If you want to watch it

Pass, thanks.

They don’t make a Clozapine big enough.

Yeah, I don’t think this needs an NSFW at all.

zen meditation… trying to illicit vivid imagery in the mind… it sounded like a whole lot of junk mind flailing.

See, but, this is exactly the kind of attitude I’m trying to address in my comment. People judging other people’s meditation practices. You didn’t specifically go so far (at least not explicitly) as to call it “not meditation”, but you’re still judging the practice without really understanding it. (Not that I think you should be judging it even if you did understand it.)

The practice you’re describing might have been something called “kasiṇa”. And it’s known to “illicit vivid imagery.” There are multiple kinds of kasina practices, but they originate from the Pali Canon itself in works such as the Visuddhimagga and Vimuttimagga^[1][2].

That’s as meditation as meditation gets. If you’re going to call that “junk mind flailing”, the Buddha would like a word.

Now, I don’t know for sure kasina was what you’re describing. But it’s also beside the point. I don’t think meditators really have a leg to stand on to claim that even something like sitting quietly, eyes closed, and playing the whole original Star Wars trilogy in their head from memory is “bad meditation” or “not meditation” just because they judgmentally can’t imagine it “exercising” a “muscle”/“mental skill”/etc. (Daniel Ingram, one of the co-authors of the fire kasina site I cited earlier and a huge advocate for fire kasina as a practice, talks about using fire kasina to conjure vivid images of dragons from Lord of the Rings, kinda just because he’s a geek (and I mean that endearingly) and it’s fun. Though he’s also strongly of the opinion that kasina can lead to insight.) “Meditation” is not the sort of term that a lot of people tend to try to gatekeep, and I think that’s basically never a good thing.

No, meditation is not like drugs.

You’ve been doing the wrong meditation. ;)

Seriously, though, I kindof bristle any time I hear anyone say that “meditation is” some particular thing. What meditation is is extremely broad and varied to the point that it nearly defies definition.

Sure many buddhist jhana practitioners will say that the purpose of jhanas is insight, but what if I develop my jhana skills and never seek insight? Is that really not meditation?

Or, if I sit quietly and learn to contact my subconscious and/or Jungian archetypes. Or if I make up my own idiosyncratic form of practice specifically in order to try to become a hungry ghost in the next life, is that really not meditation?

(Mind you, it’s valid to accept a particular strict definition of meditation within a specific context. If I was at a vipassana retreat doing white skeleton meditation, that’d probably be kindof assholeish. And if the teacher was like “no, correct meditation is such-and-such,” I wouldn’t be like “nuh-uh my ass is meditation, man”. This situation is pretty different. If OP has found a way to “meditate” that’s “better than drugs” rather than “training the mind to be calm, patient, observant and focused”, that hardly makes it invalid or “not meditation.” Any more so than if they say “nice to meet you” rather than “hey, what’s up”, that makes it “not a greeting.”)

Whew. My 586 is safe.

The internet has reached its peak with this meme.

Birds.

The god damned fucking birds outside my window scream their god-damned beaks off at 6:00 fucking AM just to get some tail-feather.

This shit always starts in the spring, every year. Where I am, it’s been going on for a bit more than “a week ago”, but that’s what’s been waking me up in the mornings.

I keep earplugs next to my bed. I don’t want to wear them all night because my superpower is overproducing earwax and I’d have to imagine wearing plugs all night would exacerbate that. So I put in the plugs when the birds wake me, roll over, and then sleep another couple of hours until my alarm goes off. (And, yes, my alarm reliably wakes me even with the ear plugs.)

Last time I was tempted to use suid, it was in order to allow an application I’d written to listen on 80 and 443. Fortunately I found the capabilities way of doing that (setcap 'cap_net_bind_service=+ep' executable) and that was the first I ever heard of capabilities. I consider myself pretty Linux-savvy, but it was pretty recently that I learned about capabilities.

it still contains animal products

It does? Assuming the replicator doesn’t get the matter it’s composing replicated “meat” from disassembled animals, what is it that makes replicated “meat” not dietarily vegan? Taste? Nutritional profile? Chemical indistinguishability?

Is real world Impossible meat dietarily vegan? Could Impossible meat be made not dietarily vegan without actually using animal products in its manufacture? Maybe with nutrient fortification of some sort or a more sophisticated chemical process that produces proteins more chemically similar to meat proteins? Shaping the vegitable-derived matter into little muscle cell shapes? Adding gristle and fat?

What about converting pure plant material into a whole living cow indistinguishable from a naturally bread/born cow, and then slaughtering, butchering, and griding it into ground “meat”?

I dunno. I’m no vegan and I’m not sure if you are. Maybe among vegans, it’s an accepted consensus that Impossible is not dietarily vegan (though maybe morally vegan? Not sure.)

I and a friend of mine were talking about the “paleo diet” at one point. The subject turned to paleo substitutes for dishes that were decidedly not paleo. Paleo breads, pastas, candy, etc. And he expressed a distaste for the entire idea of eating foods that approximate very not-paleo dishes, calling them “faileo”. Heh. I suppose one could say such foods are paleo in one sense and not the other. (Though if one were to discuss “moral paleo-ness” and “dietary paleo-ness”, I’m not sure which one they’d qualify as and which one not.) Maybe Impossible is similarly morally vegan but not dietarily vegan.

The only thing more subversive than silly hats is signing your Lemmy posts.

TootSweet

I guess I’m glad to see more use of AGPL. Maybe that will make other projects less reticent to touch AGPL with a 10-foot pole. That could be a tiny silver lining out of this whole mess.

There’s no more today, there’s only now.

A few entertaining posts on !leopardsatemyface@lemmy.world . Nothing else of consequence.

ChatGPT

Arm yourself with knowledge

Bruh

My favorite book ever. “Hackers” by Steven Levy. It really does a good job of giving you a sense of the early days of software development and the background behind/before the Free Software movement.

Wait, they can detect your pulse via a video? How? Variation in flushing during systolic vs diastolic phases of the heartbeat? Unconscious synchronization of affect/verbalization/whatever with one’s own heartbeat? Given the following, I think it must be closer to the former:

The analysis of the transmission of light through the skin and underlying blood vessels has long been indispensable in medicine, for example in pulse oximeters. Its digital cousin, so-called remote photoplethysmography (rPPP), is an emerging method in telehealthcare, which uses webcams to estimate vital signs. But rPPP can, in theory, also be used in deepfake detectors.

In recent years, such experimental rPPP-based deepfake detectors have proven good at distinguishing between real and deepfaked videos.

“Upgrade?” “UPGRADE?!” Oh no they didn’t.

Seriously, though, there may well be ways around this without switching your OS. If it’s browser-based, the first thing I’d try is a user-agent switcher.

Though, actually, does that “remind me later” option work? It does look kindof grayed out, but it couldn’t hurt to try a click.

Woah, I thought I was in !weedtime@crazypeople.online for a minute there.

Reddit: “Nobody gets to secretly experiment on Reddit users with AI-generated comments but us!”