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Hello and welcome to my journal! Here I write about my own ideas and promote others' ideas. I mostly talk about computing, philosophy, spirituality, privacy, and society but this journal is not limited to those topics.
Date: 11 October 2020
Read time: 21 minutes
Summary: Philosophers have argued for thousands of years about how we should think about ethics, how to decide what's right and what's wrong. The range of answers has been extensive. I explain why we should abandon traditional moral theories entirely and instead opt for a reductionist, pragmatic approach to morality based on hypothetical imperatives.
Date: 22 September 2020
Read time: 7 minutes
Summary: This post is about good rules of thumb and things to keep in mind when running a blog.
SIUe Unauthenticated SMTP Server
Date: 21 September 2020
Read time: 2 minutes
Summary: American colleges and universities are institutions with some of the weakest cybersecurity where you would expect better. This makes them easy targets for hackers. The reason is they don't have strong incentives to do better. Unless having poor cybersecurity is going to lose money, business as usual will continue and unauthenticated email servers will stay online.
Networked EV Charging Stations
Date: 09 September 2020
Read time: 7 minutes
Summary: Networked EV charging stations are a threat to democracy and national security. Collecting the locations on millions of law-abiding citizens is a capability no government or private entity should be allowed have. When I was attending SIUe in October of 2019, I emailed the parking services staff about the privacy concerns I had about the new Chargepoint stations that were being installed and encouraged them to install non-networked stations instead.
Free Will is Incoherent - Part 2
Date: 22 August 2020
Read time: 14 minutes
Summary: In part 1 I showed that free will is incoherent. In part 2 I discuss the implications of that fact on responsibility, compassion, justice and interpersonal relationships.
Date: 02 August 2020
Read time: 8 minutes
Summary: Remember when you got stuck thinking about something but you didn't realize you were thinking until after? Even if you don't know what I'm talking about you've almost certainly had that experience before. Ego traps are the self-reinforcing thoughts that set you on the path of thinking without awareness of thinking.
Date: 26 July 2020
Read time: 10 minutes
Summary: This post is a public service announcement about backups inspired by the post I lost. I've had my own backups for over 5 years, and never have I lost any data from those backups. The following advice is meant for individuals, not a corporate or business setting.
Date: 02 July 2020
Read time: 7 minutes
Summary: This is the story of how I learned about free software, wrestled with my conscience and ultimately quit my job as a labs and classrooms technician at SIUe because I couldn't justify supporting the proprietary software anymore.
Free Will is Incoherent - Part 1
Date: 19 June 2020
Read time: 10 minutes
Summary: I present a formal, objective knock down argument against free will refuting the common arguments for it and show how lack of free will is actually liberating, not nihilistic.
Date: 14 June 2020
Read time: 15 minutes
Summary: What doublethink means in the context of this post is to feel a certain way about how you feel. It means to have an opinion of your own thoughts. It normally goes by the name metacognition. As novice practitioners of meditation quickly realize, you can "go meta" infinitely about your own thinking to the point that your mind becomes twisted into a complicated knot. In this post I talk about common ways the mind-knot is tied.
SIUe e-ID Creation and Maintenance Problems
Date: 10 June 2020
Read time: 8 minutes
Summary: Somehow SIUe can't create a decent looking webpage for managing your own university account. It should undergo a complete redesign, but that probably won't happen for a while since it isn't losing the university money.
Date: 06 June 2020
Read time: 1 minute
Summary: Every SIUe student, faculty and staff member's full name, year, address and phone number has been available through the university search engine for years. It could facilitate stalking and it's a huge data privacy concern. It should at least be behind a login portal and remove phone numbers and addresses.
Date: 23 May 2020
Read time: 20 minutes
Summary: Since COVID-19 spread everywhere, the world now relies on Zoom to provide video communication for job meetings, university classrooms, courtrooms, government meetings, mental health services and personal interactions. It is based in China, a surveillance state country with little government/corporate separation currently committing cultural genocide against Uyghurs. Zoom itself has an awful security and privacy track record and contains known malicious features. What could possibly go wrong?
Date: 02 May 2020
Read time: 11 minutes
Summary: There is no isolated, unchanging self that answers to the name of "I". The feeling that there is this self, this center to the flow of experience, is only an illusion. Experience has no center. The self is the unbearable burden that we're all better off without.
Date: 30 April 2020
Read time: 10 minutes
Summary: This is my free software story. This semester I took Intro to Artificial Intelligence at SIUe. Artificial Intelligence is a senior level course. I'll call the professor, "Professor X" to preserve anonymity.
Unless otherwise noted, the writing in this journal is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Copyright 2019-2021 Nicholas Johnson