On the blog: Developer Journal, Golden Spike Day https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2021/05/10/spike.html #programming #project #devjournal
On the blog: Belated FSF Discussion https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2021/05/09/fsf.html #rant #freesoftware
many examples of #metapost with pictures [[http://tex.loria.fr/prod-graph/zoonekynd/metapost/metapost.html]] #links
On the blog: Free Culture Book Club — Moses und Aron, ch 10-13 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2021/05/08/moses4.html #freeculture #bookclub
On the blog: Tweets from 05/03 to 05/07 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/media/2021/05/07/week.html #twitter #week #socialmedia #linkdump
On the blog: Real Life in Star Trek, The Empath https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2021/05/06/empath.html #scifi #startrek #closereading
Modern “Freedom” Means Being a Slave to Impulses ⌘ Read more…
Modern “Freedom” Means Being a Slave to Impulses
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 disson … ⌘ Read more
Conspiratorial Thinking and “Multiple Outs” ⌘ Read more…
Conspiratorial Thinking and “Multiple Outs”
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 nice trick, but if they had picke … ⌘ Read more
The Problems with Utilitarianism ⌘ 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
Yay! Biden admin drops IP protection on Covid-19 vaccine patents. #TRIPSwaiver ⌘ Read more…
Monero and Other Privacy Coins ⌘ 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
Peter Saint-Andre: Opinions about Opinions ⌘ Read more…
Livestream on YouTube within an hour or so ⌘ Read more…
My searx instance has changed domains ⌘ Read more…
On the blog: Developer Journal, World Press Freedom Day https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2021/05/03/press.html #programming #project #devjournal
Livestream on YouTube within an hour or so ⌘ Read more…
Livestream on YouTube within an hour or so
See the link here:
On the blog: Media Websites Wanted… https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2021/05/02/wanted.html #rant #media
My searx instance has changed domains ⌘ 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
On the blog: Free Culture Book Club — Moses und Aron, ch 7-9 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2021/05/01/moses3.html #freeculture #bookclub
On the blog: Tweets from 04/26 to 04/30 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/media/2021/04/30/week.html #twitter #week #socialmedia #linkdump
On the blog: Real Life in Star Trek, Wink of an Eye https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2021/04/29/wink.html #scifi #startrek #closereading
Encryptomatic OpenPGP is updated for Microsoft Outlook and Windows Desktop. ⌘ Read more…
On the blog: Developer Journal, Old Permic Alphabet Day https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2021/04/26/permic.html #programming #project #devjournal
On the blog: Announcing All Around the News https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2021/04/25/aatn.html #announcement
Monero Maximalism: Or, How Bitcoin Is a 💩coin ⌘ Read more…
Monero Maximalism: Or, How Bitcoin Is a 💩coin
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
Monero Maximalism: Or, How Bitcoin Is a 💩coin ⌘ Read more…
Stay frosty: possible test stream on PeerTube and YouTube in a bit ⌘ 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
On the blog: Free Culture Book Club — Moses und Aron, ch 4-6 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2021/04/24/moses2.html #freeculture #bookclub
On the blog: Tweets from 04/19 to 04/23 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/media/2021/04/23/week.html #twitter #week #socialmedia #linkdump
On the blog: Real Life in Star Trek, Plato’s Stepchildren https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2021/04/22/plato.html #scifi #startrek #closereading
Monero Maximalism: Or, How Bitcoin Is a 💩coin ⌘ 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.
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
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!
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)
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?
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 … ⌘ Read more