If you pay with your CC and sign the receipt after seeing the total, you’re going to have a very hard time getting it removed.

This is brilliant. Definitely going to try this tomorrow.

A good pair of pliers, like the Knipex Cobra.

It seems silly to be distrustful of proprietary BIOS firmware without having the same skepticism of the actual hardware.

I had a linux 5520 and it was terrible. Standby and bluetooth never worked properly. Are the new models any better?

I think it’s more like “snuck up on us” than any kind of nefarious connotation. Kind of like “how did a niche game like BG3 sneak into the top ten games list”?

Blocked by my employer’s security policies.

That’s why your phone has a brightness slider, or better yet an ambient light sensor that automatically adjusts brightness. DE will need something similar.

Does everyone have to like it or do I just get to pick one and everyone has to live with it? If the latter, I might give technocracy a try…

Honestly it’s refreshing to not see the word “slammed” for once…

On days I leave the house, I shower once in the morning. That used to be 5-6 times per week, but since COVID I’ve been working from home, so that number is 1-2. I’ll also shower after swimming or strenuous exercise, though that’s rare for me.

union leaders and truck drivers said would save hundreds of thousands of jobs

There might be good reasons to have human drivers in autonomous trucks, at least for a while. But “saving jobs” is not one of them.

Alright, alright… Apart from sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health… what have the Romans ever done for us?

Barriers that were normally placed across the bridge entrance were missing due to vandalism

vandalism? What were these “barriers”, a handful of orange cones? At minimum they should have put some concrete jersey barriers there.

It’s fine if you want to decide for yourself that this is how you view these words, but it’s not how other people use them

Oxford English Dictionary:

faith: …. a strongly held belief or theory. “the faith that life will expand until it fills the universe”

it doesn’t mean they are adhered to based on faith

If not “faith” then what? Note that “faith” doesn’t need to mean some higher power; it just needs to be something you believe without evidence. Any “evidence” you claim to have experienced to support your worldview must inherently be interpreted through an existing lens of one’s own world view, which circularly depends on one’s axioms. You fundamentally cannot have a worldview without some amount of faith in something.

More concretely, the only thing one can prove a priori is “cogito ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”). Any further cognitive reasoning requires faith in one or more axioms about the world, e.g. “the world exists independent of my own perception”.

principled stance derived from logic

Those logical conclusions must inherently flow from philosophical axioms that comprise the person’s world view. Two of the most fundamental axioms that lead to supporting FOSS are not supported by everyone. Namely:

1. What is “good” exists independent of human convention (i.e. Kantian vs. Utilitarian ethical belief system)
2. Humans should endeavor to be morally good (i.e. Altruism vs. Egoism)

Those axioms cannot be logically derived from some fundamental truth - they must come from one’s own personal belief system, i.e. their “religion” (definition 3).

Someone following Kantian ethics and Altruism morality (whether or not they’re aware of the names) will probably end up favoring FOSS. Someone who has a more Utilitarian and Egoistic world view will probably be okay with proprietary software.

This is all kind of a moot point because I don’t think this sense of the word is what Musk was referring to - he was probably using it as sense 1 sarcastically and mockingly.

the two are not the same

The dictionary lists this for use #3 for religion:

”a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith”

In this sense of the word, many people, including atheists, do have a religion deeply rooted in their worldview.

A concrete example is people who fervently believe that FOSS is the only good way to make software, and that proprietary software is evil. Many of those people are unwilling to even consider the merits of the latter. In this sense, those beliefs very much qualify as “religious” in this sense of the word.

He’s not wrong in the sense that everyone has their own worldview, and humans need a worldview to process the immense amount of information we are exposed to on a daily basis. Some people incorporate organized religion into their worldview, while others do not.

I would argue the minimum number of ingredients is two.