A space to follow my Interests in epistemology, science and philosophy, separate from @lightandshadow.
Orlando, FL
Joined June 2026
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Causal Knowledge retweeted
Fun fact: the creator of CoreAnimation is one of the creators of SwiftUI!
The decision to run animations in the app process rather than the render server (as CoreAnimation does) was one of the earliest and most fundamental decisions we made when designing SwiftUI.
Some of the most distinctive experiences of using an iPhone, like UIScrollView rubber banding and SpringBoard app switching are only possible as client-side animations.
But these experiences aren’t easy to build with UIKit!
This is because if you want a UI to be fully interactive and interruptible by the user while it’s animating, it has to be running in the same process as the event handling.
In fact, in iOS 18 we added new APIs to AppKit and UIKit to adopt the SwiftUI client-side animation model.
There are a lot of valid critiques of SwiftUI. The fact that SwiftUI doesn’t use CoreAnimation for its animations is not one of them.
SwiftUI isn’t native and here’s why SwiftUI apps may sometimes feel janky. It ditches the key element that made animations run so smoothly on iOS since the original iPhone: Core Animation.
In SwiftUI animations run in-app without CA backing. Block the main thread: SwiftUI ball stalls while UIKit’s keeps moving on the render server.
Atheism doesn’t imply a specific interpretation of quantum mechanics any more than it implies a theory of morality or a doctrine of basic human rights. It’s simply a position on one question: whether God exists.
If they’re going to infer what atheism entails by pointing to particular philosophies held by atheists, consistency requires doing the same with Christianity. Historically, some Christians denied universal human rights while appealing to Scripture.
So, the question becomes, if God actively grants basic human rights, why should we assume God grants them equally to everyone? The appeal to God alone doesn’t settle the question. Nor would it in the case of atheism.
On atheism there’s no such thing as “basic human rights.” A right is just something the people in power give to their subjects, no one is entitled to them. If tomorrow the government takes away a “right,” that’s totally fine, there’s literally no justification for them. The justification for human rights is in the Declaration of Independence when it says that “ALL humans are endowed with inalienable rights by their Creator…”
Atheism, by its very nature, rejects all of that.
Saying an idea is self-contradictory is an argument that doesn’t contain evidence.
In fact, I’d suggest this argument itself appeals to definitions, not evidence.
“Arguments are not evidence” might actually be the worst talking point atheists have in their rhetorical toolkit of garbage.
Saying an argument is not evidence is like saying an egg is not yolk. An egg… by its very nature… contains yolk. An argument… by its very nature, is appealing to evidence within its premises which it uses towards the inference it drives at.
Imagine a Laywer “presenting evidence” with no argument:
“Your honor here is a bullet, here are some pictures of the scene, here’s the gun…” and then he says nothing else. He presented the evidence, right?
Obviously that’s not how evidence works. Evidence needs to be argued for. Without an argument, there’s no reason to believe your evidence actually counts in favor of your inference. If I say “my computer is evidence that I was robbed last night” that wouldn’t automatically be evidence. You have to explain WHY it’s evidence. The “why” is the argument. Evidence without argumentation is worthless.
And while it’s true an argument is not evidence (because they aren’t literally the same thing), an argument is supposed to contain* evidence within its’ premises, the same way an iron man suit contains Tony Stark.
Evidence:
-The ground is wet.
-There are dark rain clouds overhead.
Argument:
1. If it recently rained, the ground would likely be wet.
2. The ground is wet and there were rain clouds.
3. Therefore, it probably rained recently.
The key word here is "nation".
At the national/federal level, the 1787 Constitution deliberately created a secular framework with no religious test for federal office (Article VI), no established national church, and (via the 1st Amendment) no federal prohibition on religion. This was intentional to avoid the European model of state churches and to accommodate diversity. Unconditional on personal faith for federal service.
constitution.congress.gov
Some states *retained* religious tests, as a legacy requirement, but many of these were eventually repealed as the inhabitants started to catch up.
So, it depends on whether the context is descriptive / cultural, at the population level, or legal in regard to our founding constitution. Washington, Adams and others rejected a national theocracy.
Causal Knowledge retweeted
For the very first time, biologists packed nonliving components into a cell-like membrane, piece by piece, and slowly witnessed the bag of molecules start to behave like life. @yasemin_sap reports: quantamagazine.org/for-the-f…
Causal Knowledge retweeted
Claude Code quietly shipped something much bigger than people realize.
Multi-player AI artifacts.
Make a change once.
The artifact updates for everyone on your team in real time.
No screenshots. No version confusion. No "latest file" chaos.
Just a shared AI-generated workspace that evolves live.
This feels like one of those features that sounds incremental today...
...and looks inevitable 12 months from now.
We're watching the shift from:
Chat → Documents → Software
Most people won't understand the significance until every AI tool copies it.
When we bring knowledge into fundamental physics, this sort of objection falls apart. Why? Because it presents a more fundamental unification of knowledge with and without a knowing subject.
Knowledge is information that plays a causal role in being retained when embedded in a storage medium. It solves a problem, whether anyone intended it to or not. In the case of the biosphere, the storage medium is the genes of living organisms.
Note how this is not unlike our current, best theory for the growth of knowledge:
- We start out with a problem,
- conjecture theories about how the world works, for the purpose of solving them,
- then criticize them in hope of finding errors and removing them.
Since our ideas start out as conjectures (educated guesses), we still do not know they are “true”. Theories are tested by observations, not derived from them.
Does not infallibly knowing if a conjectured theory will actually solve the problem make the process random? Does the resulting feedback loop become random?
In the case of evolution, mutations are analogous to conjectures and natural selection is analogous to criticism. They both play the same role at this more fundamental level.
As such, mutations are random *to any specific problem to solve*, not completely random.
This vague unguided / random equivocation just muddies the water. nitter.cf/darwintojesus/status/2…
