dusted

I don't believe in harming anyone who exists. I do think that it is in principle, less wrong to harm someone by denying them the right to violate another. It has been shown elsewhere that it is a fundamental violation of the created, to create them, regardless of their life-outcome.

The Value-null perspective is that it's not needed to consider the life-outcome, the moral wrongness of creating someone stands without it, and so, eliminates the weak side of Benatar's asymmetry argument.

However, I don't believe morality and policy should always go hand in hand, and my stance on policy is that, people should be allowed to have children if they wish so, but they should do it with the implications in mind, and they must be able to stand up to the duties involved.

I am a parent myself, I feel a tremendous responsibility, duty, towards my child, I do not regret having them, I do not wish that they were never born, I love them more than anything. People do wrong things all the times, often for the right reasons, but people should understand what they're doing, and why it might be wrong, before making the decision, they should understand the responsibility, both practical and morally, that comes with their actions.

I'm not arguing that this means to prevent your child from all pain in the world, but to prepare them for life in a way that maximizes the likelihood that they have a good life. I'm merely arguing that life in and off itself is not inherently a gift (though it can certainly be a net positive), and that there responsibilities therefore reach widely beyond the fact of having created the kid and kept them alive.

What I'm trying to say is, that, if a person is not born, they don't exist.. they're not waiting eagerly in the "before life" to be born, therefore, there can be no duty towards them, because there's nothing there.. You can't owe anything unless you have some subject, a rights-bearer.. If you don't create one, there is not one, and so, you do not have any duty to create one..

You know, like, if you don't take a loan, you don't owe any money on that loan, it's not like there is already loans made in your name, with debts waiting to be paid off, that you must go to the bank and take, so that you can pay them off.. I don't know how many different ways there is to say the same thing, but if the _THING_ does not exist, then it really has no rights, and you really have no duty towards it.. Those start only if you make the thing exist..

If you have a fortune, and nobody to inherit it, then you don't have any obligation to create a heir, you can chose to do that (even if I argue that it's morally bad to do, I will amend that it's probably less morally bad to do than if you created them so they could inherit the debt you don't have enough time to pay off during your own life)

The argument is specifically treating the duty to create new people, not any other duties. A common argument against antinatalism, is that we have a duty to create new people, because if we don't create them, they can't have good lives..

That would be true, if there was an actual pool of unborn people, like, some metaphysical vault of people yet to be born, waiting for their turn.. In _THAT_ case, we _would_ have a duty to create them, so that they can have good lives, and experience all the amazing stuff we get to experience..

However, since there's no such vault, there is no duty to create them, there is nobody that is owed life on the grounds that if they do not get it, they are deprived of it.. because people that are not born yet, do not actually exist in any way.

That does not eliminate any duty towards the unspecific mass of people that will indeed be born in the future, regardless of whether creating them is wrong or right, there is still a moral duty to attempt to make the world as good a place for them to be in..

Nope, I'm saying that that which is not born, is owed nothing. There's no "future person" that you owe it to, to create..

There will be persons in the future, and those persons, you do have an obligation toward.

But the argument here, is about whether there is a duty to create a person, so that they can have good.. And, as there is no person before that person has been created, there is nobody to be owed this good, therefore, there is no obligation to create that person..

I am a parent. The amount of responsibility I feel towards my child is all encompassing and absolute. The love I feel for them is immeasurable, as is the joy they bring me.

The guilt of this selfishness, however, is not entirely weightless either.

My child being created is, 50% my doing, I created them into a world I cannot control, without their consent. Every pain they will experience, will rest on my shoulders, until I die, and even from beyond my death, it will be due to me.

I will do everything in my power to prepare them to achieve a good life, this does not mean shielding them from pain, because experiencing pain is part of life, and learning how to deal with it appropriately, increases the quality of life they can have. This is the worst from both worlds, it is the parent who feels all their pain, and it is the parent that recognizes that it is part of becoming a full human.

My parents were very loving and caring, they wanted to have me, they wanted a child, and they gave me life. I am not grateful for them giving me life, in fact, that they did that is something I do not appreciate. But I am grateful for the love and care they showed me, and I love them very much, despite them creating me.

If you feel there are contradictions here, think harder.

"Evolution wins in the end", well, in the end I guess entropy wins.. But, you attribute a goal to evolution, but evolution, as a concept, really boils down to "the laws of physics also apply to life", it's not like we know it to be trying to do something in particular.. the life that continues is the life that continues, it's not that life really finds a way, it's just that there's enough variance that some of it will likely survive a change, not that every species does that.. but I don't really think that matters to whether knowingly creating life is moral or not.. it's not like nature or life is inherently moral.. it'd probably be a stretch, but one could say that, at least when perfectly executed, the least moral are most likely to succeed.

I'm not arguing against the moral duty of making the future better for those that are created in the future, I agree with that perspective.

I only try to enhance the argument that there is no moral duty to create them.

Moral value is for those who exist, and given that we know more will come to exist, even though their creation itself is (in my view) morally negative, it does not conflict with acknowledging that they will, and to make the world as good as possible for them.

Granted. I didn't mean this as a complete framework, only as an additional perspective or "mod" to amend the weakest part of Benetar's asymmetry. Also, I'm not personally interested in changing peoples views, only to contribute the idea of value-null, or that the discussion really ends with the existing.

kerberos is sort of magic when/if you finally get it working

they must have missed one, I'm sure they can index 64 domains.. unless 0 means "don't do anything". Just be glad they didn't opt for a 16 bit register for the call home functionality :D

I'm trying really hard not to want to turn this into a dac for my stereo system. They build really nice boxes..

I have a PSL-3 industrial controller (well, two, but one is broken) on the shelf behind me that I'm using for the noble purpose of playing Theme Hospital in Windows 98.

Lovely article, when discussing streaming and downloading, we should ignore the transport, it's not relevant to the definition.

Downloading is a superset of streaming.

Low-level streaming is the process of transferring data, between CPU and RAM, between RAM, controller and mass storage device, between machines connected to the internet.. The data is streamed, it's sent serially, it's a stream of data.. (the width of the lake does not matter, if the entire thing does not arrive at once, it's streaming).

Low-level loading is the process of loading something down to a computer, meaning, something is loaded, if it's loaded, it's stored _SOMEWHERE_, it could be stored simply in RAM (the LOAD instructions in the cpu place a value into a storage location, a high-level use of the word could be LOAD command in BASIC which streams data from somewhere into some location in RAM for medium-term usage).

When you're viewing a video without saving it to file, we call it streaming, it fits the metaphor, even if _chunks_ of the video are DOWNLOADED into temporary storage, the entire video is not (intentionally at least, but if it's small it might be) stored as a whole before being presented, so from a high-level perspective, the video is streamed. If the data is not persisted, it's streamed.

High-level use of the word streaming fits the low-level metaphor, the process is: Stream data from content provider to client, client loads enough data to start presenting, client presents loaded data while new data is streaming into it, that data is immediately loaded in buffers, after data has been presented, it is discarded.

Downloading is a different word from loading, but it historically fits the metaphor, when a computer requests data from another computer, it pulls the data "down" from the other computer (as opposed to "up" from mass storage), and into some medium-term storage location, often RAM (when you browse a website your browser downloads the data into memory, the medium means it can't automatically discard after presenting, because it does not know when presentation is done, it may even cache some of the data it downloaded on mass storage).

The newer use of download is a slight misnomer, but only slight, the intention is to keep the file for long-term use, so it is streamed into memory buffers before being saved to disk.. "Saving" would be a more appropriate term, the distinction where it is saved FROM is not as important anymore as people used to think.

tldr:

Low-level streaming: Transfer data sequentially. High-level streaming: Transfer data sequentially, present as needed, reclaim storage.

Downloading: low-level streaming into long-term storage.

I want to be excited about this, I _HATE_ the flatness of android, windows 10/11, even macos.. but I'm afraid they'll fuck it up.. the 3D objects will be actual objects, everything will be crufted on top of the bloated dumpster-fire that is "modern" UI "frameworks". If git had been with us since the 00s, we could just do a hard-reset down to the latest commit before it became flat and ugly.

I think they forgot to include *.js *.ts *.c *.cpp *.java

"in the terms of bros" what does that even mean? I think bro is a term that's used pretty widely, for different things, in different cultures and contexts, I call my brother bro.. I've heard people call their friends bro.. I've heard someone tell a police officer "don't tase me, bro"..

I've never actually seen a brogrammer though, I've seen people who program only because they get money for it, I thought for a while those where it, but I'm not sure if I think they qualify either.

anywhere we can watch the presentation ? the slides alone are great, but if he's saying stuff alongside, I'd be interested in that too :)

This is not the first time that this is posted, but it's a great story, and I'll read it again. This made me think, ycombinators hive-memory, it'd be interesting to have this a community-curated collection of links to evergreens like this one.

Funny, because, sometimes it's not the patience of the other side that's the problem, but on my own side.. and with LLMs, I find in particular my patience challenged.. Whereas with humans, it's often somewhat possible to gauge their level of comprehension and adjust accordingly, but with the savant-idiot-like qualities that most LLMs exhibit, it's really difficult to strike a balance, or even understand at which point they're irrecoverably lost.

kinda makes sense, there must naturally be more energy in it, and therefore harder on the ears..

Shame there's no such thing as crime against earth.. Behaving like this should get you put on probation, "oh, no, you can't have a country yet, you're obviously not ready for the responsibility"..

Related, try an image-search for "canadian oil sands"

I don't delete files. They are put in directories, and at some interval, the directories are put in other directories. I've kept everything that didn't die in sudden catastrophic failures. I can access files that I got before there was even a harddrive in my computer. And I love it, like browsing an old photo album, I once in a while take a stroll through my life, but, unlike the photo, which only captures one angle of a situation, I have entire installations to look at, what was on my desktop 20 years ago, what had I downloaded, oh, that movie, yeah, I remember it now! those funny pictures a long-forgotten friend send to me over IRC DCC, the chatlogs of our cringe teenage banter..

Yes, this is hoarding, but, as opposed to the physical kind, where it goes from some neatly displayed trinkets, to inaccessible rooms and biological hazards, computer files allow us almost infinite room, and almost infinite structure.

While it is probably not healthy to entertain the idea, I believe most hoarders, given sufficient physical space (infinite, really, is sufficient cannot be determined before they're dead and no longer amassing objects), their collections, their order, would look somewhat neater (although not any less pathological).

Whereas physical objects are a burden both in weight and volume, a few hundred terabytes of data does not take up significantly more room in the physical realm.. A file server, and its backup, is really all it takes..

So I don't think they're comparible.. At least, it depends, also, how it affects you, is it a source of stress and negativity, or simply a peace of mind, or a mad obsession..

I don't delete stuff, but I don't fuss over it either, it's not a big deal, once in a while, I move everything out of sight, it's a very small effort, and, so far, 30 years later, current me is grateful for past me for leaving those little breadcrumbs to spark my memories, and so, I will continue this tradition, in honor of future me.

I'm also liking obsidian a lot, especially that the data lives on the filesystem and in markdown so it's not walled in by obsidian. I made my obsidian project folder a git repository and have a script that runs a few times a day to check for changes, if there are any, it creates a backup commit, and pushes the changes to a remote machine. What initially drew me to obsidian was the graph showing connection between documents, and while most are connected, it's not what made me stay.. What made me stay was the familiar-ish interface (reminds me of vscode, which reminds me of "ultra edit") and the way it does not impose too much structure on me.

My personal favorites:

* Deluge Torrent Client

* Gimp before they changed the toolbox icons

* InkScape

* Blender

* Bless (Merge tool)

* htop

This resonates a lot with a thought that I've had for a long time.. A computer is not a tool, it never was, it never will be.. It's a workshop.

maybe, or google.. I didn't want to make it into a political thing, EU has done a lot of silly stuff, part due to malice, part to incompetence, but I'd take that any day over the "usa model" of "freedom" :)

on the flipside, while I don't take pictures all the time, I do feel like I remember the situations in which I took pictures better.. There are two sides to this: The situation was out of the ordinary to begin with, which is why the picture was taken. But also, the act of taking the picture helps me commit it to memory, the same way writing something down means I am more likely to remember it, even if I never read the notes.

I'm not taking the picture to capture the immense beuaty of a landcape, or the magic of a sitaution, I'm not a good enough photographer, and if it's any place worth shooting, there will be much better pictures available of it online anways. I take pictures to document, not as proof, but as an anchor point, so I can remember who, and where. Having a picture of just the landscape does not matter, but having one with the people I'm with, in that landscape, matters.. I can remember travels from "oh, these people were definitely there, because I remember taking a picture of them"

Yep, this is why I dropped out.

Yeah, I dropped my apps from Play, couldn't find a way to avoid putting my personal address on there.. fuck that, I'm making something for free, and they force me to dox myself for it? Nah, I'm good.

Silly lisp-inspired language, but it turned into something different as I started asking myself more and more questions, and now it's more of a model for computation that tries to think about computers as different from looms (aka harward architecture). One where self-modification is the norm, where there is no stack unless you make one, and where there's no difference between a program extending itself or the programmer doing it (unlike LISP macros, my language, and model, does not have a distinction, there's no macros).

I'm not doing this because I'm convinced it's a great idea, or because it's going to revolutionize computing, or because it will be a good language, model or beneficial in any particular way, I'm doing it because I think it's fun, neat and interesting to think about (and talk about).

I really can't remember if it was this one, I'll have to check if I saved the link somewhere at work.. but maybe it was Hyrum's law https://www.hyrumslaw.com/