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Shutting down Windows 3 (mid-range) corrupted a project I had been working for months on. One still had to take care.

Sure, if you turned it off too early the files were corrupted. The safe thing was to exit Windows 3.x to the DOS prompt and only turn off the computer then. But it wasn't really required.

Everyone I knew would fallback to DOS before throwing the big red power switch else risk suffering a day of work or worse being corrupt tomorrow morning.

Edit: the windows 3.1 manual "recommends" exiting windows before turning off the PC. It doesn't say it's "required". And with 386 mode, windows actually did do disk IO, including caching.

Probably a lot of people did exit windows 3.x before powering off the computer.

I actually don't think it was required. Windows 3.x was just a shell on top of DOS and didn't do any IO caching. Saving files or closing all applications should've been safe enough.


Much religion depends on magical thinking and/or blind appeals to authority. IME it facilitates bad behavior that's less likely to be tolerated by more rational belief systems.

The worldview of many atheists I know seems to depend on magical thinking, holding of contradictory beliefs, and blind appeal to authority when it comes to the government.

I don't think there is clear cause and effect when it comes to religion and irrational behavior.


Certainly exceptions exist to every rule or trend.

Having visited over a hundred churches (for thousands of services), they are the only place I've consistently seen people teach and accept things that what everyone can plainly see is false. Children are taught that fallacies are better than critical thinking, wherever it serves their belief system.


This is a surprising thing to read, as that’s a lot of services. Are you religious? Or were you once?

I’ve visited many, many churches, likely hundreds. I love their architecture. I have never been to a service and am an atheist.


People often easily conflat religion, theology and theocracy. But an atheist dictator that would put death sentence for anyone that engages in a religion would obviously not be more ethical than some religious zealtoth doing the same for atheism. I'm not aware of any politically powerful atheist in history that went this path. I mean, most likely Stalin was atheist, but I doubt it ever was a matter to send people to gulag. Atheism is just rare as an ontological belief, so it makes sense most faith intolerance happened between religious dévots.

Note that strictly speaking, atheism is just rejecting the existence of any god. That doesn't necessarily make magic out of the equation. Though certainly atheism is generally associated to the rejection of any superstitious belief.

But just believing that ZFC make a sound mathematical foundation doesn't make you an advanced flawless logician. People stay mere humans, whatever they believe might be the most relevant foundation to use their more or less weak reasoning ability.


Dictators are bad regardless of religion or lack thereof.

IDK what ZFC is, so perhaps you can enlighten me?


Crudely overviewing:

Mathematics is seen a formally grown, logical system, that has features that are "discovered" rather than invented .. "Given some {X}, {Y} follows without question".

However it rests(?) on Axiomatic foundations ..

Most famously: https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/euclid.htm

It is understood that one can tweak an axiom, the fifth posulate for example, and get a different logical ediface - a non Euclidean hyperbolic geometry in that case.

The ZFC "Axiom of Choice" has bearing on infinities and other things, including many proofs that depend on reduction by absurdity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zermelo%E2%80%93Fraenkel_set_t...


What beyond self-contradiction is "rational belief?"

The arc of history simply does not show that. We can point to the various issues in communist states (not criticizing communism but all the communist states are undoubtedly atheist).

Was it the absence of religion that created issues in communist states? Or perhaps authoritarianism, hero worship, overly centralized planning, low trust culture, or some other combination of factors at play?

History's arc is much longer than communism, and religion is tied to some pretty horrific events.


Given that some of the hatred was targeting specifically religious people (for example, the CCP bans religious people from their ranks), then I think it's safe to say that it is driven by a dislike of religion

You can agree with their take on religion or not, but their motivation remains the same.


not criticizing communism? pray tell, what species are you considering? - E O Wilson

The big genocides and mass murders of the twentieth century were motivated by non-religious (the holocaust) or atheist (in the Soviet union, China, and Cambodia) ideologies..

Even historically religious motives for "bad behaviours" were rare.


Were those genocides really motivated by of a lack of religion or other factors like racism and authoritarianism?

> Even historically religious motives for "bad behaviours" were rare.

Doubt. Still, even if that's accurate, my point was that raising people to be easily manipulated sheep doesn't produce a robust society. It just makes them easier to exploit. MLMs are common in predominantly Mormon communities for a reason.


> Were those genocides really motivated by of a lack of religion or other factors like racism and authoritarianism?

You misunderstand what I said. I was refuting the idea that religion caused genocides, rather than claiming lack of religion caused genocides.

I think religion per se is too generic and varied to correlate with anything. Sometimes the lack of a particular religion or variant of a particular religion may either cause or oppose genocide - there is a reason, for example, that the Nazis wanted to replace Christianity with new religions, (Positive Christianity and new-paganism - both very different from the originals they drew on/pretended to be), consistent with their ideology.


I mean... We constantly hear that European colonization was due to Christianity and yet that cannot account for the treatment of the Syriac Christians of Kerala by the European colonists supposedly driven by Christianity.

This is the heart of the matter: any ill by an atheist is determined to be caused by something other than atheism. Meanwhile any motivation of an evil doer who professes a religion is pinned on that religion.


> I mean... We constantly hear that European colonization was due to Christianity ..

Who is "we" and why do they hear that?

Eg: Australia was colonised to take land possession ahead of the Dutch and the French, for finnancial gain, and to utilise the prisoners piling up in hulks on the river flats once the thirteen colonies in North America stopped taking them.

The thirteen US colonies were largely established as hard nosed business ventures with substantial private investments that looked for an eventual return.

The South and Central American colonies were pretty much all established to support plantations for sugar and other goods.

In these examples religion came along for the ride and provided a carrotof comfort in contrast to the sticks and guns of the military who also rode in.


It's constantly used in polemics of Christianity. Whereas actions of atheists are unable to be used against atheism

> It's constantly used in polemics of Christianity.

Doesn't make it true though.

> Whereas actions of atheists are unable to be used against atheism

Why not, aside from the obvious observation that "atheists" are not as homogenuous in their belief as, say, "Catholics".

In general the actions of, say, Nazis, can be used against them (ie Nazis) but not against humans globally or atheists in Australia, that's nonsensical.


> Why not, aside from the obvious observation that "atheists" are not as homogenous in their belief as, say, "Catholics".

Only if people are doing something because they are Catholics.

Atheist polemicists often treat the actions of any (supposed, in many cases) Christian as an objection to Christianity in general, which is just as nonsensical. That is what is objectionable in their argument.


> Atheist polemicists often treat

I'm sure some do .. I'll even grant that most online that engage in such arguments likely do.

I'd suggest the bulk of atheists don't spend much time pointlessly going around and around in such circles.

The "common tactics" of "Atheist polemicists" presented here so far are just daft - they're more the hallmark of obsessives that engage in oline forum textfests.

> Only if people are doing something because they are Catholics.

The statement I made was that "atheists" are not as homogeneous in their belief as, say, "Catholics".

I stand by it.

I would also suggest that Mormons are more homogeneous as a group than "atheists", the Greek Orthodox are more homogeneous as a group than "atheists", etc.

If people engage in activities under the organisational overwatch of the Catholic Church, eg: the Christian Brothers in Bindoon, then the Catholic Church bears responsibility for allowing those actions to proceed unchecked.


> I'm sure some do .. I'll even grant that most online that engage in such arguments likely do.

Its pretty common to do so.

For example, blaming the Spanish inquisition (an arm of the Spanish monarchy) on the Catholic Church, or people claiming that Hitler was a Catholic (without adding the important "as a child" qualifier).

> would also suggest that Mormons are more homogeneous as a group than "atheists", the Greek Orthodox are more homogeneous as a group than "atheists", etc.

Going back to what I said earlier, the original point was religion vs lack of religion - and I would argue that religious people (Christians, Hindus, pagans, ....) are a less homogenous group than atheists.


You do understand that the Coran state very explicitly that apostate should be killed, and while this is nice to pretend holy books are all about metaphors, it won't change much to the mind of those who think they are acting in good faith with divine commands when they murder heretics.

Of course, atheist compatible doctrines too can can be taken as reason to go kill those who dare to believe otherwise. But they can't pretend they have a book directly inspired by some super being that justify their actions. That is, one can also adulate Marx and kill random dudes because that's fair within their interpretation of das Kapital.

https://islam.stackexchange.com/questions/10768/death-penalt...


> I could retire any day (late 30s).

What would that look like? Do you have kids or a family to support? I'm one of two gainfully employed breadwinners among an extended family of 13 adults and 2 kids (my own).


Arguably Canonical's hold on the community is much looser than Apple or even Microsoft. Because much of Ubuntu can be forked, much like RHEL was twice forked regardless of RedHat's wishes.

Mastodon servers too have a very loose hold on their communities.


This assumes every government is as intransigent as the one you have experience with.

Do bills still matter, whether they pass or not? Apparently it's rule by executive order from here on out.

Yea, I remember the whole Biden forgiving student loans fiasco that bypassed Congress several times and argued in court that the President has extensive powers via executive orders.

I support the ban. Other podcasters I've listened to do as well, or at least understand the rationale light of the leaks and double standard.

In urban areas, yes, other's mistakes are more likely to run your day/life. One mitigating strategy is to only ride in low traffic areas. (Most of the men on my father's side have had life threatening accidents on motorcycles.)

FWIW some of these also apply to MySQL, like the use of FKs and major version upgrades. I think scaling any centralized and business-critical resource is hard.

Sure, any relational, ACID database is going to be hard to scale. But of the ones that people actually use a lot, Postgres is the hardest.

IDK, does MySQL have built in table partitioning yet? Pg is just different hard IME, not harder.

I assume you mean built-in sharding across multiple nodes/instances/servers? No, there's no built-in support for that in MySQL, at least when using a general-purpose storage engine like InnoDB. (There are alternative engines like MySQL Cluster / NDB, as well as Spider in MariaDB, but these are not widely used and have some major shortcomings.)

Or if you just mean partitioning across the same node ("partitioned tables"), then yes, MySQL has had that feature for over 16 years.

That all said, I agree 100% with your overall point: scaling any relational database is challenging, and I don't see any evidence that Postgres is harder than others. In my direct experience, nearly every item in the original post has some analog in MySQL that can become problematic at scale. So I'm not sure what Postgres-specific concerns GP is referring to.



Why do you believe Postgres is harder than others, specifically?

As I mentioned down-thread, nearly every item in the original post has some analog in MySQL that can become problematic at scale.


Everyone has a different a tipping point. But generally I see folks want more features and don't value reliability unless it's something they use really often and has no workaround.

I play games with known bugs, and on imperfect hardware, because I unwilling to pay more. Some experiences are rare, so I tolerate some jank because there aren't enough competitors.


Games I can see that. But what features are you missing in your operating system?

Operating Systems are quite mature. I suppose they do need to evolve to take advantage of newer hardware and new UI conventions. For example, swipe typing and H264 decoding are table stakes on mobile.

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