muddi [he/him]

The circular reasoning I got after proposing to use a code formatter:

• Why are you nitpicking on PRs? Let’s use a linter instead
• Yes we already have a linter for compliance sake
• Oh it’s turned off though. I don’t like it.
• No we can’t use it actually, it’s a third party one and it’s not compliant.
• We can’t use the first party one. It’s not extensive enough.
• No we shouldn’t extend it with our own custom rules. It’s too much maintenance.
• I refuse to use any IDE formatting shortcuts or plugins, and will commit my code as I feel. The problem is not how I write my code.
• Why are you still discussing this? Didn’t you figure out how to use a linter yet?

We’re still at square one with this after a year or so

Same , but in my experience this can backfire even worse because the other person thinks you are trying to show off as well as make them look bad. But the problem is less with you and me, and more with this type of person

I’ve seen this type of comment in scifi threads. It was about that one planet-consciousness in the Foundation series, some guy thought it would be hell to lose his individuality. But I think that people are confusing privacy or autonomy with individuality.

Also the fact that individuality is already illusory to begin with – we are social animals, and if we truly tried to be absolutely individual, we’d end up as a feral child or some bizarre hermit. And ironically we live in an age where we are so alienated not just from others but our own selves, and our very species-essence as well

I wonder if it’s all those variables named with single letter and abbreviations, so annoying to code review

I’m afraid to see interpretations of “cannonball” now

Fair point but I think then it just expands the consideration from linguistic (which is already more than spoken or written, it also covers signed, whistled, drummed, danced, in one case I heard about – eye movement) to semiotic.

I think that is a linguistic question ultimately. You could take potentially utter a new sentence never before uttered even with the top 10 most used words in a language.

That is one of the most significant things about the human being. Actually I am quite surprised when people come with definitions for human nature eg. fundamentally good, fundamentally evil, homo sapiens, homo faber, etc. that the linguistic potential to turn a small set of things into infinity is often ignored. No other animal can think and speak like we do.

I guess if getting new data is not allowed, then interpolation or extrapolation would be the next best option. Interpolation would be connecting existing thoughts to form or find new ones in between. Extrapolation would be following a train of thought to its ultimate end. This could be done in either the diffused or focused mental states. I like to draw up diagrams for this so I can see the blank spots to fill or direction things seem to be going.

There is also the semantics of the question. It’s actually quite an ancient topic, where our thoughts come from. What does “original” mean? The thought originating in our mind, or from some higher realm? I won’t go too deep into this, just bringing it up to think about it. The only thing I wanted to say is that maybe our mind is not entirely free and agentive, but actually there is a “darkness that comes before” to reference The Second Apocalypse which we can’t conquer, but are conquered by.

On a lighter note, and from my own experience, it is definitely possible to generate new thoughts outside of that diffuse cloud of repeated thoughts formed on the storehouse of experience accumulated so far in our lives. Following practices of mindfulness, we can learn to recognize the noise of our mind and separate those “thoughts” from what we might call more agentive thoughts that we can control over, wherever they come from. I do meditations in these styles and achieve a mental state beyond the diffuse and focused, kind of inverse to dreaming (cf. turiya for this kind of formulation of a fourth state of mind). In this state, you can come to understand things which you could probably never do in the other mental states. Those thoughts feel “cleaner” as if coming from a true origin rather than bounced around a cloud of repeated thoughts like you mention.

But I feel like maybe these thoughts are not exactly the ones you are looking for. They are removed from our everyday sense of living, and not really invested in disciplines we have come up with socially as humans. It would be like asking if a caveman 500,000 years ago would have come up with the solution to how to fix a bug in the code I just wrote. It would have been an original thought for him sure, but kind of besides the point.

Edit: as an example for the interpolation/extrapolation, consider sentences like “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” or actual usages of this sort of thing in literature:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirātārjunīya#Linguistic_ingenuity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den

The interesting part is that constrained thinking is what produces this

Think of it dialectically, not in a polar way. So called “good” and “bad” have to come together in one for one to be able to surpass the apparent duality. Any enlightenment, individual or social, should come from the stage after good/bad

This is what the sages will say, on the individual level: it’s not so much good vs bad as useful or not useful (to some end). We need to understand and maybe learn to control what this “end” is. Similar thing with socialism: it’s not class war for the sake of one class winning, but rather abolishing class as a system altogether

Fellow conlanger!

I have met people who are able to do this, and believe that everyone can, already or eventually. Unfortunately though their willingness to do it with me never aligns, so I don’t get to do this much.

Deep engagement in a conversation and a deep conversation are different things I’d say.

Deep engagement to me is when someone starts thinking about your position as their own. One time I asked a store clerk where I can get a shovel in the store. They didn’t have any, but he kept brainstorming with me what I can use as a makeshift shovel or where else I can go to shop for one. It was very engaging and nice to be part of.

One way I can describe a deep conversation is a topic that, when someone starts getting into it, the socialized knee-jerk reaction is to insult them to shut them up (unless you happen to be impassioned about it as well). Think sitcom: some quirky character waxes poetic and the others tell them to can it because the plot must go on.

I guess a deep conversation can be a personal one, although I would maybe categorize that as an intimate conversation rather than deep. Both are conversations that people usually just to ignore, avoid, or tell others to stop because they want to get on with their own lives. Usually deep conversation topics are larger-than-daily-life topics, so that’s probably why

There is so much internal politics, especially in larger companies.

I’m on the team that manages the core functionality of the product, but every other team twists our arms and escalates things all the way to the top-levels just so they can do things in the way they are used to or they just prefer. Apparently the other managers are aiming for promotions so it’s a power grab. Meanwhile, the product turns to shit, my team gets blamed, we lose money, people like me who do the actual work get laid off (thankfully I haven’t yet but idk)

Smaller companies are nicer, but they still have politics. Honestly I’ve been in cooperatives too and there is still some politics. I guess it’s just the capitalist alienation between workers

If you have to ask…then you don’t know

Absolutely true, social media presence is hardly the material conditions necessary for a revolution. The structures to be replaced run deeper than which website you use

Then the left should continue to build decentralized alternatives. Dual power is the only practical solution for when institutions are captured by reactionaries to suppress the left.

Freedom of speech is about not being censored by the government, not private citizens hosting a platform for a spectrum of opinions.

Compare it to something like freedom of religion: should private citizens engage in a spectrum of religious rituals, including violent rituals of extreme cults?

The issue isn’t how enthusiastic individual private citizens are about the freedoms granted to them from the government. Someone may truly enjoy yelling “fire” in public buildings, but the effect on the public is what causes concern.

Should you censor a person for this? That’s another debate, but I’m just explaining where the concern, assuming you have concern, should be placed.

Is that a big bargaining chip or something? The presence of the Ukrainian Olympic team?

Tolkien was just retelling legends, folktales, fairy tales, children’s bedtime stories etc. He did piece them together to create extended connected lore, but not everything gets cleanly explained away in this kind of worldbuilding technique.

So really imo Tom Bombadil is just some contrivance of Tolkien to make the story feel more like some old fairy tale.