UnbornTao

Have you switched to Brave yet? Come on, I'm getting paid by the numbers here.

At-home book printing? I want to be able to buy a book, get the file in a new format, and have some printer at home - maybe - that can produce a reasonably decent copy at an affordable price. Probably a pipe dream for now. And the company would likely go broke pretty quickly

The "disgusting" bit was a joke, actually favoring nudism over clothing. But yeah. The conformity topic is easy to make fun of - so I do.

@Jannes @Nemo28 Oh, absolutely. I wouldn't buy one myself, though.

What do you mean by installed? Steam? Cool, I've been researching about self-hosting and may actually do something similar in the future.

Can you drop that? I'm curious why you post these things. They can be pithy at times, don't get me wrong, but I can't help but suspect that you're stuck in a spiritual worldview that gets in the way of actual questioning.

Be open™. For real. Not as a pretension. The implicit arrogance behind this kind of spiritual talk is tiring and does not seem to help much - except, perhaps, in making oneself feel better. Can you let go of your attachment to this kind of talk and thinking? Question something. What about "What is surrendering?", for example?

What if you allowed yourself, in your mind, to exaggerate it a little - not to punish yourself but simply to experience it without resistance? Not to suppress it, nor to act it out - just to feel it wholesale. It's a possibility.

You just provided a two-word assertion. What question or communication could you make to promote inquiry?

Ironically enough, nudism can also be a form of conformity - like at nudist beaches. How much of a nonconformist do you have to be to go to a nudist beach wearing a swimsuit? Disgusting.

@kavaris Thanks for sharing. Some research is often required on the user's part but certain distros are quite stable and reliable nowadays - Mint, Bazzite, and so on - depending on the use case. It may be less accessible, since you have to flash it yourself onto a USB drive and deal with that process, whereas other major operating systems come preinstalled on store-bought hardware (among other things). Not sure. According to Claude, it might be "initiation" or "initial entry."

Time to make arepas.

I've never owned a gaming laptop but a handheld like the Steam Deck sounds like a better value proposition to me - provided that gaming is your priority.

I think you're fantasizing rather than actually examining either language or communication. What would it even mean to be in communication with the cosmos? I can understand the desire to feel connected and in unison with the cosmos, and this discussion doesn't necessarily invalidate that. But setting that aside, what is it to communicate? Consider that labels are just one manifestation of language; they're not the same as the space of language, to put it metaphorically. Labeling is just one of the many functions enabled by language, it seems to me. This brings us back to our earlier contention: the idea that communication is somehow stumbled upon by virtue of "stuff happening" in existence - like thinking that solar flares are "communicating" something, and, perhaps most importantly, that it is being communicated to you.

Nerd!

That's fine.

Jesus, calm down people.

How can communication exist without language - without the space or context in which communication shows up? "Language" has to exist first by necessity.

That a sound or image can represent something other than the sound or visuals themselves - yeah, that's based on language. A clap without language is just the sound it makes. Even if it produces a reaction in us, it doesn't mean something is being communicated. But when the clap is able to convey a distinction other than the sound it makes, it is already language. One conflation we (people in general) likely make is this: words are language, or the same as language.

If you approach it merely in an intellectual fashion, of course it comes across as superficial and even lame, because the heart of the matter isn't being addressed in such a case. You just think you've stepped out of it, which, unironically, is enabled by language. But it bears repeating the "taken-for-granted" bit once again - you might be surprised. Pay attention to your experience of language, and you'll start to notice its influence. It doesn't seem profound to you because, according to your previous reply, you were simply holding language as symbols in a coherent framework - and that's only a definition. And it's not even precise. It would be like saying that language is language. Language creates symbol. Notice that, in either case, your certainty actually undermines truly looking into these things. We don't really know what a body or the social world is either. Like most of us, for example, you too consider social reality as, well, real, objective, and true - excluding the superimposed, learned notions about it that still occur within such a world.

Avocados don't care. I personally don't like them that much. Guacamole is great, though. Greater than the sum of its parts

Avocado.

Thanks. Wouldn't most people's feet be weak by this criterion after a lifetime of wearing highly cushioned shoes? Chanclas will do for now

I wouldn't say it's about extra privacy, but rather less intrusion - among other things, such as security. It's a bit like disabling questionable settings on your Facebook account (or some such analogy.) To honor our focus on and love of conformity, I'll recommend the following video: It sums up the sentiment nicely.