The letter aims to maintain the status quo of the project of the Church.

The world is shifting under the Vatican's feet and the crappy system they once lorded over is done.

It's time for change, maybe people don't need to work anymore and maybe people should aim to reengineer humanity and eliminate illness, old age, suffering and vulnerability. We can fundamentally change how society distributes wealth.

Some of the arguments are rich coming from the Church: being scolded about centralization of power, claiming truth and shared information is a common good, and consider the history of the Church in their anti-war declarations.

The most astonishing thing in this letter is the pope declaring that modern technology has rendered Aquinas's just-war theory out of date.

Is traveling to Tokyo just to sprint across the Shibuya Scramble for a slightly less-crowded Instagram selfie really a model of the good life? Should someone like Zuckerberg have this level of control over the activities and minds of the human race? Is Mr. Beast a role model for children by industrializing the exploitation of human virtue?

Human social pressure and follower mindsets are part of the human experience but systematically gaming those instincts in real-time so money flows to a social media company at all costs in some strange digital sharecropping scheme is what’s new and the hierarchy of others trying to capture a small piece of that pie creates these distortions.

States have broad power to do what is being feared in the thread and haven’t already and to think that they’re waiting for this final piece of the puzzle to enact some insane regime is laughable. They could do that right now without the internet at all.

Social media is probably not healthy and kids should probably not be on social media. Age verification and age limits for social media will be a good thing for kids.

Instead of fear mongering, finding a middle ground, like governments adding some rules and protections on how this information or system is used is probably a better response.

I might be in the minority, but I think incorporating an identity layer into the internet itself should happen with the right protections for users and should have happened at the beginning of the net and is probably a result of lack of foresight by the creators of ARPANET.

Let's say for the sake of the argument it turns out that the brain tunes in to some quantum-level forces for computation and there are some other side effects to this that add to the mystery of what we call consciousness, it effectively changes nothing about this picture.

Humans or animals in general may be unique in how they accomplish consciousness but it is unlikely that it's the only pathway. To put it another way, even if humans and animals are special in their method, it doesn't mean we are special in our result.

Meditation is not a tool or a medicine for mental health issues.

The most dangerous element of this cycle is how casually contemporary politics has embraced the noble lie. It twists a classical philosophical concept into a cynical excuse for leaders to deceive the public for our own supposed good. Often sanitized in intro political science courses as a pragmatic reality of governing, in practice, it functions as a corrosive mechanism for elites to control narratives and dodge accountability.

It has never worked, and it never will.

I remember a philosophy professor telling me we're studying philosophia, not philaletheia, and that really struck me. Truth has not been the primary objective of this equation for over 3,000 years. We desperately need Popper's demand for an open, truth-seeking society to break us out of this historicist trap.

Today, the money-making side has staged a hostile takeover.

The attention conundrum is just a symptom of a deeper financialization. Multi-billion dollar companies have turned profit into a data-driven science – analytically turning the screws on every script, product, and interaction to optimize for extraction. This is the destruction of the art of making things.

The real issue is that you cannot compete with an entity that has no respect for the art. When a platform replaces the integrity of the work with the logic of a metric, the independent creator is no longer an underdog – they are functionally excluded. You can be the best at any art, but in a system that prioritizes sheer extraction over excellence, your craft effectively ceases to exist.

Ultimately, Apple is responsible here but I don't think this is an intractable issue baked into the software. And yeah, maintenance is required despite what the perception might be. Apple even offers great support services for people who are not able to do it themselves.

You could try installing Gboard (https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/gboard-the-google-keyboard/id1...), or SwiftKey (https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/microsoft-swiftkey-ai-keyboard...)...and there are probably other options.

It may be even more obvious, but there are settings in general/keyboard that you can toggle.

I noticed a bit of a shift in the stock typing experience, but I adapted and it's fine.

There was a study in 2021 that found that drinking more than six cups of coffee a day was associated with a 53% increased risk of dementia and smaller total brain volume.

https://cardiologycoffee.com/blogs/news/new-study-says-coffe...

The technical execution is just as lazy. While some magazines are tailored, many are just flat, low-res PDFs that look terrible on the high-end Retina screens Apple sells. Worst of all, Apple had the leverage to revolutionize a struggling industry; instead, they settled for a half-baked aggregator.

It’s a toxic mix of Apple tropes that simply weren't thought through. The ads are the cherry on the cake.

Ultimately, the author forces an unnecessary cognitive burden on the reader by removing a simple form of navigation; in that regard, it feels like a form of disrespect.

By adding a third electrode to replace the oxygen every time one is smashed, you maintain a perfect balance and eliminate that suction. Because the room stays full, the sensor no longer relies on the speed of the oxygen rushing in; it simply measures the steady state of the oxygen already there. Even if gunk gets on the window, the sensor won't be starved of a reading. It might take a few extra seconds for the levels to settle, but the final number will be 100% accurate because the sensor is no longer emptying its own room to get a count.

The modern interest in Stoicism in my opinion is a move toward a secular version of the Christian experience. Modern Stoicism retains the Christian emphasis on submission and endurance while ignoring the superstitious elements inherent in Stoic physics, such as providential fatalism.

If your objective is to maintain a state of functioning passivity, Stoicism is the effective solution (but I wouldn't recommend it).