TootSweet @ TootSweet @lemmy.world

Posts

23

Comments

1,700

Joined

2 yr. ago

zen meditation... trying to illicit vivid imagery in the mind... it sounded like a whole lot of junk mind flailing.

See, but, this is exactly the kind of attitude I'm trying to address in my comment. People judging other people's meditation practices. You didn't specifically go so far (at least not explicitly) as to call it "not meditation", but you're still judging the practice without really understanding it. (Not that I think you should be judging it even if you did understand it.)

The practice you're describing might have been something called "kasiṇa". And it's known to "illicit vivid imagery." There are multiple kinds of kasina practices, but they originate from the Pali Canon itself in works such as the Visuddhimagga and Vimuttimagga^{[ [The Fire Kasina Meditation Site](https://firekasina.org/) ]}[ Wikipedia page on Kammaṭṭhāna ].

That's as meditation as meditation gets. If you're going to call that "junk mind flailing", the Buddha would like a word.

Now, I don't know for sure kasina was what you're describing. But it's also beside the point. I don't think meditators really have a leg to stand on to claim that even something like sitting quietly, eyes closed, and playing the whole original Star Wars trilogy in their head from memory is "bad meditation" or "not meditation" just because they judgmentally can't imagine it "exercising" a "muscle"/"mental skill"/etc. (Daniel Ingram, one of the co-authors of the fire kasina site I cited earlier and a huge advocate for fire kasina as a practice, talks about using fire kasina to conjure vivid images of dragons from Lord of the Rings, kinda just because he's a geek (and I mean that endearingly) and it's fun. Though he's also strongly of the opinion that kasina can lead to insight.) "Meditation" is not the sort of term that a lot of people tend to try to gatekeep, and I think that's basically never a good thing.

No, meditation is not like drugs.

You've been doing the wrong meditation. ;)

Seriously, though, I kindof bristle any time I hear anyone say that "meditation is" some particular thing. What meditation is is extremely broad and varied to the point that it nearly defies definition.

Sure many buddhist jhana practitioners will say that the purpose of jhanas is insight, but what if I develop my jhana skills and never seek insight? Is that really not meditation?

Or, if I sit quietly and learn to contact my subconscious and/or Jungian archetypes. Or if I make up my own idiosyncratic form of practice specifically in order to try to become a hungry ghost in the next life, is that really not meditation?

(Mind you, it's valid to accept a particular strict definition of meditation within a specific context. If I was at a vipassana retreat doing white skeleton meditation, that'd probably be kindof assholeish. And if the teacher was like "no, correct meditation is such-and-such," I wouldn't be like "nuh-uh my ass is meditation, man". This situation is pretty different. If OP has found a way to "meditate" that's "better than drugs" rather than "training the mind to be calm, patient, observant and focused", that hardly makes it invalid or "not meditation." Any more so than if they say "nice to meet you" rather than "hey, what's up", that makes it "not a greeting.")

Whew. My 586 is safe.

The internet has reached its peak with this meme.

Birds.

The god damned fucking birds outside my window scream their god-damned beaks off at 6:00 fucking AM just to get some tail-feather.

This shit always starts in the spring, every year. Where I am, it's been going on for a bit more than "a week ago", but that's what's been waking me up in the mornings.

I keep earplugs next to my bed. I don't want to wear them all night because my superpower is overproducing earwax and I'd have to imagine wearing plugs all night would exacerbate that. So I put in the plugs when the birds wake me, roll over, and then sleep another couple of hours until my alarm goes off. (And, yes, my alarm reliably wakes me even with the ear plugs.)

Last time I was tempted to use suid, it was in order to allow an application I'd written to listen on 80 and 443. Fortunately I found the capabilities way of doing that (setcap 'cap_net_bind_service=+ep' executable) and that was the first I ever heard of capabilities. I consider myself pretty Linux-savvy, but it was pretty recently that I learned about capabilities.

A few ideas:

• If it's a hard drive, listen to see if you keep getting hard drive noises after the freeze.
• Try SSH'ing in to that box (or otherwise try making a network connection to it.) Just to make sure the system is actually freezing and it's not just the graphics screwing up and not updating the display while continuing to boot.
• Delete/uninstall your AMD firmware. Or if you don't have it installed, install it.
• If you're currently booting in EFI mode, try BIOS mode. Or vice versa.
• Try booting with an incorrect "root" kernel parameter. My thought is maybe if it's loading a module that's causing issues, if it can't get the root FS, it can't load modules. If it doesn't have the same issue, that will tell you something. (And if it does, that'll tell you something too.)
• Try other distros's live ISOs to see if you you can isolate anything that makes a difference.

The only thing more subversive than silly hats is signing your Lemmy posts.

TootSweet

There's no more today, there's only now.

ChatGPT

Arm yourself with knowledge

Bruh

My favorite book ever. "Hackers" by Steven Levy. It really does a good job of giving you a sense of the early days of software development and the background behind/before the Free Software movement.

"Upgrade?" "UPGRADE?!" Oh no they didn't.

Seriously, though, there may well be ways around this without switching your OS. If it's browser-based, the first thing I'd try is a user-agent switcher.

Though, actually, does that "remind me later" option work? It does look kindof grayed out, but it couldn't hurt to try a click.

PewDiePie is a nazi shitbag who doesn't deserve publicity for this stunt or anything else he's done in his miserable, fascist excuse for a life.

Reddit: "Nobody gets to secretly experiment on Reddit users with AI-generated comments but us!"

I'm a little disappointed it's not a GUI written in Visual Basic. (Kidding, kidding.)

I wonder if there’s a way to prevent people from even knowing that two different votes came from the same user.

What I outlined above should prevent anyone from knowing two different votes came from the same user... without specifically trying that user's id on each. That's what the salt (the comment/post id) is for.

I've personally been banned from one community for downvoting too consistently.

Votes should be anonymous.

I tend to agree, but the fact is that they aren't anonymous. This tool just exposes the already-existing fact that Lemmy expressly does not guarantee anonymity for votes. The solution isn't to not for the poster to not publish this tool. Believe me, such tools already exist in private even if none other than this one are published. Publishing this one only democratizes access to that information. (And not entirely, I don't think. From what I'm seeing on the page, it looks like it still requires an admin account on an instance. Update: Actually, I'm not sure if it requires an admin account or not. Either way, though.) The solution is (if it's possible) to make Lemmy itself protect voters' anonymity.

The reason why instances know who has up/down voted things (rather than only keeping an anonymized "total" for each post/comment) is so it can prevent double-voting.

Maybe instead of usernames, the instances could store/trade... salted hashes of the usernames where the salt is the title or unique identifier of the post/comment being voted on? It wouldn't be perfect, but it would allow the instance to figure out whether the currently-viewing or currently-voting user has already voted while also making it harder for anyone else to get that information. About the only way a tool could tell you exhaustively who had voted if that were how things worked that I can think of off hand is to try every username on Lemmy one-by-one until all the votes were accounted for.

(Of course, malicious instances could still keep track of usernames or unique user ids who up/downvoted, but only on the instance on which the vote was cast. Also, one downside of this approach would be increased CPU usage. How much? Not sure. It might be trivial. Or maybe not. Dunno.)

And there may be much better ways to do this. I haven't really thought about it much. I also haven't checked whether there is an open ticket asking for improved anonymity for votes already.

(Also, full disclosure, all of the above was written after only an extremely brief skim of the linked page.)

(One more edit. Something IHawkMike said led me to realize that the scheme I described above would allow instances to manipulate votes by just inventing hashes. Like, grabbing 512 bits of data from /dev/urandom and giving it to other instances as if it was a hash of a username or user id when, in fact, it's not a hash of anything. Other instances wouldn't be able to easily tell that it wasn't the hash of a valid user id. I haven't thought how to go about solving that yet. Maybe if it occurs to me, I'll update this post.)

Congratulations, Google, you can spy on math now.

5318008

Clear.

5318008

Clear.

5318008

etc

Shun the extravert. SHUN!

Seriously, though, I guess it depends on the question. If it's something nuanced and interesting to me that I have an opinion on, I'm likely to launch into an impromptu TED talk and monologue at you until I lose track of time. (God help you if you get me started on whether she exists or not.) If it's something simple like what species of bird that is, you'll get probably the minimum number of words necessary to convey an accurate answer (or "I don't know").

I hate conversation just for conversation's sake, though. There has to be a point to it. And the point can't just be "conversation." What you're talking about feels too much like "small talk" for my taste.

But also, it takes all kinds. You're not bad or invalid for liking small talk. Just... not necessarily my taste. Heh. Go find some other extraverts.

Also, I don't think your opinion is terribly unpopular at least in more western, individualist cultures.