I see the tumblr culture is already present, congrats! Although I never personally used tumblr, my understanding is that more than features or functionality it was very much the culture that its users cultivated that made that site special.

I wonder if they just want some more data they can then sell off to others.

Thank you for that link, it was really helpful.

Just as we are creatures of habit, we are creatures of belief. Ritual is belief + habit + (ideally) intent.

To be clear:
I don’t argue for abandoning objective reality, but rather that the path to there, from within our own minds, will need to incorporate rituals on some level. The scientific method is really just a very specific kind of ritual. Let’s lean into all of our strengths as human beings, not just our capacity for reasoning.

I think the reasoning expressed here is taking the wrong approach. The type of person in most need of convincing that we should consider ritual as an important (if not outright necessary) tool for changing society (especially if it’s to “save” the environment) is the type of person for whom:

1. ritual is responsible for everything wrong with the current state of the world
2. the ends don’t justify the means
3. indigenous practices are something to be “sifted through” with modern science to keep the “actual” and discard the “frivolous”

To convince such a person (for whom I expect Carl Sagan’s words on science being a “candle in the dark” deeply resonate), I think it would be much more productive to talk about how we came to care so much about democracy and human rights given neither are, to my knowledge, falsifiable.
The acts of voting and holding an election are deeply secular rituals; we imbue them with power by performing them, and we perform them because we view them as imbued with power (specifically, the power to confer legitimacy on the decision made by their own outcome). Similarly, writing down on a piece of paper that human beings should be treated on equal footing has been effectively ritualized[0] to help convince others - including those born long after the paper was written on - that we should act as if it were true, despite any evidence our senses may provide us for the contrary.
A third, even more mundane example of a secular ritual is when two parties sign a contract.
A fourth, much more fun example of a secular ritual is gift-giving on certain significant moments in time - birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas.

I would wager this hypothetical reader-in-need-of-convincing thinks all four of these rituals are good - for them, for everyone, and also just plain Good. They don’t need to be scientifically proven to “work” so much as they need to be scientifically “cleared of harm” - we don’t give up on contracts just because they can be used for harm, we pass laws so that we can ignore and/or annul any harmful contracts that might otherwise take effect. Similarly, maybe we can make “coexisting with the environment” sacred without involving notions of heaven, hell, or any sort of higher power. We certainly seem to want to treat human rights as sacred, even though that isn’t a perfect approach either.

In any case, I would have been much more receptive to this line of reasoning back when I would have dismissed the article itself as not-that-deep and somewhat fetishistic.

[0]: both by repetition and by continued transmission of reverence. Not only have there been multiple signings of declarations of human rights over the years, many of them were directly inspired by previous one(s). From the USA’s “bill of rights” to the French “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” to the UN’s “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”, most continue to be taught about in Western education as being important milestones for society as well having a net good impact on us.

Looking at your profile, Lemmy itself seems to be saying your account is 3 weeks old. I don’t know what exactly is going here.

Aw, geee, thanks! It’s been a while since I figured in a meme

Well, now that I made this post lemmy is finding cross-posts of it… at least none of them seem to be in this community.

And surprise, surprise, almost half of his “I use Linux now guys” video is showing off the window manager hyprland, which got a lot of bad press over the past 2 years:

https://drewdevault.com/2024/04/09/2024-04-09-FDO-conduct-enforcement.html

You buying at a grocery store is out of convenience, the alternative is learning how to hunt like a survival hunter.

At some point that was an alternative, but today the natural ecosystems have been so encroached upon by human civilization that we can’t just decide to become survival hunters - we’d simply starve. Grocery stores are all you have if you’re living in a high-rise apartment in most cities, for example. Most suburbs can’t support enough wildlife to then be hunted for survival by the humans living there.

Vegetable gardens might be a better analogy than survival hunting. There are even some initiatives being taken to break the cycle of dependency that grocery stores encourage, which I suspect is what @[email protected] is getting at: collective effort is needed beyond just letting the techies do their thing in their own corner, otherwise we all suffer. Everyone needs to move beyond their comfort zone at some point, for some amount of time - be it the techies teaching others, or the others learning a bit more about how their tools work.

the average user wants the convenience of easy to use software, because they don’t want to learn the alternative […] If everyone was like you, then easy to use software wouldn’t be selling so much.

I can’t tell if you are simply stating how the world currently is or claiming that it is destined to always be that way, but in either case I don’t see how “people prefer convenience” is a good argument against trying to help them get over that preference. I don’t think convenience is nor should be the end-all-be-all of existence, in fact it can be actively detrimental to life when prioritized.

Unless I’m mistaken, the average user wanted asbestos in their walls, lead in their paint, and asked their doctor for menthol cigarettes instead of regular ones when said doctor was prescribing them for stress. The average user in the USA couldn’t tell that their milk was full of pus and mixed with chalk to the point it was killing their babies, all for the convenience of still owners and milk producers. Their society had built up so much around the convenience of drinking milk in places that couldn’t produce it locally, that it took an Act of Congress as well as the development of technology to safely transport milk long distances before the convenience stopped killing people.

Don’t get me wrong, convenience is great when it doesn’t come at the expense of our well-being - in those cases it tends to dramatically improve our well-being. I tend to agree with @[email protected] that currently the software market is overly delivering convenience to the point that it is negatively affecting our collective well-being - with regards to software, at the very least.

Also, wasn’t Trump the reason the largest non-nuclear bomb in the USA arsenal was first used in combat? The bomb that had never been deployed in the almost 15 years since it’s creation specifically because the US military thought it would create too many civilian casualties?

The same Trump that allegedly wanted to nuke hurricanes to disrupt them before they hit the US’s coast?

The dude just wants to play with the shiny toys and see things go “boom”. He has literally stated to his own biographer that

When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same. The temperament is not that different."

(source: The Week)

I suppose it suits him just fine that Israel is now flirting with open warfare with their neighbors.

Paging Ray Bradbury… https://www.libraryofshortstories.com/storiespdf/the-veldt.pdf

I have gotten cynical to the point of assuming the “endgame” here is properly kicking off WW3, so that Trump gets an excuse to drop a nuke or two on an adversary.

“The last time we had a world war, we won it! We were the best - and we won it with our nukes, our big beautiful nukes - it’s really a shame we haven’t used them since, don’t you think? We ended the war by dropping 2 on Japan, and now Japan is our best friend. Why don’t we drop some nukes on Iran? Don’t we want them to be our friend?”

If this turns out to be a measurable and reproducible effect for most humans, online gambling and video game loot boxes just became a while lot scarier in my mind.

The 3 stooges-style robber confrontation and the death of caesar feel like a very young child’s recreation of a story they overheard from adults; very little basis in reality and full of nonsensical assumptions. Or like when a kid is trying to write a story and they come up with “Space Wars: The Fellowship of the Lightsaber, part 2: the Klingon Horcruxes”.

It’s cute when a kid does it, it’s hilarious when an adult does it intentionally. This is just sad.

I suspect there is wisdom to be learned from forest management, specifically how regular, small controlled burns are how you avoid huge, unmanageable forest fires.

It’s probably not what you’re imagining, but there is the lemmynsfw instance which is a Lemmy instance that is more or less explicitly for porn.

But there is one other, probably even more important advantage: Prolog is a programmer’s and software engineer’s dream. It is compact, highly readable, and arguably the “most structured” language of them all. Not only has it done away with virtually all control flow statements, but even explicit variable assignment too! These virtues are certainly reason enough to base not only systems but textbooks on this language.

The 90s certainly were a different time…

Which raises a larger question: Did prompt engineering roles ever truly exist?

All experts interviewed for this piece were skeptical. The market itself was real enough: The North American prompt engineering market was valued at $75.5 million in 2023, with a compound annual growth rate of 32.8%. But whether that translated into formally titled roles is another matter.

… How can the market be “real enough” if we can’t tell if any jobs actually existed? Maybe I just don’t know enough about economics.

Yeah, that’s closer to the truth. Also, state education makes sure that we are at least aware of a certain few parts of our history, from executing our King and subsequently fighting off most of Europe to preserve the republic, to armed resistance when the Nazis occupied and the state capitulated, and finally De Gaul’s staunch non-alignment (as far as Western former empires go). Not to mention that the biggest improvement in the collective safety net for our society was obtained thanks to an ostensibly leftist coalition in the 1930s.

So it’s very much in our collective consciousness that we can protest, and that it’s a pretty normal thing to do, all things considered.

More to your point, I don’t know how many people here in France still expect protests to meaningfully obtain anything nowadays.