Science of the Gaps
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 putatively proto-humans.

Here is a snippet of Mel’s response and the back and forth:

Mel: Yeah maybe t … ⌘ Read more

Miracles and Black Swans

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 to state it clearly:

**If there are paranormal or supernaturally miraculous events which actually do … ⌘ Read more

John Searle and Daniel Dennett on Consciousness

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 logical conclusion: the denial of the subjective—the consciousness itself—the thing, the … ⌘ Read more

Lindypress Bug Fix
Just a brief note that for the past couple of days, you might’ve been unable to buy books on LindyPress.net if you are in the United States, Canada or Australia (which is a lot of you). This has now been fixed, so you can place your orders now!

The issue was that there was a silent API update that kept addresses from validating states and provinces. Note that if your order placed, it’s all okay, this is only for people for whom the site would not let place an order.
… ⌘ Read more

I’ll visit South-East Europe (Greece, Albania, Montenegro, Constantinople) this Summer
I’ll be in south eastern Europe this summer (of 2023) in late June and early July.

Specific plans are still in the air, but I’ll be visiting Greece, Albania, Montenegro and possibly the European side of Turkey.
I’ll also be in Kosovo, and while I know I have some fans in Serbia, I’m not sure I can cross into Serbia proper easily since the US accepts Kosovo as independent, but I believe that being there would be a … ⌘ Read more

Consciousness and Materialism

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:

1. To be murdered is potentially painful.
   
2. To be murdered is irreversible.
   
3. Murder causes social dysfunction.
   
4. Etc. …
   

By merely my collecting these, we haven’t proven that _M … ⌘ Read more

Why I Won’t Go to Restaurants in 2023

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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 … ⌘ Read more

Retiring My Fiat Donation Portal
I’ve decided to retire my fiat donation portal at donate.lukesmith.xyz, where people could donate to me via debit and credit cards.
This will happen by the end of this calendar year.

It’s more in keeping with my principles of free software, self-ownership and everything else to only allow cryptocurrency donations.
This also is a subtle nudge to people who want to donate in streams to get into Bitcoin and Monero, as opposed to using fiat o … ⌘ Read more

Blockchain Blasphemy and the Technological Antichrist

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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 deep … ⌘ Read more

Blockchain Blasphemy

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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 unfoldin … ⌘ Read more

‘Based’ Paganism vs. Christianity
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 an article or make a video on what you think about
Varg’s Paganism in r … ⌘ Read more

Minimizing Liabilities Is Making It.
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:

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Or this:

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The hardest technical solutions are right in front of your face.
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, apparently no one thought to use the wheel to make a simple … ⌘ Read more

I will be at Southeast Linuxfest 2022 (June 10-12) in Charlotte, NC.
Title says the gist.

In 2018, I went to Southeast Linuxfest and gave a presentation which you can see here or

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I’m going to be attending again this year, as the title says Ju … ⌘ Read more

Based.Cooking has become more grandma-usable.
Over the past month, I’ve taken some off-time to tinker with
Based.Cooking, the cooking site I/we made a year or so
ago as a proof of concept for a simple and unintrusive recipe website. There
have been over 250 recipes submitted, but the hobbled-together static site
generator originally used proved unable to keep up and with all the
submissions, there was a big issue of content organization.

There have been two big changes. Firstly, I port … ⌘ Read more

Monerotopia Presentation and Website News
Just a note that within two hours (11AM NY time), my edited Monerotopia presentation with slides and all will be premiering here on the Monero Talk channel on YouTube.

I did already do an extended commentary and explanation of my talk here on my PeerTube channel, and I might put this an the edited talk onto my YouTube channel if I feel like it. You shou … ⌘ Read more

Livestream brought you by Starlink
I got Starlink/Soylink and I might, might be able to do a livestream from my house.

Come see if it works here:

https://youtu.be/iobvWRL9loM ⌘ Read more

Livestream brought you by Starlink
I got Starlink/Soylink and I might, might be able to do a livestream from my house.

Come see if it works here:

https://videos.lukesmith.xyz/w/6HaEr5NtP61H1fZC3FdXC9

I will start sometime soon once I get things set up. I should have a chat module open now on my PeerTube instance now. ⌘ Read more

Important notes for LARBS users
Two notes for LARBS users:

1. Xorg went through some updates last week that changed how it calculates dots-per-inch (DPI) on screens. There’s a chance that you might update and find your font extra large or small. If so, you can just manually addxrandr --dpi 96 to the beginning of your xprofile to set the DPI to the typical 96 (or whatever number looks best).
   
2. I have no switched new installs of LARBS from using Pulseaudio to Pipewire as an … ⌘ Read more

Obscenities are symptoms of weak minds.
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 they do on the idea that it’s someone “their right,” or “e … ⌘ Read more

Every Web Browser Absolutely Sucks.
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 stuff and 10% junk.

Here I will list:

1. Featu … ⌘ Read more

Bringing back old-school web pins and buttons
Back in the not-quite-as-bad-old-days (at least as far back as the 90’s), every good website had a small “ad” gif that fans of the site could use as a colorful link. These are called “buttons” or sometimes “pins.”

You can see sites that collect these internet artifacts (both the good ones and boring ones) here and here.

Most people would have **do … ⌘ Read more

Important: LindyPress undergoing some updates
Although I haven’t announced in a video on the YouTube channel yet, I’m glad that there’s been a lot of interest in LindyPress.net. I haven’t done a video on it just because there are some details in the site coding we’re still figuring out, but books are already printing, shipping and arriving at some of your houses.

Just a couple technical notes:

• I switched the Stripe backend of the site over the week … ⌘ Read more

YouTube stream now
I’ll be streaming on YouTube momentarily: https://youtu.be/Aj6-ASqhSEY ⌘ Read more

The classical book reprinting site is live! LindyPress.net
For a while, I’ve hinted that I’ve been contributing to a project to reprint out-of-print classical and medieval texts that are of hidden value, sometimes even in their original languages. I’ve worked on this project for a while and now it’s live and you can browse the first five books available.

See the site at https://lindypress.net. All works have been reformatted in XeLaTeX so that … ⌘ Read more

Matrix vs. XMPP

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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 one. In essence, it works like email: you might have an em … ⌘ Read more

Late livestream on YouTube ASAP
Link is here: https://youtu.be/OU84HrX8D8Q

I’ll begin before the top of the hour. ⌘ Read more

I appeared on Monero Talk
I was invited to be interviewed on Monero Talk and it’s just been released. Monero Talk is a podcast on, well… Monero the actually private cryptocurrency, which I’ve written and done videos on in the past.

See the full interview on one of the following:

• Monero Talk’s YouTube channel
  
• [Odysee Re … ⌘ Read more

Livestream on YouTube right now
Link here: https://youtu.be/GZi0gmDcuAc ⌘ Read more

Odysee stream over, worked well!
Just finished by first stream on LBRY/Odysee. If you missed it, don’t sweat it, we didn’t talk about anything too interesting, just trying Odysee’s new streaming abilities.

There was some bandwidth problems on my end, but Odysee itself seemed to handle the stream very well. ⌘ Read more

Testing out the Odysee Livestreaming; Check it out NOW!
As the title says, see here: https://odysee.com/@Luke:7/nginx-restream-luke-smith-test:b ⌘ Read more

Modern “Freedom” Means Being a Slave to Impulses

See this article in video form here.

Which of the following two people is more free:

1. A drug addict.
   
2. 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 disson … ⌘ Read more

Conspiratorial Thinking and “Multiple Outs”

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 nice trick, but if they had picke … ⌘ Read more

The Problems with Utilitarianism
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.

At a dumb intuitive level, the “ethical” idea of Utilitarianism in principle gets pretty close to what most people reflexively want from social-political affairs: the greatest good for the greatest number of people—who … ⌘ Read more

Monero and Other Privacy Coins
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 … ⌘ Read more

Livestream on YouTube within an hour or so
See the link here:

https://youtu.be/Jq9ZKvsJSJI ⌘ Read more

My searx instance has changed domains
For those that use my SearX instance (which was formerly searx.lukesmith.xyz, I have now relocated it to searx.cedars.xyz, so if you use it as a default search engine, remember to change its url.

For those who don’t know what SearX is, it’s a metasearch engine that polls whatever search engines you want and aggregates the results. It is free software that can be installed by anyone on any server.

Read more about it … ⌘ Read more

Monero Maximalism: Or, How Bitcoin Is a 💩coin

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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 unmitigated … ⌘ Read more

Stay frosty: possible test stream on PeerTube and YouTube in a bit
I’m going to probably be doing a test livestream in a bit. Hopefully I fixed the issue in the previous stream with Pulseaudio and buffering.

I’ll probably go live on PeerTube first, test it there, then test it on YouTube. I’m mobile and on limit battery though, so it won’t be a super long stream if everything works out.

PeerTube stream will be at this link: [https://videos.lukesmith.xyz/vi … ⌘ Read more

My blog system now has tagging (all pure POSIX shell of course)
This isn’t live on the old blog system’s Github, but partially inspired by by Based Cooking’s tag system which is based on blogit, I’ve added in the feature to tag articles.

I’ve been wanting to write more articles and informational pages on my website, but doing that with no organization is somewhat … ⌘ Read more

The Fragility of Physics
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 solvent models of their subject matters.Physics is thus the queen of the “hard sciences.”
… ⌘ Read more

Programs and Equipment I Use
After many requests, here are the programs I use for everything. I’m only putting here programs I consider tried and true and have used for a while.

I’m about getting things done quickly and having as little space between my thoughts and actions on the computer.

I like having vim-like bindings and prefer running programs in the terminal for simplicity’s sake. That said, I’m very much against the cringey meme that things … ⌘ Read more

Making Free Money off Credit Cards
While I’ve done a video on this topic before ( PeerTube, YouTube), some people asked me for more information, so here it is.

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In America, people are so notoriously dumb with credit and money that credit card co … ⌘ Read more

Why I Use the GPL and Not Cuck Licenses
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 sof … ⌘ Read more

Notes on Learning Languages
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.

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 manually look up every word in the dictionary to translate.This actually … ⌘ Read more

Academic

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• Papers and Memories…
  
• The Indo-European Tapes
  
• Video Talks
  
• Audio Talks
  
• Other Presentations
  

Here are some old academic papers that I mostly wrote as term papers and such in graduate school. People occasionally ask out of interest.

By the time I got a year or so into my Ph.D. at Arizona, I had pretty much not intention on continuing in t … ⌘ Read more

Reviews of All Linux Distros (That Matter)
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 what they’re doing. When I came to YouTube, all … ⌘ Read more

Only Use Old Computers!

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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,” part of my neighborhood, but I more 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 be … ⌘ Read more

Learning European Languages (Michel Thomas)

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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 … ⌘ Read more

Wanna Learn LaTeX?

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1. What is LaTeX?
   
2. Installing LaTeX
   
3. LaTeX Video Tutorials
   

I have a full video tutorial series on learning LaTeX, broken into small sensible parts, here.

Basically, it’s how big boys write and format documents.Every public brief, scientific article, book, cryptocurrency … ⌘ Read more