Luke Smith's Webpage on Luke Smith

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• For Christ's Sake or For Mine?

  I recently had my world turned upside-down—or perhaps right-side up—from contemplating a work I had never read carefully: St. Seraphim of Sarov’s Conversation with Nicholas Motovilov. It is a well-known personal testimony of a man’s conversation with an orthodox saint, often quoted by many, and often heard by me, but I noticed in combing through it something that resonated with me precisely because it doesn’t resonate with me: “As for fasts, and vigils, and prayer, and almsgiving, and every goo…

  2026/9/25 22:04https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/for-christs-sake/

• Disenchantment With the Post-AI Internet

  The internet has gone from annoying to unusable. It once could be insipid or dangerously temptacious—Now I can’t even bear to be on it. One would be justified in wondering why I haven’t posted videos or articles in a while. I’ve taken breaks in the past—sometimes for months, but starting around 2023 I nearly entirely went radio silent. After a bit of a personal break, the internet I came back to was entirely different. The bad seeds were already there when I left, but they had come to blossom i…

  2026/8/22 03:45https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/disenchantment-with-the-post-ai-internet/

• Science of the Gaps

  Mainstream science is overrated. Most of the reason it feels so effective and all-explaining is a cognitive illusion. Most people overestimate how solvent scientific consensus actually is. I saw Joe Rogan’s recent interview of Mel Gibson. Gibson said that he was a creationist and didn’t believe in evolution. Joe pushed back a bit, saying that mainstream science had found remnants of putatively proto-humans. Here is a snippet of Mel’s response and the back and forth: Mel: Yeah maybe they were mo…

  2025/4/10 16:36https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/science-of-the-gaps/

• Miracles and Black Swans

  The Blindspot The standard modern scientific worldview cannot admit miracles and cannot admit the paranormal. That’s not the same as saying the scientific worldview disbelieves in miracles or the paranormal (although most modern science fans do). Nor is it the same as saying that the scientific worldview refutes or disproves miracles or the paranormal. People get all of these confused, but to state it clearly: If there are paranormal or supernaturally miraculous events which actually do occur i…

  2024/6/26 06:50https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/miracles/

• John Searle and Daniel Dennett on Consciousness

  Below I am here giving voice to a conversation in articles on the subject of consciousness originally published by the New York Review of Books and in John Searle’s book The Mystery of Consciousness. I find these hilarious. Here, Searle’s adversary, well-known and now late “philosopher” Daniel Dennett follows the logical train of verificationist modern science to its logical conclusion: the denial of the subjective—the consciousness itself—the thing, the only thing that allows perception in the…

  2024/6/26 05:30https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/searle-dennett/

• Consciousness and Materialism

  Hume’s Parallel David Hume has often been quoted for his “Is” vs. “Ought” distinction. The argument is that fact and morality are two different domains, and from no accumulation of statements of fact alone can we ever jump to a statement of morality. We can say statements of fact such as: To be murdered is potentially painful. To be murdered is irreversible. Murder causes social dysfunction. Etc. … By merely my collecting these, we haven’t proven that Murder is evil. That is an entirely differe…

  2023/1/16 21:05https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/consciousness-and-materialism/

• Why I Won't Go to Restaurants in 2023

  I’ve decided after some consideration to not go to restaurants at all in 2023. You can call this a New Year’s Resolution. It’ll require at least some sacrifice, pain, annoyance to myself and perhaps others, but I’m going to stick by it and I think it will have a good effect. Restaurants are a drastically over-used creature comfort of the consumerist economy… even worse, nowadays they’re not even comfortable… Especially now that portions are smaller more expensive than ever, it’s hard to go to a…

  2022/12/24 07:18https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/no-restaurants-in-2023/

• Blockchain Blasphemy and the Technological Antichrist

  There’s a meme YouTube video by Leonardo of Biz (here) where the villainous Bogs refer to their desire to attain something called “The Akashic Records” using blockchai

  2022/12/10 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/blockchain-blasphemy/

• Basically Everyone Should Be Avoiding Docker

  I am a well known Docker-non-respecter. I want to explain why I don’t use Docker (so much as possible) The Real vs. Fake Reasons I admire the candidness of the developer of BTCPay here. He says that he chose to use Docker to deploy his project because he was a Windows person doing .NET and didn’t want to read up on how to use Linux/Unix. There are basically only two “real” reasons to use Docker or containerization more generally: People who do not know how to use Unix-based operating systems or…

  2022/8/16 22:19https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/everyone-should-be-avoiding-docker/

• 'Based' Paganism vs. Christianity

  I’ve been meaning to write about Paganism recently. I will frame it as a response to an email I received within the past day or so: Hey Luke, First off, I would like to thank you for all your efforts in making everything you know accessible to everyone. You have exposed me to some of the most thought-provoking people on the internet and Varg is one of them. I was wondering if you can write an article or make a video on what you think about Varg’s Paganis

  2022/7/29 19:53https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/christianity-based-paganism/

• Minimizing Liabilities Is Making It.

  The default way to look at financial “independence” nowadays is to think that means “making a lot of money.” That’s understandable. But then you see stuff like this:

  2022/7/17 00:10https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/minimizing-liabilities-is-making-it/

• The hardest technical solutions are right in front of your face.

  Nassim Taleb had this old anecdote of the sheer absurdity that while the suitcase and other bags had existed for lifetimes, it was only in the 1990’s that people had the idea to put wheels on the things so they didn’t have to haul them around airports all day with their strength. It reminds you of the fact that while children in the Incan Empire did indeed have some toys with wheels, apparently no one thought to use the wheel to make a simple cart or wagon to use in town or on the Inca’s extens…

  2022/7/13 04:16https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/obvious-technical-solutions/

• Never Trust Custodial Crypto

  It should actually be a point of optimism that centralized technology tends to destruction while decentralized tech can survive pressure… Some highly attentive people might have noticed that LandChad.net lost one of its articles: that on how to set up a website with the Basic Attention Token (BAT) which is a crypto-currency tied into the Brave Browser. I can’t even tacitly endorse this project due to some recent personal developments that we’ll see below… I’ve used the Brave Browser (in fact, I…

  2022/6/2 07:35https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/custodial-crypto-unsustainable-uphold-bat/

• On the "Hate Speech" Psy-op

  How to shamelessly win arguments. If you’re out there to “win arguments” without shame or honesty, the easiest way to do it is variously distort, shame and socially discredit everyone else to such an extent that impressionable people are left with a choice of either extreme social shame or taking your side no matter how patently dishonest and illogical you are. This is really how the modern propaganda engine works

  2022/5/4 04:58https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/hate-speech/

• Not Even Libertarians Believe in Libertarianism

  Nietzsche, in I forget which book (probably Genealogy of Morals), noted that moral philosophy is kind of the opposite of other sciences. In moral philosophy, we know beforehand what is “right” and “wrong,” and its goal is not so much to discover new truth as to concoct a framework that helps us understand the system of why things are “right” and “wrong.” We do not “discover” new moral truths. Nietzsche was living before there were any libertarians. Libertarianism, like other “Enlightenment” phi…

  2022/5/4 04:08https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/libertarianism/

• Obscenities are symptoms of weak minds.

  Over the past few years, I made the decision to totally cut obscenities out from my speech. You might actually be able to find recordings of me cursing four or five years ago, but as of now, I really stand by my decision. Obscenities are the linguistic equivalent of an trashy emaciated person entirely decked in tattoos, smoking cigarettes and wearing a shirt with nudity on it. They'll defend what they do on the idea that it's someone "their right," or "expression

  2021/9/3 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/obscenities-are-symptoms-of-weak-minds/

• Every Web Browser Absolutely Sucks.

  The title explains it all, you don't even have to read. There are no good, even passable web browsers. None. Not a single one even comes close. The weird thing is this: making a good browser should be easy! Among the existing web browsers, you could assemble all the parts necessary for a passable (if not perfect) browser. No one has ever bothered to do this, instead, people assembled 90% good stuff and 10% junk. Here I will list: Features a

  2021/8/28 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/every-web-browser-absolutely-sucks/

• Matrix vs. XMPP

  What are XMPP and Matrix and what makes them special? XMPP and Matrix are two decentralized and federated free sofware projects for chat, including true end-to-end encrypted chat. Users can either install the software on their own

  2021/6/26 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/matrix-vs-xmpp/

• Modern "Freedom" Means Being a Slave to Impulses

  What does freedom mean? See this article in video form here. Which of the following two people is more free: A drug addict. A average man who is only not a drug addict because he lives in a country where drugs are regulated or shamed in a way to make them hard to obtain. Most modern people will have a kind of cognitive dissonance, a kind of glitch in their matrix here. In the modern view of freedom, freedom means the ability to do what you want without the government or society telling you what…

  2021/5/6 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/modern-freedom-means-being-a-slave-to-impulses/

• Conspiratorial Thinking and "Multiple Outs"

  How to do magic tricks... Magicians have this concept called "Multiple Outs." It's actually how you can do simple magic tricks. Suppose you have a person pick a card and say you will guess the suit of their card. They pick a diamond card and announce it, and you tell them to check underneath their chair to reveal a slip of paper that says, "You will pick a diamond card." That might sound like a nice trick, but

  2021/5/5 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/conspiratorial-thinking-and-multiple-outs/

• Monero and Other Privacy Coins

  As I said in other writings and videos, no serious cryptocurrency can function in real life which is not also a truly private cryptocurrency. By far, the most popular of all these is Monero, which has already become the de facto currency of the dark web, but also of all cryptocurrency users who actually use cryptocurrency for purposes other than a mere investment. Monero, however, is not actually the only private or pseudo-private crypto-currency, and while I talked about its competitors in a r…

  2021/5/4 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/monero-and-other-privacy-coins/

• Monero Maximalism: Or, How Bitcoin Is a 💩coin

  The Biggest Problem with Cryptocurrency Most normal people hear the word "cryptocurrency" and assume that means that they are "cryptic" or "private," but that's actually a huge, perhaps the hugest misunderstanding of our time and it has some big consequences. The "crypto" in cryptocurrency merely comes from its cryptographic nature. When it comes to actual privacy, cryptocurrencies are an unmitigated disaster: All transactions and wallet balances are easily viewable on the necessarily public bl…

  2021/4/21 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/monero-maximalism-or-how-bitcoin-is-a-coin/

• We Want Our 4 Causes Back!

  Artistotle, a medieval depiction. Aristotle, in his Physics argued that there are four causes behind everything that exists. These causes answer the question of "How" or "Why" something is the way it is. The Material Cause The material from which something is made. E.g. the stone of a statue. The Efficient Cause The external force that causes something to be made. E.g. the artisan and his tools who make a statue. The Formal Cause The form or plan of the thing made that define it. E.g. the artis…

  2021/2/13 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/we-want-our-4-causes-back/

• Wanna Learn LaTeX?

  Table of Contents What is LaTeX? Installing LaTeX LaTeX Video Tutorials I have a full video tutorial series on learning LaTeX, broken into small sensible parts, here. What is LaTeX? Basically, it's how big boys write and format documents. Every public brief, scientific article, book, cryptocurrency whitepaper or even outline written by people who know what they're doing is written in LaTeX. If you want to see examples of documents made with LaTeX, you can see my Master's thesis here or another…

  2021/2/12 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/wanna-learn-latex/

• Veganism Is the Pinnacle of Bugmanism

  People have quoted me as saying that. I forget where it comes from, probably a livestream, but I definitely stand by it. Since a lot of people labor under the assumption that my channel is about "Linux," I've accumulated a lot of subscribers that are variously nerds, furries, degenerates, coomers, libertarians, communists, trannies and among them are vegans. Some of them (I assume) are good people. There's a stereotype about vegans that they are annoying and can't talk about anything but Vegani…

  2021/2/11 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/veganism-is-the-pinnacle-of-bugmanism/

• Why It's Bad to Have High GDP

  To put it in other words... The common way of looking at Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is that it's a metric of economic success: more GDP is more wealth. Wealth is good. "Poverty" (meaning low per capita GDP) is bad. Nowadays, pretty much everyone talks about "economics" like this as if this truism was scribbled on the back walls of the cosmos. This is just looking at one side of the ledger in a kind of global double-entry accounting book. A logically equivalent way of looking at it is that GDP…

  2021/1/22 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-its-bad-to-have-high-gdp/

• Advice on Some Other Languages

  This page is just for minor pointers on lesser studied languages that I don't have enough to have on their own pages. Gothic Gothic is a dead language and the only thing existing in it is a partially translated New Testament by Wulfila. It still is a very important language for the study of Germanic and Indo-Europeanism because it is the only language of "Eastern Germanic" so well attested. Eastern Germanic languages are distinct from other Germanic languages in their lack of umlaut and some ot…

  2020/12/11 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/other-langs/

• Command Line Bibles

  I've made a couple very useful command-line accessible Bibles for a quick and scriptable lookup of Bible verses and passages. They exist not only in English, but for Latin and Greek as well. English King James Version (including Apocrypha) — Github, Gitlab Latin Vulgate — Github, Gitlab Greek Septuagint & New Testament — Github, Gitlab Installation git clone https://github.com/lukesmithxyz/kjv.git cd kjv sudo make install Or just replace kjv with vul for the Latin version or grb for the Greek.…

  2020/12/11 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/command-line-bibles/

• Learn Chinese

  Chinese is the hardest language to learn according to normies who have never tried to learn it. In reality, Chinese is really easy. It has literally no complex morphology: no tense, plurals, gender. It doesn't have irr

  2020/12/11 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/learn-chinese/

• Learn Latin

  Latin was the first language I learned and has probably been the most useful. Here I'll talk about some of the things it's gotten me and some recommendations for how to learn it well. What I've gotten out of learning Latin

  2020/12/11 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/learn-latin/

• Learning European Languages (Michel Thomas)

  I've said on a couple livestreams that the ideal way for an English speaker to begin learning or excel in learning other major European languages (Spanish, French, Italian and German) is to use Michel Thomas's audiotapes. They can be found for free on Pirate Bay and other sites, but you can also buy them on his official site. This style of audiotapes is so far above any other, it's hard to even put it in words. They make really exceptional promises: "learn a language in 8 hours" and in some sen…

  2020/12/11 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/learning-european-languages-michel-thomas/

• Notes on Learning Languages

  I get asked a lot about learning languages, so I have a few comments about it here. Hopefully I can awaken you from some dogmatic slumbers about language. Vocabulary is the least important part of learning a language. This is hard for people to understand because I think most monolingual people think that languages are just different word lists that people use. As a result, 101 students will manually lo

  2020/12/11 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/notes-on-learning-languages/

• Only Use Old Computers!

  The ideal ThiccPad If there is a single point of advice I can offer novice computer users, it is stop using modern computers. If you look at "technology YouTube," by which I mean the massive multi-million subscriber channels, nearly all of it is devoted to constantly reviewing and comparing every new computer, processor, graphics card and product. There's big money in it because obviously all of these companies put money in it, but also if you're a normal person, you automatically assume you ne…

  2020/12/11 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/only-use-old-computers/

• Reviews of All Linux Distros (That Matter)

  Firstly, once you reach basic competency in Linux, different distributions don't matter. A lot of newbies analyze distros based on what they look like when you install them, often not realizing that it's a pretty simple affair not just to change superficial things like your theme and setup, but entire desktop environments. Basically all distro reviews online are wastes of time for people who know what they're doing. When I came to YouTube, all Linux YouTube was wa

  2020/12/11 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/reviews-of-all-linux-distros-that-matter/

• Science vs. Soyence

  There's nothing necessarily wrong with science, reason, knowledge etc. To some degree, they're fundamental for survival in this world in one way or another. But one of the more worrisome problems which have arisen since the Enlightenment, and especially in the past several years, is the fact that whenever scientific knowledge has increased, human arrogance has accelerated even faster. This isn't a metaphysical, moral arrogance; it's one that is more and more jeopardizing the human cosmos. We li…

  2020/12/11 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/science-vs-soyence/

• The Fragility of Physics

  Physics has a reputation of being a uniquely "scientific" field. In other fields, you might hear of the concept of "Physics Envy" which is supposed to be a deep-seated desire of academics of other disciplines for the rigorousness and elegance of physics. Only physics, so the popular understanding goes, is truly able to abstract away from the messiness of detail and create truly beautiful and solvent models of their subject matters. Physics is thus the queen of the "hard sciences." I object to t…

  2020/12/11 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/the-fragility-of-physics/

• The Parable of Alien Chess

  A parable on the Logical Positivist “interpretation” of scientific models. The Parable Suppose an alien race comes to Earth and wants to observe our games. They are very interested in chess, despite the fact that they have eyes with properties that make it impossible to make out what actually happens on a chess board. (The whites and blacks of the squares and pieces all blur together.) They can still learn about chess experimentally, they know they can sit two players (a so-called “white” and “…

  2020/12/11 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/the-parable-of-alien-chess/

• Why I Use the GPL and Not Cuck Licenses

  Every piece of software I write I license under the GNU Public License Version 3 (GPLv3) unless I have forked it from something else. The GPLv3 is the premiere copyleft license, meaning that it not only allows users to run, modify and distribute their own versions of what I write, but it also requires that no one in that chain of development restrict and close-source that software: it and software derivi

  2020/12/11 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-i-use-the-gpl-and-not-cuck-licenses/

• Politics matters most to slaves.

  Now onto the second point I didn't get to in my post yesterday: politics only matters so much when you're a slave. Or as I put it there, "You will need politics less than you think." That is to say that if you live in a city where your every action is watched, if you use proprietary software and communicate only via social media services, if you have no marketable skills because you have some inert degree and questionably productive and definitely replaceable job and a large company, you need p…

  2020/5/9 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/politics-matters-most-to-slaves/

• Why do I so rarely talk about politics on my channel?

  It's not a huge secret that I'm somewhere in the high echelons of the red-pill, however you define it. I'll openly talk about pretty any topic that people organically bring up in streams, or that I'm asked about, but I've never really made any kind of political content on my channel, aside from jokes and memes. That might be surprising because especially three years ago before the mass-bans and algoritm tampering, right wing political channels were a dime-a-dozen and an ea

  2020/5/9 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-do-i-so-rarely-talk-about-politics-on-my-channel/

• In Defense of "Pseudoscience"

  If you keep up with my random asides in videos and elsewhere, you might know that I'm extremely disappointed with the current state of institutionalized science. The post-war era was a disaster for scientific epistemology, in fact, epistemology and science commentary mostly became an exercise to exclude one's enemies by technicality. Academia became an enormous state-funded enterprise, and the best way to ensure that your research program got funding before your rivals was to develop advanced r…

  2019/1/1 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/in-defense-of-pseudoscience/

• How an Open Media Makes People More Dogmatic

  Recovered from my old web files. This article was written late 2016. Saleman Techniques One of the oldest tricks in the manipulation handbook is making people commit to your cause in small steps. If you’re some kind of door-to-door salesman for some kind of product or charity, before asking if someone wants to buy or donate, ask them a more abstract ethical question that emotionally commits them to your sale. “Aren’t you worried about the plight of inner city youth?” “Uhhh… sure, I guess.” “Tha…

  2016/9/1 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/how-an-open-media-makes-people-more-dogmatic/

• The Problems with Utilitarianism

  I originally wrote this essay in 2014 or 2015 in a Chinese buffet in Athens, Georgia. I've changed some of it and am re-adding it here. I talk about the issues with Utilitarianism and a bad book by Sam Harris. Utilitarianism At a dumb intuitive level, the "ethical" idea of Utilitarianism in principle gets pretty close to what most modern people reflexively want from social-political affairs: the greatest good for the greatest number of people—who doesn't want that? The problem is that that intu…

  2015/1/1 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/the-problems-with-utilitarianism/

• "I Have Nothing to Hide" and Comments on Totalitarianism

  This is an article recovered from my old site. The date must be around 2012 or shortly after. About forty years have passed since an American president, in an as-of-then unprecedented act resigned from office. It might be too much of an exaggeration to say that the Watergate Scandal singularly fomented a newly sardonic and cynical attitude in the United States, but the public has certainly moved in that direction. The illegal break-in and wiretapping at the Watergate Hotel subjected only severa…

  2013/1/1 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/i-have-nothing-to-hide-comments-on-totalitarianism/

• Why People Do or Do Not Leave Religion

  This is a blog post which I wrote years ago, far before I had a well-known internet presence. It came up in a discussion during a livestream. I wrote this around 2011, when I was an atheist. Despite that, I think the content is still true and wanted to reproduce it here, unredacted execept for this starting note and an ending note. Richard Dawkins arguably gave religion a far better explanation and dissection in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene than he ever

  2012/1/1 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-people-leave-religion/

• Why Modern Art Is So Awful

  This is a restored old article from my site years ago. Not exactly sure when I wrote it, but it was between 2010 and 2012. Historically, although this past seems long forgotten, artists were beloved founts of creativity in the eyes of the people. Their works, albeit not to everyone’s liking, demonstrated human and natural beauty and were loadedwith accessible and intended symbolism with pride and talent. There was a fairly obvious point in time, perhaps at the turn

  2011/1/1 08:00https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-modern-art-is-so-awful/