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Its like he cannot help himself sometimes. He has a video where he talks about a time he was miserable in college, and within literally moments it becomes not just that he was upset but Actually, everyone was miserable, even the people who seemed happy were obviously miserable, in fact being happy was probably philosophically impossible. Because of course, as he is the protogonist, this is just simply true. And this becomes the impetus for his life change to leave the stifling, dependent life in a city, and to become 'indepedent',,, by spending every day producing content on social media for the approval of others, living a life alone inside a perfectly normal house in the grand 'wilderness' of central Florida literally an entire single digit of miles away from the nearest town center where he mythologizes minor home repair and living a life as effectively a performer for crowds as being this grand traditionalist arc in the narrative of his reality. Anyway, the lord 'humbled' him a few days by breaking the water heater that came with the house broke, and he had to get a repair man to fix it. I don't know, there is something fascinating about a social conservative trying to mythologize their own extremely typical central Floridian life so blatantly. You look at him and realize that the only thing keeping him together is his connection to everything he claims to reject. What tradition has re-captured living inside a house built by someone else, furnished by someone else, living a life as a youtuber with unironically no other community or connection to the world around him that he supposedly adores? I guess his neighbor's property makes for good vlog backgrounds outside his car windows? Its just intellectual dishonesty and self-mythologizing wrapped up in narrative causality.
anon in r/vim/comments/hjfxsz/lets_play_vimtutor_learned_basic_vim_commands_and/fwn5llu
The guy is a pretty extreme branch of social conservative, the kind of person who gets upset at pride flags and thinks the world is devolving into degeneracy because [insert this generations fears here]. And that kind of content got old millenia ago and I personally don't like watching reruns. I think Plato did it best ranting about how wide spread literacy and books would destroy the soul of humanity and make true learning and teaching impossible, but every generation needs a subset of people who can only rationalize the world around them as a narrative, its like a kind of flawed thinking where you have to process everything effectively like its a coherent story with a beginning middle and end unfolding around you based on whatever arbitrary values or beliefs you hold. The world isn't immeasurably complex, filled with people just like me living equally complex lives, as a sustained chaotic system. Its a story, and because of these events in the story which I have decided are important, this will happen to end the story because of course its ending, stories must have an ending. Its a useful trick in small doses to help us make quick judgements, but this kind of mystical thinking can consume anybody regardless of intelligence, you can end up with religious fanatics, conspiracy theorists, or Uncle Ted sending mail bombs. So what can I say, his brand of historical narcissism ranting about the degeneracy arc in his fan fiction version of reality just doesn't appeal to most people. His other content can be fine, hes entertaining, well spoken, at least a little self aware. But also, him and his community are a dumpster fire. For a group that thinks they are woken up to the truth of reality, they are perhaps the most bound to a belief in narrative causality of them all. The dude and his audience need to stop popping pills purely based on their color hoping that this next one will remove enough off the edge off reality to make it make small enough to fit inside whatever their pet narrative is and try living in the real, terrifyingly complex world.
anon in r/vim/comments/hjfxsz/lets_play_vimtutor_learned_basic_vim_commands_and
He is not anti-modernity at all. He isn't even alt right, he calls out America and Western society arguing that all Western nations have become vassals to the US which is completely true and the US has had complete authority to remake the world in anyway that would solely benefit America. WW1 and WW2 destroyed the fabric of European and Asian society (Including their colonies) allowing America to become the moral and cultural authority in Western Nations and and the absolute authority everywhere else. They then, with help from the USSR proceeded to destabilize the entire Middle East. The result? Homogenization of culture, morals and beliefs (Or lack there of) at the expense of thousands of years of history, including tremendous loss of traditional skill sets and local industries in favor of offshoring to promote Globalism in pursuit of Capitalism and recently, Consumerism. To be perfectly clear, nobody is arguing that there wasn't anyone worse than the US in terms of the destruction of culture, history and industries, the British destroyed the world before them, especially India. And the continuing ethnic tensions between Pakistan, India and Bangladesh are a direct result of the second partition of India (Thank you Winston Churchill). His arguments are very similar to Ted Kaczynski yes. But has anyone even read his manifesto? No. His ideas are completely dismissed because the world has been conditioned into believing he was a monster who's only intent was as a mindless murderer. He took action against the people who he viewed were poisoning American society and he foresaw many, many of the issues we face today in society where people can't even think for themselves anymore. People have become subservient to technology, at the expense of rational thought, morals, and meaningful and fulfilling work. Yet we all hail Guy Fawkes for attempting to blow up Parliament in the UK, making movies about him and dramatizing his life to the point where the Guy Fawkes mask has become a global icon being used by freedom fighters everywhere. But fetishize Kaczynski as a clever, lost and eccentric psychopath in murder porn documentaries. Right so Guy Fawkes the freedom fighter we should all aspire to be like him. Ted Kaczynski the monster, don't read his work or listen to his ideals because he is a Communist, Racist, Socialist, Maoist, Marxist, Anti American, Liberal Nazi. What Luke Smith and Ted Kaczynski have in common is they see the damage "technology, innovation, and science" has brought to the world. Everything people have been taught about the past is a lie to push the modern Capitalist agenda in commercializing everything for profit. While America pursuits a false manifesto of "Freedom", destroying countries and removing their duly elected leaders to bring them Democracy! Where you can duly elect your leaders (That we personally recognize and that will support the American Empire way of life). That does not make him anti-modern or anti-technology. What he does recognize and espouse is how "technology" or whatever is being termed as "innovation" now a days has destroyed society. And he is right. We aren't living in the best age ever with the best of everything. Everything is being remade in a worse form. 120 years ago beggars on the street used to wear cotton. Today they wear synthetic trash that destroys their bodies and kills them due to exposure to the elements. Another example, Cameras are worse than ever, in fact the original Photographic processes in the 1800s, such as Daguerreotypes and Wetplates are still the highest fidelity images you can create to the point where Queen Victoria's baby pictures are capable of being scanned in far higher resolution than anyone's digital images for the past 24 years. Isn't it sad that we live in a society that has been fooled into giving up all of our physical rights and thoughts to the point where we are still be able to see Queen Victoria's entire life in stunning detail, but anyone born or alive post 2000 has had their entire life and childhood reduced to grainy compressed images on a tiny piece of paper and we still look down on the past as backwards and antiquated? That's what he is arguing "Technology", especially digital technology has blinded us and we've become slaves to the companies that pay us next to nothing, living unfulfilling lives with no meaningful skillsets. The power goes out or the internet cuts? A person now becomes effectively disabled with no ability to work in or interact with the real world.
ReclusiveEagle in r/Destiny/comments/10vfxnc/what_are_you_guys_thoughts_on_luke_smith_youtube
> He is a white supremacist? I know people have called him that for a little while but I've been watching his tech related videos for some time and I don't think he is. Right wing conservative christian yes, but nothing I've seen him say has been that racist, defiantly misogynist however. People saw that he had a copy of mein kamf on a bookshelf and one point and held that up as proof, but hes a linguist by trade so you can excuse that fairly easily. To me he just seems like a guy who went to college, decided that he hated the liberal system there, and then moved to the country to live the simple life. Is he somewhat weird yes but a full blown white supremacist not at all. Not a fascist either, hes probably a lot closer to an anarcho primitivist. Hes made videos where he speaks against agricultural regulations, state funded roads, things like that. Not really a fascist point of view in my experience.
anon_johnson in r/Monero/comments/m466n9/luke_smith_a_well_known_privacy_and_foss_advocate/
Imagine going out for your daily walk and hearing something in the distance. You head forward and come across an open field, in the middle is a man, yelling to seemingly no one. He starts pacing back and forth, his volume increasing. You're startled. You edge forward to see what the commotion is, and are able to make out a few words. "Cuck" "Linux" "bOOmer". You're not sure what it means, but he turns towards you and you duck into the brush. A shrill voice calls out "Dood! My Job! they want me to get the VaxArEEnO!". You realize this is no place for you. You peak to see if his back is turned. It is. You make a run for it. "Anyways, that's why normies SUCK" he shouts after you as you run faster, starting to become panicked. You get home alright, but you don't feel safe walking around alone again. - Bob sagget
anon in r/linuxmasterrace/comments/qzgdk9/found_in_luke_smiths_comment
I personally think Luke Smith is alright. I'm not gonna hate him for his political takes. If you don't like them, then ignore those videos. His stuff on configuration is great. His Arch install video was very helpful, especially the after minimal install part, where he explains with i3 you're gonna have to install fonts and things like that. When I first installed Arch then i3, it was very confusing without fonts lmao. I also see a comment below that claims Luke believes he knows more about computation than [insert famous programmer here]. But I never found him being arrogant in his computer science skills. He has never claimed to be super knowledgeable about that, in fact often states that he is not even a fan of technology. I can't say I've watched all his videos or whatever, but idk where anybody got that take from.
copper4eva in r/linuxmemes/comments/dkh6jx/luke_smith_starter_pack
Dude is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Arizona. Sloppy understanding of syntax, riddled with confusions about what's top-down and what's bottom-up, rambles incoherently, thinks he understands more about syntax and computation than legendary figures like Bever, Piatelli-Palmarini et al., and having to listen to his incoherent ramblings about "syntax" is more of a pain in the ass than having to listen to a creationist about evolution. His political understanding is not that much better. Paranoid for the most part, and not for the right reasons. Mostly libertarian apologies for capitalism, and every once in a while ranting about "corporations" without making it clear what he means by that term. He is like an even weirder version of Ayn Rand. I have been told by multiple high-profile professors not to bother responding to him in conferences, although it is certainly hard to ignore him as he keeps interrupting you when you are trying to present a paper. I'm just glad I don't share a department with him...
That's the difference between someone who knows how to write code and someone who can write a book like Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. He starts a podcast, I forget which one, by telling people that none of the students in Arizona were interested in Chomsky, or the conversation between Minsky and Chomsky. When his cohorts called him out on his bullshit, he responds with a rambling post about how most of them are delusional individuals who have failed to understand both formal methods and computations. He refers to people like Lakoff, largely abandoned by computationalists, to make his point but deliberately misinterprets even that. He is kind of like Jordan Peterson... extremely good at taking two unrelated facts, then combining them to make a complete fiction which he peddles as "fact". At one point he tried to convince some of us that the entire line of cognitive scientists from McCarthy to Fodor have all missed some fundamental facts that ONLY HE has been able to see through. Yet, he never explains what those are . He was also very disparaging about Medeiros, an actually insightful alumni of UA who made some novel bottom-up contributions, on the same grounds. Basically claiming that Medeiros could not be right, even though the data was all there for everyone to see, because a lot of people disagreed with him. Yet, when everyone disagrees with him, he has no problems calling everyone "delusional". Unfortunately, there are always people like him in graduate school - clever folks with no patience for understanding and insight who are so eager to become the de facto standard in science that they take to trash-talking the most successful and respected people in the field. Unfortunately, it gets the attention of some people who are not quite experts but have some amount of understanding. In mathematics there is the looney tune call Weinstein who every mathematician considers a crackpot, but who nonetheless has a Big Think interview (thanks to his buddy Peter Theil) talking about how everyone from Newton to Einstein have completely failed to provide any answers at all. Apparently he has them, but not unlike our friend Smith here, he never seems to share them with any of us.
I have no opinion/feelings about him. But I have seen him irritate, irk and depress countless hard-working students. Some of whom were poor, and surviving on scholarships. Scholarships that require them to maintain a certain GPA. His douchebaggery would get on their nerves, affect their work, and lead them into more stress while this asshole was hiding in his shack. Hiding in a shack does not absolve him from responsibility, nor does pointing out his lack of basic manners imply that I have strong feelings about him. Try to put some time into your thinking and come up with something actually clever when you get the urge to make a clever equation.
All his statements are variations of "Chomsky is completely wrong about neural computations", or "Only I can actually understand what Darwin meant and everyone else is delusional", or "No body uses Linux the right way, and should learn from me". This is fun in general... but when you are in the middle of explaining fractal patterns and fibonacci sequences in syntax, and this piece of shit goes off in a tangent about how only he truly understands mathematics... it just makes me want to take my right foot, and shove it down his throat. He is a glorified techno-weenie. There're a zillion guys like him trying to get the attention of nitwits by impressing them with ricing unix distros, followed by statements like "I shall show the true way" Fuck him.
biolinguist in r/linuxmemes/comments/dkh6jx/luke_smith_starter_pack
I don't care about Luke Smith however here is my view of him since I saw my first video of him years ago: Unfortunate I feel like a lot of people who reach a critical amount of popularity start to get ignorant and arrogant. Also they tend to often think their opinion is the best, the only valid one and worth more than those of others. Most likely start to get angry or toxic towards opinions and point of view which do not play nice with their own one and start to get way to serious about certain topics. Like as if their sanity start a race downwards into madness. A trend I saw a often in my life. There is just a different "level of madness" certain people reach before they hit the break. I admit that you do not need to agree with everyone and that there are multiple valid answers and solutions for a problem. That's why the open source community is so awesome. But if you are unable to maintain a civil conversation about something it does not benefit anyone. Be it just "the best Linux distribution" or "SystemD vs something else" "Xorg vs Wayland" or "AMD GPUs vs NVidia GPUS plus their drivers". (Only exception is GNU/Linux, Linux, SystemD/Linux vs Windows of course since Linux is the only true and valid answer to all your problems :D ) On every side there is a lot to disagree with and a lot which could be improved. That's why good communication is vital. But also everybody needs to understand that there is no one single solution. No "One thing to rule them all". Everyone needs to decide which suit their needs or they do understand better. That's the base issue I see with a lot of popular Linux personalities. Also in case of Luke Smith here: They also start to use their popularity to advocate other things as those they grew up with. Like Luke being a famous LinTuber (Let's call the Linux YouTubers LinTubers) and slowly taking a shift towards something else, in this case something political. I do understand it is his channel, his choice what to show there and how he want to advance. But on the other hand his fan base grew because of Linux and they do expect Linux centric content by him and don't want to know his political opinions. He'll probably loose half of this subscribers if he continues like this. Also I must admit I don't care about his political orientation as long as he does not force them onto others. I don't know what causes this other than most people being unable to handle their popularity properly. But in the end they seem to loose the ability to communicate properly, may just turn insane until they noticed the FU and start over again. Some do improve form this stage on others do life through the same situation again. There are other famous LinTubers and other Linux personalities which fit into this pattern too to some extend. This is nothing solely Luke is affected by. Maybe it is just how the human mind works. I don't know.
anon in r/linuxmemes/comments/jo0zrb/deleted_by_user/gb5t8la
I used to watch his videos quite a bit, but I gave up on them. He’s showcased some decent Linux things before, and he occasionally has a good point about other things, but Luke is an idiot about most things. For example with the coronavirus stuff he believes there’s nothing to it outside of a normal seasonal flu and that it’s all about “political ends”. (I don’t use 4chan, so I don’t know what the general view there is, but I remember people joking that he bought into every meme from /g/, so it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s where some of his other views come from.)

He likes to talk up his independence, but it sounds like his current situation is made possible solely because of family. He mentioned (only once I think) that he had some sort of inheritance when he was looking for property to buy, and then he wound up getting a good deal on his house from family. He lives out in the country and is able to survive because of a massive number of things that he constantly speaks out against (like roads for example but also social media).

The general hypocrisy he constantly displays is pretty comical too. He’ll tell his viewers how bad cell phones are, but he has one that he uses (he used to say that he only had/used it because his parents had him on their plan). He’ll tell his viewers how dumb college is and that they shouldn’t go, but he’s working on a PhD in linguistics (it might make sense for someone to go, get a bachelor’s degree, and still speak negatively about it, but to go as far as he has it’s just hypocritical). He’ll tell his viewers how they shouldn’t play games because they’re a pointless waste of time, but he has games on his computer including a full Nintendo 64 ROM set, and he has a physical N64 that was on his desk in a video once. (When the ROMs were visible in a video he said he just has them for nostalgia but doesn’t play them, and someone commented that they’re expecting to see a full collection of Playboy magazines that Luke just has for nostalgia and never looks at.) He’ll complain about consumers, but he participated in Black Friday sales because he really wanted something (I guess unlike the other people who bought stuff that day). And on it goes.

One funny thing is that he was saying that anti-systemd talk is cringe with no basis to it. Then within very little time he was talking about how he uses Artix now because it doesn’t have “soystemd”. (Personally, I don’t know enough either way to say anything, I just think the flip is funny.) I think he’s just someone who takes strong stances on things he doesn’t know enough to be taking such strong stances about.
https://lemmy.eus/post/5128/20702
I will always remember Luke Smith as the perfect example of what happens when you fall for every single /g/ meme at once, without carefully analyzing them first. He owns four ThinkPads at least. While I see nothing wrong with them in themselves, as they are admittedly pretty good value for the price, four is just mindless consumerism, contradictory to his "philosophy". He started using every single shitty pseudominimalist, ncurses-based program, used a shitty riced out i3 setup of dubious actual productivity (like all tiling wms), then fell for the full Suckless meme and went in even deeper. Then he started making videos shitting on Python and praising C, which is ironic considering he is not even a programmer by his own admission. He effectively spent years trying out, configuring and hopelessly trying to integrate tens of meme programs to build what is, combined, effectively a shittier Emacs, just like most of /g/ was doing in their "productive" desktop threads a year or two ago. Then he read the Unabomber manifesto and blindly accepted it without constructively analyzing it first, same with the anarcho-primitivist ideology that was all the rage about a year and a half ago on 4chan and 8ch. While he stated on his website that he "didn't browse 4chan much anymore" it was obvious this wasn't the case.Then he went and took the memes way too far, and unironically went to live in isolation. While I see nothing wrong in itself, the actual reason he did it is massive cringe. He has the mentality of someone 10 years younger than he is, yet he acts like a literal boomer jokingly criticizing "zoomers" despite he himself being the worst example of a millennial. He attacks "nerds" when it't painfully obvious he's deeply unhappy with himself, as it was obviously self-directed criticism thinly veiled as an edgy dabbing video. He is a perfect example of someone you should avoid becoming at all costs.
Luke Smith Copypasta from InstallGentoo Wiki

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