Category Archives: technology

The common core of sectarianism everywhere

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I recently commented on the similarities between the Open Source community and New Age. Since then I thought more about that and it seems to me that the similarities are far from being superficial. In fact, I think I’m on to something here. But let me explain.

They both think they are saving the world

In the Open Source community, “the enemy” used to be Microsoft, but now Apple seems to be taking over that role. Essentially, what makes them evil is that they make things everybody can use and find useful, and they make a shitload of money doing it. Of course, that’s not what the Open Source advocates will tell you. They will rant about closed source and proprietary code and what not, but there seem to be two main objections that weave through the arguments. First is “I don’t feel important and special if I’m using it because everybody can do it”, and “I can’t see the source so it must be spying on me in secret and I can’t trust it”. There’s a striking parallel between that and the opinions about the Catholic Church in the smaller religious communities. It doesn’t make you feel special because there’s a billion members, and there are all sorts of conspiracy theories about Vatican and all sorts of its supposed nefarious activities. Essentially, the big bad evil Sith Lord Emperor is in power and the valiant rebels must take him down, with the help of the Force, of course, because they are the good guys. When they take down the Evil Empire, suddenly everything will be right in the world. There will be no need for money because everybody will share things equally with others and respect each other. How they imagine they will remove conflict and disagreements in the world when they can’t agree on the color of shit even in the smallest of things they are in charge of today, I have no idea.

The things that actually work in the real world are the enemy

Let’s put it this way. If you want a computer that just works – all the hardware drivers work, all the software you need works, it’s fast, doesn’t get in the way, it’s difficult to break and will reliably allow you to do other work and completely ignore the underlying bells and whistles, what will you choose, assuming that you are technically proficient enough to be able to use just anything? Will you use a Mac, a Windows machine or a Linux machine? I’m in that exact position so I know. I used everything at some point, from Commodore 64 through a DOS 3.20 PC, Windows 3.11, 95, NT 4, 98, 2000, XP, Ubuntu Linux from Gutsy to Trusty, and a Mac Air laptop. You know what I use when I want things to work reliably, without interruptions, for years? I use Windows. It’s the most stable, the least problematic OS I know – with exception of Windows 10, which is only slightly better than Linux, in that every now and then some small thing breaks and I need to restart it. On a Mac, every OS upgrade breaks something important and I have to reinstall few programs I rely on, because they stop working properly and a new version needs to come out that is adapted to new crazy and pointless shit that Apple introduced just to fuck with it.

But when you listen to people, you’d get the impression that a Mac just works, never breaks, and Windows machines always have problems with this or that, and if you have problems with Windows and you don’t want the proprietary prison that is Mac, get Linux, that will solve all your problems. My experience, however, is that you need to have Linux on your desktop if you want to keep your skills sharp because shit is always breaking down and you need to keep fixing it, and all of it’s done from the command line, and keeping current with that helps you from getting lazy; essentially, you’re constantly in the role of a system administrator, not a user. With a Mac, things just work until you install an OS update. Then everything goes to hell, then you fix it and it keeps working for another year, when there’s a new OS update. With Windows, you install it and it just works for 10 years. When there’s a service pack, you install it and it still just works. Things break as an exception, not as a rule. You need a major OS upgrade so infrequently, you will often be having two major hardware upgrade cycles in between. With 2000, XP and 7, I kept suspending and waking up the machine for so long, I’d usually shut it down only when I went away for a vacation, and rebooted only to install some major software upgrade. Essentially, the machine with Windows behaves like a toaster, only I had toasters break more frequently than Windows machines. It’s incredibly reliable. If a Windows machine is unstable, in 100% of the cases you have a hardware failure, 80% of which is a bad RAM stick. Unfortunately they broke this polished reliability somewhat in 8 and 10, and 10 GUI is now on the reliability level close to that of Mate desktop, which is the most reliable and usable Linux window manager that I know of, which means that it usually just works, with occasional stupid shit happening without any apparent reason, like quarter of every icon missing where the shortcut sign is supposed to be, because [reasons]. Fixes with reboot. Other than that, the machine behaves like a toaster, which means, it just does what it’s supposed to, quickly, reliably, every day, so that I can do whatever else I do when not fixing the computer.

The similarity with the New Age is apparent. If you say something positive about the main-stream spirituality to someone in the New Age circles, it’s like praising Hitler in a synagogue. You can say all you want about the main-stream being spiritually sterile, obsolete, corrupt, power hungry and godless, though, and just watch the audience’s eyes glow and hearts warm with happiness as you do, but if you say something positive about the main-stream religions or something negative about some New Age nonsense, they’ll turn into harpies and try to scratch your eyes out. But the smartest people usually come from the main-stream, from the exact organizations that are supposedly devoid of all spirituality, corrupt and dark, and all those supposedly creative people in the New Age communities usually just rehash other people’s ideas, write bad poetry and literature and are intellectual midgets who think they are giants.

There is a huge number of “contributors”…

…but they mostly simply copy things from the few actual major contributors, who all originate from outside the movement. Just think about it: in the Open Source community, the greatest number of “contributors” either duplicate each other’s efforts, or contribute very simple, trivial things of little use, like ten different text editors that are all either the same or they are shit. The greatest contributions come from great companies, like Sun Microsystems, IBM, Google or Apple.

Again, the similarity with New Age is striking. When I was on the Kundalini mailing list, there were exactly two people there with original techniques that were not simple rewrites or rehashes of previously available stuff: Angelique and myself. There were practitioners of Vipasana and Dzogchen who did their stuff according to tradition with little or no innovation, there were practitioners of all sorts of pre-existing techniques and systems, and those who were the most innovative, in the sense that they did their own thing, were usually the craziest one with most problems, which would be easy to correct by simply switching to some traditional approach. So basically you had a group of people that appeared to be extremely fragmented and individualistic, but when you had to summarize and see who was it that did something useful that actually worked, you got several old traditions and two original contributors who were actually proficient enough to invent techniques and approaches through their own personal practice. Out of what, six hundred people or whatever the number was? However, whenever people spoke about traditional systems, you would get the impression that traditional systems are restricting, limiting, and inferior to the freedom and individuality of New Age.

Infighting and sectarianism are rampant

Let me quote something from Wikipedia. It’s not a list of Linux distributions, it’s a tree of distribution-types:

Basically, everyone in this tree hates every other branch, and they all hate Apple and Microsoft. But when you ask them what they are all about, they’ll talk about unity, love, freedom and creativity. I don’t even need to mention similarity with the New Age communities, do I? You just can’t believe this shit.

The moment something has a chance of actually succeeding, it is denounced as the enemy

If it doesn’t work reliably, it’s a creative small independent community or an individual who is boldly experimenting with advancing [x]. When it actually works to the point of other people wanting to use it and it becoming the main stream, it’s the evil cult of money and power whose only purpose and agenda is to limit and enslave others. Replace x with [software, spirituality, food, soap, toilet paper].

It’s only seen as positive and creative as long as it’s useless or actively harmful. When it actually starts being useful, it becomes boring and is denounced by the community of thrill-seeking ego-motivated misfits. For instance, when Ubuntu started being actually useful as an end-user-oriented distribution that could actually be installed on normal people’s computers and used to do actual work, it was immediately and universally denounced by the Open Source advocates as a commercial sellout. Prior to that, the professed goal of the community was to increase Linux adoption in the general user base. However, as that started to happen, the Linux advocates no longer felt special just for using Linux, and now had to use some “pure” shit that’s not contaminated by the plebeian main stream adoption. Similarly, when each New Age person is doing their own thing and stumbling in the dark, they praise each other as great examples. However, when someone is actually successful, and others come to him in order to learn, it’s seen as a negative example of a cult following and falling to the Dark Side. I’d say it’s the same thing: jealousy of someone else’s success, and frustration because of the possibility of a realization that originality is not necessarily a good thing if it actually stands in the way of accomplishing goals. Also, different approaches that can’t make the basics work are hardly originality; more likely, they are abortive attempts. For instance, if you can’t manage to concentrate, it’s a better idea to learn some reliable preexisting method than to experiment. Experiment only when no preexisting method is available or satisfactory. However, neither Open Source nor New Age, for the most part, are actually doing things on the bleeding edge of human endeavor. Open Source is mostly reproducing shit for free that someone else had already done for money, and New Age is no better; its stated goals are mostly re-hashed Vedanta with some Buddhism and Christianity. If something is actually new and original, it stands alone outside the New Age community, rejected because it went outside the dogmatic boundaries of a group that’s supposed be free from dogmatic boundaries.

Why walk when you can teleport?

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I’ve been watching Youtube videos with people restoring old computers to full functionality and using outdated equipment to perform tasks, and it’s been bothering me for non-obvious reasons, and I was thinking why that is.

Why use a i7-6700K when a Q8200 will do? Why use a modern smartphone when a 5 year old device will do?

It will do exactly what? Just now, I took an old netbook from my “outdated shit bin”, installed a modern version of Linux on it together with all essential apps in order to test whether it will “do”. The touchpad is shit, the display is shit, it is slow and although it does perform basic functions, like writing documents, answering mail, watching videos and playing music, it does everything poorly and with delays. So yes, it will “do” if you can’t afford a modern well made device, but if you can, by all means do because it’s worth it. Elimination of all those delays and nagging flaws has a very liberating psychological effect akin to removing painfully tight clothes or shoes; you don’t know how much it was bothering you until it stops. So one thing that was bothering me with the concept of reusing outdated equipment was the concept of deliberately putting up with bad things that can be avoided simple because you rationalized the good thing as “too expensive to be worth it”. It’s too expensive to be worth it if it gives you no actual benefit (like a gold-plated phone), but this excuse seems to be overused in order to rationalize not being able to afford things that are quantifiably better. I’m often not able to afford things, but I try not to resort to a “sour grapes” excuse. Instead I usually say something like “yes, x would be better but I can’t afford it so I use y, which is cheaper, not so good but I can get the basic functionality out of it”.

The other concept that’s bothering me is that I can recognize some urge to use minimalistic tools, the worst possible stuff that still gets the job done, in order to avoid the trap of the law of diminished returns that always rears its ugly head when you try to use the best possible tools to do the job. That makes sense when you just need a good hammer, not the best hammer in the world, because you occasionally need to hammer some nails, not do it all day, every day, for a whole year. But the problem with this is that when you try to buy the least expensive tools, they occasionally fail, and they always fail when you need them. Even if they don’t fail, they usually do a shitty job. I have a pair of cheap water pump pliers that keep slipping and performing poorly, and I never get to actually replace them because the good ones are more expensive and I’m not sure they will perform better. But I use those twice a year on average so it’s not a big deal, it’s just evidence that there indeed are bad tools and that being cheap can bite you.

There’s more, of course. There’s also a question of “why try to be rich when you can do everything with less money”, as a rationalization for staying poor. There is a limit, of course, where additional money doesn’t really get you any additional real quality of life, because you simply run out of useful things to buy. This amount of money, however, is huge; it’s probably in a billion-dollar range, and even in the open-ended range you can use the money to influence the entire civilization, by financing things that would otherwise make no economical sense, like spaceflight or pure science.

It comes down to “why would you need a car when you have your feet”, or “why would you need a forklift when you have your arms”, and, essentially, to “why do you need power”.

You need power because being limitless is better than being limited, because being powerful is better than being powerless, being great is better than being small, and a wonderful thing is better than a shitty thing, although a shitty thing is often better than nothing at all.

People love fast cars not because they couldn’t do everything with a slower and cheaper vehicle, but because a fast car gives you the feeling of unrestrained freedom that reminds you of the state in which you existed before you were born in this limiting existence. People love power because it reminds them of freedom and the joy of not being restrained in everything you attempt. That’s why settling for the inferior things disturbs me – because it looks like giving up on ever being able to see God again, and be free and unrestrained and powerful. It looks like the final acceptance of defeat. Of course, things will not give you that which you lost, but once you start giving up on greatness, you might actually mindscrew yourself into ultimate spiritual failure.

Social networking as an orgasm button

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In my last article I come off as a technophobe of a sort, or at least a techno-skeptic, and weird as that might sound, I think this perception might actually be accurate. I think of technology as a tool for solving problems and doing things that you want to do. If it creates more problems than it solves, does it really fulfill its purpose?

I’m a techno-skeptic (with a dozen working computers of all kinds in the household) because I see how people use technology. If someone was spending his life hanging out in a bar and wasting time in superficial, shallow conversations, we would recognize this as socially unacceptable, something worthy individuals don’t do. However, this is exactly what social media is: shallow people wasting time in superficial quasi-dialogue, and it’s all worthless and going nowhere. The only one actually profiting from it all is the bar owner.

Technology gives every kid an opportunity to become the smartest person who ever lived. You can buy a Raspberry Pi for a few dollars, plug it into a TV, keyboard and mouse, and install a free Linux OS on it that allows you to access the vast tomes of knowledge on the web, play multimedia and write code in multiple programming languages. And how many use it for that? How many of you did sudo apt-get install gcc?

For 200 EUR you can buy a smartphone that’s actually a 8-core pocket supercomputer with Geekbench 3 score of over 4000. You can load it with a library of books and music, you can use it to access Wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha, you can use it as a multiple-language dictionary, interactive road map with satellite navigation, you can use it to SSH-connect into a remote server, to write and execute Python code, essentially you can do everything a personal computer can do, that doesn’t require a keyboard and a big screen. Its price makes it accessible to almost anyone, and even for 50 EUR you can get a device that gives you most of those capabilities. Based on that, you would expect the people who own such devices, and the even more powerful ones, to be the smartest and most capable of all people who ever lived. Instead, they are barely literate, with poor mental focus, disastrous social skills, horribly limited general knowledge, are ignorant of history, philosophy, politics, art and science, they have very poor understanding of technology in general, and people in the 19th century would see them as retarded scum that lacks both education and proper upbringing.

Does it mean that I think that children should not own smartphones and computers? Of course not. My kids use whatever technology they need. They both have laptop computers and mobile phones. They both play videogames. However, they play Minecraft and Universe Sandbox, not Call of duty, and to them computers and mobile phones are not a life-substitute, but a tool. The older one can write code in Logo, Python and some c, and the younger one can tell you everything about masses and composition of planets in the solar system. Guess why? They read, they talk to adults, they use their brains.

The worst thing that can happen to children is to spend too much time talking to other children, because with other children there’s no positive intellectual and emotional differential, there’s just ignorance, prejudice, and a very violent and abusive pecking order. One of the main reasons why elderly people were so respected in the traditional communities is that they used to talk to children, to teach them true and useful knowledge, and do it in a calm and peaceful way that would unplug the children from the frenzy the other children caused. Children are actually the worst thing that can happen to children, because the only thing children usually learn in the company of other children is how to establish an abusive comparative ranking based on usually completely arbitrary criteria, because kids are too stupid and immature to know what’s really important.

And that’s exactly what people use modern technology for: they use it to entertain themselves and to participate in some social network with arbitrary and worthless comparative ranking. They thirst for attention and approval, and dread ridicule and criticism, and in they fears they primarily dole out ridicule and criticism. Essentially, the entire social network is a cesspool of ignorance, prejudice, ridicule and criticism of others and never satiated desire for approval. In order to earn others’ approval, people adopt one of the few memes and quasi-philosophies, and there’s no place for real diversity of opinion, because if you want approval of others there’s only one thing you want: you want a choice, an opinion and a philosophy that will earn you most approval, and everything else is secondary. That’s why you want the best phone, the best computer, the best camera, the best philosophy: you want others to recognize you as worthy and to approve of you.

You know what I told my kids about peer pressure and desire for peer approval? “Just accept the fact that you’ll never be accepted by all people, or even the majority of people. The only way you can get approval of idiots is to be an even worse idiot than they are. The only way to get approval of average people is to be slightly below average. What you need to do is accept the fact that whatever you do and whatever you choose, someone will try to shit on you. Even if you’re Jesus they’ll crucify you. That’s how people are and that’s what they do, and the thing is, you can never know if they are sincere, if someone is shitting on you because he honestly dislikes what you do, or if he’s just jealous. You need to measure your success by how much you are succeeding at realizing your personal goals, not by what others say. If you want feedback from others, ask the adults, who actually have a developed brain and a reasonable set of criteria, not children who are stupid and immature.”

That’s how people are abusing the technology. They use it to try to get peer approval, and instead they get to participate in a giant hen-house as a part of the pecking order, where they don’t learn anything really useful, except how to efficiently insult others and make them feel worthless, because they know what worked on them.

If you only let go of people and their bullshit approval, you can find great stuff on the Internet, stuff that can make all that technology worth while. You can find an abundance of downloadable books and music, that you can store on your mobile device and read. You can find excellent articles about ancient Rome and topology on Wikipedia. You can find analytical tools that can interpret common language queries as mathematical equations. Or you can get caught in some meme in order to get group approval on some forum.

I always use the best technology I can afford, if I find it useful. You should, too. However, to use it in order to create a virtual pub in which you’ll waste time trying to “be popular” is an abuse of opportunity. So, it turns out that I’m not really skeptical of technology; I just think most people are idiots to whom technologically facilitated social networking is as harmful as an orgasm button to a rat: it feels good, but eventually the poor animal dies of hunger and thirst pressing the damn thing all day.

Idiots and their smartphones

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If you asked a person on the street whether he thinks he’s smarter than a stone age person, he’d probably say yes. If you asked him whether he thinks he’s smarter than someone from the Roman empire, or the “dark ages”, the answer would probably be the same. After all, he knows that Earth revolves around the Sun, and owns a smartphone and a computer.

The interesting thing about smartphones is that I asked my son what do the kids in his class have – he’s 6th grade. It tuned out that most have the top-tier devices like iPhone, Samsung Galaxy 6 edge and Sony Xperia Z5. It’s a jaw-dropping piece of information considering how those kids are not really geniuses; they get average grades, are of average intelligence and are not especially well brought up, to put it more kindly than they deserve. You would ask, what are they using their super-devices for? Games, of course, Facebook and some chat app that’s currently “in”.

Do they use those things to read up on Wikipedia? Not really. Do they use them to navigate Google Earth and see different parts of the world? Not really. Are they reading the news to find out what’s going on in the world? Not really. Are they using them for reading books? Not really. In fact, my son told me they laughed at him when he told them he reads books, because “we’re not in the 13th century to read books”. So basically, those children are idiots with very expensive toys. They are as stupid as a brick, and if you think they would come on top in a comparison with a person from ancient Rome, you are probably wrong.

So, if you strip a today’s person of his technology, how much does he really know, what can he really do, and how much is he really worth?

If you try to reduce social media to the actual message that is shared, it’s all mostly “look at me, I’m a vain, shallow, stupid idiot that’s exactly the same as everybody else; nothing worth seeing here, but do click me because I seek attention”.

The kids in my son’s class act as if there’s a difference between having this or that smartphone, but is there, really? If you waste 10 hours a day hanging out on Facebook, as some of them apparently do, does a better phone help you waste time more effectively, or do you just feel cooler and more important as you do it?

If you strip Augustine or Thomas Aquinas of technology and dress him in rags, does it change what he is? But do it with one of those modern fancy girls who are so full of themselves they can’t stop shooting selfies with their phone and posting them online. Strip her of technology, wash her of her make-up and dress her in rags, and tell me, does it change what she is? What is she, really, if everything she is can be stripped away by removing the superficial?

To hell with social programs

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There’s a reason why we are falling behind in space technology and, essentially, in high technology, and it goes like this.

Whenever there’s some space telescope or interplanetary probe or any kind of high tech mission going on and there is news coverage, the comment section is full of “that money should have gone to the social programs (hungry people, homeless people, sick children etc.)”.

Essentially, one gets the impression that people think that social programs are the best thing that can be done with money, and any government expenditure that’s not intended for paying social justice warriors and their feminist studies, is a waste that should be abolished immediately.

However, the problem with this theory is that it has already been tested. We tried a societal model where all the money was fed into social programs.

The result was the collapsed economic model of the former socialist block, which can today be seen in Cuba as a living fossil.

It doesn’t work. It produces only widespread misery and a hugely corrupt state apparatus. Furthermore, concentrating on feeding the poor and educating the dumb while removing the financing from the high-tech state programs in fact removes the reason for being educated and, in fact, reason for eating. Why is that? Because there is a very important question that such socialist systems are constantly neglecting. “Why do we live?” “Why do we need to be educated?”

In a rational system, you eat in order to live in order to do important, great things with your life. You need education in order to be able to work on high-tech projects on the bleeding edge of mankind. If you don’t succeed at that, you settle for supporting those high goals, by making some important part of some piece of machinery that is used in a PET scanner or in James Webb telescope, or you work in a power station making electricity, or something else. In a socialist system, you eat in order to live in order to make babies who in turn need to eat in order to live in order to … Essentially, it’s a pointless life without goals and purposes. Someone doesn’t know what his life is for, but we should all make sacrifices in order to feed him, so that he could proceed to make more useless mouths to feed.

Why?

Instead, why wouldn’t we turn the table around and say that the purpose of the state budget isn’t to feed the social programs, it’s to provide worthy goals for the entire country to strive towards. The point of the state budget is to do things that normal capitalist market wouldn’t do – to explore new lands and planets and solar systems, to invest in particle accelerators that break the frontiers of knowledge, to build spaceships and terraform new worlds. Let the market build washing machines and smartphones and other low-risk, high-profit things. The state, however, should do things that need to be done but are too expensive and risky for businesses. This will employ scientists and engineers, it will motivate private businesses to compete for contracts, and this will all create high-paying, high-skill jobs, which will in turn provide good rationale for acquiring high education. The benefits will trickle down from the top, all the way to the least useful members of the community, and if someone doesn’t participate in any way in all that, and has no people who will find him useful enough to finance his work, then let him die. He’s completely and utterly useless and useless people should die, and not reproduce and make useless babies.

So what I’m saying, basically, is that we should pull all money from social programs and put it into NASA. We should pull all money from feminism studies and other useless bullshit and put it into research of new technologies on the bleeding edge of science. We tried giving money to the military and space agencies, and what did we get? The first computers were made for the military. The first microprocessor was designed for use in the US Navy F14A Tomcat fighter jet. Internet was developed by DARPA when they tried to figure out how to connect military installations by a network that would re-route itself in case its major components were destroyed by nuclear strikes. Web was developed by a scientist in CERN when he was looking for a convenient was of exposing documents to other users on the network. Positron Emission Tomography medical scanner uses short-lived radionuclides created in an accelerator. Magnetic resonance scanner was invented as a by-product of nuclear physics. It all trickled down into useful stuff from high-end science and technology, and absolutely nothing useful ever came out of the social programs. What social programs create is socialist Cuba. If you want to see what kind of world is created when social programs are the national priority, go there and see for yourself. It’s very cheap to get anything that will make you alive, and there is absolutely no reason for you to bother because there’s nothing that would make your life worth living. It’s all a circular loop of eat to live to eat, and fuck to make more babies that will eat to live to eat.

If we invested all the state money into worthwhile goals, we would have something to show for besides eating and fucking, and social networking that’s used for finding places where you go out to eat and finding people to fuck and watching videos and pictures of cats and puppies.

There are thousands of websites about new computers and smartphones and other gadgets, but what are they for? What are you for? What is the end-goal, what is the purpose of your life? What goal are you dedicated to?