> Oh really? Try holding your breath for 60 seconds while telling yourself nothing matters…

Is this supposed to be some enlightening statement? Even if you hold your breath until you die, still, nothing matters. You will die, and that will be the end of it. Some people who love you will be disheartened for some time, maybe til the end of their own life, but that too shall pass.

The idea is that nobody is really a nihilist when they're confronted with reality. Philosophy never survives first contact with a crisis in the moment.

You can simultaneously believe nothing matters while also not enjoy the sensation of pain. That doesn't suddenly mean avoiding pain "matters". It just means you have physiological response that makes you avoid pain.

Your response, any many others here, seem to take "nothing matters" as "life is bad, so you should just die and be done with it". Which is a weird redefinition if you think about it. The real redefinition should be "life doesn't matter, so it doesn't matter if you happen to die". Which is not the same as choosing to take action to kill yourself, or even choosing to deal with pain.

That's not really the argument I was going for, but it does have merit on its own. The idea is more that, in an intuitive sense, it's very unlikely that if you examine a self-described nihilist's life and inner mental world that they'll be able to genuinely not assign importance to at least a few things. In fact, you might say a human being is physiologically/psychologically/philosophically incapable of being a true nihilist in the way they actually behave.

If we turn to the argument you outlined and that other posters mentioned in this thread, it does raise some important (no pun intended) questions for nihilists. If a nihilist avoids the pain response and assigns no value to existence or its component parts, then why not make use of a painless suicide method? I don't recall the exact details, but you can assemble a nitrogen DYI kit in barely a few Amazon packages that just puts you to sleep peacefully. In effect, it's Benatar's asymmetry argument but remixed to apply to living beings. The nihilist is not losing anything of value when they lose their life, but they can avoid all the as of yet undefined physiological and psychological pain that they know is guaranteed for their future if they continue to live.

The nihilist will take logical steps to avoid many sensations that they don't enjoy as part of a life that has no value, or there is something about that life that they value enough to prevent themselves from taking this course of action. Either way, the idea that a human being can genuinely believe that nothing matters is in trouble because suicide methods are so painless and convenient today. If we point out that human psychology and physiology prevent us from willing the act of suicide no matter how painless, we are back to the original argument as well. In the end, a human can consider nihilism while being unable to perceive it truly, just like we can consider what extra colors a bird can see without being able to truly see them.

Why not just say things matter to persons with desires. We all create our own meaning. Avoiding pain matters “to me”. Why wouldn’t it matter just because I’m not eternal?

Riffing in what you said, I rather say “you can simultaneously believe the universe is indifferent while also believing things matter to individual beings.”

Well, a nihilist would argue your suffering & suffocation doesn’t matter either.

Of course, the paradox is if your suffering doesn’t matter, why bother avoiding suffering? Yet, if nothing matters, why not avoid suffering?

Because you can't help yourself. You can't change what you want. The fact that nothing matters is irrelevant.

I don't know why you're getting downvoted but this is totally correct.

Which is why I don't like the Buddhist idea of getting rid of all materialistic attachments.

If you get rid of materialistic attachments you also get rid of meaning. And while it's true, things don't mean anything in an abstract universal sense....

Human beings live in a human world not in some void in space and meaning is important to us and can give us great happiness and joy.

Obviously life means something to all of us because we're still breathing every single day and most of us wish to continue to do so.

Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.

After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.

Buddhism (as I imperfectly understand it) is not about getting rid of materialistic attachments. It’s realizing materialistic attachments are the source of suffering.

The world remains. What you do within it is up to you.

I don't think you're going to make it.

Classy.

When are we going to admit that blockchain is just a new type of data store, useful for a limited number of use-cases that require certain sorts of irreversible, immutable guarantees across a worldwide network of computational devices? Crypto is cool, in so far as any other new data storage technology is cool. It is not a new world order

It all depends on how large the addressable area is for irreversible, open-access, immutable data is. Right now it looks rather big from my POV.

It’s unlikely that blockchain / NFT’s will become widely adopted. History proves that human’s like a central authority, just not one that actively works against them.

I think the evidence is not so clear, it seems circumstantial and situational on what humans prefer. Humans invented the internet and email which is extremely decentralized. Datacenters are centralized but edge computing is decentralized. Constitutionalists across the world preferred dencentralizing powers of the central/federal governments to a certain degree. We like decentralizing supply chains to reduce risks but also centralizing them for reducing costs (supplier-to-supplier logistics). The world is literred with examples from either end of the spectrum.

Both centralized and decentralized systems can have a central authority. All of the examples above have one or more of such authorities. The fundamental premise of a blockchain is antithetical to this

maybe in premise but not reality.

Everything trends towards centralization. Tech especially. All the top chains are heavily centralized in (Hash rates, holdings, influence, Insert blockchain metric here). Blockchains has trended towards centralized entities and personalities and i expect the trend to continue.

This also makes it unlikely to be widely adopted. In a centralized evolution of the blockchain, rather than run by a widely public, known, and possibly elected entity, these nodes are run by an anonymous collective. That’s a regression in the trust-value chain for most real world applications

Well, that's my point. We went from

>these nodes are run by an anonymous collective

up until around 2017, that's how blockchain worked and gained traction.

And now most high level entities in blockchain tech now have identities/companies and individuals associated with them. Twitter has allowed these identities to stay 'psuedo-anonymous' sometimes but their 'identities' and leadership influence over the chain/ pools and infrastructure has remained.

>That’s a regression in the trust-value chain for most real world applications

Blockchain trustlessness is the whole value.

Fascinating. I hadn't considered this. Humans like central authority, and if dictators and monarchs were fair there would be no democracy. Extrapolating on this thought, could a democratic blockchain work? I can't even fathom "how", but some sort of ability to elect an entity who votes on your behalf. With an opposition, etc...

Some version of it may be implemented by America switching to a digital currency.

There would be a central regulatory bank that administers financial transactions and serves as a source of truth while Point of Transaction registers send the data for the plusses and minuses in every non-physical cash transaction event.

It wouldn't supplant the physical dollar in any reasonable time as there are many reasons why such bearer bonds would be useful, but I could see it displacing the VISA/MC/AMEX/DISCOVER dominance over electronic financial transactions in America at least.

I can't tell if this is a joke or not but i'll bite. Delegated proof of stake is exactly as you describe and there are 10+ $1B chains that have this mechanism.

My guess is it's a joke. They nailed the definition of DPoS - no way that's an accident.

What you're describing is referred to as governance in the blockchain community, and there is a ton of pre-existing literature and live examples of governance in action on chains like Ethereum. Go fork or try to build one! Governance is a killer feature of smart contract systems.

Perfectly put

There’s also a lot of YC companies that failed to gain traction. This is also seldom talked about

Some don't even feature on https://ycombinator.com/companies

How does PHP / Ruby fare?

PHP has Facebook invested in heavily.

Is this language agnostic?

Yes! That's actually one of the primary motivations behind why we made this "comment-based." The caveat of course is that we presently only support Python at the moment, but you can expect to see C++ and Java support rolled out in the next few weeks. This particularly excites me since these languages are heavily lacking these sorts of tools IMO.

To avoid duplication of input/output tags; it would be nice to have a bridge that coincides with existing documentation comment tools. For example Scaladoc has @param, and @return.

Great suggestion! I am actively pushing to try to make small decisions like this to make it flow with one's current documentation format as much as possible. I will definitely add this to the to-do list.

Do applications wanting this need to add your project as a dependency or is adding comments and running a tool sufficient?

Great question! This does not require any dependency whatsoever -- adding comments and running the tool is sufficient. This was important, as our core mission is to ensure that integrating Artemis into your code does not require you to bend your dependencies, executable code, or workflow around this tool.

That’s great! Would love to see ruby supported for my use case

I understand the sentiment, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to add a little randomized imperfection to the robot’s programming. Or is it that after you know the pizza has been made by a robot, you’re expecting a perfect pie? Ahh, the future will be interesting indeed…

Your pizza will taste like the sterile sound effect of a modern car's turn signal.

It’s not that growth is inherently bad. It’s that we’ve turned a blind eye to the costs incurred both on an individual level and a planetary level to sustain that growth.

History is replete with fallen civilizations, lost civilizations, and civilizations we barely know exist. There are likely many who rose and fell and who we are wholly unaware of.

So no, growth is not inevitable, especially if you turn the livable atmosphere unlivable.

It’s actually small companies that care about user experience that will often make these trade-offs. Less time managing multi-cloud deployments means more time spent building our core product and talking to users.