The best training for immune robustness is going outside and get exposure to a wide range of stuff. But for indoor spaces, air quality is going to be dominated by the microbes and viruses of the people in the space itself. For public spaces and shared residential spaces with poor airflow this would be great - grocery stores, nursing homes, etc. For condos, apartments, SFH, etc. it's probably less necessary, but probably wouldn't hurt. Or nice to have when company comes over, or someone in the house is sick and "polluting" the air.
"The language is intentionally neutral and apolitical, without any stance on social or political issues."
I don't applaud or condemn this, but it's strange that it's on the home and history pages. Putting this in a code of conduct document for collaborators might make sense, but on the home page? Maybe I'm the weird one, but for most languages I consider them a tool. So it's like going to the hardware store and seeing a hammer that has a label "This is not a Liberal or Conservative hammer." Yeah, buddy I know. It's just a hammer.
It's kinda funny. There is a popular claim that goes something like "silence or inaction is implicit support for the status quo." The point is that there's not really such a thing as "not taking sides."
I don't quite agree with that, simply because no matter how many things you do take a stance on, there's always an infinite number of things that you haven't taken a stance on.
But when you go out of your way to explicitly mention that you're refusing to take a stance on all social or political issues, that actually does feel pretty close to explicit approval of the status quo for all social or political issues. Of course this likely was not the intent! So why say it at all?!
> The language is intentionally neutral and apolitical, without any stance on social or political issues
TBH despite what it claims, to me it sounds like a political statement by itself.
(also it is usually the developers of a language -or other project- being judged about their actions/beliefs, not the languages/projects themselves :-P)
I was having doubts about this too. But in today's (geo)political climate it might be useful. Otherwise I can always delete it. But you're right, it's just a hammer.
- Why did you close your eyes ?
- So that the room will be empty.
Your copy reads as "I'm a radical centrist and will die trying to preserve the status quo".
As it usually goes you'd then tolerate hateful, bigoted folks in the name of openness and Free Speech Absolutism™ (which is totally non-political /s) and chase away women, minorities and folks who care about them.
If this isn't your intention, a CoC is the way to go.
You regrettably can't make hate disappear by pretending it doesn't exist.
I don’t think that’s fair. But i do get how others might read into that too.
Personally i read it more like “this project avoids having any political stance.” Similar to the HN guidelines on politics.
However i do agree that it’s better to remove that message and have no comment on politics, than to comment so visibly that you’re unwilling to comment. Even if you read charitably into the message, it’s still just a distraction on valuable page real estate.
You've put it on a forge with issues and PRs open, which implies you expect external contributions.
I'm trying to warn you about the implicit message your copy sends.
It will chase away the folks I mentioned, and some day you'll discover that one of your non-political core contributors goes by @zyklon1488 on twitter.
>one of your non-political core contributors goes by @zyklon1488 on twitter
I think this is exactly what author meant? This is just a tool, private life or political opinions of contributors are not relevant, as long as they don't try to force them on other project members. The only thing that matters is the quality of submitted code.
Seems to be a newly emerging pattern, with now at least two examples. Here's the other one I'm aware of (from the Gleam programming language homepage):
Friendly
As a community, we want to be friendly too. People from around the world, of all backgrounds, genders, and experience levels are welcome and respected equally. See our community code of conduct for more.
Black lives matter. Trans rights are human rights. No nazi bullsh*t.
Octopodes don't actually have a very long lifespan, as adults die shortly after mating. Which is only to say that the decision to consume is more complicated for this creature than others, because if the goal is to minimize suffering, an ethically aquaculture-farmed octopus harvested after mating will not live much longer anyways.
And I've always found the argument that "more intelligent/sentient creatures deserve more protection and rights" to be basically a post hoc defense against cannibalism. We can't know what "suffering" feels like to less intelligent and "simpler" animals so why make our sentience a criterion for the morality of eating? Just from a safety concern we shouldn't be eating humans, but not because we "suffer uniquely more" than other species.
> And I've always found the argument that "more intelligent/sentient creatures deserve more protection and rights" to be basically a post hoc defense against cannibalism.
It's not some veiled aversion to cannibalism, it's because humans have empathy for other humans, and our empathy for non-humans scales with how human-like we perceive those animals to be. If someone sees intelligence as a defining trait of humanity, then they're likely to empathize with animals that display great intelligence. And if you empathize with the animal, you're more likely to be sensitive to its perceived suffering.
Raw intelligence isn't the only thing that drives our empathy toward animals though. I'd argue that it isn't even the main thing.
We care much more about an animal's biological/genetic similarity to ourselves, which is why people are comfortable eating octopuses but not lemurs, even though octopuses are much better problem solvers and lemurs are relatively dumb.
We also care more about sociability / the animal's ability to communicate with humans. This is why people are more comfortable eating pigs instead of dogs. Pigs might be smarter, but dogs are much better at communicating with us, eager to please, etc.
This is completely cultural and has little to do with "genetic similarity". People have been eating monkeys since forever. Monkeys that have the most human-looking gazes.
> We can't know what "suffering" feels like to less intelligent and "simpler" animals so why make our sentience a criterion for the morality of eating?
Using the power of the scientific method, we can form hypothesis. Take a bite out of a few hundred people, give them IQ tests. Give surveys. Use induction.
As our ability to communicate with more and more animals improves with technology, start giving them surveys after taking a bite out of them.
My hypothesis is that every animal along the questionnaire wave front will overwhelmingly self report that they prefer not to be eaten.
At some point, we'll all have to wring our hands about an arXiv preprint where somebody convincingly lets us know that the corn doesn't like being eaten either.
We'll find a few really depressed plants and animals that are ready to be eaten, and some people will propose we make the world a more depressing place so there's more consent in all this. That's a bad take, but the argument will last 1000 years. All the while everyone and everything will keep on eating and eating.
Have you ever sat and thought about all the eating that has gone into making this moment for you? Like, all the eating you've done, all the eating of the creatures and plants that you've eaten have done. All your ancestors. So on and so forth back to the simplest primordial chemical reactions. Life is the tip of the spear atop a long cone of death and teeth gnashing. It's quite horrific.
The universe would be a lot more chill if we could just leave the clouds of fluorine to meditate. They're quite serene when they do that.
The same impulses of MAGA culture warriors to protect US history against "woke" is explored here. Our cultural icons are all flawed, because they're human, but examining them critically is very hard because we project so much on them. Navigating this moment is very hard because of "cancel culture" and "anti-cancel culture". We can't and shouldn't erase these men (and it's overwhelmingly men) from history, but trying to add any nuance or criticality to their story is very difficult in our current moment.
There’s an obvious religious element to this. Whether it’s the idea of Maya or that this realm is but a precursor to heaven or hell. I think that at least some people believe that morality is more arbitrary if this realm is not ”real”. And just as people seek refuge in religion or other ideologies in order to give their life meaning, if this realm is not, in fact, real, then the meaning they thought they had established evaporates.
Walabot DIY 2 in expert mode looks great! Definitely a bit more single-purpose for walls - only works on flat surfaces and probably has trouble w corners. Great suggestion, thanks!
How can you prefer one thing over the other if you haven't tried both? It's so funny how we are set up to think we are in control but overriding the default here would take some serious effort. Who is in charge really? The gut microbes order specific kinds of food then we obey? Trying to refuse to eat or change the order is pretty hard.
I have not heard that this is known to be a reason dogs do that - it's more common for them to eat their own feces, which can't have any gut-culture benefit - but it does work in humans, where it's called a "fecal transplant".
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