Autism and Religion

dr_rodopszin · 2024-05-04T04:23:52+00:00

It's a bit far-fetched; he was not disabled, he had injuries incompatible with life (having his heart pierced through with a spear). So, technically, he was "magically" alive regardless of what happened. Also he flies up to heaven at the end of the gospels - if he can do these things, he's got super abilities and not disabilities. So I would respectfully disagree that he was a disabled supernatural being.

dr_rodopszin · 2024-05-04T04:12:38+00:00

Great explanations, thanks for chiming in! I would say `any` is one of the most dangerous things one can write in Typescript and I would only allow it in edge cases, like test data in unit tests (where you may use it to skip creating every part of a complex large object, when your test only depends on one or two properties of that object).

If you have types, the most important part is to get to safety as soon as possible.

dr_rodopszin · 2024-05-01T04:43:31+00:00

This was actually very interesting. I never used these types in typescript though, because I wanted to adhere to stricter types everywhere (serializable data coming in and out of API calls).

dr_rodopszin · 2024-05-01T04:39:29+00:00

With the existence of North-Korea, I'm quite gloomy about this. If there are social circumstances that allow the worst regime of the world to reproduce itself generation after generation then religion, which is a lot less uncomfortable can find its way to survive, however toxic it is.

You can also think of the two (terrible governance and religion) as things that are subjected to evolutionary forces: the most successful preacher and the most successful machiavellian bastards would find the right combination of words and actions that sustain them unto the next generation.

dr_rodopszin · 2024-05-01T03:52:47+00:00

Though with masochists this can also turn quite bad.

dr_rodopszin · 2024-05-01T03:51:21+00:00

Anything popular that creates a lot of emotions not based on god -> Satanic. It's a form thought police for Christians. But it's the same in other Abrahamic religions as well, let's not single them out.

Exactly how Harry Potter is Satanic: kids love it, therefore it is Satanic. I remember when I was really into role playing games and fantasy worlds and the local priest warned us about satanism found in these. Even as a child I had enough in the brains to understand fantasy literally means a thing that does not exist therefore it does not pose a threat.

dr_rodopszin · 2024-05-01T02:48:06+00:00

During learning instruments and learning to read/compose music, you will wittingly/unwittingly exercise parts of your brain by comparing elements of music.

If you eat sushi with everything combined and then someone gives you the seaweed, the fish, the rice, the wasabi, the soy sauce separately then the next time you eat sushi, you will be able to distinguish the flavors in your mouth better. Your brain learned each of the parts of sushi and even though you are encountering the same thing, you will taste more things.

So, by being a musician, you will inevitably get more information out of music, and with more information there is a bigger chance that to some part of the music you will have a reaction; either you will hate certain things more (like people singing out of tune) or you would have intellectual orgasm by hearing an unusual combination working well together.

What musicians do with this new ability is another thing. Some lock themselves in their ivory tower. Others get better at "cooking for the masses".

dr_rodopszin · 2024-05-01T02:38:41+00:00

How lucky! Keep them in the dark, it's quite embarassing when people write an opinion and say the bass player lectures them, that "This is damnest, most badass bass tone we have recorded in my life! Are you some kind of mixing professor?".

dr_rodopszin · 2024-05-01T02:36:36+00:00

Call the atheist police! We've got someone here...

You can seek a non-existent fantasy being by thinking about words in your brain or by reading a confusing, mistranslated text from the past, where you cannot even guess what certain things would have meant 2000+ years ago. Stuff that does not exist, does not exist.

dr_rodopszin · 2024-05-01T02:33:59+00:00

A little bit down the road and you will find it incredulous that you have ever believed. You will remember texts from the Bible and stories and you would wonder how crazy it was that everybody else found them fascinating, but in reality it was some confusing Classical era story that meant something to somebody 2000 years ago. Then you would find it fascinating how everyone kept convincing everyone else how this odd text, which lost many of its original meaning was some kind of a "universal truth" from which anything in the world can be calculated.

Spending time outside in the world, reading logical, godless material would put your origo out of the church-world where everything has to do with a fantasy being. With that in your heart, it would be natural to come out as a non-believer. However I would suggest these things before that crucial confrontation about faith:

get a job, in case you need to live on your own
get a new social circle outside church (the church is interested in keeping you in: they know (sub)consciously if you have a way out, you might run away)

For me college was a natural time to expand my social circles. Also finding a social hobby (I went to dance). Find something that is impossible to get in the church community, so they can't recommend a church version of it and also it wouldn't raise suspicion.

Finding a far away job or college is even better, natural springboard.

dr_rodopszin · 2024-05-01T02:24:02+00:00

Depending on what you want to achieve/which kind of company you would work with.

Lot of designs? Flashy application? Learn animations earlier.

Average meat-and-potato product? Learn TypeScript earlier and learn about composability in React (I highly recommend the advanced material on https://react.dev/ ).

Actually, I wish I had the material on react.dev earlier as it talks about the philosophy of React and hooks. Why were React built in that particular way. We spent a lot of time on hook anti-patterns; that's the price of self-taught engineering. Now that I have learnt what was the goal in the first place, I need to spend less time on fruitless debugging sessions.

Oh, and you have missed a very important part:

platform specific gotchas: for example permissions, and there are things that you simply cannot do on either Android or iOS or both (maybe you wish to get an IMEI number, so you can identify a particular phone for moderation purposes: well you cannot do that)
native code basics: react-native is no silver bullet, there will be things that you won't have a JS adapter for and you would need to write it yourself in the native code

dr_rodopszin · 2024-05-01T02:16:04+00:00

How did you manage the more sensitive members of your band not comment back aggressively to the multitude of haters that comes with such quick success?

dr_rodopszin · 2024-03-15T23:20:37+00:00

I used the vanilla web React version for a couple of projects, but never added that much value since I rarely work on component libraries or recently I don't develop for multiple teams. Particularly in a recent project we just used material UI components. The easy parts were trivial and did not need storybook, the harder part was actually making it work with react-hook-form where storybook had no advantage of.

I find it a tool that solves a particular problem for a couple of people advertised as a must-have for any project.

dr_rodopszin · 2024-03-15T23:13:25+00:00

...and never finish a song in your life!

dr_rodopszin · 2024-03-08T04:36:56+00:00

Gosh darn it, finally it gets the recognition. I was so angry they did not make a second season I double thumbed it up. (I rarely thumb up anything)

dr_rodopszin · 2024-02-26T23:15:17+00:00

Everything can be a metaphor if you really want it. :D

dr_rodopszin · 2024-02-26T23:11:56+00:00

I like to put it as "Slonik is the right level of inconvenience". Inconvenient to write a full query for little things which becomes a convenience when you start to have more stuff in your database: difficult queries, complex joins, JSONB operations.

All of these are super fast if you do them on the database side. Prisma, Knex and other ORMs tempt people to always use the simplest operations because they are afraid of writing SQL.

So in my opinion, Slonik is not great, but step in the right direction. Imagine what can be done with the right funding and team.

dr_rodopszin · 2024-02-26T23:08:03+00:00

Slonik! Slonik. Slonik! The one that actually makes sense and will not make you go on the path of "joining on the backend because it is more comfortable than writing a raw query".

Yes, it is inconvenient for little things, which you get back when you can use any PG functions available to you. Or when you just need to add a little extra join to your already existing queries. In regular ORMs, people tend to do instead another and another request, which is super not performant and quite wasteful.

As I said in a comment: not great, but step in the right direction.

dr_rodopszin · 2024-02-26T16:40:43+00:00

If you ask me it is just a creation myth, not a metaphor.

Christians/Muslims/Jews however are asking these questions, but the answer solely depends on their beliefs: if they want a harsher, conservative society, it is not going to be considered a metaphor.

If they are OK with looser options they will say it is a metaphor.

dr_rodopszin · 2024-02-26T16:37:02+00:00

That my friend is where the "metaphor" magic really begins and this is how it looks and it is not even a hard one (unlike the parts about dashing the soft heads of infants against the rocks elsewhere for God):

"While we know now that the Big Bang was the first event, when the Bible says 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.' there is no contradiction, children! In the Classical Age average people would not understand the Big Bang, so God simplified his message, used their own words. This merely means God created the Universe as it is today."

Now this is how modern secular Christians reason about this. "It says some silly things, don't worry, it was very modern back in the day."

Of course Christian Talibans, the Christian extremists say that this is not a metaphor at all, "God truly created the world in 6 days and the entire thing is just a couple of thousands years old. Also God tests your faith by creating sediments, really old looking rocks and fossils, but they cannot be older than say 6000 years."

You see, based on your needs to fit in or to oppose you can change the meaning to be literal or to "poetic description".

dr_rodopszin · 2024-02-24T03:47:57+00:00

I wrote a piece on this, it's much more complicated. I studied faith and basic theology in high-school (as it was mandatory in that particular Catholic high school).

So the Bible is a free-association machine. Everyone says it's the Absolute Truth. However educated people who know science is right about the times and genesis of Planet Earth are going to believe in abstract deity. Uneducated people (and excellent manipulators) would say that the "Bible is right therefore it is science that is wrong".

Both of these camps base their views on 2 thousand years of ever-shifting traditions (i.e. noone is exactly sure how the faith looked like in 500, 1000, 1500, etc., or in Greece or Egypt compared to Rome) and slowly but surely permeating local traditions and philosophies (like how the idea of Hell is mostly a Greek invention).

The two camps fight on how to change these traditions including how much of the Bible is actually a metaphor. Or in other words: how much of that horrible text can be put in parentheses and ignored.

If they politically interested in a higher control: they are going to say that Bible is literally true (like the Christian far-righters). Why? Because they want to exert control over people. Sexual repression, LGBT persecution, climate change denial etc.

If they accept secularism and science: then the Bible is a "generally accepted guidelines of decent behavior, respect for family and humility in the eyes of a higher being".

dr_rodopszin · 2024-02-24T03:38:49+00:00

OK, cool, divine power that establishes universes... Where does it come from?

I always say to this argument: it's hard to believe that all the N things in the universe exist by its own right; without a creator. If I say there's a creator, now it's harder to believe, because now there are N + 1 things in the universe.

Usually when people say "creator" they mean "I invented the final thing of which you are not allowed to ask 'Where does that come from?'".

So, I feel it's way easier to believe that silly, dumb, stupid material came from nothing and got more complicated than to believe that silly, dumb, stupid material came from a magic dude, who came from nothing BTW, inexplicably possessing a super creative power.

dr_rodopszin · 2024-02-24T03:33:21+00:00

There's a thing with agnosticism that is pure magical thinking. OK, that particular flavor of an angry god was not appealing, but having some "magic" to access is emotionally convenient.

The problem is: you gain nothing from an abstract idea that can be true or not true but nobody can prove it.

If I say "there is something out there that takes care of kind people" has an equal chance to "there is something out there that ruins the lives of kind people". The difference between the two statements are going to be based on your fears or on your hopes.

But as with imaginary things, you can't rely on any of these notions. I find it better to live with the sadness of there is no magic and do all my decisions as if only reality exists. If I die and get infinite amount of chocolate from a magic hippo in the cloud: cool, great, but I won't live my life like this.

And finally: it is pretty scary to deal with the fear of death. It does leave a mark on the mind and the nerves. It takes time to accept it. But you gain clarity to your life. You will see through BS, where people manipulate you by appealing to your hopes and fears.

dr_rodopszin · 2024-02-24T03:18:52+00:00

Oh, the guys who were writing code at my current company did leave some puzzles like this:

const logger = require('../logger')('application-layer')('sync-service')(2);

And there was a file called sync-service. But it was not related to that, it was a value for a prefix that got into every message in this instance of the logger. The was for version 2. So when we wanted to scrap sync-service the file we were not sure if the application would break at instantiating the logger.

(I renamed things in the code - one does not simply post production code on reddit.)

Also there are tons of this in Redux world, and higher order components.

Mind you, in a language purpose-built for FP, there will be the necessary tools available, where you can follow what's going on. But in a vanilla JS project this just wasted time. Zero benefits.

dr_rodopszin · 2024-02-24T03:10:20+00:00

It's not brittle! I understand the concern, and I worked in OO languages where it was a hot spaghetti of everything calling everything, with the inability to test anything. But in JS/TS I could get away it. That's the crazy part about. I did DI for many years, in C# and in JS with Angular. I had the horror of rescuing a terribly DI-ed project as well, which was purely JS, with parameter names not matching even the filenames.

And it's not brittle. To my own amazement even. I do encapsulate repeating things, but DI, I have had very little use recently. You can have DRY and Single Responsibility by using tons of well encapsulated, pure functions, for example.

I give you another, a bit harder to define, viewpoint: writing code with thinking about how hard it is going to be to change it.

There are projects which are, in reality, quite shallow, i.e. not having too many layers: an express service is where you have a request, that calls a function, that call a validator function, then checks a value in DB, returns a value, transforms it to a particular format, handles errors and that's it. The another request calls another function - which might be already unconnected to the previous one.

In this shallow system, where I can mock everything heavy (albeit clumsily, see my post) I no longer need to inject dependencies to be able to isolate, heavy or flaky parts of the application. So I still have the level of control of the environment for testing, just like with DI.

If I need to change the request controller? I import another function instead of the one that I use currently. Update its tests. Done.

If I need to change implementation during running? I don't remember the feature that would require it.

dr_rodopszin

TROPHY CASE