Yeah, they’re really nice guys. I got to go up on stage for one of their shows and participate in a trick. We went to a lot of shows on that trip (seven, i think?), they were the only ones that stand outside the exit and greet ever person leaving that wants to meet them. They sign autographs, take pictures, etc. with hundreds of people after each show. And they stopped to talk to my friend and I for a couple minutes as we left and Penn thanked me for participating and let me keep a prop from the act as a souvenir. Great dudes.

The souvenir is a good example of the libertarian aspects of their show. It was a metal card with the bill of rights on it, with the 4th amendment (the freedom from unwarranted search and seisure) highlighted in red. The premise was you should put it in your pocket when walking through the metal detectors or scanners at TSA at the airport. When the machines go off and they question you about out it, you were meant to pull it out and snarkily go “oh sorry, that’s just my bill of rights”. It was a good for a bit of a laugh in theory, but way too obnoxious to actually do in real life. I packed it away in my carry-on instead. I still have it in a keepsake box somewhere.

Yeah, I don’t have any problem with libertarianism in theory. Pro-civil liberties, anti-racism, anti-war, pro-choice, pro-guns, free markets, etc. I disagree with the value of some of it, but I can see why someone might thoughtfully and sincerely come to that sort of rationale. I’ve never really had a problem with Penn’s (and Teller’s) views because of that.

But the reality is that the majority of modern libertarians are just narcissist capitalists that do not like rules or laws that restrict them from doing anything they want. That or, way worse, they’re Ayn Rand ideologues who genuinely believe that self-service is a moral imperative, charity is immoral, poverty is personal failure, human life is measured in productivity, and the sick, poor, or malformed should be left to whatever fate the market gives them. Those types are some of the worst people on the planet. They see a wealthy capitalist as inherently a leader and role model and think he should be unconstrained from accumulating more wealth without concern for society, employees, or individual rights. We’re living in the light version of their ideal, and it gets closer to that ideal every day.

Scotty B has to be on all the group chats. His emoji game is 🔥.

Seemed more fun this way

Obviously this is a silly example, but I really do remember when they would write out full urls with paths like 3 directories deep in magazines and newspapers expecting you to manually enter those urls and visit whatever site. I hated that shit in the early days of the internet in grade school. “http://www.theentireforty-ninecharacterlongnameofthecompany.com/marketingadvertisements/newspapertimes/landingpage79fad5c21e.html” (don’t click that link… i just made it up. It doesn’t go anywhere.) I could barely type but now I have to get every character correct or I might accidentally end up on a black market website or porn somehow (where my fellow Whitehouse dot com victims at?). QR codes and smartphones really are godsend for print media internet ads.

P.S. I told you it didn’t go anywhere. You feel better now?

P.P.S. Apparently Whitehouse dot com still functions but is no longer porn. It’s some election betting thing now? Idk.

Cute girl: “Oh, Light, you’re so cute. Let me give you my number.” … “Oh shoot, do you have a piece of paper I can borrow?”

Light: “Uh, yeah…” absentmindedly rips piece of the Death Note out “Uh, here you go…”

Cute girl: scribbles number on page “and there you go, cutey” walks away

Light: looks at paper “Oh… Oh no. ‘555-5555 TTYL, Light Yagami’? … Fuck.”

L: *rips off cute girl disguise" “Heh.”

deleted by creator

🤣

Really went downhill after volume 3. You hope that they’ll get back on course by volume 6 at least, but alas.

You’re right, but…A) the meme was about Christians, not religious people in general, and B) Christians are the ones voting in people like Donald Trump, defying their own doctrine by supporting him with their extreme levels of cognitive dissonance. So, you’ll have to excuse me if I feel fine about singling them out for their inconsistencies.

Not if it is filled to the brim with 3 TB of porn

Obviously it was god’s plan for them to pray for that specific outcome!

Which, again, negates free will, and also means their prayer didn’t do a damn thing to change the outcome of things.

Honestly the whole god’s plan thing invalidates sin, since sinning must have been part of god’s plan.

Don’t worry, you were always going to sin and didn’t have a choice in the matter, but you are still going to be punished for eternity for it.

Which, again, negates free will, and also means their prayer didn’t do a damn thing to change the outcome of things.

In some people’s deterministic view, while God has this omniscient perspective that spans all of space and time, the human perspective is one of the impression of freedom, a sense that feels so real that you might as well call it it simply “free will”.

In all fairness, I can get on board with that as a notion. I am also a determinist, though not for any religious reasons. However, I’m not applying any purpose to that determinism, deific or otherwise, or any moral implications on it.

In my view, there’s no “plan” so to speak. But every outcome is determined by the state of things at that moment. The universe is a state machine. There may be some randomness in that quantum outcomes are not predictable, but that randomness still does not manifest into “free will”.

Our choices are made by our brains computing an outcome based on its chemical and electrical state at that moment. Macro-features like personality, values, experience, memory, influence, etc. are also just bioelectrical, chemical and physical states of the brain that manifest these traits. They do factor into the decision making, obviously, and this feels like free will but it’s not. Since those are also states in the machine and they would always have been that state of the machine at that time, there is no way that they decision could have been otherwise, EXCEPT by quantum randomness, which is, again, also no free. And those states, too, are determined from other states and events previous.

So anyway, I get that idea

It gets better. “God’s Plan” and free will are incompatible, yes. But also, Christians love to pray for stuff. “Make mama get better”, “Let the Cowboys win”, “Get me the job I want”, etc. And they LOVE to say that “prayer works”. But at no point do they consider the implications of that notion, that praying for things changes the outcomes of the world.

A) Anything, prayer or otherwise, that can change the trajectory of events is, like free will, wholly incompatible with the notion that the universe is following in lockstep with “God’s Plan”.

B) If absolutely anything would be part of God’s Plan, according the Christian faith, it would be the birth and death of every human. This is directly incompatible with prayer saving someone’s life.

C) Changing the outcome of any choice a person is going to make (such as hiring decisions), is also wholly incompatible with free will.

D) The very notion of prayer causing change places human agency over God’s will. Yes, presumably, God could choose whether for not to grant a prayer. However, if he changes his prescribed outcomes based on your prayer, then that means either that he decided your idea was better (which seems odd for an all-knowing being) or decided to capitulate to you for some reason. Either way, you hold sway over your almighty god’s will for the universe. This thought is SUUUPER narcissistic to believe in.

E) Other people’s prayer holds sway over you. If your prayer can cause God to change the minds of others, then their prayers can likewise cause God to change your mind in turn. Neither of you then has free will. Moreover, it is not just God, ultimately, that can negate your free will, but any other Christian that prays for it. That’s troubling, to say the least.

F) Bad things, things unjustified by karmic justice, things unrelated to human free will, happen all the time. Things like natural disasters, disease, animal attacks, genetic accidents, etc. Those things happen to good people, Godly people, innocents, infants, the unborn. People pray for these things not to happen. “God, Protect them”, “Bless them with your Grace”, “Watch over them”. Yet they still happen. If prayers works, unless God decides to not answer them, then God must have decided to ignore those prayers. Prayer working is, itself, incompatible with the idea that there is a holy plan that must be followed, so that is not a justification for choosing to ignore those prayers and allow such things to happen. That means God could have stopped it and did not. God is directly responsible for these evils. There is no way around that.

On that happy note, enjoy your Sunday service guys!

Horseshit. Computers aren’t tools for a software engineer. Computers are tools to an administrator, an accountant. Computers are the sandbox you are building castles in as a software engineer. If you don’t understand the system upon which you build, its abilities and features, its limitations, it’s dependencies, you are going to make some stupid mistakes.

You need to understand discrete mathematics as a consequence of computer computation. You need to understand parallel processing and threading for muli-core processors. You need to understand networking, package management, security vulnerabilities, etc. from different architectures and protocols. And it ALWAYS helps to understand the very basics of a computer’s functioning, from hardware, CPU architecture, machine code, assembly/low level programming, memory management, etc.

print('Hello, World!) is day one shit for a reason. Programming language and logic is the basics. The real expertise comes from your 3rd and 4th year materials. Databases, architecture, theory of computation, discrete mathematics, networking, operating systems, compilers, etc.

My CS degree had a hardware/IT support class, but A) it was entirely simulation based. We never touched any actual hardware. We “built” PC’s or identified physical issues in 3d sim software, set up RAID arrays in software, etc. B) it was super hand holdy and you only ever go over a problem once, so nothing on the class has stuck. I know much more from having built, troubleshot and maintained my own computers and network than I ever learned from that class, then learned more by doing in an actual IT support position before becoming an engineer.

This shit sounds like when your mom tells you that the Facebook printed out her bank statement on the fax machine. I’m not smart enough to even guess how you did something dumb enough to make that happen.

How bad are you at writing queries? How does your hard drive overheat even under 100% load? Do you have it smothered under a blanket? Did you crack it up and expose it to cheeto dust? What does running a query on your, presumably, remote database even have to do with your harddrive in the first place? Are you trying to copy the entire database locally to a laptop? Do you know how to tie your shoes yet, or are you still on the velcro?

It feels like Chinese windmills with backdoor controls from the Chinese government is both a crazy idea and pretty easily solved. Just rip out and replace whatever remote control system is in it. Unless it’s wired to a bomb, worst case scenario they shut it down while you manually restart them.

Yes your interest does also need to outpace inflation. Not seen a savings account that pays interest of anything like that right now. Nothing low risk is keeping up with inflation.

That’s because what it takes is time, a resource we are all limited on. The only way to accelerate it is to have a head start like already being rich or having money seeded from family or have enough spare income early on to front load it for growth. Instead, most start with nothing, make the least when we’re young, often not being able to even start saving and accruing interest until we’re older, and when we make the most money is near our retirement when that money has the least amount of time to accrue interest before we start eating into it to live off of. If you front load it with a lot of money you could line just off interest alone.