throwaway8879

How are you defining a successful democracy? If 20% of a nation elect a philosopher king type leader, is that more "successful" than 90% of another nation electing a tyrannical despot?

One man's activist is another man's bigot.

Socrates didn't draw a crowd mostly because he was super annoying. Imagine going to the marketplace to buy food and then this short and ugly man with his two sidekicks shows up to start a dialectic about the nature of forms or something goofy, while you just want to get back home and start dinner...

Man is the measure of all things.

He translated the new testament from Greek to German. That helped the poor more than anybody else.

Nitpick. Socrates was given a choice. His decision to kill himself was his own. I'd probably do the same. He was 70+ anyway. A lifetime of annoying dialectic tends to make lots of enemies quickly.

Signal still requires a phone number. That alone should make it non-usable for people who are serious about their privacy.

My alternate solution: stop using smartphones altogether. Technology is not a good solution to the privacy problem, especially when a collective such as the government can read your data anyway, or beat it out of you.

If you're worried about drowning, don't go near water. There are no fullproof life vests.

Rightly according to your subjective experience.

There's no reason to complicate your thinking about tastes and aesthetics. There is art that you like, there id art the you don't like. Then there are criteria by which you judge the quality of the things you like/dislike.

For instance, it becomes hairy once you get down to make any sort of meaningful comparison between the quality of musicians you like, even if the criteria are pretty meaningful. Is Chopin better than Katy Perry because his works are harmonically richer? Bach because of superior use of counterpoint? Maybe Ivan Wyshnegradsky for his use of non-standard tuning systems?

Something is good if you are able to appreciate and enjoy it. Trying to justify why you like/dislike something is not going to be very fruitful in thr grand scheme of things, unless you just want to find similar things that you'd enjoy.

Rust docs is decent. Elixir's is pretty good too! OpenBSD man pages.

And of course, ArchWiki has saved my life a few hundred times so far. It's really comprehensive.

Nukes may shorten an otherwise prolonged war. "Better off" is obviously very subjective, but I don't see how nukes aren't better off if they end up saving lives. Let's also consider all the direct wars avoided in the last ~75 years, an outcome of nuclear MAD.

The reality of our situation if that we will keep fighting each other, that's a given. Best to test our nukes to make sure they work. Nukes that won't work can't save lives.

And what about the rest of us non-Americans who have our respectjve local media misleading the public? Perhaps we all have our own mini Fox News entities that drive this narrative?

I don't intend to bring too much cynicism in here, but if you outright believe any media in current year, whether mainstream or alternative, you are being misled. Everyone has an agenda.

The SerenityOS author makes fairly regular videos related to the OS, bug fixes, and other dev and life things. It's cool and inspiring to see a highly productive hacker do their thing on stream, kind of like watching Steve Gadd do a drum solo.

Every individual has their subjective valuation of "decent reasons". Please do not proclaim yourself the sole owner of objective value. It is incredibly naive, and dishonest too. Reasons that do not seem decent to you will be so to others.

There are almost 8 billion of us. You don't speak for everyone. And I say that as a non-american who has no horse in the race.

This is actually a good indicator for understanding the issue of privacy/surveillance. There are enough hackers and engineers who care little about being spied, despite understanding some of the inner workings of how the spying is done - as long as the benefits of a free service outweigh the slight privacy-violating annoyances.

Now try to understand why the average person cares even less.

Really want to push my bass playing into "primary instrument" territory this year. Will probably just spend a lot of time learning Gary Willis/Tribal Tech songs, and other great jazz fusion players.

Get decent sleep and exercise. Stop reading the news. Spend a day or two away from computers, and habitat altogether if you're able to.

Hope you're able to change those habits, friend.

When I started binge-drinking, benzos and codeine helped keep hangovers to a minimum. Sadly, that led to a pill addiction, which led to an almost decade-long use of heroin/meth, and whatever else I could get my hands on. When you're dealing with withdrawals from harder drugs, the hangovers sort of fade into the background.

In any case, if you're getting to the point where you're having to mitigate regular hangovers, you might have bigger worries.

I'd give anything to be a regular person who drinks, smokes and gets wasted once in a while without their lives devolving into absolute chaos, but life doesn't work that way.

We've had at least 2 posts from cliqz in the past few days. I have genuine issues with my short-term memory after having recovered from a coma so I don't know whether this is a glitch where I keep seeing the same posts or they keep getting reposted.

I have a weekly(Monday) chat session with an accountability buddy where we discuss the previous week's goals and make new goals for the coming week. It's a little bit more involved than just ticking off items, and involves being mindful about how to do things differently in the coming week. At first it was strictly work-related but morphed into including other areas such as health goals, mood/emotional goals etc. We're nearly one year into it.

My friend delivers mail for a day job and works on a fantasy novel the rest of the time. I'm sort of a code person working on a startup and various other things.

Somehow it works for us. And better than other approaches I've tried before.

Thankful for still breathing. It didn't seem like a possibility just a few years ago.

I've tried to get into urbit a few times over the last couple of years. The jargon and the pretense-esoteric nature of it always causes friction, even while trying to read the docs. May it's just not for me.

My main work machine runs i3 with KDE. I'd avoided kde in the early 2000s because it seemed clunky at the time. Then used Macs for a while before switching back to linux. KDE plasma is great.

That's an interesting saying, thanks for sharing. Just today morning I was listening to an audiobook that mentioned something similar _ "physician, heal thyself so you may heal thy patient...".

Start working on you health. Learn to play a musical instrument. Or learn a new one if you already play one.

The most effective privacy tool is to realise that every tool is potentially compromised. The only reliable secret is one kept inside your head.

The best life jacket still has a non-zero failure rate. Don't want to drown? Don't go swimming.

5 years ago, mid 20s - $600k and a bunch of Fender guitars

Now at age 31 - $0 and a bunch of Fender guitars

It is a science, just a very dismal one!

I agree with you. I don't play video games, but at this point in my life, I don't even want normal politics, why would I want politics in my entertainment?

Probably also why I'm seriously turned off by musicians with political agenda, like Roger Waters.