lennivelkant
@lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de
- Comment on A daunting realization 5 days ago:
More like fungsus
- Comment on Psst, the Americans are asleep, post some eggs 2 weeks ago:
Feed him enough of it and it will work
- Comment on mrw someone tries to proselytize Christianity to me [Day 64] 2 weeks ago:
For God so loved the world that he invented a hell to throw people into so he could call himself merciful by sending his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
I think I might have gotten a weird translation there. Anyway, he loves you so much he might choose not to throw you into the lake of fire.
- Comment on Anon questions the KKK 2 weeks ago:
The core of Christianity is originally the redemption, not the threat that necessitates it and often is more prominent.
The cross is a symbol of the sacrifice made to redeem people from the threat of hell. More relevant here is that sin separates humans from God, and through that sacrifice, the connection is restored. It is a catalyst of redemption and reunion. In that sense, they don’t so much pray towards an implement of torture as an implement of liberation, salvation and mercy.
Given that those are hard things to put in a visual, tangible form and that humans tend to place a lot of value in visual, tangible representations, it’s basically the simplest symbol you could come up with as a nascent cult.
It’s not the only symbol, and particularly during the rise of the Roman church, you’ll note that icons of saints become very common too. Some places will even have the Crucifix feature the crucified Jesus as well, to drive home the point about sacrifice and gratitude.
Protestants later held that the worship of saints was tantamount to idolatry and did away with them again, leaving just the core of the message of redemption. There was in some places a conscious choice to pick the “empty” cross rather than the crucified saviour as a symbol that he is no longer dead.
All in all, given his divine wisdom and love for metaphors and similes, I’d think Jesus would understand the point of the cross…
…then proceed to trash the place out of rage over the waste of money and effort that went into gaudy churches and gold-embroidered robes instead of helping the sick and poor.
- Comment on I guess we are fucked now 2 weeks ago:
Garfield would be Slaaneshi - excessive amounts of lasagna
- Comment on From now on, I wish to be addressed as Lt. Commodre Squid 3 weeks ago:
Sounds like a university I know - brilliant and accomplished people, very proud of it, to the point of projecting that pride on everyone else and assume everyone must hold their full title as dear as they do. The idea of one of my teachers, some “First Name, Baron of Examplington-Doublename”, telling us to just call him “Mr. Examplington” would have shorted out their brains.
For all their laudable competencies, humility was not among them.
(Not in Australia, but I imagine it’s hardly exclusive.)
- Comment on South Afruleca 3 weeks ago:
Glad to make you laugh :)
- Comment on South Afruleca 3 weeks ago:
Even if I knew what that is, I doubt I could do it on my phone, but I appreciate your contribution to the shitpost request chain.
- Comment on South Afruleca 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on South Afruleca 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on Caption this. 1 month ago:
I think that, vocal complainers aside, he’s still overall fairly popular. A popular white man saying wise stuff is a great opportunity to signal how committed you are to science without having to put actually significant amounts of money on the line or entering the minefield that is angering the anti-“woke” crowd. He’s a safe investment in public appearances.
Doesn’t mean they’ll have to listen to him. He gets a more sombre version of the Jester’s Privilege that allows him to say whatever he wants, they’ll nod and applaud and perform all the gestures of approval, but they won’t actually change anything.
The other half of it is probably the Internet Outrage culture that sees inciting content get more engagement and boosted visibility in a self-perpetuating cycle of upset. Legitimate criticism drowns in a sea of bullshit, everyone’s pissed off and we’re all easily swept up in the current of emotion. If we’re not mad at one person, we’re mad at the people pointlessly or excessively mad at them. If we try to stem against that, we’re dogpiled by loud complainers while quiet agreement leaves an upvote and moves on.
- Comment on Itch.io was taken down by funko pop 2 months ago:
An individual would risk corporate lawyers lobbing suits at them they don’t have nearly enough resources to fight. In that way, it’s much like other forms of activism: individual actions are easily singled out and retaliated against.
If a ton of people were to do so, however, they might have an impact. Either the registrar would have to take steps to limit who can submit them, which might conflict with some laws, or they’d invest a great deal of resources trying to sort out the legit ones. Trying to single out people for retaliation is hard when there’s enough of them. In this way, too, it is like other forms of activism:
There is strength in numbers. There is power in unity.
If, hypothetically, someone were to coordinate such actions in the style of a crowdsources DDoS, and they could get enough participants, they might get away with it.
- Comment on A tense moment. 2 months ago:
It’s a common bait-and-switch joke. “I have Ligma” “What’s Ligma?” “Ligma Balls!” (The joke being that “Ligma” sounds like “Lick My”)
Maybe you’re familiar with a similar joke: “Hey, do you think it smells like updog in here?” “What’s updog” “Not much, what’s up with you?” (Here, the joke is that “What’s updog” sounds like “What’s up, dawg”)
- Comment on Standoff 2 months ago:
Entomolinguist
- Comment on Standoff 2 months ago:
It mises the “good enough” human approximations of the “true names” when the latter is impossible for humans to pronounce: it doesn’t have to be the exact correct pronunciation. If the Ants can’t make the -lk- or -nt- sounds of my screen name and chant “Lennivekat”, It’s close enough that I get they mean me. I might try to teach them the correct pronunciation, then probably give up and ask what they actually want.
- Comment on Scientists suck at naming and abbreviating stuff 2 months ago:
There should be a Lemmy feature (perhaps just a client implementation detail?) for LaTeX conversion
- Comment on No need to boil the ocean 2 months ago:
Now I want to learn more.
That is just about the greatest compliment you could give me, and I’m delighted that my own fascination has lit some in you too.
One blog I can’t recommend enough is A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, a Roman and Military historian’s look at pop culture depictions of history like the Siege of Gondor or the general stereotype of Romans, interspersed with general info about the social patterns around making bread, a discussion on the nature and severity of the collapse of western Rome, an argument on “Why We Need the Humanities” and even some thoughts on spaceship gun placement and a followup on starship design extrapolated from the factors that informed those decisions historically (like firing arcs or protection of vital components).
I’ll give you a single, half-hearted warning that you may end up sinking hours and hours into binging this, but I honestly think that it’s a good way to spend those hours.
- Comment on No need to boil the ocean 2 months ago:
Actually, it’s not entirely disconnected.
Concrete was mostly used in large building projects. These were expensive and thus usually sponsored by those wealthy enough to invest in such projects, particularly if they were vanity projects. In Rome, that would be the Emperors. Outside, it would typically take multiple sponsors.
The decline in economic stability around the Third Century, the reduction in profitable conquest due to military power being invested in civil wars of succession and the increasingly expensive bribes for the Praetorian Guard all contributed to Emperors having less money to spend on such projects, with predictable results: Less projects were built.
This is vaguely recited from an AskHistorians post, all errors are on me.
- Comment on No need to boil the ocean 2 months ago:
Much of Roman technology was lost because the collapse of state capacity and according administrative capacity rendered the balance of agrarian to non-agrarian workers unsustainable.
A high equilibrium, where the products of population centers supports and enhances the productivity of the agrarian surroundings while administrative pressure (like taxes) encourage the trade between the two: If the farmers need to pay taxes in coin, they need to sell surplus to merchants who ship it to cities to sell it. Conversely, the craftsmen producing iron plows, pottery and so on need coin too, so they sell tools, which the farmers buy to improve their yield. The state also buys services (like construction) and the elite buys luxuries, further creating jobs and fostering more technological development.
(Obviously, the elite skim a lot off the value produced by others - just because they did some good for others with it doesn’t mean they didn’t primarily do a lot of good for themselves.)
But when internal strife, plague, worsening climate, desperate invaders and identity politics all start breaking that machine, it’s hard to keep it from falling apart. And once the rural argarian production can no longer sustain the cities, the skills and crafts of the urbanites get lost.
- Comment on Judas 2 months ago:
That, or they opted to use buzzwords to secure funding from investors more willing to buy into the hype than actually interested about the research.
Or it’s just a joke, playing off of that trope or scientific headlines to make a caricature of Musk.
- Comment on We were there monkeys all along 2 months ago:
George “Let’s ignore half of history, take a superficial misrepresentation of the other half, sprinkle some sexual violence and betrayal over it all, then let everyone claim it’s historically accurate” R.R. “The Dothraki were actually fashioned as an amalgam of racist stereotypes I didn’t bother doing even the least bit of research on, but will pretend were an actual historical inspiration” Martin?
Not throwing shade on GoT as a work of fiction, mind, as long as people are aware that it’s solidly in the realm of fiction. Its popularity alone attests to its literary quality. A piece of fiction doesn’t need to be true to reality to be good (that’s the point of fiction, isn’t it?).
- Comment on Garter snakes 2 months 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 2 months 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 2 months 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 2 months 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 months 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 months ago:
Or the server move
- Comment on Anon tries programming in Java 3 months 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 3 months 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 3 months 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.
