https://github.com/KerfuffleV2 — various random open source projects.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • It’s actually not that hard to start having them pretty frequently. I always had that same problem though: I’d realize I was dreaming, say “Wow, I’m actually dreaming and aware of it. This is amaz-” and wake up. There are supposedly tricks you can use to prevent yourself from waking up like spinning around, but it didn’t seem to help even when I remembered to try in the dream.

    You can make them more frequent by just thinking to yourself “Am I dreaming?” and checking if you are a bunch of times a day. 5-6 is probably enough. Keep that up for a few weeks and you’ll probably start having frequent lucid dreams. I read that lucid dreams aren’t really that restful compared to normal sleep though, so don’t try to induce them unless you can spare the sleep time.


  • Ahh, I hate Snap so much. It actually what drove me to switch to Arch (btw). It was just so annoying going to install something and having it try to pull in snap and all its dependencies… And of course, if you don’t want Snap you have to deal with the inconvenience of finding another way to install the app.

    There are reasons to dislike Snap on principle and also very practical reasons. It liked randomly preventing the system from shutting down. Installing a new OS on a slow or unreliable internet connection and want a browser? How about we install Snap and then tell to download that thing and maybe a bunch of random internal dependencies with no visible progress and unreliable error handling? Get it away from me.












  • If people stopped getting murdered, they’d still be killed by illness, parasites, old age, accidents.

    So it’s okay for me to murder, because those people would die anyway? If not, then there’s no point in bringing it up.

    If humans stopped eating meat, millions of animals would still be killed by predators, illness, parasites, old age, accidents

    Just like there’s no point in saying that, unless it’s intended as some kind of justification.

    Why is it OK for other animals to prey on other living beings, but not humans?

    In other words, why should we hold humans to a higher moral standard than lions? Are you really asking that?

    If so, I can give you an answer but it seems like a ridiculous thing to ask and I’m just about positive you don’t actually believe that if the standard is good enough for lions and sharks it’s good enough for humans.

    but not humans?

    Think about it for 30 seconds and I bet you can come up with two really good reasons why there should be a different standard. If you give up, I can tell you the answer but it’s really obvious. I’m confident you can come up with them if you try.

    to prey on other living beings

    This is also reframing the problem in a weird way. Living isn’t the same as having interests, preferences, emotions, being able to suffer, etc. The majority of people who are against (unnecessarily) eating animal products don’t take that position just because animals are living, but because they’re sentient.



  • And you’re saying it’s absolutely impossible to exchange meat in such a way as to not increase the incentive of meat being killed to be consumed in the future?

    What do you mean by “exchange meat”? I assume you mean exchange value (i.e. money) for meat?

    No, it’s not impossible to do this without increasing the chance that an animal gets killed to provide the meat. For example, if someone promised they’re only selling roadkill and will never kill the animals or do anything to increase the chances the animals get killed then you could buy meat from that person without increasing the probability that animals get killed. Obviously it would have to be reasonable to trust that person to keep their word.

    That’s a very unlikely exception though. If you go to the grocery store and buy some meat, there is no basis or evidence to believe they’re only collecting roadkill. When you buy meat from a grocery store, it’s virtually certain that this is increasing the chances of animals being killed (very often after being subjected to extreme suffering). And you will have a share in the responsibility for those effects, because there’s a causal link between your choice to buy the product and the things that are done to make it available.



  • If someone is driving down a wildlife-heavy road thinking “ah well, if I hit anything, the vultures will clean it up”, and a day later, a vulture finds a dead squirrel in the road that was hit, is the vulture to blame for the squirrel’s death by virtue of being a beneficiary of the squirrel’s death? Because that’s analogous to the situation.

    That’s not analogous to the situation of the vulture going to the store and buying squirrel meat.

    The problem isn’t benefiting from the squirrels death, the problem is doing something that increases the probability that the squirrel gets killed. If the vulture finds and eats a dead squirrel at the side of the road, that has no effect on the how likely that squirrel (or future squirrels) are to die.

    On the other hand, if the edit: vulture goes to the store and exchanges value for some squirrel meat, the vulture is giving others an incentive to kill squirrels to acquire their meat.

    If you were the squirrel, would you rather live in an environment where no one benefits from killing you or one where there’s a massive bounty on squirrel meat?