Author: Larry Sanger
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The Antivitist Trend in the West
Recent events have suggested that there is a trend afoot in the West: that life is overrated and that death is not so bad. Call it, for lack of a better term, antivitism (from Latin vita, life). People who are aware of their own commitment to this view call it, rather funnily, efilism, which is…
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Is letting a 17-year-old die morally equivalent to killing her?
A spate of news articles appeared yesterday, reporting that Dutch 17-year-old mental patient Noa Pothoven was euthanized. This formulation—she was euthanized—caused outrage in certain circles. This is factually incorrect, they say. She was not euthanized. She took her own life. What are the facts of the case? She was sexually attacked and assaulted three times,…
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How to write an app (that respects privacy and supports security)
Some difficult-to-meet requirements Be open source. Don’t make users have to trust your black box. I don’t want to have to trust you. I don’t know you. Don’t just release your in-house source code. Develop in public; practice outreach to OSS developers to loop in others; make distributed code reviews a standard practice. Be fully…
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Why your company should consider getting a NAS
What’s a NAS again? “NAS” means “network-attached storage,” but this buzzphrase has come to mean more than just a backup drive for your local network. It’s also, and maybe more importantly, an easy-to-set-up personal cloud server. You use it for document storage and sync a la Dropbox; to sync your calendar, contacts, notes, and password…
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How I got rid of Google calendar
It was about 2013 that my friend Terrence Yang told me I should be using Google Calendar, because everybody was using Google Calendar. So I did. And he was right: almost everyone else was using it, as far as I could tell. There was a period between approximately 2015 and 2017 when I was getting…
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A Free Speech Credo
I. Free speech is nothing if not offensive. Free speech just is the right to say offensive things. Popular, safe speech needs no protection; only unpopular, unsafe speech does. Free speech needs protection precisely because and to the extent that it bothers, annoys, dismays, infuriates, emotionally wounds—and, yes, offends—other people. You have the right to offend…
