Greetings! My name is John Pellman. I am a Linux systems administrator who is presently based in New York City (though I grew up in the chilly hinterlands of upstate New York). My interests lie at the intersection of science and computing, with a particular focus on how technology can facilitate progress in our understanding of the world and improve the human race’s quality of life.

In our contemporary, post-industrial age a pervasive fear has arisen that, with increased automation, technology will replace the need for humanity. I believe that technology cannot replace humanity, and that this perspective that humans can be replaced should be discarded for a healthier view in which society perceives technology as a tool to accompany cognition rather than a stand-in for expertise and wisdom. Technology (as a means to an end) should be used to enable and ennoble humanity, augmenting our natural abilities just as previous tools such as hammers, quills, glasses, and printing presses have augmented us in the past. In my role as a technical professional, I would like to serve to help society leverage technology to make the world a better place. In brief, I like to bring a humanistic perspective to my work.

My philosophical has outlook been influenced by the writings of Norbert Wiener, Hubert Dreyfus, Theodore Roszak, and Joseph Weizenbaum. A brief list of recommended readings for the intellectually curious can be found below:

• The Human Use of Human Beings by Norbert Wiener (ISBN13: 9780306803208)
• On the Internet by Hubert Dreyfus (ISBN13: 9780415775168)
• What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason by Hubert Dreyfus (ISBN13: 9780262540674)
• The Cult of Information by Theodore Roszak (ISBN13: 9780520085848)
• Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation by Joseph Weizenbaum (ISBN13: 9780716704645)

This website is my erratically updated blog. Occasionally I will make posts about my thoughts or happenings in my life. For many years it was simply titled John Pellman - Systems Administrator, but as I’ve grown older I’ve come to grow weary of reducing the whole of my being to a job title. Its current title, John Pellman’s Dynamically Linked Library reflects three facts:

• When I was younger and more carefree (circa 2014), I made the mistake of registering a domain under a Somali TLD and I’ve been forced to live with the consequences of this decision for more than a decade. I thought it was cute and might even drive some traffic via the occasionally mistyped search. Both of these things are true, but I didn’t really appreciate the complex geopolitical realities of TLDs at the time.
• By reading the contents of this blog, you are mapping my thoughts into your memory and letting them run through your brain (with the major caveat that a brain is not really a computer at all). When you close this site, you will unmap my thoughts from your short-term memory. If you do not understand what I’m talking about (because you aren’t a technologist or computer scientist; i.e., you’re normal), please refer to here.
• Frankly I just needed a somewhat clever name for this site and that was the first thing that popped into my head. The prior bullet point is merely a post-hoc justification.

Photo Credit: Joaquin Ruales