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.”)

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.)

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

TootSweet

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

I wonder if there’s a way to prevent people from even knowing that two different votes came from the same user.

What I outlined above should prevent anyone from knowing two different votes came from the same user… without specifically trying that user’s id on each. That’s what the salt (the comment/post id) is for.

I’ve personally been banned from one community for downvoting too consistently.

Votes should be anonymous.

I tend to agree, but the fact is that they aren’t anonymous. This tool just exposes the already-existing fact that Lemmy expressly does not guarantee anonymity for votes. The solution isn’t to not for the poster to not publish this tool. Believe me, such tools already exist in private even if none other than this one are published. Publishing this one only democratizes access to that information. (And not entirely, I don’t think. From what I’m seeing on the page, it looks like it still requires an admin account on an instance. Update: Actually, I’m not sure if it requires an admin account or not. Either way, though.) The solution is (if it’s possible) to make Lemmy itself protect voters’ anonymity.

The reason why instances know who has up/down voted things (rather than only keeping an anonymized “total” for each post/comment) is so it can prevent double-voting.

Maybe instead of usernames, the instances could store/trade… salted hashes of the usernames where the salt is the title or unique identifier of the post/comment being voted on? It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would allow the instance to figure out whether the currently-viewing or currently-voting user has already voted while also making it harder for anyone else to get that information. About the only way a tool could tell you exhaustively who had voted if that were how things worked that I can think of off hand is to try every username on Lemmy one-by-one until all the votes were accounted for.

(Of course, malicious instances could still keep track of usernames or unique user ids who up/downvoted, but only on the instance on which the vote was cast. Also, one downside of this approach would be increased CPU usage. How much? Not sure. It might be trivial. Or maybe not. Dunno.)

And there may be much better ways to do this. I haven’t really thought about it much. I also haven’t checked whether there is an open ticket asking for improved anonymity for votes already.

(Also, full disclosure, all of the above was written after only an extremely brief skim of the linked page.)

(One more edit. Something IHawkMike said led me to realize that the scheme I described above would allow instances to manipulate votes by just inventing hashes. Like, grabbing 512 bits of data from /dev/urandom and giving it to other instances as if it was a hash of a username or user id when, in fact, it’s not a hash of anything. Other instances wouldn’t be able to easily tell that it wasn’t the hash of a valid user id. I haven’t thought how to go about solving that yet. Maybe if it occurs to me, I’ll update this post.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P55t6eryY3g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnmRYRRDbuw

I joined when it was for students only and quit sometime around 2007. There was a “quit Facebook day” once a year that was for raising awareness about how evil Facebook was even back then. I quit on one of those days. At least that’s part of the reason why I quit. Also the only Facebook friend I really interacted with abruptly got extremely fundamentalist Christian and started posting stuff that I couldn’t stand to be assaulted with.

My place of work used to have a fairly large “data entry” department until they… did… something to make that job kindof unnecessary. They laid off pretty much all of that department. And I’m told the boss who was over them before they were laid off returned to his office to find a sizeable human shit directly atop his desk.

Another story. My own boss (actually my boss’s boss) was a massive asshole. Committed the team to a completely unreasonable deadline in conversations with the C-level folks above him, and then threw temper tantrums when the deadline wasn’t hit. He turned the daily standup into a 7:30am (in-person) daily demo to prove we were making progress and weren’t… I dunno… slacking off or whatever. Many a temper tantrum was had in those demos as well.

I quit and made no secret of why. After I left, I heard through the grapevine that in a meeting with the CTO, the asshole boss accused the CTO of being incompetent and said that he was gunning for the CTO’s job. The CTO, sensibly, told the asshole boss to do not pass go, do not collect $200, security will escort you out of the building and we’ll ship you your personal effects from your office.

And then I quit the place I’d gone to and went back to where the asshole boss had been and I’m still working there. Definitely would not have considered coming back if he was still there.

Ok. One more story about the other place. They switched from one chat provider to another. But they never actually shut down the one they were migrating away from. Several folks never left the old chat. When it was discovered that on the old chat service, said folks were trading really really inappropriate holocaust jokes, the whole office got a talking to in very vague terms. It wasn’t until like a month later that someone explained to me what had precipitated that.

Long COVID and fascism.

Whoever created YAML apparently thought Excel was a masterpiece of software design.

Damn. You’re tempting me to make a novelty language.

Someone woke up this morning and chose violence.

Right?

I remember the local contemporary Christian station would sometimes play P.O.D., but only late at night. It was too “hard” or something for during the day when I guess kids might be listening or whatever. The DJ even chastised listeners once for requesting P.O.D. during the day.

You just described my teens. Also Jars of Clay (I went to one of their concerts once), The News Boys, and some more obscure ones like Pillar and Paul Ruben. I also loved P.O.D… It’s really weird to hear them on secular radio these days.

Now-a-days, all of that is only for when I’m wallowing in self pity. There have been times in my life when casually mentioning a secular song around my family would make the shit hit the fan.

Same. I was the first person in my immediate family to vote for a Democrat. They were appalled I’d vote for gays. (They’d have used a different term than “gays”, but I digress.)

/thread

I’m not sure I’ve ever tried to do any write operations. I’m honestly not even sure the service behind that login page offers any write operations. I might have to check sometime. I’m curious.