Author Archives: danijel

Thoughts about computers

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I’ve been thinking about computers lately, for multiple reasons, so I’ll share a few thoughts.

It’s interesting how people tend to have weird prejudice about things based on the label. For instance, “gaming” computers are supposedly not “serious”, you shouldn’t buy that stuff if you’re doing serious work with your computer. You should get a “business” or a “workstation” machine.

That’s such incredible nonsense, because what does “gaming” even mean at this point? It’s basically “workstation” with RGB lights. If a PC or a laptop is “gaming”, it usually means a powerful graphics card, overbuilt power supply, high-performance cooling system, and generally high-end components designed to be able to work on 100% indefinitely. What’s a workstation PC? Well, it has a powerful GPU, overbuilt power supply, high performance cooling, high-spec components that are designed to be able to work on 100% indefinitely, only the graphics card has drivers for CAD, which means it supports double precision floating point arithmetics, and it’s designed more “seriously”, which means no RGB and the box looks normal, and not like an alien space ship with glowing vents. It’s also more expensive, in order to milk the “serious” customers for money, which means that if you want to have the greatest performance for your money, get gaming components, get a normal-looking case, turn off the RGB nonsense and there you go. The only situation where you would actually want a real workstation machine is if you’re running server workloads and you actually need a server CPU. Otherwise, “gaming” translates into “great for photo and video editing and programming”.

It’s interesting that everything that tends to be labelled as “business” tends to be shit. That’s because a computer for “business” is the cheapest possible piece of crap that will still work, so penny-pinchers that buy equipment for general staff that slaves their lives away in cubicles for a meager wage can feel good knowing they spent the least possible amount of money on the “workforce”. That’s never the computer the boss is getting for himself. He’s getting a 16” Macbook Pro. He’s certainly not getting the “business” model. You don’t get a business-grade computer if you’re doing business, you get it if you are considered to be equipment required for doing business, and you need to be cheap.

There’s also the question whether to buy a Mac or a “PC”, as if somehow a Mac is not a PC. Let me write down my own experience. I used to write books on IBM T41 laptops running Linux. The keyboards were great, and the screen had lots of vertical space, being 4:3 ratio, so that worked fine, but they tended to die on me, because I used them on my lap, and I didn’t have air conditioning in the room so they overheated during the summer; the motherboards would die, so I would just get another used T41 (they were several generations obsolete and dirt cheap at that point), put in my hard drive and continue writing. At some point, after I went through two IBMs in two years, I decided I had enough of that shit and got a 13” Macbook Air. Now, that thing was indestructible, a proverbial cockroach that would survive a nuclear war. I had to retire it because it had only 2GB of RAM and became unbearably slow after five or so years of use, and traded it in for some new piece of hardware, but there’s obviously a reason why so many people buy Macbooks, and it’s not because they are stupid so they buy “overpriced junk”. If anything, the old Thinkpads were junk compared to the Macbook. I replaced the Air with a mid-2015 15” Pro, which is also a cockroach – I’m using it to write this, it’s 8 years old, I more-less retired it a few years ago and still works just fine. The screen, touchpad and keyboard are still great, but it’s significantly slower than the modern machines, so I wouldn’t do serious heavy lifting on it, but for all the normal tasks it’s just fine. The only interventions I did on it was to change a bloated battery when it was 5 years old, and I replaced the 256GB SSD with a 1TB Samsung. So, my answer to “why would you buy a Mac” is “because I want it to work reliably and well until it’s a million generations obsolete and I want to replace it anyway”. It doesn’t just die, the user interface is great, and it’s usually among the fastest machines you can get, and considering how well it works and how long it lasts, it’s dirt cheap. The only exception are the generations with the touchbar and butterfly keyboard. They were shit, and everybody who got one regrets their decisions.

It’s not that I have some general recommendation, such as “just get a Mac” or “just get a gaming machine”. In fact, it is my experience that, today, the computers are so good you really have many good options, but that’s only if you avoid the “economy” and “business” stuff, which is what junk made of obsolete components sold to businesses at clearance prices is called.

Gold price rise

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Gold has been growing lately, and the question some people ask is whether it’s time to sell because it might crash.

That logic might have made sense in the past, but I don’t think it does now. Let me explain.

First of all, gold didn’t even catch up to inflation yet. The commodities such as olive oil went up 2x and I don’t see anybody expecting it to come down. However, the more important reason why people expect it to crash is the expectation that the Americans control the gold price in order to prop up the dollar, and since they are still in power, the expectation is that they will manage to crash the gold just because they always do.

The problem with this logic is that the dollar, at this point, is the world’s hottest hot potato. Everybody who has it is trying to get rid of it, because America is using it as a weapon.

China, in particular, invented a very good method of simultaneously getting rid of their dollar reserves and buying all the dumped gold from the West, and it’s so elegant I’m amazed that the Russians didn’t think of it. You see, all the Chinese did was set the gold price on the Shanghai exchange $100 above what they sell it for in London. As a result, everybody wanting to earn a quick profit will buy gold in the West and sell it in China for more money. If the West wants to dump gold to prop up the dollar, they can feel free, but everybody will quickly scoop it up and sell it in China, thus pumping the Western gold to China and Chinese dollar reserves to the West. As a result, this makes China more resistant to Western financial pressures, prepares it for a future where all the currencies are either gold backed or irrelevant, and depletes the Western gold reserves. If the West tries to counter this by raising the price of gold, it will actually increase the buying pressure because the retail buyers might smell the coffee and jump on the hype train. If they prohibit sales of gold for dollars, it’s the end of the dollar. The beauty of the thing is that they can’t even prohibit China from buying up their gold, because formally speaking it’s not China doing it, it’s everybody who wants to make money on the Shanghai exchange.

So, I guess if you think gold will crash, just because it always did, I would say you don’t understand what’s going on in the world. What’s going in the world is the end of America, the end of Dollar, and the return of gold as money. No, Bitcoin is not the new gold. Gold is the new gold, and the fact that the central banks are the ones buying most of it at this time, and the fact that the retail buyers don’t get it yet, means that you will either have gold, or you will be bankrupt.

How do I know that this present gold price rise is not a retail phenomenon? Because you can go to your local bullion dealer and buy pretty much whatever you want. When it’s a retail phenomenon, everything instantly vanishes from the shelves, because the supply of retail products is very limited, being tailored for the normal levels of demand.

Also, according to my estimates, gold is still super cheap considering where it will be soon. That’s why the Chinese can put the price at +$100 over spot; it’s because where spot is. They don’t think they are losing money doing it, they think it’s the best deal ever.

Cook slowly or strike

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There has been increasing talk in Russia about needing to detonate a nuclear weapon in order to stop the creeping escalation of the war by the West – basically, if they don’t want to be in the position of a slowly-cooked frog, they need to jump out of the pot and presumably make some shocking action that will snap the West out of their complacency and belief that nuclear weapons will of course never be used so they can defeat Russia by conventional means.

At this point, France had basically announced that they will enter Ukraine with their military in an official capacity and, basically, sit on crucial points because the Russians “won’t dare attack them”. The Russians already announced that the French soldiers in Ukraine will be priority targets. The next argument is “but then France might use nukes against Russia”. The Russian assumed response is “go right ahead, see what happens”.

The terrorist attack in Moscow was clearly ordered by the West and implemented by the Ukrainian intelligence. Simultaneously, the British cruise missiles are being fired by the British on Crimea. The Russians are supposed to pretend it’s raining, and not the UK pissing on them. Also, everybody got comfortable with Russians being cautious and moderate in their response. Essentially, Putin’s moderation and caution encouraged escalation to this point, so this strategy is obviously not working to cool down Western hotheads. We can easily project this into the future, where at some point Russia will be forced to do a full nuclear strike because things got too far. If I can see this, obviously the Russians can see it as well, because it’s not exactly rocket science, it’s more like the basic game theory, where de-escalatory actions are seen as a sign of weakness by a belligerent actor that thinks it is permanently and absolutely exempt from consequences because they have any consequences trip-wired to maximum escalation.

I actually disagree with the Russian analysts who recommend doing an aerial nuclear test, or nuking some military target as a warning. Their assumption is that the Americans are doing this because they are unaware of the nuclear consequences. My analysis, however, says that the Americans actually want the nuclear consequences, because they know that their time is up anyway, and they’ve been slowly building things up to this point with the express purpose of causing a nuclear exchange, thinking they will be able to come out on top after the dust clears. They also likely want to have extreme measures enacted in order to prevent the elections, which would be disruptive to the team currently in power. Essentially, if the Russians do nothing provocative, the Americans will escalate to the point where the Russians either lose or do a nuclear strike. If the Russians do something provocative, the Americans instantly escalate. In either case, there’s a nuclear exchange, and the only way the Russians can actually have a non-fatal outcome is to attack the American nuclear forces and wipe them all out pre-emptively, because the one that strikes first will have the best odds. Also, I think this is all being discussed in Moscow.

I already recommended elevated preparation measures three weeks ago, which was right in time for this current situation, so I have nothing new to recommend.

Persistence

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I was thinking about the concept of persistence in spirituality, and this might actually be a more layered and important issue than anyone thinks.

You see, I was thinking about my mistakes, about why I made them, whether they were “unforced” or not, to use the tennis analogy, about what I could have done better, how I handled the fallout, and what’s the reason why I could essentially walk away without so much as missing a step.

The reason why I could “fail gracefully”, to use a programming analogy, is because I think like a scientist, which means that I understand that failure is always an option. Once you think you can’t possibly be wrong and all that is needed is persistence and diligence and the attainment of perfection is guaranteed, you are either an omnipotent and omniscient God, or a stupid cultist.

I was a zealot and a fanatic, but I was never a stupid cultist. The difference is, I was absolutely dedicated to attaining the ultimate goal, but I knew better than to assume I know what that ultimate goal is, which is why I could fail an arbitrary number of times and not lose a step – you see, my assumption was that I am lost, in the dark, with everything stacked against me, that everything I know about transcendental realities is based on very powerful experiences that were short, translated very poorly into concepts that can be intellectually processed by the human brain, that all the theory I had to work with is merely someone else’s attempt at making an intellectual system out of something his brain was as poorly suited for interpreting as mine, and even when I discovered mechanisms that work repeatedly and reliably and could be made into “spiritual technology”, I could hardly even attempt to explain the actual theory, the way scientists can tell you everything about how gravity works, but they know nothing about what gravity actually is, and how mass actually bends spacetime.

Sure, I always had some kind of a theory about how things work, what’s going on and where I seem to be heading, but I knew it was a theory; or a working hypothesis, to use scientific terms. You need to have some kind of a roadmap in your brain, and if you don’t, your brain will basically refuse to cooperate. However, the way my personal roadmap works is that I absolutely need to know what my next step needs to be. I need to know what to do at the next intersection. This is where my roadmap works the best. As things get less immediate, I care less about knowing details in any kind of a resolution. I don’t care about things some religious people seem to fuss over – how many wings and eyes does some type of angel have, does God have a throne, and similar nonsense. No, I understand that physical brain has limitations, and interpolating nonsense and pretending it’s resolution doesn’t contribute anything to the probability of actual spiritual achievement and success. What I need to know is whether meditation needs to be separate from all other activities or do I have to extend meditation into daily activities and basically make it the underlying state in everything I do. The latter; good, spend years perfecting that.

That’s why I am annoyed when some supposed Buddhists talk about renouncing Nirvana at the very beginning of their path, as if it were possible for a beginner to even know what Nirvana is and what it feels like, and as if it made any sense to accept or renounce something that might be the ultimate goal, from a position where you can’t even know anything for certain about realities three steps away from your current position.

That’s where we come to the issue of persistence. You can’t know whether persistence on your current path is good or bad if you don’t know your ultimate destination, because you’re in the process of learning. Yes, you are currently moving South, but you don’t know whether South is your ultimate destination, or merely a direction of the next important junction, where you will need to re-evaluate your entire situation because you learned something new and important. Essentially, your entire theory is good if it brings you to your first transcendental experience. Then you will know much more about higher realities, you will have something practical to check your theory with, and you will have fresh understanding that will make possible for you to learn new skills and acquire new abilities, making you into a whole new kind of being that can now understand things your previous version couldn’t even comprehend. When I think about this, I remember myself and other kids in the fourth grade trying to imagine what mathematics in higher education looks like, and all we could imagine was working the same basic operations but with bigger numbers. It turned out that bigger numbers were never a thing, and I learned something about expectations based on experience. Basically, what you need to worry about is the general trajectory, and doing the immediate next step properly, not the ultimate goal, not remaining faithful to the religion you started with. The idea that a religion will take care of you from beginning to end is incredibly naive; you will eventually experience something that will make your religion seem naive and superficial, and you will then either switch to something that explains your new experience better, or simply carve your own path into solid rock, if nothing else works. Sometimes there are no paved paths because you’re on your own, doing something nobody else did before, because that’s the trick with Creation – to believe that God created souls only so that they could all end up in the same place, or at least sorted in several known boxes, is to believe that the whole thing is essentially pointless. Also, since there’s a risk of failure, the reward for success must be something much greater than what you had in the beginning, or it would just not be worth it.

You can now say that making sure that the next step is on a generally positive trajectory is, in a sense that it leads to God, is paramount. Honestly, you’d have to be God in order to know what is on a generally positive trajectory. I’d rather trust God to guide my next step than try to figure out whether a negative present slope of the curve means I’m doing something wrong, or do I need to climb down a smaller mountain top before climbing a taller one, because I learned long ago that being in the driver’s seat while blind, drunk and not knowing how to drive is not the best thing, and in most cases having control over your situation just gives you enough rope to hang yourself. It is much better to just trust God with choosing the path, and take care of the immediate things that you can actually do well if you apply yourself to it.

So, yes, do the immediate next step like your ultimate destiny depends on it, and with absolute dedication and diligence. Also, understand that you’re not a train, you’re a leaf in the wind, and act accordingly – learn what God is trying to teach you and go where He leads you. Don’t be persistent, consistent or right. It’s not about being right, or about always maintaining the upward trajectory, because you’re not in a position to know. You’re in a position to keep your mind on God, and figure out how to make that next step so that you can still keep your mind on God. If you keep your mind on God and focus only on what you need to do, God is your ultimate trajectory. If you try to figure out the path, the trajectory and the ultimate goal, the illusory forces of this world control your path and your outcome. Basically, if you try to be in control of your path, you are ceding control to Satan, and the ego trip of being in control of your situation claims another sucker.

Resist Marxism

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I just saw a video that shows quite clearly why we should never trust Marxists, or in fact any kind of crazy leftists, to “educate” our children, because this is how they will turn out:

This is what Vedanta calls avidya – ignorance, but defined not by absence of knowledge, but all kinds of crap that lives in your mind and makes you think you know things. The modern system of “education” basically takes normal children and turns them into absolute leftards.