I will keep that in mind. I look forward to taking my time with it. Thank you again!

I ordered the other book too, but Wright’s book here has definitely jumped to the front of the line.

You can say ‘they’re all talk until they’re not’ about anyone.

Sure, you can say anything about anybody. But that does not mean it is equally accurate in all cases. That’s why we pay attention to actions and history.

I was really curious to check out that first book after your short version.

But damn, the subject matter of that second book might draw my attention first. The Buddhist approach & techniques made so much sense to me in a completely pragmatic way.

I might have to order myself physical copies of both of these to read outside by my koi pond on cool fall days. The fact that the whole scene will be so on the nose to the point of being cliched will just amuse me further, lol.

Thanks for the recommendations!

Edit: oh jesus christ there’s a koi on the cover of Why Buddhism is True, haha. Looks like I should invest in the hardcover.

I think about this more than anything in those quiet “run the brain’s existential dread garbage collection routine” moments.

Self aware consciousness is just so wild. Like you say, how does it even exist? But it’s also so common on our little planet here (even if we only count the humans) that it is as commonplace as it is spectacular.

It feels like this magical “extra” thing, but at the same time the evidence kinda suggests it’s just something that naturally happens once you get complex life.

I was actually going to comment that I now know about this cheap option thanks to the lawsuit, lol.

I don’t watch live TV because I value my time, but every once in a while there’s a reason to tune into that one thing.

And the conservative base reads the article thusly:

Los Angeles

Oooh, strike one.

car wash

Ooooooooh, that sounds awful immigranty. Strike two!

Rafie Ollah Shouhed

Aaaand that’s three, your humanity is OUTTA HERE!

Your woke propaganda like “citizen” and “business owner” have no power here!

A lot of right-wing people use … as an excuse to not care about … at all…

I thought your comment would be one of those rare instances where you can make a sentence more accurate by generalizing it.

They REALLY like doing it with people, and ruining the environment and/or climate is just shitting on other people (especially the poor ones) with an added level of abstraction.

FOSS is free and open source software. And the word “free” does a lot of heavy lifting there because it refers to much more than it typically not costing anything. It means that you have the freedom to do what you want with your stuff, basically. You (or others on your behalf) can see the source code for what the software is doing, and you can even change and improve it.

You’ll see the word “libre” thrown around in this context too, for that reason. For many people the liberty side of free matters a lot more than the no-cost side. But they do go hand in hand, because not needing to protect a revenue stream makes it a lot easier to not enshittify software. You’ll see names like LibreOffice and FLOSS instead of FOSS.

So it’s basically the whole Linux world that is very well represented on Lemmy and the fediverse. :)

Sent using FOSS Voyager web client …in FOSS browser LibreWolf (a fork of FireFox) …on FOSS operating system Linux.

I use Mint btw.
(This is an inside joke for the other Linux people – a play off of “I use Arch btw” where Arch Linux is a hardcore distro where you kind of build your operating system piece by piece, but with excellent documentation. Valve switched SteamOS to be based on Arch a while back)

Longtime lifetime Plex Pass holder here.

FOSS is important. Having control over how you use your own hardware and files is important.

But even if none of that mattered, once I actually used Jellyfin for a few days the snappy bloat-free feel of it won me over. Switching between Plex and Jellyfin felt like switching between windows and linux.

That’s why I also mentioned them being made cheaply and using junk parts.

Maybe confusing if you think party labels are the important thing rather than ideology and how you treat fellow human beings.

Is there a kind of open source dumb appliance movement out there? It sure seems like we need one.

They wouldn’t be free as in beer, but it would be awesome to have widely available instructions to take existing mass produced parts and assemble a functional and serviceable appliance.

Or maybe just a control module and some sensors that you can use to retrofit smart appliances.

I’m sure the big companies would keep them from gaining mass adoption though, thanks to cheap appliances with ads and junk parts. They probably already have.

It also needs a conical upper jaw, such that the axis of each tooth is pointed at the center of his chin rather than straight down.

Lifetime Plex Pass here too. I got it long ago.

I still migrated my server and uninstalled it once I tried Jellyfin for a few days because of the performance difference alone.

I’m not sure. In my case with Jellyfin it’s fully self-hosted and not connected to any kind of discovery service.

I appreciate the value of automated music discovery services. I listened to so much last.fm in the early days of it. But like I have posted about before, I have been trying the old fashioned way lately and liking it a lot. I search for the best bands, best songs, best albums of a certain genre or period. It gives me some listicles on music websites and some discussions between what seem like real people, etc.

So then I just start downloading entire albums or discographies, and then work those in to listen at work. Maybe listen to albums as albums, or shuffle play all songs from the artist, or make a playlist, or just shuffle play my entire library.

When a song really jumps out at me, I’ll generally add it to my ever-growing playlist.

fun fact:

Jellyfin works for music (and audio books) just as well as it does for movies and TV shows!

And being open source, there are apps specific to certain use cases. Like on ios there’s Finamp for music and Plappa for audio books.

It also streams in FLAC quality!

Agreed, and your wording is excellent.

He’s an advocate for spending where it brings you value (and only you can decide that), and aggressively cutting out the things that don’t.

That’s an excellent way to put it! Sometimes I feel like a weirdo for actually pursuing the things that bring me happiness. Like that makes me the eccentric one. So many seem to be on a boring yet miserable autopilot, trying get the things they’ve been taught they SHOULD want.

Youtube Music has two different bands called Splashdown, and each has two albums.

It’s definitely a step in the wrong direction as far as not supporting giant evil corporations, but the music is there.

This subject is dear to my heart, because I realized that part of my conservative upbringing taught me money is the important thing and that emotions are worthless and dumb. If you spend money on something that makes you happy but does not provide commensurate utility or return on investment, it is by definition a dumb purchase. Treating yourself is a waste of resources and therefore makes you a bad person. Maybe unless you are debt free and fully funding every retirement and college account you got. (note the unspoken implication that it’s cool for the rich to do whatever they want)

As I have spent decades reverse engineering the instructions for my brain, I have recently concluded that not only do I thrive when building and creating things, but having the perfect high-quality tool that is great at what it does right down to the sensory feedback can really enhance the experience for me.

I’ve spent a bunch of money expanding and upgrading my collection this year, and I haven’t regretted it once. But I’ve spent even more on the materials just in the months since!