Category: continuous wave identification

There’s not much I can say about this book that hasn’t already been said a hundred times before. I finished The Brother’s Karamazov after a month of picking it up and putting it down repeatedly for a number of reasons. But I was determined to finish it because it’s the perfect time of year for heavy classic Russian literature.

I ask myself “What is hell?” And I answer thus: “The suffering of being no longer able to love.”

I loved every moment of this book. Dostoevsky is a master of his craft. From the depths he gives each character and situation, to the huge questions he beckons you to wrestle with, to the allegory of nearly every plot point, everything is deliberate, sprawling, and it reads so naturally.

It’s clear that the actual story is just a conduit for most of the philosophy that Dostoevsky explores: morally broken characters wrapped in a heinous event, each one coming to terms with their responsibility in that event, and the levels of despair each character falls largely determined by the lens they are all meant to be as a position in the broader discussion.

I say ‘discussion’ in the singular, but this book tackles so many themes: greed, lust, murder, and justice, to name a few. Still, the central question is whether humanity can be good without faith. The ‘Grand Inquisitor’ is often called the book’s most significant moment, and I agree. The takeaway is that without a basis in faith, we lose the ability to calibrate our morality. If there is no God, then ‘everything is permitted’ because the very definition of ‘good’ disappears.

However, I am more inclined to cite the discussion between Ivan Fyodorovich and Lucifer later in the novel as my personal standout. Lucifer argues that Ivan’s nihilism is self-defeating because, without evil, there can be no definition of good. Without giving ‘the good’ a tangible representation, we find ourselves at odds with our innate consciousness—which I define here as our epistemic intuition that good exists and must be defined through our pursuit of it.

“…What good is faith by force? Besides, proofs are no help to faith, especially material proofs. Thomas believed not because he saw the risen Christ but because he wanted to believe even before that.”

The need to reconcile what we know to be good and its existence, Dostoevsky argues, relies on a spiritual underpinning that we aren’t really required to reconcile. We have a natural desire to be good, we try to be good, we aren’t always good, but in the pursuit of the good we create the beauty necessary for an otherwise ugly world.

The year is drawing to a close very quick and I am doing lots of reading as one is want to do when it gets cold outside and the nights get longer. There’s no surprise then that this time of year brings with it a implicit attraction to some of the Russian classics; of which I’ve been taking my time getting through The Brothers Karamazov.

However, when I finish one or two books from each part of the novel I put it down and dive into something else to give my brain time to catch up. Upon doing so this time I decided to pick up The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, which I’ve just finished.

I tried reading Never Let Me Go in the past but it just could not hold my attention. However, The Remains of the Day was a profound and beautiful story. One I burned through over the course of three evenings.

What kept me coming back was the sorrow I felt for the main character the whole time. As I read, I could see he had devoted so much of his life to his idea of order that he missed out on so much. Under the guise of dignity, he closes himself off to the beauty of the human experience.

I suppose that is what happens to a lot of us. We will always have memories, but how we chose to spend our time determines how those memories return to us.

Heartbreaking, wonderfully crafted, and engrossing. This was a 10 out of 10 read for me.

Currently listening:

Trump admin will partially fund November SNAP benefits

Words can’t express how vile I think weaponizing food is. Both sides are guilty of this at the expense of “protecting their platform” or whatever weird justification they are using.

Currently reading: The Botanist by MW Craven

Locked-room mysteries are not something I’ve ever explored before. Although I believe this is the 8th book in this series, I’m having a blast with near-zero insight into character backstories. Quite an easy read so far but the real spotlight here belongs to the dialogue. The conversations between characters in this book feel natural, not too full of shitty banter, and drive the story forward in a meaningful way. Really enjoying it so far.

credit: Brickmason (cover art for: 𝐧 𝐢 g h t c 𝐨 m m u t 𝐞)

The Paradox of Progress

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argues that, despite the grim picture often painted by the news, humanity has made astonishing progress throughout history. He points to significant gains in life expectancy, literacy, and the fight against extreme poverty. Pinker credits these achievements to the spread of Enlightenment ideals like logic, science, and morality.

While this theory seems encouraging, a strong counterargument suggests that progress always comes at a cost. For example, globalization and economic policies have created an extreme income gap, and the resulting inequality can fuel populism, a force that has historically been detrimental to society.

This pattern is a social cycle, and the current phase of the social cycle we’re in now is not the first, nor will it be the last. I believe there is an implicit limit to the amount of progress we can make toward a utopian future. Our cyclical nature means that genuine, equitable progress cannot be measured linearly. It is a constant process of moving the proverbial goalposts. This, I believe, is the very nature of the human condition.

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The Net / Net of Technological Progress

Advances in technology are often sold as net positives for humanity. This is sometimes true, but not always. The existence of delivery services, for example, comes at the cost of gig-economy workers struggling to afford basic healthcare. However, I believe that technologies like generative / agentic AI could be a net positive for humanity, given that their development is not guided by transhumanist or “effective accelerationism” philosophies.

To be clear, I do not believe that AI in its current form is a net positive yet. While I could discuss the environmental and infrastructural ramifications of this technology, that is not the primary focus of this series. Instead, I am concerned with the nature of our relentless pursuit of technological progress and whether we truly need it to realize our full potential.

The problem with defining a “potential” for humanity is that it sets an ultimate, achievable goal, which contradicts our inherently cyclical nature. Therefore, when I use the term potential, I am not referring to a finite end-state. Instead, I am referring to our ability to adapt and respond to our ever-changing environment in service of guaranteeing the foundational needs of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs for as many people as possible.

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The Role of Technology in Human Progress

In summary:

1. Human progress is cyclical and always has a cost.
2. Technology is not always a net-positive, but it has the potential to be.
3. The goal should be to meet the foundational needs of as many people as possible, not to pursue a utopia.

Therefore, the thoughtful use of technology should help accelerate the process of providing basic foundational needs for everyone. The key word here is should. Thoughtfully deployed technology should be a net positive for humanity. But is it necessary for this pursuit?

Many would say yes, but I argue that while not strictly necessary, it is essential. For instance: small-scale communities can meet their needs without modern technology, but providing for a global population of billions requires technological systems for efficient food production, water purification, and resource distribution.

The other key word is accelerate. Technology drives the pace of change. Without it, positive change would be slow and generational. But while technology accelerates progress, it almost always creates new problems, which in turn require further technological solutions. For example, renewable energy technologies are essential for addressing the environmental costs of industrialization. Technological advancement, in essence, requires more technological advancement.

So, do humans require technology to realize our full potential? Yes. The question now becomes: at what point do we recognize our full potential with the help of machines?

When I decided to go back to college in my early 30’s I remember being committed to taking in as much of the information from my classes as I could. After all, I was paying for my education out of pocket this time around. High School was a blur to me and I promptly, almost purposefully, forgot everything I learned as soon as I threw my mortarboard in the air. But, this time around I was determined to learn.

Which is why I have this vivid memory of my Physics professor smacking a table on a Zoom call and telling the class why our perception of that small act of violence was in direct contradiction to what quantum physics would have us believe. He then proceeded to tell us that he doesn’t understand quantum physics, that no one does, and that if anyone ever tells us they understand it that we should tell them they are full of shit.

That was it. That was about as much of an introduction I got to the subject and it wasn’t until I read Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland that I came to understand, at a high level, what quantum physics actually was: a predictive theory of probabilities and the study of the principles that govern those probabilities. The contradictions my professor tried to point out by smacking a table were the assumptions of classical physics we hold, most of which are deterministic.

Fast-forward to yesterday when I read this article and it broke my brain.

Quantum tunneling, wherein particles pass through energy barriers without the energy required to do so because of their associated wave-function, essentially means that some particles of an object can potentially appear on the other side of a barrier regardless of their total energy at that point in time. No interaction of the particle and the barrier is even required.

Apparently the hypothesis is that in the early days of the universe, tunneling that occurred through high-energy barriers could have caused quantum fluctuations that may have caused gravitational collapse thus resulting in primordial black holes.

I am sitting here imagining particles entering primordial black holes, being flung out the other end, and somehow ending up, through various processes on their way here, creating amino acids that ended up on Earth and thus aiding in creating life here. We’re talking about leakage all the way down, my friends. Particle leakage through energy barriers, particle leakage across various corners of the universe, and those particles falling (or otherwise leaking through the atmosphere) onto Earth and into the water.

Those of you who know me know I hate a double-truth, and the double-truth right now is that I am both fascinated and terrified at this concept. I’m not sure I’ll ever watch Ant-Man the same way ever again.

There was a geomagnetic storm today that knocked out all of the 10m+ bands of the Earth’s radio frequencies. While trying to investigate this via the waterfall plots on SDR servers earlier, I stumbled upon a ‘net’ that was taking place in North Texas wherein a group of people were triangulating a 40-mile wide storm cell that was headed East.

The kicker was that these operators were transmitting on the 2m bands given that the ionosphere was out of commission whereas they would otherwise be on the higher frequencies (most of them had their general class HAM licenses).

To top it off, the National Weather Service would interject every once in a while to get field reports from these operators on the aforementioned storm.

So in essence, the sun attacked the Earth and rendered a layer of it’s atmosphere inefficient for reflecting specific vibrations, so these people recalibrated their vibration modulation tools so as to operate under the atmosphere enough such that they could keep other people, including a Federal government agency, up to date on what how the Earth’s atmosphere was impacting their region’s climate. With 125-year-old technology no less.

I find this absolutely fascinating.

Now listening:

The older I get the more existential dread starts to make me feel like I’ve foolishly wasted my time in this little corner of the universe. Lately I’ve given credence to that idea by rotting on my couch scrolling through the muck and the mire of social media feeds. This is objectively bad for all of us, yet it’s the de facto mode of operation I settle into once the sun sets and all the chores have been finished. I’m not sure how or when that happened and I think that’s what worries me every time I remember how many years I likely have left.

I’ve recently rediscovered a way to hide from the assault of news outlets and bot-piloted burner accounts screaming at one another about the downfall of humanity: blogs. Remember those? Most people had one at some point; some remembered to get rid of them before they grew up and embarrassed themselves, but a select few maintained the practice — namely, authors and culture curators.

These individuals have created a sort of retreat for people that I think is criminally overlooked in today’s firehose of noise and misinformation. They’ve created spaces to share art that hasn’t been generated in a server room. They’ve given themselves room to think and others room to do the same. They are providing an alternative to the same handful of autonomous systems that a majority of the population lock into throughout the day; a place to calm down for a second and consider something other than violent rhetoric.

This is important. And this is why I’ve created this space. To give myself a commonplace book of sorts to deposit some of the cool things I find or think about each day, and a conduit to share those things with others. Things that don’t raise your resting heart rate. Preferably things that help us all remember that, regardless of what’s going on, it’s still pretty damn cool out here.

Keep an eye on this space. In the meantime, check out some of the spaces I like to frequent below.

• Warren Ellis LTD / morning computer
• thejaymo
• Austin Kleon
• Daily Philosophy
• Recomendo
• Scalzi’s Whatever