lckdscl [they/them]

I self-identify as an nblob, a non-binary little object.

  • 7 Posts
  • 326 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Welcome to the club!

    The build sounds good, and yes a little bit overkill. I host way more on much older gear, comfortably. For “homelab” stuff I wouldn’t buy a Xeon like the other commenter said lmao, you’re not going to like your bills. That’s way too overkill as you’re mostly likely going to be memory-bound, not CPU-bound.

    Just for reference, I have ~65 containers running and using ~8 GB RAM. I started with 8 GB and added another 8 GB to have a bigger buffer, and to try out new stuff from time to time.

    In general, don’t worry about hardware too much, get what is within your budget to build up knowledge and skills. You will figure out what you need later down the line.

    Also, I prefer Adguard Home over Pi Hole, and check out Vaultwarden, the community Rust version of Bitwarden as well.





  • I don’t get it either. I’m from one of these countries that celebrate the Lunar New Year but live in the imperial core, and I’ve been to parties or gatherings with a mix of East asians celebrating and I don’t think anyone there took issue with it being called Lunar New Year as a quick reference to the different holidays around the same time. You can phone your parents and use your own lingo then but when returning to English it really is no big deal?

    I get the “Chinese” in CNY being a boogeyman thing for western whitewashed people, but personally as someone from East Asia I think Hexbear who think this is 100% a Sinophobic thing should log off and go to a new year party.







  • Empiricism is a narrower concept. It requires one to setup a system which defines “evidence”, “verification”, and a criterion for “true knowledge”, and probably more. Afaik, Marx did not busy himself with this, and both him and Engels did not like the static manner in which British empiricism treats knowledge and reality.

    While this “materialism” might sound positivistic, it isn’t just merely about empirical evidence (where do raw senses stop and interpretive perception starts?) but rather it’s more about aligning and rationalising our cognition as to make sense of everything (myself and everything else); to encompass as much of the whole and not only selective parts of it that bode well to our feelings and will-to-power (like superstitions or irrationalism, or fascism).

    At this point I’ve strayed far from existence and “true meaning”, which you’ve discussed under the CW section. You mentioned physicalism and lost of “meaning”, and idealism, or turning to the primacy of minds, as an existential escape from this. Here, you come round to justify meaning with inferences from seeing others. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that, but some will take issue in analytical philosophy of minds and the like, with all kinds of problems: hard problem of consciousness, problem of other minds (solipsism) etc.

    You’ve mentioned meaning quite a lot that I think you should additionally look at phenomenology for the existential question, maybe with Merleau-Ponty, then all kinds of feminist philosophy, metaphilosophy, hermeneutics, philosophy of history etc.

    I have found this top down approach more empowering than looking for answers to life within the rigid framework of (often white men’s) Anglo philosophy that, from bottom up, relies too heavily on the existential quantifier, a literal logical notation, to more fully deliver meaning to life.


  • I haven’t looked through the paper linked yet, but I think that their definition of materialism develops through a negation of Hegel’s system, since M&Es’ “world systems” are heavily taken from the systems Hegel posed himself.

    I think a close reading of how the structure of dialectics comes to being and develops through Hegel and subsequently through M&E will show that this dichotomy is more about one’s orientation within the domain of natural and social sciences as knowledge machines for understanding reality rather than strictly about epistemology or ontology (it is in fact a bit of both).

    As an aside, these latter categories and frameworks about what’s real (i.e. the existence quantifier in logic) are framed by rigid analytic traditions that took off in Anglo philosophy where philosophers agonize in circles over what constitutes reality. Here, materialism is often denoted as “metaphysical realism”, i.e. the mind independent stuff. Things-in-themselves as notions are brainteasees and an analytical struggle with this will not help any revolution whatsover. Social facts and social reality are real to us, whethe electrons are negatively charged in and of themselves is really intellectual brainmelt M&E rightly stayed away from. (For a cool way out of this hellscape, check out ontological structural realism.)

    In more continental-leaning proses I find philosophers often prefer to de-emphasise such heavy categorizations; you can say the point of German idealism is to establish connections between what’s in our mind and what’s in front of us, rather than to separate the two.

    Back to Hegel and M&E. It seems like materialism is the recognition that nature as constantly developing over time has always been changing, and will change forever. As such, there is no need for a beginning or end in an endless flow (and thus no creation, no Absolute Idea or God). To align our minds and knowledge to this nature means to recognize that science is a process of finding present understandings and synthesis, which can over time become too abstract and divorced from new development (it becomes a dogma), but then also recognizing the need to make concrete new ideas from new development, which is akin to progress in science. “Materialism” would be the constant strive to produce interpretations in accordance with nature’s ebbs and flows instead of imposing what we think it should be. If “idealism” is in tension with this, then it fails to recognize the process I just described, like imposing principles and laws as universals or as static and unchanging. Very undialectical.

    This brings me onto “ontology materialism”, which, to answer your question, I think they, or at least Engels, never intended to understand “matter” as an essence/substratum. Anyway, I think dialectical science is against a universal appraisal of Cartesian reductionism which intends to unify all sciences under one lineage (physics -> chemistry -> biology and so on). I think it’s still fine to say events are caused but what kind of substrata things belong to aren’t really a part of M&E’s materialism.