At least it’s not driving straight into a tree, I call that an improvement.

The paradox of tolerance relies on a lot of assumptions that don’t really work in reality. We don’t tend to see more open societies have more intolerance, quite the opposite. Part of the problem is that “the intolerant” is not a single group, but many groups that hate each other. And those who are intolerant towards the intolerant are themselves part of the intolerant.

For a less-political example, let’s imagine hypothetically that Lemmy is very pro-linux. However, some people who absolutely hate linux show up and start posting anti-linux memes. These people get insulted, downvoted, and eventually banned by others on Lemmy, because they’re showing intolerance towards linux.

But then what happens to those anti-linux people? They go off and created their own forums, and talk about how intolerant lemmy is to people who don’t use linux. So whenever a linux user shows up on those forums, they’re inevitably banned. The result of intolerance of the intolerant is that they remain intolerant, and now the tolerant have become hard to distinguish from them, and there’s no way for pro-linux forces to be part of the conversation anti-linux people are having - allowing them to create their own culty filter bubble.

Now imagine an alternative - instead of banning the anti-linux people, pro-linux lemmy users decide to engage with them and correct misconceptions about linux. After all, linux, like many other topics, can get kind of complicated, and linux users need to remember that not everyone has the same background knowledge that they do about the topic. Sure, some linux haters would be persistent, but maybe others would be like “hey, these linux folks are actually kind of cool and helpful, I want to be more like them.” That may sound idealistic, but I think that’s a lot closer to what we see in reality - intolerance thrives in closed off spaces, and dies in open ones.

Sure. My parents had different religions and being an atheist I don’t really have a duty to care about other people’s religions.

Of course it helped that my parents weren’t too seriously religious. And I’ve rejected religious people for having religion-tied views I find appalling. But the religion itself isn’t the issue, just the things that sometimes result from it are.

Social media is just a symptom of the larger problem which is the corporations prefering to build walled gardens so they can control users rather than the open protocols that defined the early internet. Back in the day, I used to call it “everything becoming facebook”.

Social media is fundamentally a moat - a wall built around a set of consumers to keep them away from competitors. Investors love moats. If you whisper as quietly as you possibly can to yourself “I found a company with a wide moat that no one is talking about yet” JP Morgan himself will literally burst through your wall like the Kool Aid Man. They love it because it avoids competition, and as much as competition is the whole point of capitalism, it’s the last thing an actual capitalist wants to deal with.

A big part of what made the early internet super valuable was the opposite of moats: open protocols. For example how GMail can send email to Yahoo or any other email provider. If Google had their way, that’s not how email would work at all - you’d need a google account to both send and receive emails. That’s why these companies have been trying to kill email for ages, trying to get people to use their own proprietary messaging systems instead, where you can only send to others with an account. Then they could capture you and keep you all to themselves.

Which brings us to the fediverse. The fediverse is an attempt to return to open protocols rather than creating a moat around a group of users. In many ways it’s like email - your email provider might cut off a server if it’s just sending spam all day, and this is basically defederation. But otherwise nothing stops you from communicating with anyone, and that’s how it should be.

For me WFH has helped me have a community. The office was never a real community, and the fact that we all worked together got in the way of being actual friends. Instead with the added time from WFH I was able to prioritize my social life and go to more events and meet people I actually have stuff in common with. Additionally my in-office job forced me to live in a dead suburb, WFH allowed me to move to a city with a lot more social opportunities.

Of course probably not everyone prioritized that. The office might be good for some people, but for people like me who don’t necessarily socialize at the office very easily WFH is much better for community.

Has anyone else made a successful pivot from software engineering to another field?

No, but I’ve done the complete opposite.

I’ve sent out 400+ applications

First rule of doing anything: if you hear grinding, you’re doing something wrong and need to rethink your approach.

I’ve found it to be much easier to get my foot in the door with the help of a recruiter. There’s a ton of them on linkedin, all you really need to do is start looking for jobs and they’ll appear in your messages. Interact with them, even if it’s just to say you’re not interested - I think somehow this helps you show up in whatever algo linkedin uses. I’ve only very rarely gotten anywhere with applications. Recruiters help because they usually already have a relationship with the hiring manager.

Emphasis on usually, because you need to only work with recruiters that actually have that relationship. First clue is that they are physically located near the employer, and if they’re actually an internal recruiter, all the better.

Second thing I’m guessing you’re doing wrong is your resume. Remember that anyone filtering out through resumes is probably not a technical person and is just looking for keywords. So make sure every technology you’ve worked with is mentioned by its official name on your resume.

E.g.:

worked for 1.5 years at a major financial firm building data pipelines, working with financial datasets, and using technologies like Python, SQL, and AWS

Then make sure your resume includes “Python”, “SQL”, and “AWS”, as well as the specific SQL you’re using and the names of the specific AWS services, and whatever other cool keywords you can throw in about the financial systems you were working on. Even basic things like Git should be mentioned, because you never know when a HR person might have that on a list of qualifications.

I can say I’ve been looking at switching jobs within tech and I’ve been getting plenty of interest from recruiters. Now I do have a lot more experience, but I don’t think that’s the only factor as I’m also looking at more high-level jobs. The difference in approach is probably the key.

The correct response is to consider what the correct way to synthesize the positions is, and go with that. There’s nothing wrong with adapting your position to handle possible inconsistencies. The goal is not to win but to be the most correct.

Typically, the assumption is that this is an argument that transgender is invalid. Perhaps there’s another way of looking at it. Perhaps a way people aren’t ready for, which is why your opponent went in that direction.

Alternatively, it can be pointed out that this is changing the topic, because it technically is.

Being secretly not updating because it thinks it’s disconnected, so I have to notice that little icon by the inbox to know it’s just not telling me about meetings being scheduled and such

Let’s count the problems:

1. Up front cost
2. Maintenance cost
3. Varied problems like different types of stairs, tripping hazards, etc.
4. People attacking or stealing robots and their packages.
5. Safety issues with 100+ pound metal robots falling on pets and children

Any others?

I just want to point out something that I’ve not seen others mention - sometimes girls are just way too paranoid about what their families will think. I know one girl who keeps insisting that her parents wouldn’t let her date a black guy, but then she also admits that she dated a hispanic guy before and thought the same thing but her parents loved him. Honestly I think like 70% of girls imagine that their parents wouldn’t accept some huge swath of men due to some superficial characteristic, but probably in reality only maybe 20% of parents would actually be against their daughter dating a guy who treats her well, even if he’s of a type they dislike.

Yup I was going to treat it like eating cubes of tofu

I have to disagree honestly. So many times someone tells me about some question they’re pondering, and when I offer some suggestion about what may be going on or how to fix it, they’re like “Why are you talking about something you know nothing about? You don’t have to have an opinion.”

But am I allowed to? I’m a curious person. If something interesting or strange or problematic is happening in your life, the first thing my brain is going to do is start trying to explain it. So I could keep it to myself, but then since my mind is on something I’m not allowed to talk about, I’m going to sit there and be silent and then they’ll be like “What? Do you have any reaction at all or are you going to just sit there in silence?”

And then I pull out my beretta…

The month first is best because consider what happens if a message gets cut off. You might get: “You’ll be flying to New York on the first of …” or “You’ll be flying to New York on June…”

The first message doesn’t tell you anything useful. Do you need to buy shorts or a parka? Do you have months to prepare or are you leaving in a few hours? Could this be an april fools joke? It’s a 1/12 chance. Totally useless.

Second message, sure the details are unclear but at least you know what to pack and that you need to hurry about getting the rest of the message.

He didn’t. The quotes in these tweets are fake. If I search for these quotes these tweets are the only results. Twitter is a hostile platform to reality as reality can get in the way of virality. Hence why you never see sources on twitter. This was likely written by someone with only a passing familiarity with gandhi’s position on WWII who probably guessed at how he would speak based on his character in Civ.

What did gandhi actually think the Britiish should do in 1940? In his actual words:

I want you to fight Nazism without arms, or, if I am to retain the military terminology, with non-violent arms. I would like you to lay down the arms you have, as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions. Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.

Basically he was speaking for an extreme form of non-violent civil disobedience, not capitulation.

Also a famous gandhi quote: “Stop believing everything you see on twitter you gullible rube”

In most cases, it’s wrong to violate the social contract, especially while benefiting from it. However: the harm done by violating the social contract should be weighed against the harm of not violating it.

In this case, the harm of violating the social contract is pretty minimal, as copyright law is not a fundamental part of the fabric of society. One can even argue it’s kind of dubious, as something that moneyed interests favor very heavily with no similar moneyed interests favoring a strong public domain.

The harm of not violating it is not only do you give money to a holocaust denier, you’re giving it to him for denying the holocaust. Even worse, you’re giving him money for being wrong, and so effective at deception that you are compelled to spend money disproving him.

The whole point of copyright is to encourage useful works and spreading of knowledge and art. In this case the work is not spreading knowledge, but un-knowledge. Irving is exploiting a loophole in copyright law that allows him to work against its very purpose.

Thus I’d say violating the law is ethical as the benefits far outweigh the costs.

Consciousness

Let alone neurones in my brains experiencing quantum effects.

But that’s zeroing in on the idea that quantum mechanics directly affects neurons, which affect free will. Which is only one way one could conceivably argue free will exists. But I’m saying I don’t need to come up with a specific way, because I observe free will more directly than anything else. So there’s basically infinite ways it could happen, including for example:

• Some undiscovered conscious force behind quantum mechanics that has yet to be discovered that is able to affect the brain via microtubules
• Some undiscovered conscious force that exists entirely outside of known physics and is able to affect some part of the brain via a totally novel mechanism not related to quantum mechanics
• The whole world being a simulation which for unknown reasons is set up to hide our own free will from us
• Everyone having the wrong perspective about causality in general, such as the external world being governed and dictated by the self rather than the other way around, much the same way dreams can be controlled by the free will of lucid dreamers. Or being wrong about some other fundamental reality of the universe in such a way that consciousness would make more sense.

Yes.

I observe free will directly. Watch: I will choose of my own free will to type a tilde at the end of this sentence instead of a period~ Behold free will.

Everything that says we don’t have free will depends on indirect observations that blatantly make faulty assumptions. Do our senses accurately tell us about the state of the universe, and ourselves within it? Are our interpretations of this infallible?

Most egregious is the assumption that classical mechanics governs the mind, when we know that at a deep level, classical mechanics governs nothing. Quantum mechanics is the best guess we have at the moment about how objects work at a fundamental level. Many will say neurons are too big for the quantum level. But everything is at the quantum level. We just don’t typically observe the effects because most things are too big to see quantum effects from the outside. But we don’t only look at the brain from the outside.

Nor can we say that the brain is the seat of consciousness. Who can say what the nature of reality is? Does space even exist at a fundamental level? What does it mean for consciousness to be in a particular place? What’s to say it can only affect and be affected by certain things in certain locations? Especially when we can’t pinpoint what those things are?

So yeah I believe in free will. It’s direct observation vs. blatantly faulty reasoning.