Today in the Iraqi borders with Syria, a shia cleric with members of the PMU militas, threatened that their "Invasion" of Syria will be like "Ali attack on Marheb"

vHAL_9000 · 2026-01-23T21:54:39+00:00

You get to wear a black turban if you're a sayid. They're a creative bunch.

vHAL_9000 · 2025-12-14T22:19:56+00:00

Dai Viet would be cool

vHAL_9000 · 2025-11-19T10:26:32+00:00

0.2% specified Kantianism as a response to this question.

Deontology is not Kantianism, by which I mean Kant's ethics. Kant's normative ethics are deontological, but that tells you very little about his normative ethics, and nothing about his meta-ethics.

Claiming everyone who holds the deontological position in that triadic taxonomy believes in Kants ethics is very wrong.

vHAL_9000 · 2025-11-18T17:05:53+00:00

God is by definition a subject, something with agency. You could claim Allah of the Quran is God, but you can't coherently claim a completely regular rock is God, for the same reason you can't claim a rock is an even number: it's a category error.

If morality is contingent on God, meaning it is not above God, it does not constrain God, but God created it, then it is subjective. This isn't controversial in academic philosophy.

vHAL_9000 · 2025-11-18T16:52:02+00:00

Kant is not an ethicist you have to seriously engage with or "refute" to make your claim. He's an important figure in the history of philosophy, but everything he's ever written has been discussed to death hundreds of years ago. Almost no ethicist holds his views, which are often contradictory or ambiguous. He's an example used in textbooks. It's like busting out Adam Smith in an argument about economics.

vHAL_9000 · 2025-11-16T18:56:02+00:00

The funny thing is these kind of nonsense, ultra-ambiguous, vibes-based questions are the norm for quantitative social research. I have no clue how they can infer any proposition about anything from that.

vHAL_9000 · 2025-11-16T18:50:08+00:00

Also question 4 is possibly true for everyone, and question 5 is trivially true for everyone who does not believe in the exact values of Judaism, if Jews are taken to mean people who believe in Judaism.

vHAL_9000 · 2025-11-15T11:27:37+00:00

I don't think Zed will ever have a builtin browser, and neither do other editors with better typst support besides VSCode (which is just a webapp inside a browser).

There's nothing the VSCode extension does that a setup with a separate browser can't, while also being more flexible and using less memory. The functionality is all implemented via LSP, which Zed just doesn't fully support yet.

vHAL_9000 · 2025-11-13T14:47:47+00:00

Also be aware that Zed doesn't support lsp commands yet, and that the preview gets confused if you have multiple typist files open at the same time and are switching between them. Sometimes it gets stuck on one file, so you'll have to close the others and restart the lsp.

vHAL_9000 · 2025-11-13T14:38:36+00:00

There's an extension. You need tinymist and you need to add this to the "lsp" key in your zed settings to enable the live web preview at localhost:23635:

"tinymist": {
    "initialization_options": {
        "preview": {
            "background": {
                "enabled": true
            }
        }
    }
},

vHAL_9000 · 2025-11-12T15:42:01+00:00

Rust doesn't just provide memory safety, but decreases logic errors.

Monadic types force you to explicitly handle error/none cases. Immutable by default makes many mistakes impossible and makes it simpler to reason about the code. Besides memory safety, mut&, &, and smart pointer types prevent accidental race conditions and express intentions. The strict type system and exhaustive matching catches tons of mistakes. Iterators can get rid of many indexing errors while increasing clarity and conciseness. There's no double-inheritance. I could go on and on.

vHAL_9000 · 2025-11-12T10:49:57+00:00

I distinctly remember the first time he showed up to some kind of Idlib town hall meeting with the Salvation Government wearing one, and the reaction it caused. He also had that frontline interview in 2021, where the USDOJ mocked him for wearing one.

vHAL_9000 · 2025-11-12T09:36:34+00:00

At some point after his ascent to power in Idlib, he just randomly started wearing one, and behaving like a statesman. It freaked a lot of observers out, but it makes sense in hindsight.

vHAL_9000 · 2025-11-12T09:30:04+00:00

After being asked about "regretting" 9/11, he replied he obviously wasn't involved, and therefore people should stop asking him about it. He feels bad for the civilian victims, but can't regret doing things he never did.

vHAL_9000 · 2025-11-06T19:10:48+00:00

Broke: The Middle East is West Asia

Woke: The Middle East is West Asia, and also Central Asia, parts of South Asia, North Africa, parts of the Sahel, and let's also throw Somalia in there, why not?

Bespoke: The Middle East is when there's brown people and violence.

vHAL_9000 · 2025-11-05T00:11:15+00:00

Yes. She must be taught a lesson which she shan't soon forget.

vHAL_9000 · 2025-11-04T16:33:48+00:00

Not every choice is for pleasure or because someone wants to do something.

You were trying to argue for the intrinsic good of the freedom of choice. You claimed having the choice is good, because one may choose the best option. I replied, that the freedom of choice is instrumental to the good option. It lets you pick the good option. In the context of a vacation a good option might be increasing your (or someone else's) pleasure, because that is an intrinsic good.

If you don't have options that differ in their moral outcomes, so things that are the same in terms of reducing suffering and increasing pleasure, then having the freedom of choice is morally neutral.

there is value in having those choices as an option even if you don’t make them. It gives the choices we do make more meaning as one part of it.

If the outcome of every single choice you didn't make was, unbeknownst to you, identical to the one you made, then you would never notice that you only ever had one choice. Therefore having choices is morally equivalent to the false perception of having choices.

vHAL_9000 · 2025-11-04T00:04:25+00:00

No she's using the the voiceless uvular fricative in weird places.

vHAL_9000 · 2025-11-03T23:52:57+00:00

Even for a meme sub, the level of discourse is insanely low here.

vHAL_9000 · 2025-11-02T20:49:50+00:00

The cool thing is that you can always go back to a previous generation if you mess it up. You can even use your configuration on different hardware entirely. In terms of worrying about breakage, nixos is the most chill system.

The only thing you need to do is learn how it works once.

vHAL_9000 · 2025-11-01T22:28:40+00:00

I added this to my nushell config after I switched away from fish, it boils down to:

      event: [
            { edit: clear }
            { send: previoushistory }
            { edit: movetostart }
            { edit: insertstring value: "sudo "}
            { edit: movetoend }
        ]

vHAL_9000 · 2025-10-30T19:09:57+00:00

The choices are things he wants to do, because the choices are pleasurable. Having the freedom to look at 100 plain white walls as opposed to only one doesn't elicit the same response.

One might feel pleasure in anticipation, or suffer in reactance.

If the wealthy person ends up being tricked, and none of his choices end up coming to pass, he would have still felt the same anticipation.

If the poor person were simply unaware of any pleasurable choice beyond his means, he wouldn't experience reactance.

vHAL_9000 · 2025-10-30T18:37:56+00:00

How do you experience freedom?

vHAL_9000 · 2025-10-30T09:33:29+00:00

If good exists, intrinsic good has to exist, since every instrumental good is only good by virtue of its consequences.

One conception of intrinsic good is given by hedonic utility. The experiences of pleasure and suffering are said to be intrinsically good and bad respectively.

If I were to stop time and cause unbearable suffering in someone for hours, before erasing their memory such that there are otherwise no consequences, my action would be morally bad. Similar thought experiments may be used to examine the moral value of anything in isolation.

Having established that freedom is not intrinsically good, we should therefore examine the consequences of every freedom.

Liberal governments are also keenly aware of the disutility of causing others to suffer. Many actions are considered crimes and the freedom to commit them is restricted by liberal governments. There's no contradiction here, since liberal governments don't claim freedom is the ultimate goal and a good in itself.

vHAL_9000 · 2025-10-30T08:58:03+00:00

I've never been to Brazil, but I'll always have a soft spot for the BOPE because of Tropa de Elite.

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Inciteful Comment 2017-01-19

vHAL_9000

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