Computer options

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I’ll write down some of my impressions regarding my recent decision to transition completely to the Apple ecosystem.

First of all, I had three options: Windows, Linux and Mac. All three come with serious issues – woke infestation, American spying, corporate spying, ideology and so on. With Windows, it seems that the quality of the product had seriously degraded since they fired their QA staff to cut costs, and they transitioned from being financed by the user, to being semi-free to the user and being financed by ads, which makes the present-day Windows as infested with all kinds of unwanted stuff they are installing without user permission, as a Xiaomi phone. That’s absolutely unacceptable. Also, since their QA is borderline non-existent, they keep pushing updates and patches and fixes for bad patches and so on, and something seems to be perpetually downloading and installing in the background, and if you don’t use your computer for any length of time, it will be absolutely bogged down by a seemingly endless stream of updates that will take most of the day to clear. Also, as they require an increasingly more closed down hardware platform in order to run, the former advantage of PC as an open platform on which you can install anything is, for the most part, lost, and a present-day PC is barely any more open than a Mac. It’s still not as bad, but it’s getting close. The advantages of Windows are that everything runs on them, as they are for the most intents and purposes the standard OS. It’s the default platform for gaming, business applications and so on. Also, the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is great, and for all intents and purposes Windows and Linux are blended to such a degree that they feel like a single system, and you can run both sets of applications on the same system without rebooting into another OS, or running a virtual machine. In some senses, Windows is better than it ever was, but in others it’s worse than ever.

The GNU-Linux project is so infested with ideology, from wokeism to communism, that it seems completely bogged down and will never overcome those issues. The basic concept of trying to avoid money as a system of rewarding utility always re-appears there as a stumbling block, and since it is very sensitive to the issue of a very limited number of developers maintaining critical components, it is also very sensitive to ideological corruption and bribery, as much as the large corporations are sensitive to government pressure and legal constraints within America. Basically, Linux has its own set of issues; they are just slightly different than those of Windows and Mac.

A Mac looks like an increasingly closed-down nightmare, where the user is increasingly losing influence, but on the other hand, on a Mac I have homebrew and macports projects that allow me to install more-less the same GNU package that I have on Linux. For all intents and purposes, I can bypass Apple’s nonsense, install whatever I want from the open source library and do my thing. It sounds closed down, but in reality the greatest restriction I feel is that my favourite games are not ported to Mac. On the other hand, it’s a refreshing alternative to the kilowatt arms race on the PC platform, where AMD, Intel and Nvidia are competing to produce the most power-hungry, hot machine they possibly can, to the point where cooling solutions for the hardware became ridiculous in the recent years. The problem with Apple is that when they decide not to produce the kind of hardware that you need, you are stuck, and I had that situation when they refused to make bigger iPhones so I got a Samsung Note, and returned to Apple once they came to their senses, but at the moment their iPhones have everything I need, their iPads have everything I need, their laptops are excellent and meet all of my needs, and their desktop lineup for the first time contains something I actually wanted to buy, instead of the all-in-one iMacs and the overpriced Mac Pro monstrosities. Also, since I have an Apple phone, tablet, laptop and earphones, having an Apple desktop as well allows me to integrate all of those things slightly better; the key word is “slightly” – for instance, I can switch the AirPods to the desktop with a click, and switch them back to the iPhone easily, where on Windows desktop this would require pairing them to the desktop, which would then “steal” them from the phone every time I log in – I tried that, thank you very much. The main advantage of a desktop Mac, however, is the absence of the Windows update nightmare. Also, the hardware ports are all modern and fast, unlike a PC where you get one or two “fast” ports, but everything else is a decade-old legacy. Having four Thunderbolt ports and all USB ports at the latest speed standard available is refreshing and liberating, because the external drives I plug in will work as fast as the internal one. Advantages of external NVMe storage are not to be underestimated, and I really missed having Thunderbolt ports on my PC, which is in all other respects a winged beast of a machine.

The Mac Studio plugged into my peripherals seamlessly; I just connected my 43” LG 4k display to the Thunderbolt port and it worked perfectly; I connected my Logitech webcam, mouse and keyboard and they worked perfectly. I connected the powered USB 3 hub to one of its USB A ports and this gave me a place to connect all kinds of dongles and charging cables that I use; all works perfectly. I also connected the Samsung T7 2TB SSD drive while I wait for the 4TB NVMe drive that I have on order, so that I can work with my photos in Lightroom, and everything works great. It’s not that my PC was some ancient legacy shitbox, so you’ll hear no raving about how fast a Mac is in comparison; it feels the same. The Windows keyboard layout on a Mac feels confusing so I took the Apple keyboard from the drawer and I’m using that now, just to see what it’s like, but for all intents and purposes the experience is remarkably similar to my Windows desktop, only without stability issues and Windows updates, which means mission accomplished, I guess, because that’s what I wanted to do.

Am I more susceptible to Apple’s whims now? I guess so. However, if I look at things from the practical perspective of wanting things to just work for me and not get in my way, Apple seems to allow me to just pay for things and get functionality, while others substitute money with either ads or ideology, both of which I detest. On Apple, I feel like the user and not like the product that is sold to the advertisers, and as for the money, my PC hardware was not actually cheap. In fact, it’s all in the same price range as Apple stuff, only designed with different priorities. The aluminium Studio machine doesn’t really fit into the matte-black aesthetic of the rest of the setup, but I guess I’ll live. The black (or, in Apple terms, space grey) “magic” keyboard and touchpad, on the other hand, fit great.

I tried Linux on my PC, yes. When I use the Nvidia driver, the screen doesn’t turn on after waking from sleep. I can solve it by using the Nouveau driver, but then the Ethernet port stops working. In short, I’m too old for this shit. When I was a kid I would have found it a challenge to get everything working, but now I just find it annoying; it gets in my way and doesn’t help me do the things I want to do any better, faster or easier, so it’s a hard pass.

Messy realities of life

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I am thinking further along the line I explored in the previous article; namely, that life is messy, and sometimes you need to choose between truth, justice, utility, and kindness. Those things seem to converge as you go higher, towards God, and God is at the same time fullness along multiple dimensions. Here, however, not so much. Let’s say you have to deal with a manipulative person in some business dealings. Navigating such a problem can make you choose between multiple bad options, because you can’t approach it from the position of greatest truth, you can’t approach it with kindness because it might be counterproductive (a manipulator interprets kindness as weakness and an opportunity for abuse), and what I end up doing is a melange of forthright truth and utility – in essence, I say how things are, what I want, and I do it in a pretty much brutally straightforward way, without much emotion or niceties; here’s what the contract says, here’s what I will do, and here’s what I want you to do. I turn all empathy off, I don’t complicate things with higher spiritual aspects of the situation, I tell things as they are, adhering to the principle of truthfulness, but I am also governed by the principle of utility – basically, I want to either earn or not lose money, and I try to avoid unnecessary hostilities, but I am also quite prepared to engage in them if it is necessary, just and useful. Also, I have in mind that I’m not really spiritually helping evil people if I allow them to get their way; this would only encourage them in their evil. The principle of ahimsa, therefore, does somewhat guide my actions, but not to the degree where it would always and necessarily prevail. The principle of utility, however, is tempered by the fact that I am an instrument of God, and my personal prosperity and well-being often take a second seat to other considerations.

Truth

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I recently saw a video by Jordan Peterson, in which he urges people to always to tell the truth, or at least not to lie. It made me think, because that’s an advice I would always give, and also something I personally can’t really do.

Tell the truth? Sure. Tell the greatest truth I know? That God is the ultimate reality, and this world is an elaborate, persistent illusion? That life and death don’t matter, and your relationship with God is the only thing to consider, always? When exactly should I tell those truths? When the owner of the restaurant asks me how I liked the lunch? When the neighbour asks me what’s up? When the cashier at the store asks “would that be all?”

It reminds me of a Bosnian joke where Mujo managed to burn out the latest AI supercomputer by asking him “šta ima?”, or “what’s up?” in rough translation. The computer of course took it literally and started selecting all things that are up. The answer everybody expects is something along the lines of “oh, nice to see you too man, how’s things?”, which is a trivial social phrase that means nothing, really, and is there merely to keep the pretence of a conversation when there’s nothing to say, and a way to be polite about it. In most cases, truth is neither sought nor required.

So, yes, that’s the way I go about things – answer with polite phrases, go through life providing non-responses to non-questions, because it would be awqward to do otherwise, but the fact remains that by doing so I am living a lie.

Computer issues

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I had quite a bit of computer issues lately, and mostly with my main desktop PC (a Ryzen 5900x/Nvidia 1080ti gaming/workstation system): most of them were stupid things, like something misconfigured in UEFI/BIOS after an update that made the PC wake from sleep randomly, or Windows “fast startup” not allowing the computer to sleep, but the worst are the stability issues – random crashes and BSOD, and I’m afraid all points to the CPU, which is either overheating, or shows stability issues due to heat damage. The root cause of this seems to be an AIO watercooling unit that has a nasty habit of leaving a coin-sized spot on the middle of the CPU contact-free, probably because something deforms when the pump is screwed onto the CPU too tightly or something of the sort. In any case, the computer randomly crashes from once in a few days to several times in a day, and this basically makes the computer just unreliable enough for me not to be able to use it for anything serious. Also, the fact that Windows 11 looks more like a perpetually self-updating machine than anything else, also contributed to my annoyance, and the machine is so power-inefficient that it significantly heats the room in summer, forcing the AC to work harder and thus waste even more power.

While this machine will eventually get fixed when the parts arrive, I decided to do a side-grade (a word for something that’s neither an upgrade nor a downgrade, but replacement with something different but equally powerful) and replace it in the function of my main computer by a Mac Studio.

I was quite busy with the transition – first I tried to unsuccessfully resolve the Windows machine’s stability issues by formatting and reinstalling the OS and all the apps, then had more stupid Windows issues when I tried to move the NVMe from one socket to another and the Windows refused to boot after that, so I had to fix the issue from the recovery console and in the most obscure ways possible, then the Mac arrived and I eventually had to do a clean install because Lightroom didn’t want to work when I did a recovery from another computer’s backup drive, then all kind of obscure things had to be installed, and I basically spent several weeks dealing with computers and the pointless issues they caused. For instance, there is a bug in the Apple Mail application on the Mac OS Ventura and it is widely reported on the web, but nobody in Cupertino seems to be working on it, probably because they don’t think it exists, because it doesn’t show if you upgraded from an earlier OS version, however when you do a clean install, as I did, the junk mail controls and custom filters don’t get saved and are lost on app restart. I fixed the problem by copying 3 files from my laptop:

~/Library/Mail/V10/MailData/RulesActiveState.plist
./SyncedRules.plist
./UnsyncedRules.plist

This is a trivial issue, but each such thing takes an hour or two to diagnose and fix, and I feel as if I’ve been reduced to fixing pointless computer shit and doing very little productive work the computers are meant to do, and I also need to maintain quite a bit of IT skill just to keep everything running, and moving to a Mac might reduce at least some of this pointless hassle, because I don’t think it can be outright removed without abandoning the whole thing.

In the meantime, the Mac is silent, blows out cool air under load, doesn’t use almost any electricity in normal work, updates much less often than the Windows box, and is as blazing fast as that 12-core Ryzen monstrosity with water cooling. Also, the DAC on its headphone jack is absolutely stellar, audibly better than the Schiit Modi 3 I’ve been using to connect the Windows box to the NAD. The second great thing about the Mac are the ports – there are lots of them, and they are high speed, which kind of matters, because the Windows machine only had one USB A 3.1 Gen 2 port, and one USB C connector of the same speed; all the other ports are slower. On the Mac, the slowest USB ports are USB 3.1 Gen 2, it has both USB A and C varieties, and the fast ports are Thunderbolt 4, allowing me to connect external NVMe drives at speeds equivalent to the internal drive. I already have a 4TB NVMe and the enclosure for it in the mail, and that’s going to be the storage drive for Lightroom. The drawback is that all the upgrades are necessarily external, because it doesn’t have any internal upgrade ability. I would expect to be able to at least change/add NVMe drives and RAM, but no, this thing is as upgradable as an iPhone. That’s a real shame and a continuation in a long line of steps backwards Apple was taking, from fully upgradable machines where you could replace hard drives and RAM modules, to this. However, to be honest, the thing with the computer industry is that upgrades are no longer much of a concern these days, and you can take a five or even ten year old computer and it will run fine. Just remember that ten years ago it was 2013, and the computer of the day was this. I have a mid-2015 version of that, and it’s noticeably slower than the modern hardware, but still runs everything I throw at it just fine. Basically, I replaced it long before it became defunct, and that’s the thing – you can take a 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD machine from ten years ago, and it will still run a modern OS, run modern apps, and upgrading the storage and RAM won’t really solve the main reasons why you might want to replace it. There were times when you had to constantly upgrade your machine just to keep up, and the upgrades were truly huge and relevant every six months or so. This is no longer the case, and a modern high-end machine might actually not need internal upgrades in its expected life cycle of five years.

Whether this civilisation will last that long, is a much more important question.

Misunderstandings

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I was just thinking about one possible misunderstanding that might occur due to my style of writing and speech. You see, I essentially never make outright commandments or prohibitions. I mostly just give my reasoning as to why something is a bad idea, or might have bad consequences, or why something is a good idea.

There are several reasons for this. First, it’s a matter of your free will to do whatever you personally feel you need or want to do. I will just state my opinion, which you might accept or ignore. Second, bad things can be useful. For instance, I read many books that were bad, or outright wrong, but reading them helped me understand how people who are under this or that misapprehension think and feel. Not only that – I occasionally do things that are not wise or recommended, just to test whether my understanding of the principles applies. Of course, there are things that are so outright harmful that trying them causes irreversible harm, and those are always to be avoided; for instance, ingesting chemicals or doing other things that cause brain damage, permanent injury or death. You don’t want to hang yourself or inject yourself with heroin just to see how it feels, for instance. However, it is my experience that all kinds of evil or bad things can be turned around and used to create the kind of wisdom that would otherwise be hard to attain. Basically, doing wrong things and getting wrecked because of it can teach you very valuable lessons about why certain things are bad, or why certain paths don’t work. The reason why I have such a good understanding of things is because I tried many things that didn’t work, and not always intentionally; basically, I learned some things by fucking up so badly I barely survived. The formulation I usually make, saying that something is not recommended, or that it is dangerous, can therefore mean that it is likely to destroy you, but if you survive, you might gain extremely valuable insight, and it’s up to you whether you want to take those chances or not – after all, it’s your life to waste or destroy if you so choose.

I guess this relativistic attitude towards things that others might judge as fatal is a result of my prolonged practice of detachment; you can call it vipassana if you will. I see it all as energy behind this or that vector, and everything can be powered and un-powered, redirected and powered again to test something. “Ah, this is evil, so I know what evil feels like. Now, power off. Wind down. Change direction, slowly add energy. This is good, so this is how it feels.“ Tantra would call this “game” a dance on the edge of a sword, and the sword is indeed sharp.

Non-yogis live in a different world, where they believe that “their nature” compels them to do something, and choices can’t be undone, they need to be punished for the bad things and so on. I live in a world where bad things need to be decoupled from energy and powered down. Where non-yogis think of themselves as victims of things that happen to them, I see myself as someone who can kill processes, create new ones, change priorities and the percentage of CPU power behind each, and so on. Also, I’m not afraid of failure, pain, misery or death, and I see them as merely “things you might want to avoid”, and if you expect stronger wording, you might misunderstand. After all, failure, pain, misery and death can accompany one on their way to God, while another might succeed in things all the way to utter doom.