I've had friends - they really felt like friends at one point - tell me that they don't want to know me anymore when they learned I'm an atheist. One told me that "without God there's no morality", so they can't trust in anything I say. Just like that. One told me that atheists should be branded or marked somehow, so that they can't pose as "good people". To my face. When I mentioned that history knows such policies, and that they almost always lead to massacres, pogroms, and things like the Holocaust, the person didn't see any problem with that. At all.
Beliefs, especially strongly held ones, warp a person and their perception of reality. This influences their actions, and those actions can hit you hard. If a father "100% believes" homosexuals are worse than dirt, and a son firmly believes he loves his boyfriend, that's how a "quarrel" will arise. Most people agree to "live and let live" in principle, but when it comes to details, it's almost always "but we don't want X or Y in this neighborhood".
You're really fortunate to have only met people who hold beliefs that are not in direct opposition to your continued existence in this world or in their presence. However, you need to be aware that there are beliefs that are more incompatible with yours, and that there are people who hold them - and that you will quarrel (or worse - much worse) when you happen to meet.
I would say that you are very unlucky. I know people of multiple different religions, and atheists, and agnostics, and people of no particular belief and I have never known anyone to make a comment like that about anyone else.
I know many families whose members follow multiple different religions or none in multiple combinations.
> If a father "100% believes" homosexuals are worse than dirt, and a son firmly believes he loves his boyfriend, that's how a "quarrel" will arise.
Yes, but that is atypical. It most commonly happens either with American evangelicals, or in the context of very conservative societies in certain places (e.g. in multiple African and Asian countries).
American evangelicals seem to have a peculiar obsession with homosexuality as some sort of uniquely bad sin - perhaps to deflect attention from what the Bible and Christian tradition have to say about materialism and wealth. Traditional Christianity is quite non-judgemental and optimistic - e.g. the belief, or at least the hope, at all or almost all of humanity will be redeemed.
> To my face. When I mentioned that history knows such policies, and that they almost always lead to massacres, pogroms, and things like the Holocaust
The Holocaust was carried out by people who had to invent their own religions (their variant of neo-paganism and "positive Christianity") to have religions that could be reconciled with their ideology. Their ideas were more rooted in "racial science" than anything else.
> or in the context of very conservative societies in certain places (e.g. in multiple African and Asian countries).
Also in a few European ones, I can personally assure you :) It's fortunately (much) less common today than it was 25-30 years ago, but the truth is, everybody everywhere has their own hellhole, and living there could indeed be seen as unlucky. Atheism in a country where 96% of the people adhere to folk Catholicism (outside cities, that would probably be 110%...) is a hard sell.
> The Holocaust was carried out by people who had to invent their own religions (their variant of neo-paganism and "positive Christianity") to have religions that could be reconciled with their ideology. Their ideas were more rooted in "racial science" than anything else.
Some of them thought they had to invent or resurrect such religions to sell their movement to the masses, yes. That movement's actual religion was that ideology and racial "science"; it kind of was its own religion. (Not that this is exclusive to nazism / fascism; the same goes for communism.)
> I've had friends - they really felt like friends at one point - tell me that they don't want to know me anymore when they learned I'm an atheist. One told me that "without God there's no morality", so they can't trust in anything I say. Just like that. One told me that atheists should be branded or marked somehow, so that they can't pose as "good people".
That doesn't actually lead to a quarrel any more than having a friend saying they want to stop being friends for any other reason.
IOW, if a friend wants to stop being your friend, does the reason matter? I don't argue with people who don't want to be friends anymore (regardless of the reason)
> If a father "100% believes" homosexuals are worse than dirt, and a son firmly believes he loves his boyfriend, that's how a "quarrel" will arise.
I can certainly see a quarrel arising from that because ... well ... what are you going to do? Stop showing up at family events because your boyfriend is not accepted? Cut off all ties with your family because your boyfriend is not accepted?
This "quarrel", though, is not like a normal quarrel about differing beliefs; this actually has an impact on the ability to remain part of the family.[1]
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[1] TBH, though, if it's only the father in this case who objects, simply not showing up at any event he is part of will usually be sufficient to get the rest of the family to pressure him into at least keeping quiet if you do show up, boyfriend in tow.
If the father is willing to keep from having outbursts, that more than sufficient to not quarrel. You don't need to man to believe that it isn't immoral. You don't need him to accept it. You just need him to shut up about it.
> You're really fortunate to have only met people who hold beliefs that are not in direct opposition to your continued existence in this world or in their presence.
What makes you think that?
I'm non-white, grew up in apartheid South Africa; in 2026, even transgenders in first world countries are treated better than my race was in 1986.
If you think systemic discrimination is bad, try living under legislated discrimination.
> However, you need to be aware that there are beliefs that are more incompatible with yours, and that there are people who hold them - and that you will quarrel (or worse - much worse) when you happen to meet.
No, I will not. If they are morally against my existence, let them go vote for laws to that end. I'm not gonna stand there arguing with them about it.
I'm sorry. I assumed too much about you, and I'm a bit ashamed for sounding so patronizing in my previous post. You seem wiser than me, and you're definitely wiser than I was back when it happened: I tried to defend myself. That's how the quarrel happened: I believed that I cared about morality, so I didn't want to just accept the accusation that I'm inherently immoral. That led to a few more shouts than it should; but as your sibling commenter says, at such points emotions tend to run high. I could have just walked away, and that would have been wiser. Somehow, I didn't manage to.
> What makes you think that?
Because you said you're "not even able to fathom how this is possible" - honestly, I still don't quite understand that sentence, especially after what you wrote above. It looks like you're advocating stoicism and disengagement, and I agree that it's a good strategy. But I can't believe you never felt the anger of being perceived through a lens of a belief that makes you into someone you're not - and that you "can't fathom" how that anger can get the better of you, to make you "stand there arguing with them about it". I get that you're able to rein in those emotions and simply walk away from situations like that; but I can't bring myself to believe you never felt that anger at all.
> You don't need him to accept it. You just need him to shut up about it.
Yes, that's rational. It's a way to live on without turning all family meetings into war. But maybe that particular war is worth fighting? Maybe, through countless battles over the Christmas tables, society changes course? Maybe by fighting against the belief that you're something lesser than human, by turning your life into a miserable one, you're paving a way for younger family members or the next generation to live their lives a little better than you could?
I don't know, to be honest. I'm not some activist. But I think I can understand people who decide to "stand there and argue". It's probably less rational and often leads to quarrels, but I'm almost sure that beliefs that are never challenged won't ever be changed. That's why I found your "I can't fathom" line a bit strange; sorry for overreacting :)
Is missing out a variable. It's an action. An action e.g. it has been brought up.
Idea + idea2 + action
Merely encountering someone with an idea different to one we hold shouldn't lead to a breakdown in communication. It needs an action to e.g. discuss the idea, and this action is controllable. Most of the time we do not quarrel with people even though they are different than us.
Often we are not the ones who can control this, but we can control our reactions and stop participating in the quarrel should one start. (That's easier said then done as its all emotions by this point!)
There is a growing school of thought in academia and in some radical groups that says that we shouldn't stop participating in quarrels and that we should let our anger out and voice heard. This idea says that any call to understand the other (empathy) is therefore toxic and harmful and that it's a choice which suppresses our important story. (Usually we just say they are impossible to understand and so "other" them, which leads to de-humanisation as only humans can be understood). Often our pain needs recognition but to reject the idea of understanding another seems to lead to a worse world in any reality.
Now whilst to deny understanding is utterly fundamentally wrong in any and all rational belief systems, there is actually some truth to the idea! It will cause pain and effort to understand another. It does weaken one's own ideas and certainty about things. If I try to understand someone who opposes me on some important idea that I have, it will change me somehow. Maybe I will have less attachment to the idea, maybe I will find other ideas, maybe I will reject the idea, maybe I will not. These side effects of understanding can be dangerous.
It's Von Daniken's books that lead me here:
Why do people think funny things. What are the processes to believe things? What are the processes and ideas which keep people from changing their beliefs. What do people really desire? How are people manipulated and how do they manipulate others? How can people in a cult come out of a cult? How do cults work? How do people change the ideas inside them? How do I tell what I believe in? What does "ideology" mean? How can I tell where what I believe in comes from? How can I talk about different ideas with others?
> There is a growing school of thought in academia and in some radical groups that says that we shouldn't stop participating in quarrels and that we should let our anger out and voice heard.
I think the problem is in wanting to convince the other party to change their mind, except that humans untrained in presenting arguments just switch to campaigning instead.
Academia has always been where new ideas are seeded, germinate and flourish; this means that a lot of campaigns for change come from academia. It always has, probably always will.
The problem we have had recently (Moreso in the last 10 years or so) is that academia itself has tried shutting itself off from ideas; it's why there's safe spaces, and why people have been prevented from presenting talks at campuses, etc.
This new approach is resulting in a lot of "Nope, we won't even discuss it, nor will we allow you to discuss it to third parties".
Leading us to be in a thread about von Daniken, making fun of people who have a belief that meets a higher bar for evidence than the clear majority of the world.
The people making fun of the theories aren't even self-aware enough to realise that they interact daily with the rest of humanity who have even wilder beliefs.
> How can I tell where what I believe in comes from?
I believe (hehe) that this is where Cogito Ergo Sum came from.
Time. CPython compiles in a few minutes on an underpowered laptop. I don't recall last time I compiled GCC, but I had to compile LLVM and Clang recently, and it took significantly longer than "a few minutes" on a high-end desktop.
If a language has a well-designed collections library (think Smalltalk and derivatives, not C++'s STL), the difference between 1 and 0-based indexing is hard even to notice, much less lead to "less elegant" code. Between Stream and Collection subclasses, the API is rich enough that using indexes is reserved for very low-level operations that you seldom use in non-FFI, non-VM code.
What you say is true for languages that don't have collections, real arrays, or vectors, only memory ranges. This is the case of C, but not Fortran, Pascal, or Ada. So yeah, if all you have is a hammer, you'd better use 0-based nails; hopefully, though, we'll allow for non-hammer tools in popular toolboxes sometime this century.
> I'd like to believe there is some correlation between proper punctuation and the quality of the answer.
I'd love to believe that, but it's unrealistic in 2025, given all the correctly punctuated slop that brings negative value (wastes time, gives no info) to readers everywhere on the Internet. As much as I hate to admit it, I think this ship has sailed.
> because it's closer to how I think them — usually in something like the mental form of full sentences
Yeah, I'm the same. However, I'm also very aware that not everyone thinks like that.
I'm sensitive to sounds, and most of my thinking has to be vocalized (in the background) to make sense to me. It's incredibly hard for me to read non-Latin scripts, for example, because even if I learned the alphabet, I don't recognize the word easily before piecing together all the letter clusters that need to be spoken specially. (I especially hate the thing in Russian where "o" is either "o" or "a" depending on how many of those are in the word. It slows my reading of Cyrillic script down to a crawl.)
Many people - probably most of them, even - don't need that. Those who think in pictures, for example, have it much easier to solve Sudoku or read foreign scripts. They don't need that much linguistic baggage to think. At the same time, when they write, they often struggle to form coherent sentences above a certain length, because they have to encode their thought process (that can be parallel and 3D) into a 1D sequence of tokens.
I don't know whether this distinction between types of thinking has any scientific basis - I'm using it as a crutch to explain some observable phenomena in human-to-human communication. I think I picked up the notion from some pseudo-scientific books I read as a teen (I was fascinated by "neuro-linguistic programming," which tends to list three distinct types of thinking: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic). It unexpectedly finds applications in human-computer interfaces, too, but LLMs have made it even easier to notice. While "the three NLP modalities" can well be bullshit, there seems to be something that differs between people, and that's where threads like this one seem to come from.
Isn't it the other way around - people, especially when young, like to imagine themselves as someone special, so the media give them the perspective of the most special individuals they can find? Being a king, on its own, may not qualify - but the popular shows are rarely about "just" kings, it's mostly about ones who did something impressive (if evil; though I agree that last part tends to be edited out).
In fantasy literature, a hero is almost certainly either a prince or at least of royal blood; in sci-fi, he's at least a progeny of a war hero or great inventor. Even in romance slice-of-life, you'll get mysterious amnesiacs, rich CEOs children, shrewd nerds with underworld connections, etc. much more often than statistically possible - nobody wants to read about "normal people", not really (when we think we do, it's just the author writing so well that he convinced us his "normal people" are different!)
I can't rule out the possibility that this natural tendency is being exploited and manipulated in some cases, but the stories have always been about heroes, long before anyone thought of erasing anyone else's class consciousness.
I mean, It's the same as consciousness of ourselves in the present.
There are pieces of media that present the real struggles of the average worker. But not that many. Many films are instead invested in the ephemeral (and ever lasting) questions of reality, fiction(fantasy/action/drama), or inane or politically convenient biopics (if not totally altered).
You will occasionally see a nod to "struggling to pay bills" or some mundane romanticized struggle, stuff like that, but almost never a picture of what its actually like.
For the few popular films that do show it, and this is my critique of most media, they never compel the viewer to ANSWER the question of why this happens. This is because to present the real working class life is also to critique it and the conditions that create it.
The working class life reveals it's own critique. And that critique is not something that media owners like because it puts into question the whole status quo. It is INHERENTLY politically charged content.
So they avoid painting a real picture of average people. This lack of real exposure is a heavy influence on our ideas of reality. And essentially the viewers take this image and runs with it. The viewers ends up not learning HOW the world works, they start to see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires", and end up seeing society as a pool of ever-permanent social mobility, its just not their turn yet.
This is, essentially, the same thing they do with the past.
And I do not have anything against "special people" in media. This can be helpful, even, if done appropriately, by being sure to present kids with the REAL AND RELEVANT paths on how to attain this specialty (if it isn't real and relevant its just escapism). What I critique is the role that medias self-reflection plays in the world and in the past that is problematic.
To come back to the actual post: Who originally started to view cottage living or working class farm life as cute and WHY? Was it truly our grandmas and grandpas? Or was it people compelled and organized to sell historical-fantasy books?
Kagi uses Yandex to improve search results for relevant queries. That's all they do.
As a company providing the service of web search, Kagi should do whatever it takes to improve search results. I imagine Yandex is the biggest and most complete index of Russian-language content - not using it would make the search results worse. The fact that Kagi still cross-references other indexes and allows users to downgrade specific results provides a check on propaganda content.
It's OK to have an opinion, and it's OK to dislike Kagi because it doesn't have the same opinion. It's wrong to mischaracterize what Kagi does, using wording that strongly suggests actions way more nefarious than giving a few dollars to a Russian company in exchange for some (anonymized) API calls.
As long as you still offer an easy way to highlight the button text.
Triple-click (at least in FF on Linux) highlights paragraphs or other block-elements contents; it should be allowed on things where a single-click does navigation. This would be very out of the way for normal users, but would allow easily and quickly highlighting (and copying) parts of the interface.
Also, to save any further puzzling: In practice the very fast sort you use, even if it is labelled "Quicksort" probably doesn't actually do this "all the way down" even though that's the strict algorithm.
They'll have a highly optimised small sort and use that whenever sorting very small things. So e.g. IPN Sort the Rust stdlib unstable sort will do this for 16 items, even though for a big slice it'd quick sort them by default, once it's down to say 10 items they're going to the specialised small sort.
Any serious "fast" sort in 2025 will be a hybrid, using several of these classic sorting algortihms, plus other insights to produce the overall best solution to their problem on modern hardware.
I've had friends - they really felt like friends at one point - tell me that they don't want to know me anymore when they learned I'm an atheist. One told me that "without God there's no morality", so they can't trust in anything I say. Just like that. One told me that atheists should be branded or marked somehow, so that they can't pose as "good people". To my face. When I mentioned that history knows such policies, and that they almost always lead to massacres, pogroms, and things like the Holocaust, the person didn't see any problem with that. At all.
Beliefs, especially strongly held ones, warp a person and their perception of reality. This influences their actions, and those actions can hit you hard. If a father "100% believes" homosexuals are worse than dirt, and a son firmly believes he loves his boyfriend, that's how a "quarrel" will arise. Most people agree to "live and let live" in principle, but when it comes to details, it's almost always "but we don't want X or Y in this neighborhood".
You're really fortunate to have only met people who hold beliefs that are not in direct opposition to your continued existence in this world or in their presence. However, you need to be aware that there are beliefs that are more incompatible with yours, and that there are people who hold them - and that you will quarrel (or worse - much worse) when you happen to meet.
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