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Making TROM II. 3 years in one post.

Making TROM II. 3 years in one post.

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6 months to record the interviews
40 hours of interview recordings
3.3 terabytes of project files
13.000 media files used
3 years in the making

FIRST: In these 3 years I did a lot of other things.

 

From moving all of our websites to an unmanaged server (and that requires you to become a server admin), to the release of TROM.tf (some 20 trade-free services, including our own social network, video platform, or file hosting) together with moving all of our videos and social presence there; I also managed and improved TROMjaro in this time, even moved form Gnome to XFCE, and learned how to manage our own packages – basically a ton of work. Oh and I had to rebuild VideoNeat a few times, and more stuff probably that I can’t even remember. Lots of TROM-casts, a lot of stress because of the lack of money, plus the work I was doing for WebApe to try to make more money…I was really busy.

Therefore, I was not fully working on this documentary. If I did, I would have done it in one year probably.

What did I want to do with this documentary?

Look, I know what I want to tell to the world. In my mind it is very simple. I can narrow it down to this:

We live in a society that humans have invented. It is based on their imagination: money, social statuses, ownership, prices, stuff, you name it. People imagine these things and the value of them. Shockingly, despite the same humans discovering how the world is (atoms, galaxies, cells, evolution, etc.), their day to day life is basically unchanged for the past thousands of years. The world they invented overwrites the world they have discovered. To me this is not only shocking, but extremely harmful because they chase illusions like money, fame, whateverthefuck, despite destroying themselves and the environment in the process. But there is a pattern in their thousand-years-old invented society that makes them be so destructive, primitive, and hypnotized by their creation. And that is the practice of trade. Trade makes humans be the busy idiots that they are today. And if we are to change anything, we need to understand this, and move away from it, because it is impossible to make a sane and non-destructive society if trade is the main practice in this society.

I wrote many books about this, made videos, and screamed about it for more than a decade now. But I wanted to create something that anyone can sit down and watch, and understand these ideas. Get comfortable with them. Unscripted, raw, genuine.

I wanted to combine the life stories of 5 people (us) with a general overview of this global society of trade. In my view the most powerful way to present something is to give a personal example that people can resonate with, and then expand that example globally. For instance Dima talks about how he was living in squat house for free, and how that was quite great to not worry about money. He then mentions how they were getting the food from garbage bins – the food that was perfectly fine to eat, but supermarkets would throw it away. I then expanded that to show how globally we waste so much food while so many people are starving. Then how many houses are empty through Georgi’s story. Pieces of the puzzle were combined, like a salad made up of personal stories sprinkled with footage and photos from our childhood years, combined with statistics and facts. I think that’s the best approach.

Keep in mind: we had no script, only some notes. We do not read, we talk. From our heads directly. And that makes it a lot more genuine and real.

40 hours trimmed down to 4

There is no way for me to properly explain how hard it was to go through some 40 hours of recorded interviews that had NO script, and create a story that lasts for some 5 hours. How do you even begin!?

Well I had to listen to those 40 hours some 40 times, without exaggeration. I would listen, cut, delete some parts, listen again to make sure it makes sense. Many times I had to cut the uhmm, aaah, hmmm and so forth. TONS of those! It is normal when you have no script. Many times we repeated things. Then we said the same things between all of us. It felt like taking a good and chunky piece of wood and sculpting it like this:

Layer by layer, for some 2 years. I was trimming it down to 20 hours, then 10, then split the many hundreds of little clips into sections to see how I could create the parts for the documentary. I don’t think I had a clue about how long this documentary would be, how many parts, or even how it would end, until like a few months before the release. It was a work in progress all of the time.

Color correction madness

How can you properly record at high quality, 5 humans on a pitch black background? Well, we had a smallish room, a projector “thing” that was black on the other side, some bright lights from Dima, and Dima’s camera that could record in 4K. And a napkin where we took notes of where each “item” is :).

This is the first time I recorded something for a documentary, or long video format. I almost never used a camera except those old ones that had 3 buttons. I never had a need for one. This time we used Dima’s camera that had a ton of options and a huge lens.To figure what settings we should use, was a challenge to say the least.

We could not avoid to cast a shadow on that black background, and while recording we didn’t manage to get a fully black background either. For some was blueish, for some greyish…And because we had some powerful lights (splashing photons into our faces) these faces of ours became washed out. Too bright to see much color in some recordings.

On top of this we recorded a few times with auto settings for the framerate, meaning that we got some framedrops in some recordings that look bad, and you can see that in the first part of the documentary for my recordings. I could not fix them unfortunately.

Not to mention that we recorded over a period of 6 months, a few hours a day, and the days were scattered, plus the camera was overheating so we had to pause every 20 minutes….Therefore we had to redo the settings, lights, then position us relative to everything else, and all that for this period of many months. And so the recordings did not look the same.

Again: 6 months, 4-5 recordings a day, scattered days over that period of time, 40 recorded hours in total. Recordings done, now edit!

Screens are not the same!

Another thing to consider is that I had a laptop with an LCD screen and I edited 80% of the documentary on that screen. Then I bought a new laptop with an OLED screen (left side), and these screens are far far superior in terms of blacks and colors. Basically most screens (LCD) have some “bulbs” on even when you look at a purely black image. OLED turns off the “bulbs”. If you are in a pitch black room and your laptop is at full brightness displaying a black image in full screen, on an LCD you can clearly see it. On an OLED screen you have no idea where the laptop is. Like you see in the above photo we used the same exact image of a nebula, and on my OLED screen on the left side you cannot see the black, but on the LCD on the right you clearly see that black being washed out.

Not only that but the OLED was a lot more color accurate. See the difference:

So after doing the color correction for weeks on the LCD, I noticed a lot of artifacts on the OLED so I had to do them again. In total I spent many weeks only on the color correcting and re-correcting. So I made sure that the documentary looks great on both OLED and LCD screens.

This is the original vs the color corrected footage:

As you can see Georgi had a white t-shirt and that made it a lot more difficult because if I were to lower that brightness down then her face would become very dark. I had to add some curves and a lot more effects. I wanted all of the recordings to look like one.

BEFORE
AFTER

In the right side you can see the difference between the “dark background” we used, and what it means to have a purely dark background, because I had to reposition each recording into the center of the screen. So you’ll see a “leftover” pure dark band on the right.

Aaron’s recordings were the best, because by the time we filmed him we got better at it. Plus he had a perfect shirt in terms of color. But as you can see I had to make his recording match Georgi’s.

BEFORE
AFTER

Sasha’s recording was kinda bad. She looked very pale, and there was a strong tint of blue. That background is for sure dark blue not pitch black. I had to fix a lot for this to look much better, add more reds, lower the blues, the contrast, etc. You can see it is a huge difference.

BEFORE
AFTER

And after I thought that I am done, I realized that bringing up the reds made Sasha’s beautiful red left cheek so red it was distracting. Sasha naturally gets that redness when she’s excited, stressed, or drunk 🙂 . She was not drunk tho.

I left it like that because honestly I did not know what to do… Then Dima suggested to track down her cheek and fix it. Sounded like crazy nuts to me, but eventually the result was really great. So I spent days and days, tracking down her cheek and bringing down the redness…if that’s not love then ….

BEFORE
AFTER

I added THOUSANDS of keyframes! You have no idea how intensive this task is. And also tuning it down in a way that looks natural.

Did I mention that the colors, luminosity, and position changed for each of our recordings enough to have to fix almost each of these recordings individually? It is not like I could fix a recording with Sasha and voila, copy paste those effects to the rest of her recordings. No. I had to at least tweak them a bit for the rest. At times that was crazy time consuming.

Here’s Dima. Very brightly lit, very brownish.

BEFORE
AFTER

Again, keep in mind that I wanted us all to look as if we were part of the same recording. I can’t have Dima be brownish, Sasha blueish, Georgi whitish…

And the worst offender….ME!

The idiot decided to wear a dark blue shirt on a dark background…you can even see my shadow on that “pitch black” background….

It is NOT easy to make that background dark and not make my shirt invisible. I struggled the most for this one.

I had to remove the background manually. And add so many effects, each tweaked in its own way, but each would affect the one bellow…. so a cascade of changes were happening. So tricky!

In the end I think that I did it good. As good as I could:

BEFORE
AFTER

And if you think I could have made my shirt brighter, trust me I tried, but then you could see artifacts of the background orbiting around me. I worked for weeks on my recordings alone.

The end result.

Here’s how the first part of the documentary, the intro, would have looked like if I would not have color corrected anything:

And here it is with the color correction:

I do not know what LCD/OLED screen you watch this on, but for me the difference is massive. And I had to do this for a 5 hours documentary. So yeah, I am quite happy with the result and the fact that I could do all of these in Kdenlive.

BEFORE
AFTER

Footage? From where?

Imagine a compilation with the latest automated robots with a cool background music. Imagine a 20 second compilation with people doing all sort of jobs and being stressed by that. Imagine someone talks about how wonderful the nature is on this planet and you can see some mountains, oceans, creatures…. Imagine!

Well now go ahead and make such compilations. And do not use bullshit and fake stock footage that looks weird and soulless. It is DIFFICULT.

For example here I wanted to showcase the movies that were most influential for us growing up in the 90s:

5 minutes. Took me some 2 weeks to finis that. Simply because I needed to find bits and pieces that were relevant and at times similar with each other to flow well one after the other. The kicks and kisses and all of that, had to make some sense one after the other.

Or in the second part where I wanted to showcase the entire human history in a minute and a half. From Monkeys to Money:

I had to find the proper footage and took me several documentaries to do so. Or when I showcased how automation can replace human labor and had to spend a week or more going through some 20GB of video files to find the right ones:

And so on…I hope you get it. It is easy to imagine things, but when editing even the “searching for footage” part is incredibly difficult. Not to mention to put them together.

Speaking of that: REAL FOOTAGE!

When you see a kid crying, mountains of waste, some poor people, or people working, and so on, all of these are REAL footage from real events and situations. Not some bullshit fake kid crying on storyblocks.com for $4.99 per download. It was so difficult to go through hundreds of documentaries and perhaps thousands of videos to grab the right footage. Luckily I love documentaries and I have seen thousands so far and gathered the best on VideoNeat.com so I knew where to find what. So many times I had to import a 1h documentary in Kdenlive just to grab a 2 seconds footage.

For example here, you see some people pointing at some galaxies….well these are the scientists behind the WEBB telescope looking at the images taken by the telescope:

And so goes for the rest of the footage from that part, those are real scientists….

I hope that you, the viewer, appreciate the fact that what you see is real.

This is how the documentary looked like in Kdenlive (I did not have enough vertical space to fit all of the layers):

The sounds!

To deal with the background music for a 5 hours documentary is no easy task. In my view the music for a documentary should either not be noticeable (so it won’t bother you but without it would be quite “empty”); or enhance the narrative – so to emphasize some events or whatever people say, or what you see on the screen. Therefore if you do the music badly, you can ruin the documentary. Can feel out of place.

For the first TROM documentary I simply used the same music for 70% of the documentary, the Monetary System part. The rest were a few songs that played in a loop. For this documentary I put a ton of effort into the background music. Try to see the “From Monkeys to Money” part without the music. It is empty.

To my great surprise everyone so far loved what I did with the music. And that’s fantastic because, usually, you don’t want people to complain about the music. But when you get compliments I think you did it very well!

I was very much influenced by the BBC documentaries like Seven Worlds One Planet, or Blue Planet II, and the like, that use fantastic soundtracks composed by fantastic composers. They make everything more interesting. And so I also added sound effects, and quite a lot of them. For transitions, for effects, at times for footage like animal sounds, nature sounds, or whatever made sense. Sound is so important for video, and I realized it so much more when working on this documentary. This is my first “sound editing” endeavour, so I hope I did it well.

The Land of Confusion

I wanted to use a really good song as the theme for this documentary. I even wanted to write some lyrics and work with Dima and Mara to make an original song. But that would have been mighty difficult. I also wanted a song that is not super popular, but has some very good messages in it. I searches for months probably, until I came across a silly made  music video that had some great lyrics. And I never ever heard that song before, so that was a fabulous find. The song is called Land of Confusion by Genesis:

But I didn’t feel like it was powerful enough, sounded a bit techno to me. I then searched for many many remixes and found one that was not very popular at all. And I fell in love with it (Pilotpriest Rework):

I think this song it PERFECT for TROM II. I love it! And it seems that everyone loves it so far. I will remember this song for a long long time….

Kdenlive

So often you hear that Open Source software which is also free, is not on par with the pro-paid software. It is nice, but meh. Not for the pro-bros. I use Linux (TROMjaro) for many years now and I do a ton of stuff. It is super stable and wonderful. I used LibreOffice to write massive books and even design them. People loved these books. And now I used Kdenlive to make a 5 hours documentary. What more proof do we need to accept that yes, Open Source software that is also free (so trade-free software) is good enough to make pretty much anything with it.

After 2-3 years of constant work with Kdenlive I can say the following about it:

1. Pretty stable, but…

On Windows you usually install a piece of software and let it rot. Updates? What are those? In a way that can give you a false sense of “stability” simply because the system  or apps is/are not being updated. But on Linux everything gets updated quite often, especially for a rolling release. So if you plan to work for a few years with the same video editor, then these updates may break things. And they do. So the best option is to either opt out of updating the video editor (which can be done in TROMjaro for example) or simply download the Appimage of the program. I LOVE Appimages. They are ONE single file that contains the entire video editor. Else, for those who do not understand the concept, the video editor would depend on other pieces of software. And if those pieces of software get updated but not the video editor because you chose so, then the video editor can get fucked.

Anyway with Appimages you get the entire video editor in one file that is not modified. And thus you can forever work with that, locking Kdenlive on one release. And so I did it. But after a few months of work I would download a new Appimage and migrate to it.

Basically if you want to work with Kdenlive for such a massive project, Appimages are the way to go.

Kdenlive still has some bugs, but considering how much I threw at it, it was damn stable. Plus it auto backups your projects almost every minute, therefore even if it crashes you can easily restore your project when you open it the next time.

Appimages + Auto Backups for projects = very stable and reliable.

BUT!

That being said look at this red and dark face that is misaligned:

Despite using Appimages, I came across a bug that it is still present today and it is hard to replicate, but made me almost want to give up Kdenlive. Imagine this: in a project I had some 40-50 main clips with me. For the first year of editing I cut hundreds if not thousands of little bits out of these clips. All in Kdenlive. These little bits were added to 4 separate Kdenlive projects, scattered across 5 hours. So, TONS of little clips with me scattered through 4 huge Kdenlive projects.

So.

Now I do the color editing for say 1 of those 40-50 main clips with me. Imagine this 1 clip is called C001. C001 is 30 minutes long. Out of it I cropped some 100 clips and added to the Kdenlive timeline for project number 1. When I color correct the C001 clip all of the 100 bits in the project should be color corrected as well since they belong to the color corrected C001.

And so I did. Weeks of work. Rendered the video and….voila: I looked red, or dark, or weird, or out of place, yet the rest of the video looked good. I check the project and 50% of the 100 clips that I cut from C001 were messed up in the timeline. The only way to fix was to try and move them to a different layer….and where there was no space for one…good luck!

Imagine color correcting ONE single main video, then manually check the entire timeline of say 100 clips, then fix the ones that were messed up. Multiply that by the other main videos that were with me, then the rest of the ones with Sasha, Georgi, Dima and Aaron. Not only that but say you fixed them all, and you are happy, but see that a particular main clip with Georgi needs a bit of color fixing. It is the C023 clip. I fix it, then go again and check the timeline to make sure Georgi does not look like a monster.

It was INSANE. I had to always check the timeline. And then I would become paranoid and would not trust the final render, so I would have to rewatch the ENTIRE documentary after every render….and I rendered it many many many times. It felt like a torture.

This was a very odd bug and hard to replicate because it seems that you have to add a lot of effects in some particular ways to trigger it. But if I wasn’t passionate about these trade-free things, I would have gave up Kdenlive because of this since it was becoming impossible for me to do color correcting.

2. Pretty capable, but…

I will not go into details but trust me you can do a lot with Kdenlive. Except for some photo slideshows that look 3D that I’ve created with paid software for the lack of time, everything else was made in Kdenlive. Animations (sorta), text effects, transitions, and so forth. For example this part I made entirely in Kdenlive:

The way things move, and transition, and all that. Took me around 3 hours to make it. May not seem impressive but the fact that you can do these it means you can get creative and do lots more.

BUT!

The text tool is kinda primitive, the effects are just some names in a list and you can’t preview any. 

The transitions are also weird…. Kdenlive MUST improve and become more user friendly.

The worst is that you cannot use the video card. Imagine using a video editor but unable to make use of your video card….this is insane. It is like you have an electric bike but the engine does not work. Now go ahead and climb a steep hill. That’s how Kdenlive is. Super slow to render and preview. I felt like back in 2011 when I was making the first TROM documentary on a computer that had a 128MB video memory card and 1GB of RAM. This is BY FAR the main reason why someone may not want to use Kdenlive.

However they implemented many cool features, like proxy clips and the ability to render certain parts of the video in the timeline for preview. So with the proxy clips the editing was super smooth, but bad quality.

Overall.

I love Kdenlive and I now know how to use its potential. There are lots of neat features and when you learn how to combine transitions and effects you can do some really cool shit. Last thing I’ll mention is that we could do auto transcriptions with Kdenlive, and that helped a fuck ton. And it used my GPU for the process. Basically it can transform the audio into text (subtitles).

I would say it was 95% accurate perhaps. Which is fabulous. Sasha, me and Roko worked a lot to perfect the english caption, but without the auto-caption made by Kdenlive, it would have been 100 times worse. And editing the subtitles in Kdenlive was super user friendly.

I want to dedicate a moment of silence to Sasha. Or a moment of joy. And respect. Because that girl worked so much on the captions, to make them perfect. She did a fabulous job. It is mainly thanks to her that we have english caption for the entirety of this monster documentary :).

And I want to say that I feel so proud to have used Kdenlive. The people behind this project are doing a fantastic job with 0.0001% of the resources that they would need for such a project. They always improve, add features, and kill the bugs. I am closely following the development.

Final thoughts.

Because I worked so much on this documentary all I wanted is to release it. I had no expectations more than seeing it out there. But despite that I am unpleasantly surprised by the silence of the release. I contacted a bunch of people and organizations, Including The Zeitgeist Movement, The Moneyless Society, or Peter Joseph. No one replied. No one shared the documentary. I am so happy that I first released it privately for a few friends and they gave us a lot of feedback, else would have felt even more strange.

It is ok.

At the end of the day what we talk about in TROM II is real. And fucking important. Objectively so. Therefore if not many people watch it, then there isn’t much I can do. It is a shame since I put a lot of effort to make it more genuine, realistic, not too positive, not too negative. To stir some nostalgia through our life stories, to make people empathize more with the suffering and destruction that is happening; to introduce new ideas slowly, bit by bit, so by the end of it they could accept that a change is not only needed, but possible.

I crafted it for 2-3 years, but I am afraid that the humans of today are too distracted by so much idiotic content to be curious about reality overall. And even if some will watch it, most are too busy living and consuming, so they’ll scroll to the next thing. A war, a fight, a funny kid, a bright light….a UFO? Conspiracy! And lunacy!

Tiktok, Netflix, Spotify, Twitter drama…endless Youtube nonsense. Who the fuck cares?

Call me an old grumpy man, but I think that people are becoming more and more idiotic. In a way, if this documentary would be super popular it would not make sense. I would feel like I was wrong about how I this society is. So it being very unpopular proves that what we talked about in the documentary is true.

Anyway, it is a reason why I called this documentary “A Message to the Aliens”. Because I feel like no one here listens anymore.

Contrasting with that, my feelings for the people who gravitate around TROM are positively intensifying. I like them a lot. 

Georgi is furiously and passionately working on a Romanian translation for the documentary. She wants to push it more. And she loves doing the translations. Sasha talks to everyone she knows about the documentary despite working a lot to make some money. Roko is doing a marathon screening of the documentary for his family. Roma works like a tank to make the Russian translations. Alexio, Aaron, Airton, Roma and a few more help with the translations, spreading the word and so on.

And I will continue to swim against the current, because I think that the current leads us to idiocracy and destruction. And it is hard, and you feel like not moving forward, but I am happy to be one of those who fights. To have the guts to continue despite the push against whatever I do. And if very few will watch this documentary, at least it is there and I am so happy about how it turned out to be. I think it is a unique one, and it still gives me goosebumps when I watch parts of it.

We do. Do you?

Watch it here! (click)
The last TROM Meeting. Maybe?

The last TROM Meeting. Maybe?

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The first TROM Meeting was in 2019, in May. Some 12 people came. We rented something for 3 weeks here where I live. It was very exciting at first, to see everyone for the first time:

But then I started to realize how tiring it is to have so many people around at once. So I was struggling a bit. However the worst was when I started to pee blood, mid way the meeting, and I thought am gonna die :D. It was a hellish experience for me. Read this blog post to know more about.

However looking back it was a very nice time, those first days, maybe the first 2 weeks, when I was not as sick. Memories, you know. I’ll try to keep the best and discard the worse.

Since then a bunch of things have changed. My health greatly improved, some people lost interest in TROM, new people gained interest. I created trom.tf and a bunch more stuff, plus managed to finish the TROM II documentary that should be released this month. So we decided to make another TROM Meeting, 4 years after the first one. EXCITED!

All healthy, the documentary (huge project) done and shared with the ones coming at the meeting, new excitement felt in the air. We rented a place near where we live in Spain, and invited some 14 people. Only around 10 or so could come, but then things got more complicated because now most people had jobs (unlike the first time we met) and had a hard time taking some time off for the meeting. I struggled to organize it, but we finally decided to meet for 8-10 days. Based on the first meeting, 3 weeks was way too long.

Unfortunately, again, a few could not come for health reasons or unable to get time off from their jobs, and others came later. But we were all set. I organized everything. Sasha and Georgi helped me prepare it all :). Was so excited about it. I needed a break! I wanted to laugh, to dance, to hike, to spend time with some wonderful beings. I worked too much on the documentary for the past 2-3 years. So I needed a break. It was a great timing since Sasha also finished her book and she also felt similarly.

All set. GO!

I went to the house with Sasha to organize things:

She was not feeling that well. Some abdominal discomfort on and off for the past weeks. But nothing too serious. We continued.

Vicky and Rafa came first, with their car. Drove for 6 hours. They are such positive creatures you will smile 90% of the time when you are with them. So kind, so organized, so friendly. Roma came the next day after the train he supposed to take here, was canceled numerous times. Roma is my brother for sure 🙂 – friendly, organized, in a good mood, helpful, so kind. We were all getting used to being with each other, but a bit tired. They were tired because they had to travel for so long, we were tired because we had to radically change our sleeping schedule to wake up earlier.

Then Alexio came. He was the only one we did not meet in person. He was so tall, and his kindness on par with that 🙂

So positive, always smiling, always friendly.

Me, Sasha, Georgi, Vicky, Rafa, Roma and Alexio. That was the team. Unfortunately Guil had a bad accident a few days before the meeting so he could not come 🙁 – he would need a few months to recover. Aaron was also unable to take any days off from his job…

We were all quite sad that that they could not come.

Ok. Let’s have some fun.

We went to some parks nearby:

To show off our athletic skills 🙂

And coolness 🙂

We then visited the seaside:

And found some alien creatures:

The next day we decided to go to a nearby park in the forest and we spent some really fun time there.

Laying down in the hammocks in the shade:

We played “mime”, a game where someone gives you 2 words, like say “inhabitable exoplanet”, and you have to mime that without making any sounds, and the rest have to guess it. I love this game because everyone is engaged. We laughed, it was fun.

I had to mime: endless time. Go figure….how do you do that? But I managed it eventually haha.

I’ll let you guess what Sasha might be miming here haha. Or Georgi.

Or Rafa being an octopus stripper:

We had such a great time there. Was not too hot, it was calm, it was fun. I felt like a kid again 🙂

Going there, coming back, cooking food, staying in the house, were flavored with us talking about all sort of interesting things, from TROM to the universe, from computers to us.

Later that day we had a barbecue. And I always end up in charge of that and smelling like a burned piece of wood at the end.

At night we could see the Moon and Venus from the backyard:

Unfortunately I had no time to get the telescope from home to watch some of this stuff….You see, the food aspect of life takes so much time. Especially when you are 7 or so people, and some like me having to cook separately because of stomach issues. It is so time consuming and exhausting to buy food, deposit it, cook, eat, clean….I started to get a bit tired. Sasha kept on having those health issues and would wake up in the middle of the night because of that. I tried to keep myself engaged and positive because I had many reasons to. But it was tiring….and a bit stressful because of Sasha’s issues.

You see when these wonderful people come for these meetings they are so eager to talk. And talk. And talk about many many interesting things. And that can become very tiring. Especially for me since I just finished a 2-3 years work for the documentary and I wanted to mostly chill and relax. But I cannot ignore interesting people and discussions. I can’t :D.

Ok.

Next. We visited a medieval town nearby. Was quite nice.

And at home we reinstalled TROMjaro on Rafa’s MiniPC:

But Sasha’s issues did not go away. She had them every morning. Not too painful really, just a weird discomfort in the lower part of the abdomen, as if you have an UTI. We went to the doctor and no UTI. Strange. She was sent for more tests. You see Sasha’s stomach, the digestive machine, is amazing 🙂 – she can eat anything and pretty much never has any stomach issues. But now suddenly she started to have these uncomfortable stomach issues that were on a daily basis and lasted on and off for more than a month by this time. And for the past days it was a daily occurrence.

I was like….wtf….the first TROM Meeting was ruined by my weird health issues and now Sasha has these weird health problems. This is too much….

Of course, the important bit was for her to be healthy, the meeting was secondary. But I was thinking how unlucky we are… Her health issues made us kinda stressed, tired, and cut the fun in half. At least for me for sure.

But anyway, we tried to still keep ourselves happy.

The Song.

A year or so ago we (I, Georgi and Sasha) made a song. Original lyrics and all that. So we printed it for everyone and sang it together. These are the lyrics:

And here’s a bad recording of us trying it out 🙂 – bad in terms of video quality 🙂

Everyone really liked the song. Actually we had a guitar and an ukulele and we jammed a bunch of times together. I know how to play them but only a little bit :), Sasha and Rafa know a lot more. Roma knows some too :). So it was fun to play some songs together.

Two more people came the following days: Matthias and Ann.

I met Matthias when he came a year or two ago to our place for a barbecue with Dima. He was volunteering with the same organization as Dima and came back with him to stay at his place for a day or so. I really liked the guy. He seemed very interested in TROM. He said he will visit us but we had to kindly refuse any visit for the past year or so in order to finish our documentary and the book. So I told him that he can come for the meeting. He is so kind, interested and interesting. Same is Ann. Very nice and calm people. Chill as fuck :).

We were more now, but Matthias and Ann had a van and a tent and they were staying near by in that nice forest where we put the hammocks. So the house was still not that crowded.

The next days we went to visit a very nice botanical garden. Another reason to talk more about interesting things.

Vicky is studying the plants for some courses she takes and she knew a lot about plants and insects. Her English improved since the last meeting, by a lot, and she is so funny. She uses the word “fuck” many times, and that’s so hilarious when combined with her Spanish accent.

By the way, I really like the girl from this above photo. Just saying.

We spent several hours in that garden and took a million photos. Right Alexio!? 🙂

We then visited a castle that’s on a very high hill where you can see all of the surrounding areas.

I was getting more and more tired. And a bit stressed because of Sasha’s issues. But the “party” continued. One night we made some TROM tshirts like we did the last time. Basically all you need is some tshirts (old or buy new ones) and some normal paint.

And then you can put your handprint on them. That easy!

Unfortunately it was late at night and Matthias and Ann were “long gone” to their cozy forest, so we did not make any for them 🙁 .

We wanted to do one more trip before the meeting was over. To a place where we always find friendly octopuses. And so we went:

It is such a beautiful place. Sasha found a grumpy old octopus a bit far, so only Rafa, Matthias and Ann adventured to see it.

You may wonder….this all sounds like a fun nice vacation. What’s so TROM about it?

You see, the work I/we do for TROM is happening behind the screens. I work like a maniac almost every single day. Alexio is always on the chats helping out, Roma helped the project financially so many times it is insane, plus he helps with TROMjaro and such; And so are the rest helping whenever they can. The meeting is supposed to be for creating some bonds, some relationships; to talk, to enjoy, to get to know each other better. You can’t realistically do more than that. I know a bunch of projects that have these “brainstorm” gatherings and in reality they do not do anything more than that.

For TROM is the opposite. The work is done in silence, individually, by each of us. And when we meet is for the connections between us.

Sasha worked quite a bit on the transcription in that meantime is true, I tried too. But it is difficult to focus much on these things. Too many people around, doing many things.

She also cooked for everyone a bunch of times, for hours. Even thought Alexio how to cook 🙂

I think that’s by FAR the best outcome from these meetings. To know each other, get comfortable with each other, and create new relationships. After all that’s how I and Sasha ended up together. That’s how I and Aaron became best friends and how I see this happening with Roma and Alexio and me. That’s how we got to know Vicky and not only Rafa, and get so close to them. That’s how we now got to know Matthias and Ann and who knows maybe we will meet again with them, maybe they’ll get involved with the TROM project in the future….

One comment I’ve seen from Matthias and Ann was that they were expecting more talks about TROM, maybe even to watch the documentary together and such, however for one I was exhausted, and second I did not want to shove down people’s throat this project. We have so many materials online so I thought to not make it look like a “cult meeting” :). In any case, this meeting was (from the get-go) one about friends more than one about TROM.

Dima and Mara came basically after the meeting was officially over, when Vicky and Rafa were already gone. Unfortunately we were all too tired by that time.

I kept in touch with Dima over Signal for these past 2 years so it was nice to see him again. The last 2 days were basically all about Alexio kicking everyone’s butt at chess 🙂 – apparently he is a grand-master at chess.

He was so good no one stood a single chance. And yet so funny and kind. You can’t get angry at having your ass kicked by him :).

Final days.

It was getting very hot, Sasha’s problems were still problems, we were getting only a few hours of sleep, and it was becoming more and more of a struggle for us. Oh, did I mention that all of this time Sasha was forced to deal with a lot of papers? The residency, the work, the this, the that….It was insane and endless. We still did not solve the paper situation….

We needed a break.

Everyone left except Roma who stayed 3 more days to our place and we had a more chill time together.

Such a wonderful kind! Despite us being tired and all that, this guy did not bother us at all. He manages his own shit and is so friendly you can’t be bothered by him.

I wish Roko or Shas could have come too, but they live far far away and on this paper planet you need a ton of papers to go from one place to another.

The meeting was better than I expected now that I look at it in perspective. Was quite comfortable and despite tiring it was super fun many times.

Why no more TROM Meetings?

When we rented a new place I did NOT want to rent the same house because that house looks haunted to me :D. It was the place where I had to stay while having so many health issues. It felt like an awful place towards the end of that meeting. For this new meeting me and Sasha stayed in a weird room, tho comfy still. The room was partly a bathroom.

Had a sink and a shower inside. The toilette was in a separate room. I mean is cozy to have your own shower and sink in the room, but because of Sasha’s health issues and waking up in the middle of the night and all that, I started to feel like being in a hospital for the last days. And that felt very strange. I mean it kinda looks like a hospital room.

So I honestly am sick of being sick when we do these sort of meetings. It is too much planning involved, too much responsibility for me to organize stuff for everyone, and so on. So I do not want to do this anymore. I want to relax more. If we meet we should do it somewhere else and I should not have to organize it, but all of us to.

The TROM Meeting is also more of a personal meeting so it may make no sense to call it that way.

Therefore I think this could have been the last “TROM Meeting” but for sure not the last meeting that we will have. Maybe even this year at the end of it we may meet again, at least some of us.

Sasha feels a bit better now, but we are still investigating. So far it does not seem to be anything that serious.

Conclusion.

Despite that interpretation of the bathroom/bedroom, the house was very nice:

With a cozy living-room and a fireplace:

A nice backyard:

And a nice terrace:

And despite the tiredness, everything was wonderful and I absolutely appreciate these awesome human beings:

And I hope to see each other more often, and dance, and play the guitar and ukulele, and make a new song, and go in nature, and have fun, and talk about interesting things, and live. Because life is like a domino game that has already started for all of us. And at times it is tricky and complex, at times it is smooth, but the fact is, that IT IS. And we should enjoy it while it is. The fun part of a domino game is while it is “rolling”, not when it ends.

So let’s enjoy the ride folks, as long as the ride is riding!

I appreciate you all very much, and if there is one victory I can claim in my personal life so far, it cannot be the change of this trade system that I talk about, it cannot be the popularity of the content I’ve created over the years, and it cannot be any big success with TROM. But I can claim victory when it comes to the relationships and the humans I’ve met. They are real, and they are enough for me.

Thank you!
Share the waste!

Share the waste!

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I donated my old laptop to a dear friend who also helps with the TROM project. I used this laptop for many years but I needed a more portable one and luckily others helped me buy a better one for myself. I am happy to know that my dear friend the laptop, that helped me make 80% of the TROM II documentary, and trom.tf, and tromcasts, tromjaro, and so many books, and so on, now has a new home 😀

Others helped me, I am helping others too. We should all help each other. We should share the vast amount of stuff we have in this world, rather than keeping that stuff around and not use it, or throwing it into the garbage.

I too often see these in the town I live in:

Massive waste of stuff. Unacceptable!

BUT:

  • We are incentivized to buy and buy and buy; every day bombarded with such messages. And thus people buy even when they don’t have to.
  • There is no sharing platform that is useful enough, or some place where you can put these things to then be repaired and shared with others.
  • People have no time to take any initiative. If people had the time to get involved they can create all sorts of sharing platforms and places. Like for the place where I live: imagine if some people can have the time to take the stuff people put at the garbage bin, repair and clean, and have a central place in the town where anyone can pick that stuff.

So. Yeah, anyway, I am super happy I could send my laptop to someone who will likely make good use of. I have 1 more laptop and a tablet that I want to give to others. I don’t like to have much stuff anyway. I will try to get more and more involved with this physical-stuff sharing in the future, like https://sharebay.org/ that’s made by our friend Colin. I will try to share stuff on that website too after TROM II is released.
It’s all about that trade.

It’s all about that trade.

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When I scream about how trade is the origin of most problems, some people think that I am crazy and I exaggerate. Well either read the thousands of pages I wrote so far or watch the tens of hours of videos that I made, or here’s another clear example:

I and Sasha. Much love. Love love, you know. We are together for the past 3 or so years. All we want is to stay on this planet somewhere. Can we? The answer is no. It is yes. It is maybe. It is confusing. Is it any answer?

After going through the bullshit of the marriage ritual, and went to lawyers here in Spain and all that, we still didn’t figure that out until today.

Ok so listen. If you want to be able to stay in Spain, 2 humans that is, one of you is a resident in Spain and an EU citizen, one an American citizen, here’s what you have to do:

  • Prove that you are together and you love each other.
  • That’s it. Now you can live here and we (Spain) will take care of you to make sure you won’t end up in the streets, or doing bad things.

See how easy that was!?

Oh wait….that’s just my imagination. Hold on. Hmmm….Sorry, actually no one cares if you love each other, can take care of yourself, or you are a good human. Sorry, that was a different planet.

On Earth here’s what you need:

  • Be “married” (the ritual) with a resident/citizen of Spain.
  • The resident/citizen has to prove that they have a job for the past year (so at least a year contract) and make at least 1.000 Euros a month.
  • A bunch of other IDs and documents.

OR:

  • Does not matter if you are with someone or not, you just have to stay in Spain for 3 consecutive years. Illegally.
  • Do not get into any sort of issues with the police.
  • Get a criminal record from your country of origin.
  • Do a course (at least 40 hours) for the local language, in our case a dialect….
  • Get a job offer.
  • A bunch of other documents.

Alright Planet Earth, I see you are so kind with your hoomans.

So, a tribe (say Spain) will give 0 fucks about love, relationships, health, being a good human and such. But they will give 100% to TRADE. If you TRADE in their tribe, that’s all they need really. If you invest money into a tribe, guess what, they will let you in no problemos – see. How many rich fucks that have been in jail or did so many illegal things are traveling all around the world!? Countless.

Fuck the “morality, ethics”, equality, human rights, being a good human, and all of that crap. Or being a Christian, a Muslim, a whateverthefuck. These do not matter in our society. All it matters is that TRADE.

SO. It’s all about that trade, ’bout that trade… – sing with me!
AI is ASS

AI is ASS

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Back in 2015 I wrote a book for TROM about humans and the machines they have created. It is called the Human Machine and you can read it here.

Back then it was one of the first hypes about A.I. And as you may know by now, AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. Back then Google and Apple started to promote their AIs: Google Now and Siri. You could talk to these bots and they will provide you a lot of answers from many different domains. Ask how many dogs are in the world, ask them to set up an alarm for you, how’s the weather, you name it. It would integrate with a lot of apps and devices.

People were asking these bots existential questions like what is the purpose of life:

I remember the Google supercomputers generating these weird images and the news outlets calling them “machines dreaming”. Meaning, how machines dream:

And that Pepper robot that you could talk to…

These came after a few years of another hype: the self driving cars that were about to revolutionize transportation. In the book Automated Autonomous World that I wrote for TROM in 2013 , I partially fell for that hype and wrote in a very non-skeptical way about them.

To be fair with my past-self, I was focused entirely on how in a saner society the tech-part of the world could look like. So I presented many prototypes and unproven tech. I talked about how we have to change the infrastructure for these to work, and so forth. However, what I did not realized as deeply, was how misleading the world is. You see I naively thought that the big tech companies may not exaggerate as much about their tech. I sourced their own claims from their own engineers. But 10 years later I could say for sure that the vast majority of the tech I showcased in that book, was BS. For the most part at least. That means, the words that came out of the mouths of these engineers and “specialists” that work for these big companies, were mostly crap. Marketing.

That book may be removed from TROM when we do a cleanup this month in preparation for the upcoming TROM II documentary.

Back to AI.

In 2016 I started to be more and more aware of how the tech world is full of bullshit and bullshitters. For that reason I chose to present tech that was already there, working, and when it was just in testing phases I would present it as such and link to scientific papers about that tech.

When it came to AI I already smelled the bullshit. The stupid fear that AI will take over the world, and all of that crap. But I said let’s educate myself. And so I said the best way is to understand a bit how these things work. I took several courses and read a bunch of stuff. I learned how AIs can categorize objects:

How it interprets text and speech:


I learned how facial recognition works:

I looked at how AIs learn to play games, drive cars, do science research.

Of course I only scratched the surface of these since they are complex. But I got a solid understanding I think. I realized that these are Statistical Software. Added with a bunch of filters and rules. They are complex, cool, interesting, but nothing WOW in terms of how they work. I learned that data and computer power is what makes the difference. I realized how non-magical these AI look when you have a clue about how they work. The end result is mesmerizing only for those who have a very dim understanding of these pieces of software.

I then talked about how they compared to humans. And of course the conclusion was that AI is just a complex set of statistical software with filters and rules and a lot of data, and has nothing to do with either artificial or intelligence (whatever that means).

Of course there are some applications for these pieces of software that I touched upon in the book, but mainly it was a grotesque hype.

Anthropomorphizing

That’s a new word that I learned while writhing this book. It means “to ascribe human form or attributes to (an animal, plant, material object, etc.).”. That’s what AI are mostly.

The present.

7 years later and the AI “revolution” has resurfaced again. This time it seems even more mesmerizing, although not so much for me. I fee like I’ve seen this before…

ChatGPT and the like, Stable Diffusion, Dolly, now they have different names and do similar things. They are fun to play with. Can create some weird images out of text, something I was showcasing in 2016 in another book about Language.

And the craze is starting again with people thinking these AIs will revolutionize the world, or will take over, and then no more jobs, no more artists, no more life. If you look again at how these work, they seem a lot less mesmerizing. The companies that push them use anthropomorphism to make them sound like they “think” and are like humans: neural nets, learning, hallucinating, and so forth. In fact they are still the same statistical machines that produce probabilities and that results in interesting outcomes.

Without going into specifics I recommend this funny video that explains the entire situation quite well: A.I. is B.S. ->>> https://ytb.trom.tf/watch?v=ro130m-f_yk

Also read through the sources of that video.

When I asked chatgpt about TROM I got this:

Which is not bad.
But when I asked who made TROM I got a very bad and totally wrong answer:

No idea who Catalin and Andrei are, but it is totally wrong. The project did not start as a research project, whatever the hell that means.

You see although it says some true things, it also says some entirely false things. Because this AI only knows how to put words together. Has no clue about anything else. And it will always produce well written sentences that can be totally wrong. Thus, this chatbot is entirely useless for factual information. And if you think it will get better and better, for one let’s wait for that and then “hype” it, but second it may never be able to due to how it works (statistical prediction of what words go with what other words).

When I tell chatgpt that the project was not created by those two dudes, it invents new ones:

And so on it goes:

AI is ASS!

AI is actually Anthropomorphized Statistical Software, or ASS 😀

We may find good uses for this ASS, maybe when they only rely on a main source of information like some specific research papers and provide exact quotes and sources. They are fun to play with for a bit tho. They may help us create more creative content or video/photo/audio effects. But “they” are as much as “they” as websites are “they”. Depends what websites we are talking about. Same here, these ASS are diverse and made for a diverse set of purposes.

But what it is clear to me is that the HYPE is just that, a HYPE. Pushed by companies who want to make these ASS more appealing and sell them, by the bloggers and youtubers who jump on the hype train for clicks and views, by the media that does the same. Combine that with the fact that we live in a dumbed-down society where humans are just workers who have no time to learn/digest any of these things, and we are faced with an Idiotic society that has no clue about any of these.

Our trade based society is at fault here again, for incentivizing humans to hype these things all the time, in order to trade them. And for the fact that it keeps us all busy idiots for the sake of trading to survive. This has created a Land of Confusion.

Welcome to Earth.

A.I. is B.S.

SUPPORT ON PATREON: http://patreon.com/adamconover
SEE ME LIVE ON TOUR: http://adamconover.net/tourdates
VISIT USAFACTS: https://bit.ly/3TZyUK3

The real risk of A.I.

Adam Conover | Invidious
Why I hate smartphones.

Why I hate smartphones.

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My mother has a Samsung Galaxy J5 that she bought several years ago. The phone is in great condition physically. However it only has 16GB of internal storage. Problem is she uses 99% of that space, making the device extremely slow and 0 updates possible or the ability to install any new app.

Only 10 apps out of perhaps hundreds on her phone can be removed, since the rest came pre-installed with the phone. Bloatware. Google + Samsung apps that are 100% useless. And they cannot be removed.

So, we cannot uninstall/remove anything. Now what can she do? Buy a new phone probably.

And this is how you create a massive amount of waste. On these phones you have no control over your OS, so if your phone is a few years old you can say bye bye to system updates. You cannot remove the bloatware. You cannot change the battery or any other components. And yes probably you can do some of those if you have a ton of time and skills to install a custom Android and have the guts to unglue your phone and change the battery. But most people will never do this.

I tried to make the SD card of her phone part of the system to expand the storage. Worked. But then what for if I cannot move 99% of apps there? I then enabled the developer mode and enabled the “force move the apps to the SD card”. That allowed me to move a bit more apps but still 80% cannot be moved.

However when these moved apps update, they are reinstalled on the internal storage again. Basically ‘d have to move them to the SD card all the time….sucks. Not sustainable…

I eventually managed to install adbmanager and luckily that allowed me to remove any bloatware I wanted.

Problem is you have to know the exact name of these apps and they look like “samsung.android.visioncloudagent” so you have to figure which app does what…. I found some websites where they list this bloatware like this or this. But it takes time to remove because you have to be VERY careful not to brick your phone.

After doing all of these she has some 1.7GB of free space. Which is fine for now but still unsustainable. I wonder if the next Android update will add back all of that bloatware….after all when I got some updates years ago Samsung decided to install Facebook and Instagram for me, without the ability to remove them.

So, her laptop uses Linux and not Windows, despite having Windows pre-installed when we bought it. Why not install a sane Android OS on her phone?

With laptops is a ton easier, especially for older models, to install an OS. My mother could do it if I gave her the instructions. With the phones it is a different world. People are already googlefied so you can’t just install a new Android without connecting it to their previous account since everything is tied to that. You need to root the phone and hope that it won’t brick it. That’s something that can make your phone useless. Plus all of these custom Androids that have removed the bloatware only support a tiny fraction of all phones.

LineageOS for example, the one that supports by far the most models – https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/ – does not support that phone.

The rest support mostly the Pixel phones, namely the newer ones. And that’s another issue…even these custom OSes will support this or that device for a bit, then bye bye. Therefore you still have to buy newer devices even when you want a custom Android that is bloatware free.


Some of these even add their own bloatware like https://e.foundation/e-os/ – with their own subscription models.

I was considering to compromise on buying a second hand but newer model Pixel and then install one of those bloatfree Androids, but then if you buy such a phone second hand and the battery is crap and you can’t replace it….what can you do!?

Linux phones, if anyone wonders, are an experiment at best at this stage. Plus they only support a few models too.

It is such a different world when it comes to computers. This Microsoft tablet is more than 10 years old:

And it still works with TROMjaro Linux. Granted to make the bluetooth and wifi work I had to install a custom kernel and do some gymnastics. Easier than installing a custom Android on a phone. But this tablet receives constant updates. And this was a special case since these tablets used some weird hardware for the bluetooth and wifi. Most decade old laptops/computers work just fine with the latest Linux.

So you can bring to life old computers but not old phones.

That’s one major reason why I hate smartphones. They are disposable. They come bloated with a ton of crap. It is hard if not impossible to block ads on phones. Plus they are with you all the time so notifications and all that crap will make your life a hell.

Even a Linux phone would not be something I would use much since I do not want to always be trapped in the digital space.

In this trade based society companies are incentivized to release newer model of phones constantly. They support each model for a few years then bye bye. They pre-install a lot of crap to make more off of you. Trades: attention, data, subscriptions. So we end up with a world full of disposable ad-devices that people call as “smartphones”. The irony of using the word “smart” for those devices.

And I get it, these devices if they were Linux based only, and supported indefinitely, could be useful in certain circumstances such as navigation, keeping in touch with close friends, etc.. But the rest seems to me like just a tool for consuming, trading. Your life being sucked away from you by companies and individuals who want your currency, your attention, your data.

UGLY.

I will eventually install a custom Android on my own personal phone, a Galaxy S7, 8 years old. To put some life into it. Just so that I get rid of the pile of shit that the software is on all phones nowadays, even if I only use my phone for GPS, maps, and such purposes.
Schools are not for learning.

Schools are not for learning.

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School can be seen as an abusive and inefficient system that has little to nothing to do with “education”.

Children are forced to wake up at a certain hour, every day, 5 days a week, for 12 years. They are categorized by ages and their “knowledge” level. School creates a competition between the kids, makes then hate science and learning in general, it is a boring and colorless place for these young minds, and overall ends up not teaching children much at all about the world we live in.

In a trade-based society the parents NEED to trade themselves in a job, so these kids need to be “livestocked” somehow. That’s what school is, a place where kids can be while their parents trade to survive in this society. More to that, Universities almost exclusively prepare these young creatures to become workers, like their parents.

All in all, kids go to school to compete, memorize, get ready to be workers. NOT to be EDUCATED.

If humans could have a decent life without trading in this society, they could have the time to engage with their kids, discover, learn, enjoy. And schools could be places where kids of all ages can go because they want to. A place where experts can teach them about the world and how to do something productive.

EXAMPLES:

Tell kids: See this red dot? This is the farthest thing we can take a photo off. They call it a “star”. And you show them a real photo taken by the WEBB telescope. From there on you and your class of kids will investigate what this red dot is, and in the process you’ll teach kids about light, physics, maths, distances, stars, the universe.

Or show kids a real dinosaur bone and tell them: Our mission is to understand how old it is and what creature this is. And thus you can go into a journey of discovering what geology is, paleontology, rocks and fossils, and so forth.

Or tell them that our mission is to build a robot. And they will learn mechanics, programming and so forth.

We could create real schools where kids can become curious and learn so much about our world. So that they can become the next Einsteins, the next Teslas, the next ones who can discover new things.

That’s the world we should have had by now….

And we wont be able to have it unless we change the trade-based society into a tradeless society. Where humans are not forced to trade in order to survive. Where humans like “teachers” can engage and develop such schools as explained above, to have time for that, not to go to school because that’s their job since they have to pay their rent so they are forced to do it.

A few years ago we made a video: Rethinking Education https://videos.trom.tf/w/2y5RSgvREzT6mZnwonqKMN – where we go in depth abotút this.

05. Rethinking Education

We create documentaries out of our eBooks. These documentaries are entirely based on the books themselves but they may differ here and there in terms of the script and overall presentation, but in general they are the same as the books.

videos.trom.tf
Do people have thoughts anymore?

Do people have thoughts anymore?

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Yesterday I went to the dentist. I didn’t have to go for the past 4 or so years so that’s the positive side. I used to go there for 3 or so years almost weekly, not long ago, because I had braces. I had really fucked up teeth and it took 3 years to fix them.

Anyway, I go there and they tell me to wait in the waiting room. I enter and I see a few C’s. Some young, some oldish. By C’s I mean people. Why C? Because that’s how they look to me, like the letter C when they sit down and are bent over their phone screens.

I said a timid “Ola”, and I think an older dude said “Ola” on just 5% volume.

I remember not long ago when I was going to the same dentist, waiting in the same waiting room, that most people were just sitting around. They had some magazines there and some were picking them up and browsing through them.

So I sit down and look around like I normally do. I could see through a big glass door how strongly it is raining outside. It was pouring. My mind shifted to the TROM II documentary, the stuff that I want to do next, my plans for the next months, and so forth. My mind drifted towards the scenery for a bit and I was thinking how weird that this water falls from the sky and how it sounds….those rain droplets falling on the pavement make a lot of sound. And sound is basically energy. The atmosphere, the stuff around, shaking, and the vibrations reach our ears. How cool.

I remember waiting in this waiting room for many hours when I was going for my braces. And had a lot of thoughts. I like to think about stuff.

I then look around me and the C’s are still C. I am thinking “Do they think that I am a weirdo…the only one here just sitting like that and not bent as a C? Am I more like an L when I sit down?” – but then I thought…..are these people even thinking about that? Or thinking in general?

Not to be mean, but it seems to me like pretty much everyone nowadays has no more “free time” to think. That time is completely eaten by the phones and the computers and the tv….

Like….if they go to school/work, then they have to solve all sorts of issues they may have, then they have to buy food, cook, drive, take care of family members (like the soft-brained kids they may have), have homework…..then they are nonstop on their phones….Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Youtube…..Netflix….Amazon….shop, take photos, consume, like, share, chit-chat.

Honestly, does anyone nowadays have inner thoughts? Because even when you sit in your bed, before going to sleep, probably most humans are on their phones. They wake up with their phones in their faces too.

I was amusing myself thinking that in the near future people would go to a psychologist and be like…

Patient: I hear voices in my head!
Psychologist: What do they say?
Patient: idk….like words at times…
Psychologist: Do you hear them loud?
Patient: At times yes….
Psychologist: How often and when mostly?
Patient: Not that often, and usually when I do not do anything for some reason…
Psychologist: Ok, you may suffer from ITD.
Patient IDT?
Psychologist: Inner Thoughts Disorder. A lack of outside stimulation of the brain can cause the brain to shoot random thoughts. It is nothing to worry about. Back in the days people managed to deal with that on a daily basis. I recommend you these apps to keep your brain more engaged, and take one of these sleeping pills an hour before you want to go to bed.

😀

That’s how I was amusing myself.

You know, I used to spend at least 2-3 hours in bed before going to sleep, thinking about stuff. And it is damn fun. At times I would spend 5-6 hours or more, staying in bed, thinking. Actually this thinking time allowed me to create TROM, the documentary. The many books I wrote and projects I created. Heck yeah, this article was created last night while I was sitting in bed, in darkness, just with my brain. Now I too have reduced the night thinking to say 1-2 hours for some reason, but I still think every single night before I go to bed. 😀

These moments of you inside your brain are, I think, essential to get to know yourself and the world around you. To plan ahead, to talk to yourself, understand yourself and your relationships. And the world that is out there. Without it you are like a Rumba cleaning robot. Or other sorts of robots. You observe and are pushed by the stuff you are observing. But have no time for self-reflection. Your brain is a read only software by you, and read and write for the big companies that are keeping you busy.

People have become robots. And there is a good reason why. An explanation that have predicted that. TRADE.

The same way that humans became physical robots for the past centuries, working 8 to 12 hours a day, same way today their minds are being trading assets. Facebook, Google, Netflix, TikTok and the like, they NEED your mind to trade. Your attention and data are so valuable today. So they do all they can to transform you into a livestock animal, milked daily, because that’s all they want.

It is a very ugly society we live in. Driven by the same force of trade.

When the printing press was invented some said that humans won’t even think because they will spend time reading other people’s thoughts. Wasn’t true really. Newspapers and the invention of the TV, others said, will make people dumber by keeping them glued to those media outlets. Not entirely true, but to some degree truer than before. The “smartphone” and the internet era is on a different level tho. They do keep people busy most of the time, because it is run by a cancerous invasion of companies and individuals who want BRAINS. Mindless consuming BRAINS. And you carry that consumption device with you non stop, and rely on it.

I too rely on a phone….to keep in touch with my parents and because they require one when you have a bank account, go to the hospital, the dentist, and so on. But I decided to only use the phone for that. And for the weather at times. Plus GPS. The rest I do not care. Although I spend a ton of time online, I do so only on my laptop. On my phone I rarely even have credit. And on my laptop I do a lot of work for TROM. Besides that I do scroll through reddit at times, but mostly I use our own tools like TROMnews, I watch documentaries and so forth.

But man…..this is a scary world for me. I see most humans as zombies who are not alive, but simply are automatons that are fed and milked non stop for an endless trade society.

And I genuinely wonder if people still have inner thoughts nowadays….what do they dream at night about….what do they think when they are not C’s….? Are they L’s, I’s anymore? idk….

One thing I am 100% sure is that if I did not spend a lot of time with myself, in my head, I would have been lost today. It is what allowed me to get rid of my suicidal and depressive behavior, what allowed me to change, what made me make TROM, write books, make videos, and so forth. Without these, there is no me.
The war in Ukraine: 1 year later, 10 thoughts.

The war in Ukraine: 1 year later, 10 thoughts.

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It’s been almost a year since the war started. Here are my condensed thoughts.

1. It is only Russia’s fault.

And by that I mean a few who control Russia.

A bunch of talking heads say that US pushed Russia to invade, NATO bla bla bla. Does not matter if that’s true, it is Russia who invaded Ukraine. They are dropping the bombs, they threw the first punch and keep on throwing more.

2. Russia has no excuses.

Russia is a nuclear weapons collector. They have the most numerous nuclear weapons in the world. Even if Ukraine joined NATO, even if Ukraine hosted some American nuclear weapons, it made 0 difference for Russia. No one is suicidal to ever attack Russia. For fucks-sake no one dares to attack North Korea because they have one and a half nuclear weapons…

So when Russia or others are blabbing about how they had no choices, that it is the Americans’ fault for this, then this is pure nonsense of course.

3. The situation is very complicated.

Some say the world should keep on providing arms to Ukraine, some say this is terrible and only prolongs this war so more people will die, some say they should defeat Russia (now is the moment), some say Ukraine should accept some compromises and negotiate some peace talks….

But now that this war has created a lot of damage already it is hard to say wtf anyone should do next. Allowing Russia to take those Ukrainian territories seems like an invitation to grab more from Ukraine in the future. And it just feels wrong to let them do that…like terribly wrong.

4. The others are also big bullshitters.

On the other hand “the rest” are also complete idiots by thinking that Russia wants to take Ukraine, then the other tribes. Same way that no one dares to directly attack Russia, Russia cannot dare to attack any NATO members. It is pure suicide for both sides.

5. The profiteers.

Lots of people take advantage of this war. The ones selling weapons, the ones hosting the refugees, and lots of others who deal with the tons of money transfers for aid purposes or other purposes. Many people are getting rich because of this war.

6. USA and the rest are the opposite of saints.

USA; France, Germany and others, are supplying weapons to all sorts of dictatorial tribes around the world. They have killed, tortured, and destroyed a lot over the past decades. They are charlatans who pretend to care about Ukraine. Some might, but very likely they only follow their own interests. So fuck off with your superheroes attitude. You are not here to defeat the evil, you are here to prioritize only your own interests while sitting on the shoulders of dead and enslaved people.

7. The damaged ones.

Like with all wars, the ones suffering are not the ones who started the war. Are the ones that do not want any of this. Some are dead, many are refugees now.

8. I don’t trust Ukraine.

The image of Ukraine, the heroes, I do not buy. I am sure there is some truth about what is being negatively said about them. Like them being influenced by the US, being engulfed in corruption, abusing in the past the areas that Russia occupied, that a bunch of people from those regions wanted to be part of Russia, especially in Crimea, and so forth.

9. Putin has failed.

Let’s be naive and take Putin’s words as true. If he wanted for the Russian people in those occupied regions to not be persecuted and treated badly, he achieved the opposite. He destroyed those areas, those lives. And made most of the world hate Russia and Russians.

If he was scared of Ukraine and how it was becoming a US puppet, and how they were getting new weapons and such, well…now Ukraine is even more a US puppet and has more weapons than they ever had. And they will get more. So, another failure.

If he wanted to push NATO further, then he achieved the opposite. NATO is closer and has more weapons now.

If he wanted to flex his muscles, he showcased that Russia has none.

All he achieved is dead people from both sides, destroyed homes and families, a worldwide hate on Russia; he isolated Russia in all regards, he showcased how badly prepared his army is, and made everyone look good and “come together” in this fakish fashion but one that made USA and Europe produce more arms, and ally against Russia.

10. The future is a constant suffering.

After all I am seeing, this war will drag for a long time. At best they get tired, exhausted, and will seek for a “peace deal” that may last for a bit of time, to then fight over those bordering regions again. Russia would love to destroy Ukraine, USA would love to drag Russia into a prolonged war.

It is an insane game that should not have existed in the first place.

I’ll leave you with this image:

The nearest galaxy to us. Billions upon billions of stars. Even more planets. We are in this vast Universe….on a small round rock. Why aren’t we helping each other, create a wonderful life for us all, and go explore the rest of the Universe? Why do we fight…?

We know who we are, from a scientific perspective. But almost no one understands….humans, despite the vast amount of knowledge about the universe and us, are still living like “citizens”. Patriots, workers, statuses….Zombies.

The best chatbot in the world?

The best chatbot in the world?

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@Aaron and @Alexio made me aware of this chatbot called ChatGPT and I said to give it a try. I was so impressed. Like….shockingly impressed. You need to make an account at https://chat.openai.com and then you can simply use it. I asked it many questions and the answers are impressive.

How many male cats are in the world? Well the answer is complex so it gives you a more complex answer telling you that it is hard to answer that.

I’m sorry, I do not have a specific number of the number of male cats in the world. The number of cats, both male and female, varies greatly depending on the country and region and also it is hard to measure this number accurately.
Cats are popular pets around the world and many are not registered, making it difficult to estimate the total number of cats in the world. Additionally, there are also many stray and feral cats that live in cities and rural areas.
However, it’s important to keep in mind that the number of cats, both male and female, is constantly changing due to births, deaths, and adoptions.
It’s worth to mention that the number of cats should be controlled and managed to prevent overpopulation and to protect the health and welfare of the cats and the environment.

Is trade bad? Again, it gives you a more balanced answer.

Trade is not necessarily bad. It allows countries and individuals to exchange goods and services, which can lead to increased economic growth and greater access to a wider variety of products. However, there are some potential downsides to trade, such as the displacement of domestic workers and the potential for exploitation of workers in developing countries. Additionally, trade can also lead to environmental degradation if proper regulations are not in place.

It’s important to note that trade policies are complex and have many aspects that can be evaluated differently by different people. For example, some people may be against free trade while others may be in favor of it. It’s also worth considering that trade policies can have different impacts on different groups of people, and not all trade policies are created equal.

I may not agree with that answer, but it is a balanced one and non-controversial for our society. I managed to talk to the bot about communism or mental disorders and dive deeper into the studies made about mental disorders and how placebo plays a role. I was impressed.

Now, I wanted to make a short article about it to point out a few important things. Mind you I only tested it one day and read a little about it, but my points are still valid. Read the wiki page here.

So, first of all you have to test it to see how good it is. I can’t just tell you that. If you don’t have time, trust me I am not easily impressed by these AI-BS chatbots. But this one is damn good.

However….second….despite being so damn impressive it is deceiving. I asked about TROMjaro and it said

“it includes several features designed to protect the user’s data and online activity, such as the Tor network for anonymous browsing, and support for encryption. “

Well NO. We do not include Tor. And we provide “support for encryption”? haha all Linux distros do….what’s that answer….

Also

“It also includes a wide range of pre-installed software that covers most basic needs, including a web browser, email client, and office suite.”

We do not include any email client.

You see, it can say things in a confident way, and yet be so wrong. I now wonder how many of the things it said to me were also blatantly wrong….

TROMjaro Linux is not a widely used distribution and its development status is uncertain, it may not be a good choice for beginners or those who need a more stable and supported system. It is more suitable for advanced users or those who are looking for a more privacy-focused and customizable Linux distribution.

Well TROMjaro was built specifically for those who are not technical….which is exactly the opposite of what this chatbot said.

In any case, the fact that it does not provide any sources for whatever it types, makes it pointless for me, and dangerous for everyone since it can misinform you quite easily. Double checking every fact it says makes it pointless anyway.

This chatbot is like a “smart friend” that everyone think he’s smart. But can you just believe this “smart” friend and ask him about anything? Nope….that’s naive. Worse is that this chatbot is created by a company who wants profits. I can never trust that.

I tried some technical questions too, that are not fact-based really, like how to do this or that for this or that program. And it gives you instructions and pieces of code. That’s fabulous. With CSS seems to do great, with others not so much. It failed a couple of times by providing wrong pieces of advice or outdated. You see this bot is trained with data up to 2021….so it lacks new data.

But it can create really cool poems. I asked it to create a poem about boots and shoes 😀 and it did:

Boots and shoes, oh how they march,
Through rain and snow, and city arch.
From stilettos to work boots,
Each with their own unique roots.

Boots, rugged and tough,
Built to withstand and never huff.
Shoes, sleek and refined,
Always looking sharp, never behind.

Together they take us to new heights,
Through all our daily plights.
Boots and shoes, our trusty feet friends,
Until the very end.

Quite an impressive job.

So these are my thoughts overall:

The chat is fabulous and awful. It is fabulous how it can create sentences that make sense and keep up with a normal conversation. I think it has great potential. It is amazing to be able to quickly ask something and have such a piece of software deliver a quick and friendly answer.

But it is awful because it can tell you untrue and dated info. And even if it may do so rarely, it is dangerous to use it. You can become very confused and misinformed. And being owned by a company can never become a tool for the betterment of humanity, but a tool for selling more shit and collecting data. They are already in bed with Microsoft and wanna make huge profits.

If this would be open source (fully) and not owned by any company but community driven, I’d be over the moon excited. I’d look forward to new improvements and even help test stuff. But right now am not at all interested, despite it being impressive in many ways. I may at best use it to get some CSS code and stuff like that, but likely I’ll forget about it. For now 😀

This website is Trade-Free