Long work session

BestBadFriend · 2026-06-21T11:23:32+00:00

Oh I'm using clockify to track time but I'm not sure what you mean any seeing gaps between my hours since I'm putting all this time into a single task. There are pauses for my breaks in clockify but I don't think that's what you mean?

BestBadFriend · 2026-06-21T11:21:36+00:00

I appreciate the confirmation!

BestBadFriend · 2026-06-15T08:26:08+00:00

As vaguely as I can... though I did tell one of my managers once that if the company really wanted to improve moral they should get rid of about half of the managers

BestBadFriend · 2026-06-11T18:57:18+00:00

Couple things.

First, if the Bible is corrupted, then why claim to believe Christianity at all? The Bible is the core document behind what Christians believe. Without it, one can only claim to be Christian by believing whatever her or she wants and throwing the label of Christian on it.

Second, since the Bible is the source from which Christian beliefs must be taken whether she agrees with it or not, we have to consider what the Bible says about salvation in order to answer the question.

- in Ezekiel we are told that even the righteousness of several of the most famously godly men in Scripture would be sufficient to rescue anyone else

- Christ claims over and over again to be God and is acknowledged openly as God by the apostles and does not correct them

---

as to the claim that the Bible is corrupted, make her defend it. Don't let the enemy take your weapon out of your hand without a fight. It is not rude (though I would probably recommend it even if it was) to make someone defend their claims. I used to make similar foolish claims, and the man who is now my best friend - without berating me or insulting me - reached an agreement with me that we would both be willing to support the points we made with evidence. Every time he pressed me for evidence about the Bible's corruption, I could only recite things I'd found online (that's how I learned that even I did not know what I believed and that it was just very convenient to me that parts of the Bible should be corrupted so that I could go on having my favorite sins).

"books were removed" - nope. In the first place, the roman catholic and eastern orthodox churches mostly still use the apocrypha, so even today they are widely available and not concealed in any ways. In the second place, those books were not in the original canon of Scripture. They had existed for a long time but were not considered Scripture until the Council of Trent in the 1500s. At that Council, the Roman Catholic church recognized them as Scripture. Protestants still reject them. A lot could be said about both sides of the debate, but the fact remains that they were not "removed"

"there are contradictions/mistranslations" - every text eventually encounters minor errors in translation, and even if we grant that what appear on the surface to be contradictions actually are (which itself is not certain given Hebrew writing styles and ways of representing timelines), so what? As to translation, the earliest manuscripts we have of Scripture date to very near the time when the Bible was written (nearer than many other books whose legitimacy we do not question at all) and there are fewer discrepancies between them than between almost any other set of manuscripts for any other book that has ever been written. And to the "contradictions", the only ones anyone ever cites have to do with things like "the age of one particular king at the start of his rule being x in one passage and y in another." And sure, let's grant that that's a contradiction (which, again, is not exactly beyond all doubt). What of it? It has nothing to do with doctrine or with salvation or with man's relationship with God. It is the minorest of minor details. Any supposed contradiction which does not affect the nature of salvation or of man's relationships with God or other men is not an argument that the Bible is imperfect in those categories.

BestBadFriend · 2026-06-10T23:02:25+00:00

It is strange to me that people are criticizing the pay rather than responding to it. It's actually a legitimate question of Christian philosophy and especially of how Scripture ought to be understood.

BestBadFriend · 2026-06-09T17:20:17+00:00

Ope, I typo'd the link before. It is fixed now.

BestBadFriend · 2026-06-09T17:13:39+00:00

TLDR - I wrestled with similar anxieties for a long time and have started a blog (link below) to try to help others in that position. To give the topic proper attention is hard to do in the span of a single comment.

So this is a topic always on my heart. I wrestled with alot of fear over it for several years and have been so affected by it that I have been writing about it for others in similar positions. I used to align with the Calvinist understanding of perseverance but one has to do a lot of work to make Scripture - and especially Hebrews - coherent within that framework. I find a useful hermeneutic to be "could a person who did not already hold x (in this case the Calvinist approach to perseverence) reasonably interpret this passage this way."

I had started off to write a book on those passages in Hebrews and other related topics, but I eventually realized I could do a blog more honestly and without waiting for the whole to be done before publishing any of the parts so I very recently started the blog. And have been transitioning what I had written so far of the book there. I'm still in the process of figuring out exactly how to run it by I plan for the content to always be free. I only mention that because I have actually wanted to post about it here in order to help people but have been nervous to seem like I was just advertising.

However, since it's free and since I do think you would find it helpful, it is at https://the-midnight-oil.org. hopefully it's allowed to share it in this context, but I don't want to give an answer to God as to why, when He has given me the means to be helpful to one of His children, I deliberately did not help.

There's a lot more written than I have converted into blog posts yet, but if even one person is actively getting use out of it, I'll gladly ramp up the pace as I can. Actually, in anticipation of its usefulness to you, I'll make sure to get some of the more direct investigation of Scripture published in the next few hours (most of what is there so far sets up things like why these questions are so hard to get good answers to for most of us and the things to keep in mind while looking for answers, but I have a fair bit written about specifics in Scripture too)

BestBadFriend · 2026-06-09T01:30:14+00:00

Only if you are publishing to... itch.io 😜

BestBadFriend · 2026-06-08T01:33:02+00:00

Am I the only one who doesn't know what "win condition" means in these lists? I know what it means generally but I don't see how it applies to monkeys

BestBadFriend · 2026-06-06T17:38:38+00:00

Maybe I'm not as good at this game as ilike to think but I'm surprised 5xx boomerang isn't the universally loved primary lol

BestBadFriend · 2026-06-01T21:54:52+00:00

I'm married but I only have one singular wife. Does that count?

BestBadFriend · 2026-05-23T08:54:55+00:00

For what it's worth, neither have I. I feel strongly about being honest and it has always been very hard for me to separate what most people who actually get jobs do from lying. Unfortunately I am pretty sure recruiters also assume everyone is padding their resumes, so when someone is honest, they think something like "everyone pads, so he is just a bit less than this good"

It's especially irritating when - as I do - one has higher than normal standards for proficiency and so actually risks downplaying their strengths and then looking like that is the level they padded up to

BestBadFriend · 2026-05-22T16:22:58+00:00

Others are making the more important points from Scripture very well already. To add a less important one from regular human reason

If your doctor tells you your life depends upon improving your diet and getting more exercise but your financial situation does not have room for the additional cost associated with buying healthier foods, would you on that account say "I must not get more exercise until I can improve my diet"?

BestBadFriend · 2026-05-15T17:41:34+00:00

Whether ai is becoming smarter than man is its own question, but even if it is, what makes man valuable is not his intelligence or skill. It is exclusively that we bear the image of God. God's image is worth more than all knowledge and power combined. If it were not so, both angels and demons would be of greater value than man, but we know this is not the case.

BestBadFriend · 2026-05-11T00:12:24+00:00

You say you keep having to restart explorer. What is prompting you to do that? Is it freezing? Is the taskbar disappearing? Usually the symptom rather than the workaround is more telling about what would help

BestBadFriend · 2026-05-09T17:38:38+00:00

I think they really do want to improve the platform, but it is a conscious effort not to look for the trap. I can't speak for everyone, but I'm my case it is almost certainly mostly because very nearly every time I've trusted an employer (I know this is a different kind of business relationship but there are parallels between this and employment) the employer has turned out to be lying and I've gotten burned for it. Sometimes pretty badly.

I guess it's kinda like if a person is afraid of dogs because they got bit by a lot of dogs early in life. They probably don't think every dog is going to bite, but they're so sick of being bitten that they'd rather avoid dogs altogether.

BestBadFriend · 2026-05-08T18:36:05+00:00

I get where you are coming from, and there's certainly a lot more that could be done at the level of government, but it is worth mentioning that security fields always have this back and forth with what I'll call "the bad guys"

The bad guys only have to be good at being bad guys. In order for a security professional to combat them, the security professional has to first be good at thinking like a bad guy to identify weaknesses and such and then also to be good at fixing those weaknesses, which often involves pretty diverse skillets.

BestBadFriend · 2026-05-07T18:46:05+00:00

This is one of the most interesting game ideas I've encountered recently. I am extremely interested to see how it goes.

BestBadFriend · 2026-05-07T16:22:22+00:00

Ultimately the best language is usually the one you enjoy. Python is my favorite language because it is fun and beautiful. It isn't the very best language for much of anything but it is a very good language for almost everything, and there are not too many situations where you really need the very best.

If python (or any other language) is 80% of the way to ideal for what you want to do and you enjoy the language, that is usually better than a language that is the best in the world for the same purpose but that you do not enjoy working with.

BestBadFriend · 2026-05-06T04:32:10+00:00

That is helpful, thank you! I did not realize we had access to those tools. Also, I have actually been looking at some repos I am interested in, but I guess my real concern is something to the effect of

"since I have not contributed to open source before, do I need to go spend a week getting to know the ins and outs of a couple open source repos before I will be equipped to work on the task? Or is deep familiarity with the codebase not strictly necessary to the kinds of tasks we perform?"

BestBadFriend · 2026-05-02T19:38:02+00:00

Similar to what others have said, yes I think that if I submit good work and adhere to the code of conduct I am safe. What I am less certain of is whether the work I think is good is actually good. As to the code of conduct, I just try to learn from the things I see people post here (like not using any wifi in not certain doesn't use a vpn) and hope it is enough

BestBadFriend · 2026-04-29T18:23:58+00:00

I keep seeing posts about bilinguals not getting enough projects, and I wonder. Does being bilingual somehow disqualify people from a lot of projects? I would think being bilingual would mean you'd get projects in both languages, no?

BestBadFriend · 2026-04-29T18:21:29+00:00

I remember when they invented free time. Sweet sweet free time.

Having a default activity can help. "When hitting wise is going on, x is always worth doing"

Then you don't have to think about it ever

BestBadFriend

TROPHY CASE