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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • Theoretically if you rotated the creature 180°, it could again perceive things from its own world, though in a very different way. But you’d think a sufficiently smart 2 dimensional creature could come to recognize that it was indeed the same world just mirrored.

    Though it’s possible this creature’s chemistry would have a “handedness” and it could no longer metabolize the nutrients that exist in that world.



  • From the content of this thread, I’m betting there’s a lot of selection bias going on. The ones who don’t scroll past. The ones who do post.

    And I’ll follow that pattern. I still live with my mother. Never moved out. Live in the same house I was raised in. But my mother was never really financially stable. My grandmother with whom my mother and I lived… well, she managed to keep us housed and fed with credit card debt, which honestly worked out very well.

    Anyway, I was kindof the only person who really made much of an income in my household and have been financially supporting my parents for decades now. (Though my grandmother passed on a few years back and left me a life insurance policy.)

    I’m 37 now.







  • Yup. I can. I have around 1/20 of a Bitcoin, so the amount I have should be worth about $3,000 USD (unless the price has crashed since I started writing this post. 😈)

    Cashing it in would make me feel dirty. It’s basically just handing the bag to the next bagholder. (Though, I’m not really a baholder per se. I’m not really invested to speak of. The only investment I made to get this Bitcoin is to leave my computer on for like a month or less.) Feeding the ponzi monster, as it were.

    But then again, it’s $3,000.

    As much as I hate myself for admitting it, the possibility that the price will climb a little higher is probably part of why I didn’t trade it for real money back in late 2021 when the price of a Bitcoin was so high.

    But, yeah, you’re probably right I should just sell it. Maybe I’ll just make whoever I sell it to promise they’re not giving me next month’s rent or their kids’ college fund. Lol.

    Edit: Ok. You’ve inspired me to make a post asking other crypto-skeptics what I should do with it.




  • I’m not sure why this has anything to do with FOSS per se. Proprietary software can theoretically be used by people the intellectual property owners hate as well.

    I’m guessing you’re thinking about it from a FOSS point of view because FOSS authors tend to be ideologically inclined toward making FOSS and perhaps think they’re selflessly making the world a better place whereas proprietary software is made exclusively for money. (Not that FOSS can’t be made for money.)

    But, speaking for myself, a lot of bad actors just straight up blatantly violate FOSS licenses. I wish it wasn’t that way, but it is. (Maybe the court case SFC v. Visio will make a difference. We’ll have to see.) But it’s not going to do the world any good to deprive the world of your contributions because some assholes will disregard your license.

    I suppose it could theoretically make a difference if you used a license that called certain companies out by name, but a) then again maybe it actually wouldn’t make a difference (they might just blatantly violate the license still) and b) you can’t really anticipate all the companies that are assholes at the time you write the license. If your FOSS software actually has a nontrivial user base, somebody somewhere who you don’t like is going to use your license some day and there really isn’t anything you can do about it.

    But I still see releasing your code under FOSS licenses as a big fuck-you to asshole companies. It subverts the whole capitalist foundation on which they stand. It denies them the full ability to own it.

    And copyleft licenses do that better than so-called “permissive” licenses.

    Be gay, do crime, write FOSS, donate to the SFC.








  • But it does mean that our brains have religious experience as an in-built function (which, as you described, has been needlessly enshrined in religious institutions), which might mean that being able to have these experiences is an important part of being able to survive, or maybe even to thrive, as a human being, which also means as a community.

    And that’s a take that I couldn’t have put as well as you did, and I wholeheartedly agree with.

    I think whatever cognitive faculties separate us from “the animals” (or at least some animals) comes at a cost. Most animals live very in the moment. We’re largely the only creatures that have panic attacks because of some imagined future event, and we worry constantly. The default mode network and the internal monologue let us plan for the future, but also makes us worry for the future, which is definitely maladaptive.

    Religious experiences let us greatly mitigate that by showing us, even if only temporarily (and sometimes people can achieve permanence in this), by suspending the DMN and internal monologue.