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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.


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


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.


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?


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.


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.


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


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.


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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!


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".


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).


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?


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.

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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.


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.


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.


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.

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