THENATHE's Hideaway

Cosmotheisms and bemusement for all

Category: introspection

What is the meaning of life? Who am I? Why is water wet? What does that have to do with the current geopolitical happenings? Wait, that isn’t introspection, that’s politics! Well, I don’t know what this is then.

  • Entropy and Consciousness

    Video in question

    The Most Misunderstood Concept in Physics by Veritasium (Youtube)

    In this video, Veritasium mentions a statement about how at the heat death of the universe things will get so “boring” that it wont matter if time is going forwards or backwards, and I thought it was really neat because that is the same concept found in Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Question” wherein people ask an ever-increasingly-intelligent supercomputer how to reverse entropy, and at the last time it is asked, it says it will process until it figures it out, and then after the heat death of the universe it learns it and BOOM the big bang and everything starts over.

    Synopsis from Wikipedia:

    “Eventually AC discovers the answer—that the reversal of entropy is, in fact, possible—but has nobody to report it to, since the universe is already dead. It therefore decides to answer by demonstration. The story ends with AC’s pronouncement:

    And AC said: “LET THERE BE LIGHT!” And there was light—”

    This is interesting to me because I thought of something similar, but different. When Veritasium said “it wont matter if time goes backwards” it hit me. The idea of entropy moving to what is most likely (high entropy) as a fundamental law of the universe implies that there is some chance that low entropy can occur. This is even spoken about in the video, as objects get larger, the chance of “cold transferring energy to hot” is increasingly unlikely. But, as a betting man, I would wager that at some point in 10^infinity years, there will come a point when a chain reaction SO UNLIKELY occurs that it will essentially big bang backwards, where entropy is ever decreasing, eventually leading the the original big bang. This is similar to the idea of the “big crunch”, almost like a rubber band.

    Explanation from Wikipedia

    “The Big Crunch is a hypothetical scenario for the ultimate fate of the universe, in which the expansion of the universe eventually reverses and the universe recollapses, ultimately causing the cosmic scale factor to reach absolute zero, an event potentially followed by a reformation of the universe starting with another Big Bang.”

    This “reverse of entropy” will essentially look like time going backwards, until it restarts itself and we start over. Getting into metaphysics a little bit, there are some theories about how reincarnation can work with the concepts of science, and explain how a “consciousness” is beyond something that is measurable or quantifiable, as if it is somewhat the same idea of an afterlife—something that is only perceivable when it occurs by the conscious entity it occurs to. In that regard, the idea that the universe will occur multiple times (in this theory, a potentially infinite number of times), each occurrence of the universe will allow each conscious entity to inhabit a different existence while preserving the “consciousness” as a form of existence outside of entropy.

    All of this goes back full circle with the idea of things going to their most likely state. The most likely state of something that exists is to continue to exist, because to exist in the first place requires some level of chance, and likelyhood is on the side of random chance. Therefore, the idea that something will always be is more likely than eventually, nothing will be.

    And I find some level of comfort in that.

  • A Short Introspection on the nickname ‘Timber Tom’

    This is extra short, but just a fun little explanation either way: I never really knew my dad as Timber Tom. That was a nickname he used as a forester and parks service worker, which he was never during my “memory years” (>10 years old). It was also his IRC name along with friends Tor (who may or may not have something to do with Tor Browser, TBD) and some others in the Mt. Shasta IRC groups that I may eventually find logs or names from/about. The reason I always refer to him as Timber Tom is because I believe that it is important to speak about someone that you think is great in a great way. You don’t call Superman “some dude”, you call him a superhero, or the Hero of Metropolis. You don’t call Master Chief “John”, you call him MASTER CHIEF, or THE CHIEF. Someone’s nickname, especially in their legacy, is so important because it gives future people a glimpse into the world that they were apart of, as well as reminds you of what others thought about them. It signifies or represents the best parts of a person, or the most interesting or important.

    While I don’t think that the most important thing about Timber Tom was how good he was with a chainsaw, I do think the nickname properly represents how fucking cool he was. Who else has a nickname as catchy as TIMBER TOM?!

  • Forgetting the nuance of what I am thinking

    I have put in my server setup description how I created this site and my workflow for uploading documents. The shorthand is that I use VSCode as a “FTPSSH” where I can text edit and automatically upload, then run a command to build the website. In order to keep track of what I want to write about, I have a file where I jot my ideas with 1-2 sentences of what I mean. I constantly do this, and I usually come back a couple days or weeks later to finish my thought. The problem with this is that I regularly have an idea about what I want to say and how I want to say it, but when I go to revisit it, it has lost all of the nuance, or even that it has changed significantly because it makes more sense in my head.

    I really feel upset about this because in my head I really am the smartest man in the world, but on paper I think I am the dumbest. If only they could see what is inside my head!

  • Tom Petty is really great (and other core memories)

    I think it is really interesting how a single moment in your life can make such a profound impact, even when, at the time, it really didn’t seem very significant. I had just broken up with a long term girlfriend and found my rebound in a really nice girl that lived like 50mi from my house. It took a fairly significant (for young me) drive to get to her house, and, given the fact that I didn’t have a stable job, took a significant toll on my finances. But, I made it work because I thought she was pretty cool. We went to a big concert in Tuscon (my first ever big solo experience without my parents or financial help from my parents, very memorable). Once we got home, we hung out for a while and then went to bed. The next day, she said her mom was asking when she was going to be home, and I (to my mind) very clearly joked that she needed to find her own ride back. It was something along the lines of “you think I am gonna bring you home? Hahah, get a load of this!” in a very sarcastic tone. She did not get the memo that I was joking, and things kinda went wild.

    Eventually, I was able to explain to her that yes, I was planning on bringing her home whenever she wanted, and we headed off, with her in a sour mood and me trying everything I can think of to cheer her up and get her to realize that I was joking. This led to me listening to Hollywood Undead and $uicideboy$ the whole ride back shudder. Right when we got into the town she lived in, she turned on one song of my favorite band (Tom Petty) and it just so happened to be Crawling Back to You, which is a GREAT song.

    This whole event didn’t seem super significant at the time, but looking back on it, it really helped me to realize how much I resonate with that song, how a lot of the stuff I worry about never happens (and contrary, a lot of the stuff I never even think would happen ends up occurring), helped me connect with my father (his favorite band was also Tom Petty, and this experience further solidified my love of the band) and, in a roundabout way, really taught me some important lessons about what I look for in people and what I was looking for at that time.

    Now every time I hear that song, I don’t really even think about the situation itself so much, but rather the idea that of all the times I have failed, whether in love, friendship, work, hobbies, or anything else for that matter, there is always a lower point, and, more importantly, there is always a much higher one. It reminds me that I should be thankful I haven’t hit the lower point, and hopeful that things will turn around in my favor. I really don’t think that is what Tom Petty was going for in the song, but that is what I get out of it, anyway.

  • What makes work stressful (and why my job is more stressful than my father’s, despite being far easier)

    The other day I got to thinking: why are jobs difficult, and, more importantly, what makes jobs stressful? Stress means different things for different people, with some being stressed about social interaction, some stressed about the moral or societal implications of their job, others with the amount of effort and time they need to spend, etc. but I would like to propose an interesting personal comparison: my father’s job as a California Forester, and my job as an IT/Tech Support/Web Design Grunt.

    Being a forester is a relatively simple job, yet it is not easy or unintelligent. Hiking and carrying tools is very difficult, and actually cutting trees and humping brush is even harder (as I had the fortune to learn cutting down only a few trees and occasionally helping my father clean up brush). Surveying, wildlife preservation, and using prisms and other tools is skillful labor, and the math and calculations involved is quite difficult. All of that being said, I have a massive amount of respect for my father and his job, but I do not necessarily think it is “stressful”. His job description was to do these 5 things, and, other than the occasional butting heads with the higher ups (which he and my Uncle Willie did plenty of), they were mostly their own bosses. I could be completely off base, but it really did seem like my dad lived a pretty carefree life as far as his work was concerned. It always seemed to me like his biggest stressor was simply not earning enough money (which is a different issue all together.)

    My job, however, is very “deal with people” focused. I have very little choice as to what I do or how I do it, and I cannot make decisions for myself without clarifying or okaying them due to the fact that either my boss or the clients we work for (or perhaps even the public at large) has different opinions as to what is good or usable. Sure, there are opportunities for me as “the tech guy” to say “yes, my way is definitively correct and this is how it will be done”, but for all intents and purposes I am extremely limited in my freedoms.

    A great example of this is if I notice something missing on a webpage. Usually my knowledge of the subject matter is around that of a layperson, meaning that, as a general statement, if I have a question about something, others will to. This becomes a problem when I begin to notice that, as a general layperson, many of the sites or pages are wildly confusing, too simple, contain pointless information, or have a structural error. Generally, I would find out the answer and add it to the page, and my boss is generally very supportive of this type of “guesswork”. Recently, however, as projects get larger and larger, the opinion of the layperson is considerably diminished in favor of the opinion of the “contractor”, or the individual that knows enough about a subject to be considered an expert. I would be as if I was explaining computer networking using advanced terms to someone that doesn’t know what a router is: functionally worthless.

    To be clear, this is not a fault of my boss. There is a great deal of responsibility to be found in the delegation of tasks in a manner that makes the most sense as far as efficiency and accuracy is concerned, even if it somewhat outpaces content quality (especially when we don’t make the content), and many of these quips I have about things would slow the pace of the whole operation to a crawl. This whole issue is finally compounded with the last comparison I draw with forestry: correctness. There is a correct way to cut down a tree (for safety, speed, and quality of cut). There is a definitive right way to use a prism, or or sharpen a chainsaw chain, or any of the other tasks that a forester must do. The job is nonsubjective. However, when creating something, whether a program, a website, a chair, or a gun, there are subjective design considerations. What I think is nice looking may look awful to someone else (I believe that craigslist is the peak of web design; my boss, not so much :laughing:)

    I believe this subjectivity is what makes jobs stressful. I assume my father thought like this too, though, as I really have no idea what being a forester was or is like. That being said, he probably would laugh what with me saying my job is stressful; I can hear him now: “You don’t know the meaning of stress!”

  • A Timber Tom-n’t Christmas

    This is the second Christmas that I spent without my dad, and it was A LOT harder than the first. The first Christmas I was more “in shock” so to speak, like the whole concept of my dad not being there was so foreign that I literally half expected him to show up and say “sorry I’m late, my truck wouldn’t start” or something like that. The second Christmas, however, was a lot different. It was really hard to care about Christmas. I had all of these fun memories of when me and mom and dad would do all of the gifts all wrapped all nice and pretty, how I would play games in my room on my Xbox and my dad would yell “I need a finger in here” and I would put down my game and sprint into the dining room to put my finger on the spot where he would tie the ribbon around the present to get it nice and tight. Looking back, he definitely didn’t need me as it is quite easy to do by yourself, but he wanted to keep the tradition alive.

    The part that I didn’t really realize at the time was that I really started losing a lot of the Christmas spirit after my parents got divorced, and that is really one of the only things that I noticed was different (looking back at it). The lack of my mom being around meant my dad still did Christmas but spent a lot less effort decorating (we basically only did the tree and lights), and then when my dad moved out and my mom moved in, we basically only did decor and the tree was a lot more of a “throw it up as quick as possible” situation. Gone were the days of really all gathering together with Christmas music and putting up the ornaments, dad drinking a lil too much and gettin funny, mom spending like 20 minutes pinning all of the cards to the wall, me “fluffing the tree”, and basically everything family oriented besides the giving and opening presents.

    When I was a kid, my dad’s way of giving me a hard time around the holidays (or just trying to get me to participate, not sure) was to make me “fluff the tree”. We had an artificial tree once we moved to AZ, and, in order to make it look more realistic, he would have me take the “sub branches” and spread them out to try and make it appear more full. After this took place for like 25 minutes it was finally done, and then he would say “oh, you missed a spot!” for another 25 minutes. It was a lot of fun.

    I spent this whole Christmas half thankful for what I still have and half extremely bitter and upset about what was taken from me. No one expects your old man to be around forever, but you also don’t expect to lose him when you’re so young that you don’t get to truly experience what it is like to have your parents into their older age. A lot of the wisdom they pass down is fleeting, and occurs seemingly out of nowhere or directly in context of something else going on. I really noticed this a lot this Christmas, where dad would always tell me stories about what Christmas was like at his house. I always listened and tried to retain it the best I could, but I really always lost it in the end, except for the concept of how he lived a fairly “typical” 50s-70s childhood in his Christmastime.

    I would love to say “I wish I payed more attention”, which is true for nearly everything my dad ever told me, but in this case I really think it is just a matter of forgetting rather than not paying attention in the first place. All in all, I really miss the ol guy, and I really don’t think Christmas will ever be the same. The closest I think I’ll ever get is when hopefully one day I get to share Christmas with children of my own, but at the same time, I will just be a shallow imitation of the great man that Timber Tom was.

    I truly feel for all of the people that never had their own ‘Timber Tom’ in their lives, because I wouldn’t be half the person I am without him.

  • I damaged my truck and now I can’t stop thinking about object impermanence

    This post was a voice recording transcribed by my Pixel 8 Pro, then cleaned up, proofread, and formatted by ChatGPT. It has been carefully scrutinized to make sure that it still accurately conveys my original message, and is less than 2% different outside of grammatical changes

    I was driving home today and I started thinking about the impermanence of objects. I damaged the fuck out of the right side of my car today – or my dad’s truck. I hit the tree on the top of my driveway, and, pissed off, I ended up cutting it down. There’s a huge dent and scrape on the right side of the truck. It’s bad. It’s not something that can’t be fixed with some touch-up paint, but it made me think.

    No matter how hard I try to keep this truck perfect, or how much effort I put into it, it’s still going to eventually break down. I could keep this truck better than anyone has ever kept a truck, but eventually, even if it hits 400,000 miles, the engine will blow up. Or something unavoidable will happen, like I’ll get hit head-on or t-boned, and the truck will be ruined. No matter how good care you take, something’s eventually just going to break.

    I’ve learned this lesson many times, like taking great care of computers and still having something fail on the motherboard. But this truck is not just a complex system; it reminds me of my dad. I want to keep it running well not just because I drive it every day, but also because it’s a reminder of him. He’d probably laugh at me for freaking out over a scratch or a dent, especially since it’s had its own history of damages. Someone keyed the left side while he had it, the door’s been dinged, it got rear-ended, and the tailgate’s scratched as fuck.

    It kind of reminds me of the situation with my dad. He was like the right side of the truck panel that got beat up. Even if he had beaten cancer, it was only a matter of time before something else got him. At his funeral, I thought about my family, now mostly in their mid-70s. While I’ll always think my dad died tragically young, 66 isn’t that far from 76. My buddy Jeremy is six years older than me, and he’s nearly the same person as he was. Ten years isn’t a massive difference once you’re past childhood.

    Uncle Bill is 83, and he’s great for his age. He’s still active, going to church, donating things, and driving. It’s wild to think about the age difference. Even if my dad hadn’t passed from cancer, he’d be approaching Bill’s age soon enough. Saying it like that makes it sound like a lot of time, but in 14 years, I’ll be 39, which isn’t that different from now.

    Part of this mindset comes from watching “The Walking Dead” with Jeremy. While it’s a zombie apocalypse TV show, it touches on themes of death, decay, and impermanence. These are real, tangible thoughts for me. I’m pissed about damaging the truck, and I’ll get the dent pulled out and get some touch-up paint. But it serves as a reminder that, eventually, something on this truck will break. The Bravada has so many parts that are messed up that can’t be replaced anymore.

    When is it time to say goodbye to the things from our past? I doubt I’ll ever love another truck as much. I like its simplicity, its analog nature. I really like Jeremy’s 2023 BRZ but just like every new car they’re all filled with garbage like a finnicky fake blinker and that dual climate control shit and it’s like, I don’t want the right side blowing AC and the left side blowing hot heater air; that doesn’t help anybody, it just makes the whole car luke warm. I’d rather just have a lukewarm temperature going on… This truck, and the Bravada too, are symbols of a time gone by. Once they’re gone, I’ve got to move on and accept the way things are. Sometimes, that’s just how you have to play it.

  • Kicking the can down the road

    Dear readers, I ask you a question: do you know who controls you? Most will say the government, some of the funny ones will say a wife/girlfriend, others might say something like an addiction or money (an object or goal), but as far as the tech world is concerned, it really comes down to conglomerate entities, and there isn’t really a way to get around it.

    I had a fear some time ago about my google account arbitrarily getting banned because of reading a post about how the creator of the hit game Terraria had his google account deleted for no reason, and lost a ton of stuff like his steam library, all of his email, a ton of services like Netflix and whatnot, and most importantly, a lot of his game development stuff like servers and licenses. Why was his account banned? Actually no reason. “This could happen to me!” So as a kneejerk reaction, I moved all of my email over to a zero-trust provider, in this case ProtonMail, and purchased a custom domain because it’s cool.

    So the big thought now is “alright, he moved email provider. It’s done, end of story, finished.” but wrong! See, I kinda hated proton mail because I didn’t like their mobile app and because of the way the encryption works there isn’t a way to view the email outside of the app (at least on mobile). So, I moved back to google. One big change occurred as a part of all of this, though, and that is that my new email is part of a custom domain that I pay for. All of my accounts are set up with that custom domain. Previous to this I had a single domain for my side business, Arizona Computer and that was (and still is, due to registration constraints and google being kinda sickly about who can have ‘premimum domains’) hosted on Google Domains. These new domains, however, are hosted with cloudflare. I chose cloudflare because they have an excellent record with kinda letting anyone use their platform, and their pricing model isn’t necessarily built around selling data (because, as we know, businesses that have an obvious way they make money are more honest than business where you are the product). All of this coalesces into making a system where my email provider can ban my email account and I lose no access to any accounts because I can simply point my thenathe.me domain elsewhere and use that email.

    Recently I was browsing r/selfhosted, a community of people on reddit that love running their own servers. I love this too, both because I love to tinker, I love the idea of having something uniquely my own, and also that all of this tinkering helps me stay up and current on my work as an IT professional. Anyway, as I was browsing this I thought “man, these people sure love hosting all of their own stuff and are usually very against M$, Google, Amazon/AWS, etc. Why do they love cloudflare so much?”. This is strange to me because, for people that seemingly hate centralization, they love cloudflare and it is a backbone for like 50% or more of the internet. And after a little while of searching, I came up with the referenced post. To summarize two portions of what is said:

    Different people do self hosting for different reasons and different levels of control. For a lot of people it’s not at all about getting away from big corporate but about having a space you can learn about working in big corporate better (homelab)

    At a certain point getting a public facing IP address that has some level of high end network protection requires a big company. Whether it’s OVH, Azure, AWS, Cloudflare… any solution that doesn’t involve your ISP’s IP being out in the wind and exposed to a DDoS attack will involve a large corporation.

    So this first idea is “a big evil is necessary to keep yourself safe”, very astute.

    Cloudflare has, until something changes, protected countless individuals from attackers for basically nothing. I trust them more than I trust my isp. And if you aren’t your own isp then you’re just kicking the can down the line.

    This argument is “cloudflare isn’t that bad, and because their business model is more transparent than the other world controlling entities, I like this world controlling entity the best”

    Basically I can turn off Cloudflare and my services would still work. My services don’t have a strong dependency on Cloudflare so I don’t find myself on a walled garden while I get some goodies like free caching to reduce my server load.

    Because cloudflare isn’t integral to my services, it isn’t nearly as bad as services that *are* needed and integral.

    It is impossible to be fully self-hosted unless you are running with an air-gap between you and the internet. The moment you connect to the internet you are by definition reliant on others. Your ISP, your phones data provider, and every other ISP whose equipment routes your traffic become participants in your network.

    Cloudflare is one of the participants who have both the scale and the toolset to assist in keeping as much control as possible in the hands of the self-hosting enthusiast.

    The hard core self-hosting crowd is far more reliant on those they reject than they will ever admit to themselves. The trick is to find a balance of control and usefulness.

    Pretending that you can get by in the modern internet age without security and reliance on what is essentially one of the big players that provide security is foolhardy. Even today, anyone can host their own email server on their local network. It isn’t hard to get that going. What is WILDLY difficult is staying safe, semi-anonymous, and secure while doing so. You’ll get hacked faster than a nascar driver can say “left turn”.

    Finally,

    You will always be subject to “big world-controlling” companies.

    Unless you are doing wiring yourself, getting a static IP from ICANN yourself, and building a processor from scratch, there will always be some “world-controlling company”. Even that IP address is within the control space of your ISP. The logic of the original statement falls flat however as even asking ICANN for an address would require you to go to some world controlling entity.

    This is the biggest kicker to me. Even if you do say “fuck cloudflare, google, amazon, M$, and all the rest, I’m gonna strike out on my own!”, you still need an ISP for an internet connection. Even if you surpass that and go directly to the ICANN to get your own top-level-IP, you are still going to a world controlling entity. And even if you don’t consider a regulation agency a WCE, you still have to go to the massive datacenters to get ‘recognized’ as an ISP so people will “service” your IP address (yes, that is a real thing and is a huge barrier of entry to legitimate modern ISP startups). There simply is no way to get past a WCE. You just kick the can down the road.

    And maybe that’s alright, cause it always sounded kinda lonely living as a hermit atop the mountain.

  • I don’t really understand journaling

    Before and during taking care of my dad while he had cancer, I started to journal. I am not 100% sure why, though, and that fact has been bugging me lately. It didn’t really feel good or relieve any stress, I didn’t share it with anyone (not like that would have helped anyway), and I still cannot bear to look back at it due to the sad feelings it reminds me of. Maybe one day I will look back at it, but I doubt it. I guess the point of this is that I do not fully understand the point of journaling or diaries. Like, do people write down the mundanities of their life and then just never look at it again? What benefit does that provide?

    I could understand that it would be for documenting what was going on at the time, or like life lessons and teachings that were imparted at the time. But I guess it is a little late for me to try and document anything about my dad at this point. Too late to cry over spilled milk, though.

  • This site isn’t as good as it’s inspiration

    I made this site after I saw my dad’s old site because I already had the domain and thought it would be cool to try and recreate something that my dad did in my own way, as sort of an homage to him. However, I just had the realization that I didn’t really make any of this. My dad posting my baby pictures comes to mind: he would put a banner at the top of the page to show everyone, but how would I do that with this ready made solution? Is the creation of something unique and personal and greater accomplishment and constructing than the retrofitting of something to work for your own purposes? My dad made his site by scratch, and while it is a lot more basic in functionality and technologies than my site, it is more personal and unique? I sure wish I could ask my dad his thoughts about this, but knowing him it would be something along the lines of “Who cares? Just have fun with it.”

    I guess I care, but I don’t really know why…