Category Archives: technology

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I’ve been watching Youtube videos with people restoring old computers to full functionality and using outdated equipment to perform tasks, and it’s been bothering me for non-obvious reasons, and I was thinking why that is.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 Just now, I took an old netbook from my “outdated shit bin”, installed a modern version of Linux on it together with all essential apps in order to test whether it will “do”.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 So one thing that was bothering me with the concept of reusing outdated equipment was the concept of deliberately putting up with bad things that can be avoided simple because you rationalized the good thing as “too expensive to be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?

Freedom of speech on the Internet

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I have a serious problem with significant, massive Internet services being owned and controlled from a central point, be it government or a corporation.

Just take a look at Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Paypal and, first and foremost, Google.

In order to figure out why that is a problem, let’s see what Internet is and how it works. On the bottom layer of the Internet you have the networking hardware. Then you have the central infrastructure of ICANN which defines top-level namespaces and the DNS system. Then you have servers that run services, and clients who connect to those services.

Now, in the good old days of the Internet, the services were standard: HTTP, NNTP, IRC, SMTP, POP3/IMAP, FTP and similar. Essentially, if you wanted to host a website, you needed to run a HTTP service on your web server and put files into the designated directory on the server, and everyone on the Internet could access it. If you wanted to write a blog, you put a blogging CMS into the webserver directory, install and configure the database, connect the blogging CMS to the database and you could write your blog. If you wanted to host a mail server, the process was similar – you installed a SMTP service which received mail on your domain, and a POP3/IMAP server which enabled users to access their mailbox on your domain. Those services were standard, worked the same everywhere, were accessible using standard clients.

Then came the services that offered to make things easier. You got things like Blogspot which made it easy for someone to write a blog – you just registered, chose a visual template and off you went. If you wanted to have a website, there were options that made it very easy, and ultimately most people decided all they need is a Facebook account. If you wanted a chat, you had ICQ and Skype and what not. If you wanted to host video clips, you had Vimeo and Youtube. Basically, the standard generic services that ran on any number of Internet servers were replaced by huge corporations that offered to do it all for you.

Now, what’s the problem with that? Why would we not have it easier if we can? Why would someone configure mysql database and apache webserver and wordpress blogging CMS in order to write a blog, if he can go to the Blogger service owned by Google and create a similarly-looking blog in seconds with zero effort? I’ll tell you why. Because if you host your content on some company’s web-based service, you are in a position where that company can essentially close the tap at any time. If you start writing something they don’t like, or something that will make some socially evil entity with lots of influence pissed off, they can complain to that company’s helpdesk and you’ll find your account suspended, and you’re basically silenced with a single click. On the other hand, if you host your content on a server you personally maintain, one would need to have something very serious, like a court order, in order to force the hosting center to suspend your service. You still can’t do anything criminal, but today you don’t need to do anything criminal in order to be silenced on the Internet. It suffices to have some social justice warrior complaining about you and you’re fucked. It won’t do them any good in a court of law, but they can suspend your Twitter or Blogger or Facebook account, because those accounts are hosted by companies that are publicly traded and their revenue is generated exclusively from advertising, and advertising revenue depends hugely on good public relations, which basically means yielding to pressure from lobbying groups and professional complainers.

What I find extremely worrisome is that huge parts of everybody’s online functionality are based around services provided by huge, centralized corporations that are hugely sensitive to pressure for more censorship, and we will unfortunately see more and more of this every day, because people will continue using what is easier and gives them good results with a minimum of effort, which will result in producing single-point control over their online functionality, forcing everyone to basically censor themselves and reduce variety in the mental space in which we all operate. Because, if you unconsciously censor yourself in order not to have your account suspended, and the rules for account suspension are generated at a non-democratic single-point (corporate management and public relations departments in Facebook and Google, for instance) which is vulnerable to pressure from minority focus-groups (the professional complainers and whiners), the logical result will be either people reducing their thoughts to an increasingly narrow space of political correctness, or doing what I did: taking things into their own hands and doing it the hard way, by hosting everything on their own server (which is very inexpensive to do these days) in order to be able to write whatever they want, and if someone doesn’t like it, he needs to actually take you to court in order to take your content down. And in order to take your content down by a court order, it isn’t enough that they don’t like it or that their feelings are hurt. It needs to be something that is actually illegal, like piracy or child porn or giving advice to terrorists on how to make bombs. It can’t be mere opinions you disagree with. The point of the freedom of speech is that the option to speak offensive opinions needs to be protected by all means. Freedom of saying only inoffensive things isn’t worth having; they had that in Stalinist Russia.

Certainly, if all you want to do online is post pictures of your cat and talk about coffee, then by all means use Facebook and Youtube. That is, until some focus group starts complaining that cats and coffee trigger their psychotic episodes and hurt their feelings about something, that white cats and black coffee are racist and your offensive content needs to be taken down in order to protect their right to be fucking idiots.