2026-03-12 21:00:00
Post last updated 2 hours, 39 minutes ago
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I don't intend to have a fight over this, and I'll try to keep my ideas related to the person's text, not the person themself.
So, somewhat expected, my latest post sparked some fireworks and although I don't mind (people can disagree with or dislike what they read here), I'd like to have some clarifications regarding re-chunkofcoal's reply
Let's begin, shall we?
One of the most unsympathetic posts I've read on Bear.
I mean, there was a warning at the beginning of the post. It's fine if you disagree or dislike what I write, but I find it a bit weird to complain that after being cautioned about the content you still feel the need to complain about it, especially since I don't feel I was calling for public executions.
A headache is not worth cursing your entire existence over, or holding a gripe against "some religious people" and God. Which by the way, what do you mean by some religious people? Just be honest and say Christians.
I think I'm free to curse whatever I want, ain't I? I'll write more at the end about the victim complex Christians seem to have.
Where is your proof even that "some religious people" believe in perfect design? Or push a belief that because every human is supposedly "built perfect", that when you aren't it's immediately your own fault, even with ailments out of your own control?
I don't even know how to respond to this. I should've kept a log of every time I'd heard religious people say X or Y and link it in my post? What difference would it make, because without faith (hehe) that I really experienced it, you could've claimed even then that I just made up a bunch of stuff.
I have read online and even heard in person many outrageous (to me) things said by someone religious, or how many times they tried to shove, against my will, shit down my throat. That's why I added "some" there, to indicate that not necessarily all of them are like this. I thought it would be a truism to specially mention it in that post. If you consider yourself a good Christian, cheers to you; the post was not about you then.
Let's make this clear. Christians believe that every human is "made in God's image".
Theoretically, yes; in practice, not really, as the majority of people bend whatever religion they have to accommodate their own beliefs about the world. I like how Nietzsche put it: there was only one Christian and he died on the cross.1
Adam and Eve were the only perfect humans and they sinned, making themselves imperfect and their descendants the same. It's that simple.
I don't like to say this, but in my opinion this is a perfect example of an illogical statement, because how can you be perfect and sin?
I have to ask, why are you so quick to blame God and "religious people" when you don't even know the entirety of how your mind, body and soul work?
I think I live one of the most average lives possible: don't drink, don't smoke, do some sport every once in a while, try to do some good here and there, yadda yadda. I personally think that annoyances like the ones I was complaining about are, in part at least, due to bad luck. Shit just happens. But if there were a God, especially one in the likeness portrayed in the Bible, it would make sense (to me, again, to me) to moan about such an illogical thing: to inflict unnecessary pain or discomfort for being less stressed than normal.
I don't know where you saw that I was "blaming" religious people, though. I was making a little bit of fun about the contradictions of what some of them believe regarding perfect design and a scenario where that makes no sense.
Furthermore, I find it really funny at the conclusion of your post
Thanks, I was intentional about the post having a quasi-comedic tone.
I'd like to call bluff on that. Since you felt your judgement was pressing enough to let the world know about it. The problem was over and yet you want to whinge about it more - it's almost like you are using your own ailment as an excuse to be a dick to an entire group of people for their beliefs. Now it makes sense that you wouldn't specify which religion you were judging.
I had the impression that a blog is, or can be, akin to a journal. Again, given I don't feel I called for public executions or anything like that, it should be fine to write whatever's on my mind. Also, the last part is a bit hypocritical. Christians have long been, and in some places still are, dicks to large swaths of people, and not just by writing mildly annoying blog posts but by actively writing laws that restrict freedoms or force beliefs.
I guess you can never, ever judge a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Muslim or a Jew. Only, Only judge Christians. Don't you know, they only drink beer from Adolf Hitler's pub!!!
Many people in my family are practicing Orthodox; about 90% of Romanians declare themselves Orthodox. The majority of Europe and the Western Hemisphere has been Christian for hundreds or thousands of years. Christianity is the biggest religion on Earth, and it had an enormous influence over the past two thousand years.
Doesn't it make sense that I mostly refer to Christians? I don't personally know practicing Buddhists,2 Hindus, or Jews. I know some non-practicing Muslims. Does it matter, though? If you are really focused on the God part, my post can be equally read as an affront to Christians, Jews, and Muslims, as they all have a monotheistic religion and share many ideas.
I see this reccurrently: people in the majority, who hold most of the power, start to whine and moan about how oppressed they are the instant someone on the other side gives them even a side eye. Christians, right-wingers, white males, conservative straight people, etc. Even when you mock or attack the ideas or beliefs, not the person, they start throwing a tantrum. Why?
Christians might've been persecuted in the times of Nero, but since then they persecuted others tenfold harder and longer. Even though they have a large (and sadly larger by the year) influence on politics on both sides of the Atlantic, they still feel others are oppressing them. Same with right-wingers who believe that anything left of turbo-capitalism is Stalinism. Same with white males who think women having equal rights and treatment in society will make them the second gender. Same with straight people who think LGBTQ+ people having somewhat equal rights to them will make them homo.
I just can't comprehend being this entitled.
re-chunkofcoal - re: Perfect design my ass
You can reach out by sending me an email.
2026-03-12 06:00:00
Post last updated 6 hours, 39 minutes ago
CAUTION
The following text might be offensive to certain religious people; proceed at your own risk.
For the longest time, especially after being full-time employed, I noticed that on weekends I'd often get a headache, mostly on Saturdays. I shrugged it off as me not drinking enough water, because I usually don't, and would solve it by some ibuprofen.
My headaches are mostly mild but relatively frequent, same as my mother has them. Sometimes I'd get a worse one-not quite a migraine, but pretty bad, for example if I stayed too long with my eyes glued to a screen or slept in a weird position. Last Saturday was one of the worst ones. At first, I thought I wouldn't pill myself and would let the pain ease on its own. Bad idea, because 90% of my headaches don't go away unless I take a pill or go to sleep. Well, after some time it got to the point it was bad enough that I had to take a pill, but now I'd be fucked by this worsening headache until the pill took effect.
So, in my semi-disabled state, I went to the internet, typing into Kagi "headaches on weekends." Lo and behold, weekend headaches seem to be a thing, like you can get one because cortisol levels are lower than usual, among other things. So you get a headache because you are less stressed. Wonderful. While relieved that others have similar symptoms, I was cursing my existence that something like this can exist.
And then I remembered that some religious people think that the human body has the perfect designTM and it melted my brain that a supposedly perfect design can mean you get headaches when you are less stressed. I ain't no God, but this makes no fucking sense in Hell. My honest expression was something like this:
Anyway, in the end the pill started taking effect, and I started being less hateful towards the Universe.
You can reach out by sending me an email.
2026-03-12 05:21:00
At work, I have to use AI.
Let's not argue that "have to" can be worked around, and that no one has gotten into problems for not using it. I generally do what I am told to, I am not the type to protest.
A few days ago I have tried to pick up a personal project I started six months ago: its use-case came up again, with much more narrow scope, so it was actually achievable.
And man, was it painful.
Portion of it could be attributed to my nostalgic choice of using Sublime Text 4 instead of PyCharm. Without intellisense, I had to look up more of the Python's standard library than usual, and I have made a few syntactic mistakes I do not think I should have done.
But what was even worse, it felt really exhausting. To write out every line by hand was like trying to walk in a viscous liquid that sticks to your legs. My brain hurt.
It was not like sugar which you can fight by not buying those snacks when doing groceries. It felt like a literal withdrawl. I got nervous, my focus was gone, and so was clear thinking about what I was trying to achieve.
I am aware this was not the only thing that was different. At work, I am contributing to major projects that have had most of their architectural and technical decisions made a decade ago.
Greenfields done by myself for myself have them all unresolved, and it may contribute to that uneasy feeling.
But the fact I craved AI, not a stable project I would be improving upon, points me at the direction I have described above.
And I have got no idea what to do about it. My job is my dealer and until the whole system collapses, it will not stop inviting me to take more shots.
2026-03-11 23:03:50
Holy crap my screen time went from 6-8 hours down to just 2 since moving my desk upstairs! My phone is no longer my all in one entertainment system and work station and I can finally put it down and work from my computer, textbooks and written form like god intended.
It's been a very much needed breath of fresh air not staring at a black slab every day honestly and if I knew I didn't need it to participate in society, I would love to get rid of it entirely and go back to an old school Nokia just... now with 5G.
Not only do I have my hands free now but my dreams are so much more vivid and memorable, my concentration is improving, and did I mention I have both my hands back for other things like going to the gym and baking?!
Good times, let's hope it sticks!
2026-03-11 21:35:00
A service promising to protect your privacy is not able to keep you anonymous. Why is that?
This distinction is actually really important in data protection and privacy laws.
Anonymity is about the inability to link an action, message, or data point to a specific individual. If attribution is possible (even if difficult, like with pseudonymization), you are identifiable and therefore not anonymous.
Privacy, however, is about the ability to limit or control access to personal information. The focus is not identity removal, but boundaries of who can observe, store, or process personal data. Personal data has to, by default, be linked to an individual, which makes you identifiable and not anonymous. If it isn't, it no longer counts as personal data. You can see this in the way the GDPR works; it doesn't apply to anonymous data, but personal data, and pseudonymous data still counts.
Privacy can exist with full identification: Your doctor knows you and your diagnoses, but is protecting your health file from unauthorized access.
On the other hand, anonymity can exist without privacy, like anonymous browsing that is still heavily tracked behaviorally.
The way we ensure privacy has different mechanisms. In data protection law, this is referred to as "technical- and organizational measures" (TOMs). For example, these can be access controls, confidentiality obligations, encryption, and following the general principles of data minimization, storage and purpose limitations in the way your systems and organization are set up.
Where we think they overlap is when we expect an entity to protect our privacy so an external actor cannot identify us.
This is problematic in a variety of ways: When we are offered privacy, we implicitly assume privacy from everyone, while most privacy guarantees actually mean privacy from the public or third parties or less tracking than other services; not privacy from the service provider itself, or legal obligations/the state. Companies who aim to protect your privacy act more like privacy intermediaries: They shield users from outsiders or offer a service where less data is harvested or data isn't sold to third parties, but they still maintain some capability to associate activity with an identity.
If you want anonymity at a service offering you privacy, you have to create it yourself by not giving the service a way to identify you. This can be done via using a fake name and address, using a way to pay that doesn't directly link your bank accounts or other payment info (privacy.com cards, or crypto, etc.), accessing it via a VPN, and possibly more precautions on an OS level (Kali Linux, containers etc.). That's cumbersome and not realistic for most people, as their threat level is not one of a whistleblower; however, you can of course decide to do it anyway.
Even then, it might be impossible, depending on the service and what you share with it. You can be anonymous on a blog, but over the years, the very little vague information you share can paint a picture. If you use an email service for your normal email needs, you will likely receive all kinds of de-anonymizing information: Doctor's appointments, booking confirmations, event tickets and more, all with your real name and location. The correct move here would be to separate your different email needs into different accounts and addresses. Sensitive political organizing, for example, should be separated from your personal information, either the one you give the service directly, or any other private email coming in.
Just remember at the end of the day:
Privacy is conditional access to identity.
Anonymity is the absence of an identity link.
If the right legal conditions are met, access to identity is given. But if the service doesn't know who you are, it cannot reveal it.
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2026-03-11 20:00:00
When talking about using AI for decision-making, you often hear that there will be "human oversight" or "human intervention".
One popular example that I have come across in conferences and webinars about data protection law is the hiring process and recruiting: Companies are already proudly using AI to select applicants. It summarizes CVs, compares qualifications with the job profile, and ranks candidates. At the end, HR decides who to invite for interviews based on this output.
The fact that AI isn't just sending out the interviews itself immediately and instead, a human is required to write an email or press a button is the idolized "human oversight". The fact that someone could intervene and make a different decision is supposed to be enough.
What bothers me is that despite being ranked as "high risk" under the AI Act (together with using AI for medical diagnosis, financial and legal advice, etc.), we aren't looking at how these systems are realistically used in practice. We shove a human in the loop ("HITL") somewhere to assuage fears and comply with legal requirements, but almost no one wants to talk about the fact that
Think about it: You have an IT company that gets 400-600 applications on each open spot. Spending time on every single application weeding people out takes a lot of time. You want to save time using AI so the people whose CVs and motivational letters most closely match the job description are already pre-selected for you and ranked. You know the next few weeks will bring new application deadlines again and you're already behind. You just can't check all of the applications to see whether the AI messed up or not. You can do a random check here and there, but at what point will you just look at the top candidates, check their applications, see it was correctly summarized (or well enough), and assume the rest of applicants that weren't considered were assessed correctly as well? Why would you look at all or most of the applications again anyway when the AI system is advertised as saving you that time and step entirely?
If anything, the human intervention here is for the companies - making sure that the AI didn't accidentally rank someone top that is completely unfitting for the task. It's not there for you. No one will notice if your perfectly fitting application has been disregarded by AI for no discernible reason, and no one will find it as part of the oversight process in the hundreds of other applications to make sure. If the AI makes the task quicker and the first top candidates sound fitting and plausible, that's it, nail in the coffin, why would HR put in more work?
All you can realistically do is make them explain and check after each rejection where you were a good fit and know AI was used. If you don't do that, you can't know whether you've been unjustly treated by their AI hiring process or were rejected on a justifiable basis.
As long as AI continues to hallucinate or leave things out inexplicably just to say sorry afterwards, this is a huge liability. Companies don't seem to really care for possible poor data quality, biases and systemic inequities that are subtle or deeply embedded, requiring more work and possibly an outside view to detect and mitigate. We are lacking nuanced oversight mechanisms, and I hope companies are prepared for the lawsuits this will generate.
If a company wants to use AI in the hiring process, I'd at least expect them to do the following bare minimum:
Unfortunately, companies have no incentive to do this! This is seen as more bureaucracy, more time and money wasted, restrictive to innovation. They're competing with companies who are grabbing talent even faster than them who don't give a shit about fairness in AI hiring. Each day they don't find a replacement or candidate for a new role is bad. And why hire more HR personnel to sift through hundreds of applicants if less HR personnel can handle it with AI? Organizational priorities and financial pressures don't allow enough checks and considerations to go into this delicate process.
We need to question "human oversight" more closely and require more explanations on how they plan to combat opaque decision-making, automation bias and the pressure to optimize and make work as easy as possible. Until adequate systems are in place that combat this, it will always be ineffective and a buzzword to me.
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