• 13 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • It sounds like we were similarly inquisitive children, perhaps to the point of making adults uncomfortable.

    My European mother is the reason religion didn’t fuck me up worse than it did. I was also forced to go to church as a kid, but even within our own family there were differences in thought and opinion that still managed to exist in civil dinner table discourse. My mother seems to have gone through her own questioning process, it just didn’t take her to extreme atheism but rather she arrived at more of a mystical Abrahammic monotheism. When I was older, I fell into the trap of religion on my own (Evangelical Christianity) and it’s changed the course of my life significantly in both good and bad ways.

    A decade to a decade and a half later I’m mostly over it. I’m comfortable with my current belief system and I live life openly and honestly with 95% of people I meet. If I had to describe myself I’d call myself a self-rolled Buddhist-Atheist.

    I’m not envious of those Christians with enough of a conscience to realize what’s going, but who are reliant on “American Christians™” for their community, support, spirituality/philosophy/introspection. They have difficult and painful decisions ahead of them. You can only ignore your conscience for so long, but the first to defect will be shunned and hated and will likely lose their entire social circles. That happened to me. They will also be susceptible, as we all are, to similar tactics and abuses as those doled out by their former religion. You don’t leave and suddenly become a mastermind at spotting abuse of power and become immediately immune. If anyone reading this falls into that category, I would recommend finding a nice, non-religious hobby where you see people from different walks of life on a regular basis. Bicycling groups, social dances, gardening collectives, etc. People are pretty nice outside of the bubble. You’ll be okay.


  • I’m a Buddatheist who grew up with both cultural Catholicism and later Christian Evangelicism.

    I like how this hints at the nature of the self. If I leave someone behind am I not also leaving myself behind?

    For me, ethical acts are those that increase the freedom of the self and others. We all suffer. That’s a fact of life. If we dissolve our concept of the self and acknowledge our link to others and the world itself we can see ourselves more as threads going through human experience. If we are kind to ourselves and “others”, we have a better chance at reducing that suffering.

    Imagine the time a stranger forgot their wallet and you paid for their coffee. A version of that experience could still exist in that person’s mind long after you die. It could get blended with other experiences and reinterpreted. It could be told as a story to a friend who was inspired by the act. The cascading effects of that person being properly caffeinated on that day could have world changing effects. In a similar way, I carry the shared experiences of my own ancestors and even strangers who have shared their stories with me. They are still alive as a small part of me because my true self is humanity or even some animating life force of the universe or something like that and the name that people call me just refers to the limited perspective and incomplete view I have of existence. Essentially I see existence as blinders limiting my perspective like a race horse, but the true self is a satellite view of the track. When I act, I do so based not only on my experience, but the collective experience of every perspective and experience that has been conveyed to me in every way, but I am still one human body, in physical space, subject to time. I hope that when I die, those blinders will be lifted and I’ll exist as pure conscious perception of everything that ever was is and will be. Able to see through anyone’s eyes, in any time. To feel any and every feeling felt my an animal or human. To view the entirety of existence as a completed masterpiece from outside time itself.

    You can probably see why I like the Buddhists.

    I find that when you acknowledge the interconnection of things compassion becomes easier.

    I hope that people rediscover that within themselves and others.


  • Valve could easily enter the OS space. They have hardware and a dedicated user-base. They’ve built some good will with the Linux community. They’re already doing the work to make other stuff work well with Linux. I’m not always a fan of walking too close to the corporate edge with paid software and DRM and proprietary blobs and whatever, but at this point we have to figure out how to get everyone out of Windows, even 100 year old Grandma Geraldine who plays bejeweled on Facebook all day. I probably won’t run SteamOS as a primary OS, but if I could dual boot it instead of Win10 on my gaming PC that would lesson the pain of MS’s betrayal and the loss of some Windows-only games a little bit.




  • I started my Linux journey as a poor high school college student and while I got hand-me-down windows machines at home, I worried about breaking them fiddling with things beyond my knowledge level. A budget basement eeePC became my workbench and I started tinkering. I had to drive to the next city to find one in stock. Today the gas would cost more than the computer. :-D

    I’d still be running the eee but it got put in the closet when many distros dropped 32 bit support.



  • I’ve been seeing exactly that. Reading through these job descriptions is a bit depressing. I can’t virtue signal my lack of morality and unthinking subservience to my potential employer hard enough to make cutoff to become “Director of AI Shilling” or a “Dark Pattern Consent Violation Engineer”.

    I know the kind of environments that won’t work for me. This will always limit the jobs I can and can’t work and I’m generally okay with that. I would love some of that bountiful defence contractor money, but I can’t ethically justify doing work that harms others or limits their freedom. Advertising tech would have been a good fit for me… if I had no sense of ethics.

    It’s a tough realization that my gaming consoles, GPS Smart Watch, and fancy modern over-engineered car only became possible because tons of money was poured into building out related tech for defence and surveillance.

    I imagine the cognitive dissonance must be really strong in someone working for some of these companies that have monetized governmentally sanctioned or corporately opportunistic civil rights abuses. Then again, we’re often kept apart, working in our own little areas where we’re safe from having to see the whole horrifying machine.


  • " the pro-Putin posters known as CopyCop, aka Storm-1516, use self-hosted, uncensored LLMs based on Meta’s Llama 3 open-source models to generate at least some of these fictional news stories" - the Article

    So what? This quote is written in a way that makes it seem like that is the problem and the solution is that we need censored LLM’s hosted by massive corps (who definitely have our best interest at heart) using closed-source models and that’s how we end up with Real News™

    The issue is that we’d surrounded by morons who never learned critical thinking. To be fair, we all have our own blind spots. How about instead of trying to top-down legislate truth, we focus on teaching research skills, vetting processes, and learn to better identify and label misinformation and common misinformation sources.

    Maybe in 2025 all news articles should be voluntarily citing public and detailed source material so that people can better substantiate what is real?

    The enemy of my enemy is not my friend.



  • The wildest part of this to me is the politicians exempting themselves. It may be different in Europe, but in the US, the politicians are often the child predators this legislation claims to protect against.

    The politicians claim “professional secrecy”, but shouldn’t you be increasingly auditable the more power you are given. Private individuals should have an expectation of privacy. Politicians, and those with power and influence should live in the open to protect from abuses of that power.



  • I had a base model around that time frame. Good safety ratings for its time but the car isn’t integrated with the touchscreen so while it’s already a dumb-car, I could make it even more simple by tearing out the radio and installing one without a screen. Makes me happy to know I’m not obligated to fix it if the radio breaks because I drive maybe 30-40 miles a week and would rather keep my money than shell out for all the gimmicks.



  • They’re just making a market for someone to compile a 1TB “Best of the Best Cumpilation”, copy it to a handful of cheap terrabyte drives and resell them (to legal adults) in a verification state.

    • This comment should not be read as condoning copyright infringement, but rather as a commentary pointing out that prohibition instantly creates very easy to serve and lucrative black markets that will be filled by someone.

  • To me this sounds like a fundamental problem with their business model. Private vehicles used for public transportation by people who aren’t well-trained commercial drivers.

    I have always thought it was sketchy that we let random people in the US be commercial drivers for Uber without forcing them to get a new type of license or earn some kind of state certificate because most people are absolutely shit drivers and beyond that, there are rules for dealing with people (in this case disability stuff) that you should know if you drive the public.

    Would you get in a car with that dude “Chad” who hangs out behind the bowling ally, or that chick “Tammy” who learned to drive from her highschool boyfriend who was a year or two older than her and basically got a rubber-stamped license because the US doesn’t actually take driver safety seriously?