I’m many things. Here’s perhaps a few worth knowing.

I’m:

  • an M.A. in #Philosophy
  • a teacher, mostly #teaching #academic #writing
  • a committed #FOSS user
  • a #Fediverse enthusiast

If you’re into Mastodon, you can also find me @UdeRecife@firefish.social.

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  • 47 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 30th, 2023

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  • Sorry if I mistake your intention. If that’s the case, it’s just me making a wrong guess.

    You’re probably misreading this.

    I authored THE NAME. If you prefer, I’m the name-giver, the author in this sense.

    Linus is the namer and the creator of that kernel.

    As creator he is by right allowed to name his creation whatever he likes. Just like me, as the cat ‘entity creator as a pet’ am allowed to name it whatever I like.

    No outsiders input required. You get now what I mean by author?

    Whatever your reply may be, let me thank you already for engaging. It’s nice to be pressured to explain something in simpler, more accessible terms.




  • Maybe you’ll like it more under this new guise: I named my cat Goofyball. But since Linnaeus named the species Felis catus, you remind me that my cat’s name should ackchyually be Felis catus/Goofyball. To which I reply, very appropriately, ‘it’s MY cat’. So Goofyball it is.

    Understand now the authority argument? Authority in the sense of authorial, having an author.




  • Philosophically, the premise is flawed. Best life… according to whom?

    I mean, the best life for a slug or a fly won’t cut it for you. I can imagine a fly being born in such conditions that from that fly’s perspective it would be ‘the best life’ imaginable… for a fly.

    There’s this passage from Roger Crisp’s Mill on Utilitarianism, where he proposes this thought experiment. There one reads:

    “You are a soul in heaven waiting to be allocated a life on Earth. It is late Friday afternoon, and you watch anxiously as the supply of available lives dwindles. When your turn comes, the angel in charge offers you a choice between two lives, that of the composer Joseph Haydn and that of an oyster. Besides composing some wonderful music and influencing the evolution of the symphony, Haydn will meet with success and honour in his own lifetime, be cheerful and popular, travel and gain much enjoyment from field sports. The oyster’s life is far less exciting. Though this is rather a sophisticated oyster, its life will consist only of mild sensual pleasure, rather like that experienced by humans when floating very drunk in a warm bath. When you request the life of Haydn, the angel sighs, ‘I’ll never get rid of this oyster life. It’s been hanging around for ages. Look, I’ll offer you a special deal. Haydn will die at the age of seventy-seven. But I’ll make the oyster life as long as you like…’”

    So, a pig or Haydn? A fly or your own life right now?



  • My aside:

    In every community I see this. There are always folks trying to narrow the community to some cut and dry descriptors—which for them are always obvious.

    Sometimes the jab is perhaps intended as a joke. But to my reading it’s always a trope, namely the tired fallacy of taking a part as the whole.

    Either way, it’s myopic. In any internet community, we’re always bound to narrowly see what’s happening. Because:

    • We can only see the posters, never the lurkers—which far exceed the former;
    • Posters, by virtue of taking the time to post, are most often than not highly opinionated;
    • Our reading is always selective. We’re either misguided by the way the comments are sorted, by our mood at the moment, by chance, or simply because we’re really bad at reading;
    • Our reading is always biased. Either by our mood, our current situation in life, our upbringing, our milieu, whatever;
    • the list goes on and on and on.

    This results in a very reductive view that, although very teasing because very personal and idiosyncratic, is ultimately an exercise in futility. To those already biased, it simply supplies them with fodder to confirm what they already believed.

    From afar, it’s just noise. Any view on what the community is is but a poor reflection of what the community ultimately is.