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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Atheist is a non-believer. Prefix “a-“ means absence. Every human is an atheist unless they believe in every god. The word was first used in relation to Christians.

    Anti-theist is someone opposed to religion or belief in supernatural. “Anti” means “opposed / opposite to”.

    Agnostic is a bullshit cop-out term that at some point in a Christian discourse briefly meant “someone who considers supernatural to not be knowable”, but doesn’t have a proper meaning nowadays. It has a transactional role in conversation - it most often relays unwillingness to continue the conversation on religion.

    A “definite belief that there is no god” would be “gnostic atheist” in proper terms. I.e. “god is knowable and he’s absent”. But those proper terms were barely ever alive. Instead, people dance around topic of religion as if it didn’t enjoy enough fucking dances for millennia past.




  • Seems to me, you’re dealing with a micromanager.

    Personal recommendation - put things into writing. When you get your assignment verbally, write it down with assumptions you have to make to fill the gaps, and send it to the person who gave you the assignment, with the person responsible for your teams’ results in CC. Basically an “I heard you, and I’m starting the work as described below”.

    Communication is one of the most important skills in software engineering, and this way you get to practise it while probing the social waters of dealing with management.

    Try it, see how it goes, adjust accordingly.


  • “We decide that it exists so it exists” is a terrible argument.

    Consequently, there’s no “trap” in attributing it to neurochemical signals. Emergence is a known phenomenon, and it’s present everywhere. Asking “which signal is qualia” is as nonsensical as asking “which atom is a star” or “which transistor is the video on my phone”. It’s a deflection and misdirection.

    I get it, people want to feel magical. But there’s a name to magic that works - science. Neurochemical processes are no less magical than some untestable source of experiences, with one big difference - they demonstrably exist.


  • You just replace that anxiety with a different fear.

    I don’t fear oblivion, I fear it will keep me waiting. Not existing is a silent matter, living past your due as a broken, diseased husk or a person is a torture to you and those you cherish.

    Death is a promise of rest, there’s no need to fear it. I’m a bit sad that I won’t get to witness most of the things I want to witness, but so be it.




  • NoYeah no. Get out of US bubble.

    Private and public are both viable models of operations with some applicability overlap. Private doesn’t necessarily pursue profit first, despite US literally enforcing it.

    Basic needs that are either unchanging or change very slowly are the purview of public policy. Healthcare, infrastructure, etc. Privatize it and you’ll have a catastrophe.

    Basic needs that benefit from variation and supply elasticity with a necessary baseline is where hybrid model works well. Public entrepreneurship provides variation, regulations or public enterprises cover baseline. Agriculture is a great example of such overlap. Private-only agriculture leads to profiteering on basic human need. Public-only agriculture leads to famines due to incompetence, malice, or lack of elasticity.

    Desires that people can live without and can change on a whim is where private innovation thrives. Be it a product to sell or a charity project to pursue. Some of the results of said innovation can and will become matters of public interest. Forbid private enterprise here, and you’ll end up in a bleak reality of North Korea.

    We literally had a case of “public everything” half a century ago and it didn’t fucking work. It needed serfdom and insane amounts of natural resources to prop itself up. It also left a mafia-led capitalism in its wake.

    We also have a live case of blind trust in markets, as if information was immediately available everywhere. It leads to a very similar looking outcome.