Learn Latin

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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.

Latin, as you probably know is the ancestor of Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, etc. Once you know Latin, it is quite literally downhill learning any of these. In college … ⌘ Read more

Command Line Bibles

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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.

1. English King James Version (including Apocrypha) —Github, Gitlab, Local git server
   
2. Latin Vulgate —[Github](https://github. … ⌘ Read more

Why It’s Bad to Have High GDP

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 kind of global double-entry accounting book.A logically equivale … ⌘ Read more

Science vs. Soyence

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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 metaphysical, moral arrogance; it’s one that is more and mor … ⌘ Read more

Hedonism, Asceticism and the Hermetic Answer
The modern world more or less gives you the philosophical choice of either Hedonism or Asceticism.You never really hear it in those terms, but that’s how it is.

Hedonism living for pleasure. Your default lifestyle is eating whatever, watching Netflix and playing video games irrespective of how late it is.You watch porn, masturbate, have sex as much as you can and any consequences of any of this are just facts of life which you view a … ⌘ Read more

Veganism Is the Pinnacle of Bugmanism
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 people.

There’s a stereotype about vegans that they are annoyin … ⌘ Read more

Learn Chinese

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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 is I hesitate to say anachronistic. The Chinese character system i … ⌘ Read more

The Parable of Alien Chess
A parable on the Logical Postivist “interpretation” of scientific models.

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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 and squares all blur together.)

They can still learn about … ⌘ Read more

We Want Our 4 Causes Back!

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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 CauseThe material from which something is made. E.g. the stone of a statue.The Efficient CauseThe external force that causes something to be made. E.g. the artisan and his tools who make a statue.The Formal Cause … ⌘ Read more

Hating Brave is Cool!

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I like and use the Brave Browser.It’s a free and open source browser with features like:

1. Ad-blocking by default.
   
2. Tracker-blocking by default.
   
3. Anti-fingerprinting mechanisms to prevent you from being monitored.
   
4. Built-in Tor windows.
   
5. Run by a based Christian and not furry leftists.
   

As far as I’m concerned, Brave is indisputably the best general-purpose browser out there.There are other okay brows … ⌘ Read more

Livestream on PeerTube ONLY at 10AM New York time
As the title says, I’ll be livestreaming today on PeerTube only at this link.

I’ll talk about finishing my book reptinting project that you’re going to want to know about and perhaps “recent events” (several weeks late)
for example, on Richard Stallman.

I’ll read donations I get if you want to talk about other things.

If you haven’t already, subscribe to my PeerTube’s RSS feed to get up … ⌘ Read more

Bringing back blog system.
For the benefit of RSS users, I’m going to bring back the blog feature
on my website, which is done with lb,
a minor script I wrote a while ago.

This is where I’ll be posting updates. Old blog entries, while not on the RSS feed
still exist via their permalinks and can be accessed
from lukesmith.xyz/blog. ⌘ Read more

YouTube Channel Deletion (updated)
For info, I’ve added a list of the striked videos so you can see how innocuous they are. ⌘ Read more

YouTube Channel Deletion

by Luke Smith

Google is prepping to delete my YouTube channel.
As of today (March 26, 2021), I now cannot post for another two weeks.
YouTube “strikes” which are functionally unappealable (automatically rejected) last for 3 months.
If they give thee concurrent strikes, you channel is permanently deleted.

If YouTube Jannies delete my YouTube channel, remember that
**100% of my videos are still easily viewable, includi … ⌘ Read more

Emergency: re: YouTube
Hi everyone.

YouTube has given an arbitrary strike to one of my videos.
I am temporarily blocked and banned from posting on YouTube for a week.

I mentioned in a stream that I was planning to wean myself off YouTube as a platform in 2021,
but now I might have to move faster, only three strikes means a permanent channel deletion.
Considering how inconsistent and ambiguous YouTube’s pretended rules are,
I expect to wake up every day with those final strikes.

Frankly, YouTube shouldn’t be … ⌘ Read more

https://Based.Cooking (non-bloated, non-soydev recipes and more)
Well, I figured that it’d be best and I go ahead and start a recipe site, since it came up. I’ll go ahead and tell you RSS chads.
It’s based.cooking (yes, apparently .cooking is a TLD nowadays).

The site isn’t much of a looker now. Just simple CSS, so feel free to open PRs with elegant improvements.
I don’t have much time today, so I’ll leave it to other people.
I might record a video on the site this evening or tomorr … ⌘ Read more

Livestream momentarily
On YouTube at this link: https://youtu.be/uYDfdeySis0 ⌘ Read more

We Want Our 4 Causes Back!

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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 CauseThe material from which something is made.
E.g. the stone of a statue.The Efficient CauseThe external force that causes something to be made.
E.g. the artisan and his tools who make a statue.The Formal CauseThe f … ⌘ Read more

Wanna learn 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 you want to see examples of documents made with LaTeX, you can see my Master’s thesis here or another paper here that shows some diagrams and other features you can have in LaTe … ⌘ Read more

Veganism is the Pinnacle of Bugmanism

by Luke Smith

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 go … ⌘ Read more

Wallpaper gray on LARBS?
If after a recent update, xwallpaper isn’t setting your wallpaper on boot in LARBS, it’s because xwallpaper is giving an error with the recent version of glibc.

There’s already an issue up about this on the xwallpaper Github and hopefully it will be fixed soon. Out of my control.

You can spend a little time learning alternate ways to set wallpapers in the meantime, or learn to love gray. ⌘ Read more

Why it’s bad to have a high GDP

by Luke Smith, originally a blog post in November 2018, rewritten for this website.

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 … ⌘ Read more

PeerTube v3 is now live with Live Streaming abilities
PeerTube has recently released version 3.0.0, which has added many things, including the ability to livestream. I’ve already updated by PeerTube instance to version 3 (it is linked from this RSS entry), but the link is just videos.lukesmith.xyz .

I’m not sure if I’ll end up immediately using the livestream ability, but it is certainly nice to have a non-YouTube option which is, in fact, self-hosted.

Aside from that, I strong recommend you … ⌘ Read more

Short Notice: Appearing on Millenniyule TONIGHT at 7PM New York Time
Sorry for the short notice, I’ve been busy for the holidays, but I’ve been asked to be interviewed on Millenniyule in less than two hours from when I’m posting this. I’m scheduled for 7PM to as late as 9PM New York time.

The livestream will be on this channel (i.e. not my own due to bandwidth issues).

If you miss it, you can get it [at the bottom of this playlist](https://www.youtube.com/ … ⌘ Read more

New website
Got a new simplified website. Real old school, no CSS sheet. I’m going to make it more text-based and have more writings.

I’ve also rolled over this RSS feed.

A lot of the site is still unfinished, so notify my of anything I’ve missed so far.
I want to keep old links more or less in place. I haven’t decided if I want to keep using my old blog script (this entry is RSS only).
I feel like I had neglected the blog for a while, and my new site is more conducive to browsing as I add even more. ⌘ Read more