Atheism and dogma

Argument: Can atheists rationally prove, absolutely, that there is no God? And if they can't, then why are they so dogmatic?

Anyone making the above argument does not understand atheism nor it's position fully. One key point is missing - the burden of proof lies with whomever is making the claim that God does exist. An atheist doesn't claim there is proof for or against the existence of God. When an atheist says there is no God what he probably means is - there is no evidence to support the claim. That is why many of us have such a strong conviction that God doesn't exist.

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” ― Christopher Hitchens

Neither scientists nor Christians can prove the existence or non-existence of God due to the unfalsifiability of the claim. Scientific theories must be falsifiable to be considered valid. By proof I mean providing evidence produced by the scientific method. Falsification is an important mechanism of the scientific method to separate superstition and pseudoscience from real science.

I'm sure you can find quite a few dogmatic atheists in placs like YouTube claiming they can prove God doesn't exist by, for example, reciting news articles about a baby being struck by lightning ("If God exists, and he is good, then why did he allow this terrible thing to happen?!!".. and so on). Bad events, however, do not prove one way or the other whether God exists (e.g. consider the "God is mysterious" statement). You can't test stuff like that scientifically, you need palpable evidence. This is also when classifications like strong and weak atheism comes into play. These youtubers often have a distinct belief that god doesn't exist (strong atheism) when atheism in general (weak atheism) is defined by it's lack of belief without any claims or denials being made. It's a subtle, but important difference. Ironically, strong atheism has belief-without-proof in common with religion.

So as an atheists can I rationally prove, absolutely, that there is no God? Of course not - no one can. Atheists don't have to prove it because, as I mentioned, the burden of proof lies with the religious folk. It's not simply a matter of copping out and passing the buck either - from an atheist point of view God is a non-factor in the natural world until solid evidence to the contrary is presented, and it never has. Not even once. It doesn't make sense to make claims about something that cannot possibly be known. People can speculate, sure, but that's a far cry from truth.

On a personal note, I call myself an agnostic atheist because I find that it's the most rational position for me. For example, I answer two key questions in the following manner:

Question #1: Do you believe in God?
Answer: No - I see no reason to believe due to lack of evidence. (Atheism)

Question #2: Does God exist?
Answer: I don't know if a god exist - because God is by definition unknowable. (Agnosticism)

Which I guess qualifies me as both atheist and agnostic. There is a lot of overlap between agnosticism and atheism so they are not mutually exclusive. When casually asked if I believe in God I tend to simply say no without elaborating, just to avoid the headaches. I also skip the agnostic part when asked about my lack of faith and simply go with atheist; unless, of course, I'm invested in a deeper conversation about religion. This lazy way of labeling myself as simply an atheist is something I have in common with many others, both weak and strong atheists alike.

About Trolls

Like many people I occasionally enjoy watching YouTube. As an atheist I particularly enjoy atheist related videos, like those made by AronRa, Thunderf00t, TheThinkingAtheist, BionicDance and philhellenes. So imagine my surprise when Thunderf00t indirectly exposed a troll with his latest video Girl prays to CAUSE Japanese earthquake (he was using bits of her video to make a point and linking to the original in the description of the video). Her video turned out to be very controversial. The only problem is that Thunderf00t happens to be very popular and his subscriber base number in the six digits. As you might imagine, TamTamPamela (the handle of the youtuber in question) got some attention. A metric crapload of attention, and more than she could handle; especially when her personal info was discovered and posted for the world to see, they call this "dropping someone's docs". People were so outraged by her that they had pizzas ordered in her name and delivered to her home, and she probably got more than a few nasty phone calls. For TamTam it was the final straw so she came clean about being a troll to put an end to the mess and shortly thereafter she closed down her YouTube account.

Now, what's interesting to me is that some youtubers rallied to her defense calling her videos satire, even though she specifically came clean as being a troll. There's a difference between satire and trolling. Satire is basically ridicule, irony and sarcasm. Sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant and typically very obvious.

If you've ever been on Usenet and frequented a major newsgroup you will almost certainly have come across more than a few trolls. But to those who are confused about what, exactly, a troll is and what they do - here's my explanation.

It's the girl who sleeps with your boyfriend not because she wants him, or even because she hates you, but because she wants to destroy your relationship. It's the guy who lets the air out of your tires just to mess with you and not out of revenge for something you might have done. It's the kind of person who throws a rock at a bird just because he thinks it's funny and he's also the guy who might enjoy poking a sharp stick at a caged animal. I'm sure most of you know the type, they're mean-spirited people you avoid on a regular basis or simply wish you didn't know. That's what a troll really is. A dictionary lookup of the term internet troll reads as follows "someone who posts controversial and usually irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum or chat room, with the intention of baiting other users into an emotional response[1] or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion.", what the dictionary doesn't tell you is why they do it, put simply - they get off on it. The only real way to handle a troll is to ignore them, regardless of what bullshit they post. Don't even respond once, because if you give any hint they've got your attention they'll just redouble their efforts. And these assholes can stick around for years.

Why anyone would defend such a person is beyond me. Take this holier-than-thou, pretentious asshole for example. The only reason he's defending TamTamPamela is, I'm guessing, because she's cute or because he's a troll himself. So he has to be the knight in shining armor sticking it to the man (Thunderf00t). Only problem is that TamTamPamela is a troll, she even admitted so herself, and she wasn't doing satire. Way to go, asshat.

On Delphi 2010

I don't often use Windows for anything significant at home except for playing a handful of games (I generally prefer consoles like the PS3). Some odd exceptions are video editing/encoding with VirtualDub and on certain rare occasions even programming. For programming I like Delphi in particular. Not because I have any serious projects - work related or otherwise - but because I just have fun doing it. The first time I did some real programming was on MS-DOS with Turbo Pascal (BBS related hacking) and later I went on to use Delphi on Windows. Delphi 3 was the first version I used on Windows and I later upgraded to Delphi 7 after a short period of using 6 (the free version). To give you an example, my last project was a MDI code editor for programmers with a built in IRC client, mail client, hex editor and syntax highlighting for dozens of languages. It even had RSA encryption for public key cryptography and AES for symmetric encryption as well as SHA hashing (all encryption based on TPLockBox components). It was all for fun you understand, and I never really finished it, although it was perfectly usable for my own purposes. All of it contained in a single executable of about 600kb in size, it used .ini files for settings so it could carry it's configuration along on a USB thumbdrive. Fun eh? Anyway, I'm getting carried away..

Not too long ago I got my hands on a copy of Delphi 2010... interesting I thought, could it still be as good for RAD programming as I remembered it? Sadly no. Delphi 2010 doesn't have the polish 7 had. The help system, for example, is mostly useless. In Delphi 7 you could place the cursor on just about any object property, hit F1, and you would have all the information you needed instantly pop up about that particular property. Embarcadero redesigned the help system completely and now you often just get a (mostly) empty page, and sometimes the help page only shows you C++ specific information. Not too helpful if all you do is Object Pascal.

2010 also has a lot more bugs, on more than one occasion I've encountered a bug that more or less locks delphi up with an error that says something along the lines of "can't set focus on invisible Window", I've had seemingly random form errors when I've used TListView's that produce broken executables. Simply restarting Delphi and recompiling fixes the problem, embarrasing, but this is just one of several wierd bugs I never encountered in Delphi 7. 2010 also has a crapload of pointless junk added to it, like Mono and Gtk#. I've never even seen a serious attempt at making applications on the Mono platform. Embarcadero's Delphi also uses a lot more Microsoft technologies than it used to, it even installs a minimalistic version of Visual Studio for reasons I fail to understand, apparently it augments Delphi in some fashion. And the previously mentioned (and useless) help system, which I believe is based on something called Microsoft Document Explorer. Microsoft has retired the old .hlp system in Vista/7 so I understand why they've changed it, but considering how poorly the new one works, I think Embarcadero should've developed their own documentation system.

Delphi 2010 is still a fairly decent environment, but it's a far cry from the Delphi I used to know. If you're getting nostalgic and feel like doing some hacking on Embarcadero's Delphi, I'd advise you to just let it go - It'll only depress you if you came from Delphi 7 or earlier. Admittedly, Embarcadero has added some really cool features, but what use are they if they couldn't even get the basics right?

Thumbs down.

CAT-5e vs. CAT-6

In an effort to improve network performance on my home network I did some cable testing. I was curious whether or not it was worth spending a little extra money to buy CAT-6 cable instead of CAT-5e - in short, no, it isn't. On my network I have an Linksys WRT610n router, my main computer, a small Mini-ITX server and a Laptop - all of which have Gigabit ethernet interfaces. The WRT610n is a Wireless-N router equipped with a 4-port gigabit switch. My testing was done between the Mini-ITX server (a VIA EPIA m700 clocked at 1GHz on a C7 processor with a 2-port integrated VIA Velocity ethernet controller). The via-velocity driver had to be patched to add NAPI support and some other fixes. Beyond that everything was running vanilla Linux without tweaking. My main computer has a 2-port integrated RealTek 8111C/DL ethernet controller on the mobo.

The parameters I used were "spray -l 8828 -c 100000 -d 1 10.10.10.10". This command sends 100000 packets with a length of 8828 bytes and a 1 millisecond delay between packets. 8828 bytes was literally the largest packet i could send - down to the byte - without experiencing packet loss. It's worth noting that I also had to use the 1 millisecond delay to avoid packet loss. Without it the hardware simply couldn't cope.

CAT-5e

Run #1:

sending 100000 packets of length 8828 to 10.10.10.10...
        in 9.20 seconds elapsed time,
        0 packets (0.00%) dropped.
Sent:   10866 packets/sec, 95932.7 KBytes/sec
Recvd:  10803 packets/sec, 95369.5 KBytes/sec

Run #2:

sending 100000 packets of length 8828 to 10.10.10.10...
        in 9.17 seconds elapsed time,
        0 packets (0.00%) dropped.
Sent:   10901 packets/sec, 96236.3 KBytes/sec
Recvd:  10837 packets/sec, 95669.5 KBytes/sec

Run #3:

sending 100000 packets of length 8828 to 10.10.10.10...
        in 9.16 seconds elapsed time,
        0 packets (0.00%) dropped.
Sent:   10914 packets/sec, 96350.9 KBytes/sec
Recvd:  10849 packets/sec, 95782.7 KBytes/sec

CAT-6

Run #1:

sending 100000 packets of length 8828 to 10.10.10.10...
        in 9.11 seconds elapsed time,
        0 packets (0.00%) dropped.
Sent:   10976 packets/sec, 96900.9 KBytes/sec
Recvd:  10911 packets/sec, 96326.6 KBytes/sec

Run #2:

sending 100000 packets of length 8828 to 10.10.10.10...
        in 9.17 seconds elapsed time,
        0 packets (0.00%) dropped.
Sent:   10903 packets/sec, 96252.9 KBytes/sec
Recvd:  10838 packets/sec, 95685.9 KBytes/sec

Run #3:

sending 100000 packets of length 8828 to 10.10.10.10...
        in 9.24 seconds elapsed time,
        0 packets (0.00%) dropped.
Sent:   10821 packets/sec, 95536.1 KBytes/sec
Recvd:  10758 packets/sec, 94977.2 KBytes/sec

As you can see CAT-6 didn't give me a performance boost and that's probably because there are bottlenecks preventing better speeds. The bottlenecks might be anything from the router, the ethernet controllers or their drivers. So there you have it. CAT-5e should serve you just as well as CAT-6 unless you have hardware capable of reaching optimal Gigabit ethernet performance. This is very unlikely unless you buy very expensive gear. The theoretical limit of Gigabit ethernet is about 125MB/s, on my LAN I only reached about 96MB/s. These ethernet controllers were integrated on the motherboard so that's what most people would use, but you could spend some cash on expensive Intel adapters with dedicated processors for packet processing. It would probably give you a boost - but few people would do this, and I doubt many would even go as far as I did and patch the via-velocity driver (which is known to suck ass).

Even if you do spend some extra cash on high-end ethernet adapters you still have to account for disk I/O speeds which will also be a limiting factor during file transfer (but it wasn't in my test because spray doesn't read nor write to disk). I was only able to reach about 50MB/s during a file transfer which is about half of the 96MB/s I got using spray, and that's probably because of the disk I/O bottleneck on both ends.

Update1: I conducted a new test (on CAT-6) in which I replaced the Linksys router with a Netgear Gigabit switch, so now I get about 113MB/s and the test finishes about 2 seconds faster, from about 9 down to 7 seconds for transferring 100000 packets of 8828 in length. I never tested with CAT-5e to see if I've exceeded the cable limit. Here's the output:

sending 100000 packets of length 8828 to 10.10.10.10...
        in 7.84 seconds elapsed time,
        0 packets (0.00%) dropped.
Sent:   12760 packets/sec, 112645.5 KBytes/sec
Recvd:  12851 packets/sec, 113451.6 KBytes/sec

So the conclusion still stands, don't worry about CAT-5e vs CAT-6 because there are almost definitely bigger bottlenecks elsewhere.

Update2: This article summed it up very well.

Update3 (2016-09-20): I've done a lot more testing since I first published this post and since then I've bought more powerful hardware. My router is now a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter PoE, the switch is an HP 1820-8G (Layer 2) - a convenient accessory to my HP MicroServer Gen8 (dual Broadcom adapters) running CentOS 7 and LACP truncated ports. My client computer is a dual processor HP Z820 Workstation with integrated Intel adapters (only one is used in testing). This time around I did benchmarks with iperf3 rather than the aging spray and I used iperf's --format parameter to get the results in KBytes to make a comparison to the old results easier. Here's the output:

Connecting to host 10.10.10.10, port 5201
[  4] local 10.10.10.193 port 49270 connected to 10.10.10.10 port 5201
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth
[  4]   0.00-1.00   sec   112 MBytes  114144 KBytes/sec
[  4]   1.00-2.02   sec   115 MBytes  115755 KBytes/sec
[  4]   2.02-3.00   sec   112 MBytes  115820 KBytes/sec
[  4]   3.00-4.00   sec   113 MBytes  115781 KBytes/sec
[  4]   4.00-5.00   sec   113 MBytes  115702 KBytes/sec
[  4]   5.00-6.00   sec   113 MBytes  115769 KBytes/sec
[  4]   6.00-7.00   sec   113 MBytes  115678 KBytes/sec
[  4]   7.00-8.00   sec   113 MBytes  115793 KBytes/sec
[  4]   8.00-9.01   sec   113 MBytes  115678 KBytes/sec
[  4]   9.01-10.00  sec   113 MBytes  115769 KBytes/sec
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  1.10 GBytes  115589 KBytes/sec                  sender
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  1.10 GBytes  115589 KBytes/sec                  receive
r

iperf Done.

I've managed to improve performance a little by getting better hardware and still the cabling is pretty much the same (CAT-6). In my first run of tests I managed to reach about 750Mbit, the second time i reached about 880Mbit and finally in this latest test just about 950Mbit. At this point there isn't all that much more I can do and the performance gains get smaller and smaller. At work I did rudimentary gigabit performance testing over CAT-5 and managed to reach about 960Mbit (albeit with high end networking gear, far better than I have at home) so even cables that old can still stand up very well today. This time, I did get around to testing a CAT-5e cable with my current hardware and the results are as expected:

Connecting to host 10.10.10.10, port 5201
[  4] local 10.10.10.193 port 49342 connected to 10.10.10.10 port 5201
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth
[  4]   0.00-1.01   sec   114 MBytes  114619 KBytes/sec
[  4]   1.01-2.01   sec   113 MBytes  115513 KBytes/sec
[  4]   2.01-3.01   sec   113 MBytes  115769 KBytes/sec
[  4]   3.01-4.01   sec   113 MBytes  115641 KBytes/sec
[  4]   4.01-5.01   sec   113 MBytes  115690 KBytes/sec
[  4]   5.01-6.01   sec   113 MBytes  115641 KBytes/sec
[  4]   6.01-7.01   sec   113 MBytes  115641 KBytes/sec
[  4]   7.01-8.01   sec   113 MBytes  115769 KBytes/sec
[  4]   8.01-9.01   sec   113 MBytes  115641 KBytes/sec
[  4]   9.01-10.00  sec   113 MBytes  115641 KBytes/sec
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  1.10 GBytes  115555 KBytes/sec                  sender
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  1.10 GBytes  115555 KBytes/sec                  receive
r

iperf Done.

Pretty much the same, about 950Mbit. So there you have it, confirmed several times over - hardware is generally what gets you performance, not cables. Once you get close to the gigabit speed limit there's also no point in investing in more expensive gear to get even further because you'll be paying through the nose just to get those extra few megabits - at that point the main argument for buying better gear is features (VLAN support for example) and long-term stability. Of course, 10Gbit ethernet is a different matter - old CAT-5 cabling should (in theory) start experiencing some serious packet loss but for me that remains untested.

Mono - does it suck?

I just stumbled across an amusing rant in my RSS reader: Here we go again - Why Mono doesn't suck. Why do I find it amusing? Because this is probably the most disillusioned rant I've read in years. It goes from ranting about "anti-Mono movements", "Software Terrorism" to quoting Thomas Jefferson to accusations about persecution. Many gems in this piece I tell you. Extremist and bias is what I peg this sort of thing as, and it really is quite funny. He starts by claiming that he'll address certain points of concern like why Mono is not a threat to free software. Of course, in the end, he does no such thing.

The hell that is Gnome and Xorg

Gnome and Xorg are fine pieces of software but they're a real pain to build. This is a rant I've been thinking about venting for a couple of years now.

First off, Xorg used to be OK when it had the monolithic build but then it split into hundreds of pieces and the maintenance overhead went up a hundredfold (for anyone who creates packages). It has become as tedious to build as Gnome.

Gnome has always been a pain, the developers say "modularity" is the brilliance underlying Gnome. Modularity is good. Modularity is excellent. Modularity makes things easier. But NOT when you break your project into a gazillion pieces. If you do that then it's just shattered. KDE understands this, their desktop is modular but "grouped" into larger packages, effectively turning it into a monolithic/modular hybrid. Basically, there is modularity within the packages while the packages themselves are monolithic. The advantage is that the desktop packages can be managed by a small group of people or even a single individual because the dependency chains become shorter. And you still get to keep modularity for developers. The disadvantage is that security patches become tougher to roll out because the packages become much bigger. With that in mind - I'll take one big package over a hundred small ones ANY day.

I am still using Xorg 6.9.0 because it's the last monolithic version of X. Why? I simply do not have the time to manage the modular Xorg - you need a team to do that or settle for a hackish build system (ala Slackware). Slackware's build system works well enough to ship modular X but if you take a closer look you'll notice the packages do not even have proper descriptions because there is simply too many of them to bother. In addition - broken down into so many small pieces it becomes much harder to understand what each piece is supposed to do. It's like puzzles - A few big pieces is easier to fit together than hundreds of very small ones.

Update: I switched to modular Xorg quite some time ago, my opinion remains the same however. In fact, to migrate I had to write a script that automatically generated the package build scripts for each tarball so I wouldn't have to do it all manually. Also interesting is that there are many bits of the modular Xorg that suffer from neglect and no longer compiles, this especially applies to drivers (there are dozens of drivers that for one reason or another has been abandoned yet is still included in the Xorg distribution).

Gnomes and users

Recently Linus got into yet another spat on one of the Gnome mailing lists (an overblown incident IMO). It's hard not to get emotional about these things, and as someone who also gets frustrated by Gnome I can't help but cheer for Linus on this one. Feedback should be one of the most valuable sources of input Gnome could get regarding usability so you'd think they'd care, but unfortunately they don't. Instead, they hold interface guidelines (and their own conclusions about GUI design) in a much higher regard and leave a number of frustrated users behind. It's their right, of course, but perhaps also a mistake if the goal is to appeal to a wide user base. Not all of us subscribe to the Gnome project's idea of "simple is always better", and personally I doubt I'll ever learn to like it, well, at least not Gnome's approach which is to literally strip features away.

Certain Gnome developers are absolutely, positively convinced they're right too, and that's just creepy given how subjective GUI design is. In this particular case they even rationalized with an "it's been discussed before" argument. Consensus among Gnome developers translates into fact, apparently, but there's only one problem - GUI design is NOT an exact science regardless of what they might have you believe, and there is definitely a bias among Gnome regarding design.

I was also shocked when one of the Gnome developers implied that Linus was stupid because he didn't speak Spanish. I know that he (Linus) speaks at least three languages (incidentally the same ones I speak - English, Swedish and Finnish and I've heard him speak all of them) so it's not like he's linguistically challanged or anything. It can be an advantage to know several languages, true, but it doesn't make you intelligent any more than driving a porsche makes you important. We can't be expected to be sharp at all times though, and occasionally even the brightest among us make mistakes and say stupid things, so I think I'll cut the Gnome developer some slack for that reason alone. Still, the arrogance is stunning.

I wish Gnome would revert to what it used to be at around Gnome 2.6. It was OK back then. It still had it's fair share of problems but it somehow felt better and seemed less fragile. That was before they got all fanatic about interface guidelines and began copying OS X. I don't think Gnome is inherently bad. In fact, I find it quite enjoyable at times when I can bring myself to ignore certain quirks - like the supposedly "intuitive" file dialogs (a truly horrible design if there ever was one).