Normally, I’d wait 3-6 months for an update, but I’ve decided that, after observing the stunning brilliance of the artist David Revoy, there’s a certain zen to rhythmically describing the sausage-making of your craft.
What I Did
Naturally, my craft is far less exciting. I’m now getting tens of consumers!*
*”Consumers” is such a dirty word, but I can’t call them “readers” because I have a Philosominute, I can’t call them “listeners” because I write stuff, and I can’t call them “viewers” because I don’t make much in the visuals department.
So, without further adíèoüe, here’s what I’ve done in October.
1: Essays have been scant. I have created The Problem with Spirituality, To New Christians, and Our Unnatural Law. Only 41 more ideas to hash out until I’m “done”.
2: Weekly Philosominute podcast still happening every Friday. In particular, I’m very proud of my latest one.
3: I’ve been working on school like crazy. Since I’m the computer equivalent of being a shade-tree mechanic, I have been able to smash through 24 units. Thankfully, not all aspects of network engineering are this easy, and I have now hit against things that hurt the thinky parts.
4: My record-keeping on it sucks, but I’ve been steadily de-hoarding a bunch of things sitting in my boy-I-hope-I-can-work-through-that-and-add-it-to-my-toolbox-or-commonplace-someday pile. The number was ~52k, and is now ~50k.
5: I finally started using vim as a text editor! This is the fulfillment of a prophecy:
- It’s the law that all supernerds need vim or emacs. The learning curve is a cliff, but then you never have to move your hands from your keyboard.
- emacs is a text editor that grew up to become an operating system with the right config files. vim is a text editor that grew up to be a very good text editor that runs anywhere.
- I’m focusing on the paradigmatically fragmented world of networking, so there’s a more-than-50% chance I’ll be doing things on computers that aren’t mine. This means I’ll need access to something that quickly deploys on that computer.
- I’m also not actually good at it. Mostly, I’m just replacing my ad hoc text editing with it, and will play with the config files when I feel like it.
6: I likely would have done more, but I’ve been dealing with the traumatic documentation requirements of building a case against false allegations in a divorce.
- On that note, I’m now famous! My ex-wife (bureaucracy pending) decided to submit my most recent post as silly evidence that I’m debatably sane. Coming to an Exhibit D in a Greenville court near you!
- The irony she doesn’t know (and don’t tell her, since she might find out I wrote this) is that insane people are the ones who refuse to acknowledge their limits or imperfections. The more perfecter she looks to the courts, the worse she looks to every professional who deals with crazy high-conflict people all day.
My personal life: family update
Holding oneself accountable to self-improvement is often difficult, and it’s doubly difficult when my ex-wife (bureaucracy pending) is gatekeeping our children. It’s a miracle of God’s providence that I’m still standing after what she has done to me. She’s clever enough and has paid lawyers a lot, so only His strategic timing will give me any future chance with my children. The child support has now been triggered, so we’re now in Step 34 of 473 in the divorce court process (it’d be 3 steps if I was dealing with an ex-wife, bureaucracy pending, that loved her children).
All statements made are intel, and I’ve finally been blessed to see her motivations for what they really are:
- According to her allegations, I’m a hyper-calculating combination of Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, and every evil man ever.
- Of course, she did kidnap our two children, left our cat to die, disappear off the face of the earth for over a year, file for divorce against me halfway across the country, then demand child support while gatekeeping all access to Victor and Mia for another year.
- It’s entirely possible that painting me in a bad light just might be the only way to hide #2.
- I’m also starting to suspect that she might dislike me. Just a hunch.
Understatement notwithstanding, understanding and bringing someone’s motivations to light is the beginning of any remedy. Her sole intent is to destroy me, and she doesn’t care in the process who she harms. She is now stalling while racking up tremendous debt to maintain a farce of perfection. To her, those decisions are entirely my fault because I focused on a stable marriage instead of a perfect one. Thus, weaponizing the fact that I love Victor and Mia is the ultimate revenge. It’s a standard criminal mind developing maturity through experience.
Counter to this world’s mindset, I can be grateful in this context. I get to see how God will work in mine and the children’s lives, even if it’s not visibly apparent.
- Jesus is King, which means this world is His (Matthew 28:18).
- From the world’s view, people get away with the worst evil imaginable.
- From a spiritual sense, He is granting permission for people to do evil. He does it in the hopes that people will repent (2 Peter 3:9).
- For those who still do evil, He protects His people from the worst of it (2 Thessalonians 3:3).
God desires my ex-wife (bureaucracy pending) to repent and make amends for the above-stated. He desires reconciliation and truly hates divorce (Malachi 2:16). Reconciliation, however, is also a denial of personal desires, at least in part.
I really hope she gets her act together before her last day this side of eternity. As the Father to the fatherless (Psalm 68:5), she’ll have to explain to God why she made the children fatherless. She’ll also have to answer for why she lied so much to Victor and Mia about me. Further, she’ll have to testify for what she did to God Himself (Matthew 12:36).
While it’s not my preferred timing, He will work it all out for His glory and our good, whatever she decides. He promises timely retribution (Psalm 64), so I trust what I’ve asked Him to do (Mark 11:24), even if the world thinks I’m crazy. Further, God uses chaos to accomplish His designs (here’s a partial list), so all I can expect is the unexpected.
What I’ve noticed: AI’s historical precedent
So you’ve heard of AI, right? That’s a real thing for sure. Some people talked about it once. I’m sure you would just love to hear another opinion about AI!
Wait, don’t go. I promise it’s more interesting! It’s also not AI-generated.
I’ve been ruminating on how to historically compare the AI boom we’re presently in. The analogies only tell part of the story:
- In the 1990s, the dot-com boom was a gigantic overinvestment in websites. It exploded in popularity, then died rapidly, and web developers had a hard time finding work through the mid-2000s. This finally turned around after the iPhone came around, but that took 14 years of investment.
- In the 1830s, everyone in the USA thought that canal waterways were the future of commerce. Every state government started building waterways in anticipation of this change. This all collapsed in 1837 when there was a massive recession, and the railroad boom had overtaken it by the time it had arisen 5 years later, which is why every city in the Midwest still has a half-finished canal.
- The railroad boom in the US began in the 1830s, but really exploded after the American Civil War in 1865. This was because everyone promised that rail was the future (which was true) and investment would give guaranteed returns (which was premature). In 1873, there was a panic and market drop, and lots of wealthy people lost money. However, the presence of the laid track definitely moved the US economy until the automotive industry became a thing.
However, it’s missing something, specifically the absurd gazillion-dollar influx of subsidization by God knows how many large entities through groups like OpenAI and Anthropic.
So, to interpret it the most accurately, I believe the following historical revisionist take is most accurate to compare to our present state.
- In the 1890s, the robber barons were captivated by the new automotive technology. They decided to dump unbelievable amounts of money into getting a car to every household. This was against the public’s preference for it, and it still barely made any economic sense. They threw money at the entire process, from subsidized manufacturing to getting the government to buy cars to making gas almost free.
- There was a lack of other innovations necessary for this (e.g., the moving assembly line, improved gasoline refinement, better oil transport logistics). Cars were still far too expensive for normal people, even with subsidies.
- After the robber barons lost everything, which led to the Rockefeller Ruin, the car went into obscurity until about 1900, when Fenry Hord made the moving assembly line.
In other words, Alternate Take History only created 2-3 years of faster progress toward the automobile. What this means is that nothing really changed except a little bit of timing.
You know what’s so groundbreaking about what I’m saying? I’m basically going against all techbro wisdom that The Progress Of Humanity will be utterly and irrevocably changed in exactly -3 months. To quote the legendary RFC 1925, “No matter how hard you try, you can’t make a baby in much less than 9 months. Trying to speed this up might make it slower, but it won’t make it happen any quicker.”
Of course, I’m a mid-aged curmudgeon, so I obviously don’t know anything. It’s a good chance that everything I predicted is wrong, and in that case I love the Robot Overlords very much.
To apply this, then, that’s where we’re at:
- There are a lot of computers being used right now. They’re top-shelf stuff, so I expect the used graphics card and RAM market to utterly drop through the floor once the data centers aren’t affordable. This will allow nerds everywhere to make not-that-profitable-but-certainly-cool AI projects.
- The deep learning data centers are massive electrical hubs, which can be repurposed for most other manufacturing roles. This coincides with a tariff-induced American factory boom.
- AI will transform society, sure, but it will probably take another decade. Like every other technology that has ever existed, it’ll be slow enough that society will adopt it without too much fuss.
What I’ve also noticed: AI + misinformation
One connection with AI’s non-adoption I haven’t seen discussed is the general institutional distrust everyone has. Basically, 3 out of 4 people on average distrust any given big institution, and the public cares a lot more today about institutions taking, misusing, and preserving their personal data without consent than ever before. Are people really going to believe the institution’s deployed chatbot will be different?
This is also against a unique historical backdrop of bad information. The whole “progress for progress’s sake” mindset has meant that most of society’s systems use incorrect ideas that other systems asserted were true. I remember when Wikipedia was considered an academically bad source. But, in the presence of AI slop, some people are calling it (I kid you not) “the last good place on the internet”. It’s hard to move forward when the truth isn’t clear, similar to how a map of Spider-Man’s New York City won’t help you navigate through New York City very well.
Of course, this is also assuming the government keeps ignoring the public’s opinions about privacy and doesn’t do anything. There’s no chance any of the AI would work if it hadn’t trained itself on the entire internet without anyone’s consent, and a decisive bipartisan act of Congress would quickly end the Season of Slop.
Am I predicting something? Well, I dunno, I guess? All mechanical objects experience friction, which releases heat and slowly degrades the mechanisms. In social systems, the friction is through distrust, which comes through unreliable information and dogmatically maintained falsehoods, then magnifies itself through any bad-faith behaviors. I expect lots of things to go slower and break down as we move into 2027.
What I’m Doing Now
Most of my time is learning more gooder about the dumb logic machines, but I’ll get the fancy title of Cloud and Network Engineering. One sliver of silver lining about my ex-wife’s (bureaucracy pending) decision to kidnap our kids and divorce me is my Bachelor’s Degree will be accurately named.
Right now I’m learning about network diagnostics. Learning about how things connect is a lot nicer than the whole “type that Google-searched article into the terminal and hope it does something” arrangement. Maybe someday I’ll be able to figure out what those “power cable” or “network cable” things are that stick uselessly out of every Wi-Fi hotspot.
I’m still getting a feel for what I need to do to accomplish my vision. I have no clear path yet on how to get there, but the path exists. Nobody has told me otherwise yet.
On the side, I’m also working through a bunch of hoarded things, because hoarding is bad. The approximate numbers:
- ~46.5k bookmarks and ~3.2k files
- All this is spread across ~330 applicable pages, though I’m avoiding touching 109 of them because they’re in-the-weeds computer things