eivarv

    even the utmost atheist needs to have beliefs

They might, but my point is that they are different - meaning that you therefore can’t categorize it as a religion (not to mention that these answers don’t have anything to do with atheism in and of itself).

Even this charitable interpretation doesn't make much sense: The only thing "atheists" have in common is that they have a lack of belief – we have no idea what they actually DO believe (people come with various philosophical persuasions, after all).

The other way you propose of defining religions is so general and vague that it borders on meaningless, and doesn't deal with the fact that different people have different questions, formulated differently, using different assumptions and caring about the answers to different extents.

You can't be serious.

Actual religions have sets of ideas (rules, creation-myths, alternative epistemologies, etc.), whereas atheism has none. The term literally means "without god(s)" (which was a defining feature of religions by those who coined the term).

It is an absence of belief (at least in the way the term is commonly used; There are "atheistic religions" in the sense that they don't have a deity).

Atheism is to religion as being silent is to speaking – and you're essentially claiming it's just another way of speaking.

    There's no more core i7 for Macbook 13

Sure there is – you just have to select one of the Intel-models and customize the processor.

Because recordings of politicians interacting with experts and NGOs in a recent Norwegian hearing (about bulk metadata collection) makes it seem they have no practical understanding of the subject matter.

I mean, I organize petitions, write op-eds (incl. in major national papers), contribute to OSS, have back-and-forths with major decision makers in public, etc. ...

But I don't seem to reach through. I'd be willing to do volunteer work or start an organization, but can't really run for office as I have another career.

Besides: I don't know what party would have me, because it seems to me that the politicians don't understand the arguments nor the premise – they're no tech-experts, after all (which is part of the problem, I suspect).

I'm sick and tired of seeing tech-illiterate decision makers on both international levels attempt to thwart our right to privacy.

Does anyone know what we or I can do (in this case specifically) to help fight this idiocy?

No chance of working remote from Europe, right? :P

I'm working on a tool [0] (mac only for now) that will let you manipulate browser tabs and windows – along with any other set of tabs and windows – that are intended to be long-running, and save and load your working context (running apps and their states).

Now to finish up and release that beta...

[0]: https://cleave.app

Pyxel: https://github.com/kitao/pyxel

The human mind is prone to certain types of errors, for sure. Pareidolia and apophenia are other interesting examples.

Why does it matter if few (or many, for that matter) ascribe them self awareness? Popularity is no measure of truth.

And who's to say what actions are "free will" (whatever that means) over instincts?

Just about nothing new wrt content.

I remember I kept thinking how naive, imaginationless and without knowledge of history these people must be if they genuinely never thought critically about what they were doing – if no one ever saw any potential for abuse.

That, and the fact that they kept pushing unfounded conclusions, like correlation between diagnosed mental issues and appearence of social media allegedly pointing to a causative relationship; alleging that this thing is so "new" and "different" from any other tool that has played on weaknesses inherent in the human mind that we just can't deal with it, etc.

I tend to think proper education, including critical thinking skills (including logic and cognitive biases), critique of media, etc., as well as defining privacy clearer as a human right (including explicitly stating that data subjects own data about themselves) and enforcing this hard will solve many problems.

1. Security, privacy, software development, music, random goings on...

2. From a couple times a week to every other month.

3. Self-hosted because of development-ease and customizability.

4. https://www.eivindarvesen.com

Context: This bill would mean implementing collecting all metadata of communications "crossing the border" (in practice most of Norwegian traffic), and that "service providers" (undefined) would have make unencrypted communications available if they can. The bill was about out military/foreign intelligence service. They would also combine this with "metadata" from other sources, as well as unspecified data from unspecified sources. They would be able to search in the metadata-storage via court-order. Content data could also be collected via court-order.

From memory:

- Members of the committee kept stating that this bill would provide us security (without arguing how/why)

- Members of the committee kept ignoring rights-based arguments re: privacy from orgs like our DPA, Amnesty, the Norwegian Institute for Human Rights, Norwegian Society of Graduate Technical and Scientific Professionals, etc.

- Members of the committee kept suggesting that the bill would let us protect ourselves against the types of attacks we've seen on large public (petroleum, health) services

- Member of the committee kept harping about how this bill could protect us against identity-theft, hacking by extranational threat actors, etc. (despite obviously being out of legal scope)

- Member of the committee arguing with consulted bodies (incl. organizations of editors, journalists) that source protection was not about democracy or the public, but about the individual

- Comments from our Minister of Defense like: "This is not mass surveillance; It is mass storage" (mirroring arguments from Europe) and "Source protection should not be something threats to the nation can hide behind"

- Top politicians conflating privacy with securing against external threats throughout debate, and claiming that we had to remember that the Norwegian state is not "the bad guy"

- The government stating that without this bill, we'd be a less attractive collaborative partner internationally, and that most other countries have this sort of practice

- The Minister claiming that the external intelligence service needs these tools to be able to do their job at all, casting doubt on the existing of a chilling effect, claiming the ends justify the means...

Though not exactly what you're referring to, my impression is that people discuss the chilling effect [0] quite a bit.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect#Chilling_effec...

The Norwegian parliament recently passed a bill that implements bulk metadata collection here as well.

I tried debating with ministers, writing op-eds, and even organizing petitions (over 1000 security, privacy and tech professionals in a couple of days) before the vote. While every informed person I know thinks it's a bad idea, and every organization consulted massively criticized it as mass surveillance, a huge majority of our nation's decision makers apparently disagreed.

Watching video from the proceedings made me realize just how few of them have any real understanding both of the practical consequences of the technical implementation, as well as of privacy in and of itself (my jaw was literally agape from some comments).

How can we do something about this sorry state of things when politicians are not only ignorant, but ignorant of their ignorance – and unwilling to listen to experts that are critical?

Besides using privacy-preserving technologies, how can we work against this on a technical level?

Another "but" here is what [0] may happen if you're storing personal data in big indexes...

TLDR; In some cases, what data you actually have (as in "on disk") becomes complicated. For instance, in some cases, once a segment reaches max size (5GB by default) it will only be eligible for merging when it accumulates 50% deletions. This means you might not be able to guarantee deletion of data within 30 days (in accordance with the GDPR).

[0]: https://www.eivindarvesen.com/blog/2018/09/23/lucene-indexes...

Wireshark, TeamViewer, Parallels Desktop for Mac, etc. For more, see [0].

The fact that it's possible to not build an "app that looks native or actually looks good" doesn't imply that it's impossible to build one that does, though.

And I actually tend to prefer wxWidgets, as this wraps the platform's native widgets proper, whereas Qt reimplements many (all?) widgets, but attempts to offer a native look-and-feel.

Regardless: Actual GUI-frameworks have huge advantages to using a browser, like:

- Better performance

- Visual and UX consistency (HCI, people!) on a shared platform

- Smaller sized apps

- Drastically reduced resource and energy usage

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Software_that_uses_Qt

I've used wxWidgets, Qt, etc. using several languages, on several projects, and haven't really had any major issues.

Given this experience, I just don't get how cross-platform UI-frameworks are somehow a bigger PITA than pulling in and involving a whole other set of technologies.

There are frameworks, such as Qt and wxWidgets (desktop), that offer native or near-native widgets for all major platform.

Given that most of these have bindings to many languages, I don't understand why one would involve a browser-runtime and whole other set of technologies.

It's an important distinction, for sure – but it only addresses one (of the many) tradeoffs made in such a decision.

In general, why would one take this approach of embedding a browser, compiling to WASM, etc. over a native UI?

I'm genuinely curious why/when this is a better solution.

Gatsby's a static site generator, isn't it? That's different from SSR.

Whataboutism. Mass-surveillance (including bulk collection of metadata) is an authoritarian move, which more and more western countries are guilty of.

I'm not making a comparison – I'm simply arguing against something.

People being profiled and surveilled, for instance.

... and the West slipping into borderline crypto-authoritarianism itself with mass-surveillance and so on - encroaching on citizens' rights while excusing themselves with being the good guys, and only protecting the population against the usual suspects of bad actors.

Here's hoping for a Butlerian Jihad... or, you know, just introducing privacy legislation that make specific outcomes, not methods, illegal – in the same way that murder is illegal, regardless of method, tools, etc.

While Tethics and AI are buzzwords du jour, the problem is more general: The weakening of liberal democratic values.

We need laws and regulation that guarantee privacy more concretely as a foundational right.

How is "cognition != consciousness" surprising, especially given the (now old) fMRI studies complicating (our experience of) free will?

Why would one assume awareness and processing abilities to be related, if there is no evidence for it?

Human-computer context switching.

Which is why I started making Cleave: An application that lets users persist OS state as a "context" - saving and loading open applications, their windows, tabs, open files/documents and so on.

Started because of frequent multitasking heavy work with limited resources.

Made it because I wanted to switch between studying, working, reading, looking for an apartment, etc. without manually managing all states or consuming all resources.

Open Beta (macOS) as soon as I finish license verification and delta updates, but I keep getting sidetracked...

https://cleave.app