bitcrafter
@bitcrafter@programming.dev
- Comment on Which timezone would win in a conflict? 2 weeks 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? 2 weeks 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? 2 weeks 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 weeks 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 weeks 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 weeks 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 weeks 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 1 month ago:
Make sure you check out Metal: Hellsinger if you haven’t already!
- Comment on Me too. 2 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 3 months ago:
Imagining your death.
- Comment on Planck units 3 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? 4 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? 4 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? 4 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? 4 months ago:
Huh? What did he do?
- Comment on Should Neutron Stars be Added to the Periodic Table? 5 months ago:
Huh. Could you explain?
- Comment on You cannot learn without failing. 6 months ago:
You can tell that this image did not actually come from God because it is not 640x480x16.
- Comment on ARMADILL-NO 6 months ago:
Uh… That wasn’t quite what I had in mind for it either…
- Comment on ARMADILL-NO 6 months ago:
Keeping it as a pet is not quite the fate I had in mind for it…
- Comment on ARMADILL-NO 6 months ago:
Fair enough, but if the fawn is just there for the taking anyway…
- Comment on ARMADILL-NO 6 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 8 months ago:
Historical revisionism at work:
The astroid shot first.
- Comment on Could Trump Force X To Become The Everything App For Government Payments 8 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.
- Comment on Were Sony and Microsoft Truly Worried About The Google Stadia? 8 months ago:
In that case, I clearly stand corrected! Thank you for the reply.
- Comment on Were Sony and Microsoft Truly Worried About The Google Stadia? 8 months ago:
The biggest problem with Stadia was not the technical implementation but the business model: you had to pay for both a subscription to use the service and additionally a license to play particular games on the service (though there were also some free games). And of all the companies to even attempt such a business model, it is harder to think of a company that had the least chance of making it work than Google because almost no one believed that the licenses they paid for would be good for anything in a couple of years. In fairness, Google did refund these purchases when it shut down Stadia, and this was absolutely the right call, but it is also befuddling because, if they had been planning on doing this anyway, they could have told everyone at the beginning and made people a lot less wary of spending money on Stadia!
- Comment on ScIence 9 months ago:
Or, in other words, around 244 kibiInternets.
- Comment on GOG reportedly suffering from staff turnover and poor management: “Current business model is likely running out of steam” 9 months ago:
That’s completely fair. I personally really like the site because it feels like being part of a creative community, but that also makes the selection of games that are available more eclectic.
- Comment on This feels wrong. I love it. 11 months ago:
If you are comfortable with negative numbers, then you are already comfortable with the idea that a number can be tagged with an extra bit of information that represents a rotation. Complex numbers just generalize the choices available to you from 0 degrees and 180 degrees to arbitrary angles.
- Comment on Just Terrible 11 months ago:
Just to be clear, the problem is actually not that the guy was being boring but that he was a monster.
- Comment on Magic Mineral 11 months ago:
This is especially a concern for those of us who keep pork chops in our walls for a quick and convenient snack!