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Life through the lens of rationality. Medium: https://medium.com/@egorcentric Quora: theminimalist.quora.com/ Chat: https://t.me/dailyEmChat Feedback& advertising: @zmaznevegor
Over a year ago, I decided to push for an initiative to change the design of one of the Linux distributions. I thought it would take just a couple of weeks to create a concept and publish it. Turns out that squeezing in hours of work alongside client projects and managing multiple designers took much longer than expected.
Today, with the world witnessing a massive Windows failure, I thought it would be a good time to share a progress update and show the concept we managed to assemble for Linux Mint: https://github.com/klad-design/linuxmint-brand
I'm a huge fan of Linux and open-source projects. Unfortunately, such projects always were incredibly unappealing for a wider non-tech audience, which felt really frustrating to me. Even during the privacy crisis and whole Snowden scandal the number of open-source supporters and Linux users has barely risen, while corporations kept collecting as much user data as they could through their operating systems.
Lately as a design studio co-founder I wanted to make a difference in this regard and try to make Linux more appealing. The first thing that I encountered was just direct decline that said "our Linux distro is perfect the way it is, we don't need any design help". Now I'm at my second attempt at creating absolutely free and open branding for Linux Mint project. If you can support this initiative by upvoting the following post, I would very much appreciate your help: https://github.com/orgs/linuxmint/discussions/36
Recently more and more I've been thinking about AI governance and I feel like this will be a defining point for the next five to ten years in the AI progress in terms of adoption, as right now we are seeing the product launch effects.
Governance was one of the core reasons to stabilise web3, but at the same time, it tremendously affected the adoption. Initiatives from the big tech players were seized right before the major releases - good examples are Facebook and Telegram. The latter has launched in the end by trying to deny all of the connections to the core team, which doesn't help the project.
Apart from the adoption, I wonder how the technology might be twisted and used by the government and big corp. I feel like "Age of Surveillance Capitalism" might be a good start for that but haven't got my chance to read it yet. If you've already read it, what are your thoughts? Worth the time?
Recently found this article referred by Scott Alexander, who had a similar experience at the APA meeting almost four years ago.
I believe that "woke-ism" has affected on a different level almost every field in the western world. However, I hold an optimistic stance and have a feeling that we are past its peak. Interestingly I started to notice more and more studies on woke-ism, where it can be quite objectively measured. But my point is simple - more and more people are starting to note 'woke' culture and recognise it as an ultimate threat (especially in science), so there is a strong chance we will see how it goes down already in the near future.
Bye, Cynic!
In the past years, writing posts as Cynic became more and more strange to me. I don't know whether it's due to the format of the old posts or just a general lack of themes that I wanted to discuss with a larger audience for a while.
Therefore, I've decided to change the format of the channel - from now on posts won't have any specific format, I will just share, brag, and describe what's interesting to me. It can be something serious or can be absolutely random - will depend on my mood at the moment. Posts won't be limited by any theme - the only limitation will be the scope of my interest.
Also in the past years, I felt like editing messages to ensure that they are 'ready for publishing" takes away the liveliness of the texts, so more likely most of the future posts will be almost unedited.
Happy New Year! I wish an amazing year and strong health. Also, I want you to remember that you shape your life the way that you want and everything is just a matter of choice. Once again have a great year and thanks for continuing reading my posts!
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How to choose a country?
I believe that moving from one country to another is the only way of voting that remains effective. As I don't believe in the power elections, over time, I found myself comfortable moving from one country to another with an understanding of the associated trade-offs. I believe every country will come to the understanding that people are the most precious resource. This rule comes as default in the corporate world driven by market competition, yet this wasn't really an issue for governments. For now, countries didn't fully grasp this paradigm, and therefore, migrating now is the best way to detach yourself from the state's system and look at the world as a diverse menu of countries to choose from. Before I continue with the menu metaphor, I'll get a bit more into why I think migration is almost a mandatory thing one can do.
First of all, by moving you control the change. For governments, time moves differently: months for a government are like days for humans. Therefore, in your already not so long life I don't feel like you should wait for the big changes but rather enact them (of course, if you need them). Your country is way too corrupt? Move to a more stable place. Living is too expensive? Downshift. Want less control from the state? There are loads of options for this matter as well.
Secondly, increasing personal independence. Migration builds up independence by detaching you from solid connections and opening you to a world of global-level opportunities (and are you really free without them?). The more you get into that, the more agile you get. This helps you set up a living where you count just on yourself.
Lastly, there are so many more practical bonuses in moving, including economic, academic, professional, and of course, you get to experience a new culture.
So, let's get back to the menu metaphor. Every country has its trade-offs that you will have to deal with and just find the one that suits you best. I will skip the obvious ones, like some countries are prosperous and have better salaries or higher taxes, and will get to some that I experienced on a more personal level. Richer countries mean stability by any means. "Any" means that country will have higher control of the population, tighter economic restrictions, slower innovation embracement and in many cases, a poor culture (due to the professional "over-incentivisation"). Here is an example with Norway. It is an amazing country, where every single bank transaction is monitored. If you walk in a district you haven't been to before, more likely one of the neighbours will mention this to the police. The government controls your diet indirectly through taxation (which is twice as powerful in combination with market protectionism). At the same time, Norway is the cleanest country you will see, with amazing nature, unbelievably high salaries, beautiful landscapes, charming people and healthy eco-produced food (thanks to the food control by taxation).Freedom often comes with chaos. I have a strong belief, that in Russia you can kill anyone and get away with it, either by bribing someone (or just being good at hiding evidence). You can be loud there at any time of the day. Copyright doesn't exist there at all and nepotism opens even more doors. Not the best example of freedom but good luck being loud at 3AM in the German apartment. Don't think like an investor, think like a buyer. What I mean here is do not overthink about the prospects of a region. Do not try to guess whether the country will be on the rise in 50, 30 or even 15 years. Think "right now" with the max outlook of 5 years (10 at most). This is what you gonna get the most out of a single migration. The best thing that you can find is something with a positive current state and uprising economic trend (very rare these days).
The Decade of Failed Revolutions
Another decade has come to an end, and yes, I have realized that a bit too late. Therefore, I decided to come up with a theory on why the previous 10-years should have drastically changed the world, yet we have come to another year of stagnation and even higher expectations.
Before I get to the direct formulation of the idea of the missed revolutions, let’s recap the previous decade. For that, we need to imagine ourselves in the post-crisis time of the wild 2010. Back then the world was slowly recovering after the “globalization” crisis of 2008, the word “Bitcoin” was almost unknown to the large public, people enjoyed their iPhones 3GS and Skyrim did not even exist. It was a start not of a new decade but a new era: people had great expectations on how technology is going to change the world, how economic systems will come up with new transparent policies to boost global trade and development and how governments will fight against the rise of monopolies.
Why was that a good start? Well, we had loads of chances to bring the change in almost every sphere of our lives: economic, social, political and technological; people were expecting that the change just has to come and that it has to bring something absolutely new. Moreover, the early 2010s just had to do it, because the decade prior to that has shown that in the new, “digitalized” world, old processes have to be switched to the new practices. It meant that the companies have to become more transparent in their operations, they should be striving for change; that meant that the old political powers had to come up with new directives to address the rising risks of another crisis as well as adopt technological advantages to fight against existing problems. It is important to notice, how closely tied the economics, politics and technological development have become in the early 2010s. We were surrounded by enormous opportunities, that later we refused to use.
dailymoron/the-decade-of-failed-revolutions-49d59a4439fd">Continue reading
Silence
We do not value silence enough these days. Noise is following us everywhere: from the transport and overcrowded cafes to constant music in our earbuds and endless videos on YouTube. Over time we stopped referring to noise as pollution. It got so deep to our lives, and this constant buzz became so comfortable for our minds, that silence for us became an attribute of the scary environment.
We make the buzz ourselves — intentionally or not. We talk just for the sake of it. Words became meaningless, and the gap between the ideas and speeches became much larger. Just like a commodity on a stock market, the value of words has dropped in value. We talk to fill in "awkward silence", without realising that the awkwardness comes from the meaningless talks.
When we finally reach the precious silence — whether it is the end of the workday or comfortably boring weekends — we run from silence. Cause in silence we meet ourselves, and the "ourselves" are scary. Not just scary but also boring, we ran out of the topics to talk about with "ourselves". And instead of changing it, we reach to our phones and start watching another video, or get in conversation on social media, cause we will do everything to minimise the time with ourselves.
Creativity.
Over time concepts have a tendency to evolve and change. They are changing within the ecosystem and changing the ecosystem itself; something that used to be one thing evolves to absolutely different one. If we look into the world of creativity or ask ourselves what is it, more likely we are going to imagine arts, music or some garage-made tech, and if it for real was a creative thing in the early 20th century, now it has become nothing more than just an average thing. Every fifth person is a musician, with every third is a producer and almost every second is a DJ/rapper. They have lost their creativity already in the late 80s, stepping away for some nerdy guys. Arts is not something creative anymore. This concept may have changed, but its core is still “being different” and artists are no longer different than anyone else, they are just average with a slightly better taste. Unexpectedly and more likely unintentionally, something completely “casual” became the ruler of the creative world. Marketing, engineering, IT – you name it - that has over time become more creative than the top charts of iTunes.
The worst part about it is that everyone is trying to be creative and they are driven not by the part that loudly says “create”. They are imitating, copying, changing and doing anything else but creating and usually, it is done with the lack of taste or style. They are either trying to be nihilistic (and failing) or artistic (that is not possible without a sense of taste, so failing as well) and making the world of content just a stinking garbage bin. While the truly creative people are lost somewhere among these garbage bins.
So, what is “creative” today then? It is something that goes step ahead of time, something that bends the limits of standards that inspires. This “something” becomes when it is found is giving you understanding that there is a little number of people with the genius ideas that are worth going through 99% of dumbness and stupidity.
For the last 2 months, my head was overwhelmed with ideas about cryptocurrencies, digital money and blockchain. I am proud of the result and all the past weeks' hard work paid off with the great research and final paper. Thank you for the participation in the survey, by the way, it helped a lot.
If you are interested in cryptomarket or blockchain but didn't know where to start - read my work -it's like a complete introduction and overview of the essential economic and technical aspects of the topic. You can find my thesis here: https://www.theseus.fi/handle/10024/141520
Feel free to share! If you have any questions regarding the channel or thesis or anything related - share your thoughts in our chat @dailyEmChat
Telegram survey
Lately, I have been working on my thesis regarding cryptocurrencies, more likely I am going to post it here once it is done if some of you will need a manual to the crypto world. During the research, I found out that there are not so many resources on public's familiarity and adaptation, and the ones that exist are partially out of date already. So, I have decided to make my own study and survey (with blackjack...).
So what?
https://goo.gl/forms/vLWfS7BVfTHHbcUT2
This link would be the best answer in this case for the Miles Davis's question.
Why should I participate?
You will not only help me as a researcher but will bring your contribution to your favourite messenger! Such topic as this brings a lot of attention from everyone - from ICO-developers to SMM guys. Just a couple of minutes may make our community even better.
What if I am not so good with cryptocurrencies?
Your answers still matter! If you answer honestly, then you won't get to the hard questions and if you are getting stuck, just skip one.
Are there any specific instructions?
Not really. Basically, it is just a classic survey, however, as soon as you are getting to the survey page, you will get some nicely written section descriptions.
Hey, you promised to post more often but looks like I don't have the posts that I deserve!
Yeah, for real, there were some problems with content lately, in the sense that I don't have too much free time due to the work and thesis. I should be done with this crazy combination in a week and then will get back to two posts per month or even more.
This sounds like a lot of work, maybe I can help somehow.
Yes, share the link with your friends and Telegram users you know. More replies - better survey! The work is for real pretty big but the writer is comfortable with huge loads of work (please, help me, I haven't seen my family because of this paper for months).
P.S. If you really want to help me (actually, I hope so), I wrote a special easy-to-forward short post below. Don't hesitate to share it with your friends, relatives, pets or whosoever.
The whole day I was thinking about what would be the best way of writing this New Year post. Whether should I mention the fact that my channel grew from less than 400 to over 1700, or that from some weird motivational posts I came to semi-philosophical texts that I have started to like. Another achievement that I wanted to mention is our sweet and cozy @dailyEmChat, that brought dozens or maybe hundreds of interesting and original topics and conversations (mixed up with constant talks on Ethereum). I have tried myself in podcasts, lived in a couple of different countries and found a profession that I truly like. Amount of achievements and great moments that I’ve experienced this year is enormous. I wish you all the best in 2018 and be happy!
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Today I have been to the job interview. Unlike my any previous interview experience, I have been on the other side of the screen - I was asking the questions. As far it was my first time on the recruiting side of this battlefield for the work place, there was another HR person. I was not asking most of the questions: main part was conducted by my experienced colleague. By the end of it, my legs stopped nervous shaking and my coworker was pretty surprised about it. "Why have you been so nervous, you are on the decision-making side right now?" - she asked.
- Yeah, that's why I'm so nervous, now responsibility for any decision is on me - I'm the one to blame if he fails after acceptance or succeeding after my "no"; moreover, im the one who can cut the potential at its root or make it grow
- That's why we try to get everything about them during the interview
It is neither a sentimental story, nor a fiction intro but an experience. It gave me some unique feeling that I don't want to loose with time, no matter how cynical I am (haha, cause the name of the channel is the cynic; sorry for that dumb pun).
If you miss the old internet's charm - you are not the only one.
I really liked the grime take in the article, but in the recent years more and more I hear the second take that can be summed up with "suck it up, users", which I don't really support.
What's better — orgasm or universal basic income? GTA 4 or land tax?
Now you can compare anything. You can also check the leader-board here - currently "universe" has the highest rating and "the Holocaust" has the lowest.
https://annas-archive.org/search
Shadow libraries indexer. Really glad that something like this continues to appear cause sci-hub’s stability felt worrisome a couple of years ago.
I rarely find articles discussing the state of design, and even fewer articles do it well enough to consider them seriously. But the report from Float really hooked me with some of the threads pointing to existential issues for the industry that just can't be ignored. In many ways, some of the issues (especially the ones brought up in thread two) are relevant not only to the design field but to content in general.
The report has many downsides as well - from populism among the designers' ideas on cultural tyranny to climate change alarmism. I'd personally say that threads one and four seemed ultimately weak - the first feels naive, in many ways outdated and simply not relevant with issues brought up in the latter chapters, while the fourth is just majorly under-researched, making the whole thread a giant speculation.
Doctorow gives a very interesting perspective about BigTech (not only). I found that I personally don't agree with a lot of stuff he shares but at the same time I really like his takes and argumentation. Here is just one of his thoughts that I found very interesting to think about:
What that narrative can do is shift the point of peak indifference. But, just as importantly, it can keep denialism from sliding into nihilism. What you have to show people is not just how bad it will be if they don’t take action but how much room there is to take action to make things better.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/cory-doctorow-wants-you-to-know-what-computers-can-and-cant-do
Another day of the war
Russia started a war with Ukraine that they cover up for their people as a "special task force operation". In Russian media, you are not allowed to call it a war as you are not allowed to call anything by its name and without proper confirmation from the ruling party.
Every day from its start feels fast and slow at the same time. People outside of Ukraine live by following the news and hoping that innocent people will not be hurt. Every day gets harder, every night gets scarier.
As a Russian citizen, the insanity of a single person and the spinelessness of the whole parliament was not a surprise for me. For the past decades, Russia has had its inner war. Opposition leaders are getting killed, some survive but still are going to be imprisoned until the end of the current regime. Over these years, Russians didn't manage to change anything: some like me felt pointless to fight it and decided to flee, some decided to fight and got imprisoned, others became a part of it. This war is a result of decisions made by a mentally disabled person supported by hundreds of corrupted yes-men.
This war is showing the darkness of Russian reality to the world at cost of the lives of thousands of innocent people. In this war, I believe that Ukraine will defeat the enemy, and every day they prove it. In this war, I believe that it is Ukraine that saves Russia and not the otherwise as Russian propaganda is trying to picture. In this war, I believe that the whole world will come together to finally stop the nationwide oppression of the Putin government, which has shown to be a bunch of war criminals who intentionally started the genocide. In this war, the truth will win, no matter how hard propaganda is trying to prevent it.
Long live Ukraine! Слава Украине!
Culture first, money second. Migration before used to be purely about the improvement of economic factors of living. Now money should be more of a supportive factor rather than defining. From what I experienced, the cultural aspect feels far more important for me. I don't mean just the historic development of the region or number of museums, but a culture in its broad meaning — from people's values and ambitions to general state education and heritage. Often your own culture may feel the best suiting but very often it's just a "first-timer bias".
Do you remember the old meme about the year 2020 being the worst? Unexpectedly during this period, I felt like my life was going against all of the global events, and that contrast made me feel even more detached from the world than ever.
During the period of channel inactivity, I had a lot of things in my life going at such a high pace, which is very often confused with the feeling of being young. A lot of thoughts I didn't manage to share on time here and even the start of this post sounds rather outdated.
"So where have you been and overall what's up?" — this is something you are always welcome to ask in the chat and try to interrupt non-stop conversations there. But in short, I started my professional life, found it rather boring and even meaningless, saved up some money and went to Norway for my Master studies, had another run as a student, but unlike Bachelors, it felt completely different and way more focused. During my studies, I met a lot of new people from absolutely various backgrounds but all are damn amazing. Then in the middle of my Master's, I founded a design studio with 4 other partners. Since then the amount of free time I have decreased drastically but this still feels like one of the best choices I did so far.
In the last year, I fully focused on the studio hustle and finishing the degree. Still not sure how, but in June I managed to finish the studies. My thesis (once again on crypto and this time it is fantastic) felt like a burden during the time of writing but mainly due to coping with work in parallel. Back then thesis felt like another task, which is stuck in your head and makes you anxious at every second of free time due to the constant thought: "I could be writing thesis right now". Even though I liked writing and coding, the thought of getting it done (on time) strongly stuck in my head, and even after a couple of weeks after thesis submission, deadlines kept living in my head.
Now I am in Georgia, where I am fully focused on Klad. Alongside, I am trying to build a creative community together with musicians and designers from Russia.
As you can see, the post turned out to be about me, myself and I. Yet we had a lot of catch up to do after such a long break. Regarding the channel, now I want to get back to writing and will even try to establish some posting frequency. However, this time I want posts to be more spontaneous but more up-to-date. Anyway, how you've been?
Happy New Year!
I wish you all the best in the upcoming year and I am very thankful that you keep reading my thoughts from time to time.
Have a great holiday and spend this time with your close friends and family.
Simplicity
The modern world has everything we need — from automatic vacuum cleaners to cars in space (as you can see this post was written a while ago). Materialistic oversupply brought us to the understanding of the value of information; this is how we basically entered the age of information economy, where data and knowledge became the key assets of success. Yet this world full of information, and tech has taken away one important thing — simplicity. We started to lack simplicity in the way we think, make decisions, work and live. With the simplification of the living process, people are still trying to make the life itself more complex.
The life is the same though. The complexity of the world is slowly but surely trying to get in our heads from the rather early stages of life. First we are learning some social norms and values, then we grow up a little and getting piles of knowledge in school that we do not really value sometimes, then we are getting to university where knowledge gets more specialized, so when we get to the first real actions we have so many things in our minds that we do not even know where to start. At certain moment simplicity appears to be lost.
Even in the art that is supposed to be a space of feelings complexity has its effect. Today you cannot just be amazed by the black square or abstract colorful lines; you need some Mona Lisa that is closer to your inner complicated world. Inner world, by the way, should hit the records of complexity, otherwise, you do not compile with the social norms. Even though we admire something complex, we value more something simple.
The idea is easy, we lack simplicity. Clearness of thoughts and directness of actions are inspiring. A simple idea makes great things, while simple action makes a living.
Art.
Have you mentioned that art goes beyond its time? The world, as the artist sees it, is absolutely different from our reality. It is not just an image, sound or text - it is a statement, idea or "innovation" of mind. And when the century of certain ideas is over, it looks at the artistic world and follows it with a deformed adaptation. It works as some sort of a loop, where reality creates a new mind that creates a new image. To simplify, it works as an AI at its literal understanding - it sees the world differently with the different values, norms and standards, therefore, with the different judgement structure, and when this AI starts to create something new - it goes according to different principles rather than an "average"/normal perspective.
If you are familiar with Russian literature, you could have mentioned that trendy ideas of nihilism were created by Turgenev. Female rights, or feminism, as we know it, was completely developed by Chernyshevsky. Constructive and "effective" thinking were successfully brought to life by Kandinsky and Malevich. If we turn away from Russian literature and art, we can name even more examples - Balzac has masterfully described the end of the 19th century, while Dreiser has depicted the reality of America. As Wilde mentioned, "art deforms life according to its needs". The list of examples can go on and on, frightening you with its fatalistic behaviour. Yet, amusement from these correlations may get you away from the "heart" of the theme.
Art lives in its unique world. However, we can't judge modern art in an objective manner, simply because we need to understand it according to its own rules, that comes to a "normal" mind only over time. Art is questioning our norms and judges our time. It expands our understanding of life overall, showing lack of perfectionism in natural things. It brings its aesthetic touch to environment and human.
Fuck Facebook.
I do not know how can a person create such a nice thing as a social network that becomes one of the most used things in the world. An application that made thousands of people stick to their phones. An application that is simple and useful. At least, it used to be like this 10 years ago. Every positive adjective you can use with "Facebook" has been lost during the past 10 years.
From the project that could have been monetised without dumb, getting all of your data, advertisements, it just became an app full of dull and stupid shit. And it is not only about the application but a whole company - anything they make, anything they buy is becoming a pile of advertised shit. The worst thing about it is that people are still using it. No matter how slow is it or how bad in terms of optimisation/UI/UX. From a simple "a bit more than a messenger" it has become a nightmare for any designer or just any person with a good taste. Marketing managers and SMM-ers will still spend thousands and millions of dollars just for buying advertisements.
Facebook alone could have become the key competitor (or if done right - the key market monopoly) as a video-hosting platform, blogging platform, messenger, photo-sharing network. Every time you want to defend Facebook just think about their "could have" and also wait until WhatsApp, Instagram and other applications are slowly dying in pain. The pain caused by a complete lack of optimization, good design and lack of change management.
My work led me to analyze and look into the countries' policies regarding new technologies. As you might know, I am a pretty big fan of blockchain and cryptocurrencies, so during the analysis, (that is also a part of my thesis work) I'm usually looking into the ways of the countries handling it. Cryptocurrency is a relatively new concept and the way governments are coping with that allows me to understand not only their approach and vision of the technological disruption but their ambition about the future and their trust to their own citizens.
Analysis conclusion is sad: as soon as you do not know something, you ban it and try to forget it like it was a bad dream. This is the way many policy-makers approached revolutionary technology, without giving it a single chance. Some sophisticated readers may debate with me, claiming that "blockchain is not the same as cryptocurrencies and you are mixing those two", and partially they would be right. Moreover, this is the key defensive argument, the government will use. However, preventing people from use of cryptocurrencies give them fewer opportunities to understand this whole new economic model. Crypto is like a new application and when you want to understand the application, less likely you will check its code first.
So what do the countries that wish "the best they can give to their citizens" actually achieve with limitations to the digital money? Nothing else but a selfishly missed opportunity: the opportunity of flipping the system by finally making the last hit to already broken Bretton Woods system, the opportunity to become the digitalisation adopters rather than conservative idiots, opportunity to bring the future to the people.
Made a short article relating the recent discussion in @dailyEmChat on future of money.
egorcentric/future-currency-9d0f08fbc0da" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@egorcentric/future-currency-9d0f08fbc0da
Quick updates about the channel.
- I owe you articles for September and October, so far fully loaded with my work but expect several articles striking your notifications list
- Due to my personal overload (thesis, work and all the stuff) but will to write articles will become shorter (not the ones that I owe you tho) and more idea-focused
- Amount of my grammar mistakes may rise due to the lack of time
Thanks for following, reading and understanding.