I would like to believe that people can change over time.
522 karma · joined August 8, 2018
I would like to believe that people can change over time.
And with fuzzy matching built in? Just amazing. Good job OP.
Debt is related to value, which is inherently subjective. In nature, nothing reproducable is one yard long, so we create something and call it a yard, and that first thing becomes the standard. The same is true economically; there's no way to measure what one loaf of bread is inherently worth. Even the time and resources needed to produce it vary depending on countless circumstances. A man with a bread factory will have a much easier time producing one loaf than a homeless man.
The same is true for pain. What's as trivial as a small papercut to one person may be overwhelmingly traumatic to another person, and another can handle losing a limb as easily as losing a pen. Countless variable psychological circumstances prevent us from making any true measurement of debt.
But justice requires that we try our best and move on. So we create economies out of barter and then gold and then bills and then credit. Or we create justice systems that are constantly flowing and changing in their understanding of right and wrong, and also value and loss.
It may be that some people who helped you had no difficulty. I do remember a teacher telling us once to be careful of what we say, because we never know which things we say will stick with someone forever with deep profoundness. Which goes to show that a small off the cuff comment has the very real potential to contribute toward making someone's life significantly better or significantly worse, yet the comment took almost no thought or effort. It cost little.
There's a moment in a play written by Karol Wojtyla in the 1940s, where Adam Chmielowski asks Madame Helena what it costs her to play Ophelia or Lady MacBeth. She replies, "in a way, it costs me all my life. It is a strange ransom; every time I pay it all over again."
I have met many people who are convinced that they have been wronged so grievously that the offender must pay every last penny they have or ever will make, and suffer every second of this life as much as possible, and they hope Hell exists purely so that the offender's suffering may not be relieved by the most torturous death imaginable. Such a person will never be satisfied or happy.
For the little it's worth, my recommendation is to repay people with what good value you justly and reasonably estimate that you owe them for the good they have done to you, and be done with it. If they consider it too much or too little, accomodate them a little, but only within reason. Inversely, if anyone has wronged you, consider their debt paid to you already, since this costs you nothing, whereas exacting justice is tiresome and restless. Besides, forgiving someone's debt to you gives them encouragement to improve, whereas exacting it discourages them and puts them on the defense. That's not to say you shouldn't insist that society as a whole have justice also, for example by calling the police when a legitimate crime has occurred to you or someone else. I'm only talking about the debt in context of two humans.
[1] https://github.com/sdegutis/Novo-Cantico [2] https://www.novocantico.org/blog
[1] https://www.novocantico.org/blog/2022-02-28-why-isnt-this-on...
The second half has valuable advice for more than just spouses, although it's mostly talking about divorce. But also employee/employer relationships, friendships, and any other type: if you are not actually trying to make sure you fully understand the other person's position, you are working against unity with them.
But I have to disagree with the article's final word of advice:
> Spend less effort trying to control your partner's thinking and more trying to understand and appreciate differences in your perspectives.
Not that this is wrong, but that there's another step after it which must carefully be practiced: when you know for sure that you're right, and that the other person is objectively wrong in this situation, it's important to stand firm on what you must do, and not waver. All without losing kindness, compassion, patience, an attentive ear and everything else the article mentions.
St. Edith Stein once said something like without truth, there is no charity, and without charity, there is no truth. I see time and time again people make this very simple mistake: forfeit truth in order to preserve charity. But the two are not incompatible and never can be.
A person will say, "well in order to be accepting to this person, I must be willing to accept that maybe they are correct and I am incorrect," and they will stray from their objective certainty. That's why I'm not a fan of the quote in this article, "Certainty itself is an emotional state, not an intellectual one." It either states or strongly implies that there is no objective truth, depending on the author's meaning. But there is objective truth, truth that is true no matter if nobody is alive to perceive it or not.
And when we stray from that truth, we abandon our only hope of helping people out of their own self-deceit and delusions. I have seen many people join in the delusions of others in order to comfort them or calm them down or give them hope in a false reality. This is not truly charitable behavior.
True charity, true selfless and sacrificial love for another, always wants to help them out of their self-destruction, which always comes from self-deceit. And this requires that we remain in the truth. A tree cannot help birds of the air if it uproots itself and tries to follow them, it needs to stand firmly planted.
If two things change that both trigger a third thing to change, how does this efficiently prevent the third thing from updating twice needlessly? I'm imagining this becoming an exponential problem in real apps, where hundreds of components are re-updated needlessly at every UI interaction.
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies (recent): React.js, TypeScript/JavaScript, AWS, Electron
Technologies (rusty): Objective-C, Swift, Ruby, Python, C, Rust, Lua
Résumé/CV: Available upon request
Email: sbdegutis@gmail.com
The vast majority of Emacs's usefulness is its ecosystem. Several Emacs clones have been made in a very small amount of time, but none have caught on because they lack the ecosystem and community. So it's only really fair to compare VS Code's ecosystem with Emacs's ecosystem. And VS Code's ecosystem was created by unpaid volunteers too.
Emacs is built on a philosophy of human nature that deemphasizes the subjective personal experience in favor of (a limited group of people’s theory of) the objective ideal experience.
In a short amount of time, VSCode and it’s ecosystem has almost equally matched what Emacs and its ecosystem took 30+ years to create.
But not all religions are created equal. The Protestant religions are emasculated to some degree. Since they're based around rejecting the truth, their foundation is all wrong, and they can never get back to reality. Unfortunately, they turn many people away from Christianity.
But that's not necessarily true. Those who keep looking for it will find it in Catholicism, just like John Henry Newman did. As he said, "to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant." But more often, people don't really want to find out the truth. So they reject religion altogether. Except as a psychological tool.
I'm unable to describe the magnitude of the amazingness of the world I found, simply by wanting to believe that God is real, and then finding out that the Resurrection actually did happen. Anyone who does enough research on this topic and has a good and honest heart will eventually become Catholic.
God how I wish I had looked into this years earlier, but I didn't because I assumed it was just too unlikely to be worth investigating. What an awfully powerful fallacy.
For example, someone might dismiss IDEs as being unnecessary because technically the same job can be done without them by a superior human being, so the solution is to just be a superior human being.
Or as another example, someone could completely dismiss syntax highlighting as being useless for the superior, implying that the solution to the problem syntax highlighting solves is to just also become a superior human being.
There are multiple layers to any solution, and if one of them is missing, the others are kind of shaken out of balance.
Also https://xkcd.com/55/ and https://xkcd.com/128/
This is the inevitable confusion of a society that insists that nothing exists outside what we can scientifically observe, who rejects concepts of soul and love and still tries to explain their effects using only what they admit. It's like saying we bleed when we're cut because the skin must be producing that blood, denying the existence of veins or a heart.
EDIT: Oh, it's a game engine. Is there a basic 'vanilla' Minecraft clone based on Minetest, for this purpose?