uploaded March 6, 2019
odysee.com
All right. Hello, everyone. Sorry for the several-minute delay. I had to put my clothes in the washer, but those will be done soon. Now, as you probably can see by the fact that I'm here with the internet, I'm no longer in the woods. I'm actually back in my old apartment. So I'll talk about my experience later on, or I might actually do it in a separate video. But anyway, as you can see by the title of this livestream, I'm thinking about doing a tour, possibly a college tour, at some point. It depends on what kind of variables can fall in place, but I'll just say that I've been getting around more recently.
I've had to drive all over the state, all over the region, and I figured it would be nice if I could stop some places, maybe at universities, see some people who might want to see me, which I figure are around every once in a while. Actually, I'm starting to get more people who are asking me to come see them or if I'm in the area or something else like that. Now, it's a little weird if you just get an email, which I do get a lot. I do get emails from people who just want to meet me. I don't know if I want to do that, but if it were in a more controlled setting, I might be open to that.
So, as per the title of the livestream, just have that I am now open if you are in the region. This isn't just for universities, mind you, but if you want me to come to your area, if you know other people who know me, and it could be worth my while, I can probably come out there just because I've been doing a lot of traveling recently. Now, there are some places that I'm more biased towards. So, for example, I live in Georgia. It would be extremely easy for me to do something at the University of Georgia. Not only have I been there, I can probably get someone to put me up for the night anyway, ignoring subscribers, but I drive by there every once in a while. I was actually by there twice last week. So I do go in that area, some places around Atlanta and stuff like that.
So, as you probably know, I live near Savannah. I live really close, well, I should say I live near Statesboro, and that's where Georgia Southern University is. I don't actually know. I don't think I have any subscribers at Georgia Southern University. Well, I probably do, but they don't know that I'm around here. Otherwise, I feel like they would probably contact me or something because I think when I moved here, I basically requested people, or I volunteered that if people wanted to contact me, they could, just so I could be around.
So anyway, if any of you want me to come to your place, not your house, not like a house kind of thing, but if you know people who watch the channel, if you know people who want to see me, and you might be one of those and you're anywhere in the region, anywhere in the southeast of the United States, you should contact me now. I'm not saying I'm going to come over there next week, but I'd like to just know where people are so I can start making plans. And I would like to either, in one sitting, go to a whole bunch of places or be able to plan it into the rest of the movement that I do all over the place.
So if you probably know my email, I think it's on my website, but it's just luke.xyz. So if you are anywhere in the region and you want to see me, even if you don't necessarily know anyone else who watches the channel, you might want to contact me. For example, if you are at Georgia State University, that's in Atlanta. I actually went there like 10 years ago. Not quite 10 years ago, but if you are there, contact me. Just tell me. Don't even expect a response, but I want to get an email just knowing how many people are there because there might be 20 other people at that university who watch the channel and might be interested in me coming.
As for me going to other countries, I'll just say it's relatively unlikely, at least until I'm getting massively huge and people will pay for everything. I don't think I'm going to go to Brazil. I don't think I'm going to go to Europe. And the only reason I would do an event there is if I happen to end up there. So if I were still doing linguistic conferences or something like that and one was in Europe, I would stop by at whichever university I was at. But I'm not actively doing academic conferences now.
Now, the only exception, I suppose, is the University of Arizona, which, if you watch my channel, if you know me, you know that I am actually a graduate student at the University of Arizona, right? So I have to go back there at least in the fall to defend my dissertation once I write it. It could be as late as spring. But I need to go to the University of Arizona, and I have connections there. So if you are at the University of Arizona or at Arizona State, you can contact me as well. So feel free to do that.
I don't know. I'm probably, I mean, I'll put it this way: if you are somewhere else outside of the region, outside of the southeast United States or outside of Arizona, feel free to contact me. But realistically speaking, unless I'm getting all expenses paid to go to wherever you are, I'm probably not going to go. Realistically speaking. And that's just because I have other constraints. So anyway, I guess I'll do pretty much the normal livestream thing this time. You can of course give super chats. You can give donations over there if you go to lukemith.xyz/donate. I will read out donations, and I'll try to read some of the stuff that's in the comment section or the live chat if I have time.
So in addition to that, hot. So, in addition to that, I guess I can talk about my experience. Well, as you may know, a couple weeks ago, you're still actually watching the videos from it, but a couple weeks ago, really two weeks ago, I took a vacation. That is, I left where I live and I went to a parcel of, not a parcel, but an area owned by my family in rural somewhere or another. I'm not going to tell you exactly where it is. That would eliminate a lot of the fun, but for a week or so, I stayed in a farmhouse, which I've been many times before. I've been there when I was a kid. In fact, I've even been there alone. But I stayed in a farmhouse. I recorded a bunch of videos, mind you, and you are seeing them, and they're still going to be coming out in the next couple days.
I recorded, some days I recorded three or four videos a day. It's insane when you don't have distractions, the kind of things that you can get done. I was going on vacation, and on that vacation I got much more work done on my dissertation, on videos, on everything else, on just thinking things through than I have in a long time. So I'll probably be doing it again. I'm thinking about going maybe later this month again to the same place, maybe early April, and again I'm also seeing family there and other stuff, but of course you're not going to see videos on that. I'm not going to dox my whole family or something like that.
Actually, I shouldn't even say that. Oh yeah, you like my extremely arrogant cup. Feel free to call me brilliant. Maybe you've seen it on a video. Every once in a while it makes an appearance. This isn't a cup I would ever buy this arrogant. I actually got it from a girl who is much more arrogant than me. It fits her personality better than it fits me. But of course, chamomile. That's it. See, kids, I only drink two types of tea: green tea before noon and chamomile in the afternoon. That's it. So anyway, no. And I don't condone drinking Monsters. I know that that is the meme, but I don't condone drinking them.
I like how the chat blew up when I mentioned a girl. Not even a girlfriend, but a girl that I knew. That's the absolute state of this comment section. Now, of course, I'm not a big fan of coffee. I will say that. The thing about coffee, if you look at the caffeine content, coffee is just off the charts. Tea, if you are a well-adjusted person who is not addicted to caffeine, you can get a good caffeine buzz from tea. But if you're doing coffee, you're just gradually growing some kind of a resistance to it. It's not necessarily healthy. Yeah, I don't condone Monster. Not at all.
And I usually—someone asked on the last stream about my copper water bottle. Don't worry, it's still here. Actually, when I got back from my vacation, I'll go ahead and say it, I got back to this room, this apartment, and the whole thing, there was mold. I mean, not like a really dangerous or really damaging mold, but this kind of mold that was appearing on certain books, certain kinds of fabrics and stuff. And I had to clean that. I took a whole day off just to clean that off.
All right. So, let's see if there have been any donations or any comments, and I might read some. As you know, usually my livestreams are pretty disorganized. It's just my style. But if anyone has any comments about recent videos, you can feel free to throw them in now. But I will go ahead and let me go ahead and pull up because I didn't pull up all the stuff. Let's see. Got to pull up chat. Now I can see it. Got to pull up super chat. And you know what? I should bring up Streamlabs.
Okay. So, as you may also notice, I've tried to be a little better on email than I have been recently. So, I've probably been answering a little more emails than I usually used to. I mean, when I started out my channel, I wanted to be the man of the people. I wanted to be the guy who answers all of his emails. But the thing about that is that you just get so many when you put your address out there. If you go on, I mean, again, my address is lukelmith.xyz. If you have anything about the college tour, any kind of thing you want to set up, feel free to email me. But the thing about it is when you put it out there, you get so many not just questions, but identical questions. So, it really, it's almost a little disappointing.
Looks like we got $5 from based. I don't know if there was a comment on that. I didn't see one, but thank you, Bas. And of course, if you do go to the donate link over there, there are different ways you can donate. I'm a big proponent of Zelle. I should do a video on Zelle because it's like PayPal except PayPal doesn't take the money off the top and everyone in America has Zelle and you don't even know you have it. It's basically just part of your bank account. So anyway, let's see. Let me, what was I doing? I was pulling up my Streamlabs.
I do accept Bitcoin, but I don't really get a notification when I get some Bitcoin. And realistically speaking, I mean, it's not that I don't want it. I mean, if Bitcoin might possibly go up, I'll take it. Whatever. But realistically, I've never spent any Bitcoin and I only have a little bit of it. I probably have less than $100 in cryptocurrency just because I only enabled it as a donation method just a little bit ago.
Should probably create common questions on your site. I used to have an FAQ. But the thing about having an FAQ, well, first off, it's hard to write an FAQ without sounding a little snarky sometimes because the questions you get all the time are often, I don't want to say dumb questions, but you get annoyed by them because you get so many of them. So there's that aspect of it. And a lot of the questions are not the kind of thing that they're questions that could be answered by anyone who can find an FAQ. I mean, for example, one of the most common questions I get is, "Do you have a GitHub?" Well, if you can find my GitHub or if you could find my FAQ, you could definitely find my GitHub.
I mean, you can really just—the thing is, in all my videos now, I only have two links: one to donate, one to my website. The same things are up there, and everything is on my website if you want to get to it. So I used to have more stuff, but I find that just confuses people, but anyone who is looking for stuff, they can find it. All right, let's see. Okay, so based again sent $5. He says, "Tell us more about the girl also. How old are you?" Okay, well, the girl is just someone I knew in graduate school. No special relationship with her. In fact, I don't think we like each other. Actually, I saw her recently, but I don't have anything against her, but I think she thinks I'm a bad boy. So we'll just say that. But I think I got this when I moved out from her or when she was moving out of her apartment. She got rid of a bunch of stuff. So that's where I got the cup. There's no significance of the girl, though. How old are you? I'm not actually 30. I'm 29. I'll be a 30-year-old boomer soon.
The thing is, I actually thought when I turned 30, which isn't going to be too far away, but when I turned 30, I sort of thought of myself doing a 30-year-old boomer-tier meme video on it where I have a 30-year-old boomer cringe birthday party. But the thing about it is my friends in real life, they are not mess. They don't know what 30-year-old boomers are. They don't understand this. In fact, frankly, a lot of my subscribers don't even know what this is. They just sort of see me doing these memes and get confused by them. I mean, the amount of meme confusion I get is very surprising. But I sort of wish I could do that for my big 30th birthday, have a 30-year-old boomer event, but you never know.
That background is trippy. Yeah, the background right now it's Project M. It's actually synced up with my microphone, so of course it's a little trippy. Yeah, it is sort of going through. I'm flipping it. When it gets too garish, I'll change it to the next one.
But what do you think about the systemd discussion? I don't really think that much about it, to be honest. There are things about systemd I don't like. But there are also things about using a systemd distribution that are much easier than everything else. So most of us nowadays, when we learn Linux and you learn managing, for example, user accounts with systemd, it always ends up being much easier. So there are a lot of things every time I use a non-systemd distribution I find it honestly a little difficult. There are a whole bunch of things that I have to rehearse. But as for it, I think that a lot of the memes against systemd are usually true. I think it does have, there are just, it's a big piece of software and I think a lot of people are suspicious of it, and I'm not against being suspicious of it.
And I've tried, if I had the choice I would move to a distribution that is easy and doesn't have it, but the thing is now I'm on Arch. I maintain Larsbs. I do all the stuff for Arch Linux, and of course that has systemd. Now you can use OpenRC on Lars if you want, but the hurdles you have to go through are much more difficult, especially if you're managing something, you know, a project that other people are using. So, feasibly speaking, I'm going to stay using Arch Linux and using systemd for a while.
So, I think I saw a super chat a second ago. I don't think there—I have to refresh this thing every once in a while. Let's see. Do you support our lord and savior Bashar al-Assad? Of course I do. In fact, I have a—I think I have thought I had them. Might have moved them around. I have some Bashar al-Assad pens that I specially ordered. Oh, you know what? I know where they are. They're not around, but I do have them. So, let's see.
$5 from CADM5. Should I continue being homeless or get a job? I'm 19 and it's rough. I don't want to be a wage, though. Well, it depends on what terms you're being homeless on, I suppose. I don't know. I think it's funny that you're homeless and you have a computer and you're donating. But as for if you're 19, honestly, when people ask me life advice, even if it's something like this, which is so absurd, someone saying they're homeless, I'm usually ambivalent about it, especially if you're young. I think I'm against going out and exploring things and just doing things to do them. But I think that if you want to, if you're, say for example, living out of your car and you're actually doing something with that, that might be an okay thing to do if you're a guy with nothing else to do when you're 19. But if you're just sitting there doing nothing day in, day out, that's a waste of your time. That's what I would say.
Actually, I want to find those Assad pins. They are just in the other door. Oh, yeah. There they are. Forgot I moved them back. So, I got little—there we go. Got two of them. They're very nice. They're very cute.
Thoughts on Var and the Vargards? Well, obviously I like Var. I think that the actions that he does in his life are good, and I think the people should not emulate him, but if they're doing something similar to him, they're doing a good job. That is, he tries to be physically independent. He tries to basically live away from the system and, well, really just be independent, and that's a good thing to do. I endorse that. Now, Var says a lot of things. He's a big counter-signaler. He gets into a lot of fights that he doesn't need to because he has silly—he's a perfectionist in some things he doesn't need to be a perfectionist on, and he tends to stab at people who are closer to him than people who he should really be upset about. His spat with Survive the Jive is a pretty good example of that.
But in addition, when it comes, well, actually on that, I've said it before, I think people ask me about these guys like nearly every stream, or at least last time. When it comes to any kind of the—I don't want to say scientific issue, but when it comes to any kind of factual dispute that Var has with Survive the Jive, say you should go with Survive the Jive, frankly. And it really just has to do, I think Var gets down these paths where he believes his own stuff and he can't really see things from other perspectives. And I don't want to attack him in his ego because I think, I mean, I'm not even calling him egotistical, but I think he has a tendency to be incapable of, he doesn't really see other people's sides sometimes.
So, was computer science too easy for you, Luke? I never took a computer science class. I like his view on paganism. Placenta meme included. Yeah. Well, don't take it too seriously. Video response to Luke Smith and coming on Thulian Perspective. Yeah, possibly. I don't think he knows. I don't think I'm on his radar, though. The thing about my channel is people will come to my channel and they'll have no clue what it is. They see some technology videos, although less technology videos. Well, not less technology videos, but a smaller percentage of them. Been doing more videos, but less relevant to technology.
Why do you think economics is a pseudoscience? Well, it literally is a pseudoscience in the sense that, well, for multiple reasons. First off, when I usually there are two main bad areas of economics that really take up the whole field. One is econometrics, and that is using statistics to look at economic phenomena, which really just has all the same problematic hallmarks of any kind of statistical sciences as they're used in modern academia. I'm actually thinking about doing a video on this soon, specifically a critique of null hypothesis testing. Because null hypothesis testing is a standard in economics, in psychology, even in linguistics if you're doing experiments. But scientifically and statistically it doesn't really have a foundation. And I'll explain why in this video. I think it's a little too much for a livestream, but we'll just say that a lot of econometrics ends up being, even aside from this, sort of, it's often described as like trying to find out what a computer's doing by seeing what parts are hot or something like that. Looking at aggregate phenomena, running statistics, and then drawing conclusions from those.
Now, additionally, economics is even bigger of a problem because it's sort of the videos I did in the past week or so, right, have I, for whatever reason, felt like talking about rationality a lot recently and why people misunderstand. And the same is true in economics. In economics, what economic—let's take someone like, for example, Marx. Now, I don't particularly get upset about Marx. I'm not emotionally against Marx or something like that, but I think he's one of the best examples of an economist who does this kind of stuff where he creates a sort of mental model about how the economy works and how this causes that and that causes that, and it's a big system that all goes together and it makes a lot of logical sense. But the thing is it doesn't correspond perfectly. It might even correspond 99% to real life out there, but it doesn't correspond 100%. And when you have something like that writ large, your epistemological—the things that you don't see suddenly become much more dangerous, and you would start interpreting the world in this formal model. And this, of course, isn't just what Marx does; it's what every mainstream economist does. Every Keynesian, even Austrian school people, everyone in economics, their modus operandi is usually looking at aggregate phenomena, making up rationalistic reasons as for this trail of events as to why it has to happen, and when in reality an economy is far too complex to model in the same way, and we definitely can't treat it as a hydraulic system where we can modify one thing and it modifies the other.
Now, I did say the Austrian school is the same thing, and I do agree with that, but I know that there are some Austrian school people or some libertarians, even left libertarians, who are sort of woke to—they see the problems in it and they won't get too focused on this kind of stuff and they will just sort of say, calm down with your formal models and stuff like that. Now if that's what you're doing, that's okay, but even in the Austrian school there are a lot of people who will, you know, praxiology—they'll rely so much on this thing praxiology, which is really just following through this very narrow system of deduction, which is really only as fragile as it can only even begin to work if your knowledge about the world and your understanding about the world is perfect.
Missed. Capitalism is not for the 20th, 21st century. It just doesn't work anymore. Okay. What does that mean? When you say capitalism, what do you actually mean? The thing is, I said this in one of my podcasts, there's a tendency, this is literally just word thinking. There are a lot of people who will get focused on a term like capitalism, for example, which many people will even pretend to be advocates of. What does it actually really mean? Well, rhetorically, it has a purpose. That is if you are some kind of utopian, you have some kind of utopian design for society, you have to call society by a particular name which is contraposed with whatever your ideal is. So all the real-world, you know, all the things that are bad in the world you can call by a label. Maybe you call it capitalism if you're a socialist or something like that. Other people use this kind of thinking as well. But there's no meaningful such thing as capitalism or socialism or any of these isms. That's autism 101. And I think that the sooner that you as a person lose your emotional reaction to them, the better. I'll just say that.
Talk about Julius Evola. I don't really have anything to say about Julius Evola. I only read some of his stuff last year, mostly at the complaining of my subscribers, and it was honestly just not what I expected. And I don't mean that in a bad way. I just mean that I was expecting to, well I guess I fell for the memes about Evola. I thought that I was going to read it as some extremely strong right-wing political pamphlet or something like that, and it really wasn't anything. It was highly esoteric. I'm trying to think. So I got two of his books. They're actually over here. I'm thinking about doing a video reviewing some of the books I read last year, but I'll go ahead and give you at least a preview of these. I got two of his books. One is Revolt Against the Modern World and one is The Hermetic Tradition, and I thought, okay, so this is his esoteric stuff. I'll read some of that, see whatever he views about that, and I'll read Revolt Against the Modern World and that's going to be a political book. In reality, they're actually pretty much the same. That is, they're both a kind of esotericist traditionalist worldview. None of it is, at least none of it really seems political in an obvious sense, you know, it's all sublimated if it is political.
Now for those kind of people who are always asking me about him, I don't like his style that much. Actually, I say that, but I realized when I read his works, when I was writing my own stuff, I started imitating his style, I think, because it's contagious. But I prefer Nietzsche to Evola, but I know that some people will disagree about that.
So let's see. I got $5 from Harris on Zelle. Thank you, Harris. I don't know if there was a comment on that. I think if I get an email about it, I'll see that. But are you still going to do Graham Hancock for a Not Related episode? I think I still will. Not Related has sort of been on the back burner for a while, as you've probably noticed. I haven't done one in like two months, partially because Lunchtime with Luke is starting to eat up some of the content. But on Graham Hancock, I've actually recorded a video already. I think it will come out maybe next week or actually maybe this weekend. I might have already scheduled it where I talk about the concept of pseudoscience. And I also mention Graham Hancock in there. I might actually put him in the thumbnail or something, but it'll explain my views on that kind of stuff.
Should unironically and sincerely review Industrial Society and Its Future. Yeah, I probably should.
Is linguistics a waste of time, a waste of life to study? Yes, everything is a waste of life to study if you're not studying it for a reason. I mean, if you have some reason to do linguistics, it's useful. But if you're the kind of person and, oh, I'm just going to learn something. I'm going to read up on a discipline for no particular reason. Well, yeah, it's probably going to be useless for you. I mean, I only accidentally learned linguistics. Now, as I mentioned in the video I did on Latin a couple days ago, learning Latin, learning the grammar of Latin, is basically the equivalent of getting an undergraduate degree in linguistics. If you learn Latin and you understand the concepts of it, you know as much as a graduate of linguistics knows about linguistics generally. That's just how it is and that's just what you get for free. So I much prefer if you're going to learn a subject, learn it in the process of learning something more useful. And in this case, Latin is more useful than linguistics itself.
How come you're livestreaming from home if you have in the past said that you don't have internet at home? Okay, when I put up that video about me having no internet at my house, I already had internet at my house at that point. I was doing a video to tell people about my experiences, the two years I went without internet at my house. So, I have internet now. Actually, I have very fast internet because I want to be able to do livestreams. So, I do have internet. Let me refresh, see if there are any more super chats. I don't know if there have been. I might have lost them.
I? Well, there's a super chat. I might as well read that. Let me pull it up over here.
YouTube takes 30% of donations. Yeah, that's why I put up these links up here. You should donate by Zelle. You can also give me an email just simultaneously, just to be sure. But yeah, on that page, luke.xyzdonate xyz/donate, I give you all the instructions for that up there if you want to avoid paying some kind of company like YouTube.
Anyway, Emile says The Lucifer Principle by Howard Bloom. It goes into natural selection by ideas and memes and human cruelty. Oh, and everything is referenced. Okay. Well, I don't know about it. Howard Bloom. I'd be suspicious of that.
Luca, have you ever thought of making philosophical videos? I don't know. I mean, depends on what you mean by that. Every video I do could be interpreted as being philosophical, unless you're specifically saying, should I cover the field of philosophy, which I don't necessarily. I think that the field of philosophy nowadays is pretty much inert. There really hasn't been anything out of philosophy for 100 years or so. Actually, before that, I don't think there's that much.
People are saying I missed Harris's question. Okay, I'll see if I can find it. Thought I read that one out. Maybe I didn't. Was that a super chat or was that Azel? Oh, okay. He reposted it. Do you think that software minimalism is practical for inherently monolithic software such as 3D parametric CAD, PLC programming suites, other engineering nonsense? Realistically, well, depends on what it is. Since I've been doing carpentry recently, my boss has to do all this stuff in CAD, and my autistic brain is always thinking about how I could do this with PZIX-compliant shell utilities or something like that. I think for some things like that, we're not going to invent some kind of minimalist alternative for CAD as it is right now. At least I can't necessarily imagine it happening, or a lot of these other programs, because I think you really have to be in a totally different way of looking at software to get something out of it.
This is the same thing. If you look at my setup on Linux and you try to explain Dmenu to a normie, they're going to be utterly confused because there's no equivalent. I think you can get stuff like that done, but you have to really approach things from a totally different perspective. One example I remember when I presented at Linuxfest, I gave this example of how nowadays when kids go to school in elementary school, one of the first things they're taught — and they're taught literally because of corporate sponsorship — is how to use Microsoft Word and other presentation software. And so when that happens, everything they do is going to be interpreted in that mold. When you look at a minimalist alternative to that, people can only think in that paradigm. They're not going to think, why would I just type something up and compile it? That doesn't make sense. I just like a big bloated word processor. It's easy. It just works. Now, in reality, it doesn't work any better than — well, it's a lot more painful to use, it's a lot less extensible, and it's more bloated. But since people are stuck in this mindset, understandably, I'm not calling them stupid, it's hard to get out of there. As to the original question, I think that there can be minimalist alternatives to software like that, but I don't think it's going to look exactly like CAD. It's not really going to be the same kind of thing.
And that's really the thing. Again, what I do on my channel is I don't try to tell people what the mindset that people often have is, "What's the Linux alternative to this?" when often there isn't an alternative. And it's not because Linux doesn't have the software. It's because we approach things totally differently, or not just Linux, but really using minimalist tools. That's what I'm getting at.
So, I tried FreeCAD. Sorry, but it's not even close. Well, I've actually played around with FreeCAD, but that's not what we're talking about. We're not talking about Libre equivalents of CAD. We're talking about programs that are minimalist at the core and work totally different. Okay. I don't actually like my image right here because the sun is shining on me. So, you can see my veins on the side of my head. One thing, when you're bald, for whatever reason, sometimes your veins on one side of your head or the other will pop out. It really annoys me. It makes me feel uncomfortable. So, I'm going to move a little bit like this. You can see my bed, which of course I don't make. Even though I'm doing a livestream where I'm going to have hundreds of people watching, I never make it. This channel is all about no pretense. We don't pretend to do anything fancy. I'm going to move my lamp up here just because I feel like it's getting dark.
Okay, I really should just get another lamp, but that's minimalist.
One thing about me shaving that I actually like: when I was balding, when I began to bald, of course, I'd have a bald spot up here. And whenever I bent down or whenever my head was showing to someone, I'd feel a little naked. Now that I shave it all off, it feels a lot better. If you're losing hair, just shave it off. You don't want to be a balding soy boy. Just get rid of it. You're going to look less bald if you have no hair. Just shave it off.
Wouldn't true minimalism be not having a lamp? Yeah, I think you're right. There is actually a period — this is actually something that I sort of advocate — going without electric lights. Now, I've never forced myself to do this for more than a couple days, but it is fantastic. And it's fantastic because one of the reasons — there are these meme diseases nowadays, diseases. So something like insomnia. A lot of people will make up reasons as to why they're insomniac, but most of it comes down to them just using their phone or using the computer after it's dark. People will say, "I had this girlfriend of mine who'd complain about how she could never get sleep." Actually, I had two girlfriends who were literally the same way. They both had this complaint, and they would complain about how they could never get to sleep on time. And I'd always ask, "So, what do you do?" "Oh, I can't get to bed, so I just scroll through my phone. I check social media." It's one of those things where it's like people aren't actually insomniac. It's really just they don't have the control to ignore technology for a second. But anyway, I think getting rid of technology when it's dark outside — it actually isn't dark right now, it's just getting a little dark in here because the sun moved out of the window — a lot of people will always have their face in something glowing and they won't be able to get to bed. If you just force yourself not to use lights, then you're going to be in a better position.
Girlfriends are bloat. I don't have a girlfriend now, so I'm not bloated. I've actually intentionally gone without trying to be involved with a woman for the past couple of months. I'm thinking I might give in soon. We'll just say I'm thinking I might be giving in soon. But it's been like — it's easier if you just go without even thinking about women. It's much better. Even if you want — especially, ironically enough, if you want to attract a woman, you should just ignore them.
Now, I'm going to say it again because I know there are more people here now. As the title suggests, I am thinking about doing a tour, possibly a college tour or a tour of just wherever, doesn't matter. So what I want people to do is if you are anywhere in the American Southeast, especially Georgia, especially Florida, especially the Carolinas, especially Tennessee, you should email me. If you are willing to see me come by your area, I just want to know where people are, what they're interested in, what kind of talk they want. Maybe you should email me if you're at a university, especially. There's some places I go by all the time. I go by UGA all the time nowadays. I actually went there. So if you're there or if you're anywhere down in Florida, anywhere in Tennessee, I'm not saying I'm going to come there just to see you next week, but I want to know who's out there. So that's what I want to know. I should. Now, if anyone also has a software suggestion for some kind of botnet that will keep track of people so they can say, "I'm interested in going," feel free to recommend it to me. Again, my email is lukesmith.xyz.
Everyone's saying come to Brazil. Don't count on that. Unless I have some reason to go to Brazil, I'll go. If you're giving me an all-expenses-paid vacation to Brazil, maybe I'll come. But anything else? Honestly, if you are just fantastically rich and you want to fund me to come wherever you are and you can provide me with stuff to do, I might do that. If you want to give me a free vacation, I'll take that. But I'm expecting that I don't have any billionaire benefactors out there.
How many Brazilians watch your channel? A lot, actually. It's funny to look at my country statistics. I think we did it a couple streams ago, but yeah, it's less than 25% Americans now.
Boomer seeking sugar daddy. Speaking of sugar daddy, let's see if there are any donations that I missed.
Yeah, apologies to whoever it was who sent in a Zelle donation and I didn't see your comment. I think on Zelle, when you send the money, you should have a comment prompt and just put whatever it is in there. Okay, let's see.
Okay. So, who's saying something interesting? We haven't gotten any super chats recently. So that means I'm going to have to dive into the...
When's the video about roads? I don't know. It's almost the name at this...
Okay. Yeah. Oh, you heard that phone go off? Yeah, I got my phone right here.
Cat says, "I've learned so much from your videos and I've never felt more comfortable in my digital environment. Didn't know how to edit config files in January. Now I do thanks to you. Thanks."
Yeah, that's the funniest thing. The basic stuff they never tell you. The one thing that I've learned having my YouTube channel is that things that you take for granted — well, I'll put it this way: I probably wouldn't have a YouTube channel if I had waited a couple more years because when I started putting up videos here, I was really just learning all the stuff that I put up on. I put up the LTE videos when I had learned LTE only a couple months prior, that kind of stuff. So there are all these things that if you've just learned something, you still remember what normal people don't know. Now, if time goes on, and that's even happened to me now, there are a lot of basic things like, for example, editing dot files that people don't even know. So I go to there are some other people I've noticed that — Dro Tube Derek, whenever he mentions config files, dot files, he has to explain what they are. He always does that, and I was like, that's so weird. Why does he always do that? But there's a reason for that, and that is a lot of people just don't know. There are basic things you don't know. It's a very sensible idea, putting all your config, like putting all your settings in some kind of separate thing.
Sven, $50: "Thanks."
Well, thank you, Sven. It's a good bit. Speaking of it about it, I don't know if anyone has asked, but on the New Year's livestream, I said I would spend that money on an EOMA, and I have spent that money. I have not got the EOMA. If you don't remember what that is, it's one of those modular computers. There are a bunch of prototypes out there. I bought one of the — I guess a prototype. I don't know exactly what it is. It's probably better than that, but it's supposed to be shipping. I think it might have already shipped now. I don't know. I haven't gotten an email about it. They might have delayed it. It originally was supposed to ship out on February 1st, though.
So, Dro Tube and Luke Smith are the same person. I don't think me and Dro Tube are similar at all in personality. I think that's just the meme about all bald people looking the same.
How was China? Dirty. China's dirty. Chinese people have a very interesting sense of cleanliness. We'll just say that. I don't know. Well, actually, it's really Americans who have a very unique sense of cleanliness. We're always cleaning everything like neurotically almost. Before Europeans post pictures of Americans with poop on their legs in Walmart or something like that. But in general, if you look at China, their concept of cleaning something — let's say you want to clean the floor. In China, what you do is you take a bucket of water and you pour it on the floor. Maybe you move it around. That's cleaning it. There's no soap involved. Cleaning your hands means running water through them. Cleaning dishes means putting the dishes in water, maybe getting the big parts off, nothing else. That's the thing. No soap involved. Soap is bloat for Chinese people. And that was one of the big things that was really weird. I mean, if you're sort of neurotic, you should probably take soap around if you're traveling in China. Actually, after I went to China, I had a Chinese roommate back when I moved to America, and he did this stuff as well. He would take a glass out, drink from it, then just wash it by pouring water on it and put it back up. And you don't do that here. You don't do that here.
The funniest thing is there was a period where I lived in a university in China, and we lived in the premier — if you're a foreigner in China, they will give you the best dormitories ever, which are really like a really crappy hotel. That's basically how they are. But the Chinese students, I mean, the Chinese dormitories are like, oh my god, it's the worst thing ever. You'll have a room about as big as my room, which is not particularly big, and six kids will be living in there. They'll have open toilets down the hall, and Chinese dorms just smell like, oh my god, it's the worst thing ever. But if you're a foreigner, they'll give you the nice dorms that are more like a crappy American hotel. One of the perks to living there is they'd come in every week and clean your apartment. Oh god. Which I wish they didn't do because most of the time it meant just pouring water on your floor and then sort of moving it around. So you actually have these black streaks of dirt that was picked up by the water, and they just mopped it around. It's terrible. So yeah, I wouldn't recommend going to China or really going to foreign countries is actually a terrible thing to do. Just don't do it. I am very anti-tourist. Extremely anti-tourist. Just the very concept, I think, is bad.
Any hot Chinese gals? No, Chinese girls are not attractive when you're in China. We'll just say that. I've never really been into Asian girls. I have to say, no, I don't recommend going abroad anywhere. See, I just dislike the concept of tourism. I don't think it's something that people should do. If you want to do tourism, there are places near you that you don't know about. People nowadays are so insular. They are so insular even in the environments they live in. They don't know about the people who live around them. If you really want to explore the world, there's plenty of stuff around you. And the stupidest thing that people do, the thing that I cannot stand, is when people go to another country and they have these really superficial anecdotal experiences and they draw overreaching conclusions about everything they know about the world because they were a tourist. They went to this place and went through a couple museums and blah blah blah. And it breeds this kind of pseudocosmopolitanism where people have these contorted ideas of how other countries are. So I don't really think people should do tourism. When I was in China, I went there for a specific reason. I did do some tourist-like things when I was there. I went to the Great Wall and all that stuff, but it was really to study. I took some classes at a university. I did do some tourist things, but the important thing is to not have a tourist mindset. Don't go into these commercial areas. Just do everything like actually get to know the people how they actually are there. Tourism as a meme just needs to end. It's terrible. Don't let your kids go to other countries. Don't even let them go to Canada if you're an American. Anyway, people nowadays are so oblivious even to the places around them. They really have no reason to go to this other country and get drunk in some other country and have superficial experiences. Just don't do it.
Luke Soy dev tip says, "Sorry, but I'm a citizen of Earth."
Luke, what resource would you recommend for someone who has gone through Wheelock and is currently going back through Lingua Latina as a refresher but is still terrible with vocabulary? Vocabulary is the kind of thing that you really just need experience to do. I feel like it depends on what kind of words you're missing. Actually, I should say that. I think that Lingua Latina — it depends on which Lingua Latina you have. Either one would pretty much be the same thing. Honestly, vocabulary, I don't believe in this index cards nonsense. I don't believe in this rote memorization nonsense. If you want to learn vocabulary, you just have to have more exposure. You just have to get out there or be able to intuit it. Most of the time, once you reach a certain level in a language, vocabulary just doesn't matter. You will be able to figure it out in the same way that a speaker of the language who doesn't have the best vocabulary can speak it or figure it out.
Luke, I have the red hardback Lingua Latina. Cool. Thanks. Thank you very much. Thank you, I guess. Well, not really thank you, but congrats.
What are some indie medieval Latin texts? There are too many to even go over. My suggestion is to just look for a topic you're interested in and you'll find some stuff. You can start at big-name things if you really want. You can read Aquinas or something like that. But honestly, the world — it's like saying, can you give me some text in 20th century English? There's way too much of it to even begin with.
Is the background moving based on his movements? No, it's moving based on the input to my microphone. Although sometimes it goes through different visualizations.
Okay. But which hundred-year-old books do I need to learn Latin? Just any 100-year-old book to learn Latin is fine. Actually, I think I had one. Let's see which ones I have right here in my room. I think there's one I was cleaning up. Okay, here's one. Here's one. Let's see what Latin books I have. Actually, I think this is one of my only older Latin books. Latin First Year by those people, McGuffin and Henry. This one's okay. It would probably be sufficient, but it's not the one that I did. I forgot. Well, as I said in the last video, the first one I had was Caller and Daniel, whatever it was, which I lent to a friend in high school. Never do that. Don't lend books to people. They never give them back. I have lost so many books. I was thinking just today especially — I'll just say this — there's a big gender disparity in my experience between if you get a book back, if you lend it. I have lent many books to males and females and neither gender has a good record, but females have an abysmal record at returning books. In fact, I have never received a book back that I've lent to a woman. Never one. I have probably half a dozen books that I've lent to girls in my life and they never give them back. Men, however, typically do. Well, maybe it's 50/50. Anyway, this one's pretty nice. I don't think I have any older Latin books, but I lent out the one I originally learned Latin from, which I had actually totally abused. It was falling apart anyway.
East? Well, if there was no America and there was no Israel, I think the Middle East would be pretty fine.
Where do you find resources that are written in Latin but haven't been translated to English? You just have to — I mean, there's not like a database. Obviously you can't find them in English either. Usually what you do is, if you really do prying, you'll eventually find someone who alludes to some kind of Latin text. Maybe it's even a popular one. So let's say, you know, in linguistics there's Priscian's grammar. You can look that up. But once you get into one, once you find your way in, that book is going to allude to a whole bunch of other ones, or you can find a line of thought that goes from there and you can start tracing. But you really just have to be — no one's going to tell you. There's not like a database of here are all the Latin books that people don't use.
What do you think of Esperanto? Nothing good. I think most people who have subscribed to my channel know how disappointed I am with the autism of conlangs. Actually, you know what? Maybe I just lend more books to girls. Actually, I mean, if that were the case, my generalization that they never return books, that would probably be more likely to be falsified. I think there's just something about it. Maybe I just am too nice to girls and I don't make it clear that I want them back. Maybe that's it. I don't know.
I'm fluent fourth generation Esperanto and I find this offensive. Yeah, whatever.
Tolkien's conlangs are exceptions. Well, you can have a conlang in a book. I mean, if you want consistency, but people who learn those books, they're just suspect. But especially something like Esperanto, which is literally supposed to be, let's just invent a language for everyone to speak. Why? Why not just use an actual real language? You know, Luke Smith, do you use Git? Sort of curious how you think I get all this stuff on GitHub.
Esperanto is pretty easy to learn, though. Okay, for a language that's utterly useless, it's not any easier to learn than say Chinese or something.
All right, I'm going to check for super chats, which I may have missed. Maybe I haven't. I don't know.
Robert Delgado sends in 250 some kind of — it's actually not showing up on my browser. PHPs. What is that? Is that Peruvian? I forget. He says living is bloat. Okay. Okay, bud. Living is bloat. Filipino? Is that it? I don't know. I get a lot of PHPs though. Whoever — maybe I should look it up. PHP currency. Oh, Philippine peso. Okay, so I have a lot of flip...
Right. Are you Catholic? No, I'm not Catholic.
Quite impressed with the chat latency. It's some of the lowest I've seen so far. Well, you can change the settings in the livestream area. I don't know what I have it set for. I might have it set for extremely low, but yeah. If you've ever seen someone with just extremely delayed chat, it's probably because they set it like that.
Have I done Linux from scratch? No, I haven't. Are you — am I a Mormon? No.
How's your skin so smooth and clean? I don't know. Good diet and I bathe. It actually, to me, it doesn't look — it actually looks sort of bad right now.
What are your thoughts on the mainland Protestant churches now? I suppose you mean mainline. The thing is, on that, mainline churches aren't really even mainline anymore because no one — most of them just became atheists or some kind of bug religion like secular humanists or something. So they're not really mainline. Evangelicals are now the norm, you know.
You're really pale for someone living in Arizona. Lol. That's because I don't live in Arizona.
Let's see. Alex or is it Alec? I only see his first and last name. L is one word. So it's either Alec or Alex. He says, "Luke, I'm a professional French hornist, but I love your Linux vids. What's your relation with music? Any favorite composers?" Well, if you're talking about me making music, I've never done it. I don't have any instrumental skills. Never really tried it. I guess I played piano when I was a kid. If I had to learn something, I would probably learn the piano, but I think it's a little late. It's always hard for me to do different things with two hands, that kind of stuff. I never really got over that as a kid. As it comes to favorite composers, I don't really believe in favorites as a thing generally. So I don't know if I can give you an answer on that. I don't actually listen to that much classical stuff nowadays. Maybe a couple years ago, but it's really just a piece-by-piece kind of thing. I listen to a bunch of Chopin and stuff, but...
Jacob donated two, I guess Australian dollars, something like that. How do you grow such a sexy beard? Just don't cut it. And it comes out. It's actually a little messy right now.
Uses Vim with eyes closed but cannot play piano. Well, yeah.
People have been asking me a lot if I'm in the Yang Gang. I like those memes. I can say that. I think they're funny because a lot of these guys who supported Trump, they were very disappointed about how Orange Man hasn't done enough. He's not been good enough. So they're just going to get their thousand dollars from the Yang Gang and call it a day. I mean, if Blump isn't even going to build the wall, you might as well just get the $1,000. So we'll see where that goes. We'll see where that goes. But Luke, do you take drugs? Of course, I don't take drugs.
Why do you suck tea bags? Because there's perfectly good tea inside of them. I got to get the rest of it out. Actually, I should probably just pour more water. I'm going to be back.
If you don't smoke weed, you're missing out, Elmo. Yeah, I don't think I am. If you do, you're missing out on even more important stuff. Should I stop eating sugar? Yeah, you should. Categorically, I'll have sugar every once in a while. In my first cup of tea, I had a drip of honey, but that's me being indulgent. Sugar should not be eaten at all.
Why don't you consider caffeine a drug? Caffeine is a drug. But when people ask you, "Do you do drugs?" that's not what they're asking. Come back to Twitter. No, I'm not going to come back to Twitter. Although, every once in a while I'll see a really good post on Twitter and I wish I could retweet it or something.
Have you studied formal languages, Chomsky hierarchy, in a computer science context instead of linguistics? No. Also, implying that that's useful or used in linguistics. When will Lucost meme review? Yeah, that would be good for my brand, wouldn't it? Go and study formal languages and automata. It's just not useful. The Deus Ex stream was lit. Maybe I'll do it sometime. Even though I often come out against video games, which I am against. But playing games with friends, possibly even live streaming, can be justified because it's not this onanistic usage of the game, wasting hours and hours by yourself. But that doesn't mean I condone it regardless. I'll have to think about it.
Hey Luke, how do I get rid of my unhealthy video game addiction? Just stop playing video games. What do you think's going to happen? You could just switch to Linux. Then you won't have games legitimately. I mean, just go outside. It's not even a joke. Which is worse, social media or video games? Probably social media. That's my first reaction, but if I thought more about it, it might actually be video games. I don't know. But I would probably say social media. Social media is like a social disease. It affects a whole lot of people, makes them highly manipulatable by corporations, by algorithms. Video games are just a huge waste of time that drive individual people to destructive lives down the road. But I feel like social media has video games beat in terms of how bad it is.
I mean, I would probably play video games daily if I had a group of friends come over and we just played Super Smash Brothers Melee, which was a good game. If we just knocked out an hour of that kind of stuff, I'm not against that in the same way that I might play cards with friends or something like that. But when I say I'm against video games, it's because realistically speaking, most of the time when people are playing video games, they are draining hours and hours and hours of their time playing a game that often is only they will know about. I know they say, "Oh, I'm learning strategy" or something silly like that. And to whatever extent that is true, it's something you learn quickly and then becomes totally wasted. But anyway, I shouldn't even talk about this. Everyone who plays video games sort of knows this. I think I was the same way. But you know, I eventually just got over it. I guess I do. I've played video games. I think even early last year, I still played some video games. I still played Civilization 5 every once in a while, but I pretty much entirely stopped.
David Kr donates $2: "Did you invent the word upcommies?"
No, I didn't invent it. It's a TRS word, or I'm pretty sure I know the guys on TRS use it, but I didn't invent it. But I'm sure now if you search upcommies, you'll find my video or something. Yeah. And of course porn is probably worse. Well, I don't know if porn is worse than social media, but it comes pretty close.
See all the things, all the when you're a kid and you hear all these conservative boomers talk about how pornography is going to destroy the world. When I was a kid I thought they were totally moronic. You're crazy. It's not going to affect me like that. I'm just having fun. I think even at the time I felt a little weird about watching porn. But as time goes on and you realize how it affects you, like when you have your first girlfriend and you have a pornography addiction, if you watch porn, you basically have a pornography addiction. It's pretty much impossible to just, "Oh, I watch porn every once in a while." You're basically addicted to porn if you watch it at all. But as soon as you get into a real relationship, you really start to see how it affects you and how it perturbs you. Now, I haven't watched porn for a while. I know that I've watched it at some point last year. I haven't watched it at all this year, and I think I will probably go the rest of my life without watching it at this point. And that's not because I have really strong senses of resistance. As you get older, you just need that kind of stuff less. And so now that I've gotten to 2019, I haven't watched it at all. And I noticed in January, it's like I haven't ever watched porn this year. So, I'm just going to go the rest of the year. In fact, I'll go forever without it. I'm just going to say this is my clean year. I don't even remember the last time I watched porn. Sometime in 2018, I don't remember what it was, but yeah, I'll just say that that is over.
What effects do you think nationwide porn bans have on society versus personal responsibility type thing? The whole idea that people are not just going to resist things need to be illegal sometimes. Let's just put it that way. I know that a lot of people have this idea that especially when it comes to, you know, when I tell people not to play too many video games or when I tell people not to watch porn or something like that, the alternative that I never give, I never tell them, "Oh, don't watch porn, do something else on the internet." "Oh, don't play video games. Fine, you can do something else on your computer" or something like that. The alternative is doing something out there where you have no temptation out in the real world. Go out, go to a coffee shop, go to the library, see friends, do something in the public, just do something. Nothing pornographic in public because realistically speaking, people are not good at resisting these kind of new modern temptations. Pornography is not something that people can feasibly resist. And we can talk about, "Oh, people just need to get more personal responsibility." Realistically speaking, that's not going to happen. People are not going to get to a point where something like Tinder, which is constantly making sex easily accessible, people are not necessarily going to instantly get these amazing resistance abilities and not be able to do it. And I say that because look at how people have acted in the context of pornography or in the context of fatty foods. If you have a bunch of sugar and you're just eating a bunch of stuff with sugar, the only way that you're going to stop doing that is if you just eat so much you get physically sick. And that's honestly how I did it when I was a kid. And that's probably what happened to me with pornography. I got to the point where I was so disgusted with it, how it affected me psychologically, that I had to quit. And that's often what happens. But when it comes to legality, I don't think there's anything wrong with us banning sugary foods. I have no autistic libertarian principles that prevent me from saying there are some things that we know are bad, sugary foods, easy access to pornography, that we can just ban. There's no reason for that. Because sure, people could go years and years of their life building up a resistance and a psychological defense mechanism to resist these kind of things that gradually destroy their lives. Or we could just make it not legal. That's what it comes down to. So bring your libertarian arguments about why everything should be legal. That's fine. I'm just saying a society that bans these kind of things is better off.
So yeah, literally you got a license for that porn. That's how it should be. See, there are a lot of terrible totalitarian things that the United Kingdom has done, but one of the things that I don't know if that's a universal thing, but the things where you have to specifically say, "I want to watch porn" in order to get it, because that really sort of drives it in. But the market prohibition doesn't work. Yeah, prohibition works. Some prohibitions can have consequences, but we know people do not need daily access to pornography. Now, if you ban something like alcohol, for example, where most people didn't want it banned and most people there was a relatively healthy usage of alcohol, it wasn't as antisocial as something like pornography or something like that and long, literally millennia of traditions with alcohol, that's going to have consequences. Now if alcohol were banned gradually it would have been weeded out of the psyche, but the reason that alcohol prohibition was ended was not just because, "Oh, we just can't do it." Same thing with porn. We know in fact that people can survive without pornography. We know it can happen. Pornography is not something that has to happen. It can easily be stopped. There are many countries that do it and do it effectively.
Whatever, who cares if it's bad for people? They should have the autonomy to decide what they want to do. See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. There are many of you. I get so many emails all the time about people who are desperately trying to quit pornography, who are desperately trying to quit some kind of bad habit, who psychologically they can't do it. There are a lot of people who want to do this. Okay, this isn't an issue. Humans are not monolithic beings. They don't have one set of preferences. They have temptations that they fall for. They have the proverbial sinful nature. So saying something like that, "Oh well, people can just make their own decision." The problem is human psychology doesn't work like that. This is not people just stating a preference. This is people who are falling for antisocial tendencies, in the same way that they might fall for antisocial tendencies to rob people or something like that. Now, if you put forth just really simple incentives or in the case of pornography, it's not like some temptation that's always going to be there. If you ban porn, it's going to be very difficult or substantially more difficult to get control of it, right? If you want to do something illegal, literally illegal on the internet, you have to know how to use some kind of Tor or something like that. There are a whole bunch of steps you need to go to. Now, if you had to do the same thing for pornography, that would reduce the consumption of pornography. And a lot of those people are specifically those people who don't want to watch it. You know, who as a kid sat down and said, "You know what, I want to watch porn" when you were a little kid? No, you gradually stumbled upon it. It was a temptation that you got yourself in. It is not a logical decision. When you watch it nowadays it's the kind of thing that you just sort of fall into because you have nothing else to do. And most guys who are neets or something like that and who are watching porn or something like that, they're falling into something that they know isn't really good for them. It would be better if I could do something else.
I sort of have to pee. I'm probably going to pee.
doomer guy, $5: "What about filling the time with books and gaining knowledge instead of playing video games and watching porn?"
Well, that's easier said than done. Obviously people don't want to hear that kind of advice, even though it is sensible, right? "Oh, why don't you just stop doing bad things and do good things?" But obviously, it's hard to motivate. I think one of the problems nowadays, especially this is one of the many things that pornography does to you, it gets you so desensitized not just to sexual things, but to pleasurable things. Once you are on porn, it's hard for you to pay attention to anything else. Anything else that doesn't give you the euphoria of an orgasm is hard for you to concentrate on. So, it's hard for you to read books. It's hard for you to gain knowledge or learn a language or something like that. It becomes hard because at all times I could just watch porn and have way more fun. And at the moment in time when you're making that decision, pornography always seems like a better thing to do. And even if you know, okay, in the long term this is not going to be good for me, I should be doing something else. And what happens is people get so vested in this. My advocacy is just separate yourself from the temptation. Just utterly separate yourself physically from the temptation. Go somewhere else and get invested in other things. But one of the core psychological ways you have to change is you have to seek immediate pleasure less. You have to be re-sensitized instead of being in a state where you need porn all the time or just you need mind-numbing video games or the excitement of leveling up. Instead of needing that excitement all the time, you have to get used to being bored again. Boredom is good. It's good for people to sit there and calibrate themselves to the world around them and find simple pleasures. Because once you are re-calibrated to how the world actually is instead of the world of porn and video games, you're going to be much more motivated to learn what you need to learn, to do what you need to do, and to really find those things enjoyable. And additionally, when you actually do something like have sex the way that people are supposed to have sex, you are not desensitized by pornography. Same thing with video games: instead of being desensitized by video games all the time, instead of playing, I don't know, Farmville, I don't know if that even existed, some game for boomers back in the day, but instead of doing something like that, when you do the equivalent in real life, it seems less fun if you are on video games because video games and pornography are developed as psychological mechanisms to give you this constant pleasure. So if you're using them all the time, you're not calibrated with the real world. And you're never going to find anything enjoyable in the real world. And it's not because the real world is less fun. The real world is calibrated to how your psychology actually is. You're not going to get burnt out on it. So the issue is just getting back. So yeah, as to what Doomer Guy said, yeah, you should replace the time that you're doing these things with time doing things that are more edifying. But when you are losing that addiction to pornography or whatever, that sometimes is hard for you to get back to that state where you're calibrated to the real world.
Boomer teaches libtards about games epic style. Yeah, that's right.
What about YouTube as a source of obsessive entertainment? I need to watch your videos or videos about programming, but I get sucked into hours of comment awards. Lmao. Well, yeah. I don't know that YouTube has never been a big temptation for me. I'll just say that. So, I don't know if I can relate, but the same applies. I actually think I recorded a video while I was gone on this subject recommending people to watch YouTube less. But, you know, my videos are always going to be there. I don't want to make my videos too exciting. I don't do any video editing. I really just want them to be either for information on my tutorials or my take on things. I don't want them to be too enjoyable.
If you were a parent and caught your kid watching porn, what would you say or explain to them? It's a hard thing to say because it's one of those things like explaining. Even if I look at myself when I was a kid, 16, what could I say to myself to convince me that watching porn was a bad thing? I'm not quite sure to be honest. I haven't thought about it. I don't have kids yet and if I did I don't think they'd be that close to watching porn. But I would say that the priority is just keeping them away from the temptation as a parent. But I honestly can't give you a decisive answer to that.
For people addicted to YouTube, install distraction-free YouTube. I wonder what that is. What is that? Get rid of comments or something? Getting rid of recommended videos is probably a good thing because that's where so many people get sucked in. So any of you zoomers, you might not remember this, but back in the old days of YouTube, right now you watch a YouTube video and over to the left there's recommended videos and then the description is below. It used to be recommended videos were below and the description was to the right, and then recommended videos were all below that. So they changed that because it used to be when you watched the video you didn't see recommended videos unless you scrolled down. So that of course is going to keep a lot of people from clicking on extra stuff. Nowadays they spam you with all these related videos and that's how people keep watching. A lot of people have the idea that on YouTube, if I want to get a lot of views, I go out and post links on Reddit or 4chan or something. You don't get any views from that. You could if you want, if you're starting out a YouTube channel, you can try that yourself. It's not going to work. Because that's not really where you get views from. You really get views from recommended videos and that's about it. The number of people who come directly to your video basically doesn't exist.
Another thing I've learned from you is how to use Newsboat plus Podboat. I like having a concentrated feed of videos I know I want to watch. No spiral into recommended vids. Yeah, I think that is good. If you don't follow through the links and you just watch them via MPV, but I think the same kind of thing can happen when you have a bunch of RSS feeds. I get tempted to check all the RSS feeds that I have. I have a whole lot of them and it's a little too much. So, I find myself having to constrain myself from doing that too much, just because they're too many things.
Why do you think us humans are so interested and drawn into technology? Like there are so many other things that we could do. I mean technology since it's designed by us, it's designed to be pleasurable to us in the same way that processed food is designed to be extremely pleasurable. So, yeah, of course, what we've built with technology is going to be a hack in the same way that sugary foods are a hack. It takes these elements that we really like and constantly puts them in front of your face and you follow them around.
Turn off that background. My eyes. Sorry, it's just going random. I can switch it there. It's a little...
They used to smuggle porn into enemy territory to demoralize them. Well, that's what porn does basically. Salt is greater than sugar. Yeah, that's true. All right, I'm going to check for donations. We'll see. Thanks again to everyone who has donated, including donations, and that $50 in particular from who was it? Sven, was it exactly? Yeah, Spinn actually. It looks like he donated twice. $150, $110. I don't know if I read that before, but I will now. Oh, his note says, "Do you sometimes respond to emails?" Yeah, sometimes. I've been trying to respond to them more. Around a month or two ago, I took my email address out of the email me area, just saying I get too many emails. I can't respond to them. But I still get a lot of emails and I've tried to respond to those. I need to just make it a little bit more clear what kind of stuff people should email me about. I probably will do a FAQ eventually.
TRS Finn. No, not TRS Finn. I think I mailed snailmailed TRS Finn once. I'm trying to remember what for. I sent him a letter at some point. He's taking notes during a lecture a meme. Well, I don't think I've ever talked about this. Well, I probably mentioned it in passing, but I don't take notes. I never took notes in school at all. Or the last time I ever took notes was in seventh grade. My biology teacher required us to take notes and submit them. So, that's the last time I've ever. And of course, back I took my notes in pictures. I drew pictures for everything, but I don't take notes. I don't believe in them. I just don't do them. I just don't find them conducive to my memory. I just like remembering things with my brain, letting it filter out all the garbage stuff.
Have you ever met RMS? I met him a few years ago and even got my picture on his on the FSF site. Well, congrats. I've never met him. All right, I'm going to How long have we been going? Actually, I might stop soon. So, if you have any final questions, send in a donation. How long have we gone? Why does it not show the time? Okay, close to two hours. Okay, this thing is too seizure inducing. See, the thing is the background here, as I said, it's going off of the sound input and it's going through all the different project, you know, the MilkDrop visualizations. Some of them are just really bad or not really bad, but really like in your face. So, might not be the best for this. Where did you buy your xyz domain? The places I found them were way too expensive. I bought it originally on NameCheap. It's less than $10. And I have it now on Epic and it was pretty cheap there, too. It was also less than $10. I've never seen an XYZ for more than 10 bucks or so.
Yep. What kind of outdoor hobbies do I have? I camp and stuff. I'll do hiking, but only if I'm camping. I don't really like doing day hikes. Actually, originally this week I have off. Originally, I was going to go camping at a bunch of campsites in Georgia, but the weather just took a turn for the extremely cold, so I ended up not doing that, unfortunately. But probably in a couple weeks, I'll do some camping.
Are you sick? Your voice sounds weird. I don't know. It's probably because I'm a little tired.
Campsites are for plebs. Patricians camp in the wilderness. Yeah, I sort of agree. When I go to a state park, I always go to the most primitive campsites. Or just not a campsite. But the thing is, if you're going in a state park or something else, they pretty much want you at a site. Amicalola Falls. Yeah, I think I've been there. I don't know if I've camped there.
How do you find friends that aren't porn and video game obsessed weebs? Well, don't find your friend that's on the internet if that's what you're getting at. There are plenty of people. There are plenty of normal people out there. So, is the stream so choppy to you? I'm looking at my OBS and it just seems very choppy. You know what? I'm going to get rid of the ProjectM. Okay, that looks already less choppy. Was that literally it? Was it choppy just because of that? Okay, that might be the last time I use that. Is it faster now? Is it faster now? I don't know if people are saying yes to that or for... Okay, so that was it. I thought it was bad bandwidth. It was just my project. Let me check up. See, last time I did that, it was much better or it was doing it much better. Yeah, it is bloat. We will do the minimalist way next time. We'll just do like this. The visualization I removed was ProjectM. If any of you boomers remember Winamp back on Windows, Winamp had this MilkDrop visualization or whatever that became ProjectM. You can get it on Linux. You can use it as a music visualizer. It's the best. It has a gajillion different ones. But of course, I think in this stream obviously it took up a bunch of processing power for some reason. Whenamp is still being developed. Well, it doesn't matter if no one uses it. It's an old boomer tool.
All right. So, anyway, so I'll rephrase. I'll say once again, if you are in Georgia or anywhere in the Southeast, just shoot me a little email. Just tell me that you might be interested in me coming around or people around and I might be doing a college tour. No guarantees, but I just want to know where people are. Especially if you're at a place like UG, which I go by a good bit often, or if you're in the Atlanta area, or especially if you're at Georgia Southern. I could basically walk to Georgia Southern right now. I live here. I don't know if you guys know. So anyway, I'm going to go ahead and if there aren't any, well, I'll double check. I'll double check the super cummies, double check the donations one last time, and if there aren't any, I'll close out the stream. So, if you have a final donation, give it now.
Michael Roberts, $10: "If you have children, will you homeschool them? Do you think that it's desirable to insulate children from the modern world somewhat? There's a controversy in the UK at the moment. Muslim parents are kicking off because a primary school is teaching our kids about alternative families."
Yeah, I mean I sort of intend on homeschooling my children or at least having a wife who homeschools our children. I sort of almost take it for granted that it was insane that even I went through the public school system now looking back at it. I think it's very difficult to rationalize. You might know my views on education generally: they're very low. Especially for little kids and stuff like that. I think it's basically torture. But specifically in America and Europe, sending your kids to any kind of school, public school, is just terrible. It's just brainwashing and stuff. So, I definitely sympathize with those Muslim parents who stood up against the British education system. And I do think homeschooling is a good idea, or unschool. I have a friend who does unschooling. You know what that is? It's just basically not having any kind of school and your kid learns whatever. I'm the kind of person who thinks that people should be conditioned by real life and the necessities they run into. And when it comes down to it, I think there's a lot of learning that education prepares you for the job market. It absolutely doesn't. No matter what you end up doing, you're going to end up learning how to do it on the job. I think education, if at all, should be based on cultural inheritance, and right now instead of actually that, we have a deconstructionist social engineering education system which goes against everything it's supposed to be. But it certainly doesn't prepare people for real life or working or anything. Not that I even think that education should do that, but I think that people should homeschool their children or have some kind of private schooling. And it's insane to me that there are countries where that isn't legal or something like that. So, yeah.
Let's see. Let me double check if there's anything else. Gotta triple check all my different sources. I have like a bunch of tabs filled out for all my areas.
The audio is coming before video. Yeah, that's expected. Okay. Yeah, I don't think there are any more donations. Or if there are, if you just sent one, it might show up in a second.
Okay. Okay. So, I will see you guys next time. And anyway, yeah, I guess that's about it. So, again, email me if you're anywhere in the southeast. Oh, the EOMA video. When I get the thing, when it arrives, I'll do a video on it. So, I'll see you guys next time. And, yeah, that's about it. So, if you have any other... Oh, yeah. Email address lukesmith.xyz. Email me for any of that stuff.