lennivelkant
@lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de
- Comment on Garter snakes 1 hour ago:
That is a very sweet compliment, thank you very much!
I always aspire to be better than my teachers, who were as competent in their subjects as they were boring and hard to listen to. I may not have the same depth of knowledge, but I try to make it more approachable at least.
- Comment on Garter snakes 3 hours ago:
Isn’t that why we’re all here? I assume the average layperson wouldn’t concern themselves enough with the different definitions of “venomous” to make a meme about it or respond with an apt explanation and commentary for how that could be communicated.
- Comment on Garter snakes 5 hours ago:
Your conclusion mentions a term not present in the premises.
(Though we may assume that “this post” is synonymous with “this comment”)
- Comment on Garter snakes 6 hours ago:
Specialists in a specific subfield being pedantic about their subfield? Inconceivable!
Technically, both assertions are true - under the respective definitions of their field.
Formally, if the question is ambiguous as to which definition it’s aimed at, either answer without clarification is incorrect* because it assumes a premise that isn’t specified.
Practically, which answer is right for the question’s purpose is a coin toss between coincidentally useful and accidentally misleading.So really, both of them should respond that way.
* Note the difference between “(contextually) right”, “(factually) true” and “(formally) correct”:
I can make formally correct statements based on factually wrong premises like “All cats are blue. My dog is a cat. Thus, my dog is blue.”
Conversely, I can make factually true statements that happen to be right despite being formally incorrect: “Some cats are black. My dog is not a cat. Thus, my dog is not black.”Both of these assume the common context of the culture and vocabulary I am accustomed to: While some cats are blue and some are black, my dog is not a cat, falsifying both the second premise and the conclusion of the first example. The second example is formally incorrect, because the negative association of the minor term (my dog) with the middle term (cats) doesn’t imply any connection with the major term (black, meaning the category of black things).
However, a different context can alter the facts of the premises: Suppose I’m doing an exercise where I assign animals to groups, visually coded with colors, and cats belong in the blue group. Further, suppose I have only one pet, a cat I nicknamed “dog” (for example because it acts like a dog). That would alter the contextual premises: “blue” and “black” would refer to the respectively color-coded animal groups, while “My dog” would unambiguously refer to the cat of that nickname, since there is only one animal I own that fits that label. In that context, the first conclusion would be both formally and factually correct, while the second would be neither.
Take away the second premise of each example, however, and the implication becomes formally incorrect, no matter which definition I use for the first premise, because there is no established relationship between my dog and the category of colors it does or doesn’t belong to. The respective conclusion might still be factually true, but that would be a coincidence of context rather than a formally deducable result.
That has nothing to do with the topic at hand, I just felt like rambling about formal logic and its relation to reality and communication.
- Comment on Frog's Gift 2 days ago:
Nah, there was another contender, but he was a fuckin nerd with big, scary words and headachy sentences and got bullied out of the race.
(The nerd is a general analogy to reasonable people, not any specific person or group)
- Comment on Frog's Gift 2 days ago:
Or the server move
- Comment on Anon tries programming in Java 1 week ago:
What came across as tribalistic there? Pointing out that you might not immediately see the tech stack of every Web app you use is hardly saying “Java is better”, and suggesting to not shit on others’ opinions is kinda the opposite: I’m saying your opinion disliking it is fine, just as mine liking it is.
- Comment on Anon tries programming in Java 1 week ago:
I’m not sure you’d even notice all apps that are made with Java, particularly Enterprise Web apps. But yeah, if you’re going for humour, maybe jokingly shitting on people’s opinions isn’t the safest bet.
- Comment on Anon tries programming in Java 1 week ago:
The dev culture certainly contributes to the problem. In the attempt to modularize, isolate functionality from expectations and create reusable code, a mess of abstraction patterns have sprung up.
I get the point: Your logic shouldn’t be tightly coupled to your data storage, nor to the presentation, so you can swap out your persistence method without touching your business logic and use the same business logic for multiple frontends. You can reuse parts of your frontend (like some corporate design default structures) for different business apps.
But you can also go overboard with it, and while it’s technically a dev culture issue rather than a language one, it practically creates another hurdle to jump if you want to use Java in an enterprise context. And since that hurdle is placed at the summit of the mountain that is Inheritance, Abstraction and Generics… well, like I said, massively front-loaded.
Once you have a decent intuition for it, the sheer ubiquity makes it easier to find your way around other projects built on the same patterns, but getting there can be a confusing slog.
- Comment on Anon tries programming in Java 1 week ago:
So you’re going to stride past the part where I say “I’m not going to […] claim that it’s better or worse than others”, ignore the bulk of my comment on Java being hard to get into, make a point of declaring you’ll downvote for stating a personal opinion, then pretend it’s “nothing personal”? I’d be curious how that makes sense in your mind.
Anyway, like I said, I see no point in petty tribalism. I like Python and C too - that’s not mutually exclusive. I hope you have a pleasant, Java-less day :)
- Comment on On bugs... 1 week ago:
The only cats I’ve got are con-cats, unfortunately, but they do put things in a row.
I’d love to work more with animals - pythons, anacondas, pandas, cats… Alas, I am stuck with SQL and Power BI, for better or for worse.
- Comment on Anon tries programming in Java 1 week ago:
Aside from the general stupidity, Java is a heavily front-loaded language in my experience. I’m not going to engage in any tribalism about it or claim that it’s better or worse than others. As a matter of personal taste, I have come to like it, but I had to learn a lot until I reached a level of proficiency where I started considering it usable.
Likewise, there is a level of preparation on the target machines: “Platform-independent” just means you don’t have to compile the program itself for different platforms and architectures like you would with C and its kin, as long as the target machines have an appropriate runtime installed.
Libraries and library management is a whole thing in every general-purpose language I’ve dealt with so far. DSLs get away with including everything domain-specific, but non-specific languages can’t possibly cover everything. Again, Java has a steep learning curve for things like Maven - I find it to be powerful for the things I’ve used it in, but it’s a lot to wrap your head around.
It definitely isn’t beginner-friendly and I still think my university was wrong to start right into it with the first programming classes. Part of it was the teacher (Technically excellent, didactically atrocious), but it also wasn’t a great entry point into programming in general.
- Comment on On bugs... 1 week ago:
Data Analyst: So what do you want to measure? What question do you want to answer?
Customer: Can you do a column chart, where I can see how many Orders we have?
Data Analyst: Column chart? What’s the Axis? Per day?
Customer: No, per month.
Data Analyst: Right, so new Orders per month?
Customer: No, how many we have in general, new and old.
Data Analyst: Do you mean the old ones still open at the start of the month?
Customer: That’s a good idea, yeah. Actually, can you add the ones we complete in that month too?
Data Analyst: The amount of completed orders? That would double-count them.*shared moment of confusion*
Customer: Don’t make it so complicated, I just want to see how many orders we had.
Data Analyst: Let me ask again, what question do you want to answer?
Customer: I want to know how much our teams are working.
Data Analyst: As in, how many orders they’re completing?
Customer: I also want to see if we need more people.
Data Analyst: Like, if they can’t complete all their orders? So basically, the rate of completed versus new ones?
Customer: Ooooh, good idea, can you put that rate as a line over our chart of new, old and completed orders?Customer: Oh, and the warranty returns too! They need to be processed as well, that’s also work.
Customer: Actually, we have this task tracking for who does which work for the order or warranty return.
Data Analyst: Shouldn’t we use that to track how much work the teams are doing?
Customer: Yes, put it in the chart too.
Epilogue: The Customer got a separate chart for the tasks - turns out I’m not charging by the chart, so you don’t need to cram as much as possible into a single chart. They also were persuaded to stick with “Old” and “New” to show the total workload, with the “Old” bars providing an indicator for how much stayed open and whether the backlog was growing.
- Comment on Quantum 2 weeks ago:
I’m in a superposition of knowledgeable and ignorant until you ask me something, in which case I produce either a good or a stupid answer, depending on various random factors such as whether I’m versed in the general topic, happen to know the specific subject of the question or just get lucky with guessing.
(This analogy breaks apart if you consider the possibility of giving a mediocre answer that’s neither accurate nor entirely stupid, which probably makes it the perfect self-defeating counterexample)
- Comment on hard to argue with 4 weeks ago:
Poor lady, victim of a fucked up religion enforcing sexist bullshit, became an bullshitter in turn. I feel sorry for her.
Doesn’t mean I excuse the crap she’s dumping out there, of course.
- Comment on Honey 4 weeks ago:
Misunderstandings happen, I don’t think any malice was intended
- Comment on Proud globohomo 4 weeks ago:
Those evil leftists always pushing… checks notes corporate culture!
- Comment on Honey 4 weeks ago:
I think the point was that some numbskulls try to pull a “checkmate vegans” claiming that. You probably know the type, obnoxiously trying to butt in on vegan discussions and go “but if you’re fine with breastfeeding, you’re not really vegan”, misunderstanding (or misconstruing) the motivations in the same vein as mentioned before.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
I keep thinking about the guy complaining that Tom Morello from Rage Against The Machine got political with that one picture of his guitar, and the reddit comment or whatever asking what type of machine he thought the band was rafing against - kitchen appliances?
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
I think he made decent enough content when the competition wasn’t particularly fierce, then kept coasting on the early adopter acclaim.
- Comment on Asian Beauty 5 weeks ago:
Jesus is the son of god
I always hated this sentiment. I don’t think sons should automatically inherit their fathers’ sins. Jesus seemed to be a mostly cool dude, albeit with his own human flaws (including the common blindness to his father’s abusive nature) and it really doesn’t seem fair to lump him in with his dad.
- Comment on Cool People Doing Cool Things 5 weeks ago:
It’s even older: The myth of individual excellence is at least as old as the phenomenon of a distinct class of a warrior aristocracy. All throughout history, you’ll see the elite (as most historians and poets were, because a peasant working for subsistence doesn’t have the time to write deep musings about that time he got conscripted for war and stood in a line with all the other common peasants) writing of this or that great general or warrior, despite most of just about everything being done by groups.
You might know about the great heroes of the Iliad, excelling in battle by taking down a key figure of the opposing side, but most people probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the mass of “common” infantry on either side, let alone about the servants carrying the hoplites’ stuff.
You might find a lot of medieval works focused on the glory and honor of a knight, but the (comparatively) poor spear-and-shield conscripts receive attention mostly in official documents detailing the way their army was to be raised (see the section “Ninth-Century Rohirrim” here).
Even when thinking about heavy cavalry charges, for the longest time I never gave much thought to the value of coordinated cohesion between them. The knights’ charge is still a group effort, where an isolated warrior - great hero or not - would be doomed. And while we may be aware that knights had a squire, the rest of the retinue wouldn’t be clear to everyone:
Clifford Rogers notes one (fictional and lavish, but not outrageous) war party “suitable for a baron or banneret” included a chaplain, three heralds, four trumpeters, two drummers, four pages, two varlets (that is, servants for the pages), two cooks, a forager, a farrier, an armorer, twelve more serving men (with horses, presumably both as combatants and as servants), and a majordomo to manage them all – in addition to the one lord, three knights and nine esquires (C. Rogers, Soldiers’ Lives through History: the Middle Ages (2007), 28-9).
(Citation copied from this entry of the same blog as before)
Ever since there has been an elite with the leisure to write and document, served by a lower class who didn’t, there has been a tendency to emphasise these elites’ individual value and omit the group effort of all the invisible people contributing to that value.
I don’t know if that is the cultural inspiration for the modern trend of focusing on single individuals or simply a symptom of a similar cause, but there is a certain resemblance that I suspect isn’t pure coincidence.
- Comment on the flies 1 month ago:
Some horse fly blankets and hoods have a zebra pattern, probably for the same reason.
- Comment on Jazz hands 1 month ago:
It would be Musical Roulette essentially
- Comment on Horse archers ruin every game they are in. 1 month ago:
Skirmishers as in “Light Cavalry”, designed to catch closing archery and ride them down? I’m not big on RTS (I suck at multitasking), but I’m always fascinated by gamified implementations of historical dynamics.
I don’t suppose they also support “recruit auxiliary specialists” as option?
- Comment on Horse archers ruin every game they are in. 1 month ago:
Announcing the new “Royal Stables” DLC: “Marauders & Massacres” is sure to spice up your medieval farm simulation!
- Comment on Horse archers ruin every game they are in. 1 month ago:
They were also rare. To effectively pull off horse archery, you needed good horses, good riders that also happened to be good archers (both of which weren’t trivial on their own, let alone combined) and good coordination. Bows are more effective the closer you are, so to get the most out of your arrows, you’ll want to close in, but then you also need to wheel off again without your riders getting in each other’s way, so you needed to drill maneuvers for that.
So you either need to have a sufficiently large body of soldiers with the leisure to train both archery and riding instead of working the fields, or you needed a society that treats them as basic skills anyway and only needed training in the military application. Nomadic peoples like the Scythians or Mongols often had the former, so they were notable sources of dangerous mounted archery, particularly where the raising and support of a professional army wasn’t feasible. Rome had the Equites Sagitarii, but they were part of the distinct social class we would call Knights, so not your rank-and-file soldier (and those were already more professional than later levy- or retinue-based militaries).
So if we were concerned about accuracy*, these units should be expensive and require good management to make the most of them, but be very dangerous too. The point about open / closed terrain certainly fits as well.
What’s a bit more foggy is how games usually handle bow effectiveness at range, but that’s its own topic.
*I do care about accuracy, but not at any cost - games need to be fun too, and that’s worth sacrificing some accuracy for.
- Comment on Oxygen 1 month ago:
Well, First Of All, With God, All Things Are Possible, So Jot That Down
- Comment on Academic writing 1 month ago:
I think this leaves out the “epistemological imperative”, which I understand as the compulsion to use this specific language for the sake of being scientifically accurate. Particularly when dealing with peers, who will all too readily hold you accountable for inaccuracies, being precise is important, possibly even necessary to avoid the scientific community’s habit of tearing into any error to prove their own proficiency by showing up your deficiency.
I can’t find my source any more, unfortunately, but I read an article once about how students are essentially scared to have their writing torn to shreds because they were too direct in their assertions. I recall that it related an anecdote about birds on a movie set that were supposed to all fly away at the sound of a gunshot. Except they tried to fly away beforehand, so the solution was to tie them to the branch and release that wire when they were supposed to fly. Then the birds tried anyway, didn’t get anywhere, ended up hanging upside down and falling unconscious. When they tried again (after restoring the birds to consciousness), they released the wire… but the birds had learned that trying to fly away was unpleasant, so they just sat there instead. Why bother, if you go nowhere?
In the same manner, academics who write too clearly will end up getting bad grades, have papers rejected, essentially be punished for it. They may learn that, by carefully coaching their assertions, assumptions or just about anything that could be conceived as a statement of facts in a multi-layered insulation of qualifying statements and vague circumscriptions to avoid saying something wrong and show the acknowledgement that, like science in general, the causation they’re ascribing this phenomenon to is at best an educated guess and, while we can narrow down things that are not true, we can never be certain that things we assume are true really are and won’t be refuted somewhere down the line, making them look like morons…
I lost track of the sentence. Anyway, if you make mistakes, you’ll get attacked. Most people don’t like being attacked. So if you’ve been attacked enough, eventually you’ll either give up or adopt strategies to avoid being attacked.
Being complex and obscure in your phrasing makes it harder to attack you. And if it’s hard to understand you, people might just skim the points and not bother with the attackable details anway. If you notice that people who write in a difficult style don’t get attacked as much or as badly, you’ll adopt that style too.
Eventually, your writing is read by students stepping to fill your shoes. They may not understand why you write this way, but they see that many successful academics do. They may also experience the same attacks and come to the same conclusion. Either way, your caution has inspired a new generation of academic writers who will continue that trend.
Finally you’ll end up with a body of scientific knowledge that only experts can still navigate. They know to skim past the vagueness, indirections and qualifications, mostly understand the terms and can take the time to pick apart the details if something strikes them as odd. The common rube doesn’t understand jack shit. Your research may further the understanding of a small group of people, possibly see some practical use, but the general public can’t directly make any use of it.
- Comment on rabioli 2 months ago:
I doubt many people actually pay that much for their meds.
They’ll go broke instead, eternally in debt, unable to save up enough or get a credit for, say, buying a house to save on horribly inflated rent prices, always living in fear of being fired and ending up homeless until they get arrested for not having a home to sleep in, sent to for-profit prisons at the expense of other taxpayers, possibly even put to work as a legal slave…
…but I can’t imagine the pharma company doesn’t actually get all of those 60k on average. Maybe 20k-40k - hardly enough to pay their shareholders, let alone their insurance subsidiaries’ employees for the soul-crushing job of listening to patients breaking down because the insurance won’t cover their child’s life-saving treatment for some reason rep, patient, doctor and executives all know is bullshit.