བོད་རྒྱལ་ལོ།

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • A lot of people are saying to learn to cook, but things aren’t that simple. Many people know how to cook perfectly well but order out anyway, either because they’re busy or because they have mental health conditions that make cooking incredibly stressful.

    We need to change our economic system so that CEO bonuses aren’t inflating the prices of people’s food. This would make it easier for people to eat out more often if they feel they need to. It shouldn’t break the bank to get simple meals at a restaurant.


  • [Buddhism] is intended to justify existing, generational, disparities in wealth, power, and property.

    Uh, no, this simply isn’t true. In South Asia, these disparities are instantiated in the hereditary varna system (usually translated as “caste”, though conservative Hindus will object to this), in which the highest social class is the Vedic clergy called the “brahmins”. Brahmin supremacy has been a constant feature of South Asian society going back millennia, and it is still widespread today.

    As the Buddha said in the Vasala Sutta, “Not by birth is one an outcast; not by birth is one a brahman. By deed one becomes an outcast, by deed one becomes a brahman.”

    This runs counter to the idea of generational class, which was the general attitude of brahminical society and was how brahmins maintained their power over others.

    The Buddha elaborates on this idea in the Vasettha Sutta:

    While the differences between these species

    are defined by birth,

    the differences between humans

    are not defined by birth.

    Not by hair nor by head,

    not by ear nor by eye,

    not by mouth nor by nose,

    not by lips nor by eyebrow,

    not by shoulder nor by neck,

    not by belly nor by back,

    not by buttocks nor by breast,

    not by groin nor by genitals,

    not by hands nor by feet,

    not by fingers nor by nails,

    not by knees nor by thighs,

    not by color nor by voice:

    none of these are defined by birth

    as it is for other species.

    In individual human bodies

    you can’t find such distinctions.

    The distinctions among humans

    are spoken of by convention.

    This is essentially an early version of social constructionism.

    The Buddha goes on to criticize the various things that brahmins do, saying that e.g. doing sacrifices makes you a sacrificer, not a brahmin. He ultimately says that only people who are virtuous, detached from pleasures and free from disturbing emotions are really “brahmins”. So, the Buddha actually taught a countercultural criticism of hereditary class.



  • That’s fair enough, and sorry for jumping to accusing you of dishonesty. To be honest I’m totally shocked that you and so many others in this thread have had such an easy time installing software through the CLI. I have had loads of trouble for the same user case as you, to the extent that I’ve had to completely give up on installing a variety of programs that didn’t have GUI installers available.

    Our experiences are totally opposite, so it makes sense that we have opposite stances on the CLI.


  • I’m talking about installing ordinary programs via the CLI in the 2020s. I have had loads of complicated installs for software (no LLMs) just for personal use in the last 5 years. I’ve heard the same story from other people who’ve switched to Linux.

    I think what’s happening is that people who insist that the CLI is easy just don’t tend to run into the problems I’m talking about, whereas for CLI haters it’s the norm.


  • That is an oversimplification and you know it. Why is it so hard for CLI people to be honest?

    Installing software on the command line is often a nightmare, requiring multiple commands and throwing error messages that you can only find mention of in one unresolved thread on some obscure forum somewhere.

    Plus, there are so many different commands that you have other CLI users saying that they need to pull up reference tools to remember how to do different actions. I have only ever needed to that once or twice ever for GUIs.

    Get real.


  • To expand on your second point in case anyone isn’t sure what you mean:

    Different browsers render webpages slightly differently, because they use different “engines”. The most popular browsers are Chrome or Edge, both of these which use the Blink engine, whereas Firefox uses a different engine called Gecko.

    Web developers want their websites to work for most people, so they develop websites that are optimized to run in Blink, which means they sometimes don’t look as intended on Gecko (Firefox). It’s not Firefox’s fault that developers are doing this – of course developers want to reach the most users possible. There’s nothing wrong with Gecko, either – if it were more popular, then developers would build sites for it instead of for Blink. But, this issue of sites breaking can sometimes turn people off.

    (Conversely, I develop for Firefox first, so sometimes webpages I make don’t render properly in Chrome/Edge. That’s not ideal, but I don’t care much. I think Gecko is the better + more consistent engine, and I’m not interested in chasing mass appeal.)