I think there’s something that always seems to get left out of these conversations and that’s that “when I practice my religion, I feel something that I don’t feel otherwise” is frequently a true statement for the religious.

I’ve often heard self-described atheists say that, often when conversing/debating with religious folks about why they believe, the conversation comes to a point where the religious person will say “I’ve just had a personal experience” and the atheist, unable to relate to that, really has no way to advance the conversation beyond that.

Were I opposite some fundamentalist Christian or something in such a situation, my response would be “yeah, me too! That’s totally normal.”

I think the beligerantly nonreligious either can’t relate to religious experiences or don’t want to admit to having had them for fear of embarassment or maybe rhetorical concessions. And the religious typically haven’t had such experiences outside the context of their religious practices, or if they have they still attribute it to their religious beliefs, and so take it as proof of their beliefs.

And these religious experiences are very real and very normal. Probably some people are more prone to such experiences than others. But despite how the religious tend to interpret them they have little to no relationship to one’s beliefs. One can have experiences of anatta (“no-self” in Theravada Buddhism) or satori (sudden, typically-temporary, enlightenment in Japanese Zen Buddhism) or recollection (a term from Christian mysticism) or kavana (Jewish mysticism) or whatever without accepting any particular belief system. There are secularized mindfulness and meditation practices that can increase one’s chances and frequency of experiencing these states.

But, unfortunately, the history of these experiences has been one of large religious organizations claiming and mostly exercising a monopoly on such experiences.

These experiences feel very deep and profound and can be a very positive (or negative!) thing, even affecting the overall course of one’s life. And they can be kindof addictive in a good way.

All that to say that I think any conversation about why people believe in religions today is incomplete without taking into account that for many people, their religion is their means of connection with some extremely profound and beautiful experiences. Though people only accept beliefs along with those experiences because they don’t know these experiences aren’t actually exclusive to any one religion or any set of beliefs. And those experiences are 100% real and tangible to them. (Whether they correspond to anything real in consensus reality is a whole other conversation, but the experiences themselves are a normal human phenomenon like orgasm or schadenfreude.)

Just some followup thoughts:

• Like I alluded to earlier, meditation can be dangerous. Do your research first and know the risks.
• There are a ton of good books on these topics. “Stealing Fire” by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal is a good place to start if you’re interested in the science of it or The Science of Enlightenment if you want to get a little deeper into the practice.
• If you want to know my personal beliefs, my beliefs are that beliefs don’t matter. Personal experience does. “But do you believe god exists?” Honestly it’d take me a good hour or more to give a proper answer to that question. Let’s go with “neither yes nor no” for the short version.
• Every culture has these experiences. Humans likely have had them since humans have existed.

Human languages or programming languages? (I find it amusing that there’s one comment here assuming the former and one assuming the latter.)

Stop giving Republicans ideas.

Thank you for bringing more awareness of this. I’m what you might call an “AI skeptic” and don’t really care what happens in the AI space as long as it doesn’t screw up things I care about.

But I care deeply about FOSS and AI is screwing it up. I don’t want to have to explain why XYZ thing absolutely is not Open Source and that “Open Source” has a specific meaning beyond “you can look at (at least some of) the source code.”

(Compare it to the term “hacker” that has among at least a lot of muggles taken on the exclusive meaning of committing some kind of fraud with computers. Originally it meant something very different. And it’s unfortunate the world has forgotten the old meaning.)

Another project that is diluting the term “Open Source” is Grayjay, a video streaming app that is a FUTO project (and FUTO is a Louis Rossman thing.) Rossman has called it Open Source in YouTube videos, but it’s not Open Source. (The license is here and forbids things like “commercial use” (selling the software or derivative works) and removing facilites for paying the FUTO project from derivative works. Which is a lot less restrictive than the license was last time I checked it. Previously it didn’t allow redistribution or derivative works at all. But it’s not Open Source even now.)

Cryptocurrency always ran on nothing but prophesy (“to the moon”) and curses (“bearish”, “FUD”).

Nice!

You didn’t print the plastic parts yourself, did you? Just bought them? (Still cool that they print them with off-the-shelf consumer printers.)

Also, what’s “detent?” Is that the ratcheted-ish feel where it kindof sticks in regularly-spaced spots? (If that makes any sense. Lol.)

Minetest is an excellent candidate for this use case, I’d say. I play Minetest on a Raspberry Pi 4 connected to a Minetest server hosted on a different Raspberry Pi 4 (both running Arch Linux Arm) over Wifi regularly and don’t find latency or lag or anything to be a significant issue.

The world I’ve been playing in that particular way is on the game VoxelLibre (Formerly Mineclone 2). It’s intended to mirror Minecraft’s functionality as closely as possible. It’s not 100% implemented, but a lot of it is implemented, and it’s very playable. The default Minetest Game is great too. It lacks mobs, but mobs can be added with mods like the various Mobs Redo API plugins. (And it’s easy to have mobs but not enemy mobs that can kill the players if that’s the vibe you’re going for.)

Ok, I get that writing a browser rendering engine is “hard”. But Jesus do we need more, better options. And full-featured ones. Not just Gecko and WebKit.

How is a visual novel half a gigabyte?

Video games are weird now days.

I was the unofficial “security” guy where I worked as a software engineer. (Web apps, mostly.) We had a scanning tool (Burp Suite Pro, for those who want to know) that we ran against our apps on a regular basis to find any security issues. I was almost always the guy who did triage and remediation of any issues that came up. And when I had fixed a hole, I’d put a summary of the issue and the fix on the internal wiki page where we tracked such things.

For one particularly interesting vulnerability, I had to create my own implementation of a subset of the Java serialization API in order to remediate the vulnerability in a way that maintained backwards compatibility and didn’t inconvenience users. In the summary I wrote that the fix was “a hack” but it closed the vulnerability, which is all the PCI auditors would care about anyway. (If you don’t know what a PCI auditor is, don’t worry too much. They’re a regulatory thing that’s required if you’re a big enough business that process credit cards. They have to audit your security practices annually.)

My boss pulled me into his office to tell me to change the wording. He was worried the auditors would see the word “hack” and think that… I dunno… I committed some kind of financial fraud in the process of making the code change or something? Or maybe that we’d failed to disclose a security breach?

It didn’t sit right with me. For one thing, I’m the sort of person who wants to reclaim the positive connotations of the word “hack.” (And, honestly, using the word “hack” in a positive light never died.) But more importantly, if I were a PCI auditor and I heard that the boss had pressured a developer to alter their wording of the description of a remediation to make it sound better to PCI auditors, I’d probably pitch a shit fit at said boss.

(And, honestly, the boss and the development team weren’t on great terms at the time for reasons. So it sat worse still than it would have otherwise.)

But also, it wasn’t a hill worth dying on right then. I agreed to change my wording without raising a fuss. I decided if I ever got called to testify in court because there was a massive breach or something (I’m being hyperbolic here, but you get my point), I knew who to point the finger at.

But it still stuck in my craw. And when I resigned a few months later, I went and edited my comment back to say “hack” on my last day and didn’t tell anyone.

Actually, when I gave my resignation, my boss didn’t handle the process correctly with HR and they didn’t find out until way later into my notice period than they should have. As a result, they didn’t schedule an exit interview with me until way late. So I contacted HR about it and stayed late on my last day to voice how terrible the management was. (I was hoping to be the first of several to send such a message to HR.)

When I returned to the same company/position 5 years later, the page was still present and had the word “hack.” One of the first things I did once I had access to the corporate wiki again was to check that page. I still work there today and it’s still in the pristine state it should be in.

The boss in question also left and came back, but he’s been promoted up high enough in the ranks that he doesn’t concern himself with little old me and my security remediation reports. I imagine he’s probably forgotten about the whole thing.

Plus, his boss was way worse, and it’s very likely it was that guy who demanded I change it and delivered the message through his underling. And the worse guy isn’t at the company any more, but that’s a story for another day.

It’s small. And petty. But I feel satisfied with myself every time I think about it.

Somebody woke up and chose violence.

That’s once more than for me.

For a second there I was worried there was something I hadn’t heard about Robert Downey Jr.

Preferably taxpayers. Not that that part of the analogy relates to Ubuntu.

Yeah, but Canonical locks security patches behind payment or signup, not just support.

Seems really dodgy to me making your business model holding security features hostage for either money or sign-ups, honestly.

Kindof like charging people for vaccines against deadly diseases or something.

But then again, my craw may be extra susceptible to sticking when it comes to such things.

If you’re not paying for the product, then you’re the product.

(I don’t believe the above quote to be absolutely true, but I’m not sure what motivation Canonical could have to lock some features of the OS behind a free account except $$$.)

I gave it a watch and it was amazing! And it was awesome to see Matthew Mercer play the role of Ganondorf long before playing the voice of Ganondorf in Tears of the Kingdom. Thanks for the recommendation!

If it’s already in memory, that’s one few step to reach it.

I search my live memory with Tab Manager Plud

Oh, so you’re doing something like Googling just to find the page title and then rather than clicking the link in Google, (closing the Google results page, I hope and) searching through your tab titles with Tab Manager Plus to find and switch to the open tab where you already have the page in question open?

Though, I still don’t understand why you keep the tab open in the first place rather than juat closing the tab when you’re (at least for the moment) done with it and then Googling to find the content again and clicking the appropriate link to get that same content in a new tab when you do need it again. I asked whether the reason was so that if the content is removed from the server, you didn’t lose it, but I don’t think anything you said in your last post answered that question. You did say:

My software should not discard data without my permission. When it runs out of RAM it should dump to disk cache, not delete.

Which wasn’t quite a direct answer to my question. And you then directly admit that the browser doesn’t even keep content that’s open in a tab:

But browser have the builtin assumption that the web remembers everything, which is false.

So that must not be why you keep content open in tabs, right?

Is it maybe something like if you keep something open in a tab, the presence of that page title in your tab manager gives you confirmation when you later Google to find the page title that such-and-such particular result in the Google results is indeed the thing you’re looking for and not a different page than the one you were looking for?

Just as an aside, my web browser use is probably atypical as well. I have my browser forget all cookies, history, cache, etc (basically everything but my bookmarks) every time I fully close it. And I close it every time I switch activities to keep my online personas isolated from each other. (So I’m never logged into my Google account and my Amazon account at the same time, for instance. To reduce targeted ads and such.)

Also, I’m wondering if something more like a caching proxy with maybe page searching capabilities and finegrained control of what is cached and what isn’t might fill part of your use case, but I still don’t have a firm grasp on your use case.

I’ve read this entire thread like three times and watched all the videos you’ve posted, and I still don’t understand your workflow at all.

If searching bookmarks/history is harder than using Google to just find the thing you want to get back to, why do you need to keep the things you want to get back to open rather than just using Google to find the page again later? Or when you want to get back to something you (think you?) have left open, do you find it just by scrolling through all your tabs until a title/favicon looks like what you’re looking for?

Your last paragraph makes it seem like maybe you want to keep the tabs open so if the page/content gets deleted off of the server, you don’t lose it. Is that correct? I’d imagine that doesn’t always accomplish that, though, right? (Particularly for something like YouTube.) If that’s a significant part of why you keep the tabs open, though, maybe that bit at least is a good question for a data hoarder community.

I haven’t been able to find any “discard all tabs” addon for Firefox by Googling. And I can’t guess what exactly it does. (Does it save tab states to disk and suspend - but also leave open - all tabs or something?) Are you sure that’s the name of the addon you’re using?