How does extra scope (like an afterlife) solve the problem of purpose? Now you have two problems of purpose. If I remember rightly, C.S. Lewis in his sci-fi made heaven into an endless series of adventures, which is the minimum necessary to make it attractive. But this still doesn't resolve to an ultimate purpose any more than a finite life does.
Often the question "what is the purpose of my existence?" is a proxy for some less abstract question, I think. Consider Young Frankenstein, and the gag where characters sing "Oh, sweet mystery of life at last I've found you! At last, I know the secret of it all!" because they got sex. Less cynically, it may simply be a matter of identifying comfortable values, in terms of the possible values available in the human condition in the present day. I mean you're unlikely to be honestly asking a question with a giant universal scope, if you claim that it bothers you personally.
I don't find it contradictory to subscribe to both an individual Destiny and an "universal scope" Destiny of which the individual Destiny is a component.
This Destiny is in tension with Free Will (in my telling).
In retirement, my hope is to produce a lengthy, pretentious exploration of a few ideas that will doubtless help someone's insomnia.
Right, but any identification of the Ultimate Purpose is going to be a very vague bad guess. I kind of like "to learn", but besides that I tend to keep returning to a string bag of mixed values that won't boil down to anything neat.
The reason I don't think Destiny can amount to more than a "very vague bad guess" as an intellectual matter is that such a solution would tamper with Free Will.
At their peril, because any set of rules, no matter how seemingly simple, has edge cases that only become apparent once we take on the task of implementing them at the code level into a functioning app. And that's assuming specs have been written up by someone who has made every effort to consider every relevant condition, which is never the case.
And in the example of "why" this 401 is happening that's another one of those. The spec might have said to return a 401 for both not being authenticated and for not having enough privileges.
But that's just plain wrong and a proper developer would be allowed to change that. If you're not authenticating properly, you get a 401. That means you can't prove you're who you say you are.
If you are past that, i.e. we know that you are who you say you are, then the proper return code is 403 for saying "You are not allowed to access what you're trying to access, given who you are".
Which funnily enough seems to be a very elusive concept to many humans as well, never mind an LLM.
...then there are the other fun ones, like not wanting to tell people things exist that they don't have access to, like Github returning 404 errors for private repositories you know exist when you aren't logged into an account that has access to them.
That one at least makes sense if you ask me. It's not just Github doing it. On the web side of things you'd return the same "no such thing here" page whether you don't have access or it really doesn't exist as well. So leaking more info than the page you return to users in the browser would show via the status code would not be good.
I.e. that would be the appropriate thing to do if you're trying to prevent leakage of information i.e. enumeration of resources. But you should not return 401 for this still. A 404 is the appropriate response for pretending that "it's just not there" if you ask me. You can't return 404 when it's not there and a 403 when you have no access if enumeration is bad.
So for example, if you don't have access to say the settings of a repo you have access to, a 403 is OK. No use pretending with a 404, because we all know the settings are just a feature of Github.
However, pretending that a repo you don't have access to but exists isn't there with a 404 is appropriate because otherwise you could prove the existence of "superSecretRepo123" simply by guessing and getting a 403 instead of a 404.
