Beware the Re-Corralling
In this blog post, I discuss the need to stay up-to-date with the latest technological advancements and the potential for AI to disrupt our lives. To prevent becoming too reliant on AI, I suggest running scripts from home to republish blogs and switching to Linux or Unix systems instead of Windows. I also provide tips on how to use modern computer technology, such as connecting to remote computers through SSH, transmitting files with git, editing files with vim, and controlling servicew with the CLI.
Stay Up-to-Date and Avoid Re-Corralling with Modern Computer Technology
By Michael Levin
Friday, January 6, 2023
Amplify their effect because of the tight data feedback loop between data collectors like Google Search Console and data publishers like scheduled Git actions. You don’t need to code-in reliance on continuous deployment Github hooks. Fine if you know how to do that stuff, but in my book, I’ll run my own scheduler or task queue and keep all the business logic local and off the cloud, thank you very much.
Republish your blogs from a script you run at home. Get that script running from home, and make it under the same system we have emailing us SERP results every day.
The greatest thing of value to you in professional life is the time to practice while you’re paid. Never not have a horse in the race, but also never sell your soul for the side hustle. There’s a vibrating edge balance here, and sometimes compensation on the employee’s side is notoriety in the free and open source software community that makes the employee valuable and speak with an heir of credibility.
It’s helpful that I’m hopeful making systems to decide — what is all the fuss about in this here nutty ride? Gonna gear my bloggining to focus what I know — on LPvg noggining next-gen SEO.
When to re-think a thing? When the realities change around you, and you are disrupted and perhaps caught unaware and unprepared? Just don’t let that happen, and clearly AI is changing everything. Or it will soon. And in some of the ways predicted and in some new wholly unimagined ways, which just might be a delightful experience for humanity. Every person capable of doing so can give a try at having their own machine-children, and that new generation of beings partake in a new sort of Cambrian Explosion of life.
It is in such new phases of evolution the timeless designs like turtles and alligators emerge. There will always be something saber-toothed. Convergent evolution on Earth gives us a lot of clues about recurring life patterns we might want to stay aware of regarding our machine children. Some combinations of scalable neural-networks, swarming and the ability to self-fix or self-replicate come to mind. Stuff like that may have to get splat.
So, let’s splat some tuples in Python, so we’re psychologically ready to speak in enough languages for machines to make sense to us and us to make sense to machines. If you wait around long enough that you don’t have to code, then you lose the chance to be next-gen literate. Next-gen literate is a lot about not coding new dependencies on AI directly into your new life patterns.
Once you need that AI-presence in your life as a sort of surrogate parent that does your taxes and makes your bead, you’ll be hooked. That’s what’s coming. Read the Asimov iRobot short stories that opens with Robbie to get a feel of what I’m talking about. The emotional and intellectual attachments are coming.
Did I say Beware the Re-Corralling? We’ve been corralled in the past. There was the 1950s with channels of communication tied-up by NBC/ABC/CBS and GE/Westinghouse. Then there was the rise of the Internet, and new giants like Amazon and Google born amidst the chaos. Apple is like Galactus. Apple comes from before the birth of the Internet, amazingly. Oh and Microsoft… did I say corralling? Yes, you, me and everyone you know in tech has been successfully corralled by Microsoft.
Apple off the hook? You’re all on Unix without an official FOSS repo. Sure, Homebrew. But Home brew? Surely M$ofties are better off on Ubuntu with systemd and all? I mean what’s deployed on Mac-ish Unix anymore? You might as well know what’s actually used everywhere. So Microsoft now includes Linux as a part of Windows. And that is brilliant, and using that to your advantage is what I talk much about here on this site.
Switching to computer-life mostly in a Linux terminal isn’t necessarily easy, and also I know it sounds horrifying to most folks. But I assure you and them what we’re talking about here is living in some Windowing Desktop OS of some brand or another, it matters not.
The mattering not of the host hardware is made possible due to the ability of that host to open a window through direct or remote secure shell (SSH) connection to a real genuine Linux system somewhere, which is where you run your vim or your Linux daemon services, or whatever. We don’t need no stinkin windowing desktop GUI on our cloud instances. We manage all these various remote computers by executing command-line commands that run scripts.
This is the key, core, fundamental, 1st-principle, assumption, theory, tenant or whatever of my LPvg message: Linux is close to Unix and Unix got most things right, but Linux got to and standardized wide-spread Web deployments, then added systemd, so now even the non-Web-stuff is easy. Let me tell you about Linux daemons.
It’s not easy getting off the mainstream, which in this case is probably the Windows laptop you’re reading this on, or the one you have at home if you’re on mobile. It’s still the fruits of evil anti-competitive Original Equipment Manufacturing deals (OEM) by which Microsoft pressures hardware manufacturers to not put out a Linux version. A few companies like DELL have defined Microsoft over the years and paid the price. Microsoft will charge you more per unit license of Windows if they don’t like what you’re doing with Windows alternatives.
That’s reality. We’re all on Windows because Microsoft is good at strong-arming vendors and now is time to rise up in quiet unmeasurable rebellion. You are in the secret blog of Mike Levin, and only you are receiving this LPvg survive & thrive message. Everyone else is being corralled into VSCode.
Nobody ever fully ruined your chance at coolness and newness and independent thought that rises from not being predisposed by vendor-designed tools. Granted, being introduced to JavaScript or VSCode first, and God-forbid both at the same time, will cause mental deficiencies, but none that can’t be overcome with cognitive behavioral therapy.
If you’re the type who wants to wire-up your brain correctly on the first pass, then here’s the thought process you need to go through.
Optimization is over-rated. The human experience involves many people walking many paths. Over time, best paths emerge but it’s never the whole picture. Use what’s become popular and is everywhere, but know the big picture so you don’t develop vulnerabilities and blind-spots.
The current reality is a Unix/C one, made so by the fact that the dynamic duo became a viral operating system first. There are many ways to say it, but Unix decoupled itself from hardware in a way LISP never did. There was always “LISP hardware” in the computer-graphics world, but Unix could be rigged to run on anything. Unix would have been even more viral were it not for its restrictive proprietary licence and legal entanglements for so many years. Enter Linux.
If Unix is the ivory tower, then Linux is the Wild West. Linux was born with a license that encouraged users to give back, and thus one of the key events in the rise of the free and open source software movement. This was reinforced by the GNU General Public License 2 that stipulated you had to give back if you use it for commercial gain. There’s a GPL 3 which loosens these restrictions, but Linux ain’t under it.
So eventually, Linux won. But not until Microsoft started including Ubuntu Linux with Windows under a subsystem called WSL. And even after that, it wasn’t until WSL Linux finally embraced systemd as available on default WSL instances of Ubuntu Linux. And even then, it wasn’t until Microsoft back-ported the systemd (and Linux graphics) capabilities that only existed under Windows 11 WSL, that a magic portal was opened.
Now a magic portal to the land of LPvg is open. Microsoft doesn’t particularly want you seeing that, so they will distract you enormously with VSCode. It will block you from ever really learning git from the command-line. It will block you from knowing how to connect to remote computers through SSH and to interact with them by transmitting files into location with git, editing files with vim, stopping and starting services with command-line, and generally have all the control over modern computers as modern computer literacy demands.
It is Microsoft’s job to stop you from having these realizations. It is my job to help you have these realizations.
I think I must use my tools more often and better to make my point.
Embed YouTube videos into more blog pages, and make another “Easter Egg” on this site, like my blog link, but to the videos. I can talk about each, one per post. Then I string them together with the categories feature. Hmmm. Nice.