NirodhaAvidya

Sam Neill

Try as I may to avoid this absurd political reality I find myself in, I am continuously dumbfounded by these headlines. I have to check everytime if the post is an Onion article.

Subtle

It’s funny because it’s true. chuckles softly

• No offense taken

• These are salient points

• I edited my post

• I hope it’s easier to digest now

• Thank you for the constructive criticism

“You are under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago” - Alan Watts

This one is a bit hard-won for me. You see I used to be an asshole. It was my brand. I thought “it’s just in my nature”.

Fortunately, I was also a student of religion (mostly because I was a militant atheist. Know your enemy and all that). Studying Buddhism, I began to observe the nature of self. I found enough distance from it to see its transient nature.

I realized being an asshole was a choice and I could just as easily choose otherwise. Soon I began to discover this was true of most character traits.

I’m not saying you don’t have consistent patterns of behavior. I’ll hopefully always be curious and analytical. But for the most part, the way you conduct yourself and where you focus your attention is a choice.

So, if you’re not happy with who you are maybe don’t be so attached to the idea of 'who you are". And if that seems hard, observe what you pay your attention to and try to find the distance between observation and behavior. In that gap lies the choice you make, consciously or not, to be “you”.

Strength Before Weakness

For an example -NSFW strong language-, here’s an AI imitating/mocking the US presidential debate

Good read, if a bit lengthy for so little content. But it’s an interview transcript. Nevertheless, Whittaker makes some good points. I do find it odd that privacy invasion is always justified by those in power under the rubric of protecting children. Yet, time and time again we can see that their true aim is always more authoritarian overreach. At least we are seeing less claims of “fighting the war on terror” mostly, I believe, thanks to Snowden blowing that myth out of the water.

I for one will be continuing to use end-to-end encryption whenever possible. I’ve used Signal for years and have dragged many a friend onto the platform. Unfortunately, one of the downsides, Signal up until recently was able to be used as a complete replacement for your SMS app, utilizing E2E encryption for Signal users. This meant I could just convince my friends to change messaging apps. It was so simple my mother could do it. Now however, Signal is no longer routing standard SMS messages, which means you must have Signal for Signal users and another app for SMS. This is often too much a barrier for the less tech savvy. At least RCS between 2 individuals is ostensibly E2E encrypted.