How not to be a noob

This will be a post with is kind of every thing put together i sill have to see if this makes sense. So i came about some videos by George Hotz and some articles he recommended and the topic coming up i thing is really interesting.

First i want to define how to be a noob, a noob is someone who seeks for validation of other people instead of a skill. „If i only had a collage degree the world would open up to me“, „I need a certificate for this“, „I need dollars from the state“. „Ooh i got to go through HR“ and hobble a bit infront of the people who think they run cooperations. Or if you are doing something in order to buy their stuff. . The same thing if you vote, you are just consenting to their ownership of you. The system only works because people buy into it. Do you ever own anything anymore? When you buy a playstation do you own that? When you buy a new car do you really own that? Do you own your kid? Or the state? If you oppose this, the skills follow.

Its everybody who wants to put you in a grid that is the problem. "The system isn't a few people oppressing the majority, the system is everybody oppressing everybody else"

Let's start with a story: In 18th-century Prussia, peasants would simply go into the forest and cut down whatever trees were growing there. Rationalists came up with the idea of clearing the forest and replacing it with Norway spruce, which had the highest yield per acre, planting them in a rectangular grid. This way, you could just go in and chop a gazillion trees and have as many as you wanted. However, this did not work out well. The ecosystem could not sustain this change and collapsed, leading to numerous diseases and forest fires. After a century, no Norway spruce was to be seen anywhere. Yet, the people who came up with the idea were promoted, and "scientific forestry" became established.

Cities in Europe tend to be densely packed with narrow alleys, tiny shops, and overcrowded streets. In the US, the situation is the complete opposite. Rationalists came up with the idea of evenly spaced grids, but people disliked them. Despite this, urban planners were still promoted. Just compare London with Chicago.

While many villagers planted 50 different crops in one field and used irregularly shaped parcels, rationalists came up with the idea of giant mechanized farms, also arranged in (say it with me) evenly spaced rectangular grids. However, for some reason, these farms had much lower yields than the villagers' methods.

In Africa, many projects aimed at providing better education and fresh water failed. Natives were resettled into evenly spaced villages where they would have access to electricity, water, and education. However, these villages continued to fail.

Why did these schemes fail but at the same time get celebrated, rewarded and continued? Its 2 parts:

First: The postmodernists were modernists who wanted everything to be as efficient and high-tech as possible, despite knowing little about math or science. They were essentially "LARPing" and placing things in grids. The state also wanted a better way to control and monitor, arranging things in a way that facilitated this. For example, it's easier to collect taxes when the trees are evenly ordered.

Second: Let's say you are a king and want to collect taxes for a crusade. Everyone below you is a peasant, so you decide to tax grain. You measure how many pints of grain everyone produces. However, a pint was 0.93 liters in Paris, 1.99 liters in Seine-en-Montane, and 3.33 liters in Précy-sous-Thil. Hmm, maybe give everyone the same basket for a new unit of measurement. Should the grain be pressed down? How thick should the rim be? How should you pour the grain? What should we do now? Just leave the problem to the lords below me. Over time, the size of the pints kept increasing slightly, about one-third from 1674 to 1716. But who will really care about this, right? It seemed small—until a revolution started, and as you're led to the guillotine, you might think it was actually a big deal. Maybe try to tax the land where the grain grows instead. The conclusion is that they did not have the ability to tax people effectively.

From the beginning, kings had an incentive to make the country "legible"—organized and well-indexed—so it was easy to know everything about everyone and to collect and double-check taxes. Nobles, on the other hand, had an incentive to frustrate the kings to protect their own positions. Commoners, who believed that anything making it easier for the State to tax them and interfere in their affairs was bad news, usually resisted as well.

(If you examine the Holocaust survival rate data, you will notice that the greater the legibility in a country, the worse it was for Jews. For example, in the Netherlands, there were many records indicating where Jews lived.)

High Modernism is closely related to standardization. Some of the greatest thinkers were High Modernists, like Le Corbusier. He was asked to redesign Moscow, and his idea was to kick out everyone, bulldoze everything, and redesign from scratch. Instead of using traditional systems of measurement, he invented one himself called the Modulor, which combined the average height of a Frenchman with the Golden Ratio. The Russians did not accept his plan, but some aspects ended up being used in Chandigarh, India.

„People will say: “That’s easily said! But all your intersections are right angles. What about the infinite variations that constitute the reality of our cities?” But that’s precisely the point: I eliminate all these things. Otherwise we shall never get anywhere. I can already hear the storms of protest and the sarcastic gibes: “Imbecile, madman, idiot, braggart, lunatic, etc.” Thank you very much, but it makes no difference: my starting point is still the same: I insist on right-angled intersections. The intersections shown here are all perfect.“ – Le Corbusier

High Modernist Principles in the context:

And to be fair, I think these are great points: bigger roads, easier navigation, and buildings that receive plenty of light. I’m on board.

One of Le Corbusier's students, Oscar Niemeyer, designed the perfectly rational city of Brasília for 500,000 inhabitants, but today it is only half full. Brasília is one of the few cities built entirely by High Modernists; most cities incorporate only parts of such ideals. Cities are often more than just functional spaces; they serve social goals and cater to art, culture, and coziness—things that aren't easily calculated. Americans want different things than Indians or Africans. Most rules state that while well-educated technocrats may understand principles that give them some advantages in their domain, they are often lost without the on-the-ground experience of the people they are trying to serve. The years of living in and dealing with their environment provide locals with deep, practical knowledge that is difficult to codify.

So lets go back to the question from above? Why did everybody keep doing it?

The collectivized farms couldn’t produce much, and people were placed in artificial towns designed to prevent the development of any sense of community. There was little to do except sleep, work in the fields, or attend public school, where they received their daily dose of state propaganda. The towns consisted of identical concrete buildings arranged in a grid, which left the locals disoriented (due to the lack of recognizable visual cues) and the officials well-oriented. All fields were perfectly rectangular and produced standardized food products, making it theoretically easy to calculate production levels and determine if targets were being met. Furthermore, having everyone in the same place made it much easier to deploy the army or secret police in case of trouble, compared to managing a dispersed population spread across countless tiny villages.

So, although modernist cities and farms may have initially aimed to improve living conditions and farming practices, they ultimately contributed to the broader government project of legibility and efficient tax collection. Be cautious when someone tries to put you into a grid.

Some thoughts on programming

Many people want to learn how to program but never start with the basics. It's important to first understand what programming really is and what you want to achieve with it.

At the end it is just:

(Imput -> Computation -> Ouput) -> this could be a paradime for understanding or learning anything.

What input to the system achieves my desired outcome? Let’s use an example: Suppose you want to change your flight on Delta without paying fees. You can call support and (input) → the support representative will talk to you (system) → the agent will press a button on some CRUD app (output). What else could you change in the input to influence the system? Call several times, change the words you use, dox the agent, or threaten them (which I don't advise). This is all part of input → system → output, also known as programming.

Lets look at programing for work, what does a software engineer do?

They are translators: („Business Requirements“ -> „Code“) <- many frameworks exist to make this easier „make a webpage to let the user input phone number“ <- Ruby on Rails, React <- memorizing weird syntax

What you will learn in bootcamps. -> You will only lean CRUD app programming -> are you willing to put 40hr a week into a relatively useless skill? (CRUD apps <- Create, read, update, delete) <- like a monk „Someone needs to copy the bible“ <- Software engineers really know nothing about computers

Easily solvable with AI:

1. Build a CRUD app contracting firm

2. Record all the inputs of my developers (Translators)

3. Trained AI model to translate „Business Logic“ -> „Code“

Want to be:

High Brow Software Engineer

1. Understand a complex system

2. Modify the system add a feature

3. Ship the new system

Machine Learning Engineer

1. Download Paper

2. Implement it

3. Keep doing this until you have skills

Sell Cars

1. Advertising (10.000)

2. Visit the dealership (100)

3. Buy cars (5)

Waisting Time

Every thing you don’t get in life you just realize you did not want it anyway.

Existentialism -> you make your own meaning

There's not such thing as wasting time; wasting time is great, that's the point of time; to waste it!

1. Don’t fall in funnels.

2. Don’t be influenced by advertising.

3. Don’t fall in skinner boxes.

If you are learning object-level skills, you're probably not focusing on the right things. These skills may become obsolete when the tools or technologies change. Instead, focus on meta-level concepts that are more likely to reveal truths about the world.

Are you learning something from nature or people?

Nature -> good/Power over nature is waxing.

People -> bad/Power over people is waning.

Data Science -> statistics -> good

Tooling used at company x -> no

Build a knowledge tree

New information fits into the tree

-„Interpolation“ is possible

- Framework for understanding

Elon roots knowledge tree in physics (modernist)

George root knowledge in tree information (postmodernist)

Thanks,

Finn