A hypothesis requires no evidence.

Correct

It’s then tested through repeatable controlled experiments

repeatable controlled experiments are only one aspect of evidence gathering to falsify a hypothesis. Here are a few other methods:

• Observational Astronomy
• Modeling and Simulations
• Indirect Experiments
• Lab Experiments
• Historical Data Analysis

By combining these methods we can still falsify a hypothesis, thus allowing “science to happen”.

The events leading to the Big Bang have no evidence.

Correct! There is no evidence for what lead to the big bang because we can’t gather any data before it started. But we have mountains of evidence that all point to a “big bang” happening - down to a fraction of a second shortly after it started! [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] .

If science can hypothesize, why can’t religion?

Science is willing to discard ideas that lack evidence or aren’t falsifiable. Is religion ready to stop preaching because faith, by definition, is a lack of evidence?

Have you read string theory? It’s no different than Spinoza’s god.

The difference between string theory and Spinoza’s god is the falsifiable part. String Theory, being a scientific theory, makes predictions that should be able to be tested through experiments (although testing will likely be a challenge much like Astrophysics and will instead depend on other scientific methods to gather evidence for/against it). Spinoza’s God is a philosophical concept and not directly falsifiable through scientific methods. Spinoza’s god is the equivalent of me claiming I’m friends with a telepathic unicorn from another dimension, both useless and irrelevant.

[1] Gravitational Waves: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/new-cosmic-discovery-could-be-closest-weve-come-beginning-time-180950109/

[2] Redshift: https://socratic.org/questions/how-does-a-redshift-give-evidence-to-the-big-bang-theory

[3] Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/cosmic-microwave-background-proves-big-bang/

[4] Abundance of Light Elements: https://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/bb_tests_ele.html

[5] Expansion: https://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/bb_tests_exp.html](https://www.space.com/52-the-expanding-universe-from-the-big-bang-to-today.html

[6] Olbers’ Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers’s_paradox

[7] Quasars Existence: https://www.astronomy.com/science/60-years-of-quasars/

[8] WMAP Survey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilkinson_Microwave_Anisotropy_Probe](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Wilkinson-Microwave-Anisotropy-Probe

Are you familiar with Baruch Spinoza? His take is fascinating. His higher power did not concern itself with the fates of mankind, but is responsible for the lawful harmony of existence. It also does not discount or displace science in any way.

That’s basic deism but I would disagree and say it does conflict with science. Science is evidence-based, if you claim something exists you must present evidence to support it. I can’t just claim there’s a 5-ton diamond in my backyard and say “trust me bro”. Nobody would believe me, so why should anyone believe in any god without evidence?

Removed by mod

… but worse!

What do terrorist holding hostages have to do with the indiscriminate murder, displacement and starvation of innocent women and children? Genuinely curious. Cops don’t kill innocents when there’s a hostage situation, why is Israel allowed to commit genocide in this situation? Can you explain?

Offline/internal network installs can be handled with flatpak create-usb - https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/usb-drives.html

One can distribute flatpaks along with their dependencies on USB drives (or network shares, etc.) which is especially helpful in situations where Internet access is limited or non-existent.

Cache/mirroring would be great for those who need it.

Edit:

Thinking about it, I wonder if there’s enough “core features” with ‘create-usb’ that its just matter of scripting something together to intercept requests, auto-create-usb what’s being requested and then serve the package locally? If a whole mirror is required, it may be possible to iterate over all flathub packages and ‘create-usb’ the entire repo to have a local cache/mirror? Just thinking “out loud”.

Here are a few reasons people believe:

• Meaning and Purpose: Religion can offer a framework for understanding the universe and our place in it. It can provide answers to big questions about life, death, and morality.

• Community and Belonging: Religious communities can provide social support, a sense of belonging, and shared values. This can be especially important during difficult times.

• Comfort and Hope: Religion can offer comfort in times of grief or hardship. It can also provide hope for the afterlife or a better future.

• Tradition and Identity: Religion can be a core part of a person’s cultural heritage or family identity. People may feel a connection to their ancestors or cultural background through their faith.

• Ethics and Morality: Many religions provide a moral code that guides people’s behavior. This can be helpful in making decisions about right and wrong.

I don’t believe, but I can see why people stick with it and don’t look beyond it. You can get all these things without religion, its just not something that’s taught/passed down in the same way as religion is. Additionally, deconstructing is very difficult. You’re raised to believe something to be real and you’re expected to just drop it and step out of Plato’s cave? You’d look like a madman to any friends/family who aren’t willing and ready to step out and look around.

Science tests hypothesizes and never claims they’re true until there’s mountains of evidence to indicate so.

Religion on the other hand takes a book written by bronze age goat herders and claims it to be true, damn the evidence stacked against it and contradictions within.

Like it or not, people who went to prayer house or religious gatherings socialise more than people who stay indoor and only interact with limited amount of people.

While this statement is true, its also true even if you’re not religious. I was not raised religious at all but always got together with family/cousins/friends nearly every weekend.

… they tend to be happier considering the fact human are social animal and the feeling of loneliness due to lack of human to human interaction is the build-in alarm system to warn us against solitude. It’s this reason religion is so success because it’s enforce togetherness and make you feels like you’re part of something.

Kinda. This study [0] of 3,942 19-year-old in Sweden put it best:

… religion and religiousness per se have little impact on happiness. In particular, we find that social networks tend to be positively associated with happiness, and that this effect is driven by co-organizational membership among friends.

So while religious upbringing can force people to socialize, that doesn’t mean the lack of religiosity will have a negative impact as the lack of religion does not dictate that you will not congregate/gather with peers/friends/family and feel the same level of “belonging” to a group - even if its not a well defined group.

If we’re going into a utopian world where human doesn’t need to work anymore and social security is guaranteed, religious will be something even bigger than today.

I’d say this claim is unfounded. Why must we turn to religion? There are clubs, groups, meetups, friends, events and niches of never ending categories that easily fulfill the need of “belonging” to a group - it’s actually one thing humans are really good at - forming “in” and “out” groups.

Source: [0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275143707_Faith_or_Social_Foci_Happiness_Religion_and_Social_Networks_in_Sweden

Seriously! Maybe he’s trying to play the honesty card in hopes that people see it as being transparent and we should trust him, but this is admission of guilt and willful negligence that lead to death. The guy should be charged and locked up.

about time?

That’s the one. How’d you find it? I always struggle. Is it linked anywhere on their official site?

Thank you. not all *@lemmy.ml users are ignorant science deniers.

Serious question, because I get a similar “TIL” on my mastodon thread and saw this and had a similar thought - would you prefer to see no “TIL” content posted by bots? I don’t have any stake, but they do provide 3 benefits that I personally enjoy, as much as I’d prefer it was “organically” generated content:

1. Some posts are insightful, others I can just ignore/move on.
2. It provides a way to interact with the broader “fediverse” community about certain topics.
3. Helps avoid visiting sites like Reddit by virtue of having less content here and looking elsewhere.

More on topic - here’s a pic of the couple, for anyone interested:

I’m gonna need some evidence before I believe Google isn’t analyzing all the data that passes through it unencrypted.

Unlike Telegram, Signal doesn’t allow researchers to make sure that their GitHub code is the same code that is used in the Signal app run on users’ iPhones.

A few things to keep in mind:

1. Apple’s build process makes reproducible builds near-impossible.
   • All the effort Telegram went through and it doesn’t completely validate the entire build - there are components that are not fully reproducible [0] and as we saw with the recent XZ backdoor, these could potentially be leveraged to hide a backdoor while claiming to be secure - so was anything gained other than “these things are validated but this black box, which could contain malware, was not validated because we can’t check them”?
2. Developing Signal is difficult.
   • Signal is developed by a small team and has to prioritize and coordinate efforts to deliver results - look at how long usernames took or even private contact discovery [1] - nearly 3 years (as a preview) after Signal was created.
   • Signal has no built-in telemetry, any issues are not automatically logged and reported. The end user has to manually submit debug logs and provide an adequate description of the issue for the devs to even attempt to understand what the issue is and how to fix it. Telegram may also have this issue in their very limited private chats, but as most chats aren’t E2EE, they can already see all your traffic anyways, making things significantly easier in terms of development speed.

Considering the two points above, it’s not irrational to come to state the following:

1. Signal has been prioritizing a fully end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) platform that shares zero data with anyone but the intended recipient and this decision has slowed down their development speed. Non-E2EE chat solutions have existed for decades and can iterate and progress significantly faster as they don’t have to work on difficult privacy/security/encryption related issues.
2. Telegram has not been prioritizing a fully E2EE platform and by default do collect most of their user’s data. This makes it much easier to develop Telegram and is why E2EE group messages don’t even exist on the platform - the Telegram devs have spent more time talking about privacy and security than actually implementing it

Given the two statements above, assuming both projects need to balance resource constraints, it’s safe to conclude, :

• Signal has spent zero effort working on reproducible builds on iOS because its impossible to completely reproduce a build and would take development resources working on enhancing the platform for minimal gains, as Telegram has proven [0]. Signal has instead placed their efforts on reproducible builds on a platform where it is possible [2].
• Telegram, instead of working towards implementing security and privacy by default, have decided to work on security theater by working on reproducible builds for iOS that are not even completely reproducible.

Signal refused to add reproducible builds for iOS, closing a GitHub request from the community.

It was closed because they use Github for bug reports, not feature requests [4]. The dev even pointed them to the right place. That said, I do agree it would be great if there was some progress made on this front for Signal, but realize its a huge effort and may be best avoided for now as the iOS client still needs some “catching up” to do, compared to the Android version.

And WhatsApp doesn’t even publish the code of its apps, so all their talk about “privacy” is an even more obvious circus trick 💤

Agreed.

Telegram is the only massively popular messaging service that allows everyone to make sure that all of its apps indeed use the same open source code that is published on Github. For the past ten years, Telegram Secret Chats have remained the only popular method of communication that is verifiably private 💪

Telegram collects all your data by default in a way that’s accessible to anyone with enough privileges to their infrastructure.

[0] https://core.telegram.org/reproducible-builds#step-6-comparing-the-appstore-build-and-the-version-built-in-the

[1] https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/

[2] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/tree/main/reproducible-builds

[3] https://github.com/ali-fareed/darwin-containers/commits/main/

[4] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/641#issuecomment-1276308990

I would suggest you give this feedback directly through here: https://whispersystems.discoursehosting.net/

For anyone considering Session messenger:

The Session developers dropped Perfect Forward Secrecy because it would be hard to work around it.

First things first, let’s talk about what we’re leaving behind: Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) and deniability.

Source: https://getsession.org/session-protocol-explained

In plain English, they dropped a security feature for their convenience to the detriment of their users’ security.

For anyone unsure what PFS provides:

The value of forward secrecy is that it protects past communication.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_secrecy

The Session devs also claim:

Session provides protections against these types of threats in other ways — through fully anonymous account creation, onion routing, and metadata minimisation, for example.

Reading between the lines, we can interpret that as introducing security through obscurity, which is generally considered bad practice - https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/656.html

You’re looking at it through the eyes of a competent user. It’s obvious to us. It’s not trivial to the general population. Just ask most iOS users what the difference is between green/blue bubbles - they have no idea other than “one sucks and means they use Android”