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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2019

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  • I feel like the last remnants of the New Atheists have retreated onto lemmy. Often when you reference spirituality, religion, or even reflections on group dynamics and psychology that doesn’t portray humans as perfectly rational self-interest decision-making machines, you get raided by these edgy “facts and logic” kids that are extremely annoying.

    On reddit, they are contained in their own zoos, while here they seem to pile up even in generalist communities. It feels like 2012 all over again.


  • At a demo some weeks ago in Berlin I definitely saw them chasing a kid that was 12 or younger, but luckily he was swift and disappeared into the crowd that was starting to surround and corner the police after they charged the crowd from the side into an otherwise completely relaxed demo. Obviously, the kid was arab.

    Police in Germany is composed of pigs as much as any other police force.






  • chobeattoAsklemmyWhat do you think of Richard Stallman?
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    14 days ago

    Politically, I don’t like him. He had a critical influence in the beginning of the Free Software movement, and its failure can be easily identified in the core ideas that put the freedom of the software before the freedom of the people. The fact he cared more about software than people is reflected in pretty much anything he did.

    On a personal level, he seems an insufferable asshole with enough power to get away with toxic behavior. Luckily, I never had to interact with him, but his visibility for sure didn’t help marginalizing toxic egomaniacs in IT communities. Being neurodivergent is not an excuse for being an asshole. He’s the last remnant of an age that hopefully is over.



  • “debate me” kids are another stereotype on the internet though. The idea that ideas should be entertained and discussed for the sake of it and come without implications attached is just another form of edgyness. It’s another thing that often goes away with age or with touching grass. I know because I was one of them. Now I understand that the fact itself of discussing something publicly has moral implications.


  • Larping as a tankie is definitely a thing of immature, terminally online kids, but I wouldn’t throw Lenin in the bunch. While Stalin is mostly condemned as a reactionary psychopath by pretty much everybody except a few leftist basement-dwellers, Lenin is still read and taught throughout the world. Nothing edgy in reading Lenin.

    Edgy kids on the internet worship other psychopaths like Pol Pot or Hoxha.




  • A lot of coopyleft or p2pp projects adopt the license and it’s not discussed that much in the identity of the project.

    I personally believe that software freedom shouldn’t come at the expense of people’s freedom, and I consider the FOSS movement a political failure because it’s completely incapable of mediating between the two things. New generations are growing more and more alienated from a movement they consider a relic of the past.

    For my projects, I avoid FOSS licenses, but they are also not relevant enough to get insights from them.


  • Since here the answers are split between edgy kids and people repeating a bland, stale narrative about comfort and fear of death, I will try to bring a different perspective.

    For context: I grew up in a Catholic country but in a very secular family and in a very secular region. I’ve had an edgy atheist phase that lasted between 8yo and probably around 30yo.

    I studied a STEM discipline and have always been surrounded by mostly atheist or agnostic people.

    I was afraid of death up until I was 27/28yo, but the cope was gnostic transhumanism, not Abrahamitic religions. At some point I took acid, my gf at the time told me I was going to die, I cried my eyes out for a few minutes and then I was fine and I’m still fine. I had a near-death experience in the hospital that further consolidated the idea that I’m going to die, and it’s chill: if you’re sick, you have a bunch of people looking after you, everybody gives you attention, you spend all your day chilling in bed on drugs. Dream life death.

    I was still agnostic at that point. I started approaching spirituality later on, not much because of an emotional need, but because further studies both in STEM disciplines and Philosophy highlighted the limit of reason to explain and understand the world. Reason is a tool among others, with its limits. Limits that can be reasoned about using reason itself. You cannot investigate or explain what lies outside though, let alone change it, something for which you need different tools: faith, spirituality, trust. I got closer to what Erik Davis calls “Cyborg Spiritualism”, but it doesn’t mean much since it’s not an organized movement, but more of a shared intuition and meaning-making process to which, in the last 60 years, more and more people arrived. Especially people dealing with disciplines like system theory, cybernetics, system design, and information theory, but also people disillusioned with the New Age movement or other Western Gnostic practices. Mixed in it there’s plenty of animism.

    Atheists believe that all religions are about speaking to God, and hoping for an answer, while many religions are about listening to God because they are already talking to us all the time.



















  • to a reasonably large audience

    That’s a measure of success that makes sense only in a for-profit, growth-oriented environment. Software just has to be sustainable and “bigger” doesn’t necessarily imply "more sustainable.

    That said, what is now possible with social media is extremely restricted and our idea of what a social media is is constrained by profit motives. Social media could be much more, connect humans for collaboration and exchange instead of data extraction. We are so used to the little crumbs of positive experiences on social media that we normalized it.

    Bonfire, for example, if we want to stick to the fediverse, is trying to challenge this narrative and push the boundaries of what a social media is supposed to do.

    Another space would be non-siloed notion-like tools.

    Anothe entire can of worms would be to go beyond the “dictatorship of the app” and start building software and UX around flexibility and customizability for the average user, rather than keeping this a privilege for tools targeting power users. Flexibility in UX means harder trackability and less CTR, so most end-user “apps” avoid that.