You must be someone who hates working from home, because home is the place where we should all feel relaxed, right? What about working in the garden? The garden is certainly a relaxation spot, but god forbid you get some rays of sunshine while you work.

I understand the desire to pity people who work at the beach. But then again, I pity anyone who ended up living near Silicon Valley. Think of all the money though!

I can respect that. Appreciate your thoughtful responses!

Yeah, I think I see where you’re coming from. It’s a fair point, and we need to be very careful not to loose sight of reality indeed.

The idea of the Universal God is very tolerant towards “fantasy” so far as it exists in the minds of people, yet it also prescribes to align such belief with a scientific understanding. So the thing I’m trying to say is: believe what you want to believe, and so long as it’s a rational and tolerant belief, it’s fine. But it does explicitly recognise there are limits to what science can do for us, so it provides the idea of Universal God as kind of a North Star for those in search, but then it doesn’t really prescribe what this Universal God must look like. I don’t see it as a religious god, but more a path towards a belief in something beyond ourselves.

In the book I also take effort to describe how this relates to Buddhism, Taoism, and Abrahamic religions, and attempt to show how they are all efforts to describe similar concepts, and whether we call this Nature, Tao, or God, doesn’t really matter in the end. So long as we don’t fall into nihilism and believe in something, I believe we can find common ground as a people.

Yeah, absolutely, but I think as soon as you’re getting government funding you would fall under public service rather than civic service, that’s kinda the distinction I was trying to point out.

But I like your idea!

Fixed, thank you.

Saying that people are corruptible doesn’t imply they are corrupt. Thankfully we live finite lives and plenty of us can make it to the end before we corrupt ourselves.

Given the right luck they could only mirror the elite, not change their structure.

This is quite literally pretending the Age of Enlightenment never existed. We can change structures and have throughout history.

This is effectively Spinoza’s argument indeed, which relies on nature / the universe to be fully deterministic. As I mentioned in the post, I don’t agree with determinism though. Science doesn’t either, because as we know from quantum mechanics, reality is probabilistic rather than deterministic. So saying that everything can be determined from previous states is an assumption that is not supported by science.

Ah, but that’s no reason to give into defeatism. Words and wisdom can survive our lifetimes, so it’s never too early to practice them.

Yeah, I think we’re pretty much aligned on that.

I also wish I could do more in those regards, but I’m neither an American nor a politician. The latter I could change, but even if I were successful, then by the time I could affect some change it would probably be too late.

Still refusing to sit idly by, I decided to have a thought on how this could be prevented. A system with similar values as democracy, but better resilience against corruption could theoretically prevent a lot of harm. I don’t when or if anyone would be willing and able to do something with these ideas, but I figured it was the best I could do for now.

The formatter is similar to Prettier in that regard, yes. Recently we decided to deviate in one specific case for accessibility reasons, but it’s a rare exception: https://fosstodon.org/@biomejs/113163964170882716

The linter is less opinionated, but it’s not concerned with formatting.

Modern C++ does use references, which can also reference memory that is no longer available. Avoiding raw pointers isn’t enough to be memory safe.

No sorry, we follow Prettier’s philosophy there.