Is… This car… Flying?

It doesn’t always get the answers right, and I have to re-feed its broken instructions back into itself to get the right scripts, but for someone with no official coding training, this saves me so much damn time.

Consider I’m juggling learning Linux starting from 4 years ago, along with python, rust, nixos, bash scripts, yaml scripts, etc.

It’s a LOT.

For what it’s worth, I dont just take the scripts and paste them in, I’m always trying to understand what the code does, so I can be less reliant as time goes on.

Except that half the time I dont know what the fuck I’m doing. It’s normal for me to spend hours trying to figure out why a small config file isnt working.

That’s not just text editing, that’s browsing the internet, referring to YouTube videos, or wallowing in self-pity.

That was before I started using gpt.

Yep, more time for doing home renovations.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while. Consider how quick LLM’s are.

If the amount of energy spent powering your device (without an LLM), is more than using an LLM, then it’s probably saving energy.

In all honesty, I’ve probably saved over 50 hours or more since I started using it about 2 months ago.

Coding has become incredibly efficient, and I’m not suffering through search-engine hell any more.

Edit:

Lemmy when someone uses AI to get a cheap, fast answer: “Noooo, it’s killing the planet!”

Lemmy when someone uses a nuclear reactor to run Doom: Dark Ages on a $20,000 RGB space heater: “Based”

What part of my argument do you find philosophically incorrect?

I dont care whether ‘evil’ is prevented, I care whether undue suffering could be prevented.

If the bar is so high, that God’s only obligation is preventing Cthulhu from fucking out butts, then he’s just as much of a cunt as squid-daddy.

🫰

As mentioned in my post, in response to people falling for the naturalistic fallacy: “So what? Who gives a shit?”

Whether it’s natural or not is simply the wrong metric by which to evaluate whether someone has a right to exist or be treated with dignity.

It’s akin to someone saying to you after you’ve dyed your hair, “that’s not natural,” and then you scramble to insist that it is.

The right response is: “So what? Who gives a shit?”

Also: how do you read this and think I’m anything but an ally? I’m explicitly advocating for compassion, dignity, and equal rights for trans people. Pushing back on bad reasoning doesn’t contradict that; it strengthens it.

If your definition of “ally” means I’m required to accept weak arguments without criticism, then you don’t want allies. You want sycophants. And I’m not signing up for that.

I’m not interested in moral purity contests where allyship is contingent on uncritical agreement.

I’m going to be that guy, and no, this isn’t a gotcha. I’m a trans ally. I support the existence, rights, and dignity of trans people. But I’m allergic to lazy thinking; even from my own side.

“Trans people are natural.” Cool sentiment. Terrible framing.

First off, “natural” is a word people use when they’ve run out of real arguments. It’s vague, emotionally loaded, and epistemologically useless.

Plenty of things are “natural”: cancer, infanticide, parasites, sexual coercion. Doesn’t make them desirable. Doesn’t make them moral. If you want to make a moral case for something, do it without the crutch of nature.

Second, let’s talk about optics. When you say “trans people are natural,” you’re not helping. You’re feeding into the exact framework used against queer and trans people for decades; the idea that something has to be “natural” to be valid.

Why are we reinforcing that standard? Why are we bending over backwards to find a species of fish that flips sexes and pretending that proves anything about human gender identity?

Transgender identity is not “natural” in the biological sense. There’s no mammalian precedent for someone born male socially transitioning to live as female with a nuanced internal experience of gender. That’s not how “natural” animal behavior works. But so what? Who gives a shit?

Being trans is a human phenomenon; emergent from consciousness, culture, language, and self-reflection. You know, all the “unnatural” stuff that makes humans interesting. The wheel isn’t natural. The internet isn’t natural. Civil rights aren’t natural.

Trans people don’t need to be validated by nature. They need to be validated by ethics. By compassion. By rational moral reasoning.

So let’s stop appealing to nature. It’s weak, it’s misleading, and it sets the movement back by anchoring it to bad philosophy.

IMO, look into the linuxserver.io fork of NGINX, called SWAG.

It comes preloaded with a bunch of fantastic addons for security.

Quite easy to get set up, if you’ve got an idea about how it works.

Fair assessment. Though I didnt go as far as to assert that it ‘was’ all bullshit - and is the reason I prefaced my comment with an admission of ignorance.

In any case, I’m convinced that my friend was not doing it right, either by his own failure to understand, or the lack of adequate instruction during guided meditation, because he didnt seem to have any meaningful insight into his own mind - beyond having a better imagination, which I suppose does translate to a more creative mind in general.

In addition, he didnt comprehend the idea of being able to ‘drop in’ to a meditative state when not actively practicing. After introducing him to mindfulness, he found it far more insightful and beneficial in general.

I talk like a guy who read a pop psychology book? That’s very judgmental. I did my best to articulate my thoughts and you arrogantly claim your own response is better, even though the court of public opinion regards my explanation as preferable.

You claim meditation is helpful for focusing attention, but this reply is the first which isnt riddled with grammatical or structural errors. You dont need flowery language to describe your sensations.

As for the dichotomy between drugs and meditation, it all depends what metric you’re evaluating. The ones aforementioned in my comment (which you’ve reduced to ‘getting high’) are the metrics I’ve used, but doesn’t encompass the entire spectrum of drug use. There are ways to compare them, and way they’re different - it’s a very narrow perspective to simply claim that one is just a more extreme version, or that the other is ‘better’.

It might be more beneficial for some people to think of ‘meditation’ as ‘exercise’.

If someone says they’ve exercised, we dont automatically assume they’ve lifted weights, or done cardio, or stretches; we know how broad this term is.

One of my friends did ‘meditation’ during his karate days, but failed to understand a lot of basics around the science focused practices like mindfulness.

Turns out his dojo was practicing zen meditation, which involves trying to illicit vivid imagery in the mind (according to him).

Now, I dont know a lot about zen-meditation, maybe they did it as a cultural thing, but from what he was able to tell me, it sounded like a whole lot of junk mind flailing.

Let’s break this down: You’re essentially saying that paying attention to something is how we experience reality. Well, no kidding. If you pay attention to something, you’re going to notice it more. But that’s not some grand, cosmic revelation. That’s just basic human perception.

I think there’s a bit of overcomplication here. Yes, meditation involves focusing attention, but describing it as the “axis of your reality” is a bit much. The basic idea is that by concentrating, we become more aware of certain things, which does influence our experience. That’s a simple process, not some deep philosophical mystery.

The “wings” analogy also feels like an attempt to make meditation sound more magical than it really is. Meditation is a way to help focus the mind, find calm, and possibly gain insight. But it’s not about discovering some hidden set of “wings” or some grand spiritual power. It’s just a practice for mental clarity.

As for the comparison to drugs, both meditation and drugs alter consciousness, but in different ways. Drugs can give an intense experience, while meditation tends to offer a slower, more controlled shift in awareness. Saying that drugs are weak because they’re like a “dumb machine” doesn’t really capture the complexity of either experience. Both have their place, and both can have benefits, depending on what someone’s looking for.

In short, meditation isn’t some mystical or supernatural process, it’s about training attention in a specific way. The real value comes from consistency and practice, not some grand revelation.

Edit: also, bold of you to assume my experiences are scant, and born of conventional thought - when you have no way of actually understanding what experiences I’ve had.

It’s evident that your experiences with meditation aren’t sufficient to counter your hubris.

Meditation is essentially a self-imposed flow state; an artifact of consciousness reflecting extreme focus. It’s akin to a runners high. Its features include ego dissolution, a distorted sense of time, reduced perceptions of pain, and feelings of bliss.

This is normally due to the release of neurotransmitters - dopamine, serotonin, endorphins and GABA, the same chemicals affected by common recreational drugs.

These features are regrettably short-cut with drug use. With training, these states of consciousness can be attained without any downsides (barring destabilizing intuitive realizations like free will being an illusion), though at the cost of not being quite as powerful as drugs.

Think of it this way, meditation is like pouring happy juice on your brain slowly. Taking drugs is like placing the bottle on your head and smashing it with a hammer - sure, you’re going to get a lot of happy juice on your brain, but the glass might make it unbearable, you have no choice when it ends, and the next day you’re going to be forced to pick the shards of glass out.

Weird analogy I suppose, but it helps to illustrate why OP might prefer the slow drip.

At the end of the day, there’s no debate about whether meditation can produce these feelings - it’s simply a matter of whether a person has the time and interest to seek these things out, or whether they want to flood their brains with happy juice.

Personally, I live in both camps; I’ve had profound realizations about my own mind while meditating, but I also like getting zonked off my gourd.

Shout to my own comment from a month ago

Lol OP is actually right but not explaining it well in the comments.

Enjoy your sarrlac