we’re talking about Cortex podcast

I don’t know about Metafilter but on cursory search, it seems unrelated.

(I’m in the middle of #22, “16-hour Search for Wallpaper” now.)

I tried not to let he end of HI sour it for me and I think I’m still holding up. After all, it’s not unlike Grey to quit like this, in “rip the band-aid off” way, and as Tim although I don’t completely resonate with it, I do feel like Grey has been transparent about this aspect of his personality, it’s also common topic of discussion on HI. Also I vaguely recall Grey mentioning something about some sort of immunity problem with someone in his close vicinity (his wife, I assume) which made me realize that the COVID time was indeed very different for different people; we don’t know what he was going through. (I’m trying not to speculate here.)

Also ironically, in a “selfish” sense, the end came in handy, because just before few of the last episodes, I gathered the confidence to file the whole podcast on MusicBrainz, thinking that adding new episodes is going to be a long-term commitment that I’m going to eventually fall back on. Little did I know that I only had to add one or two more episodes. Also my safety blanket has a finite size now there’s no question about waiting for the next episode, it’s just 136 -> 1 :D

Anyway, I don’t mind in the end. Grey is just being Grey. It’s OK to fall in and out (and maybe back in again) of favor. After all it’s not a real relationship. Many of his ideas have influenced me greatly in my life philosophy (often on the basis that I had similar feelings about things, just never words to describe them), some of them I had to revise and abandon, but many still hold, and that’s good.

Anyway, nice chat!

As a huge Tim (as in Hello Internet listener) and always thought I would want to listen to Cortex but never got around, there was always this little fear of what if I did not like it and it would spoil my perfect parasocial relationship with Grey :D So I ended up just re-listening Hello Internet over and over. (Re-listening HI is kind of my safety blanket now :D)

Ironically, I was not aware about Grey leaving and I only noticed Cortex again because of Technology Connections and Simone Giertz interviews, which were obvious “must listen” for me (and they were great!), but it’s not enough for long term sub.

I’ll check out Upgrade and Connected though.

There’s a podcast called Upgrade where

OT, but is Myke just doing podcast 24/7/365?

(I only knew about Cortex, now I clicked around the site and looks like he has … well, let’s just say he has a lot of podcast.)

Great episode, thanks for the link… (Listening to it right now…)

Socrates is one of the most well know ln philosophers of all time and there isn’t any proof he ever lived.

when is the fact about the level of certainty we have about Socrates’s existence relevant, though? it depends.

• if someone just mentions some specific idea that is often attributed to Socrates, then it’s probably totally irrelevant and you would be just "well, actually"ing someone. (which will backfire esp. if they actually know that full well and can/will stand for themselves)

• if someone is defending a specific idea using an argument from authority of Socrates himself, then it’s probably pretty relevant. at best it’s an invitation to skip a bad argument path and take the focus back to the potential merit of the idea itself. (ofc this is regardless of whether you like that idea or not, learning what the other person perceive as valuable about the idea is usually more interesting than who they think came up with it)

• if someone does the same but based on moral authority, then it’s the same principle, but probably much more important

• if someone creates religion based on teachings of Socrates, then it’s pretty much important (although often seemingly ineffective, and in some cases, risky)

• If someone starts asking questions about Socrates as a historical person (and heck, even questions specifcally about history of Socrates’ state of mind–see title of this whole post), then it’s obviously the most important thing they need to learn before continuing their research or pondering.

The last point bullet point describes what @Phoenixz did here, in the beginning of this sub-thread. (Just for Jesus Christ, not Socrates, of course.)

LOL, I didn’t read your post and made basically the exact same argument.

at least I’m happy I’m not wasting my time on social media alone 🙃

plumbers exist, so do people named starting with M or J. so do people who walk around and yap about end of the world and/or resurrection. and even people who listen to them.

however…

plumbers that can jump 5 times their own height? people named with M that grow 2x when they eat a mushroom? people that turn water into wine? that’s a completely different story.

sentence like “Jesus did not exist” always need to be interpreted in context. when someone says it in context of religion or adjacent, and you respond by “but people called Jesus existed” then you’re just being obtuse.

or rather, playing Motte and Bailey: f…ing OF COURSE you can defend the that Bob—different one than in the story, in particular, a tigerless Bob—exists, but that’s not what is being disputed. what’s being disputed is the existence of Bob with the tiger, and the motivation is to challenge the whole story.

So what you’re saying is if Bob tells me (your name) has a flying tiger, and I later find out you don’t have a flying tiger… you no longer exists?

They did not say someone named Jesus did not exist.

There’s a difference between believing “Joe who had a tiger and a bear and an elephant”, and assuming that there might have been 3 different Joe’s, one with a tiger, one with a bear and one with an elephant, each of them in a different period. Saying “Joe with 3 animals did not exist” does not imply that those Joe’s did not exist.

I’m not a historian but what I’ve heard (must have been on Alex O’Connor’s podcast) is that even some of the possible historical Jesuses (or “Jesusi” :D) had things going on that were not compatible with what the biblical Jesus was all about. (Such as being cult leader proclaiming that world will end in few years.)

i … i don’t know how i left you with the impression that i can’t tell poo from pee. … i must have done something horribly wrong. 🤣

Actually I think for pretty much all mammals it’s as easy as telling liquid the difference between liquid and solid.

Regarding my original comment, it’s mainly frustration at the hypocrisy some people have who make every excuse to avoid using someone’s preferred name or pronouns, but then have no problem switching when it’s someone else’s pet

yeah I got that message. it really shows the hypocrisy, and it makes me wanna scream.

I wonder if a far away vision of a world where the gender just slowly disappears from the language is really the best. (When i get asked about preferred pronoun, i feel i want to answer “i don’t care and no one should, let’s collectively try to really not give a f*k”.) I feel like in the ideal world all pronouns would just be gender-neutral.

But language vs. gender is yet another fascinating rabbit hole. My first language is Czech, where basically every word – even unanimous and abstract concepts like “book” have gender, and the grammar is such that effect of word “gender” spreads to other words as inflections and such. Eg. “ona spala” ~ “she slept” vs. “on spal” ~ “he slept” but “ona spal” is an obvious grammar mistake. I wonder if this makes it worse or actually better: while it makes it harder to have a gender-neutral language (the plural trick does not work: “ony spaly” ~ “they (females) slept”, “oni spali” ~ “they (males) slept” … siiigh…), I also feel it could make it less problematic in the sense that the concept of gender in language is not actually tied to identity of a person–it’s just a weird thing present in the language.

Of course, none of that applies to intentional misgendering, which is just being a huge asshole, with little to no excuse.

Edit: I missed the last–the most important—part of your post, so I was just replying casually (and nerd sniping myself on the language part).

Yeah, that’s really disgusting and alarming. I totally believe. I don’t know what to do about it but I do believe and wish nothing but failure to these hateful, cruel people.

unless you see them pee

You mean see/not see the “pebbles”?

Or do they tend to pee differently? I know dogs typically pee by raising one leg, but sometimes they just crouch by both back legs and just release. Is this what you mean?

I vaguely recall when I was a teen we had a dog (he/him, and a mutt) and he would usually do the “this lamp post is mine now” pee but when he really needed to go he would just crouch and leave a big puddle.

it’s probably misgendering to assume its gender at all and that the concept of gender applies to dogs

Is that true, though? How would we know? Just by Occam’s razor, I would find it safer assume it applies to all mammals, ie. why would humans specifically be different, or if there is a spectrum across species, where/how would we draw the line?

(As a trans person, I have more to say on how easily people pronoun switch for animals but that’s a different topic for another time)

It is different topic, although I’d love to hear more about that as well. Eg. as a cis male with no transgender friends (well, not that I know of), I find myself thinking ruminating about how impolite/distracting it is to misgender a trans person, provided one can just switch after being corrected and move on… How bad it is to make the (honest) mistake repeatedly? How is it compared to other kinds of faux-pas, like, messing up someone’s name? (Eg. repeatedly calling someone John when they are Joe, or forgetting someone’s occupation. These things do happen to my distractable mind that seems to love lossy data compression.)

But yeah, it’s a huge, fascinating topic, but a different one from my intention in the OP. :)

Lot of people will tell you something like “don’t run stuff aS rOoT” but from personal security POV root is almost irrelevant. Potential attacker can do plenty of damage without root.

root only allows crossing boundaries of the current user, but for personal use, everything you care about is probably 100% accessible under your normal user account. You don’t need root to steal your photos and passwords, you don’t need root to shimmy a daemon in your ~/.profile to start every time you log in, you don’t need root to mine shitcoins, use your machine as part of botnet or whatnot.

Good advice is to vet everything you install, or choose a third party to vet it for you. In ideal world,

• choose a stable, well-maintained and up-toodate distro with a good reputation,
• limit installing software from official sources only. …and you’re probably going to be fine.

In less than ideal world, maybe add flatpak to the mix but assume that the repository is a wild west. Running AppImage apps or installing third-party .deb/.rpm/etc. packages, again, if you trust the source, you trust the source.

(But for f’s sake, don’t just run curl | bash scripts (with sudo or not) from random github repos and stuff.)