Thanks.
I agree with you, although question the usefulness of going into what I perceive as a more metaphysical direction. In this sense it is trivial that nothing has intrinsic value. But putting on my more pragmatist hat, I would say that there is a sense in which basic survival is very much universal and unquestionable value. "I don't want to die", "I want to be happy", are pretty much safe assumptions to make across cultures and history (yeah, people commit suicide, hence it is not universal, but still a pretty safe bet and worth to consider 'universal' for all practical purposes).
I think that would be an exception rather than the rule, to be honest.
I think though, that if you are in the position of doing serious critical reflection about this stuff, which is in my opinion necessary for being in a position of discernment wrt this stuff, then you are privileged. This is the idea I wanted to convey.
It isn’t about being smart (you assumed this is what ‘education’ was pointing at). Most people aren’t even aware of what’s happening besides extremely superficial things that they get here and there on the news. Can’t you honestly see the real potential for massive damage coming out of all this?
I’m not (exclusively) talking about formal education. There are lots of people (I would dare say the majority of the planet) that don’t have the ‘digital literacy’ required to handle what’s happening right now. Being from a developed country I am very much worried about this.
"It's nearly impossible to build a rendering engine that never crashes or hangs. It's also nearly impossible to build a rendering engine that is perfectly secure.
In some ways, the state of web browsers around 2006 was like that of the single-user, co-operatively multi-tasked operating systems of the past. As a misbehaving application in such an operating system could take down the entire system, so could a misbehaving web page in a web browser. All it took was one rendering engine or plug-in bug to bring down the entire browser and all of the currently running tabs.
Modern operating systems are more robust because they put applications into separate processes that are walled off from one another. A crash in one application generally does not impair other applications or the integrity of the operating system, and each user's access to other users' data is restricted. Chromium's architecture aims for this more robust design."
"This is the first of (many) parts in the upstreaming of the Wayland driver for Wine. Since the amount of code and commits is large, my approach is to upstream the driver in multiple parts in a serial fashion, with each part being a cohesive (to the degree possible) set of not too many commits. When each part is reviewed and merged, I will move on to proposing the next part. My main goal with this approach is to make reviewing easier and more focused. If you have other ideas about how to improve this process for the reviewers, please let me know.
A lot of pieces need to fall into place before the driver becomes even remotely functional, so, some MRs (especially the initial ones) will be a bit more preparatory in nature. To aid in the understanding of and justification for some of the code introduced in such MRs, all the remaining driver commits are always going to be available at https://gitlab.winehq.org/afrantzis/wine/-/tree/wayland."
> Is it? I see far more people saying that material possessions don't make one happy than that they do. How many movies, novels, etc, are about living for oneself rather than possessions? How many say the opposite? IMO everyone knows that material possessions are nice to have, in the sense that we all want what we want, but also that they do not produce happiness. Does anyone say otherwise?
Yeah, I agree with you in that it is "common knowledge" that material possessions != happiness. However, I do question that we actually believe this on a level deeper than just an intellectual exercise.
I think that it would be better to be a bit more precise about what we mean by "material possession". For example: would the fulfillment of the desire to be in a love relationship count as "material possession"? I would say it does, in the sense that the expectation is that an external element will fulfill us, because there is something that we currently lack to feel 'complete'. So we might think: "if only I had this relationship with this beautiful person" or "if only I could buy a bigger house", the abstract form being "if only I could have X or Y experience", etc. In this sense I would say that this paradigm is very much the rule in our attempt for happiness, and even if people acknowledge intellectually that it isn't so, it is actually implicit in their worldview and behavior.
> I cannot enjoy the suffering of my children or the torture and murder of the innocent because "they can happen" which I'd be required to do in this so called "enlightenment." What you're describing is pure selfishness and taking pleasure in evil. That's horrific.
Right. You won't enjoy those things. You just won't add additional unnecessary suffering.
Buddhism doesn't teach to enjoy the terrible things about the world, nor to ignore them by some kind of numbness. The whole point is that there is an additional layer of suffering that is entirely optional. This is what they refer to as Dukkha in the "Four Noble Truths".
> Which is total detachment from other people too and their needs and for making the external world better since any attempt to do so would be admitting that things in the external world can really be bad. That's not a recipe for happiness, it's a recipe for total loneliness and, if seriously adopted by enough people, societal collapse. We're a social species, demonstrably. Buddhism as you describe it appears to be a rejection of the real evils in the world, passions, charity, and society.
>"Bliss" built on the enjoyment of evil is infinitely worse than mere numbness.
I think your parents' comments admit of more charitable readings.