lennivelkant

@lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Itch.io was taken down by funko pop⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Entomolinguist

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Standoff⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Or the server move

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries programming in Java⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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...⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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...⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Misunderstandings happen, I don’t think any malice was intended

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Proud globohomo⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Those evil leftists always pushing… checks notes corporate culture!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Honey⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think he made decent enough content when the competition wasn’t particularly fierce, then kept coasting on the early adopter acclaim.