I remember the feeling the first time I did Cmd-Shift-O-F-W on my old iBook and got a black text on white OpenFirmware console with a nice font, it felt like The Future (even though SunOS had it forever) compared to some Grub or initrd with the classic white text on black.
@RL_Dane
That seems like it would work. Do you know of any reference for what colors would go with which number? I'm pretty good at porting themes (see tty1.blog) but need to go which colors go where.
@RL_Dane
Well I'm more thinking about the fact that I don't have leftctrl. XD
And I'm also using my QMK config, which is firmware-based.
A display manager does help you with some security things, tho. For example, if sway crashes, it doesn't just drop you back into the tty, you're back at a login screen.
@RL_Dane
I may be misunderstanding? What exactly are you trying to set the font size of? I was assuming you were referring to the agreety prompt's font size.
Well, it depends on what porn you watch, if you go for lowest common denominator stuff, of course that's what you get, I mean, you don't go to McDonalds and get disappointed that you don't get a gourmet meal :p
Sure, I guess I'm just easy to please, my machine is basically rolling white text on background, log in, and then getting dumped into the terminal, and then writing startx, and you're left with your background, and nothing else on the screen :p
@RL_Dane@sotolf
HiDPI enough that the default tty text is far too tiny for me to read without squinting. I normally keep everything 2x scaled, which I've heard is overkill for this resolution but I actually really like.
@RL_Dane@sotolf
I might be misremembering that description from my previous laptop? Not sure. All I know is I've read was a lot of people bemoaning poor fractional scaling support on Linux due to both this and the previous laptops.
It's a fun little thing to carry around. It's basically a 2016 chromebook with Linux
The keyboard is decent, the tackpad is kind of disappointing, and you won't be very happy in a web browser, but everything else is fine.
I do believe video is hardware accelerated in Firefox, but I always play video (YT & otherwise) in mpv, because I don't have the patience to deal with the modern web in something that's got the CPU power of an iPhone 7.
My hope is for a very portable device I can run vim on and do some writing on, without necessarily having all the distractions my main laptop has. Hey, maybe I'd even run it tty-only.
@RL_Dane@fbievan@sirber@sotolf
My previous laptop was a Surface Laptop 1st-gen, which never got Linux support for the webcam. Most of the time, my Framework's camera is switched off via the hardware switch. I don't need a webcam. ;)
The swiveling screen is kinda cool. I've used it to "talk" to my nearly deaf grandmother before.
The digitizer is a proper Wacom (or clone), but there's a HUGE gap between the LCD and the surface glass (plastic, really).
I bought a cheap stylus on eBay, and it's not quality. I wish I could find an authentic one. Any wacom stylus will work, but not any stylus will fit in the stylus bay.
The display latch is a sliding plastic piece that breaks easily. It slides to allow you to latch the cover closed with the display down (laptop) or up (tablet). I already broke mine, so it just kinda sits there, but doesn't quite latch. The plastic around the hole where the latching part goes is slightly broken, and doesn't properly keep the little latch piece captive.
@sirber@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@sotolf reminder my phone is from 2020 (Pixel 4a), mostly because I need a headphone jack and the adapter i had just melted randomly
Yeah, I will give Apple credit for keeping small phones alive.
Every now and then I boot up my iPhone 4 and MARVEL that I used it daily for nearly three years.
@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@fbievan@sirber I don't buy phones that often, and am no good on brands, I have an LG and it has served me well for the time I've had it, I don't think LG is either niche or suspect really, just another electronics company.
@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@fbievan@sirber There you see how up to date I am :p I basically just go for a non-chinese brand and I think I've had this phone for over 3 years now, still working great. I don't know I've been using android devices since 2013 or something, before that different symbian ones.
@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@fbievan@sirber nope, just the rom the phone came with, it has been rather flawless, it has some strange things some times, like 0,05 of the times I connect a charger it goes into firmware flashing mode for some reason, and the boot sequenence being weird some times, but it's nothing that I have often.
@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@fbievan@sirber I seriously could use most of the phones that I used to use back in the day and continue on like I do today, not really feeling clunky or anything.
To me, the most important dimension is the width of the phone, not the length, because I chiefly use my phone for reading stuff.
I was so excited to get my 4a 5G with its MASSIVE 6.2" screen, then suddenly crushed to learn that it was actually "smaller" in the dimension that mattered to me -- horizontal -- than my 5.5" iPhone 7+. WAT.
@RL_Dane@fbievan@benjaminhollon@sirber I don't really like reading on my phone much, my kindle, while being from an evil company has been one of the greatest things I've bought, so good to read on, it's not comparable to even the best led screen.
@RL_Dane@fbievan@benjaminhollon@sirber I have done so many weird ways of reading books on devices I have read at least one book on, the psion, palm pilot, psp, nintendo ds phone and a computer :p
@benjaminhollon@RL_Dane@fbievan@sirber I had a kobo glo for a while, but the screen cracked, it certainly was more clunky than the kindle, that being said I never connect to the net with my kindle, just transfer stuff over usb :)
@sotolf@RL_Dane@fbievan@sirber
Yeah that’s the same way I do it. I still don’t like living in fear of accidentally turning off airplane mode for a moment and them sending a firmware update that makes everything worse, like has happened so many times. :P
Honestly, the main thing it's got going for it is weight, screen, keyboard, and openness.
Any modern web browser won't be a very fun experience, although if you stick to lighter websites, it's tolerable.
No, that's the beauty of w3m. Even very heavy websites work like a champ IF they present any plain html. So, the super heavy crap that's all JS and no actual content won't display anything, but some websites that have regular html content and some heavy JS will be much more enjoyable in w3m than firefox.
I'm liking Vimium C, although it's limited in that it only works in actual web pages, and only once a page is loaded.
So if you're in about:blank or the system start page, or if a page is still loading, you don't get anything ;)
I usually keep a file:///dev/null tab open so I can have a functional launchpad for vimium features
@sirber@benjaminhollon@RL_Dane@fbievan js if more like the walking dead, it's a small gnome hanging on our neck trying to strangle us, and we are trying to pretend everything is okay. No it's not js is utter garbage.
@RL_Dane@sirber@sotolf@fbievan@RL_Dane
Now, now, I'm chiefly a web dev. It's just on the backend that I'm chiefly JS, and currently I'm using a JS SSG, so none of that buttery goodness gets handed down to the visitors of my sites.
I'm a... (counts massive life-reboots on his fingers)...
...ex infosec analyst, ex Unix sysadmin, ex academia hopeful currently working in some kind of sales because the universe is hilarious.
My early 2010 Thinkpad X200 "tablet" is a better experience in every way but weight and screen.
Also, ironically, the Pinebook Pro chicklet keyboard vs. the X200 "TRUE BLUE" keyboard are kind of a tossup. They're both pretty good.
@benjaminhollon you kind of wish that a company with almost unlimited resources would be on every moonshot project you can think of but they’re kind of the opposite? But then you have Google over there starting and cancelling things left and right? Idk I’m glad I’m not a tech ceo.
@benjaminhollon@RL_Dane@sirber@fbievan why sad? It's just an american gigacorporation, why are people taking it so personal, the wellbeing of a soulless greedy megacorp..
Sad because they had, if nothing else, the semblance of a proper mythology back in the 80s through the naughties.
Even if they weren't noble, the had some noble ideas, even if those ideas were in the service of greed. It wasn't all greed, even if it was mostly greed.
@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@sirber@fbievan They had an image of soul, because of hugely successful ad campaigns, seen from someone who never cared about it, and not from their langauge or country I see nothing else than a google/amazon/microsoft company with no soul, just focused on parting as many people from their money as possible, I don't see them doing a single thing that made me thing about something noble, all greed.
@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@sirber@fbievan mcrosoft invented loads of stuff too, but I don't really hold them up either, I don't know if I just don't wasn't there at the time but I can't remember them having invented anything that useful.
Old iFanboy roots showing, but to me, Apple took the Xerox Alto demo and made it into a working product, and took something that would become a $10,000 workstation and shrunk it down to a $1,999 home computer (yes, it sold for $2,495. Purely John Scully's fault).
I don't think Microsoft contributed a single thing, not one solitary innovation in their entire first decade of life.
They packaged up QDOS to sell to IBM and they ripped off the Macintosh interface by having Charles Simonyi work very closely with the Macintosh system devs under the guise of getting MS Office working well.
AFAICT, their very first innovations came in Windows 95, twenty years after they were founded.
(Ok, MS Basic was ok. I'll give them that. I think Applesoft basic was better, but it lacked floats)
@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@sirber@fbievan ah, so basically just copying what others did but with better advertisements, like they did with the phone market.
They used to quite a lot of programming language development, and still do, that's basically the main thing that they do quite okay.
Man, don't discount Bill Atkinson's mathematical genius. It's easy to think of GUIs as no big deal today, but with the slow CPU, limited RAM, and limited dev tools they had in the day, that work was MIRACULOUS.
I don't give a crap about Jobs, but Atkinson and Woz before him deserve our respect. The Macintosh was much more than a copy of or a marketing refinement of the work at Xerox. They took a very rough sketch and made it actually work, and with commodity hardware.
@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@sirber@fbievan Sure I can respect people, not soulless corporations, if I remember correctly apple pretty much fucked Woz anyway, not giving him almost any worth for what he did.
And don't get me started on Jobs, the guy who killed himself because he didn't believe in science, and just died from something way before he should have, truly there are things that can't be bought with money.
Woz's biggest problem was the airplane accident. Well, his biggest problem from the perspective of someone who loved his innovations and wishes he had continued. After the accident, he really lost interest in tinkering.
But he's definitely not a poor man. But I'm pretty sure he's got tons of stock.
The democratization of tech that resulted from it was good, but the dumbing-down of tech was bad.
Honestly, I think that the GUI was pretty good overall, but smartphones (particularly the iPhone-derived variety) were disastrous.
Of course the GUI would come anyway, just as someone would eventually land on the moon. The remarkable thing isn't that Armstrong was first, but that he was first in 1969, when the technology was barely ready.
@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@sirber@fbievan yeah, but I keep thinking what if the ui more evolved through TUI, so we would have had good keyboard shortcuts everywhere, and things laid out better, come to think of it, maybe the mouse was the worst thing that happened, there are few things that are good about mice, ma'be the scroll wheel, I like the scroll wheel :)
much of the slowness comes from people using garbage technology, such as electron or other java script garbage with huge frameworks rather than using an actually good language that compiles down to fast software, basically making "applications" that are little less than offline webpages that has only the downsides from the web of being slow as molasses, and being made by people who don't care about performance at all.
Just look at how our machines now are at least an order of magnitude faster than they used to be, but in many cases they feel more sluggish to use now than they did back in the day.
@RL_Dane@sotolf@pixelherodev@sirber@fbievan
The functionality is all cloud-based now. But don't worry, the companies running the services have no intention of going bankrupt. Why would you even worry about that? ;)
My thing is, what is the point of running something in the cloud when you have a perfectly good computer right infront of you (I get stroage). I rent a server from digitalocean (if you check the ip address the domain of this points to it is digitalocean). I dont see a reason to run the actaul programs on there, only really my E-Mail because most other things are not going to be helpful to me if something happens, so there is no reason wasting cycles on that.
Why run a program in the cloud for a bunch of money if you have a more powerful computer right infront of you
I think benjamin meant for things like smarthome stuff, I've seen things like lightbulbs having cloud stuff built into them, in devices that will never be updated, it's kind of scary.
All you gotta do is install their little spyware app and waive your right to seek justice in a court of law.
Such a small price to pay for such important features. /s
I have nothing to worry about I have the dumbest house ever :p (As the luddite that I am) but it would be kind of fun to mine bitcoin on a distributed bulb network :p
@Anachron@RL_Dane@sotolf@pixelherodev@sirber@fbievan
One of my best friends started using hyper as his terminal and I just can't even. I don't get it at all, it seems like the worst possible technology to build a terminal on.
@benjaminhollon@RL_Dane@sotolf@pixelherodev@sirber@fbievan one day humanity will regret this, when our cars can be hacked through a zero day exploit in of the 10000 deps the electron apps in them uses and other apps simply stop working after an update because a dependency down the tree is outdated... or even worse, got hijacked and now strangers have access to your car.
@sotolf@Anachron@RL_Dane@pixelherodev@sirber@fbievan
Yeah, really frustrating. It's surpringly tricky, though, on Windows to do it natively, though, at least in my experience. At least it's a portable .exe so you can just delete it when you're done. Though I bet it leaves trace files all over your app data folders.
Weather apps are a bit worse imo.
You can either just use the browser or use the console or even statusbar widget. But an electron app displaying a few weather icons?
Not that I ever used this much then; I had an 8G computer and occasionally ran up against limits there. It wasn't too much more expensive than the 16G I would have gotten, iirc, so I went ahead and made sure I'd never need to upgrade my RAM again. :D
…yeah I've never used even half of it. And I rarely cross 2G of usage.
Something I kinda want to try is putting my .cache directory on a ramdisk. See if I get faster speeds on anything. Or at least experiment with tmpfs for different applications.
I've done this.
I don't know if it makes things faster, but it's less wear on the disk.
I had a script that got executed upon login that looked for symlinks in the .cache directory, and created the corresponding directories in /tmp
I'd say that's one of the more extreme examples of "do it for me". In most cases, you do have to do a lot of figuring it out yourself, especially if you go down the route of learning how to package things, which (from what I can tell not having done it) is similar to creating programmatic instructions on how to compile from source in many cases.
@pixelherodev@RL_Dane@Anachron@sotolf@sirber@fbievan
I do agree with you that it does abstract away much of the complexity, but I'd also argue that for some people that's a good thing. It lets them harness granulated control over their system without needing as much in-depth technical knowledge as it might take.
I don't use Linux because I want to learn the complexity, I'm here because I want the control, and NixOS gives that to me.
@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sotolf@sirber@fbievan There's a reason I'm looking at moving from alpine to OpenBSD for where I need to interact with Other stuff [e.g. dayjob], and using Plan 9 for everything I care about.
I get that argument (being an ex-infosec guy myself), but if there's so much security that you can't use you're laptop, you're doing it wrong (unless you want to use said laptop for something critically important)
I am ONCE AGAIN urging people to write BETTER SOFTWARE instead of demanding that the hardware be so fast that we have to turn off the MMU to run your crap
Sadly, Gimp 2.10 required Python2 of all things, so I was stuck running the beta GIMP 2.99 (which was honestly fine).
Now that I think of it, I wonder if #OpenBSD's disk encryption wasn't taking access of crypto instructions on the Core 2 Duo??? That would explain a LOT
Disk access felt slower (might have been the encryption scheme, dunno), and even something as simple as firing up xdm (xenodm) and having it run an xsetroot seemed to take a while.
But yeah, outside of web browsers and other tragically heavy things, it's pretty usable, particularly if you put it on a machine that you haven't used any other OS on (and therefore have no basis of comparison)
I don't think any of my passwords are stored in RAM? I've been trying to clamp down on that as much as I can.
Much of being more worried about physical attacks is due to living in a dorm where certain people do have physical access to my devices for long periods of time. :P
What it means is I keep typing my ~40-char passphrase over and over into GPG popups, but that's a small price to pay since it only takes ~3-4 seconds to type.
@pixelherodev@RL_Dane@Anachron@sotolf@sirber@fbievan
Ha, clever. I used to do something similar, using Encrypted ZIP files, which Nautilus let me create and open easily. Not the ideal solution anymore of course.
I think I can set pass to use a different key for a specific password? I'll have to check that.
I wouldn't trust an encrypted zip file unless I was certain of the implementation.
Early zip "encryption" was pretty terrible.
I really like ccrypt (after the compressor of your choice and tar). It's available on almost all distro and all BSDs, and is fast. It's just straight-up AES.
Speaking of which, when's NIST going to announce AES' successor?
I'd give it 90% odds that a FOSS project TRIES to use real encryption, but decides it's not a priority, and so they don't realize how insecure their solution really is.
I've been thinking I'd like to give #OpenBSD another try sometime, but I'd still like to find out why the performance on my Core 2 Duo was so abysmally poor. Not just browsers, but everything, including browsing threads in tut were painful.
I guess if all you did was edit code, then hit compile and walk away and get a coffee, then it wouldn't matter. But as a desktop, it was kinda bad.
I'll admit that (even just STARTING) the web browser was my #1 pain point in #OpenBSD, but everything was slow.
The one thing that it did better than the other major BSDs is its resume from suspend was pretty quick. #FreeBSD took 14 seconds to resume from S3 suspend on this box.
@pixelherodev@RL_Dane@Anachron@sotolf@sirber@fbievan
That said I am considering moving to a different base distro and building on top of that with nix or something similar to harness some of the benefits of NixOS while sidestepping some of the drawbacks, like the difficulty of running binaries.
@sotolf@pixelherodev@Anachron@RL_Dane@sirber@fbievan
You "can", you just can't use their servers with those other clients. Run your own server and you're good, but that kinda negates the purpose of Signal in the first place. :P
@sotolf@pixelherodev@Anachron@RL_Dane@sirber@fbievan
The fact that my parents already use it, though, makes it hugely better than lots of the competition. Their oranization uses it, too, so I'm not likely to convince them to move over to an alternative with (from their perspective) marginal gains.
@sotolf@pixelherodev@Anachron@RL_Dane@sirber@fbievan
Yeeeah I need whatsapp too since it's practically ubiquitous here in Malaysia. Really frustrating. I avoid it, though, and I am glad that my parents are on Signal instead.
And honestly, usability-wise, I prefer whatsapp to iMessage (which is the ubiquitous communication in Texas) since I at least can access it on my computer without OWNING A MAC.
I’m now trying scli and if it holds up I might just be able to rid myself of electron for good.
The one limitation that affects me is not being able to do video calls through it, but I guess I can either do that through my phone or temporarily install the electron app once a week when my dad calls.
I'm used to seeing them the old-fashioned way, in the "you're NOT ALLOWED TO SAY IT OUT LOUD unless you're FORMALLY RECITING THE BLESSING" Hebrew.
...but I'm realizing you dashed the "Lord" and "God" there and I totally missed it and now I feel stupid, this is really obvious in retrospect even in english 😅
I can get as far as "Baruch hashem adonai," but then I get off the rails.
But I can recite the first line of the Shema in Hebrew. I learned that much ;)
A friend of mine goes to a Messianic Synagogue. I need to hit him up for lunch to ask him how he navigates both worlds without going cross-eyed. ;)
Not that I'm necessarily interested in becoming a practicing Jew (even a Messianic one), but I have a lot of respect for the Hebrew roots of my faith... and a lot of sadness for how the church has treated Jews throughout history. Egad. :'(
The first word there is one of God's names; the second is the stand-in we're actually allowed to say out loud [because it literally means "the name", as in "the name of God," since God said not to say God's name, but didn't say "don't say *the words" 'god's name'", so it's totally fair game]
I think you meant to write "baruch ata hashem," which is basically "blessed are you, G-d"
@RL_Dane@sotolf@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan Me writing God's name there is arguably blasphemous, but I'm pretty sure education is one of the legitimate reasons to use it, so it doesn't count as "in vain" here.
"Hashem" is two parts: "Ha" means "the", and "Shem" means "name". "hashem" means "the name," and is what we say to loophole our way out of the "don't say My name in vain" rule :P
Ah, I didn't realize Adonai counted, because it was my understanding that it's a drop-in replacement for the actual name, to the point that the Christian world gets the poor transliteration "Jehovah" because the vowel markings of Adonai were added to the tetragrammaton at some point as a kind of... obfuscation?
I also love how the morning Shema says "I am thankful before You, living and enduring King," because they reasoned that people weren't holy enough to even say "HaShem" before washing their hands.
Kinda legalistic for my taste, but I have to massively respect the way the Jewish fathers of faith sanctified the Name, at least in terms of practice.
@RL_Dane@sotolf@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan Pretty sure they're both considered to be names of the divine - which is maybe why Jews and Jehova's Witnesses aren't oft found together, since one of them considers the other's NAME to be blasphemous? :P
I've got a lot of respect for anyone who gets out of the house on a weekend to knock on doors for their faith, even if others consider it annoying, but yeah...
Love the JW's, but I think they are "mistaken. About a great many things." ;)
I have to give them credit for being one of the only groups, religious or otherwise, that actually lives truly to their stated ideals.
I think most religions, at least in the US, have basically adjusted themselves to be more compatible with the current political/economic envrionment; it's one of the main disputes I have with current Judaism TBH
Yeah, that's my #1 heartburn with American Christianity. To the point of tears and groaned prayers.
I hate hypocrisy. Not the common hypocrisy of the average person failing to live up to what they believe -- that's just ordinary growing pains -- but the really deep-seated hypocrisy that can skip over the multitude of verses concerning the care of orphans and widows, ...
To borrow the words of dear Brennan Manning,
“The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians: who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, walk out the door, and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.”
A large part of it is that U.S. "Christianity" has become largely tied to a specific political party which everyone sees as representing the same views when it really doesn't, in many cases.
@RL_Dane@pixelherodev@sotolf@Anachron@sirber@fbievan
Yeeeeeaaaah I was gonna say the same thing. Keep in mind that back when state laws were considered more important than federal, half the states had slaves. Not saying that would happen again, just pointing out that states don't always make good decisions, so having a back and forth tug-and-war between the state and federal can be healthy.
It communicates that I'm dissatisfied with the current state of things. That's more than, say, not voting would do. But I refuse to vote for either of the main parties because voting for one of them communicates that I'm okay with the two-party system that's developed.
@benjaminhollon@pixelherodev@RL_Dane@Anachron@sirber@fbievan it's why I'mo happy to live a place with small parties and coalitions, more stable and fewer wild swings. Always people keeping an eye on each other, now the left-ish coalition we curretly have is garbage, and they don't do much right, but the representative from the party I voted for is doing an awesome job.
I think I remember reading about some states trying to work together to effectively remove the electoral college? It was something like, if enough states join the agreement, they'd all change their system to being popular-vote-based.
@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@sotolf@Anachron@sirber@fbievan I'll note that part of the reason I didn't vote in 2020 was that I became aware - shortly before the election - of the fact that both parties have been murdering innocent people for decades with no repercussions, and I couldn't bring myself to express support for either of them, even if it would make a net positive difference to the world
Some things are bad enough that they can't be overlooked for any cost.
Sorry but politics is one of the topics I just don't discuss except in person. Too easy for things to be taken out of context and completely ruin friendships. :D
(I don't discuss it with people I disagree with or who I think I might agree with; I've made it a hard rule.)
@benjaminhollon@RL_Dane@pixelherodev@Anachron@sirber@fbievan ehm are you trying to not all republicans? Because all republicans are at fault for big parts of the us taking bodily autonomy away from women, and trans hatred is from them 95% of the time...
No, I'm not. I disagree with both major political parties in the US. I'm saying it's a problem that Christianity is associated with being Republican in the first case, since I don't think the values do line up, but most US "christians" assume they do.
> Let them hear us sing, lost and broken souls
> Trusted priest and king, all of the lies they told
> They can hear our cries, leave us in the cold
> While the children die, watch them count their gold
especially that last line.
How much stolen wealth does the Vatican have, again?
I mean, that's basically why the Protestants are a thing, no? Because a looooot of people got fed up with the church literally selling people tickets to heaven?
@RL_Dane@sotolf@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan and, relatedly, with the church sending folks off to engage in ACTUAL LITERAL GENOCIDE, plunder other people's shit, and then use that to buy their way into heaven
I feel like there was an important rule about, oh right, "DO NOT STEAL" somewhere in there, no?
Not really following the buy their way into heaven, but I'm tracking you with the rest of it.
Leonard Ravenhill (a revivalist preacher) would say, "You wouldn't send your daughters off to [prostitute themselves] to benefit your country, so why do you send your sons off to kill?"
@pixelherodev@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan yup large amounts of people where I'm from got murdered in the "christening" it's weird how christians always talk as if they are against murders and stealing when it's exactly what they inflicted on us, yeah I mean it's the same as what the vikings did, but at least we never claim we were against it :p
I know you don't do movies much, and it's only tangentially related to the subject at hand, but I think you really need to watch "Brother Sun, Sister Moon" at some point.
@RL_Dane@pixelherodev@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan you loke the people who abandon their kids for not agreeing with them, and kill kids that could surive by not letting them do blood transfusion because of the way they read a book..
Well, those aspects obviously stink. I had forgotten about the blood transfusion ridiculousness. O_o
Cutting off kids because they don't follow your beliefs is sadly not isolated to JWs, although they are particularly egregious about it.
My friend's father-in-law wouldn't come to their wedding. Sheesh.
People are complex, and belief systems are complex. I can respect some aspects of a group's practice, even if I find some aspects weird. But yeah, I had forgotten just how controlling the organization/structure is. That's absolutely not ok.
@RL_Dane@pixelherodev@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan yep, they aren't allowed to tank to their kids, shun them, toss them out so others have to take care of them, which is why jw doesn't get any money from the norwegian people like other religions, because their rules are evil and make people do bad things.
PLEASE do not ever do that to a kid -- filling their minds with "religion" instead of leaving them open to explore faith on their own. It's bloody criminal.
I'm not saying people shouldn't teach their own faith to their kids. I'm just saying that I honestly abhor the world religion smorgasbord approach. It's just awful. Way to inoculate kids from ever having any kind of faith (most likely).
Personal question (answer if you like), what of your parents (expression/practice of) faith did you admire, and how do you feel about it now that you have some perspective?
Heyyy the "girl you walk with physics with" I teased one brother about and about which relationship he claimed there was nothing just agreed to date him so I'm getting plenty of teasing in about that. ;)
I just hate the idea of kids being given the most cynical view from the outset -- that of religion as a purely human phenomena. The human soul is made to ponder big questions, and giving easy (and crappy) answers to really enormous questions absolutely saps the soul's potential (unless the person is naturally given to pondering deeper and questioning their assumptions)
Personally I didn't really know anything about religion before I started at school.
If I asked about the bigger things my mom and dad was pretty honest about not knowing the answers, but giving me help to look in libraries and stuff to figure things out as I was getting old enough to read.
I am really happy that they were honest enough to tell me they didn't know when they didnt :)
In my case, I literally didn't know what the word "religion" meant until around middle school or so, but I had some kind of innate knowledge of God, or intuition.
I went to a Catholic school for a semester during middle school, and I thought it was both interesting, and incredibly boring.
A couple years later, I was (somehow?) going through confirmation classes at a Lutheran school, but dropped out. I just didn't see any point in it. It was (to me at the time) all form, no substance.
I became an agnostic soon after that, and then an atheist fairly early on in High School until my early-mid twenties.
I've always been a crocs kid. Still am. I think I was about eleven before I could consistently tie my own shoes. And even then I almost never wore anything but crocs.
Hmm, I don't know, that kind of feels like second hand indoctrination to me, but I won't claim something that I don't have any idea about, I still kind of doubt it coming out of nothing.
That's kind of an apologetic and arguing some kind of a-priori knowledge that I see no reason for, at least for me. It's kind of very shaky when we can understand how it get there with way less assumptions than "a god exists, this god cares about people, this god can put things in peoples minds, it wanted to do it, did it to some people and not to other" compared to they picked up something from the environment they grew up in.
> ... apologetic and arguing some kind of a-priori knowledge...
I'm not really arguing from a perspective of origins, but rather an a priori (YES) knowledge of something greater than ourselves.
I know it's a weak argument. To me, there are simply things that transcend pure logos, dialectic, and even dogma. But that's a gut-conviction (a meta-gut-conviction, even), and not easy to be argued.
As I said, it's definitely not in and of itself an argument that God exists. Much more of a personal thing than something that can persuade others. Perhaps a hint to look in a direction rather than persuasion either way.
That doesn't mean you don't pick up things from neighbours, traditions and things like that, maybe from being at a friend's house and they were doing prayers before a meal and things like that.
@RL_Dane@pixelherodev@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan hah, well, I was not thinking about the feeling, more of the thing that you can't really describe but kind of know what is, it's just my degenerate mind that goes straight to porn :p
That's an interesting phenomenon, "porn" being used to describe gawking at non-titillating images.
Not moralizing you, BTW. I'm obviously not a fan of the, er, artform, but I'm not a fan of moralizing either. At least not in a person-to-person sense.
@RL_Dane@pixelherodev@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan no worries, yeah, It's often used to describe things like that, and there is something to that, it also depends on a lot of things, where does the border lie between porn and art, is there anything redeemable about it, it's generally something that can be hard to define, is something porn if it isn't distributed, I'm getting tired and sleepy, and my mind goes to weird places :p
Yeah I'm very not a fan of the title of "unixporn". I could totally get into the subreddit if not for the title but it puts me off. And it seems silly of them to pick a title that'll alienate a lot of people who are like me. I mean… it's vivid, so I guess it hits that mark. But still…
Problem is it's hard to start an alternate place for people to post stuff with an alternate name since a lot of people would just see it as a duplicate. :P
Nahhhh I still couldn't. I'm in COMM, remember? I obsess about how other people view things; using unixporn communicates implicit approval of the name, as I see it.
@RL_Dane@pixelherodev@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan Isn't eros more like lovemaking than the often more carnal raw some times really ugly nature of porn? There is a lot of it, really a lot that just don't work for someone like me who is rather "boring" and vanilla, and just want something wholesome ;)
@RL_Dane@pixelherodev@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan so here is a question then, what about people in a long distance relationship sharing nudes, is that porn, it's obviously closer to sharing the little intimacy one can have between seeing each other.
@RL_Dane@pixelherodev@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan well, I've been in long distance relationships where it was some of the only ways to share intimacy, apart from the times that we were actually together, some of my longest relationships started out long distance.
I mean intimacy, and being close in many ways are really important things for humans.
I don't have any moral objections to erotica, but porn is not erotic art; it is a debasement of the erotic arts, as surely as Beiber debases the sonorous arts, Atlas Shrugged is a debasement of the literary arts, and every Star Wars movie since after I was born is a debasement of the visual arts. Or, even more directly, as "food porn" is a debasement of the culinary arts.
@RL_Dane@sotolf@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan >
> Hedonism has never been enjoyment, but the opposite. They take the wonderful things of life and indulge until they lose savor. It's listening to beautiful music, performed so loud as to eliminate all subtlety - taking something beautiful and making it carnal."
The King's Wit, Brandon Sanderson's "Oathbringer"
Pornography is just the worst possible interpretation of hedonism; it takes erotica and debases every aspect of it.
I can already tell that tonight is gonna be another that'll take forever to scroll through the backlog, since my schedule is inverted from pretty much everyone else in this conversation. XD
@pixelherodev@hq1@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan I'm not a big fan of the immediate nature of it though, I've had to stop chatting many times, since it's not good for my mental health, things like this and forums that are async I deal with a lot better.
It's a tweet from Mike Godwin (@sfmnemonic) saying,
"By all means compare these s**theads to Nazis. Again and again. I'm with you."
Dated Aug 14, 2017 10:03 AM (tz unknown)
A lot of people have the intuition that things happen for a reason - taking it to [one possible] logical extreme, even for a kid, is perfectly plausible IMO. I doubt it's common, but I also doubt it never happens.
[that's not even getting into whether or not it's right, of course - people, kids and otherwise, have plenty of incorrect intuitions!]
I'm actually not crazy about that line of reasoning.
I mean, something good may very well come out of evil tidings (or so we'd hope), but that doesn't mean the evil tidings came about FOR the sake of those good things.
Yeah, this is why mythos is mythos and logos and logos.
I don't say never the twain shall meet, but rather a hammer is a terrible screwdriver, and a screwdriver (particularly Phillips #00 ;) is a terrible hammer.
Sure enough, but what makes you think there is a prime mover, if that prime mover is eternal, why couldn't our universe be, no matter what you end up with infinite regression, just that yours have more steps that are unknown.
I mean... [unanswerable], but if we're going to dance around the unknowable, if a universe comes from a singularity, is it still a universe? What is it exactly? A seed? A being?
"If all matter in the universe was, at one point in the past, compressed into a single point, then what does that imply?"
Virtually nothing, as I see it? It implies that all matter was in one point?
I'd have to throw myself back into math and physics for a week or three to have a more satisfying answer, but purely philosophically I see no meaning in it.
Just because all the stuff is in one place doesn't inherently mean the container is. I don't see how it would meaningfully affect the "character" of the universe [or whatever word you want to use].
It'd just be a universe with all the stuff in one place, just like our current universe is just a universe with all the stuff spread out.
I think my thing is that any understanding of the nature of our universe falls apart when it's in a singularity. At least my understanding of it does.
Even if we define the universe as a limitless expanse containing varying amounts of mass and volume, a universe containing all of the massenergy of the universe today in a singularity is what I'd call Something Other-Than.
@RL_Dane@pixelherodev@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan well that is easy, for most of those grand big things, I don't know. So I can't say anything about how the universe came into existence or if there is any meaning to it, and neither can anyone else.
No, there's no way to prove it one way or the other, or even to prove that the entire topic is meaningless and pointless (although it may indeed be quite unfruitful).
That's why I think it behooves all to engage in the topic with charity and humility.
I'd define the universe as "the thing that holds all stuff in it," to be extremely non-mathematical ("the four dimensions of space and time," presumably, if I were going for the math)
No matter what you do to the stuff, it does not affect the container.
I'd definitely reject the definition of the universe as a "limitless expanse"; whether it's finite is entirely irrelevant!
> ("the four dimensions of space and time," presumably, if I were going for the math)
I'd personally describe it as "the seven dimensions of space, time, and possibility" but that's just me being weird. ;)
@sotolf@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan Of note: this is also part of why I don't reject the idea of spirituality - I find it basically utterly insane, but I think that's true about things which I'm certain are real, too, so arguably the fact that it's crazy is a point in its favor!
I mean, really, we WRITE RUNES ON ROCKS AND THEY START THINKING.
I don't care how much you mansplain photolithography to me, I GET IT, but it's STILL WRITING RUNES ON ROCKS.
I'm more prone to using slang when it's very clearly in a joking context already. If there's any chance of the joke flying over someone's head, the slang from an unexpected source helps clue them in. ;)
There's a line from the Loki series I really loved.
Loki was ridiculing the Owen Wilson character for believing that he was created by the timekeepers. Owen responds by asking where he came from. Loki said that he was created by an ice giant of Jotunheim.
Owen responded by saying that no matter what you believe about your origins, the more you look into it, the more ridiculous it sounds.
My solution to the paradox is to assume that the math is subtly wrong, and that compressing all the matter to a point actually works just fine - or, perhaps, that it wasn't compressed to a single point, just very very small.
But yes, without any mechanism of direct observation, all conclusions here are the completely abstract and meaningless, even^Wespecially the ones I agree with ;P
My issue isn't thinking that a singularity-universe (let's skip the universe definition debate) can't exist, only that it may not be fathomable in any sense, and maybe not any kind of universe that we can comprehend.
It reminds me a lot of Greek thought: that the origin of all things was a void from which anything can come out. Pure possibility.
String theory is mad, and cool. No one can convince me there were no recreational pharmaceuticals (or at least, some kind of deep trance states) involved. XD
I could classify the current universe as a manylarity, because it started as a single point, and expanded into many; clearly, we've gone from being a universe (when we were a singularity) to something meaningfully different.
I find the argument pretty absurd. If you rearrange the matter in the universe in any fashion, the result should - definitionally!- still be the universe!
I disagree, and I'm not trying to be semantically clever.
To me an entire universe of matter packed into a single dot is impossible to comprehend. You may define the universe as the space around that dot, but to me, that dot still defies understanding.
I get that distinction. I'm not sure I agree, but I understand where you're coming from.
I have a hard time seeing an endless true vacuum as the universe.
It is more plausible if it indeed isn't endless, but then what defines its bounds? And what is beyond it? That has a lot of problems.
@RL_Dane@pixelherodev@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan no the universe would be that dot, I mean an infinitely big void is also kind of impossible to imagine as well. Really big, sure but infinite, I even find it hard to understand the distance to the nearest galaxy.
@sotolf@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan I've always found infinity pretty easy to understand - instead of trying to picture a large number, I just visualize endless growth [or, for endless space, endless movement]
Sure, you can't visualize all of infinity at once, but that's kinda the definition of infinity ;)
The problem with a non-infinite universe is trying to define its bounds, why it's limited, and what lies beyond it.
If we define the universe as an infinite void with some stuff in it in various volumes, densities, and arrangements, that just seems more intuitive to me.
Have you heard about (I might get the name wrong) the infinite hotel problem? It's where an infinite number of people go to an infinite hotel and fill it up, then another infinite bus of people want to stay at the hotel, so the hotel manager tells everyone to move two doors down so that there's another infinity to fill up, so on and so forth.
@pixelherodev@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan yup tthat's one of my big problems with philosophy, it just takes a bit of time, and it's starting to be weird word games and trying to one-up another, I prefer things that has actual solutions.
@sotolf@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan I think philosophy is EXTREMELY important - arguably, the most important activity humans engage in - but it's important because it affects how we live our lives.
Of note, science - as the word is popularly used - has become a term for "philosophy for which we found the answer." The classical term was "natural philosophy."
I prefer to continue calling it that, as a reminder that it's important to ask questions BEFORE we can answer em
@pixelherodev@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan well people are naturally curious and will always ask questions, i'm not convinced that building gigantic castles in the skies, with extremely flimsy evidence. I just don't see the use for it. It's fun to have wild discussions like that over some relaxing substances for sure, but I don't think it's something very important for anything else than entertainment.
Interesting, I always felt "natural philosophy" was an odd term, as philosophy is so up in the air (in good and bad ways) and the scientific method is (relatively) so concrete.
It makes more sense for a singularity to be an origin point than the universe itself, unless you're defining the universe as that singularity, but then we still don't -- oh look, I've gone all cross-eyed.
@RL_Dane@pixelherodev@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan well still, it being a beginning point doesn't indicate a prime mover though, that's just inserting extra variables that we don't understand to explain something else that we don't understand, and that thing will have to be outside of the universe, if something like outside of the universe even exists.
Yeah, it's all really heady stuff. It sounds to me like you could identify that universingularity as a prime mover, as it no longer has the properties of any natural phenomenon that we can understand.
We can't hardly even imaging gazing AT it from outside it, in which case, what is it actually?
@RL_Dane@pixelherodev@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan it's the sack of space that we live in, and the only one we know, which makes even fantasising about it weird, if all we have ever seen were black swans, would we even come up with dogs? maybe all we could imagine was different varieties of birds. So yeah, it's crazy.
Considering that we all know SO very little of our origins, source, and purpose, WHAT IF there was some kind of low-level soul firmware that still had a wee little connection to that which came before us? I'd think of it along the lines of monotheism (sorrynotsorry, lol), but it's not limited to that in this train of thought.
@RL_Dane@pixelherodev@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan why monotheism rather than an ensamble like the old norse pantheon? Or nothing lik in buddhism and no religion, like we say in norway, it kind of feels like butter on bacon, too much for no good reason.
I think the pantheon of gods has its own problems. First of all, if gods are in opposition to each other, are they even worth following?
Secondly, if they have parents, then who is the original god? Is then the original god God, and the other gods just superheroes?
As far as non-theistic faiths, I think they have a stronger argument, taking observations of the world around them and extrapolating a higher purpose and being, but not necessarily a creator or superior being -- just a more abstracted one, like the Kami of Shintō (if I'm understanding the concept correctly, which I'm likely not ;)
@RL_Dane@pixelherodev@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan I've had many apologists and even priests trying to explain me solutions to the problem of evil, and nobody has came with a sane or even likely explanation for it, so don't worry :p
@sotolf@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan My personal explanation is that, taking for granted the existence of a unified Higher Power, their ultimate goal is not maximization of benevolence, and that that's a silly human imposition.
It makes more sense to me that, if there is a higher power, they're more interested in watching [and possibly helping] us to become better than we are - and that inherently requires conflict!
But hey, that's just a hypothesis. A GOD HYPOTHESIS
A good parent will lie to their kids if it means they become better people down the line; if anything, I find it entirely plausible that many religious texts from many religions were divinely inspired, and still largely false.
@pixelherodev@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan hehe, yeah, if you take away the benevolent part of a god idea that would be totally working, but then why worship them if they are not benevolent then they may just as well lie to you and you're actually worshipping something evil ;)
@RL_Dane@pixelherodev@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan a relationsip needs to sides, I don't think a parasocial relationship is something that is healthy. Love? What is love when there is no realisation of it, when there is nothing showing love is there is it then love, for something to be mutual two people have to be in contact, I'd say all of those are impossible without bidirectional contact, or else i'm in a relationship with many people.
I guess you're assuming that bidirectional contact with the divine is impossible or delusional. I'm not of the same mind on that.
In terms of realization of love, it can be love and service towards others (I guess that is parasocial), but also intimacy and enjoyment on a one-to-"one" level with the divine.
@sotolf@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan This is one reason I consider certain religions to be utterly inherently immoral, as in "If your religion is true, it'd mean that God exists and that God is EVIL."
This always flip-flops. If the universe needs a creator, who created the creator?
If the universe doesn't need a creator, then why can't the creator not need a creator.
Man my youngest brother could talk to you for hours about this stuff. He reads dozens of apologetics books in his free time and loves the stuff.
It's never been something I'm very interested in, though. In my experience no one ever gets convinced of anything by apologetics, it's just a way for people to push themselves deeper into their already-held beliefs.
If you're troubled by a philosopher, lets say, then go read them. Get to understand them well. THEN decide you don't agree and come up with arguments against their ideas.
Don't just read someone else's pre-chewed ideas and parrot them. That's not worth anything. :P
I am happy that he does read a lot of the original sources, I think? Still, he's twelve. I'm kinda astonished he's reading stuff at this level already, and I'm not sure he could handle the raw writings of philosophers yet. Hopefully he'll get to that point. And he's a smart kid, I'm sure he will.
Personal experience, man.
I was in my second geology course in nearly ten years ago, and the heavy emphasis on evolution was really bewildering me.
I went for answers to my local campus apologist guy, and I was deeply unsatisfied with what he had to say. Not a bad guy, but it just didn't speak to me.
I found my couple weeks of deep soul-searching, reading (of both Bible and science), and pondering to be worth more than any amount of time spend reading apologetics.
If the universe needs to have a creator - if the first event needs a cause outside the bounds of the universe / causality - well. Even if you take that for granted [and I don't, because i consider 'the first event' to be a definitionally invalid term], who says that that cause had Intention?
What does it means to be the "original" god? A "god" is just an infinitely powerful entity, classically; all that "Creator" and "absolute power" stuff came about later.
I also don't think the whole creator/omnipotent bundling is logically necessary.
Heck, some of the conflict in nature makes MORE sense through a divine-conflict lense!
@sotolf@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan I'll note that I don't take what I wrote there particularly seriously; it's an explanation of why I don't agree with the "monotheism is obvious" sentiment, but I don't actually agree that polytheism is inherently reasonable, either.
@RL_Dane@pixelherodev@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan well, it's impossible for us to know what was before the singularity as the big bang is where time for us began, it doesn't even really make sense to talk about before, when tim, as we know it didn't exist. The singularity was the universe, just really compressed I guess, beyond that, all we have is guesswork.
Right, I'm not trying to think about before the singularity, even. Just the singularity it self.
It seems to me you cannot go backwards in time past the early, hot, rapidly expanding universe without crossing a boundary into mythology. I'm not saying I don't think the big bang has scientific merit, only that we're building such a tall ladder of logical statements and educated guesses that it becomes very ethereal in nature.
That's not to say that it's not true, but that the source for belief in it is not that it is true. Most people who accept the big bang as the origin of the universe are not scientists who understand the cosmic microwave background; they're normal folks who trust the ones who are.
The core of science is empiricism; most scientific analysis that stretches so far back is extrapolation from empirical observations about the present.
Correlation has its place, but it takes a few more assumptions than I'm willing to make to accept some of the conclusions that come up in these contexts.
I also think that just because you have a beautiful, elegant, and well-functioning mathematical model for deeply mysterious properties of the universe, it does not necessarily follow that that actually is the way the universe works. It's a functional model matching multitudes of observations.
The same as if I took a 5MP image and AI/Fractal/N.C.I.S-Magic upscaled it to 50MP, the resulting image may look AMAZING, but that doesn't mean that that resulting image IS what was there.
@RL_Dane@pixelherodev@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan You can't go past the bginning as far as I understand it at least, even going backwards, at some place it has to begin, and since everything has a beginning it has to stop somewhere, I think I just stop one step before you, as we can't know anything else than that it had a start, philosophy so often just end in people in a big circljerk whil patting themselves on the back
@sotolf@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan I don't think there's a meaningful consensus that time began with the Big Bang. Hawking certainly believed that to be the case, but genius is not always correct.
Einstein infamously disbelieved quantum mechanics, for instance, though evidence since his death makes it extremely hard to reject, to put it mildly.
I personally see no reason to believe that time began with the Big Bang.
Ahh, of course, yes. I avoid the term "hypothesis" for this, though, since it implies I have a way or intent of testing it. I have no way to do so, it's a theoretical structure through which I currently view the world but have no way of testing.
@sotolf@benjaminhollon@RL_Dane@Anachron@sirber@fbievan Only in a scientific context, but given that the article is coached in scientific language [which is totally fine, of course!], I think I'd suggest going with "hypothesis" for clarity.
I don't think anyone's going to misunderstand it, though, unless they're doing so willfully.
@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@sotolf@Anachron@sirber@fbievan I don't know that there is a good word for it. I agree with Ben that hypothesis is wrong, upon further reflection, for the reasons he indicated; but theory in this context also seems wrong.
I think "idea" works, though is a bit too abstract; there's probably an option I'm missing
> I don't know that there is a good word for it.
Yeah, that's about where I'm landing on this.
> I think "idea" works, though is a bit too abstract; there's probably an option I'm missing
Yeah idea feels ot general. It also makes it feel less fully-formed than it is, to me; I have thought through it a lot, even though I don't have experimental evidence for it.
I mean not necessarily. If so that's a colloquial meaning tacked on. A theory just means an idea that hasn't been proven. That said there are many theories (like Gravity or Relativity) that have been tested and are very likely, but have no way to actually prove.
Scientific English holds that a theory has predictive power definitionally; pop open any intro to chemistry/bio/physics/whatever textbook and it will explicitly tell you so.
Yeah, I see that. I'd argue from my perspective of a COMM major and based on what I've learned in that class that the scientific definition of "theory" is "jargon"—occupation-specific language. It's not necessarily the same meaning the language at large uses.
But since this is a scientific-ish conjecture of mine, the scientific jargon fits.
@benjaminhollon@sotolf@RL_Dane@Anachron@sirber@fbievan That, and I'd argue that science is so widespread at this point that it's not purely occupational. A lot of people - most of them not professional scientists! - expect and demand that you hold to this definition at all times.
Personally, I think the response to "Evolution is just a theory" should have been "We decided that we should still be using 'Law' terminology for these things, it's the Law of Evolution now.'
Assuming the thread doesn't die right now, I'm probably going to revive it on, like, Tuesday as I start answering all the posts from the next 20 minutes XD
@benjaminhollon@pixelherodev@RL_Dane@Anachron@sirber@fbievan that's just because over use by people not in the group using the jargon it gets watered down, there is no more and less correct in semantics really, but for communication I would think clarity would count more than just the number of definitions you find supporting you. I can swear I use fags for cigarettes in a conversation, but I would never use it in a situation where I can hurt people with it.
Side note, it tickles me pink that the word "jargon" is itself COMM jargon. Yeah, that's the kind of humor (if you can call it that) that for some reason gets me. XD
@benjaminhollon@RL_Dane@sotolf@Anachron@sirber@fbievan The scientific definition of a theory is, in fact, an that's been tested repeatedly, never been disproved, and which has predictive power. In order to count as a theory, knowledge has to have been predicted using the theory before that knowledge was empirically confirmed.
@benjaminhollon@pixelherodev@RL_Dane@Anachron@sirber@fbievan linguistics, well, I mean if you drag in semantics, but linguistically it has both meanings, depending on who's using it and the situation, when you use it in a context that feels like science, the science connotations will most often be used.
@pixelherodev@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan yeah I mean isn't it kind of impossible, even? But since Dane was talking about a prime mover, how does a prime mover mean if nothing needs to be moved, I agree with you by the way, I don't think everything needs to have a beginning.
I think either way you come at it, there's always a really good argument for the opposite. These arguments always end in some sort of impasse, but they're fun.
What about cyclical time? That is kind of a neat solution. If time is a circle, then it's both "contained" in a sense (and doesn't sprawl on indefinitely, which is difficult to imagine), nor does it have the problem of coming from a fixed point.
But then again "Cylon eyes time" (going back and forth in the same space) is another hypothetical possibility.
I wish I could remember how my translation studies professor described philosophy.
It was something along the lines of, "The philosophers are just airing each other's laundry" or something like that. But I'm pretty sure I'm missing a lot.
I was at a party today with a bunch of people from my old drama club and we got to playing improv games. In one I ended up playing a "philosophical clown" for most of it. :D
(The scene was at a circus, and I was assigned to be a clown, so I threw in a bunch of existential questions and theories to everything I said and did)
The specific game was our own customized version of the party game Mafia. The short version is, we have a defined scenario, then we all design characters we stay in for the duration of the game.
In this case I was assigned to be a clown but really wanted something more interesting so I threw in the "Philosopher" part.
I've even seen interpretations of the math which, combined with long-term predictions of universal behavior, implies that time is infinite in both directions, and that eventually the universe will compress again and explode again in a never-ending cycle.
And if you can somehow create a recording of all of those BOOMs and FOOPs, and somehow preserve it through time eternal, play it back at fifteen million gajillion times speed, it will begin to form notes and words and say,
"Louie Louie, oh no, you take me where ya gotta go
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, baby
Louie Louie, oh baby, take me where ya gotta go..."
Kinda factors into my view of physics. Of course my view is extremely complex and seven-dimensional. (And if you add an eighth in, I think it allows non-paradoxical time travel!)
Seems pretty straightforward, but I'm not following how you're expressing multiversal possibility as three dimensions. To me, it would either be a single dimension (distance from our universe) or as more dimensions than I can conceive: the time, place, and decision that spawned the new universe, and the universe from which it came.
Yeah it's pretty tricky to visualize. Not sure how to explain it better than I did. XD
I think, based on what you said, that this is accurate: it fits the "single dimension" you said, where it expresses distance from our universe. The reason there's three is that there's one of those "single dimensions" for each of the three spatial dimensions.
Yeeeah it's not the easiest idea to parse. There was one day that I was thinking over those two ideas and just "got it". There's only two other people I think I've really successfully explained it to, in person. XD
Also this article wasn't written with the most care in the world. But I think it gets the point across.
In a way it is. It started when I encountered Eternalism and really liked the idea, but didn't agree with the fact that it implies determinism. So in a way this is "Eternalism but still allowing free will." XD
I agree with you. Standard eternalism, though goes further. It doesn’t just say that everything is decided but that the future already exists as part of the universe. That to me feels like it does take away agency. But maybe that’s an arbitrary line.
But if you are a part of the universe steering the universe, and the outcome is the outcome -- to me, that still has agency, although maybe not as much as saying that there are any number of futures and universes that branch according to what we do.
Prediction is actually a central tenet of Arminianism (as I understand it), that rather than arbitrarily choosing the Good and the bad, He foreknows those that will choose to be good and those who choose to be bad, and does not force their hand either way.
@benjaminhollon@RL_Dane@pixelherodev@Anachron@sirber@fbievan that's something that is very weird to me as I've never had an inner monologue or voice in my head. I was sure that voiceover in movies was just a trick of the movies, not that people actually narrate and think in words and sentences.
I've never heard of this before, although it sounds a little bit like the phenomena where people are unable to visualize anything, but can only mentally describe it to themselves.
My internal interlocutor is an absolute MOTORMOUTH.
@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@pixelherodev@Anachron@sirber@fbievan you mean aphantasia? That's not really what I have, it's just that I don't have a voice in my head, sometimes it makes talking cumbersome, since I have to translate the weird collection of fragmented feelings, memories, and concepts into something halfway coherent :p
Not everyone has an internal monologue. I've met people from both sides. But I definitely do, and as far as I can tell it's far more active than anyone else I've talked to about it.
...I will note that I am genuinely unconvinced that my internal monologue does purely originate internally. Some of the things it says are too much at odds with, well, Me.
Well since this thread does have a theological aspect to it I will point out that from the perspective of a theist (namely, me) there are "other" (i.e. spiritual) influences that can put a thought in one's head. ;)
Not planning to get sucked into a debate on whether those influences exist, though.
@benjaminhollon@pixelherodev@RL_Dane@Anachron@sirber@fbievan and I'm just answering with my thoughts, if you write something and send it out you must at least be okay with being challenged on it, I can't let bait like that just lie unchallenged.
@markusl@RL_Dane@pixelherodev@benjaminhollon@Anachron@sirber@fbievan lot's of lies yea, JWs are allowed to lie and cheat if it furthers their religion, my dad used to ask them in for coffee and have hours long discussions when he had the time, changed nothing for him, or for them, but was very educational for me as a child. Especially when I started seeing how much they lied or were not quite honest.
I mean it makes sense that they are scared of it, because that's how religion usually gets out of peoples heads, it starts with a little seed, that litlte doubt that grows, then you start looking into it to see why it bothers you and as you start pulling the thread the whole sweater falls apart.
I think if your faith is insecure by nature, then the very first seed of doubt could demolish your whole world.
But once you've had some history, it doesn't shake you, but rather gives you an earnest desire to learn more and to have a better answer than just some easy 'apologetics' nonsense.
Of course it's simplistic, I can only get so much into 350 characters ;)
It also wasn't meant as a critique of all religion, more as a reason for why the elders don't want JWs to have any outside thought, I don't think they trust the faith of their "flock" as much as they maybe should.
Well, with all the names in this conversation just a bit over 400 :p but yeah, I do, I just didn't know the limit of the top of my head, I just write until the counter stops me :p
@sotolf@RL_Dane@markusl@pixelherodev@Anachron@sirber@fbievan
Not exactly sure how it works out but I don't think mentions count for the full value, at least on Fosstodon. I'm not sure the calculation, but I've definitely sent some toots that would have been a bit over.
@benjaminhollon
Yeah, I don't remember correctly either, there are leniency for both mentions and links, something like ~30 char for a link or something like it, 76 chars for all the menitions in this thread :)
@markusl
Yeah exactly, and those healthy confident religions are mostly the ones that have been dragged kicking and screaming into our times, that being said I am mostly quite happy with those people, it's the zealots and old timey ones that I worry about. The ones that just moves priests around when they have been diddling kids (catholic, mormon) the ones who shun (LW, mormon) the ones who go door to door and lie (JW, mormon)
Man, that's really the question, isn't it?
Coming from that general area, there's a LOT of fear. Faith based on practice and external validation isn't faith, it's just fear-dressed-as-faith. And that's a VERY fragile faith. Those who live from that place are always afraid of being led astray.
Those who have discovered genuine faith tend to be very open and inquisitive. They echo the mindset of St. Paul, "All things are permissible for me, [although] not all things are profitable."
They don't run scared from every new thing and every new possibility.
Unless they're an IT veteran, in which case they hiss, run for cover, and mutter, "Oh dear God, what abomination hath Silicon Valley unleashed on us THIS TIME?!?" X'-D
Yeah. Of course, what constitutes taking the Name in vain is somewhat up to interpretation, but I'd totally get if someone felt that the name of the entire faith was blasphemous.
Oh, haha, fascinating. I never did a curve on the vertical line for t. Then again I'm pretty lazy when it comes to hand-writing things.
Speaking of idol worship, reminds me of how the Taliban (back pre-2001) made Chess-playing illegal because the pieces were seen as idols. Apparently a friend of my dad who liked chess had to jump out a window to escape them, at some point? The story's grown a little fuzzy, I admit.
Okay so I was actually researching how you'd keep the Sabbath while on the ISS, but the resulting article used the dashes so I had to figure out what was up with that.
The bigger issue with that paper from my view is that the teacher told all the other English teachers about it, so the next time I had a research paper the teacher said "I heard about your paper last year, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with."
I mean, I'd argue that you just should not allow it, because, really, why? But if I HAD NO CHOICE but to pick semantics, than... it's not unreasonable, just weird.
I could live with JS; it's quirky but fun. I can't stand the DOM or the Web* APIs or the other stuff the modern web is built on.
XML is a terrible basis for trees; Lisp is way better
That's unironic, I'd genuinely rather e.g. (paragraph "foo " (bold "bar") "baz") over what we've actually got. Bonus: that would let the scripting and styling be specified in the same mechanism as the document, instead of THREE!
heck, styling can be done both by HTML AND CSS AND JS! [<b>, style="font-weight" or what have you]
There's too many things grafted on, since basically anything that's wanted by Google just gets tacked on without regard for how it interacts with other parts of the design
This isn't even touching on the parts that are less than 100% technical: the way its design inherently facilitates tracking people; the way many features only exist to push ads; the fact that the web encourages bloat to such an extent that it's probably a major cause of climate change; ...
(that's not even to speak about how Apple can basically blackmail the whole web dev community on what gets implemented on websites because if a feature is not implemented on WebKit it works on zero iPhones ever)
> - For instance, want to set a paragraph's color?
> - style="text-color: ..."
You seem to be out of practice with your CSS properties, eh? ;)
But I take the point. Really, though, many of the things you're bringing up are due to an amazing thing about the web: with very few exceptions, a website from 1991 will work in modern browsers. It's (except with security issues) thoroughly backwards compatible, which is so rare in modern computing.
And many of the inconsistencies are due to the browser wars, when everyone was making different standards. The reason they're still around is, as I said, backwards compatibility.
I know, let's let completely feckless, gormless, and soulless corporodroids drive the ENTIRE path and advancement of the Web for twenty years... LET'S JUST SEE WHAT HAPPENS
Ha, perhaps. I do know that the result when I used recursive arrays was several orders of magnitude faster than the original approach I took at the problem, but it might be that other languages have features that could beat that result too.
Tangential:
/me reads with interest about some hot new language
"One of the big selling features of language X is that it transpiles to Javascript*"
/me flips the table in front of him, then every other table in the house, then goes to his neighbor's house to flip their tables, too 😆
Yeah, it's one of the targets, it also does c++ and objective-c ;) I've never used it though, so I have no experience with it, but it can do it, doesn't mean it's a good idea :p
"But Mr. Musk/Jobs/Gates/Brin/Zuck!
If you do this, you could very well destroy society itself! Surely that's not worth it for just some paltry profi--"
"LEEEEROOOOY JENKIIIIIINSSSSS!!!!!"
@RL_Dane@sotolf@pixelherodev@sirber@fbievan
I'm going to pretend that name is the activation phrase for the society-killer because to me that takes the hilarity even higher.
Figured you'd know, but it's probably before your time as well.
It was a move in #Netrek where you go after another player, no matter the cost. You frag them (to use fps parlance), even if you end up getting fragged yourself in the process.
Actually the guidance computer ran around three processes in parallel IIRC, and if one crashed, it would quietly reboot and the other two would take over.
But early Macintosh "blue screens" were way more aesthetic, I think:
When they were coming down (Apollo 11) in the LM, it kept throwing error messages no one recognized. Landon ended up succeeding though.
Turns out it was the lunar module’s guidance computer running out of RAM and automatically clearing out low priority processes to make sure they could keep landing.
@sotolf@RL_Dane@benjaminhollon@sirber@fbievan I'm fully convinced it IS a bad idea, if only because GUIs are more captivating than CLIs. Nobody's going to doomscroll through a command line social media client ;)
@benjaminhollon@RL_Dane Why such a huge resolution for such a small screen? Well, I might not be the right one to talk, I grew up with very low resolution devices ;)
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