2021-03-25

Posted on by Dave Stucky

What I Did

Like my forays into adequately living well and the philosophical truths of reality, I created a folder convention to sort through the many facets of computers technologies. I’m porting the entire experience out to TechSplained.

The first part was simple enough. I went back into the stuff I started on in November and cleaned them up, as well as added a few odds and ends:

However, I have a severe intolerance for uncertainty. I had about 600 various hyperlinks that I couldn’t presently figure out what to do with.

I deem Hacker News articles to be the crème de la crème of technological savvy, and about 80% of those links were solid-gold to me:

Article: “I made a complete guide that summarizes how to use Go in a production environment at scale.”

(drool)

I also had many hyperlinks that might be useful in the toolbox, but I don’t like to add what I don’t understand:

  • “A simple file copier! Just upload your file and you can download as many copies as you want!” Right, that sounds sensible, until you realize the operating system is already programmed to do that. Now someone else on the internet has a copy of your file.
  • “A new lightweight JavaScript library that solves all your problems!” Are you sure? Why is it superior to React or Node? Your words are hollow promises until I can look under the hood.
  • “An online hiring portal that actually connects employers and employees!” Oh, you mean like LinkedIn or Indeed or about 15 others? I’ll think about it.

Of course, I will understand this someday-soon-ish-fingers-crossed, so I had to do something with it. The only sensible thing was to drop links to those tools into the corresponding folders of where I’d probably learn it (e.g., various language-based frameworks go into the “Programming Features” page I’m tentatively going to make).

As of yesterday, I can finally say I got through that pile of chaos. All the tools have been updated that I’m comfortable covering until I know more.

What I Learned

Perfectionism

Perfectionism is inherently bad, at least with respect to anything in the present-tense. While it may be good to imagine perfection (such as my imagining of the perfect society and the implementation I believe it’ll exist through), it’s not going to happen pre-mortem for anyone alive. This world has too many imperfect things that “getting it just right” won’t ever be right enough.

Censorship

I had debated this, but I’ve concluded that censorship is always bad. I was on the fence about whether it was only mostly bad, but I now consider it universally bad. The reason for this is because I believe that in the presence of a rational-minded person who can fully understand all of the perspectives of truths and lies, would always choose the truth as their perspective. And, on top of that, they would be wiser and savvier about the nuances of those lies, to the point that their mind would be immune to further “mental diseases” of that type.

And, to direct the abstraction toward my own value system, it further enforces an aspect of thought I’ve been leaning toward believing about how people follow conservative/liberal values:

  1. People typically don’t care about their own value system because it’s not that useful to consider it. If you’re not inclined to think about the afterlife, why bother with consulting and questioning your Catholic background? The same goes for political views.
  2. When people do consider those values, they tend to veer towards their interpretation of the “center/moderate” angle, or swing to the polar opposite.
  3. In the absence/defiance of both the above pressures, the tend to veer conservative if they believe people have irreconcilable sin decisions and liberal if they believe people are victims of circumstance, for most people often both context-depending.
  4. Once someone has made up their mind, they’ll want to prevent perceived lies from infiltrating others’ minds. Since conservatives see it as bad thinking, they’ll try to give better reasoning. Liberals, on the other hand, will attack it in the public sphere because they see it as victimhood if a person changes their mind about something.

In practice, this means that “true” conservatives will generally foster more discussion while “true” liberals will censor untrendy ideas if the trend declares those ideas as “wrong”. It’s a big portion of why conservatives have more geeky, nerdy types who are trend-resistant and why liberals tend to have more fashionable representatives.

Operating Systems

I glossed over hundreds of links to various possible tools and looked at the operating systems. I realized some facts about operating systems in the process:

  • Design-focused non-programming software generally aims for the Apple ecosystem first, then Windows.
  • Simple productivity software is made on the ecosystem the developer made it on, which is about 60-70% Windows, with the rest being mostly Linux-based.
  • Web apps are all the rage for anything super simple. This is a cybersecurity double-edged sword since you’re sending data to them, but not downloading any code to run it, so they have the photo but but the metrics of your system.

There are some entertaining trends that underlie these softwares:

  • Windows is slowly migrating everything over to becoming more Linux-like, probably because Microsoft make near as much money on Windows as they used to and they make shedloads of cash on other things instead.
  • Linux is always getting better. While digging through the distros can be chaotic, it’s all made by volunteer programmers, so it’s effectively crowd-sourced. Android and Chrome OS, among others, are simply “Linux with the hood welded shut”.
  • Apple’s ecosystem is Bizarro Linux. It has some Unix-like elements (specifically, a monolithic architecture), but also some other components (like a microkernel architecture mixed in). If they can just figure out how to make and keep a fancy, pleasant user interface, they can still thrive with their vastly overpriced hardware and non-genius Genius Bar.

It’s a real possibility that someday soon-ish, we’ll all be using Unix-likes for all our general computing needs. This would make cross-platform software shockingly easy to develop for and, naturally, everything could run on everything.

Well, except the old stuff. But who needs GeoCities, right?

What I’m Doing Now

I’m creating TechSplained, a simple distillation of technology concepts, in a similar vein to my AdequateLife and Gained InSite pages. You can see my progress here as I sift through content.

Building this toolbox jointly alongside TechSplained as I understand the usefulness/reliability of that tool.

I’m in between contracts, so most of my day’s tasks are TechSplained and random interviewing times.

I have custody of two small people, who become legally allowed to vote in the late-2030’s. My wife and I have been turning money into a nurturing-enough home.