom</h2>

<figure class="resright"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/paul.jpg"></figure>

<p>In reality, since the Enlightenment, we have had a hobbled understanding
of what &quot;freedom&quot; is. Enlightenment &quot;freedom&quot; is only the freedom to
perfectly follow the whims of impulses and vices indiscriminately.</p>
<h3 id="the-christian-tradition">The Christian tradition</h3>
<p>Christians stated the classical view of freedom very clearly. Paul
writes that all men are either &quot;slaves to Christ&quot; or &quot;slaves to
sin.&quot; The modern man wants to retort that he doesn't want to be a
slave to anything, but wants to be his own master, but there is really
no such thing.</p>
<p>One can be guided by Christ, or more generally, by consistent moral
principles, restraint and forethought. Or one can abandon the pretense
of morality and by definition follow his impulses to fornication,
substance-abuse, and general reckless living.</p>
<p>These masters aren't equivalent either. Being a slave to one is nothing
like being a slave to another. Slaves to sin are wrapped up into
incoherent and uncontrollable behavior. Following one's sexual whims
might be inconsistent and thoughtless behavior that one likes one second
and is disgusted by the next. It might mean someone exploding in rage
and emotion.</p>
<p>This &quot;free&quot; man, a slave to sin, is only bound by the practical
consideration that he might get caught or shamed by &quot;prudes&quot; and that
might dampen his ability to follow his inpulses more.</p>
<h3 id="impulses-are-not-the-man">Impulses are not the man</h3>

<figure class="titleimg"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/nihilism.jpg"></figure>

<p>If we look at the modern world as if it has desires and goals for us, it
certainly seems like it is trying to induce as many people as possible
into being slave to sin. People no long have identity in who they
actually are, but in accidental preferences formed over years of
impulse-seeking: their sexual fetishes, drugs of choice, their favorite
TV show to consoom or their favorite music they constantly pump in their
head to dampen the possibility that an original reflective thought might
occur to them.</p>
<p>More than that, these people often can't even fathom of life without
their master sins, and retort in rage when someone dares to direct them
otherwise or &quot;judge&quot; them. They don't just have a kind of Stockholm
Syndrome with sin, but they can't comprehend the fact the people are
something deeper than their pleasure habits.</p>
<h3 id="control-of-impulses-leads-to-freedom">Control of Impulses Leads to Freedom</h3>
<p>However if one can constrain his impulses, he will be free to truly sit
down and deliberate and make free decisions on what is best to do.</p>
<p>This is where true freedom begins. The concept is totally alien to the
coomer, the slave to sin, because he can't even afford the mental space
to think further than his constant service to sin.</p>
<p>To him, it is merely &quot;me having fun,&quot; versus &quot;some haters who are
against fun.&quot;</p>
<h2 id="slaves-to-vices-are-slaves-in-general">Slaves to Vices are Slaves in General</h2>

<figure class="titleimg"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/fedora_consoomer.jpg"></figure>

<p>If you indentify with your impulses, it's very easy to get you
motivated to defend them with the same impulsivity if you are told that
they are &quot;under attack.&quot; While impulsive people might be hard to be
around as individuals, they are easy to control as groups and can be
herded around like unthinking sheep.</p>
<p>People who are reactive in politics are always the losers, and what is
an impulsive life but one that is entirely reactive and therefore
controllable?</p>
<h2 id="the-kingly-state">The Kingly State</h2>
<p>With the classical understanding of freedom, the goal of social
conventions, traditional morality and the good government is to increase
true liberty by minimizing one's temptation to vice. People are born
with some tendency to vice (original sin to Chrisitians) that can be
easily made worse. The goal of normal society is to lead people away
from lasciviousness and impulsive behavior. (That is clearly not the
goal of the modern West, however.)</p>
<p>A drug addict is not free. A teenager who gets home from school
everyday, closes his door and watches internet pornography is not free.
A person who compulsively checks their social media feed when they wake
up or are minorly bored is not free. A woman who sleeps around
throughout her twenties and is left with nothing is not free. A boy who
stays up late because he has to &quot;grind&quot; on a video game is not free.</p>
<p>No one can say that these people truly want what they do: no one <em>fully</em>
consents to any impulsive behavior. This is actually why in the Catholic
tradition, sins of incontinence are not as grave as deliberate sins.
It's not a fair game.</p>
<p>Either way, the goal of the church, or a moral society and moral
government generally, is to increase freedom by being a countervailing
power to inborn vices.</p>
<p>The point of moral instruction is not to restrain man, but to make him
more free by eliminating the true causes of his enslavement: his vices,
his bad habits, his sexual paraphilias, his gluttony and greed.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/matrix-vs-xmpp/
title: Matrix vs. XMPP
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/matrix-vs-xmpp/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<figure class="titleimg"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/xmpp.svg" title="The Chad XMPP"></figure>

<h2 id="what-are-xmpp-and-matrix-and-what-makes-them-special">What are XMPP and Matrix and what makes them special?</h2>
<p>XMPP and Matrix are two decentralized and federated free sofware
projects for chat, including true end-to-end encrypted chat.</p>
<p>Users can either install the software on their own server if they want,
but they can also easily register on any public server&mdash;both allow any
XMPP or Matrix user to talk to users on their server or on any other
one. In essence, it works like email: you might have an email account on
a different site than your friend, but all accounts on all sites can
communicate.</p>
<p>In a world where most communication is done on centralized proprietary
platforms without end-to-end encryption like Facebook, Telegram and
Google, Matrix and XMPP both are permanent solutions to communication
privacy. Even based boomerware like IRC has to play second fiddle to
them.</p>
<p>The only question is, &quot;Which is better? XMPP or Matrix?&quot;</p>
<h2 id="matrix-vs-xmpp-which-is-better">Matrix vs. XMPP: Which is better?</h2>
<p>After timely research and experience, I will say that XMPP is superior
to Matrix. I'll talk about why here, but I'll firstly discuss
Matrix's apparent advantages over XMPP.</p>
<p>There are some use-cases where Matrix is preferrable to use and Matrix
is somewhat easier for normal people to start using. However, Matrix,
although it is still end-to-end encrypted has larger metadata
liabilities. Although Matrix is decentralized, there are many issues
that make it too reliant on the &quot;main&quot; Matrix.org server. It also has
more significant problems in that metadata is spread from server to
server.</p>
<h3 id="matrixs-advantages-over-xmpp">Matrix's advantages over XMPP</h3>
<h4 id="matrix-is-more-normie-friendly">Matrix is more normie friendly.</h4>
<p>Although there are <a href="https://matrix.org/clients/">many Matrix clients out
there</a>, there is one &quot;primary&quot; one,
Element (formerly called Riot). Element is a lot more streamlined and
easier to use than most all other clients, and it is available on all
platforms. This is because it is an odious Electron-based application,
but that it is a big advantage to be able to tell your friends just
about one program they can use on all platforms.</p>
<h4 id="matrix-now-comes-end-to-end-encrypted-by-default">Matrix now comes End-to-end encrypted by default.</h4>
<p>The standard Matrix-Synapse server now encrypts all chats and private
rooms with end-to-end encryption by default. This is not the case for
most XMPP servers. For example, OMEMO encryption can be used with XMPP
servers, but it usually requires extra setting up and many XMPP clients
do not have proper or easy compatibility with default End-to-end
encryption (you may have to manually select to encrypt communications
for each chat).</p>
<h4 id="matrixs-default-functionality-is-more-intuitive">Matrix's default functionality is more &quot;intuitive.&quot;</h4>
<p>If someone sends you a message, you expect it to show up on all your
devices, not just the one that checks first. When you install a new
application on your phone, you sort of expect it to be able to view
previous conversations in the chat. XMPP does not necessarily work like
this by default (I should say that some XMPP servers do allow this), but
in general Matrix chats are really more like entire chat histories that
multiple people can edit and sync.</p>
<p>This makes Matrix a lot more familiar in functionality to old AOL/Google
chats, or things like Discord or Telegram, which people are used to and
find convenient. XMPP can indeed do all this, but it requires more
setting up, and you are more likely to run into unexpected things when
setting it up yourself.</p>
<h3 id="xmpps-advantages-over-matrix">XMPP's advantages over Matrix</h3>
<p>But all that said, as I said above, XMPP is better than Matrix.</p>
<h4 id="xmpp-servers-are-easier-to-manage-than-matrix">XMPP servers are easier to manage than Matrix.</h4>
<p>The default Matrix server software is atrocious. Trying to do something
&quot;simple&quot; like deleting a user account from the command line is
frustration. You might have to open up databases yourself and do it
manually. There is a distinct lack of configuration options in Matrix
compared to XMPP servers and XMPP server usually have a good
command-line interface to do basic things.</p>
<h4 id="xmpp-is-lightweight-matrix-is-big-bloatware">XMPP is lightweight. Matrix is big bloatware.</h4>
<p>I just logged into a VPS where I host both a Matrix and an XMPP server.
It has about 1G of RAM. Right now, <strong>27.7% of my memory is hogged by the
Matrix server</strong>, while <strong>the XMPP server is only using 1.4%</strong>. That
makes Matrix a major resource hog, while XMPP is the kind of thing you
can spin up on your already-existing VPS and not really have to worry
about it.</p>
<p>This is no big surprise because the default Matrix server is soyware
written in Python. While the Matrix team is allegedly working on a
better non-Python server-side, XMPP already has <a href="https://xmpp.org/software/servers.html">many different kinds of
server software to choose from</a>,
some of the more popular ones being
<a href="https://docs.ejabberd.im/admin/installation/">ejabberd</a> and <a href="https://prosody.im/">Prosody
IM</a>.</p>
<h4 id="matrix-is-less-decentralized">Matrix is less decentralized.</h4>
<p>This might be somewhat related to the above issue, but very few people
actually run their own Matrix servers and instead, just use Matrix.org,
which is the Matrix server of the official company. This means that
policies and blocks issued by Matrix the organization can functionally
disconnect who they want from most Matrix users.</p>
<p>Additionally, the default settings in the Matrix server configuration
use matrix.org and vector.im. These sites thus get a lot of independent
metadata from other unsuspecting instances.</p>
<h4 id="matrix-is-a-metadata-disaster">Matrix is a metadata disaster.</h4>
<p>It gets worse. Because Matrix doesn't really just exchange individual
messages, but because it syncs entire chats to all involved servers,
this means that while all messages might be end-to-end encrypted, the
conversation metadata is known to all servers, including what accounts
are involved, when messages are sent and other account information made
public (for example, users can add their emails and phone numbers to
their accounts). <a href="https://gist.github.com/maxidorius/5736fd09c9194b7a6dc03b6b8d7220d0">See more
here.</a></p>
<p>That means that all Matrix servers, <em>especially</em> Matrix.org, has a huge
repository of metadata. Although chats are thankfully encrypted,
encrypted chat logs are synced between all relevant servers, spreading
metadata far and wide, and nearly always back to Matrix.org.</p>
<p>Privacy with Matrix <a href="https://www.matrix.org/blog/2019/09/27/privacy-improvements-in-synapse-1-4-and-riot-1-4">used to be even
worse</a>.
Passwords used to be verified on a centralized identity server, and much
more.</p>
<p>You're probably wondering how any of this could get any worse...</p>
<p>   </p>
<p>...</p>
<p>   </p>
<p>Take a guess...</p>
<p>   </p>
<p>...</p>
<p>   </p>
<h4 id="-matrix-is-linked-to-israeli-intelligence-">🇮🇱 Matrix is linked to Israeli intelligence! 🇮🇱</h4>
<p>Matrix was developed and funded by a company Amdocs. Amdocs is an
Israeli company that has since moved to America and has near total
knowledge of American telephone communications.</p>
<p>You can read about the fun history of Amdocs
<a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2008/09/27/an-israeli-trojan-horse/">here</a>.
More about Matrix and Amdocs
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20201219014215/https://samba.noblogs.org/post/2018/08/27/matrix-org-a-federated-app-funded-by-a-mossad-company/">here</a>.</p>
<p>Since American telephone records have &quot;mysteriously&quot; fallen into the
hands of Israel, there are many questions as how this has happened.
Perhaps this Israeli company which has had many Israeli military and
intelligence officers involved with it and which also has all American
telephone records might be involved?</p>
<p>Actually, this is just like Matrix. Amdocs does not have access to
telephone audio (so far as I know), they only traffic in metadata (when
calls are made and between whom). Matrix functions the same way. Chats
are <em>at least</em> end-to-end encrypted (which still puts this Israeli
honeypot lightyears ahead of proprietary spyware like Telegram), but
Matrix metadata is easily available to server administrators.</p>
<p>Now to be clear, formally, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20201104154843/https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues/979">since
2017</a>,
Amdocs no longer is the open sponsor of Matrix. It is instead funded by
a break-off organization called Vector. But Matrix/Vector has somehow
remained very, very well-funded for a &quot;community-driven&quot; project:
<a href="https://www.matrix.org/blog/2019/10/10/new-vector-raises-8-5-m-to-accelerate-matrix-riot-modular">they raised $8.5
million</a>,
that's a lot for free stuff! Crowd-funding for relatively unknown open
source software projects is apparently much more lucrative than I
thought!</p>
<p>(Of course, we all know that this is a baseless and widely deboonkted
anti-semitic conspiracy theory as Our Greatest Ally^®️^ Israel would
never do <a href="https://www.whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/ussliberty.html">anything
bad</a> <a href="https://dancingisraelis.com/">to
us at all</a>.)</p>
<h2 id="in-conclusion">In conclusion</h2>
<p>Matrix is federated and free software which is end-to-end encrypted, but
it's bloated and the company behind it might be a privacy danger. Using
Matrix is indisputably better than using Telegram or Google or Facebook
on nearly every count, but XMPP outclasses Matrix on pretty much
everything.</p>
<p>XMPP is minimal software that is easy to run on a small server. It
requires more setup time and has the Linux-like &quot;problem&quot; of there
being a lot of &quot;fragmentation&quot; (i.e. choices), but XMPP is a much
better long-term tool despite the fact that it might require you to set
a couple more settings to get it how you want. XMPP is also more
scalable and customizeable.</p>
<p>I do run a Matrix server because I had to move some Telegram-using
friends to something better and I was worried that the world of XMPP
might be a little much. Retrospectively, I think I could've just
switched them to XMPP, and I might still in the future, but Matrix is
simpler for people to grasp and install if they don't know too much
about computers.</p>
<h3 id="how-the-xmpp-environment-can-be-improved">How the XMPP environment can be improved</h3>
<p>It would be very nice to have a cross-platform XMPP chat platform.
Obviously I don't want Electron trash like Matrix's Element (although
Element is intuitive enough), but when I say cross-platform, that might
just be several different XMPP clients (one Linux, one Android, one iOS,
etc.) that decide to go for similar design principles and branding. This
might sound stupid, but it makes the environment accessible to people
unfamiliar with it because they know that one program (or &quot;branding&quot;)
they can look up and recomend friends.</p>
<h3 id="other-note">Other note</h3>
<p>I suspect some people will be a little upset I &quot;only&quot; talked about
Matrix and XMPP as chat protocols. In reality, both are highly
extensible and can to many more things. I'll talk about that when I
feel it's relevant, but most people looking into them are looking for
an actually secure chat system.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/every-web-browser-absolutely-sucks/
title: Every Web Browser Absolutely Sucks.
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/every-web-browser-absolutely-sucks/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>The title explains it all, you don't even have to read.</p>
<p>There are no good, even passable web browsers. None. Not a single one
even comes close.</p>
<p>The weird thing is this: <em>making a good browser should be easy!</em> Among
the existing web browsers, you could assemble all the parts necessary
for a passable (if not perfect) browser. No one has ever bothered to do
this, instead, people assembled 90% good stuff and 10% junk.</p>
<p>Here I will list:</p>
<ol>
<li>Features a <strong>passable</strong> browser must have.</li>
<li>Features a <strong>good</strong> browser must have.</li>
</ol>
<p>Again, no browser out there has all the traits of even a passable
browser, but we might as well list them all here for the record.</p>
<h2 id="features-a-passable-browser-must-have">Features a <strong>Passable</strong> Browser must have.</h2>
<h3 id="it-must-actually-work-on-the-modern-web">It must actually work on the modern web.</h3>
<p>Sorry terminal browsers. lynx, w3m, you're out. There is some role for
you in scripting and dumping HTML email as standard output, but no can
get along using a terminal browser unless they are purposefully limiting
themselves to a very small segment of the modern web. I wish this
weren't the case, but it is.</p>
<p>Sorry also to niche independent browsers like Dillo. Nice concept, but
not usable. I don't think Dillo can even handle my simple modern CSS on
my website.</p>
<h3 id="free-and-open-source-software">Free and open source software.</h3>
<p>No reason to explain this. Absolutely insane to use a program to browse
the internet whose source code isn't publicly auditable.</p>
<h3 id="no-unsolicited-connections">No unsolicited connections.</h3>
<p>This will be <em>literally the easiest</em> point to comply with, but also the
rarest thing in browsers:</p>
<p>Don't automatically connect to Google.com or Brave.org or some stupid
start page or analytics page or Cloudflare or any other site on when I
open the browser or at anytime while browsing unless I type the address
in my URL bar.</p>
<p>Don't automatically connect to an &quot;autoupdate&quot; site, and especially
don't pull updates from it.</p>
<p>Don't send analytics. Don't <em>make</em> analytics. Actually, don't even
ask me if I want to opt in to &quot;bug reports,&quot; I don't. If something
breaks, I'll tell you.</p>
<p>If you want analytics, I want you to beg for it on an obscure Settings
page. Tell me your sob story about how it helps you get funding. And I
will <em>still</em> not give you analytics because I don't let my file
manager, email client, music player, video player, text editor or any
other random program monitor me for no reason, least of all will I allow
a browser, which often handles the most sensitive information.</p>
<p>It's a statement of just how bad the browser market is that this is
even something we're talking about.</p>
<h3 id="ad-blocking-must-come-with-the-browser">Ad-blocking must come with the browser.</h3>
<p>No one opens up a browser to view ads. This is just not why browsers
exist. No human in all of humanity has benefited from involuntary ads.
100% of people would be better off with browsers without ads, therefore,
a sensible browser should block ads.</p>
<p>This is no more controversial than saying that if you rent a server from
a company, it should come with sensible defaults, like an operating
system, a solid root password that a Chinese script-kiddy isn't going
to guess and maybe a firewall.</p>
<p>Ad-blocking must be universal, so should other sensible
&quot;add-ons&quot;/features. HTTPS everywhere is a sensible universal browser
feature as well. There are no places where using HTTP is preferrable to
using HTTPS if available. If there are reasons to ever use HTTP only or
to view ads, they are so rare as to hide them away in the Settings Menu.</p>
<p>Brave (Le Shill Lion) has at least done us the favor of blocking ads by
default (it also has HTTPS everywhere). Qutebrowser has a notional hosts
ad-blocker that allegedly blocks I guess some things, but you will still
get an add-full browsing experience. GNU Icecat has a lot of sensible
default add-ons (I forget if it blocks ads by default), but in truth,
only developers have any reasons to use bare browsers without
ad-blockers and other basic add-ons.</p>
<h3 id="basic-options">Basic options!</h3>
<p>How long has Google Chrome and its clones been around? A decade? Why has
literally no one in that period had a problem with the fact that none of
these browsers have an option <em>to not store history!</em></p>
<p>No, not Incognito mode, I want to keep cookies, but I don't want stupid
browsing history showing up whenever I start typing.</p>
<p>No, I don't just want you to not suggest previous sites, but still
store them all for some reason.</p>
<p>Thankfully, Firefox browsers at least have this basic option. Brave does
too. Ungoogled Chromium doesn't. Useless. I like that it doesn't send
my browsing history to Google and all, but I also don't want it
broadcasting it to the people over my shoulder when I type a url. I
honestly imagine that the mandatory &quot;we must keep history&quot; aspect of
Chrome is subtle social engineering. &quot;Oh you shouldn't have that
choice, you want everything you do to be stored for reference!&quot;</p>
<h4 id="internet-browser-history-is-really-obsolete">Internet browser history is really obsolete.</h4>
<p>For normies on the modern web, there is really less and less purpose of
browsing history with every passing year. In the better days of the
internet, back when <em>people actually browsed the internet</em> and you would
see dozens or hundreds of different websites a day, there is kind of a
use to a constant log of history, in case you vaguely remember seeing a
site, but couldn't remember how you got there and you couldn't search
because there were no search engines.</p>
<p>Web history is basically obsolete for 99% of people because:</p>
<ol>
<li>They use only Facebook or two other sites and quite simply never see
any of the rest of the internet.</li>
<li>Bookmarks exist and are widely used for the few sites people do use.</li>
<li>People can use a search engine to find a site.</li>
<li>They are daily watching porn or simping for instathots or doing
other abominable things for which they will be erasing their
internet history anyway.</li>
</ol>
<h3 id="no-clutter-in-the-browser-experience-and-neutrality">No clutter in the browser experience and <em>Neutrality</em></h3>
<p>Brave. Lol.</p>
<p>I complimented Brave for adding ad-blockers to their browser by default.
The issue is that they also continually add more and more and more stuff
to their browser of extremely niche orientation in every single update.</p>
<p>Update Brave and there'll be some new Crypto gadget on the main screen
which is probably making some kind of unsolicited connections to
something or another. Brave has been dutiful enough to allow everything
to be disabled, but none of this is browsing related. I want a browser.
Stop giving me stuff that's not a browser. That's why I liked the idea
of the ad-block, but it looks like Brave will need a feature-block as
well.</p>
<p>Aside from Brave, about <em>every browser</em> from Pale Meme to unJewgled
Chromium has a distracting stupid start page that advertises your
history or suggests inane sites. When I open a fresh browser window,
unless I have specifically created an HTML page which I have set as my
homepage, I want to see a clean virgin page. I don't want to see giant
soy blocks that show a links to my bank account or the Bitchute
documentaries I was just watching. If I want to get there quick, I'll
bookmark it, thank you.</p>
<p>I want a browser to be <strong>neutral</strong>, not personalized. Or at least
<strong>neutral by default</strong>. I don't want it to advertise new features and
software. I don't want it to change when I visit a site.</p>
<h3 id="do-not-clutter-home">Do not clutter home!</h3>
<p>Browsers routinely make messes in home directories. XDG Compliance. Know
these directories:</p>
<ul>
<li><code>~/.config/</code> &ndash; for configuration files</li>
<li><code>~/.cache/</code> &ndash; for your cache</li>
<li><code>~/.local/share</code> &ndash; for share files</li>
</ul>
<p>This is where stuff goes so 100 useless folders don't clog up your home
when you <code>ls -a</code>. No one seems to have told this to browser developers.</p>
<p>Chromium browsers give you this useless <code>~/.pki/</code> directory. If you're
using a Furryfox clone, they are going to force at least <code>~/.mozilla/</code>
on you, but you'll also get something else. Installed Librewolf?
You'll get <code>~/.librewolf/</code> too.</p>
<p>I don't know how hardcoded Google and Mozilla made this annoyance, but
if you can deGoogle Chrome, you can use the proper XDG directories.</p>
<p>Dishonorable mention <em>definitely</em> goes to Pale Moon. Being an
independent browser, you would <em>think</em> they would jump at being less
annoying. Nope: <code>~/.Moonchild Productions</code> right in your home directory.
Capital letters and whitespace: a big eff-yew to Unix-based operating
systems. (I think they made this lower-case now?)</p>
<h3 id="must-be-written-in-a-sensible-language">Must be written in a sensible language.</h3>
<p>Aw, Dang!</p>
<p>Sorry, Qutebrowser, you thought you could make it all the way right?</p>
<p>Hey, that's okay, there are a lot of great aspects to being written in
Python: it's easier for people to play around with your config file and
script things into it, but let's be real: you're slow and buggy and
take way more system resources than a browser written in C or C++.
That's just not going to cut it for a mainstream browser that old
boomers are going to be watching YouTube and Netflix in with 250 other
open tabs.</p>
<p>Maybe if you were written in Go? Or maybe you could get compiled in
Cython or something? Idk, but as it is, it ain't cutting it.</p>
<p>Of course I realize that Qutebrowser does basically everything else
well. If I had a computer with more CPU power and RAM, I might use
Qutebrowser. It has gotten a lot better over the years.</p>
<hr>
<h2 id="features-a-good-browser-must-have">Features a <strong>Good</strong> Browser must have.</h2>
<p>Now that we've ascended past the summits of the bare minimum, we might
as well discuss what additional features every browser should have.</p>
<h3 id="a-config-file">A config file.</h3>
<p>I don't care if only 2% of people know what a configuration file is,
you need one. You can keep your Settings menu for normies, but it's
nuts that browsers think it's okay to get by without a configuration
file.</p>
<p>Once someone has their browser configured, all they have to do if they
change computers or want to replicate their settings is to move one
file. Or for someone like me, who has <a href="https://larbs.xyz">people wanting to install my
system configuration a lot</a>, it would be convenient
to be able to have a single text message that assembles a browser with
sensible settings. You just can do that though. You can sorta-kinda do
that with some Furryfox settings, but for a Chromium browser, forget
about it.</p>
<p>Either way, there needs to be a simple text file that can handle setting
settings, like:</p>
<ul>
<li>Add-on lists including links to the source (similar to a vim plugin
manager)</li>
<li>Key bindings and custom shortcuts</li>
<li>Bookmarks</li>
<li>Search engine prefixes (combination of the two above).</li>
<li>Graphical settings, color appearance, organization of tabs and
buttons</li>
<li>Font, language</li>
</ul>
<p>Config files, even if 2% of people are going to use them now open up a
new world of sharable and editable settings. This will solve a lot of
tech support issues as well, frankly.</p>
<h3 id="actually">Actually...</h3>
<p>After the configuration file, every other feature a browser should have
comes for free. For example, it would be nice to get vim-like
key-bindings for mouseless browsing, but that is really dealt with
custom key-binds (and I suppose a link hint feature).</p>
<p>In general, I feel that once you have the sensible defaults above and
configuration file, you really have everything. Browsers suddenly become
programs with the same level of usability and customizability and
non-egregiousness of every other program on the computer.</p>
<hr>
<h2 id="summary">Summary</h2>
<p>A browser...</p>
<ol>
<li>Must actually work.</li>
<li>Must be free and open source software.</li>
<li>Must make no unsollicited connections.</li>
<li>Must block unsollicited ads and other sensible defaults.</li>
<li>Must have sensible options for history and cookies.</li>
<li>Must not be cluttered by features irrelevant to browsing.</li>
<li>Must not clutter the filesystem.</li>
<li>Must be written in a fast language light on system resources.</li>
<li>Must have a configuration file.</li>
</ol>
<p>Tell me when a browser finally meets these requirements.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/obscenities-are-symptoms-of-weak-minds/
title: Obscenities are symptoms of weak minds.
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/obscenities-are-symptoms-of-weak-minds/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>Over the past few years, I made the decision to totally cut obscenities
out from my speech. You might actually be able to find recordings of me
cursing four or five years ago, but as of now, I really stand by my
decision.</p>
<p>Obscenities are the linguistic equivalent of an trashy emaciated person
entirely decked in tattoos, smoking cigarettes and wearing a shirt with
nudity on it. They'll defend what they do on the idea that it's
someone &quot;their right,&quot; or &quot;expression,&quot; as if they do what they do
for some lofty philosophical reason. What everyone else sees is a person
who is not in control of themselves or their vices, in fact, someone who
views their vices as a good thing.</p>
<p>There's the atomistic and nihilistic tendency to give an
&quot;intellectual&quot; argument for obscenities: &quot;What's so special,&quot; the
argument goes, &quot;about obscenities in English? They're just a
combination of arbitrary sounds! They don't have some objective magical
harm in them.&quot;</p>
<p>But the &quot;arbitrary sounds&quot; in an obscenity do indeed have a special
place in human psychology. Obscenities are produced and processed in the
brain quite differently from non-obscene language, involving the more
animalistic/reptilian parts of the brain. When assembling a well-thought
out case, there is really never a temptation to litter it with curses.</p>
<p><strong>When a person curses, it's a direct indication that they are thinking
on a lower, more reactive, more emotional level.</strong></p>
<p>I get a lot of email every day and most I don't answer for time
constraints. I've gotten good at filtering out emails, and I have
realized that obscenities are one of the best indications of a low
quality content. I haven't gone so far as to totally block curse words
with Spam Assassin, but it is genuinely rare that I receive an email of
any quality with obscenities.</p>
<p>All of this is to say that obscenities are a great indication of
reactive thinking. When someone is cursing, he is thinking at least in
part like an animal. In deciding not to curse, I have decided to be
quiet first, then only evaluate things calmly afterwards.</p>
<p>For me, there is extra reason not to curse because I am in a position of
an exemplar for many people on the internet. The internet is full of
&quot;snarky&quot; people cursing profusely and creating the idea that all
&quot;famous&quot; people should be highly arrogant and emotional.</p>
<p>There might be times when it's proper for someone to react in righteous
anger, but those are in reality so rare as to only happen in
life-and-death situations. Instead, a lot of modern nihilism is becoming
just as emotionally transfixed on minor slights and imaginary problems,
thus one spews out curses as if one is fighting some kind of crusade.
This makes profuse cursers not only the type of people who are reactive
and hard to relate to, but indicates how disordered their priorities
are.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/obvious-technical-solutions/
title: The hardest technical solutions are right in front of your face.
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/obvious-technical-solutions/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>Nassim Taleb had this old anecdote of the sheer absurdity that while the suitcase and other bags had existed for lifetimes, it was only in the 1990&rsquo;s that people had the idea to put wheels on the things so they didn&rsquo;t have to haul them around airports all day with their strength.</p>
<p>It reminds you of the fact that while children in the Incan Empire did indeed have some toys with wheels, apparently no one thought to use the wheel to make a simple cart or wagon to use in town or on the Inca&rsquo;s extensive imperial roadways.</p>
<p>The proper response to hearing this should be the deserved angst that right now, there are make &ldquo;obvious&rdquo; technological improvements we could make to improve our lives significantly.
Even worse, in lieu of these simple and obvious solutions which have lain hidden in plain site for centuries, we have no doubt developed a lot of inefficient technology to fill in the gap.</p>
<p>Since I was recently doing <a href="https://videos.lukesmith.xyz/w/oz4VV8SrnTEACCndxMASZH">tutorials on Hugo</a>, a static site generator, it&rsquo;s funny to think that through the 90&rsquo;s, no one really thought to invent a computationally simple static-site generator as they exist now.
People moved pretty much directly from manually edditing HTML files manually into massive proprietary WYSIWYG editors and web &ldquo;frameworks&rdquo; that regenerate web pages on every single visit.</p>
<p>This lack of vision and inability to see the simpler solution has largely produced the slow-loading, content-minimal web of today and the bizarre culture of modern &ldquo;webdevs&rdquo; whose diets consist in anti-patterns.</p>
<h2 id="the-shame-of-bitcoin">The shame of Bitcoin</h2>
<p>Recently there was <a href="https://videos.lukesmith.xyz/w/7PZGdoF7WdpWVS1UDcwDFz">an interview released of me</a> at Monerotopia with the Crypto Vigilate team.
Unfortunately, the video cut off and doesn&rsquo;t have perhaps the best part which I now remember: our discussion on the possibility of &ldquo;obvious solutions&rdquo; that could conceivably replace proof-of-work in cryptocurrency.</p>
<p>Bitcoin, ultimately is a self-reinforcing behavioral Nash Equilibrium that uses the logic of proof-of-work mining to establish consensus while still remaining decentralized.
The thing is, anyone who is not a delusional fanboy has to look at proof-of-work as some kind of incredible weird and inefficient abomination.</p>
<p>To establish decentralized consensus, we have to have an increasing farm of the world&rsquo;s computers performing computations that do essentially nothing outside of &ldquo;secure the network.&rdquo;</p>
<p>There is no magic force in the universe that has ordained that the only possible way to establish decentralized consensus is Proof-of-Work.
Proof-of-stake is obviously an alternative to it, but one whose long-term game theoretic nature is still an issue of significant controversy.</p>
<p>Regardless, an alien civilization observing us might view the issue of decentralized consensus similar to how we view the Inca who never thought to use wheels to make carts.
It will be pretty absurd if most of the world&rsquo;s computing power will soon be dedicated to proof-of-work mining only for some bratty kid or jaded cryptographer to come up with an &ldquo;obvious&rdquo; other way to establish a self-reinforcing system that can verify decentralized consensus that doesn&rsquo;t require the waste.</p>
<h2 id="take-aways">Take-aways</h2>
<ol>
<li>Technological opportunities are not just everywhere, they are right in front of your face.</li>
<li>The fact that a solution is obvious and simple is not reason for ruling it out because &ldquo;Someone must have thought of that and tried it before.&rdquo;</li>
<li>Never be happy with technology that is inelegant just because there is no obvious alternative now.</li>
</ol>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/minimizing-liabilities-is-making-it/
title: Minimizing Liabilities Is Making It.
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/minimizing-liabilities-is-making-it/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>The default way to look at financial &ldquo;independence&rdquo; nowadays is to think that means &ldquo;making a lot of money.&rdquo;
That&rsquo;s understandable.</p>
<p>But then you see stuff like this:</p>

<figure class="titleimg"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/millennial-paycheck.jpg" alt="60% of millennials earning over $100,000 say they&#39;re living paycheck to paycheck."></figure>

<p>Or this:</p>

<figure class="title"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/net-worth.jpg"><figcaption>It takes until 30 for a person to be as rich as they were when they were born. (And this is average net worth, median would be significantly worse.)</figcaption></figure>

<p>The longer you mentally analyze the second picture, the more depressing it will get. Obviously the negative net worth early in life is kids losing around $10,000 a year in value by going to college, but the truly depressing thing is that after that period, their net worth increases only by an average of about $5,000 a year.</p>
<p>That means they might have $5,000 more in the bank or $5,000 paid off of their student loans or $5,000 going to equity in a house, but no combination greater than that.</p>
<h2 id="how-does-this-happen">How does this happen?</h2>
<p>How is it that people alive in the period of the highest and most productive technology are working more than Medieval serfs?</p>
<p>Let&rsquo;s put it in simple terms by defining &ldquo;making it:&rdquo;</p>
<dl>
<dt>Making it:</dt>
<dd>Earning or having significantly more money than you spend or owe.</dd>
</dl>
<p>Or in pseudomath:</p>
<p><math>income - liabilities = comfortability</math></p>
<p>To increase comfortablity, you can increase your income or decrease your liabilities.
This is a simple equation.</p>
<p>By &ldquo;liabilities&rdquo; I mean:</p>
<ul>
<li>the cost of food you have to eat to live</li>
<li>the cost of the place you need to live</li>
<li>the payments for goods and services you actually need (power, or perhaps a car, etc.)</li>
<li>debts</li>
</ul>
<p>The <em>problem</em> I would estimate is that people focus <strong>all of their time, money and interest on increasing their income and focus quite literally none on <em>decreasing</em> their liabilities</strong>, which is actually substantially easier anyway.</p>
<p>In fact, the modern economy, including all the bad advice it gives to people can generally be thought of a system that is desperatly trying to <em>increase</em> everyone&rsquo;s liabilities within it.
Financial libabilities, debt and others, breed even more financial liabilities.</p>
<h3 id="the-lifestory-of-basically-everyone-nowadays">The Lifestory of Basically Everyone Nowadays</h3>
<p>Let&rsquo;s illustrate this with the story of most people you know:</p>
<ol>
<li>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to the best college I can because everyone told me to.&rdquo;</li>
<li>&ldquo;I need to pay off my $40,000+ in student loans, so I need to move to the city and get a good job.&rdquo;</li>
<li>&ldquo;I get paid well, so I need a better car and other stuff to match.&rdquo;</li>
<li>&ldquo;I still have loan debt, car debt and now credit card debt, but now I have a good credit score, so I&rsquo;ll use all my savings to pay 20% of an expensive house I&rsquo;ll be paying off for 25 years.&rdquo;</li>
<li>&ldquo;Oh my boss wants me to humiliate myself for sodomy month or get the Coofid vaccine or the Mark of the Beast to keep my job. I have at least a quarter of a mil invested in my life here, so I can&rsquo;t just leave. Be realistic.&rdquo;</li>
<li>&ldquo;Yeah the economy is really bad and I lost a lot of investments. Either way, this is my career and what I&rsquo;m trained for. It&rsquo;d be hard to retrain. I made the right choices, I just got unlucky.&rdquo;</li>
<li>&ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;m 60 and it&rsquo;s time for retirement! Now that my body is broken I can start enjoying life!&rdquo;</li>
<li><em>*Dies of seed-oil-induced heart attack.*</em></li>
</ol>
<p>It&rsquo;d be wrong to singularly blame student loans for all of this, but there is a tangible sense in which opening up any new massive monthly liability to the system encourages people to open up more to cover for it.</p>
<p>No one is ever told that this is the inevitable end of increasing liabilities: you need more and more liabilities.</p>
<h3 id="which-way-millennial">&ldquo;Which way Millennial?&rdquo;</h3>
<p>Millennials come in two financial categories: around 90% of them are extreme consoomers who cannot not spend every penny of their salaries on subscriptions, plastic toys and coffee and seem to view the fact they get calls from collections agencies as some unpreventable outcome of &ldquo;capitalism.&rdquo;</p>
<p>The other 10% are the exact opposite: they are contemplating living in the trunk of their 1990&rsquo;s Corolla parked in the parking lot of their job site so they can save 97% of their income.
When they plan on buying a house or getting married, they are quixotically salivating on how much money they can save on monthly bills.</p>
<h2 id="the-endgame">The Endgame</h2>
<p>I will go ahead and say, I consider the ideal not even to be rich, but to not need money to live a comfortable life because you have put yourself in a geographic and behavioral position where you can survive on as little as possible.</p>
<p>Either way, my mindset (as the second type of millennial) has always been &ldquo;How can I absolutely minimize the amount of money I need to live?&rdquo;</p>
<ul>
<li>&ldquo;What is the cheapest place to rent?&rdquo;</li>
<li>&ldquo;What is the cheapest-per-calorie real food for me to eat?&rdquo;</li>
<li>&ldquo;What &ldquo;needs&rdquo; are not really needs and can I go without?&rdquo;</li>
</ul>
<p>The implicit goal was to live on as little as possible: that&rsquo;s what actually maximizes your life&rsquo;s freedom.
If you can live on less than, say, $500 a month, even working as a part-time wagie, you will be plenty to pay bills, save a significant amount and have lots of free time.</p>
<p>For young single guys in computer science, this is especially ideal, since your hobbey/craft doesn&rsquo;t cost anything to tinker with.</p>
<p>In my late twenties, right before I bought my house, I was living in a college town with a monthly budget <strong>including my rent</strong> of around $400 ($300 was rent $100 was basically groceries). Probably went over that $100 most months, but never by much. This is also when I started <a href="https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/making-free-money-off-credit-cards">churning credit cards</a> to make a significant portion of my little expenditure back.</p>
<h2 id="behavioral-patterns-over-life">Behavioral Patterns over Life</h2>
<p>As you&rsquo;re saving money to buy/pay off a permanent dwelling place, most important is cultivating permanent behaviors that will reduce your need for money and &ldquo;the system.&rdquo;</p>
<p>If you take the &ldquo;high&rdquo;-income, high-liability route, you&rsquo;re going to be establishing wasteful antipatterns your early life and when you need to buckle down and root those out, it will be more difficult because it will be the egotistically trying task of going from showly and &ldquo;easy&rdquo; pleasure spending to a Spartan budget.</p>
<p>It&rsquo;s much easier to have a solid foundation of low spending. I said in that video years ago on getting Trumpbux that all money you earn and spend should be directly weaponized to decrease your reliance on money. Property, tools, plants, skills. These are investments much more substantial than investing in boomer stocks because they lessen your need for money.</p>
<h3 id="worst-case-scenario">Worst Case Scenario</h3>
<p>As a passing remark, I&rsquo;ll add that the other benefit of focusing on minimizing liabilities is that it makes you significantly less reliant on &ldquo;the system&rdquo; and more robust in the case of disaster.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Training&rdquo; to get a highly specific corporate job is not going to help you in all possible scenarios in the way that simple the simple craftsmanship of someone who fixes their own cars and things.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/christianity-based-paganism/
title: 'Based' Paganism vs. Christianity
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/christianity-based-paganism/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<p>I&rsquo;ve been meaning to write about Paganism recently. I will frame it as a response to an email I received within the past day or so:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Hey Luke,</p>
<p>First off, I would like to thank you for all your efforts in making everything
you know accessible to everyone. You have exposed me to some of the most
thought-provoking people on the internet and Varg is one of them. I was
wondering if you can write an article or make a video on what you think about
Varg&rsquo;s Paganism in relation to you choosing Orthodox Christianity. I know that
you briefly talked about it in one of your livestreams, however, I would like
to better understand why you don&rsquo;t practice Paganism yourself. My background is
Serbian and most Serbians follow the Serbian Orthodox Church, but after
watching Varg&rsquo;s videos, I&rsquo;m conflicted. I agree with a lot of what Varg says
about Christianity, but my father long ago told me to follow the Serbian
Orthodox Church if I were to become religious. I&rsquo;m sure that many people feel
the same way after watching Varg&rsquo;s videos, and your thoughts on it would
greatly help people like me make up their minds.</p>
<p>Best,</p>
<p><em>redacted</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>I will sum up my answer to this email in bullet points, then explain what I mean.</p>
<ul>
<li>Modern &ldquo;paganism&rdquo; is not a real thing and has nothing to do with paganism in history.</li>
<li>The most direct cultural link between modern man and antiquity is the Orthodox Christian Church.</li>
<li>Truth matters&mdash;&ldquo;Picking&rdquo; a religion on personal preferences is brain-dead and self-refuting.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="your-average-pagan">Your Average Pagan</h2>
<p>Many people probably don&rsquo;t know who Varg Vikernes is, but since the email brings him up, I will talk about him as an example of where paganism leads.
Modern &ldquo;paganism&rdquo; is not an authentic tradition handed down over the ages.
It is an attempt of modern disconnected people to recreate or re-engineer a culture, time and place they have absolutely no contact with.
This ultimately makes &ldquo;paganism&rdquo; a modernist Rorschach test where individuals can more-or-less create the religion they want.</p>
<h3 id="paganism-with-modern-goggles">Paganism with modern goggles</h3>
<p>Varg&rsquo;s particular &ldquo;paganism&rdquo; is a kind of scientific euhemerism: he doesn&rsquo;t actually believe in gods in the way an ancient pagan would have, but that the concepts of the gods represent scientific or other knowledge.
(This is where the placenta meme around him comes from after all, when he and his wife related assorted pagan myths and items to the tree-like appearance of a human placenta.)
He has also reduced classical abstract spiritual concepts into hormones and other related things.
In essence, he has created a pseudo-paganism that is compatible with modern materialism.</p>
<p>Varg had cited and recommended works such as Frazer&rsquo;s <em>Golden Bough</em> as influential on his thought which is of a similar vein.
This book was part of a wider movement in the English-speaking rationalist world to rationalize and explain myth.
It goes without saying that I think this all comes from the assumption of modern man that all ancient people underlyingly thought like Neil deGrasse Tyson.</p>
<h3 id="how-long-until-legend-becomes-myth">How long until legend becomes myth?</h3>
<p>More plausible is the viewpoint I&rsquo;ve spoken of in works such as <a href="https://notrelated.xyz/#02.04"><em>Hamlet&rsquo;s Mill</em></a>.
It alleges that <em>one specific</em> prehistoric civilization used myth to transmit scientific knowledge, but being thousands of years out from that civilization, the descendant stories are distorted, partial and can only be related after extensive study.
They allege that &ldquo;Hamlet stories&rdquo; are similar in origin and actually carry astrological information, including the idea of the procession of the equinoxes.</p>
<p>But Varg&rsquo;s quasi-euhemerism makes a much stronger claim, that all our &ldquo;forebears&rdquo; (as he tends to call them) left an entire encyclopedia of scientific knowledge in stories that have remained unblemished and mostly unchanged over thousands or <em>millions</em> of years since the Neanderthals, who he views as the Trve Europeans.</p>
<p>This stronger claim should be absurd on its face, as it assumes that over the millennia, there is little to no addition, subtraction or change of folklore.
The <em>Hamlet&rsquo;s Mill</em> model admits that this does happen, but Varg is dealing with a much longer scale and often makes very specific claims about some myths.
What I think Varg is truly doing when he looks at a pagan myth and sees a placenta, he is seeing statistical noise and fitting that noise to the many possibilities in his head.
(I will also say that this is somewhat the modus operandi of many capital-T &ldquo;Traditionalists&rdquo; in the vein of Evola or Guénon.)</p>
<aside>
This is principally a response to the theories that Varg put forth around 2016-2018 when I would occasionally watch his videos. I'm sure it's very possible that he endorses things very different now, since this "paganism" is not anything concrete.
</aside>
<h2 id="is-christianity-a-departure-from-european-tradition">Is Christianity a departure from European tradition?</h2>
<p>One thing I&rsquo;ve tried to emphasize <a href="https://notrelated.xyz/#02.02">in some places</a> is the general wrongness of the idea of the cultural &ldquo;quantum leap&rdquo; or &ldquo;discontinuity&rdquo; between Prechristian and Christian Europe.
This is a highly important issue for many putative pagans, because they view the &ldquo;change&rdquo; of Europe over to Christianity as perhaps the start of the now constant and perpetual leftist cultural revolution.</p>
<p>This is the idea, which most people and &ldquo;based&rdquo; pagans have even by osmosis, that the Christianization of Europe was a radical break from history and tradition.</p>
<p>This is true only on the Christian metric: obviously the salvation of Europe is a quantum leap.
However, melodramatic pagans will lament that this is when Europe have up its &ldquo;European&rdquo; soul and adopted a &ldquo;Jewish&rdquo; or &ldquo;desert&rdquo; religion which put the continent on a totally different and out-of-touch cultural direction.</p>
<h3 id="pagan-philosophy-and-christianity">Pagan Philosophy and Christianity</h3>
<p>Christian theology, including Trinitarian theology has direct and undeniable &ldquo;pagan&rdquo; analogues and imitators:
Neoplatonism expresses a kind of theological trinity as well (the One, the Intellect and the Soul), albeit one more similar to Origen&rsquo;s trinity where a hierarchy of the three persons exist.</p>
<p>In the cosmogony of the <em>Poemandres</em>, a Hermetic work, shows a pagan creation myth wherein God creates the world via his <em>Logos</em>, as in the first chapter of St. John&rsquo;s gospel, which also has a trinitarian and monotheistic unity with God (differing from Christianity in its panentheism).</p>
<p>As I mentioned in the linked podcast <a href="https://notrelated.xyz/#02.02">episode above</a>, Stoic philosophy is a component needed to understand the opening of the gospel of John and is part of the philosophical backdrop of early Christian theology.</p>
<p>Medieval esoteric doctrines and alchemy viewed all of nature as trinitarian, possessing body, mind, and spirit (salt, sulfur and mercury), which was related directly to the Triune nature of God.
Even specific mystical sects like Mithraism or the many forms of Gnosticism are tied closely to the development of Christianity.</p>
<p>All of these intellectual strands were intertwined with Christianity since the beginning of the written expression of Christian theology.</p>
<p>A pagan now has to ask himself: if Hermeticism or Mithraism had taken over as a universal religion of Europe, would they loathe it like they loathe Christianity and view it as a radical departure from &ldquo;paganism?&rdquo;
Note that Hermeticism had an alleged Egyptian origin, and Mithraism had a orientalist/Iranic origin.</p>
<p>Note that none of my point here is specifically that Christianity influenced or created these other philosophies or that they influenced (providentially) Christianity.
What is important is that looking at it dispassionately, we cannot deem Christianity as some cultural departure from &ldquo;real&rdquo; European culture without also throwing out this entire philosophical tradition as a whole.</p>
<p>Medieval Christians would often look at Greek Philosophy as another covenant of God established to prepare mankind intellectually for the revelation of the Trinity.
(Note also that <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCjX0il3wkc">Dante and others</a> represent Christians who viewed the Roman Empire also as part of a divine plan.)</p>
<p>Ultimately, the Christian religion is non-cultural and thus universal/catholic. There are cultural aspects associated with it, but there&rsquo;s a difference between essence and accidents.
Of those cultural aspects, they are nearly all European, not, as some allege, Hebrew or Jewish.
Most of the New Testament is quite literally an explication of why this religion which accepts the Hebrew Scriptures is markedly non-Jewish and why Jewish practices like circumcision and sacrifice are sacrilegious.</p>
<p>So the view we should get from this is that Christianization was no cultural leap into an alien worldview, but something whose intellectual side happened slowly over centuries and would only be viewed as spiritual, not culturally distinct from its environment.</p>
<h3 id="which-change-is-good">Which change is good?</h3>
<p>Note that even Varg admits that religious interpretation and practice changes with the centuries.
In his interpretation and even in his RPG, MYFAROG (which is really just an expression of his paganism and worldview), characters can have one of two &ldquo;Life Stances&rdquo; or religious inclinations: <em>Seiðr</em> or  <em>Âsatrû</em>.
Seiðr &ldquo;tradition,&rdquo; represents a kind of animism, witchcraft or spell-casting, while Âsatrû represents the worship of pagan gods.
Characters can choose either life stance, but one can only change from Seiðr to Âsatrû, which is a representation of the alleged historical shift in early history from animistic to polytheistic practices.</p>
<p>If we accept this cultural transition as &ldquo;legitimate&rdquo; in terms of cultural continuity, on what grounds could we also mark as verboten a shift from polytheism to monotheism?
After all, the pagan philosophy of Plato and Aristotle even from the earliest was monotheistic at its core, and even today, the world&rsquo;s one remaining &ldquo;polytheistic&rdquo; religion, Hinduism only appears so on the surface, but has at its core its own monad and final cause: Brahman.</p>
<h2 id="tradition-vs-inventing-your-own-religion">Tradition vs. Inventing your own religion</h2>
<p>To learn of Christian theology, thus, is to set oneself down a road of millennia of learning with often with no delineation between Christian and Prechristian thought.
By the same token, learning of secular philosophy, even as an atheist might lead you to Christianity, as was the case with me.
There is no obvious discontinuity, either in thought or practice.</p>
<p>But modern day &ldquo;paganism&rdquo; does indeed have such a gap.
To be a &ldquo;pagan&rdquo; does not involve communing with a centuries-old tradition passed down generation-to-generation from antiquity.</p>
<p>It is modern people imagining based on T.V. shows, books and their own creativity what Prechristian Europe was like and then putting on their own imitation of it.
They might see something they dislike in the world, blame it on Christians and then imagine a world without it.
This invariably comes with retrojecting their own modern values and assumptions on the past.</p>
<p>After all, we Christians can sit down with an Orthodox Priest or grow up in a Orthodox household and have a direct, personal contact with a tradition and understand how people who are part of it think and act.
We have no tangible contact with Prechristian European paganism, even out of intellectual interest.
Understanding how Europeans truly thought and acted is an issue of cultural reconstruction and theory.
Traditional folklore and practices are still very much alive, but they are now decked in a Christian garb.
We do celebrate Christmas for Our Lord&rsquo;s birth, but everyone knows that nearly all of the practices of that season of the many nations of Europe predate Christianization.</p>
<h3 id="the-worst-possible-decision">The Worst Possible Decision.</h3>
<p>All this said, the absolute worst self-own possible would be someone who has direct and easy access to the Orthodox Church and abandons it or leaves it for a false &ldquo;religion&rdquo; that doesn&rsquo;t even exist off of the internet and has no organic connection to reality, like Neo-Paganism.</p>
<p>So my recommendation to the emailer above should be obvious.</p>
<p>Being physically close to the Orthodox Church is a huge asset, but even being able to travel to one occasionally is a massive grace. Everyone should be taking advantage of that as often as possible.</p>
<h3 id="pagan-gurus">Pagan Gurus</h3>
<p>Because it is ungrounded and ahistorical, modern &ldquo;paganism&rdquo; thus naturally exists as a kind of extreme Protestant guru-centered feel-goodery where since there is absolutely no tether to a genuine preserved tradition, a man can make up an unfalsifiable claim about what true &ldquo;Paganism&rdquo; is and sell it as legit.</p>
<p>I mentioned Varg earlier, who has concocted a &ldquo;paganism&rdquo; that consists in claiming that their lore and practice embed scientific information.
He doesn&rsquo;t <em>believe</em> in pagan gods, unless we&rsquo;re talking about belief in a very evasive and meaningless Jordan Peterson kind of way.
If we could actually transport a prehistoric pagan to our day and speak to him, he would probably either be confused or bemused by this very modern worldview, but we can&rsquo;t even do this.</p>
<p>Most pagans are not &ldquo;based&rdquo; like Varg anyway (he lives a minimalist and traditional lifestyle in rural France with an ever-growing family).
Most &ldquo;pagans&rdquo; are leftists who like &ldquo;paganism&rdquo; because they hate God and nature and morality and imagine that pagans were demented sexual perverts like they are.</p>
<h2 id="truth">Truth</h2>
<p>Notice that I had specifically avoided the most important issue: Truth.</p>
<p>I&rsquo;ve done this because when people are asking to convert to something just because it&rsquo;s &ldquo;based,&rdquo; <em>Truth</em> is unfortunately not necessarily their concern, so I&rsquo;ve first addressed issues that do concern them.</p>
<p>The reality is, thankfully, that truth is the most &ldquo;based&rdquo; thing of all&mdash;And it is entirely cringe to believe in something because it sounds cool to you.
If you think you can decide your own truth, you are no different from someone who thinks they can decide their own pronouns, literally.</p>
<p>Even in the email above, he refers to me &ldquo;choosing&rdquo; Orthodox Christianity as if it were an issue of personal taste.
If I liked pop music and people rolling on the ground, perhaps I would be just as justified converting to some Pentecostal sect.
This is silly.</p>
<p>The greatest deception is that religion is this separate category about &ldquo;feelings&rdquo; or &ldquo;preference&rdquo; and not truth.
Atheist and spiritual R*dditor Stephen Jay Gould put this in words in the modern era, calling science and religion &ldquo;non-overlapping magesteria,&rdquo; declaring in a laughable attempt at big-braned centrism that nothing in material reality is relevant to religion and nothing in religion is relevant to material reality.</p>
<p>This is strange because people can research the philosophies I mentioned earlier, Platonism, Gnosticism, Stoicism, Hermeticism and can analyze and critique them and look at them as models of reality perfectly comparable to modern philosophical assumptions and approaches.
But we have been taught to view Christianity as this separate category, that can&rsquo;t possibly be a model of reality, but is a something merely &ldquo;moral&rdquo; or &ldquo;personal&rdquo; or &ldquo;spiritual&rdquo; which are all terms that have been debased to mean nothing at all.</p>
<p>A Christian believes that Jesus&rsquo;s resurrection was a true historical event, and a prelude of a general resurrection to come and that he established a Church and sacraments which are his vehicles for having man recover from sin within this life to prepare for his roles in the next.
The Orthodox Christian Church is an unbroken chain since that period, and oft built on yet older philosophical and liturgical practices.</p>
<p>If you find this alien, or God unbelieveable, you can do yourself the favor of prayer and visit a priest and see what happens.</p>
<h3 id="they-dont-even-believe-it">They don&rsquo;t even believe it.</h3>
<p>To contrast, pagans do not believe in pagan gods. Their brains are 100% modern and materialistic in mindset, and if they ironically say they believe in gods, it is out of some kind of Petersonian fake metaphorical &ldquo;belief&rdquo; in a concept or that &ldquo;Zeus&rdquo; isn&rsquo;t a person, but is some kind of abstraction symbolizing the weather or something silly.
The only thing sillier is for them to claim that people in the ancient world <em>didn&rsquo;t really believe in them either</em>, but practiced entire religions meta-ironically for some social reasons.
If they believe in a &ldquo;spiritual&rdquo; nature, it is not one beyond or above matter, but instead derived from it: it is psychological, hormonal, etc.</p>
<p>Modern paganism is neither a tradition, nor a religion, nor even a belief.
It is just a new identity which supposedly flexes some kind of disposition to the world which is not even consistent across pagans because there is no basis for any of it.</p>
<hr>
<h3 id="real-baste-european-pagans">Real Baste European Pagans</h3>
<p>Christians, however, do believe in pagan gods.
Christians have always admitted the reality of spiritual beings, including the demonic.
You can take the Michael Heiser/Divine Council pill on this if you&rsquo;re interested:
While there is only one Creator and Supreme God, he created many among his heavenly host, and originally appointed them to the different races on earth.
Many rebelled and set themselves up as specific gods of their appointed races.</p>
<p>One of the purposes of Christ&rsquo;s coming was to vanquish these usurpers, and thus paganism/polytheism, which obviously has been successful.
(Note that the <a href="https://lindypress.net/book?pk=6">Book of Enoch</a> in Chapter 10 prophecies that these fallen angels would be judged 70 generations after the Enochian period, which cross-referencing with the Gospel of Luke, it is exactly 70 generations until Christ.)
Now the issues of faith are not so much polytheism, but heresy and then atheism, which is a significant enough change in the cosmic dynamic.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/blockchain-blasphemy/
title: Blockchain Blasphemy and the Technological Antichrist
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/blockchain-blasphemy/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<figure class="titleimg"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqaxQmjsb2A"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/akashic.webp"></a></figure>

<p>There&rsquo;s a meme YouTube video by Leonardo of Biz (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqaxQmjsb2A">here</a>) where the villainous Bogs refer to their desire to attain something called <strong>&ldquo;The Akashic Records&rdquo;</strong> using blockchain technology.</p>
<p>This random aside not just shows the attention to detail Leonardo gives what would otherwise be silly videos, but articulates something deeply troubling about a war unfolding over Bitcoin, Ethereum and other blockchain technology, but also technology generally.</p>
<p>Most normal people see this comment and ask&hellip;</p>
<h2 id="what-are-the-akashic-records">&ldquo;What are the <em>Akashic Records</em>?&rdquo;</h2>
<p>In the late 1800&rsquo;s, there emerged a group of spiritualists and scammers called <em>Theosophists</em>, principally followers of the eccentric Helena Blavatsky.</p>
<p>This New Age religion was a mishmash of perennialism and invented secret eastern teachings (which Blavatsky claimed to have learned in a fabricated part of her life in Tibet), with significant parallels with other universalist sects like Freemasonry.
It was one of the many spiritual vultures preying on the spiritually empty as the power of Christendom waned.</p>
<p><strong>The Akashic Records were their idea of a cosmic repository of all reality, past, present and future.</strong>
They contain every event of the universe from all past and all future.
Theosophist psychics tried to &ldquo;tap into&rdquo; these records to attain universal and specific knowledge.</p>
<h2 id="blockchain-as-akashic-record">Blockchain as Akashic Record</h2>
<p>To explain aloud Leonardo&rsquo;s subtle joke: blockchains, as they come to maturity, are functioning as Akashic Records of our own invention.</p>
<p>Bitcoin&rsquo;s blockchain is a necessarily public ledger of all past transactions, the origin of their funds, the wallets they interact with and more.
People often erroneously think that the &ldquo;crypto&rdquo; in cryptocurrency means that information about it is somehow &ldquo;cryptic&rdquo; or hidden, but this is just ignorance.</p>
<p>Bitcoin is substantially worse for privacy than even the most corporate credit cards, since even then credit cards don&rsquo;t broadcast your transactions publicly on the internet as bitcoin must do for all submitted transactions.</p>
<p>As time has gone on and projects such has Ethereum have developed, blockchain technology is employing these public ledgers for an ever wide range of tasks:
decentralized computing, contracting and much more&hellip;</p>
<p><strong>If blockchains continue developing as they are, they will gradually record and make publicly available every transaction, action and for that matter&mdash;idle word of every human.</strong>
There are projects and coins for every segment of digital life, including storing and accessing files, watching videos, interacting with the internet of things and more.
A combination of greed, stupidity and neophilia are leading us to disaster world that might not be able to be undone.</p>
<p>The technologization of society is accelerating for most.
Less and less of human life occurs without the filter, approval and overwatch of internet-connected technology.
As more of this becomes part of &ldquo;the Blockchain,&rdquo; more of it becomes an issue of common knowledge.</p>
<p>A normal human reacts in fear at the idea that God the Dread Judge has a Book of Life with all actions and thoughts of all men and will judge them accordingly.
A delusional theosophist might pine for the power that such knowledge would give them over others, but they needn&rsquo;t pine long, since this is exactly the weaponry we are creating and leaving in the open with blockchain technology&hellip;</p>
<h2 id="technology-and-will-to-power">Technology and Will-to-Power</h2>
<p>The greatest threat to good programming, human freedom and humanity itself is the love of technology just for technology&rsquo;s sake.</p>
<p>There is no shortage of visionary programmers who can imagine niche uses for novel technology.
But unfortunately for these people &ldquo;Can I?&rdquo; is a common question, but &ldquo;Should I?&rdquo; is fairly rare.</p>
<p>Pride and lust for power are the true motivations of many visionary programmers.
It doesn&rsquo;t feel like &ldquo;lust for power&rdquo; when you experience it, but there is a very Nietzschean muscle a programmer exercises when he sees a large and exploitable dataset.
When you see masses of metadata, and you know you have the means at your fingertips to create something &ldquo;new&rdquo; with it, the temptation is almost always too difficult to resist.</p>
<p>Only the most mercenary and depraved programmer sets out to write software to enslave.
Still, when even a semi-competent programmer sees an interesting dataset of GPS coordinates, cell-phone metadata, Bitcoin transaction data or something else, there often arises an insatiable desire to deploy this dataset in a &ldquo;clever&rdquo; and &ldquo;useful&rdquo; way.</p>
<p>This is the pinnacle of the &ldquo;useful idiot&rdquo; phenomenon.
In design alone, the technology is morally and socially inert, <strong>but no technology is morally or socially inert in implementation.</strong>
This is even more the case when many evil actors, governments, the media, organized power weaponize &ldquo;clever&rdquo; and &ldquo;useful&rdquo; projects to actualize private and hidden goals.</p>
<p>There is a deep undercurrent in modernity to have &ldquo;smart&rdquo; technology.
Refrigerators and appliances often now connect to the internet and download software patches from their vendors.
Simple finger-operated light switches have apparently been ruled passé, while voice-operated light switches that communicate with Amazon servers are the new thing.</p>
<p>The reason that people like Richard Stallman continue ending up sounding prophetic about the dangerous of proprietary software is because they are serious enough to realize that <strong>programming is the closest mankind has ever come to wizardry and dark arts.</strong>
With such supreme power and with such a lack of oversight (either by writing closed-source code or otherwise), even the most noble programmer can be easily seduced into flexing their Will-to-Power to do the absurd.</p>
<h2 id="the-antichrist-and-digital-hyperreality">The Antichrist and Digital Hyperreality</h2>
<p>As we further encroach creating the Akashic Records by hand,
this all might remind you of that one Voltaire quote&hellip;</p>
<p>You know, that one that millennial gamers will know from the ending of <em>Deus Ex</em> if you decide to merge yourself with the omniscient and omnipotent AI panopticon:</p>

<figure class="titleimg"><a href="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/invent-him.jpg"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/invent-him.jpg" title="If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him." alt="If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him."></a><figcaption>If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.</figcaption></figure>

<p>The zeitgeist of modernity is certainly atheistic, but at the same time, every movement in it seems to bend like pliable reeds to the desire to create a &ldquo;God&rdquo; of its own design.</p>
<p>Positivism rejects or scientifically dismisses the very metaphysical reality of &ldquo;truth&rdquo; and &ldquo;falsity&rdquo; themselves.
It then encourages the assumptive jump from personal or informational subjectivity <em>to the denial of transcendent objectivity altogether</em>.
Since this is an absurd crime even against logic, <strong>we have a natural deep-seated desire to instead create a new layer of reality on which objective and undeniable truth can be restored.</strong>
This is the newly created digital realm.
This is man&rsquo;s electronic equivalent of God&rsquo;s &ldquo;Book of Life&rdquo; which logs all truth in digital databases and blockchains.</p>
<p>Actual reality is messy, organic and is perceived subjectively&mdash;And mankind is only a part of that creation.
But in the digital world, we can arrange our new lives with inviolable programs and smart contracts that have a new enforced objectivity.</p>
<p>Mankind is creator and omnipotent in this lesser reality, but our desire for power is so great that we want to elevate this lesser reality to something greater than reality itself.
Wouldn&rsquo;t it be nice to have the kinds of superpowers we can achieve with computer programming in our waking lives?
If so, why not insert our waking consciousnesses into this reduced reality to wield this fantasy power?</p>
<p>Worst of all, you now have a class of Jordan Petersonian &ldquo;intellects&rdquo; denigrating and obfuscating reality to such a degree as to make the new digital Antichrist sounds like it was what we were talking about the whole time!
God has been reduced to and confused with &ldquo;the idea of God&rdquo; or &ldquo;the most powerful thing in creation.&rdquo;
The mentalistic world of archetypes has become the world of digital imagination, which is now held up as a replacement for the very idea of reality beyond atoms bumping into each other.
We&rsquo;re all theosophists!
We&rsquo;re all Free Masons now!</p>
<p>It is now held as an ideal to <em>create</em> our &ldquo;Creator&rdquo; and imbue digital technology with as much power and omniscience as possible.
People will soon unironically call themselves religious because they worship a created techno-god because they have been duped into believing this is what &ldquo;God&rdquo; always meant.</p>

<figure class="titleimg"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/musk-page-helios.webp"><figcaption>Deus Ex was a dystopian video game, not an instructional manual. (Looking at you, Elon Musk.)</figcaption></figure>

<p>It&rsquo;s naturally common for Christians to interpret the singular final antichrist to be an individual person, but at this point, a much more obvious &ldquo;beast system&rdquo; to marvel at is a technological system in itself consummated in something that looks like God.</p>
<h2 id="transhumanism-and-singularity-as-pattern-extrapolation">Transhumanism and Singularity as Pattern Extrapolation</h2>
<p>This entire budding techno-futurist religion has a simple origin.
The human mind sees patterns.</p>

<figure class="titleimg"><a href="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/xkcd-extrapolating.png"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/xkcd-extrapolating.png" title="Apologies for the use of XKSoyD."></a></figure>

<p>In every moment of history, every society manages to &ldquo;see patterns&rdquo; by extrapolating the past presented to them, just adding on a couple extra steps (also presented to them).
Do not mistake your extrapolation of recent events to be a foundational direction of the universe.</p>
<p>For example, John von Neumann, the most notable polymath of the 20th century took the geometric proliferation of nuclear arms and their Game Theoretics seriously&mdash;<strong>and unironically recommended immediate nuclear war.</strong>
His obituary in <em>Life</em> (Feb 25, 1957; p. 96) says of his thinking the following:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[He] observed at that time: &ldquo;With the Russians it is not a question of whether but when.&rdquo; A hard-boiled strategist, he was one of the few scientists to advocate for preemptive war, and in 1950 he was remarking, &ldquo;If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o&rsquo;clock, I say why not 1 o&rsquo;clock?&rdquo;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Thankfully most people lacked the iron-clad logic of von Neumann and we avoided nuclear holocaust.</p>
<p>In our modern world, this lazy tendency of extrapolation often manifests in a kind of <em>Transhumanism</em> or belief in technological &ldquo;Singularity&rdquo;.</p>
<p>This is a utopian or millenarian belief that we can eternally extrapolate geometric increases in increased technological or computational power to a point where technological improvement becomes instant, effortless, yet infinite.
Technology seems to have significantly accelerated in human life, so it seems to these people that we should assume it continues to do so, apparently with the idea that there is no factor in human psychology, physiological, neuroscience or even economy that could ever be a principled boundary for this tumorous growth.</p>
<p>Transhumanists, as their name suggests, ultimately believe in what they might glowingly describe as humans &ldquo;transcending their biology and psychology&rdquo; or other cloudy terms.
In reality, these people are pining for the death of humanity, or as some absurdly put it, &ldquo;human civilization surviving [sic] in human-created AI.&rdquo;</p>

<figure class="titleimg"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/having-fun.webp"><figcaption>This is actually the best case scenario of &#39;transhumanism.&#39; If you think this comic is weird, wait until there are Matrix-style warehouses of pod-people hooked up to auto-masturbators. Acutally, you&#39;ll realize in some senses, they&#39;re already here.</figcaption></figure>

<p>They imagine husks of biological humanity, perfectly climate-controlled by vaccines, &ldquo;augmentations,&rdquo; and directly-injected stimulation and entertainment, embedded in a casket of metal for their entire lives.
They imagine human-created robots, then totally de-tethered from their creators, exploring the universe and installing robot colonies on distant planets.
In some perverted way, they call this genocidal conquest of humanity <em>humanity</em> itself, or humanity &ldquo;improved.&rdquo;</p>
<p>This is the Gnostic Heresy reborn, but worse than original Gnostics, who at least believed in the structure beyond matter, and who consistently denigrated matter compared to it.
These new Gnostics believe in creating this realm of ideas, but destroying and mutilating the human mind and body that they believe to be the very metric of value of this new realm.
In a literal sense, they want to destroy nature, mankind and the universe as they know it.</p>
<h2 id="cucked-by-inevitability">Cucked by &ldquo;Inevitability&rdquo;</h2>
<p>Transhumanists take a page from Marx&rsquo;s book in passing of their true desire as being a scientific &ldquo;inevitability.&rdquo;
They argue that singularity <em>will</em> happen, therefore, by some leap of logic, it <em>should</em>, or even its many consequences or birth-pangs are therefore <em>good</em>.
This is absurd.</p>
<p>If, after all, an asteroid were hurdling towards this planet capable of wiping out human life, only a moron refuse to act saying that &ldquo;It&rsquo;s inevitable,&rdquo; or &ldquo;It&rsquo;s the clear direction of history.&rdquo;
At that, the trajectory of an asteroid is an issue of math, while any alleged trajectory of history is an issue of pure fantasy.</p>
<p>I mention this to say that transhumanists often try to pass of their fantasies of the future as being &ldquo;inevitable,&rdquo; when in fact, they are merely titillating ideas that appeal to their imaginations formed for years under the influence of interesting fantasy futurism in film, fiction and modern culture.</p>
<h2 id="so-our-state-of-affairs">So, our state of affairs&hellip;</h2>
<ol>
<li>The influence of technology is at a local high point now. It has become over-encompassing enough to be reminiscent of omnipotence and omniscience.</li>
<li>In our godless age, this power naturally breeds a kind of worship from godless people. It provides not only a pseudo-divinity, but a new arena for a new objectivity that out-classes the skepticism of post-modernity.</li>
<li>There are psychological (and material) incentives for people to continue expanding the power of this technological system, and build it new powers to monitor and control people.</li>
<li>There are utopian and millennialist sects going by various names that concoct rationalizations to expand the power of this technological system, expand its range and shield it from questioning.</li>
</ol>
<p>I will leave for the future why I so quickly dismiss the supposed inevitability of &ldquo;singularity.&rdquo; Perhaps in the next episode&hellip;</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/no-restaurants-in-2023/
title: Why I Won't Go to Restaurants in 2023
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/no-restaurants-in-2023/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<figure class="titleimg"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/Nighthawks_by_Edward_Hopper_1942.jpg"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/nighthawks.webp"></a></figure>

<p>I&rsquo;ve decided after some consideration <strong>to not go to restaurants at all in 2023</strong>.
You can call this a New Year&rsquo;s Resolution.
It&rsquo;ll require at least some sacrifice, pain, annoyance to myself and perhaps others, but I&rsquo;m going to stick by it and I think it will have a good effect.</p>
<p>Restaurants are a drastically over-used creature comfort of the consumerist economy&hellip; even worse, nowadays they&rsquo;re not even comfortable&hellip;</p>
<p>Especially now that portions are smaller more expensive than ever, it&rsquo;s hard to go to a restaurant without feeling cheated.</p>
<p>All of this is fortunate, though, since relying on the ease of restaurants is a vice.
It is now easier than ever to quit it without missing anything but disappointment.</p>
<h2 id="here-are-the-rules">Here Are the Rules.</h2>
<ol>
<li>When I travel alone, I will flatly never eat at a restaurant, no matter what. I will pack food, or prepare food bought at a grocery store.</li>
<li>At time when I might usually offer to go to restaurants out with people, I will serve them at home.</li>
<li>I&rsquo;ll get in the habit of preparing and carrying food&mdash;not snacks&mdash;but food when I will need it. This will include trips.</li>
<li>If I have not prepared food while out, I will go hungry. Oh well!</li>
</ol>
<p>I have even already forewarned people in my life about my adherence to this.</p>
<p>I&rsquo;m not saying I&rsquo;m going to throw a Richard Stallman-style sperg-out when asked to go to a restaurant, but I will find a novel alternative.
If I do go physically to a restaurant with people, obviously I will order nothing and eat nothing, not even free tortilla chips (because it&rsquo;s not just about the money, either).</p>
<h3 id="things-even-worse-that-restaurants">Things <em>even worse</em> that restaurants</h3>

<figure class="titleimg"><a href="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/grubhub.png"><img src="https://lukesmith.xyz/pix/grubhub.png"></a><figcaption>Obviously take-out counts as a restaurant, in fact, is even worse.</figcaption></figure>

<p>There are some things <em>even worse</em> than restaurants that I don&rsquo;t use now and won&rsquo;t start.
(I say this because some might be tempted to comply with the letter, but not the spirit of the law.)</p>
<ul>
<li>I will get no take-out.</li>
<li>I will buy no food from gas stations, convenience stores or delis.</li>
<li>I will have no junk food.</li>
<li>I will also count coffee shops and other such things as restaurants and thus subject to exclusion.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="what-not-going-to-restaurants-will-get-me">What not Going to Restaurants Will Get Me.</h2>
<p>The first and obvious advantage is that I will be saving money.</p>
<p>The wider goal is to make sure that I am more comfortable with preparing food for people on short notice, having spontaneous picnics, planning in advance for things and thereby acting less impulsive in food consumption.</p>
<p>It might be weird to unironically suggest in the 21st century that &ldquo;picnics&rdquo; can be an alternative to restaurants, but however corny they may sound to our ears, they are infinitely more social, customizable and economical.
Doing all of this make a new habit to permanently displace compulsive restauranting.</p>
<p>My goal is <strong>not</strong> to minimize alimentary social outings&mdash;but to improve them by minimizing cost and maximizing the possibilities of what I can end up doing.</p>
<h2 id="how-rigorous-will-i-be">How Rigorous Will I be?</h2>
<p>People in real life have questioned how rigorous I will be in this resolution.
I&rsquo;ve said I will reserve the right to go to a restaurant on a highly exceptional occassion which is certainly not a part of everyday habit.</p>
<p>For example, earlier this year, I went out to a nice restaurant with some friends and subscribers during Linuxfest&mdash;this is the kind of outing/event I might exempt.
Even in those circumstances, I want to consider social alternatives to restaurant-going though.</p>
<p>I&rsquo;ve talked to other people and restaurants have become a continuing disappointment to many in the days of shrinkflation.
Since I can barely go to one and be filled for less than $35, I don&rsquo;t think I&rsquo;m going to look back from this.</p>


guid: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/consciousness-and-materialism/
title: Consciousness and Materialism
url: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/consciousness-and-materialism/
feedurl: https://lukesmith.xyz/index.xml
content:
<h2 id="humes-parallel">Hume&rsquo;s Parallel</h2>
<p>David Hume has often been quoted for his <em>&ldquo;Is&rdquo; vs. &ldquo;Ought&rdquo;</em> distinction.
The argument is that fact and morality are two different domains, and from no accumulation of statements of fact alone can we ever jump to a statement of morality.</p>
<p>We can say statements of fact such as:</p>
<ol>
<li>To be murdered is potentially painful.</li>
<li>To be murdered is irreversible.</li>
<li>Murder causes social dysfunction.</li>
<li><em>Etc.</em> &hellip;</li>
</ol>
<p>By merely my collecting these, we haven&rsquo;t proven that <em>Murder is evil.</em>
That is an entirely different statement that cannot be inducted from statements about the description of murder.</p>
<p>Certainly we can derive moral statements from <em>other</em> moral statements accompanied by factual statements. For example, if we assume that the moral statement <em>To kill a living being is immoral.</em> we can derive new moral &ldquo;facts&rdquo; from it:</p>
<ol>
<li>To kill a living being is immoral.</li>
<li>Unborn children in the womb are living beings.</li>
<li>Abortion is immoral.</li>
</ol>
<p>Or&hellip;</p>
<ol>
<li>To kill a living being is immoral.</li>
<li>Animals are living beings.</li>
<li>Killing animals is immoral.</li>
</ol>
<p>Whether you find Hume&rsquo;s argument ironclad, it proposes that mere fact and morality are ultimately two domains and substances, and while they can interact, importantly, morality itself&mdash;whatever it is&mdash;is made of different stuff than just empirical statements.
There requires some extra jump.</p>
<h2 id="consciousness">Consciousness</h2>
<p>I bring this up because it is a logical analog to the reality of consciousness.</p>
<p>Some would incorrectly say that the issue of consciousness is the &ldquo;Hardest Problem in Science.&rdquo;
That&rsquo;s premature because it presupposes that science <em>has even</em> begun to properly ask the question, or has any idea of a vector to approach the issue, or any tools to attack the problem.</p>
<p>One funny thing, even&mdash;perhaps especially true about the institutionalized academic venues for the study of consciousness, is that they are rife with &ldquo;pseudoscience.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Go to a &ldquo;scientific&rdquo; conference or institute and however many serious scientists you see, you will find no fewer Hindu gurus.
This is because there are simply no scientific methods for even approaching the issue of the origin and nature of consciousness and many scientists are at least honest enough to recognize they have little to no performative advantage in the field over pagan lore or even esotericist scammers.</p>
<h3 id="consciousness-from-a-humean-perspective">Consciousness from a Humean Perspective</h3>
<p>In the same way that Hume argued that morality must be a different substance from fact, I will state flatly that consciousness, in its essence, must be a totally different substance from matter.</p>
<p>Materialist science is self-limited to what is ultimately the syntactic interactions of atoms more or less bumping into each other, at whatever level of abstraction.
In the same way that Hume could say that no as-of-yet unknown facts could generate a foundational moral statement, I say that no as-of-yet unknown material configuration generates this ontologically new category of self-perception.</p>
<p>Now when Hume, as a skeptic, suggested that fact and morality were different domains, a part of that skepticism is the suggestion that morality, since it is not grounded in fact, might actually just be a worthless enterprise. That &ldquo;solves&rdquo; the philosophical problems of morality by saying it ultimately has no independent ontology, i.e. it doesn&rsquo;t really exist, so we don&rsquo;t really have to talk about it.</p>
<p>Consciousness cannot be discarded in the same fashion.
Consciousness is not just something we observe, but it is <em>the only thing we observe</em>.
It is the basis of all of our other observations and it is the most inexplicable thing.</p>
<h3 id="mere-computation">Mere computation?</h3>
<p>You might interpret my statement here as a denial of the so-called <em>Computational Theory of Mind</em> which, among other things, alleges that consciousness itself is a side-effect of the configuration of the brain to compute and process reality.</p>
<p>After all, computation is merely the processing rules of a formal game.
Saying computational operations can generate consciousness by themselves is no sillier than saying that a game of Monopoly can generate consciousness.
(There are some who have argued themselves into corners where they will affirm that such Monopoly games can be conscious).</p>
<p>It might be that some syntactic configurations might resonate in such a way to &ldquo;summon&rdquo; consciousness from another dimension.
That is not my point, my point is the more obvious one: consciousness itself, qualia, sense in itself are obviously something <em>different</em> than matter.</p>
<p>There&rsquo;s an unfortunate temptation to describe things that consciousness seems to interact with or do or correlate with, mistaking that to be an explanation of the sensation of consciousness itself.
To do that is to forget the question altogether, replacing it with something trivial.</p>
<h2 id="matter-over-mind">Matter over Mind?</h2>
<p>To be clear, it is very obvious that material conditions <em>affect</em> consciousness.
This is no different from how Hume admitted that factual statements can affect derivations of moral statements.</p>
<p>Chemicals can induce other states of consciousness.
Injuries can affect the state of self-perception.</p>
<p>For a while I assumed the error of thinking that because these statements were true, that must mean that consciousness itself must be merely material as well.</p>
<p>This is fallacious reasoning because we can just as easily say that the physical components of the brain are &ldquo;receivers&rdquo; of a &ldquo;signal&rdquo; of consciousness.</p>
<p>In the same way that smashing a T.V. doesn&rsquo;t destroy the signal it receives, damaging the brain or distorting its physical reactions in such a way to affect consciousness doesn&rsquo;t mean the consciousness itself has an origin in the physical brain.</p>
<p>That might sound other-worldly, as if it entails consciousness must be something from another dimension, but it&rsquo;s even similar to the way people approach their <em>non-solutions</em> in the Computational Theory of Mind.</p>
<h2 id="other-worldly">Other-worldly</h2>
<p>I will say that I have come to grips with the idea that consciousness must be something literally other-worldly.</p>
<p>Before pan-physicalists and atheists throw their computers aside in disgust, remember that this is almost a tautology or truism, and it is really the essence of my argument here.
It also doesn&rsquo;t even require any more metaphysics than are required to remain consistent.</p>
<p>Physicalism and materialism assume that the core of the universe is familiar atomic matter and other physical forces and energies.
Consciousness is simply something ontologically apart from these things.</p>
<p>In making philosophically physicalist models for consciousness, we are trying to build paper-flat two-dimensional scaffolding to hold an immensely oblong three-dimensional object.
That might teach us something about consciousness in a pedagogical sense, but the operations of atoms and forces are just different stuff than consciousness and even with clever emergent arguments, never suffice to explain it.</p>
<p>It is one thing to say that complex computational systems can emerge from simple interactions of matter.
This is a mere issue of complexity.
It is a totally different thing to say that the very realm of the cognitive theater, including qualia and sense itself are mere complex atom-bumpings. This is an addition of that same third dimension.</p>
<p>While nearly everything in the universe can be attacked with a materialist model, and even though we can correlate matter with conscious states, the appearance of the qualia of things in the mind is not just something we can reduce to material corollaries, because the material corollaries are not the interesting or crucial aspect.</p>
<h3 id="youre-already-a-dualist-anyway">You&rsquo;re already a dualist anyway.</h3>
<p>There is an obvious sense in which even a rigid materialist should realize the wide scope of the universe is pretty wide, nearly certainly wider than we now anticipate.</p>
<p>Familiar matter and energy has formed the physical sciences, but that in no way means that part of, in fact, most of reality is actually other types of forces and substances.</p>
<p><strong>Remember that modern materialism before used to be &ldquo;mechanicalism.&rdquo;</strong>
Before Newton, many thought that atoms alone were sufficient to describe reality, specifically, atoms exerting direct force on one another.</p>
<p>Newton proposed an elegant theory that was involved an occult force: <em>Gravity</em> that acted counter-mechanically over long distances via an unknown&mdash;and still totally unknown&mdash;means.
The theory solved significant problems and unified much, but its central assumption was other-worldly and totally unjustified and unexplained.</p>
<p>How can a force act over long distances seemingly instantly?
The fact that we don&rsquo;t dismiss gravity immediately as spiritualism is only a testament to the multi-generational coping mechanism has made this new force mundane.</p>
<p>Now Newton&rsquo;s concept of gravity is thought of as being &ldquo;real&rdquo; and &ldquo;physical&rdquo; and within the realm of &ldquo;science&rdquo; despite the fact that it upended the physicalist assumptions of the day of how matter and atoms can interact.</p>
<p>All of this is to say that old-school atomists (Democritus, Lucretius, etc.) promoted a highly obsolete science that not even modern &ldquo;materialists&rdquo; endorse.
At that, new occult and spiritual forces, like gravity, after repeated observations and theories come under purview of &ldquo;science&rdquo; and thus become &ldquo;physical&rdquo; even though they are clearly of a totally different substance than traditional atoms and matter.</p>
<p>That said, the universe has many different substances and forces that are not necessarily commensurable.
They may interact, but that in no ways makes them the same substance.
When we realize that, we have already dismissed philosophical monism.
Some forces are familiar enough to make models of, thus they become unsurprising, regular and subject to science.
Other forces of the universe might be wider than experimental tests can harness, so irregular as to avoid sensible-sounding theories and different enough to still seem miraculous forever.</p>
<p>So in saying that consciousness is a totally different substance, of a non-material reality and cannot be accounted for from narrowly material computation is not an unreasonable statement.
I would say that it is a self-evidently true statement regardless of philosophical assumptions, and I think it would behoove people who purport to study consciousness to acknowledge it as such, rather than attempting to muddy the waters and reduce conscious theater to something it is not, so they can pretend to study it.</p>


