Exactly this. Respecting the human is important, but nobody owes a thing to a belief.
The meaning of words is not important to propagandists. The value is in the power of uninhibited emotional reaction of the proletariat and the influence those people have over others in their social circles.
Here's hoping.
Using Connect right now. What I really care about is a Frontpage widget like RIF. I'm holding open real estate on the main screen of my Android. Basically the first dev to have that and a decently usable interface (bonus points for a "black" mode) gets the space :)
You and I are VERY similar in that way. I was literally shopping for new parts last night for a whole new PC since this is effectively a motherboard problem.
With a decent sleep behind me, I got back at it today and flashed every BIOS from my manufacturer, backward from the newest, until I arrived at one that didn't have the GPU issue which I thought was caused by the moth. It turns out that it was not, in the end, the bug's fault.
Having started on Friday morning with the very first manufacturer BIOS, which shipped with the board, I knew that it worked in a stable fashion but was missing a key feature for my new hardware. By the time I found one that once and truly didn't exhibit the issue that was crashing my GPU, I was back to the 3rd BIOS release and now I think we are at "stable."
The board in question, in case anyone finds this on a search engine, is the Gigabyte Aorus Z690 Ultra DDR4, and the shipped bios is version F3. My video card is a Gigabyte RTX 3060Ti, and the bug causing hard locks / crashes is present in every BIOS from F20 and upward. Version F6 has another issue I didn't bother to diagnose that was causing instability for unknown reasons. F8, however, works just as well as F3 so far, though I want the rest of the weekend to test. So far none of the F20 series issues are in the journal though, so I think that's where the issue was introduced.
And for Gigabyte haters, I feel you, but it's a SFF build and I needed a mITX Z690 board and a 3060Ti that was short enough to fit in a NF200 case built at the peak of the GPU shortage which only made things more complicated. My options were serendipitously limited to that manufacturer. :)
I've been in IT a long time and building PCs for longer, but my debugging skills degrade in direct proportion to how frustrated I am by the problem. That usually starts off very high and gets higher as obvious things get checked off the list.
Evidently I still have some kind of problem, because the GPU just fell off the bus again... but I haven't had any frame rate issues in the last hour, so I think it's a coincident problem and maybe not related to the moth. I did just update a BIOS, so I dunno. Too late to worry about it tonight.
Trying to determine what the "weirdest horrible religious thing" one has seen in the world is like trying to choose a favorite picture of John Oliver.
I always enjoy this kind of conversation. People emerging from incarceration in a prison of the mind gives me joy.
My journey started with a conversation with my father around the time I was to be confirmed Catholic.
During that time, my confirmation sponsor was my father's best friend. I spent some time with him every week or so for a little while, and we'd have chats about our shared superstitions and delusions and why they are important to us. Well, at one point for some reason I don't recall and is unimportant now, I decided that I wasn't sure I was ready to be confirmed. I think at the time that I was acutely aware of what that said about my ownership over that relationship, and I wasn't sure that was a commitment I was ready to make.
As far as my father was concerned, if I was not ready to make that commitment, he would not be willing to help me pay for college and jumped directly to how I would have to move out the day I turned 18, get a job or join the military and probably get killed in a war, and then go to hell because I'm not Catholic. The important takeaway here was that he was basically telegraphing the reality that he would disown any responsibility for my life if I wasn't certain I wanted to dedicate myself to the same cult he was in.
So I got confirmed. I might be cognizant of the importance of commitments and doing what I say I'm going to do, but I'm also not stupid, and a middle school kid can't manage any part of their own life without support of their parents.
It's worth mentioning at this point that up until that period of time, I was devout. I'd drank the kool-aid, I was an altar boy and considered seminary for a while. Following this ultimatum, I was not interested in that any longer, but I still went to church with my parents until college.
Once I went to school, I only went to church on xmas every year, and then only because I loved my father and we had a tradition of playing guitar and singing for the xmas mass. It was just him and I, and I know it gave him joy for us to sing hymns together. That was the extent of my religious involvement for a while, and during that time I was very much on my way out. Not yet "certainly" atheist yet, as I was a bit confused about semantics for one, and innately fearful of eternal damnation as I was raised to be straight out of the womb.
During my last year in school, I lived in an off-campus party house that was on the side of a "mountain" in Vermont. One of my routines was to wake up every morning and run up the mountain, look over the land, and run down again. This was not a particularly large mountain, but it was also not really a rock and bigger than a hill. Let's call it a mountain.
One day, at the top of this mountain, looking over the lakes, the mountains, the streets with the cars as tiny as points on the landscape; observing the green earth and the moon still visible in the sky, I said aloud for the first time "I don't believe in god." I remember the moment as clearly as any I have available in my memory from that time. At that point, it was 2001 and the "four horsemen of new atheism" hadn't yet written their seminal works on the topic. I also had no particular feelings against cultists other than pity, and I had an overwhelming sense of freedom and a bit of anxiety as I now had to consider what morality was all about... since in my world, morality was tied to religion.
I feel as if my comprehension is considerably better with the advantage of 20+ years' adult experience since that time. I've lived more than half my life free from superstition and have a much better defined worldview.. but that doesn't matter to this comment. :)
I appreciate the imagery and the metaphor.
Rational thought has a lot going against it. Mostly an organized culture of fear with plenty of history and money.
I was in exactly the same boat as you until I was about confirmation age. Around mid way through college, I was pretty much over it. Late bloomer.
Yes. If you are a buyer and you submit INAD, you can say anything you want and ebay will side with you. 100% of the time. Even if you lie. And if they initially don't, just keep it up and they will. Then, when you "return" the empty box to the seller, there's nothing they can do about it.
There are stories all over ebay about it. And I'm not a big seller btw, I'm just a dude who sells odd stuff to pay for new stuff. When I get screwed, which I occasionally do, it hurts because every time it feels personal unlike if it were my job.