Recent content in Luke Smith's Webpage on Luke Smith
Mainstream science is overrated. Most of the reason it feels so effective and all-explaining is a cognitive illusion. Most people overestimate how solvent scientific consensus actually is. I saw Joe Rogan’s recent interview of Mel Gibson. Gibson said that he was a creationist and didn’t believe in evolution. Joe pushed back a bit, saying that mainstream science had found remnants of…
The Blindspot The standard modern scientific worldview cannot admit miracles and cannot admit the paranormal. That’s not the same as saying the scientific worldview disbelieves in miracles or the paranormal (although most modern science fans do). Nor is it the same as saying that the scientific worldview refutes or disproves miracles or the paranormal. People get all of these confused, but…
Below I am here giving voice to a conversation in articles on the subject of consciousness originally published by the New York Review of Books and in John Searle’s book The Mystery of Consciousness . I find these hilarious. Here, Searle’s adversary, well-known and now late “philosopher” Daniel Dennett follows the logical train of verificationist modern science to its…
Hume’s Parallel David Hume has often been quoted for his “Is” vs. “Ought” distinction. The argument is that fact and morality are two different domains, and from no accumulation of statements of fact alone can we ever jump to a statement of morality. We can say statements of fact such as: To be murdered is potentially painful. To be murdered is irreversible. Murder…
I’ve decided after some consideration to not go to restaurants at all in 2023 . You can call this a New Year’s Resolution. It’ll require at least some sacrifice, pain, annoyance to myself and perhaps others, but I’m going to stick by it and I think it will have a good effect. Restaurants are a drastically over-used creature comfort of the consumerist economy… even…
There’s a meme YouTube video by Leonardo of Biz ( here ) where the villainous Bogs refer to their desire to attain something called “The Akashic Records” using blockchain technology. This random aside not just shows the attention to detail Leonardo gives what would otherwise be silly videos, but articulates something deeply troubling about a war unfolding over Bitcoin, Ethereum…
I am a well known Docker-non-respecter. I want to explain why I don’t use Docker (so much as possible) The Real vs. Fake Reasons I admire the candidness of the developer of BTCPay here . He says that he chose to use Docker to deploy his project because he was a Windows person doing .NET and didn’t want to read up on how to use Linux/Unix. There are basically only two “real”…
I’ve been meaning to write about Paganism recently. I will frame it as a response to an email I received within the past day or so: Hey Luke, First off, I would like to thank you for all your efforts in making everything you know accessible to everyone. You have exposed me to some of the most thought-provoking people on the internet and Varg is one of them. I was wondering if you can write…
The default way to look at financial “independence” nowadays is to think that means “making a lot of money.” That’s understandable. But then you see stuff like this: Or this: It takes until 30 for a person to be as rich as they were when they were born. (And this is average net worth, median would be significantly worse.) The longer you mentally analyze the second…
Nassim Taleb had this old anecdote of the sheer absurdity that while the suitcase and other bags had existed for lifetimes, it was only in the 1990’s that people had the idea to put wheels on the things so they didn’t have to haul them around airports all day with their strength. It reminds you of the fact that while children in the Incan Empire did indeed have some toys with wheels,…
It should actually be a point of optimism that centralized technology tends to destruction while decentralized tech can survive pressure… Some highly attentive people might have noticed that LandChad.net lost one of its articles: that on how to set up a website with the Basic Attention Token (BAT) which is a crypto-currency tied into the Brave Browser. I can’t even tacitly endorse…
How to shamelessly win arguments. If you’re out there to “win arguments” without shame or honesty, the easiest way to do it is variously distort, shame and socially discredit everyone else to such an extent that impressionable people are left with a choice of either extreme social shame or taking your side no matter how patently dishonest and illogical you are. This is really how…
Nietzsche, in I forget which book (probably Genealogy of Morals ), noted that moral philosophy is kind of the opposite of other sciences. In moral philosophy, we know beforehand what is “right” and “wrong,” and its goal is not so much to discover new truth as to concoct a framework that helps us understand the system of why things are “right” and…
Over the past few years, I made the decision to totally cut obscenities out from my speech. You might actually be able to find recordings of me cursing four or five years ago, but as of now, I really stand by my decision. Obscenities are the linguistic equivalent of an trashy emaciated person entirely decked in tattoos, smoking cigarettes and wearing a shirt with nudity on it. They'll defend what…
The title explains it all, you don't even have to read. There are no good, even passable web browsers. None. Not a single one even comes close. The weird thing is this: making a good browser should be easy! Among the existing web browsers, you could assemble all the parts necessary for a passable (if not perfect) browser. No one has ever bothered to do this, instead, people assembled 90% good…
What are XMPP and Matrix and what makes them special? XMPP and Matrix are two decentralized and federated free sofware projects for chat, including true end-to-end encrypted chat. Users can either install the software on their own server if they want, but they can also easily register on any public server—both allow any XMPP or Matrix user to talk to users on their server or on any other…
What does freedom mean? See this article in video form here . Which of the following two people is more free: A drug addict. A average man who is only not a drug addict because he lives in a country where drugs are regulated or shamed in a way to make them hard to obtain. Most modern people will have a kind of cognitive dissonance, a kind of glitch in their matrix here. In the modern view of…
How to do magic tricks... Magicians have this concept called "Multiple Outs." It's actually how you can do simple magic tricks. Suppose you have a person pick a card and say you will guess the suit of their card. They pick a diamond card and announce it, and you tell them to check underneath their chair to reveal a slip of paper that says, "You will pick a diamond card." That might sound like a…
As I said in other writings and videos , no serious cryptocurrency can function in real life which is not also a truly private cryptocurrency. By far, the most popular of all these is Monero, which has already become the de facto currency of the dark web, but also of all cryptocurrency users who actually use cryptocurrency for purposes other than a mere investment . Monero, however, is not…
The Biggest Problem with Cryptocurrency Most normal people hear the word "cryptocurrency" and assume that means that they are "cryptic" or "private," but that's actually a huge, perhaps the hugest misunderstanding of our time and it has some big consequences. The "crypto" in cryptocurrency merely comes from its cryptographic nature. When it comes to actual privacy, cryptocurrencies are an…
Artistotle, a medieval depiction. Aristotle, in his Physics argued that there are four causes behind everything that exists. These causes answer the question of "How" or "Why" something is the way it is. The Material Cause The material from which something is made. E.g. the stone of a statue. The Efficient Cause The external force that causes something to be made. E.g. the artisan and his tools…
Table of Contents What is LaTeX? Installing LaTeX LaTeX Video Tutorials I have a full video tutorial series on learning LaTeX, broken into small sensible parts, here . What is LaTeX? Basically, it's how big boys write and format documents. Every public brief, scientific article, book, cryptocurrency whitepaper or even outline written by people who know what they're doing is written in LaTeX. If…
People have quoted me as saying that. I forget where it comes from, probably a livestream, but I definitely stand by it. Since a lot of people labor under the assumption that my channel is about "Linux," I've accumulated a lot of subscribers that are variously nerds, furries, degenerates, coomers, libertarians, communists, trannies and among them are vegans. Some of them (I assume) are good…
To put it in other words... The common way of looking at Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is that it's a metric of economic success: more GDP is more wealth. Wealth is good. "Poverty" (meaning low per capita GDP) is bad. Nowadays, pretty much everyone talks about "economics" like this as if this truism was scribbled on the back walls of the cosmos. This is just looking at one side of the ledger in a…
This page is just for minor pointers on lesser studied languages that I don't have enough to have on their own pages. Gothic Gothic is a dead language and the only thing existing in it is a partially translated New Testament by Wulfila. It still is a very important language for the study of Germanic and Indo-Europeanism because it is the only language of "Eastern Germanic" so well attested.…
I've made a couple very useful command-line accessible Bibles for a quick and scriptable lookup of Bible verses and passages. They exist not only in English, but for Latin and Greek as well. English King James Version (including Apocrypha) — Github , Gitlab Latin Vulgate — Github , Gitlab Greek Septuagint & New Testament — Github , Gitlab Installation git clone…
Chinese is the hardest language to learn according to normies who have never tried to learn it. In reality, Chinese is really easy. It has literally no complex morphology: no tense, plurals, gender. It doesn't have irregular verbs or nouns because it has no verb and noun endings whatsoever. It's almost difficult to explain how easy Chinese is. The only different thing is the writing system which…
Latin was the first language I learned and has probably been the most useful. Here I'll talk about some of the things it's gotten me and some recommendations for how to learn it well. What I've gotten out of learning Latin You get multiple languages for one. Latin, as you probably know is the ancestor of Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, etc. Once you know Latin, it is quite…
I've said on a couple livestreams that the ideal way for an English speaker to begin learning or excel in learning other major European languages (Spanish, French, Italian and German) is to use Michel Thomas's audiotapes . They can be found for free on Pirate Bay and other sites, but you can also buy them on his official site . This style of audiotapes is so far above any other, it's hard to even…
I get asked a lot about learning languages, so I have a few comments about it here. Hopefully I can awaken you from some dogmatic slumbers about language. Vocabulary is the least important part of learning a language. This is hard for people to understand because I think most monolingual people think that languages are just different word lists that people use. As a result, 101 students will…
The ideal ThiccPad If there is a single point of advice I can offer novice computer users, it is stop using modern computers . If you look at "technology YouTube," by which I mean the massive multi-million subscriber channels, nearly all of it is devoted to constantly reviewing and comparing every new computer, processor, graphics card and product. There's big money in it because obviously all of…
Firstly, once you reach basic competency in Linux, different distributions don't matter. A lot of newbies analyze distros based on what they look like when you install them, often not realizing that it's a pretty simple affair not just to change superficial things like your theme and setup, but entire desktop environments. Basically all distro reviews online are wastes of time for people who know…
There's nothing necessarily wrong with science, reason, knowledge etc. To some degree, they're fundamental for survival in this world in one way or another. But one of the more worrisome problems which have arisen since the Enlightenment, and especially in the past several years, is the fact that whenever scientific knowledge has increased, human arrogance has accelerated even faster. This isn't a…
Physics has a reputation of being a uniquely "scientific" field. In other fields, you might hear of the concept of "Physics Envy" which is supposed to be a deep-seated desire of academics of other disciplines for the rigorousness and elegance of physics. Only physics, so the popular understanding goes, is truly able to abstract away from the messiness of detail and create truly beautiful and…
A parable on the Logical Positivist “interpretation” of scientific models. The Parable Suppose an alien race comes to Earth and wants to observe our games. They are very interested in chess, despite the fact that they have eyes with properties that make it impossible to make out what actually happens on a chess board. (The whites and blacks of the squares and pieces all blur together.)…
Every piece of software I write I license under the GNU Public License Version 3 (GPLv3) unless I have forked it from something else. The GPLv3 is the premiere copyleft license, meaning that it not only allows users to run, modify and distribute their own versions of what I write, but it also requires that no one in that chain of development restrict and close-source that software: it and software…
Now onto the second point I didn't get to in my post yesterday : politics only matters so much when you're a slave. Or as I put it there, "You will need politics less than you think." That is to say that if you live in a city where your every action is watched, if you use proprietary software and communicate only via social media services, if you have no marketable skills because you have some…
It's not a huge secret that I'm somewhere in the high echelons of the red-pill, however you define it. I'll openly talk about pretty any topic that people organically bring up in streams, or that I'm asked about, but I've never really made any kind of political content on my channel, aside from jokes and memes. That might be surprising because especially three years ago before the mass-bans and…
If you keep up with my random asides in videos and elsewhere, you might know that I'm extremely disappointed with the current state of institutionalized science. The post-war era was a disaster for scientific epistemology, in fact, epistemology and science commentary mostly became an exercise to exclude one's enemies by technicality. Academia became an enormous state-funded enterprise, and the…
I originally wrote this essay in 2014 or 2015 in a Chinese buffet in Athens, Georgia. I've changed some of it and am re-adding it here. I talk about the issues with Utilitarianism and a bad book by Sam Harris. Utilitarianism At a dumb intuitive level, the "ethical" idea of Utilitarianism in principle gets pretty close to what most modern people reflexively want from social-political affairs: the…
This is an article recovered from my old site. The date must be around 2012 or shortly after. About forty years have passed since an American president, in an as-of-then unprecedented act resigned from office. It might be too much of an exaggeration to say that the Watergate Scandal singularly fomented a newly sardonic and cynical attitude in the United States, but the public has certainly moved…
This is a blog post which I wrote years ago, far before I had a well-known internet presence. It came up in a discussion during a livestream. I wrote this around 2011, when I was an atheist. Despite that, I think the content is still true and wanted to reproduce it here, unredacted execept for this starting note and an ending note. Richard Dawkins arguably gave religion a far better explanation…
This is a restored old article from my site years ago. Not exactly sure when I wrote it, but it was between 2010 and 2012. Historically, although this past seems long forgotten, artists were beloved founts of creativity in the eyes of the people. Their works, albeit not to everyone’s liking, demonstrated human and natural beauty and were loadedwith accessible and intended symbolism with…