i like the serenity religious institutions provide - the artwork - the quiet comfort

I can highly recommend checking out your local library, especially if they have a reading room of some kind. It can also be quiet and serene, there is a lot of beautiful stuff hidden on the shelves, and if you turn coming there into a ritual it can also bring you comfort.

And it can also help you build the same kind of community that a religious institution may provide.

I think it depends on the country and industry. I never ever had to write a cover letter, but then again most of my jobs the company recruiters found and messaged me instead of the other way around. On the other hand one of my friends had to recently write a detailed cover letter and heavily customize their CV for every job they applied to.

Fair.

Honestly that sounds really nice.

The railroad switch also contains a device that may turn it into a Banach-Tarski switch, depending on the quantum interaction of an electron (Schrodinger cat style), but that electron entangled with an electron in one of your synapses responsible for making the decision, but you don’t know in which way. Think fast!

If it was unusually selfish to care about how you were honored after you die, then nobody would be buying grave monuments or fancy urns.

I wouldn’t say unusually, but yes, people are known to be selfish and immature sometimes. Especially when faced with something scary and unavoidable, like death, and backed by culture and tradition.

I imagine it makes them feel like their child doesn’t love them as much as they thought they did.

People receive and express love in different ways. Not understanding and engaging with that is immature. Trying to manipulate another person into doing something uncomfortable after your death for no material reason at all is selfish.

Sometimes we bear little burdens for the people we love, and that’s totally normal, in my opinion.

Maybe the father can bear the little burden of not doing anything and not being materially affected in any way, then.

The reasons to visit a funeral are:

1. If it helps you process your own grief
2. If you can/want to help others process their grief

If, when your father dies, you feel overpowered with emotions, you should consider going, because a ritualized, socialized process like this can really help you process the sadness in a healthier way. If you care about your mother or other relatives and think your attendance will help them process the loss, you should go. Don’t let your annoying aunts ruin your mental health or relationships with people you care about.

If neither of those applies, you are fully justified in skipping the event.

As for what to tell your father: I would say a white lie is justified in this particular case, whatever you decide to do in the end. He will not know whether or not your attend. Yes, this is treating him like a child; however, by manipulating you to attend an event which definitionally will not affect his life in any way, he is already being childish. Unfortunately this is how some people are, it doesn’t mean you can’t love or respect them in other aspects.

On the other hand, it is immature and even selfish to care about the details of your own funeral. Your funeral is specifically an event for people who loved you, to process their grief. You will definitionally not be around to care about any of it, let your loved ones process their grief however they want.

I am VERY willing to give it up if this LLM and generative bubble completely blew up tomorrow

The best part is that when the bubble blows we’ll still be left with dozens of LLMs that can run locally on modest hardware with results not far behind the “frontier” bullshit, and nobody will be shoving AI down our throats every waking moment.

I have a slightly more advanced setup which uses post-command hooks to send a desktop notification when a command has been running for over 3 seconds. That notification contains the elapsed time and the exit code too, and plays a different sound depending on whether the command was successful or not. This allows for some neat integrations with KDE connect to let me know when some long compile has finished or something even when I’m away from my computer. You can see how it works here.

Honestly nothing wrong with that, not my cup of tea but content like that definitely has an audience…

That’s obviously wrong. I don’t need to read Mein Kampf to know that nazism is a bad idea. Sure, it helps, but it’s not necessary.

Similarly, I don’t need to read the entire corpus of christian theology to understand that the bible is mostly fiction and that christofascists are wrong and awful people (don’t get me wrong, those are two separate facts - I don’t think all christians are awful).

Well, IIRC The Hobbit was initially just a collection of bedtime fairy tales he made up for his children, of course it had inconsistencies.

Actually, thinking about it, that seems like a plausible source of the Old Testament as well…

Also, sadly this is not that real passport. You can tell (at a minimum) because the first machine-readable passports were issued in 1980, and Egypt didn’t start issuing MRPs until 2008.

I wouldn’t trust unreviewed LLM output to be executed on my laptop, what you’re proposing would definitely end the human civilization. See also: all the funny times when someone piped OpenClaw into a prod environment root shell and it wipes the drive within a couple days. LLMs can’t think, they are not smart, they are just a very advanced autocomplete. A useful tool for many situations, but its output needs careful human verification.

IMO the best combo is pirated Youtube Music (e.g. via OpenTune) for music discovery, then Bandcamp to buy albums you enjoyed.

That way you’re not paying subscription to the giant corpo sucking life out of musicians, you get to actually own the music you buy forever, and in great quality (as long as you archive it properly), and a significant proportion of your purchase goes to the artists who created the things you enjoy!

Ah, I see. Yeah, that makes more sense and I don’t have an answer for your question then. I suspect it wouldn’t really work due to long reproductive cycles and extremely limited total food supply.

And, since we’re all cannibals now, what portion of the hucows is going to be reserved as hucow food?

I think this is where your farming idea falls apart (or becomes identical to the problem discussed in the video). You can’t sustainably farm animals without an external energy source. The reason we farm herbivores and some omnivores is that it’s possible to feed them with grass (or whatever processed awfulness passes as grass nowadays). When we do farm carnivores for some reason, we feed them with meat harvested from herbivores.

A fully cannibal-based farm is simply impossible because even if humans were perfect at turning food into muscles on their body, there wouldn’t be anything to (sustainably) extract from the overall farm system, since there wouldn’t be any extra energy/muscle mass/whatever going into it. Also, humans are very very not perfect at turning food into muscle mass, and waste most of the energy that came into their system on stuff like breathing and heartbeat and other metabolism. So, if the requirement is that all humans are cannibals, the only thing left to do is to farm non-sustainably, i.e. extract meat from the system as it runs out, feeding hucows with other hucows to keep at least some of them alive, but eventually you will run out of hucows (which is, once again, pretty much what’s discussed in the video).

Alternatively you could claim that “hucows” are not “humans” per se and feed them with non-hucow-based food, in which case it could probably work in a fairly similar manner to modern-day pig farming but on an even larger and more horrifying scale - pigs are quite similar to humans in many ways. Sans all the pandemics that would eventually happen due to cannibalism, of course.

I don’t think the farmed humans would even be able to consent in this scenario, so it would not be vegan. However to me it also doesn’t seem much worse than the world we’re living in now 🤷

I feel like it’s very xkcd. See also http://xkcd.com/2002