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More philosophy works
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I have read or re-read more philosophy works this month: finished some
of the previously started ones, and had another push to review those
when I decided to put together a little e-book collection.
Bertrand Russell's "The Problems of Philosophy" is fairly modern and
easy to read, being clearly written in modern English, apparently
designed as a popular (accessible) book. It focuses on epistemology,
and I vaguely remember finding it boring a while ago, but it did not
seem so now; I guess the trick might be to become old and boring
yourself, so that more books look relatively fun then.
Unlike most of the other works I have read recently, this one seems to
rely more on argumentation than on rhetoric, though at some point it
brings up what looks like an extreme realism, considering things like
"Desdemonda's love for Cassio" "being" (not exactly existing)
independently of thought (even of Desdemonda's, AIUI), but not
allowing for their negations to exist that way, and not allowing
"blank nodes" (to borrow the RDF terminology) or simply introduction
of ad hoc entities in such expressions, insisting on referencing
multiple entities from a single relation, which is apparently his
"multiple relation theory". So it reads like an overview or an
introduction, but quite opinionated in some parts.
Marcus Aurelius's "Meditations" consist of rather repetitive notes,
poking at the same set of Stoic ideas over and over, though perhaps
approaching them from slightly different sides. It is still nice to
read though, akin to TV series with episodes that follow a similar
story arc or few. Following the previously mentioned discovery of
ideas associated with more recent times and authors, I spotted
Pascal's wager there (actually at least in two places, one of which is
referenced from Wikipedia). Much of it looks practically useful, even
if many of the justifications are missing, vague, or involve
supernatural ideas.
Seneca's "Of Benefits" and "Of a Happy Life" are similar, but
structured and less repetitive. The more I read those older works, the
better it drives home the understanding of how different the dominant
pictures of the world were before Darwinism specifically, with people
marveling at how well the world works for them, as if it was made
intentionally so, being fitting for life and even having so many
pleasurable things around, and people being capable of forming a
society, not realizing that it is because they are adapted to that,
because of the natural selection. And the presence of a reasoning
"soul" distinct from the body being "obvious", apparently. Even though
they knew about inherited qualities, and there was some speculation
along the lines of natural selection. But much of the older ideas on
ethics still seem sensible and useful: as in other areas, plenty of
progress can be made without necessarily understanding how all the
relevant underlying stuff works.
Then there is Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil". It is a break from
the now-odd-looking dogma, but at the same time it is intentionally
and explicitly obscure, includes a whole section of aphorisms, seems
overly edgy, and as if the few interesting ideas are covered in
author's prejudices (which reminded me of Descartes in particular);
AFAICT, he criticizes others for that, but then goes on to do that
himself. Some of the ideas are similar to those in much older works,
including preference of tiered or hierarchical systems over democracy
(which, yet again, was viewed as a way towards a tyranny), but I found
them easier to interpret charitably in those older works. While the
"good" or "nature" from other works is criticized, the "will to power"
(equated to "life" at some point) seems to be used in a similar
manner, as an universal justification. Unsure if I have read this book
previously, but not recalling having such mixed impressions after
reading Nietzsche's books before. While Russell seemed to bring up
extreme realism, this seems to include extreme anti-realism in section
21, denying causality being independent of thought. Though there are
other ways to interpret it, which also made me to wonder how far one
should go in charitable interpretations: particularly with vague
statements, those can completely flip the meaning, simply making
everything to fit one's own views. Well, it is a common question about
creative works: whether it matters at all what the author meant,
whether one should try to figure that out or to focus on their own
perception and interpretation; apparently it is along the lines of
hermeneutics. Maybe I should re-read it again later, and find some
good secondary sources.
Seneca together with Nietzsche reminded me of Dostoevsky's "Crime and
Punishment": the idea attributed to the protagonist (Raskolnikov)
there seemed to me simply peculiar but good for a plot, but now it
does seem to illustrate and contrast the view covered by Seneca
(though others as well, I think), describing the state of having no
peace of conscience, "wickedness", and that of Nietzsche (and
existentialism more broadly, and even perspectivism), about picking
virtues and deciding what is good or acceptable for oneself. Now it
makes more sense that Dostoevsky is often counted as an
existentialist; I wondered about reasons behind that before, but
somehow missed the described bit (and probably more). As in
technologies, it is satisfying to spot such connections.
I have also read another Leo Tolstoy's article, "Patriotism and
Government" (but in Russian, "Патриотизм и правительство"). It sounded
like another "I am not an anarchist, but governments do more harm than
good, and we do not need them anymore" text. Which is hard to argue
against from here and now, but I imagine it is easier from the
neighboring places, since without a sufficiently efficient
organization such as a government they would have all the chances to
quickly become my fellow citizens. Speaking of which, I have also
skimmed the Russian constitution yet again, and it does get harder and
harder to find articles that are not clearly violated.
Skimmed some essays at LessWrong as well: it can be relaxing to read
texts without adjusting for the time when they were written. Probably
I will look for more of modern philosophy (and adjacent) works after a
few more of the major older ones.
Proceeding to the more mundane news, I keep following the news. Apart
from the global mess, locally things also keep worsening: there were
more mobile Internet blackouts, mandatory ROC-promoted "spiritual and
moral culture" lessons at schools will commence soon, while social
sciences (including lessons covering the constitution) are removed. A
WeChat-like messenger with government service integration is
planned. As before, I find it more disheartening to observe some
people actually supporting such policies than the government creating
those. The economy and all the rest does not fare much better,
apparently.
As for other online services, I ordered a few items from Ozon (a local
Amazon cloning attempt) recently, and it was a pretty bad experience:
in one case I received a different item, in a few others the boxes
were torn or crushed, including one with glassware and a "fragile"
label on it. Then went to a brick-and-mortar store, to buy a few more
items there instead of ordering them, but it turned out to be
primarily a show room, with them ordering things for
customers. Actually had to deal with more online services recently,
including government ones, and though I am not surprised anymore,
still finding it disappointing how much worse they are implemented,
compared to what one may have hoped for before.
The weather is nice and warm now, but along with it come intentionally
noisy bikers at night, and construction workers in the early morning
(since sunrise), so windows must be shut to reduce all that
noise. Another consequence of good weather is the increase in
e-bicyclists (often couriers) occupying sidewalks, possibly even
outnumbering pedestrians at some places, making walks less
comfortable, especially when crossing a road and having to look for
both cars and those, all moving in different directions, sometimes on
the red light. Occasionally I think that it would be nice and
convenient to ride a non-electric bicycle in the city, but even that
seems too inconsiderate to do on a sidewalk, while more dangerous on a
road, and impractical on a road during a traffic jam.
At work, I had to go through an odd local security controls list,
which is mandatory now; the controls are "one size fits all", with
many not being applicable to the kind of system we work on, some being
silly (including those introducing password requirements contradictory
to NIST recommendations), but some being actually sensible, and
allowing to make use of those requirements to poke everyone to employ
more secure practices, hopefully prioritizing the parts that are both
present in such a list and useful. Sadly, some requirements from those
checklists do look capable of creating a security theater, an
imitation of work, as do many other things around here: sometimes I
wonder to what extent people can keep making up all such
theaters. Perhaps it is an example of "bullshit jobs", but there is a
workforce shortage here, so those make less sense.
Speaking of which, I looked into first aid kits, particularly what is
recommended by the Red Cross/Crescent/Crystal to include into those,
saw antibiotic ointments, looked up the one commonly prescribed here,
Levomecol, and learned that it is a combination of a real antibiotic
and of yet another dubious Soviet-era drug with ambitious claims and
no proper studies showing its efficacy. Quite similar to those
security controls: not entirely useless, but neither it is entirely
useful, and it does look silly, if you bother to look into it. Though
in both those areas there is no shortage of wholly useless options,
plain placebos.
Not as a clearly useful security measure, but more out of curiosity, I
have set auditd on a few servers, and used it a little. Writing all
the root user calls to execve produces too much output, especially
when too many things are executed under the root user, but that seems
potentially useful. Using auditd simply as a logging system for
security events seems fine, too. Maybe will configure it more later,
to send logs to a central server, and possibly add more rules. The
rules I found online, for other security compliance checklists, seemed
quite arbitrary, aiming certain programs or files being used, but it
might still be useful. I rarely work on user-facing software, so not
producing many security events, but writing those via libaudit, in
addition to regular logs, might be a nice feature to add.
I keep trying out Python, both at work and outside of it. As expected
and as mentioned previously, it is wonky, and not just because of its
dynamic typing: I introduced another bug by missing a comma between
two strings, which did not even yield a runtime error, but simply
treated those as a single string. Yet the libraries, including the
standard library, are nice: using those, it was easy to put together a
basic TCP-to-WebSocket proxy to connect to the Discworld MUD via its
WebSocket service over HTTPS, so that the connection is encrypted
(which makes it considerably more comfortable, given the local data
retention laws, censorship, and related prosecutions), unlike plain
Telnet. I added the script into my dwproxy public repository. I rarely
log into that MUD myself though, being rather short on spare time.
At some point I started thinking of trying out Go, as a language
comparable to Python, similarly aiming decent concurrency support out
of the box, but with static typing, even if oversimplified. But then
noticed that networking is in a separate library there, and at that
point it is pretty close to Haskell, except for the latter having
decent typing and semantics.
Apart from those, I had quite a few minor chores to sort out, and may
have my usual physical exercises routine disrupted soon. It would be
unfortunate to level down in pull-ups if I will not have a suitable
bar available as easily, for instance, but being more flexible in that
routine would be useful. From the beginning I tried to not depend much
on the equipment, but it is hard to avoid completely. Likewise with
computing: trying to avoid potentially problematic software or service
dependencies, but still gathering some, though relatively
few. Speaking of which, I still did not learn to work productively on
a laptop, but maybe will attempt it soon.
In the culinary news, I tried and enjoyed adding store-bought sous
vide chicken breasts into quesadillas. Also had a few lazy dinners
consisting of those chicken breasts, tomatoes, and bread. And lazy
bruschetta-like sandwiches made of bread, whole or halved cloves of
garlic, salt, olive oil, optionally tomato. It is hard to go wrong
with nice ingredients like those, whichever way you prepare and cook
them.
In the music playlist news, I added a few Love Spirals Downwards
albums after having their "Write In Water" song from a Projekt Records
compilation for many years there, as happened before with a couple of
other bands (Lycia and Mors Syphilitica) featured in the same
compilation. I liked that song, but did not like others much upon
quick checking before.
Finally, I discovered an entertaining time sink: the Taskmaster show
(or TV series): playful, humorous, and with pleasant aesthetics.
