Monthly Archives: July 2023

Negativity

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Negativity came to some sort of a disrepute in the spiritual circles, thanks to the positivity being hyped up – and it’s not only in the 1990s, because I know that Yogananda, who preceded this trend by decades, gave his contribution. So, let me explain why negativity is a legitimate and useful thing.

First of all, Vedanta insists on it – “neti, neti” means “not this, not that”, and it’s one of the primary ways of discarding non-brahman entities from the mind. Also, Vedanta defines things negatively – brahman is “acintya” and “nirguna”. Acintya means “inconceivable” or “unimaginable”, and nirguna means “attribute-less” or “devoid of worldly qualities”. Those are all negative designations.

Buddhism, also, approaches things negatively, by deconstructing attachments and spiritual constructs, not even bothering to say that something will eventually arise that can’t be deconstructed – essentially, your job is to assume that everything you encounter is a compound structure that can be dissolved, and if there is a positive underlying principle, such as nirvana, that will be revealed in due course without any attempt on your behalf to visualize the goal.

So, the most intellectually and spiritually authoritative religious systems of the East couldn’t care less about positivity, and in fact promote negativity in a very obvious way. We know that Christianity couldn’t care less about the concepts such as “positive” or “negative”, and instead focuses on spiritually and morally relevant terms such as “good” and “evil”, or “truth” and “falsehood”. There’s no concept of a “negative person” in Christianity – a person is either good or evil. If someone’s words are unpleasant to you, the question is whether he’s right or wrong. If he’s right and his words are unpleasant to you, saying he’s “negative” doesn’t allow you to dismiss him out of hand, and instead it is quite obvious that you’re the problem.

So, if Christianity doesn’t recognize those designations as valid, if Buddhism and Vedanta use negativity as one of the primary instruments of detachment, deconstruction and discernment (all three words being negative, by the way), where did all the idolatry of positivity and contempt of negativity come from?

The answer is obvious – not from the ancient, traditional sources. It’s all New Age nonsense. By all means, you can believe in that stuff, just don’t try to convince people that it’s the spiritual main stream and something self-evident, because it’s not. In fact, it stands in opposition to all the religious philosophies I find compelling and impressive.

Positivity

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I was just thinking about all the virtue-signalling and posturing that is currently in vogue, and remembered that I’ve sen something similar before: the “positivity” trend of the 1990s.

Positivity actually has a legitimate purpose in psychology, as I would know, having been proficient in autogenous training, which is a form of self-hypnosis, where positive formulation of suggestions is paramount. By “positive” mean statements such as “my hands are warm” instead of “my hands are not cold”, and so on. It seems that human mind doesn’t really work well with avoiding undesirable outcomes; basically, if you tell it what you don’t want, you’re not really telling it what you do want, which is very much like telling your driver to go “not to London”. That’s hardly a useful instruction, because “not London” is quite a large place.

So, positive suggestions such as “drive me to Bristol” or “get me coffee” work, and negative suggestions such as “drive me away from here” or “get me something other than tea” don’t. However, a whole movement of abject charlatanry developed around those basic truths, and “positivity” and “negativity” became amoral substitute for good and evil, and right and wrong, in a moral framework that tried to avoid such designations at all cost, in order to avoid any notion of religion.

You see, there’s a problem with rejecting negativity in expression. While it is true that you need to positively formulate your ultimate goal in order to be able to get there, it is also true that we often don’t have enough knowledge of the goal at the beginning of the journey. For instance, let’s say that you want to reach God, but what is God, exactly, to someone who is a mere beginner? God is something awesome and magnificent at the very extreme end of a multidimensional coordinate system of values – greatest consciousness, greatest truth, greatest power and so on – but what does that actually mean? Here, negativity plays an important part, because you can see all kinds of evil and depravity and say, “I don’t know what God is, exactly, but let’s assume he’s in the opposite direction from this”, and such a statement will, of course, not lead you to God directly, but if you practice the virtues that are opposite to the wicked depravities that are abundant in the world and easy to perceive, it will certainly help to move you from the starting point, and trying to imagine virtues by rejecting sins will give you some idea of where you want to be, which is of course not perfect, but “not perfect” is much better than “horrible” already, and as long as you understand that this is a transitory position and not a destination, I see nothing wrong with it. Hate and disgust directed at evil things imply some sense of goodness and virtue, and this can later be properly formulated, but as beginnings go, hatred and disgust are effective and dynamic enough to give you some momentum. Certainly, that’s not where you want to be stuck permanently, and you do need to transition your understanding from, for example, “I am revolted by all the perversions in modern society”, to “those things are instinctively revolting because they lie in the direction opposite of God, who is truth, reality and fulfilment”.

My problem with the positivity movement is not as much that it is wrong; it’s an ideological poison, akin to the modern variety known as “tolerance” and “diversity”. Positivity on its own can actually be extremely harmful, if it stops you from recognizing and changing things that are obviously wrong; likewise, tolerance for bad things isn’t a good thing, and diversity on its own doesn’t mean anything good, because is it really preferable to have many different bad things, and not one good thing? If you have many things, is it preferable to see them all as equal, or to choose between them based on some criterion of merit? It all looks like some kindergarten ethical philosophy of “nobody is wrong”; in fact, everybody is wrong, and everybody stands to improve, and stupid flattery is of no use whatsoever.

Without an ethical framework based upon the referential target of the Absolute, all quantitative and qualitative designations are pointless and worthless. What is right and wrong without God as the referential truth? What is good and evil without God as the referential goodness? Of what use is positivity without a referential absolute target? Also, if you understand that a statement “Satan is beautiful” is positive, and a statement “Satan is not beautiful” is negative, it becomes apparent that the entire thing on its own has no moral reference, and is a mere linguistic gimmick. Positivity starts making sense only after you obtain your actual moral reference from a worthwhile theology.

Cherish trauma

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I was thinking about the extent to which past trauma and frustrations condition my actions, and whether that is something that should be remedied, or accepted.

You see, people usually assume that conditioning by trauma is a bad thing, but if you know anything about how neural networks are trained, you would know that trauma is an excellent way to condition a neural network to avoid a certain path. For instance, fall from great height is deadly. In order to avoid death, it would be a good idea to condition oneself to avoid situations that can lead to fall from height. In case of humans, it’s an instinct, hard-wired in our brains from the beginning, as something that is always necessary. Don’t fuck around at heights. Don’t eat foods you never ate before if you’re lost in the woods. Be afraid of the dark. Basically, try to survive long enough that your conscious mind can guide you, but before that, rely on instinct. Also, if you barely survived something, it creates a strong trauma-imprint in order for you to avoid things that might bring you close to such a near-miss in the future. You can see where I’m going there – fear and trauma can be a very good way not to get poisoned, raped, robbed or killed. It’s much safer for you to be afraid of snakes and spiders, than to handle them. The worst thing that can happen to you if you fear them is fear. The worst thing that can happen if you don’t fear them is death. From the evolution standpoint, fear is preferable, and trauma is a way to store personal experience in actionable, useful form – if you hit your toe on a rock once and broke it, trauma-caused imprint will make you careful about it in the future. If you got raped in a corn field once because you weren’t afraid to walk alone in the dark through desolate places, trauma will change your dangerous behaviour in a hurry.

The problem is neither fear nor trauma – rather, the problem are all those “positive thinking” nonsense books from America, authored in the 1990s or earlier, where fear, stress or trauma are seen as a philosophical substitute for evil in a worldview that tries very hard to avoid evil as a concept. They thought that, if you removed all trauma-imprints, you will psychologically return to the innocence of childhood which they for some reason see as perfection. I don’t share that opinion, because you know what the difference is between a child and an idiot? A child is younger; that’s all. I don’t wish to be an idiot again, because I worked quite hard to learn what I have, and if I have scars from trauma, they all contain a lesson – if you do this, you might get wrecked again.

Sure, sometimes trauma generalises things too much, to the point where very specific bad experience can “poison the well” in a very broad way that isn’t really helpful – for instance, you get scared of heights even when it’s pointless and not at all useful. Such things need to be worked on, of course, but if I have traumatic experiences caused by a computer that ran a shitty Win98 OS with too little RAM, and repeatedly froze and crashed when I tried to edit a 300DPI TIFF image for the cover of my first book, and as a result I couldn’t finish the edit in time and I ended up submitting the version that’s not properly sized and text ended up being too close to the margins, and so on? What if those traumatic experiences cause me to over-specify my computers in order to avoid situations of this kind, where the computer runs perfectly fine 99% of the time, but when I need to do some graphics work, it turns out to be unfit and causes me to fail at important tasks? What’s the worst thing that can happen if I listen to my experience and buy over-specced equipment whenever I can? I can waste some money, and that’s it. For 99% of the time, I will have a computer that’s vastly over-specified for the task at hand, but at that instance when I need to prepare a meter-sized high-res photographic print, I will be able to do it without a problem. Also, with cars – I have trauma caused by cars with insufficiently powerful engines, because my first car had 54HP and overtaking was always scary and dangerous. I also have issues with bad tyres. As a result, I avoid cars that are underpowered or in some other way unsafe, and I try to always have excellent tyres. Again, what exactly is the problem with trauma here? It causes me to spend more money on really important things that prevent dangerous situations? How terrible. 🙂 I also have trauma caused by food poisoning that makes me wary of things that caused food poisoning before – that jar of pickled olives with only a few remaining ones that’s been sitting in the fridge, or that opened cup of sour cream that’s been in the fridge for a week, especially in the summer, and stuff that tastes a bit “off” – what’s the worst that can happen if I “succumb to my fears”? I throw away suspicious foods and not get sick? That’s terrible, I must immediately return to childhood where I had no such fears and would eat any kind of toxic garbage including leaked batteries and dog shit. What an ideal state of spiritual perfection that was. 🙂

In short, we’ve all been told all kinds of stupid bullshit, and we need to un-learn it all, especially the stuff that came from America, because that’s simply a motherlode of nonsense.

Dangers of AI

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There’s been quite a bit of talk recently about the dangers of AI technology – from human jobs being replaced, to terminator-like robots killing all humans.

My take on this, after having seen some of the AI achievements, is that the name “artificial intelligence” is a misnomer – “artificial stupidity” would be more appropriate. Those things are essentially stupid as fuck, and have some extreme limitations, but they do have the ability to quickly iterate across datasets in order to find a solution, if there is a clear way of punishing failure and rewarding success. That’s basically all they do.

I’ve seen neural networks being trained to win in computer games, and the end-result is amazing and exceeds human ability, simply because it’s a scenario where there are clear win/loss events that enable the neural networks to be trained.

In essence, yes, those things can replace a significant number of human jobs; everything that has to do with data mining, pattern recognition and analysis, trivial but seemingly complex work such as programming that consists of finding and adapting code snippets from the web, or iterative “art” that consists of modifying and combining generic tropes – that’s all going to be done with AI. Engineering work that would require too many calculations for a human, such as fluid mechanics solutions – turbines, rocket engines and so on – are all excellent cases for neural networks.

Unfortunately, military use is among those cases, where it is quite easy to create loitering munitions – basically, drones that hover in the air – that can be sent to scan enemy territory for everything that moves, then recognise targets to identify the priority ones, and crash into them. Ground weapons that recognise human targets and take them down with some kind of a weapon also fit this category, as well as underwater drones that use passive sonar to scan for exactly the kind of ship they want to sink, and then rise from the sea floor and hit it from beneath. This is all trivially easy to do with pattern recognition of the kind that exists today, combined with the kind of hardware that exists today. Imagining killer drones as the humanoid terminators is silly, because such a form would not be efficient. Instead, imagine a quadcopter drone hovering above in scan mode, seeking targets, and then using some kind of a weapon to take them down – a needle with some kind of venom would do. It’s all technically feasible.

The more dangerous thing is a combination of neural networks and totalitarian-minded humans, and by that I mean all kinds of leftists in the West. An AI can data-mine the information sources in order to tag “undesirable” humans, and then this tag would be acted upon by the banks, governments, corporations and so on, basically making it impossible for one to send or receive money if not compliant with the current ideological requirements. This already exists and it’s why we must look for all the things the governments attack as “money laundering friendly” and adopt them as means of doing financial transactions, because if it’s “money laundering friendly”, it means the government can’t completely control it, and if the government can’t control it, it’s the only way for us to survive totalitarian governments aided by neural networks. Have in mind that the governments talk about controlling all kinds of criminals and perverts, but what they really mean is you. Targetting universally hated groups is merely a way to get public approval for totalitarian measures that will then be applied universally. What we will probably all end up doing in order to evade fascist governments is transact in crypto tokens, and settle in gold and silver, in some kind of a distributed, encrypted network that will be incredibly difficult to infiltrate or crack.

Basically, the payment and financial systems have been modified to accommodate totalitarian intent for decades already, to the point where now even the common folk understand that something is not right, but they cannot even imagine the danger. If someone restricts your ability to conduct business and purchase goods and services, and connects that to your political attitudes, you can kiss every idea of freedom and democracy goodbye, and that’s exactly what the American “democratic” overlords have been quietly doing, both at home and in their vassal states. Unfortunately, Russia and China are no better, because government power over the populace is just too tempting for any government bastard to resist.

So, basically, I’m not really afraid of AI. I’m afraid of AI being used by evil humans to create a prison for our bodies and minds, and only God can save us from this hell, which is basically why I think a nuclear war that would decapitate all the governments and destroy the technosphere that gives them infinite power is a lesser evil. The alternative, unfortunately, is much, much worse, because a logical continuation of “business as usual” is being completely controlled by the madmen who will cull the population every now and then to “save the planet” or whatever makes them feel good about themselves, and control us to the point where even saying the word “freedom” would put you on some list you don’t want to be on.

Computer options

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I’ll write down some of my impressions regarding my recent decision to transition completely to the Apple ecosystem.

First of all, I had three options: Windows, Linux and Mac. All three come with serious issues – woke infestation, American spying, corporate spying, ideology and so on. With Windows, it seems that the quality of the product had seriously degraded since they fired their QA staff to cut costs, and they transitioned from being financed by the user, to being semi-free to the user and being financed by ads, which makes the present-day Windows as infested with all kinds of unwanted stuff they are installing without user permission, as a Xiaomi phone. That’s absolutely unacceptable. Also, since their QA is borderline non-existent, they keep pushing updates and patches and fixes for bad patches and so on, and something seems to be perpetually downloading and installing in the background, and if you don’t use your computer for any length of time, it will be absolutely bogged down by a seemingly endless stream of updates that will take most of the day to clear. Also, as they require an increasingly more closed down hardware platform in order to run, the former advantage of PC as an open platform on which you can install anything is, for the most part, lost, and a present-day PC is barely any more open than a Mac. It’s still not as bad, but it’s getting close. The advantages of Windows are that everything runs on them, as they are for the most intents and purposes the standard OS. It’s the default platform for gaming, business applications and so on. Also, the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is great, and for all intents and purposes Windows and Linux are blended to such a degree that they feel like a single system, and you can run both sets of applications on the same system without rebooting into another OS, or running a virtual machine. In some senses, Windows is better than it ever was, but in others it’s worse than ever.

The GNU-Linux project is so infested with ideology, from wokeism to communism, that it seems completely bogged down and will never overcome those issues. The basic concept of trying to avoid money as a system of rewarding utility always re-appears there as a stumbling block, and since it is very sensitive to the issue of a very limited number of developers maintaining critical components, it is also very sensitive to ideological corruption and bribery, as much as the large corporations are sensitive to government pressure and legal constraints within America. Basically, Linux has its own set of issues; they are just slightly different than those of Windows and Mac.

A Mac looks like an increasingly closed-down nightmare, where the user is increasingly losing influence, but on the other hand, on a Mac I have homebrew and macports projects that allow me to install more-less the same GNU package that I have on Linux. For all intents and purposes, I can bypass Apple’s nonsense, install whatever I want from the open source library and do my thing. It sounds closed down, but in reality the greatest restriction I feel is that my favourite games are not ported to Mac. On the other hand, it’s a refreshing alternative to the kilowatt arms race on the PC platform, where AMD, Intel and Nvidia are competing to produce the most power-hungry, hot machine they possibly can, to the point where cooling solutions for the hardware became ridiculous in the recent years. The problem with Apple is that when they decide not to produce the kind of hardware that you need, you are stuck, and I had that situation when they refused to make bigger iPhones so I got a Samsung Note, and returned to Apple once they came to their senses, but at the moment their iPhones have everything I need, their iPads have everything I need, their laptops are excellent and meet all of my needs, and their desktop lineup for the first time contains something I actually wanted to buy, instead of the all-in-one iMacs and the overpriced Mac Pro monstrosities. Also, since I have an Apple phone, tablet, laptop and earphones, having an Apple desktop as well allows me to integrate all of those things slightly better; the key word is “slightly” – for instance, I can switch the AirPods to the desktop with a click, and switch them back to the iPhone easily, where on Windows desktop this would require pairing them to the desktop, which would then “steal” them from the phone every time I log in – I tried that, thank you very much. The main advantage of a desktop Mac, however, is the absence of the Windows update nightmare. Also, the hardware ports are all modern and fast, unlike a PC where you get one or two “fast” ports, but everything else is a decade-old legacy. Having four Thunderbolt ports and all USB ports at the latest speed standard available is refreshing and liberating, because the external drives I plug in will work as fast as the internal one. Advantages of external NVMe storage are not to be underestimated, and I really missed having Thunderbolt ports on my PC, which is in all other respects a winged beast of a machine.

The Mac Studio plugged into my peripherals seamlessly; I just connected my 43” LG 4k display to the Thunderbolt port and it worked perfectly; I connected my Logitech webcam, mouse and keyboard and they worked perfectly. I connected the powered USB 3 hub to one of its USB A ports and this gave me a place to connect all kinds of dongles and charging cables that I use; all works perfectly. I also connected the Samsung T7 2TB SSD drive while I wait for the 4TB NVMe drive that I have on order, so that I can work with my photos in Lightroom, and everything works great. It’s not that my PC was some ancient legacy shitbox, so you’ll hear no raving about how fast a Mac is in comparison; it feels the same. The Windows keyboard layout on a Mac feels confusing so I took the Apple keyboard from the drawer and I’m using that now, just to see what it’s like, but for all intents and purposes the experience is remarkably similar to my Windows desktop, only without stability issues and Windows updates, which means mission accomplished, I guess, because that’s what I wanted to do.

Am I more susceptible to Apple’s whims now? I guess so. However, if I look at things from the practical perspective of wanting things to just work for me and not get in my way, Apple seems to allow me to just pay for things and get functionality, while others substitute money with either ads or ideology, both of which I detest. On Apple, I feel like the user and not like the product that is sold to the advertisers, and as for the money, my PC hardware was not actually cheap. In fact, it’s all in the same price range as Apple stuff, only designed with different priorities. The aluminium Studio machine doesn’t really fit into the matte-black aesthetic of the rest of the setup, but I guess I’ll live. The black (or, in Apple terms, space grey) “magic” keyboard and touchpad, on the other hand, fit great.

I tried Linux on my PC, yes. When I use the Nvidia driver, the screen doesn’t turn on after waking from sleep. I can solve it by using the Nouveau driver, but then the Ethernet port stops working. In short, I’m too old for this shit. When I was a kid I would have found it a challenge to get everything working, but now I just find it annoying; it gets in my way and doesn’t help me do the things I want to do any better, faster or easier, so it’s a hard pass.