wombatmobile

In this case, the question is informative and stimulating because it challenges the assumption that human interaction has a different dynamic to animal interaction.

Bringing this question to conscious awareness is a different category of social discourse to “What is the meaning of life”, which is not really a social question at all.

The soul is an emergent property of the mind and body interacting with the world.

… in the hope of avoiding shallow comments like this.

Shallow? It’s profound.

Have you tried to respond to the question, in the human context?

I know the code that I and my team contributed to Mozilla was only some trivial part of the whole beast, but for us it was drawn from years of work.

And that’s the whole point.

Mozilla has made a browser. So has google. Why make them out to be bad actors for providing something that is too big for mortals to even contemplate?

It’s your life, your money, and your choice.

Would your life be better if you spent $100 on junk food, alcohol, pot, gasoline or Netflix instead?

Soda is 98% water and 46% sugar.

> It's still significant because it speaks to people being more willing to admit to being part Native.

More people are proud to proclaim being First Nations people.

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

― Anaïs Nin

I’m a big fan of H2O.

The reason I’m posting that here is because for many years I don’t drink it. I was so used to hydrating from soda and other beverages advertised on TV I completely lost touch with plain old H2O.

Then one day I rediscovered its pure refreshing goodness. What a surprise! I savoured it and marvelled at the pureness of the way it quenched my thirst.

Water! Quenching thirst since before the dinosaurs.

Affordable. Convenient if you have a tap. Amazing on a hot day if you have a fridge and a pitcher.

You're not stuck in some evil country. You have Mozilla. If you want to improve it, you can submit code to it. Or start a new browser project by rounding up a dozen friends who feel the same way you do and going for it. If you're not a software engineer, you can be an evangelist who inspires software engineers. What is stopping you from working towards your own ideals?

> Why are we at the mercy of …

We aren’t at anyone’s mercy.

Nobody is forcing us to use browsers from google or Mozilla.

We are all free to implement our own UA. The specs are all open standards.

What stops us from writing browsers is the sheer volume of time and effort required - hundreds of thousands of hours of highly skilled work. That is all.

In the absence of such an effort, we would be left high and dry, with no way to experience the web.

Fortunately, that isn’t the case, because some others have done the work and allow us to use their browsers.

For that, we might feel grateful.

We might also be wary, and try to be aware of any adverse consequences of using someone else’s thing. That’s common sense, but it is still not a case of being at someone’s mercy. That situation loomed when one company sought to control the standards for the web as well as the implementation, but what we have today is different to that.

Amber is heterogeneous in composition, but consists of several resinous bodies more or less soluble in alcohol, ether and chloroform, associated with an insoluble bituminous substance. Amber is a macromolecule by free radical polymerization of several precursors in the labdane family, e.g. communic acid, cummunol, and biformene. These labdanes are diterpenes (C20H32) and trienes, equipping the organic skeleton with three alkene groups for polymerization. As amber matures over the years, more polymerization takes place as well as isomerization reactions, crosslinking and cyclization.

Wikipedia Amber

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber

CAN YOU REALLY PULL A "JURASSIC PARK" AND EXTRACT DNA FROM BUGS FROZEN IN AMBER?

https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/can-you-really-extract-dna-fr...

How about in amber then? How long might we expect DNA to remain intact perfectly encased in amber?

A corporation is neither a human nor an AI.

A corporation is a shield behind which humans plot and practice their most deliberate, libidinous schemes of avarice, moderated not by morality or community, but only by laws and markets. And for that, corporations have lawyers, resumes and advertising.

It is a rare corporation that retains a soul for longer than its founders presence, because lawyers, resumes and advertising cannot sense what founders could: a creative future.

Nature

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11555

Scientific American

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dinos-dna-demise-...

The Royal Society

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2012.174...

Scitech Daily

https://scitechdaily.com/researchers-calculate-that-dna-has-...

> Why isn't there a universal data format for résumés?

There can be. You can create a universal data format for résumés.

You can make the universal data format a world standard in 7 steps:

1. Create a committee comprised of stakeholders.

2. Agree on a protocol for establishing consensus on requirements.

3. Consult all stakeholders about their requirements, and process these requirements through the committee in the form of a requirements document.

4. Develop a résumé format that meets the requirements through the committee.

5. Ratify and publish the résumé format standard through the committee.

6. Publicise the résumé standard.

7. Evangelise the résumé standard until it achieves widespread adoption.

That's almost all there is to it. You just need money, time, expertise, charisma, luck, and for the stakeholders to want you to succeed.

> It seems impossible for me to recommend someone do this stuff without having that lifelong level of understanding and context and passion.

Your lifelong learning and passion are a key part of your identify, and most probably the reason why your friends respect you and trust you enough to approach you about software.

Unless your friends are trying to replicate you, it won't be necessary for them to develop the same lifelong understanding as you. If all they want to do is to learn about software, they could just learn a little bit about it, or as much as they can given their late start. That might still satisfy them.

If you want to be a good friend, it's important for you to distinguish between their ambitions and your passion. Try to see things from their point of view, and only share as much information as is necessary for them to be able to see the next step of the big picture.

For example, if they don't already know any programming languages, you could just tell them that there are different languages that suit different applications, and ask them what they are interested to work on. Don't talk in detail about the merits of particular languages because they won't be able to grasp these details yet.

If they say they just want to be able to program Excel, or to write an app to help their grandmother remember something, then you just need to tell them about the tools that exist for those applications.

Don't tell them too much. Just point them towards the right starting point, and tell them they are welcome to bring more questions to you as they arise. That will keep the conversation relevant to them, and avoid the difficulty of having you talk for too long about things they can't understand or appreciate yet.

> Bir Tawil is just a worthless desert

To you perhaps, but outside of your imagination?

“members of the Ababda and Bisharin tribe … carry goods, graze crops and make camp within the sands.”

How do you personally handle tipping, in a restaurant where you know the owner is paying $tiny/hr?

What are the cognitive steps you go through to derive your tipping behaviour in each instance?

> Most of Amazon jungle was, essentially, a big orchard.

What is your understanding of the word "orchard"?

What is your understanding of the word "jungle"?

> You have a great deal to learn about the prehistory of South American civilization.

I am always interested to investigate and learn. Could you link to a source for the estimate of 100 million Amazonian jungle inhabitants?

Just curious how you cogitate it?

> tips were probably 150% of my income

That makes you an entrepreneur.

But unlike other entrepreneurs, you don’t get to deduct the costs involved with turning up to the market.

Or else they might experience poverty and/or overwork.

Sounds like you are comparing the experiences of an American eating out in America with the experiences of an American dining in foreign countries.

Some of your experiences were negative, and others positive. But none of your foreign data used a native diner, so, it’s difficult to correlate the results with the topic of this discussion, which is about the effect of tipping on service.

Not sure what you mean by "big Amazonian civilisations".

It's full of trees. People traditionally live in small villages.

There are no roads.

The Inca didn't live in the jungle. The administrative, political and military center of the empire was in the city of Cusco. The Inca civilization arose from the Peruvian highlands.

How can the question be answered without first defining "heretical"?

TFA seems to use the term to mean "mainstream" or "popular"?

I'm sure it doesn't mean "sanctioned by the Catholic Church", which is the meaning I had associated with that term before thinking about it.

> I think there was a peak in hobby photography

By "hobby photography" it sounds like you mean SLR hobby photography. Of course, hobby photography has boomed off the charts with phones.

Meanwhile, professional photography is nearly an extinct profession.

Over the last 20 years, as print publications were replaced by online, the professions of journalist and press photographer declined to the point where they now hardly exist.