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Cake day: January 26th, 2024

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  • You have free will, but you also have chains that bound you.

    Starting from the social order, you need money and other social relations (friends, family, bosses) to literally survive in the modern world - you’re not omnipotent.

    Then you have the cognitive chains - stuff you know and understand, as well stuff you can invent (or reinvent) from your current knowledge - you are not omnipresent.

    Then, as a consequence, without these two, you cannot be (omni)benevolent - you’ll always fuck something up (and even if you didn’t, most actions positive towards something will have a negative impact towards something else).

    All these are pretty much categorically impossible to exist - you’re not some god-damn deity.

    But does this mean free will doesn’t exist?

    Hardly. It’s just not as ultimate a power or virtue as some may put it. Flies or pigs also have free will - they’re free to roll in mud or lick a turd - except for when they’re not because they do it to survive (cool themselves or eat respectively).

    We humans similarily eat and shit, and we go to work so we have something to eat and someplace to shit. Otherwise you die without the former or get fined without the latter.

    So that’s what free will is - the ability of an organism to guide what it’s doing, how, when (and, to some extent, even why) it’s doing it, according to its senses and sensibilities. It’s the process with which we put our own, unique spin on the things in our lives.

    Being an omnipotent, omnipresent and (omni)benevolent would in fact remove the essence of what free will (with all its limits) is, because our actions wouldn’t have any meaningful consequences. It’d all just be an effective (what I’ll call negative) chaos - a mishmush of everything only understandable to the diety.

    So in fact, the essence of “free” will is that it’s free within some bounds - some we’ve set ourselves, some we’re forced with (disabilities, cognitive abilities, physical limits, etc.). Percisely in the alternative scenario would “free” will cease to be free - because someone already knows it all - past, present future, local and global, from each atom on up. There’s perfect causality - as perfect as a movie. You can’t change it meaningfully - any changes become a remix or remaster - they lose their originality.

    With the limits on our thinking which cause us to be less-than-perfect, they cause a kind of positive chaos, one where one tries to do their best with what they have on their disposal - as they say, you get to know people best at their lowest. Similarily, everyone gets corrupted at a high enough power level - some just do it sooner than others. So surely, at an infinite power level, not even someone omnipotent, omnipresent and (omni)benevolent all at once would be able to curb this flaw.


  • It’s a Linux subsystem for Windows. As in, you run Windows and within it run Linux. Thus Linux is the sub-system, while Windows is the “overarching” system. Therefore, it’s Linux running as a subsystem on a Windows machine. Therefore, a Linux subsystem on/for Windows.

    <edit>

    That was just setting the two viewpoints equal.

    Now, to add why this one is more “correct”: when talking about Windows (or Linux or anything else fir that matter) subsystems, you don’t call the Windows file system the Windows subsystem for Files or the Windows subsystem for Networking or Linux subsystem for RNG - You call them the filesystem, the networking system or the RNG system. And since none of them get the “for host” suffix, it seems natural to assume it’s the guest system that’s the “sub” system, with the other one being the whole.

    </edit>


















  • How exactly do you expect every single privacy “enthusiast” to inspect source code?

    A privacy “enthusiast” is not the same as a privacy “expert”. And even then, a “privacy expert” doesn’t need to be a genius programmer - or even one at all - they can be lawyers, historians or journalists.

    Knowing how to code is hard. Knowing reading someone else’s code is even harder. Vetting code for security is even harder than that.

    Not to mention the fact that the Firefox source is enormus, dwarfing kernel.org, a huge project with an incredible amount of contributors.

    Expecting every privacy “expert” to be able to fully understand every single line of code in a project is divorced from reality. Expecting it from anyone merely interested in it is asinine.

    Not even a genius security researcher would be capable of vetting the source of something as giant as Firefox on their own. Sure, it’s a great passion project which many have taken up and learned many things from it, but it just isn’t practical for literally anyone.

    The Open source community is just that - a community. And any good community sticks together. A deeply rooted interst of this community is to spread its message and accomplishments to everyone, “experts”, “enthusiast” or “neither” alike.

    Any community benefits most from active members who wish it good. It also benefits from members being varied, and thus able to give their own, unique perspective on community issues. As I said, many privacy experts aren’t security experts, but rather people of a legal, journalist and historic background. Some are vloggers. Nothing wrong with that.

    If the community is healthy, things will balance out. The vloggers, bloggers and Mastodon posters’ backlash (among others) would force Mozilla to capitulate on the issue, or create a fork if the situation asks for.