Grokking is ALWAYS a tradeoff

This is a concept that isn't touched on in most definitions that I've read of grokking.  I found a paragraph about shell scripting that said something that really helps:

Shell scripting hearkens back to the classic UNIX philosophy of breaking complex projects into simpler subtasks, of chaining together components and utilities. Many consider this a better, or at least more esthetically pleasing approach to problem solving than using one of the new generation of high powered all-in-one languages, such as Perl, which attempt to be all things to all people, but at the cost of forcing you to alter your thinking processes to fit the tool.

(bolding my own, excerpt from: http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/why-shell.html)

Because in soviet russia water DRINK YOU.

`grep` for "an ipv4 ip address"

That means return lines with normal (ddd.ddd.ddd.ddd style) ip addresses:

cat .bash_history | grep -E '[0-9]{1,3}\.[1-9]{1,3}\.[1-9]{1,3}\.[1-9]{1,3}'

 I was looking for a server I connected to a few days ago, but didn't want to search through everything manually. I'm no regex master, so I am SURE there's a better way (maybe grouping that first one and saying {3}? ...

haha yep:

[nak@arch ~]$ cat .bash_history | grep -E '([0-9]{1,3}\.){3}'

My Faith: What people talk about before they die

I got an okay face feel...

"We don't live our lives in our heads, in theology and theories.  We live our lives in our families:  the families we are born into, the families we create, the families we make through the people we choose as friends."

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/01/28/my-faith-what-people-talk-about-before-they-die/

Yeah, I'll probably be calling out for mommy when I die.  Genetics, man. Dem genes.
Or, who knows, maybe my death will be violent and full of derp.

The Fly (1986)

I just recently watched The Fly (1986) with Jeff Goldblum playing the scientist who got too drunk while playing god.

I really liked the maggot prop in the horrific abortion nightmare from the movie. Take a look here... warning, it's graphic.

That's a prop I wouldn't mind trying to build to be honest.

After Seth Brundle mixes genetics with the fly he takes on a personality of someone who's come down off a really good acid trip and decided to smoke a bowl of methamphetamine to keep the glow going.  He settles down after a while, but becomes grotesque.  I found it interesting how they talked of "the flesh" before the transformation -- pretty interesting message...


I couldn't help but laugh at all the terrible gore and juices, not that it was badly done, just that it was horrifying.  I really liked it and think it would be fun to make scenes like that.

You can also easily draw parallel between Kafka's Metamorphosis and this movie, the difference being Brundle had to get someone to care about him before he went through the metamorphosis while the character in Metamorphosis had a family to begin with.

A lighter meal

The clever implementation of socket.io and Node.JS being abused by heinous ASCII pr0n enthusiasts.

indutny.com -- the demo's there (For now)

"Adjective" Singularity

This article pulled a huge comment out of me,
So it must be worth a blog post:

Good article.
I will say that the individual mindset will feel inherently ostracized whether he is in a state of prosper or poverty.

I also believe Atlas Shrugged is the story you’re talking about: the transistion between a world that loved novelty, innovation and risk towards a sterilized and safe world of predictable cycles..

I don’t believe it’s ideological martyrdom, you can’t kill a rock… its a hibernation if anything:
“Build your cities proud and high. Lay your sewers. Span your rivers. Work feverishly. Sleep dreamlessly. Sing madly, like the bulbul. Underneath, below the deepest foundations, there lives another race of men. They are dark, sombre, passionate. They muscle into the bowels of the earth. They wait with a patience which is terrifying. They are the scavengers, the devourers, the avengers. They emerge when everything topples into dust.” — Henry Miller: Sexus

Maybe I truly am a doomed deviant not deserving an existence among the people-pleasing master race. Your article did call it: I am pretty much homeless…

Another thought (cosmic shmuck level):
that the whole cosmos got too caught up in itself, and everything is springing back very forcefully to try and attain zero again… and in doing so the pendulum is going far into what we see as group think. I don’t know, this movement of “the principle” is why I think the first sentence of the Tao Te Ching reads like it does.

There are A LOT of people who are currently prospering that don’t really DO anything besides be conduits for the skills and money of others. This doesn’t worry me either, I’ve seen it as a stretching out of cosmic energy, instead of concentrated individuals it has become a network of node humans that live by connecting people to eachother, just creating a bigger and bigger network (is this the singularity in action and it’s just waiting for me to “give fully”?). It’s interesting and I believe I could do it, but I would come away feeling dirty.

Maybe it’s because I AM the dirty one in the eyes of “the ‘human’ singularity” (the adjective means less and less as we get closer to pure singularity).

wow. lol

Blocking Sites -> Writing Blog Entries

So, I've been withdrawing from the online community as of late. Here, let me post my hosts file:

[nak@arch ~]$ cat /etc/hosts
#
# /etc/hosts: static lookup table for host names
#

#       
127.0.0.1   canv.as    canv
127.0.0.1   www.canv.as    canv
127.0.0.1   facebook.com    facebook
127.0.0.1   www.facebook.com    facebook
127.0.0.1    localhost.localdomain    localhost arch
::1        localhost.localdomain    localhost

# End of file

Whaaa?! Yes - I've decided to block a couple sites (I don't know how long I can live without canv.as... I've been really addicted to that site the past couple months, even setting aside full days to doodle-dick around, which I can't say isn't productive.  It is productive, in ways like this:

[Link to Canv.as Thread]


Oh well, I just spend a good 10 minutes checking out threads on canv.as when I got that link (had to comment out canv.as in /etc/hosts of course) There was a really neat one in #abstract where a fellow wanted to find out what happened to a innertube when it was cut in a spiral... and someone posted a vihart youtube video:

Which was a treat, vihart makes the best videos (I'm jelly).

ANYWAY, what I did with all my freetime today! WOoo000.

I found this neato website http://fontstruct.com just click and you'll be greeted with a super video showing it's font creation interface so I signed up last night (going in fully aware that font creation is a time consuming processes that takes a lot of patience -- I tried it years ago)

SOOOOOOOO

I started making a font last night (I think I did up to S or R then got sick of the pattern I was going with (5x5 bricks aka font parts) and decided to do something with a bit more wiggle room: http://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/608543 -- I've decided to call it 'Horny' for now, and that's a step up from my friend calling it 'Satan's Anus' lol -- maybe I'll end up calling it 'Mindsforge', but I sort of want to make another font for that name.

Took me some of last night and a lot of today to get that far (All caps and some basic punctuation, and it still needs some tweaking, but I sort of like it!)

I've also been wanting to experiment with using the CSS shadow as a glow, I think it turned out pretty sexy.

I can be hypnotised by my work... I am, probably, I just don't even know it!

Love, The End

Canv.as: Partial Life Inventory

Age 10> "I'm a decade old!!" -- I remember climbing the tree in the back of my aunts yard thinking about decades. I probably had a phoenix suns shirt that my mom got me, she was really into that. 5th grade, I was really into spies, and reading about UFOs and carnivarous plants and mars missions. Magic trick books and I prided myself on knowing where everything was in the library at school. Being a 5th grader was almost being a head-honcho 6th grader. I remember having intense crushes at this time of my life. I had braces.

Age 13> "I'm a teenager now..." -- puberty frightened me, I worried about having a wetdream because I learned about them from sex-ed.  If I got a boner at night I would get a flashlight and check to see if anything new and weird was happening. Started getting fuzzy, I loved The Matrix and made friends with some more secretive types, we'd hang out after school concoting "chemistry experiments" (as to not alarm the DHS).  At one point we put koolaide powder in a peice of paper and I was like "I'll smoke that hurr hurr!". I spent the night over at that house alot with the kid that lived there, we would login to IRC and DCC sub7 trojans to people and have cheap adolescent fun.  Also defaced the districts webpage BY ACCIDENT because they had their frontpage extension setup wrong, wow, good times.

Age 16> I got glasses my Junior year of highschool -- I was getting nearsighted, maybe because of a growth spurt and/or computer use. I started a science and tech. club and participated in my other friends extracurricular activities.  No sports.  There was a cacophony of lunchtime clubs, which was nice because you could eat inside around other people that were talking about interesting things. I was printing an underground student newspaper at the time which caused a a little rucus, and my ability to cause trouble with computers was also increasing, and I was still having fun with that.  I wore a labcoat to school. I liked this girl who wore one but she graduated, and I've always wanted to be a mad scientist so it worked out. It became sort of a security blanket once everyone wasn't intrigued by it anymore.  My cohorts began wearing them to, which was to my chagrin -- my individuality! Now were like a gang of evil nerds, which was sorta cool :)

NINE YEARS PASS, MANY EXPERIENCES, SHAME! TROUBLE! LULZ! SEX! RAVES! CYBERPUNK! LOTS OF GROWING OUTWARD AND IN.

Age 25>Constantly learning, reading and creating now that I've dropped out of school. Programming, esoteric teachings, painting, electronic engineering... as of late (past 6 or 7 months... maybe longer) I've been recovering my brain ("the drugs" really did a trick) and working on delving deeper and deeper into the workings of Linux, web development, and programming in general.  Like, today I was figuring out the differences between 64bit and 32bit assembly instructions, as well as looking into nginx.  Last night I checked out a programming language called Rust (its really new and in development).  I'm making plans to move off my friends VPS onto my own so I can begin hosting sites in order to make some money (I'll continue squatting until I actually have a client I think).  I've set up a vpn recently (without knowing how at first) which paid very well (first well paying computer job!) and has allowed me to buy some new stupid toys, but its also seed money for a business... oh yes, living on my dad's couch and helping him out, he has parkinsons and I've got to witness it progress, yay. Don't worry I don't get offended by MJFox jokes... offended people make me sick

[Link back to canv.as thread ]

On Friendship: And other Tainted Musings

Do you ever make the distinction between "IRL" and "Internet" friends?

I had a dream once where I was looking at a GIF of someone cutting their limbs off with a power tool. I then lost the boundry or "slipped consciousness" into the experience of cutting my arm off with a circular saw.
It wasn't terrible, everything seemed to flow right, and there was little stress during the change of perspective.

It's also common to make a distinction between "artificial intelligence" and "intelligence".

Nature and human doings.

I will stop here, this finishes some short examples of false division.  Even between dream world and the real world, there is something that experiences.  We can say what it experiences can be based on perspective and how that perspective is distinct.  Point consciousness

I don't like to use the word "real" because it implies some sort of higher Truth. I'd like to reformulate the question to be "Meatspace" and "Cyberspace" instead of "IRL" and "Internet".

We are interacting with information constantly.

Some of this information becomes labeled as "friends".  I don't know why I feel compelled to build a model of the universe on to which to stand and speak about such abstract ideas as friends... but it seems necessary.
You have to know where someone is coming from in order to understand what they are talking about.

Philosopher/Mathematicians love to start with a set of axioms from which they can draw logical conclusions and arrive at proofs of truth within that system.

The answer to the prompt, in my current state of consciousness, is a plain and obvious "Yes."

On to why this is obvious:
Looking at the choice-tree that leads back all the way to the big bang, I've confined myself to a certain way of thinking:
Pain and pleasure exist.  It is easy to discuss dichotomies, however we know there is a infinitely varied "emotion" that the something can exprience outside of the Pain-Pleasure spectrum. There are multiple types of consciousness in which we experience this "emotion".

Usually we're acting out a "strange loop" and re-enforcing our subconscious beliefs, or how RAW puts it "What the thinker thinks, the prover proves"...

* * *

My friend asked me which friend has had the most influence on me while we were walking to the store in Flagstaff. This question touched me somewhere deeply. I had to answer, "Dead ones" the friends who figured out how to bind themselves in time and let me experience them through words.  Internet friends would be on the same level as book friends, they are bound in words.

Meatspace friends are also bound, but not by words alone. They are bound to maliable, protein rich, fatty flesh as well.


That is a DISTINCT DIFFERENCE to my sober*-ego-mind.

My friend was upset with my answer because he was also looking for me to talk about meatspace friends... and of course I knew that's what he was looking for, but I can't say I've really looked up to anyone: maybe I have a really bad case of self-absorption.  He said I was the biggest influence on him.  It made me feel bad because I don't think I'm a good person to model after.

We can talk about how the syntax changes between real-time interaction, time-binded (word) interaction... but that's not important, the important thing is there is a distinction.  You could hang out with someone in meatspace for a long time and have a good time that you wouldn't have anything to talk about online, and the other way around... I've seen relationships not transfer well between the online universe and the meat universe.

There is a level of survival to all this. The individual and the collective seem to be at war constantly.  Deviations from the norm are destroyed and the norm is constantly in motion.  Those who cannot adapt will die, the universe moves and you move with the universe.

Questions of pretending is besides the point.  If you feel they are true friends then that's all that matters. If you find joy from pretending to be something or feel that it's necessary, then that's what matters.

I personally don't find any joy what-so-ever in pretending, I pretend out of necessity sometimes (ie family functions, bodily functions, difficult, volitile situations) but most of the time I don't have some "faker" function sitting between the universe and myself, and if I do, it's like turning the steering wheel of my universe and what was once "fake" becomes "real" and a non-thought.

*Culturally acceptable thought patterns and behavior

 P.S.
Ask yourself why you asked me that question, because that will lead to self-growth more so than my ramblings on how the universe seems to be assmebled to this guy. For me the distinction is obvious and is beyond consideration for me at the moment.

There is no friend, just people

*EDIT*

I tried to answer the question from many different angles, and I couldn't do it. I consciously avoided defining friend:
To define "friend" kills it.

"Freedom defined, is freedom denied"