bitcrafter

@bitcrafter@programming.dev

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta is closing down three VR studios as part of its metaverse cuts⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Thank goodness there was nothing more useful we could have done as a society with all of the tens of billions of dollars that was spent on this project, or it would have been an incredible waste!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Instead of everyone leaving NATO, could everyone else just kick the US out?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If by “advancing against Russia” you mean that a bunch of countries were extremely eager to sign up when given the chance, then arguably its Russia’s own fault that they felt the need to join a defense alliance so that their sovereignty would not be threatened in the future. And given that Ukraine has been invaded multiple times by Russia exactly because it does not have a NATO mutual defense guarantee, it sure looks like they had the right idea.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Instead of everyone leaving NATO, could everyone else just kick the US out?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It might surprise you, but I do not actually get paid to post comments on Lemmy for living, so I am allowed to focus on the part of the argument that I think is strangest.

  The author of that comment was free to reply in turn by something along the lines of, “Fine, then drop Ukraine from the list, because I don’t need it to make my point.” Instead, they doubled down that it belongs there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Instead of everyone leaving NATO, could everyone else just kick the US out?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Could you explain exactly how NATO and US imperialism led to Russia invading Ukraine?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I am so scared of nuclear war, how do I cope with it?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If this is in response to the capture of Maduro specifically, then yes, you are overreacting. Trump seems to only be interested in being a bully picking on those weaker than him, which excludes nuclear powers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a point we can track down when we stopped caring about doctors, nurses, teacher, etc? And thought it was a great idea to pay atheletes millions and screw everyone else?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No, you have it backwards. If the total pot for athletes is considerably smaller than the total pot for medical professionals, than redistributing it amongst medical professionals would not significantly increase their individual incomes because there are so many of them that each would only get a small share of it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨mmm... tastes like chimkin⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  …though my personal recommendation is that you don’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Which timezone would win in a conflict?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Apparently not quite! It looks like you would mostly be stepping back and forth between UTC and its opposite.

  Given that time zones are essentially set by the local research stations, I conclude that Chile and Argentina would win the war because their time zone has the most coastland and so they would have the most penguins on their side.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Which timezone would win in a conflict?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They would all lose because they stretch all the way down into Antarctica which means that the penguins would be involved…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How would a wealth tax affect real estate rentals?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that the implication was that they would have to sell in order to come up with the cash to pay the tax?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not to get all religiony but why in the old testament God was all fire and brimstone and fatal consequences? But the new testament God is all about forgiveness and such??⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  EDIT: Hahaha, instant downvote!

  For the record, the downvote was from me, and it was because you are being an ass.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not to get all religiony but why in the old testament God was all fire and brimstone and fatal consequences? But the new testament God is all about forgiveness and such??⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It must be very convenient to be able to declare victory in a discussion without hanging to present an actual argument. 😉

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not to get all religiony but why in the old testament God was all fire and brimstone and fatal consequences? But the new testament God is all about forgiveness and such??⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You are thinking about this the wrong way. From the scraps of information that we do have, which includes volumes of work by Jesus’s followers, there are two extremes one could take: we know absolutely nothing about Jesus or whether he even existed, or we know absolutely everything about Jesus. I agree that the later extreme is wrongheaded, but surely treating it as a binary choice so that the only other possibility is that we can say nothing at all about Jesus is also wrongheaded.

  You might argue reasonably, of course, that his followers cannot be trusted, so we can learn nothing from their writings. This is not true, however, because if nothing else we can learn from the editorial choices that they made; for example, when a Gospel goes out of is way to explain a detail that would have been embarrassing to contemporaries, this actually provides potential evidence that this detail was true and widely known at the time so that it needed to be explained, because otherwise it would just have been left out.

  At the end of the day, scholarship is essentially about weighing probabilities rather than certainties, and good scholars do not pretend otherwise.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not to get all religiony but why in the old testament God was all fire and brimstone and fatal consequences? But the new testament God is all about forgiveness and such??⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Keep in mind that most likely the historical Jesus was just one of many apocalyptic preachers going around telling people that, within the lifetime of some present, God was going to come down and vanquish evil once and for all, so one had better be prepared and be on God’s good side when this happened. (Incidentally, the Romans probably could not have cared less about this; it was when they got word that he was claiming to be an earthly king–which may have been how Judas actually betrayed him–that they got seriously pissed and executed him because they had a zero tolerance policy for that kind of thing.)

  You can see imminent apocalypse theme in the epistles where John writes that there is no real point making big life changes like getting married since the world is going to end any day; amusingly, when this did not happen, they needed to start coming up with alternative policies, and so other letters start to set down rules which thematically contradict the earlier letters, but it turns out that there are other things about these letters that make them different too so I’m many cases they are considered to be forgeries. (Obviously this is an oversimplification of the academic research!)

  (Also, it’s also worth noting that John and the apostles had really different notions of what Jesus was all about, and part of the whole point of Acts is to paper over these differences and make it seem like they had all been past of one team all along.)

  Finally, it is worth pointing out that there were a lot of texts floating around in the same genre as Revelation, so it was not all that unique and it almost did not make it’s way into the Bible, but the Church Fathers thought incorrectly that the John who wrote it was the same as the author of the Gospel of John; if they had known that these were two different Johns, then the Left Behind series would never have been written (amount other consequences).

  So in conclusion, be very wary of trying to read a lot of significance into the New Testament as a whole because it was not a unified document written with single purpose.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨At Gamescom, it felt like the industry now has a plan: make games quicker | Opinion⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Make sure you check out Metal: Hellsinger if you haven’t already!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Me too.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that is a bit of a misleading way of putting it because the feeling being a “self” that is in charge of the body is an experience that is contained within consciousness rather than the essential nature of it; in principle, one could imagine having consciousness without any feeling of being a “self” at all.

  If I had to define the nature of consciousness, I would say that it is essentially an internal simulation that the brain creates in order to aggregate information from various sources in order to facilitate processing and decision making. Just to be clear, this is not my own original idea, and more importantly I do not think that it is a particularly clever or deep way of thinking about consciousness, but rather the inevitable conclusion one reaches when one plays around with one’s own attention and awareness and sees what happens; the trick is just to do it like a scientist and be constantly challenging one’s own conclusions, rather than to invent one’s own version of chakras. I find it especially enlightening to watch what the mind does when one tries not to steer it into doing anything; with some practice, it is possible to watch the “self” pretend to be in charge while simultaneously realizing it is not, and this experience can be helpful (though frustratingly I have not found it to be as immediately life-changing as I might have hoped).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UwU brat mathematician behavior⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Imagining your death.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Planck units⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I for one like to keep things simple and just express everything directly in units of the number of periods of the radiation emitted by the ground state hyperfine levels of Cesium-133.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the ethics behind purchasing a book from an author you don't agree with?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Thank you for linking to a source!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the ethics behind purchasing a book from an author you don't agree with?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure, I am obviously not obligated to read the book, but what I was specifically responding to was the following remark:

  Yeah isolating yourself from everyone you disagree with is awesome, truly nothing bad ever comes out of it.

  which in turn was a response to the following:

  Do you have to agree with everyone you give your money to? What sort of economy would that be?

  Probably a pretty nice one, actually.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the ethics behind purchasing a book from an author you don't agree with?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ergo we should feel obligated to give money to people who we believe are actively harming the world?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the ethics behind purchasing a book from an author you don't agree with?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Huh? What did he do?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should Neutron Stars be Added to the Periodic Table?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Huh. Could you explain?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You cannot learn without failing.⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You can tell that this image did not actually come from God because it is not 640x480x16.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ARMADILL-NO⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Uh… That wasn’t quite what I had in mind for it either…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ARMADILL-NO⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Keeping it as a pet is not quite the fate I had in mind for it…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ARMADILL-NO⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Fair enough, but if the fawn is just there for the taking anyway…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ARMADILL-NO⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In fairness, the deer population is way out of control, so I’m just doing my part to reduce it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨pew pew⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Historical revisionism at work:

  The astroid shot first.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could Trump Force X To Become The Everything App For Government Payments⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Also, as I understand it, the Book of Revelation essentially only barely squeaked its way into the Bible anyway under the belief that its author was the same John as the John that wrote the Gospel of John; if it had been believed to have been authored by anyone else then it would have been left out because it was hardly a unique representative of its genre.