TheJach.com

Jach's personal blog

(Largely containing a mind-dump to myselves: past, present, and future)
Current favorite quote: "Supposedly smart people are weirdly ignorant of Bayes' Rule." William B Vogt, 2010

Blog Fodder: Why, Ubuntu, Why?

So Ubuntu is moving even further to becoming nothing more than a Mac clone on Desktop UI looks, and that annoys me to no end. First it was the purple, then it was the moving of the close-expand-minimize buttons to the opposite side of the window, and now they want to copy the most idiotic of all UI designs: a global menu taskbar that each application steals focus for when it's open.

It's just so insanely stupid of a UI, sorry Mac users.

This rant by "Goat Jam", from this comment thread, provides my complete opinion:

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Short argument against Pascal's Wager

Pascal's Wager, for the uninformed, is a trick meant to get agnostics to pronounce they believe in God anyway. The idea being that if there is a god, then you score in heaven for believing in him, whereas if you didn't you'd be sent to eternal damnation. And if there's not a god, oh well, it's not like going to church and prayer and fasting and tithing and memorizing parts of the bible are a huge time sucker... Just do it to be safe, because you stand to gain infinite payoff if there is a god, and stand to lose infinitely if there is a god, and if there isn't a god it's more or less the same whatever you do.

There are nice arguments against this such as the lack of useful reasoning with infinite utility, or the fact that there are infinite possible gods, with a smaller infinity of whom may damn you for believing in the Christian god, and all the infinities probably cancel each other out. Here's my short argument, behold the paranoid parrot. If I accepted Pascal's Wager, that would put me in the corner of having to accept every Pascal's Wager-like problem in the future if I wish to remain consistent and hold any sort of respect. And as you can see, being paranoid is quite costly and with overwhelming probability not very useful.

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