My point is that the concept of God, or any other concept for that matter, never unbounds the material carrier. It could be the neurons in your brain, or letters in a book we learn to transform into the neural activity, or something else - but it is always material.

If all people die, all books rot, all hard drives lose surface charge, all material evidence of the concept gets destroyed, so does the concept itself. It doesn’t persist outside the material - we just learned to replicate it and taught others to restore materially bound knowledge to make it last ages.

This is, by the way, exactly why concepts remain in the “human domain”. We don’t have any kind of special affinity to the “immaterial”; we are simply the only animals that can convert letters and drawings (which are material) to respective neural activity (which is also material), and vice versa, thanks to the evolutionary development of respective brain parts. This allows us to be more efficient at communicating concepts, even without personal presence, as long as you both agree on what symbols mean.

As for time, it’s not moving anywhere. It is us moving through it, similarly as we move through space with Earth without ever doing anything, or to falling off a cliff, for example. As any concept, time is what we formulated to explain to ourselves why things happen the way they do, and to predict what happens next. What we objectively experience we then attribute to the flow of time, yet the Universe is more complicated, and time gets “warped” (or rather, it does what it always did, it just falls out of a simple human perception) all the time in all the places. Think of black holes, or near-light travel, or even GPS satellite clocks needing correction because they literally move through time differently. The concept of time is merely a reflection of the immensely interrelated processes happening in the Universe. Yet, they’re all material, and so is the man-made concept of time flowing through our neurons.

Better energy efficiency overall.

Other than that - maybe some habit.

Zotero is straight up godsend - especially with some useful plugins. Figuring out how Zettlr integration works took a while, but it was fairly convenient at the end.

Alright, that explains it

I think you two are actually on the same page, in that capitalism strives on inequality and dependence

The original comment was not advocating for capitalism and the old ways, it was just saying that making us poor is essential to keep capitalism running.

Absolutely. Most people being low on money is essential to making the system work.

Otherwise, no one would take terrible low-paying jobs that pay for billionaires’ lavish lifestyles.

And so is the real estate market. Any excess of money you get sinks into having a place to live. Once population overall earns more, housing prices skyrocket. It’s an ingenious trap to keep us eternally broke and powerless, while feeding the rich.

There’s no market-based solution for this. We need a serious intervention. As long as we don’t put the working majority first, unsurprisingly, the world is gonna suck.

Wow, I appreciate the time and effort you put into this, and yes, it sounds a bit reassuring :)

I probably feel the way computer noobs feel when someone here enthusiastically calls them to join Linux lol (I already did, no need to advocate here! :D)

And yes, with that in mind, I’ll give it another spin. I’d like to have that basic file example!

Oh, this is based on my first impression I had a while back when I noped out of it :D

This is less of a detailed problem description and more like a scream over perceived complexity of something that should be so simple, especially for someone who’s very far from programming or advanced computing overall.

Outside of documentclass, there are all the paragraph, section, title, there are all the packages introducing all sorts of things (like, why there’s a need for external PACKAGES inside a TEXT DOCUMENT?! Why are they required to do the very basics that are somehow not covered by the base kit?!) etc.

Tables are straight up scary to write in LaTeX, you insert all the parameters and then write it out like some sort of matrix but without any decent sctructure; and plotting - I didn’t even try to comprehend it.

Overall, it feels like some unnecessarily nerdy way to edit docs. Probably powerful, but same sort of powerful as editing configs to customize things. Please, make it any sort of user-friendly!

I believe Zettlr editor uses pandoc to convert MD to LaTeX.

Indeed needs some manual tinkering, as long as I remember, at least since MD is not so feature-rich :D

But thanks for the recommendation!

Will take a look!

Thanks!

I wonder how people actually work with LaTeX.

Do you actually write all the headers and stuff manually through a TeX editor, or do you use tools that do it for you?

Because the former sounds incredibly tedious.

Death and God are merely concepts brought about by the currents in our neurons. And through this quirkiness instilled in us through the imperfection of evolution, we started seeing lack of something as a concept of its own, even though it’s still a strictly material circumstance directly related to presence of a respective concept.

Death is simply lack of life (which is why we can attribute it to something that didn’t live in the first place). Vacuum is similarly just a lack of matter. It’s the same, just two sides of a spectrum defined merely by the material circumstances.

Descartes merely found he existed regardless of the reality of perception, which, yes, he did.

The time is yet another coordinate of spacetime. What happened in the past is merely off one coordinate same as when we move left or right. What will happen in the future is also off the same coordinate. It’s all there, materially - but we can only be present in one place at a given time - and vice versa, move it one second and you and the planet you stand on are in a wildly different place, and you’ll never return.

And God is just something we imagined not to feel alone and scared in the grand realm of the Universe. Who says He needs breathing? Who says He is alive? Who says He…is?

Not quite; ultimately, what you experience is brought to you by material objects and events; we just consider our thinking and perception to be immaterial to maintain integrity with our limited perception.

The book you read is material. The game you play is a set of pixels on a material screen captured by your retina. The very thought you have while considering the immaterial is actually very material, with electrons traveling through the synapses of your brain neurons. At the end of the day, everything is material, and immateriality is nothing.

After all, it’s not what is real, it is what we experience that matters. Ever found yourself in another place when reading a book? Experienced a game so immersive that you are the character? Cried over a movie?

None of this is real. But all of this matters.

Honestly I just want KDE to do the backbone and GNOME to do the designs.

Adwaita apps look just right, minimalistic yet powerful, pinnacle of modern simplified designs. Everything you actually need is close, and the rest doesn’t clog the view.

The rest of GNOME is heavily meh. Customization is next to nothing, and generally any workflow falling outside the one window = one task paradigm is gonna be a pain. Settings are convoluted and sometimes straight up unreachable without additional tools or config edits (and sometimes these straight up don’t apply).

I guess what unites Adwaita and GNOME project overall is the stubborn adversity to users making it comfy for themselves - it’s the GNOME way, or no way. And while Adwaita is at least actually good in its defaults, GNOME is not.

KDE, on the other hand, is brilliant as a desktop environment, but menus could be so, so much better. So, when I have a choice, I use Adwaita-themed apps on KDE. With proper theming on KDE side of things, they come together just right.

Also, 7 inches are generally enough to teleport through a wall

Yeah, it’s generally better in here in that respect. Transphobia is massively downvoted and commonly banned as well.

There are quite a few trans communities here, too, if you belong to the group and seek a friendly environment.

Gotta say the “fake one” looks better lol