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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 13th, 2022

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  • I once had a very special, very young colleague, who would always question everything, but was never willing to change his own mind. And of course, he believed the Bible was 100% verbatim correct and scientists were lying.

    Well, one day he exclaimed, “Scientists don’t know everything for certain either!”.
    So, I responded, “Yeah…? They don’t claim to…?”.

    And that left him absolutely confused. I don’t know how much propaganda his parents fed him, but I guess, at the very least he never considered that a possibility.

    So, I told him that it’s not called a “scientific theory” for nothing. And that literally everything in science will be abolished, if you can disprove it.

    After that quick shock, he was already back to not wanting to believe anything that sounded logical, but his last response was something along the lines of “That doesn’t make any sense. How can you live by something and not know for certain that it’s correct?”.

    Which, like, I get it. It’s scary to not have certain answers. But it makes no sense to just pick one answer and decide that this one is certain.
    But yeah, that is the mindset he grew up in.



  • Yeah, but to my knowledge, you can only go forwards in time.

    What you can do, is go forwards at a slower speed. So, if you sat yourself in a spaceship and accelerated to e.g. 10% of the speed of light, you might get out after what you perceive as a few years and find yourself in the year 2200 (I did not do the math), but you cannot go back from there.

    Causal chains always have to follow causality. They can just do so less quickly, because, as far as my current understanding goes, the speed of light is actually the speed of causality.

    (Sorry to bonk you with so much physics. I know that initial statement could have also come from someone who’s never heard of the theory of relativity…)



  • Every now and then, you’ll see some journalist uncovering the great revelation that Mozilla is doing unthinkable things, but I have never these stories actually being relevant, if you do more research on the topic.

    Some examples:

    And telemetry by itself is not evil either. It depends entirely on what data is actually being sent. You can look at what Mozilla sends by typing “about:telemetry” into the URL bar. In my opinion, that is perfectly fine.

    Ultimately, though, they enjoy so much trust, because they have no profit motive. The Mozilla Foundation is legally a non-profit and the Mozilla Corporation is a 100% subsidiary of the Foundation, so cannot pay out profits to anyone either.

    Any ‘evil’ shit they do to make money, they do it to pay wages and to invest further into Firefox & their other projects.

    You can criticize that the CEO takes a salary she can’t possibly spend (yet is below industry-standard, to my knowledge). And you can argue whether they should be taking so much money from Google rather than other sources.

    But all in all, that still leaves them far above companies who need to exploit users as much as justifiable, to make the maximum amount of profit.