Hmm, I wonder…does “my favourite pirate streaming service” count as avoiding big tech?

First, you’ll note that I started this conversation by conceding free will and concentrating my discussion of evil on evils that are not performed by humans, but by the planet itself, or by fundamental biology.

But as for “the concept of life as a test”…why is something supposedly omniscient performing a test? It should already know the result of said test, thus making the test itself irrelevant. That’s what omniscience is.

If you’re asking for money to fix bugs, that incentivises writing code with bugs, as if you write perfect code first time nobody will pay you to fix it

There’s certainly potential for that to be a problem. But it’s not necessarily insurmountable. For starters, I think the idea is you’re not paying to have your thing fixed, you’re paying to have your thing prioritised. The same amount of work is getting done either way, but bugs reported by people who paid will be prioritised over bugs reported by people who don’t pay. If there are no bugs reported by paid users, then unpaid bugs will still be worked on.

If there is no evil how can there be good?

Easy. You take the world as it is right now…and then remove the evil things. Evil is a metaphysical concept. We often use analogies of light and dark, but it doesn’t literally work that way.

the Abrahamic trio, so God is supposed to be all powerful.

The funny thing is, the ancient Israelites almost certainly didn’t believe this. It was a more recent invention that’s obviously not supported by the old testament or the talmud.

Yeah, the average person gets a pass on this sort of thing because I generally assume they haven’t thought much about it. But it’s particularly galling when biblical scholars do it.

I saw one biblical scholar whose schtick was debunking things evangelicals believe about the bible. He would happily admit it’s written by a collection of authors over a long period of time, who were doing so not literally but in rhetorical styles popular in their day. Things like that.

Once, I saw him describe how the early Israelites did not believe in the three omnis. They may not have even believed in a monotheistic god, but it was certainly not omniscient and omnibenevolent. Then he went on to say that despite that—despite the fact that the authors of the religious text and the society that invented this god not believing in three omnis—he nevertheless did believe god was omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. Wtf?

But why is that all good? Why couldn’t he have earth be good?

Not sure that’s true. Free will doesn’t mean anyone can do anything. It means any decisions a person makes are truly decided by them, and they actually could have made a different decision.

People who don’t believe in free will believe that the physical laws of the universe are deterministic. That leptons and quarks behave in ways determined by their state. That this is true even inside your brain, and thus decisions you make are actually just the result of particles interacting. Even quantum effects, though random, are not consciously decided and thus do not affect free will.

The circumstances you are in change the inputs to those equations, but they don’t change the fact that the equations exist.

I’m upvoting because I thought this was done good engagement with the premise and you don’t deserve to be downvoted for it.

But fundamentally, you’ve missed a pretty big step. What if god just…didn’t create a situation where children get diseases that can only be cured with one rare tree?

Or, more importantly, what about diseases that cannot be cured? What about natural disasters? Yes, some types of natural disasters have gotten more common and worse as a result of human action, but they still happened before climate change, and if anything were more disruptive to people before we had modern building practices.

We’re talking about a god that is literally capable of anything. It could just wave its hand and delete all disease from existence. It chooses not to.

Because one of the many inputs to people’s actions, if we assume that their actions are deterministic, is their knowledge of how other people will respond, and how they have responded to similar things in the past.

What shits me is Christians (and Jews and Muslims, but it’s mainly Christians who do this) who just handwave away the problem of evil. Like fine, I can accept that some evils might arise as a result of human decisions and free will. Things like wars and genocides are done by people. It’s difficult to swallow even that much with the idea of a god who supposedly knows all, is capable of doing anything, and is “all good”, but fine, maybe free will ultimately supplants all that.

But what I absolutely cannot accept is any claim that tries to square the idea of a god with the triple-omnis with the fact that natural disasters happen. That children die of cancer. You try telling the parents of a child slowly dying of a painful incurable disease that someone could fix it if they wanted, and they completely know about it, but that they won’t. And then try telling them that person is “all good”. See how they react.

I find religious people who believe in the three omnis after having given it any amount of serious consideration to be absolutely disgusting and immoral people.

My take is that there is no free will, but that this fact is irrelevant and we’re all better off just behaving as though we do.

I think the solution to the problem with quarters is to say “calendar quarter”.

it has top billing in their FAQ

I find that genuinely hilarious and delightful 😂

I think German j would be the closest

Yeah, German J is /j/.

I know this is buy European, but for people who are more interested in buy non-American and less specifically only European, Bitbucket is owned by Australian company Atlassian, and free accounts get unlimited private repos, and relatively reasonable pricing for small teams.

It’s a bit less geared towards open source than GitHub or gitlab, but that is available too. I’m not sure how it works.

How do we pronounce Forgejo? The english J, the German J, or the Spanish J? (Or is there a 4th option?)

Ah yeah. It looks like this comment was set to undetermined, which should mean everyone is able to see it. I think undetermined is what most mobile apps use by default, since they don’t have a switch on them to set your comment’s language like the web does:

I love the idea of Threema, but the reason I love it is also precisely why it’s an extremely hard sell for casuals. Self-management of keys.

It’s also not open source. Sure, the clients are, but the back-end isn’t, and that arguably the most important piece.

No problem, I’m happy to help.

Are you using an app, or the website in a browser? I ask because many apps seem to make it hard to select your language, unfortunately.