squaresinger
@squaresinger@lemmy.world
- Comment on Valve's new hardware will NOT be loss leaders 1 hour ago:
This happens so often. The new version of the framework our frontend developers use has massive performance problems, which meant that our FE devs couldn’t test their changes locally, they had to upload a release to the cloud to test every single change. That reduces productivity to close to 0. A developer isn’t cheap, so you’d think the company would be quick to issue macbooks that we are also allowed to have so that they can work again.
Nope, it took 3 months for our manager to convince the helpdesk that they can get macbooks. Helpdesk originally said they’d have to wait for 2 years for the scheduled replacement of the laptops.
- Comment on Valve's new hardware will NOT be loss leaders 1 day ago:
There are quite a few office jobs that benefit from a decent CPU. Anything to do with images/photos/video/rendering for example.
- Comment on Valve's new hardware will NOT be loss leaders 1 day ago:
It can’t be a loss leader.
The steam machine is, hardware-wise, just a regular Mini-PC. Valve even lets you put whatever OS you want on there. So if this was a loss leader, that would mean that non-gamers and even small businesses would buy these, would install Windows on them and use them as office PCs, with Steam probably not even installed on the PC.
With the Steam Deck, the form factor made it impractical or at least really weird to use them as office PCs. The steam machine doesn’t have that issue.
- Comment on I've heard New Yorkers are devastated 4 days ago:
The one thing that communism and dictatorship have in common is that the one pretty much requires a revolution and the other often appears after a revolution.
They have similar origin stories.
The problem with revolutions is that revolutions need a strong man to rally around who can quickly make decisions without compromise and who is in close to complete power. A democratic revolution would not happen, since it’s not fast and decisive enough. But when the revolution is done and that same strongman is still in power, and he gets to decide how the new government is run, only very few of them are capable of handing the power over to a democratic government. And if you run a government like a revolution we tend to call that dictatorship.
- Comment on I've heard New Yorkers are devastated 4 days ago:
If Mamdani is a communist, he’s clearly the least ambitious communist that I’ve ever heard of. What he’s asking for is just basic services of a city to work and be affordable.
- Comment on Chaotic Evil 1 week ago:
On my laptop there’s two USB ports on the back and an Ethernet port in between. Ethernet is exactly as wide that an USB A connector fits into it and feels close enough to the real thing.
There’s also the Lenovo proprietary power connector, which has almost identical dimensions to USB A, so it feels like putting an USB A connector in the wrong way.
It’s basically impossible to plug in a USB connector blindly into this laptop. I always have to shut the lid to plug in USB.
- Comment on fight club 1 week ago:
I took the “asshole” as a simplified example. It’s a stand in for all kinds of bad behaviour. Behaving badly isn’t a personality type, it’s bad behaviour and nothing else.
If you don’t understand why you come across as condescending, ask about specific situations and actions that make you seem condescending. Often it’s something as simple as a choice of words or the way you talk about others. That’s usually quite easy to adjust, without denying who you are.
- Comment on fight club 1 week ago:
At times I find it quite hard to be my elf.
- Comment on fight club 1 week ago:
Tbh, “be yourself” is not a statement that can be taken literally.
It means “don’t put up an act and hide what you like” and not “behave like an asshole because you feel like it”.
As a counter-example: I overheard two guys I know a few years ago talking about how to get a second date. Their strategy was to rent an expensive car and matching suit and talk business jargon to appear like they have a ton of money while both of them were actually working minimum wage jobs.
That’s the kind of behaviour the “be yourself” line is trying to counter.
One of my exes took that statement to mean “be a moody asshole who constantly bitches about everything and everyone and when someone reacts to that unrestrained bad behaviour, call them out for rejecting your ‘true self’”. That’s not what’s meant by “be yourself”.
We teach kids that they should behave well, and we expect adults to do the same. Good/bad behavior is not a personality and “be yourself” doesn’t mean “behave badly”.
- Comment on Come the fuck on.... please? 1 week ago:
I think the main issue for me is the genre switch between 1-4 and 5-7.
- Comment on A hypothesis 2 weeks ago:
This. So freaking much this.
Mac is unix in the same way that Android is unix or my car’s infotainment system is Unix.
Yes, there’s unix under the hood, but there’s such a bunch of garbage on top that the unixity really doesn’t help much at all.
- Comment on Come the fuck on.... please? 2 weeks ago:
Makes a lot of sense. 1-4 are great, fun, whimsical magical mystery books. 5 is painfully annoying. Couldn’t get through 6 and 7. As a kid I skipped through them only reading the most important section.
I have since tried to read the 6th book, listen to the audiobook version or watch the movie multiple times and couldn’t manage to get through it even once. It just sucks.
- Comment on Banana 3 weeks ago:
Because you can make explosives out of that.
- Comment on Honestly Bizarre 4 weeks ago:
And this is the whole point of the controversy: The same word can have multiple meanings in different contexts and some people have trouble with that concept.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 4 weeks ago:
I very much agree with that. There’s a ton of stuff being mixed up together.
There’s cultural and political Christianity, that both neither require faith (or even belief) in Christ or really have anything to do with Christianity as a religion at all.
And that’s quite a bit of the issue at hand. You have people like Trump, who has no connection to Christianity (the religion) at all, who runs as the “champion of Christian values”, while being pretty much the opposite of that. Because it’s political Christianity.
And here you get a ton of this “us vs them” into play, that doesn’t really have anything to do with Christianity (the religion) at all.
Cultural Christianity is in a very similar boat. In my country, ~70% of the people say they are Christian, according to census data, and a total of ~78% of the people say they belong to some organized religion (Christianity, Islam, …), but only 22% of the people say they believe in some kind of God.
So more than two thirds of these so-called religious people, are not Christian by religion, but Christian by culture. I personally know quite a few people who don’t believe in God, don’t go to church, but who want to marry in a beautiful gothic church and use their Christian label to hate on foreigners and their foreign religions.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 4 weeks ago:
And a christian who doesn’t even follow (or doesn’t even know) the basic teachings of Christ is also using the wrong label.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 4 weeks ago:
So you can’t see a difference between “I irrationally believe that God doesn’t exist even though there’s no proof against it” and “I don’t care whether God exists, there’s no proof for or against it, and it doesn’t matter to me”?
Atheism is being religious about the non-existence of God.
Atheism is believing that black swans are impossible, because all swans you have seen so far are white.
Agnosticism is the logical conclusion based on the knowledge we have. Atheism is just another religion.
If you can’t see the difference, it’s hard to continue the discussion.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 4 weeks ago:
In other words, stop whining about atheists not using the term you’d prefer. We don’t tell you what you should call yourself either.
Yes, you do, that’s what the whole thread here was about.
And you mistake my position on belief as well. I am mostly agnostic.
And yes, the difference between agnosticism and atheism is huge, except if you are too uneducated to understand the difference, which makes it weird that you have such a strong opinion on the matter.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 4 weeks ago:
I don’t really agree with that. A program could break out of the sandbox and get to know the things around it. In fact, there are many programs that interact with the real world, gathering information about it and acting on it.
If there was something like an actually sentient program, it would be totally conceivable that said program could use cameras, microphones and other sensors to get to know its programmer.
The difference between the science and things considered supernatural is that one is something we have a solid understanding of and the other is speculation.
If there’s an unexplained phenomenon and we find a solid explanation for it, it becomes science. Weather and other natural phenomena used to be in the realm of the supernatural, same as dragon bones, mermaid bones and the kraken. Until we found out what they really were and how they worked.
If magic were to exist in reality, it wouldn’t be magic but instead just a branch of science.
A lot of things we can do nowadays would be called magic a few centuries ago. I mean, we can literally make frogs float in thin air. We can make incredible amounts of power from some magic rocks (nuclear power). We can even inscribe magic patterns into sand to make it think and talk (computers).
So coming back to the beginning: If we talk about something like a Simulation Hypothesis scenario (which is de facto identical to a scenario where God exists outside of our plane of existence, however that is defined), it’s totally in the realm of possibility of that scenario that the simulated could break out of the simulation.
Or in case of the Big Bang Theory, it would be theoretically possible to peek before the big bang.
I’m not saying that it is actually possible, but I’m saying that we can’t summarily dismiss the possibility.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 4 weeks ago:
Again: “They are no true Atheists because they believe in God.”
No true scotsman or not?
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 4 weeks ago:
According to Christ himself, this one is pretty central:
One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
If someone denounces this baseline (and not fails to follow it, but denounces it), there’s not much left to a claim of following Christ.
A large number of people who attend religious ceremonies don’t even believe in the deities or take things literally, they are there for the community.
And these people are people who attend religious ceremonies, not Christians.
Same as someone attending a meeting about Atheism doesn’t become an Atheist by attending the meeting but by being convinced that God doesn’t exist.
Person B is an idiot who doesn’t understand words because atheist is a simple label with a singular meaning.
Is that so? A lot of agnostics call themselves atheists. In general, if you ask atheists specifically about what they believe, quite a few of them actually describe agnosticism, as in they do not firmly believe that god doesn’t exist, but rather believe that there’s no basis in believing that god exists.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 4 weeks ago:
According to Christ himself, this one is pretty central:
One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
If someone denounces this baseline (and not fails to follow it, but denounces it), there’s not much left to a claim of following Christ.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 4 weeks ago:
Ok, let me put it in a way that you might understand:
- Person A: "You aren’t an Atheist if you believe in God."
- Person B: "But I identify as an Atheist and I believe in God."
- Person A: “Then you aren’t an Atheist.”
You: “No true Scotsman! Anyone who calls themselves an Atheist is an Atheist, no matter if they believe in God.”
Do you see how this makes no sense?
An Atheist is a person who doesn’t believe in God, not a person who calls themselves an Atheist. And saying you aren’t an Atheist if you don’t believe in God isn’t a fallacy but just purely the definition of the term.
Here’s the Wikipedia definition of a Christian:
A Christian (/ˈkrɪstʃən, -tiən/ ⓘ) is a person who follows or adheres to Christianity, a monotheistic Abrahamic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.
(Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christians)
So someone who does not follow or adhere a religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ is not a Christian. Not by fallacy, but by definition.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 4 weeks ago:
Funnily, you see similar things with e.g. Americans who lived for generations in America, but still identify as Irish, German and so on.
My wife’s late grandma had a daughter who moved from Germany to the USA at age 18. Her children never lived in Germany. Some of them have learned a bit of very rudimentary German. None of their children (the cousins of my wife) learned German in any meaningful way and they maybe visited Germany once or twice as children. One of these cousins (the second generation born in the USA) now had a kid (third generation born in the USA) and they called their kid “Schaefer” to “honour their German heritage”.
“Schaefer” is a misspelling of the word “Schäfer”, which means “shepherd” and is, if anything, exclusively used as a last name in German (German countries are quite strict about what’s a first name and what’s not). There’s actually a registry of first names that were given to children in Germany, and the name “Schaefer” doesn’t occur once over the last 80 or so years that this registry covers.
So they identify as “German”, even though they never had any meaningful contact with the country and couldn’t even be bothered to google whether the name they chose to “honour their German legacy” was actually a German first name.
TLDR: People identify as all sorts of garbage, because it makes them feel cool or makes them feel part of something, even if they have no clue about or interest in what they identify with.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 4 weeks ago:
Another part was that Jews were quite spread out over a lot of areas and didn’t have a “home country” to back them. You see a similar level of distrust, historically and even today, against Roma and Sinti.
So Jews were always a minority that was easy to scapegoat for all sorts of problems.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 4 weeks ago:
It makes sense if you don’t think of it from the viewpoint of principles and ideals.
Antisemites are in general all for zionism. Antisemitic Brits were the ones who made Israel possible in the first place, and even the Nazis supported the creation of Israel. Because it’s not about the Jews having their own country where they can (supposedly) live in peace, safety and freedom, but it’s about Jews moving far, far away.
And with Israel being a western “outpost” pretty much in the centre of the Muslim world, there’s a secondary effect: If Israel and the Muslim countries around it are fighting, that hurts Muslims without causing too much trouble for people living e.g. in the USA.
(These are obviously not my views. I’m just trying to explain why many antisemites are pro Israel.)
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 4 weeks ago:
Which fallacy is this? It’s not the “No true Scotsman” one as explained here: lemmy.world/post/37452533/19987098
For example, let’s turn that argument around:
- Person A: "No true atheist believes in God"
- Person B: "But I call myself an Atheist and I strongly believe in God"
- Person A: “Then you aren’t a true Atheist”
Did person A argue fallaciously to you? Or is person B just an idiot who took on a wrong label?
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 4 weeks ago:
No true Scotsman
Knowing a name of a fallacy doesn’t mean you understood what the fallacy means.
The No true Scotsman fallacy is a very specific thing and it doesn’t mean what you think it does.
Here’s the name-giving example of the No true Scotsman fallacy:
- Person A states an absolute statement: "No Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge."
- Person B disproves that by offering a counter-example "Angus is a Scotsman and he puts sugar in his porridge."
- Person A declares “But no true Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge.”
So for an argument being the No true Scotsman, there need to be three elements. If one or more are missing, the fallacy doesn’t apply:
- Person A does not retreat from the original statement
- Person A offers a modified assertion that excludes all counter-examples by definition (this turns the argument into a tautology: "No true Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge, and a true Scotsman is a Scotsman who does not put sugar in his porridge."
- Person A uses rhetoric to signal that change
So why does the no true Scotsman fallacy not apply here?
Because it’s about this change, not about whether something can be classified as something.
Take for example this exchange:
- Person A: "A true Scotsman is someone who lives in Scotland, holds a Scottish passport and identifies as a Scotsman."
- Person B: "But Angus, who was born in the USA, and holds an US passport and who’s only connection to Scotland is that his great grandma was from there claims that he is a true Scotsman."
- Person A: “He can claim what he want, he is no true Scotsman.”
In this case Person A
- Did not retreat from the original statement
- Did not modify the original statement
- Did not use rhetoric to signal a change, because no change existed.
That’s what @Demdaru@lemmy.world argued:
- A true Christian is someone who follows the teachings of Christ.
- American “Christians” claim to be Christians but are largely against the teachings of Christ.
- Hence they are no true Christians.
The “no true scotsman” fallacy is about changing your argument into a non-falsifiable tautology. It’s not about using the words “true” or excluding some group from some definition. And it certainly doesn’t mean “Everyone who calls themselves X surely and irrefutably belongs to group X”.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 4 weeks ago:
The question itself doesn’t really make sense, because it just boils down to “Why don’t we know everything?”.
The same question would lead to the same answer (“We don’t know”) if we ask it about e.g. the Big Bang. “If everything was created by the big bang, what created the big bang?”
It also applies literally in every field where we don’t know something yet (“What’s beyond the stars/beyond the universe?”, “What are quarks made of?”, “What’s past infinity?”). We don’t even know what’s in the dark at the edge of the solar system. Judging by orbits and gravitational patterns, there’s likely an entire large planet that we don’t know of because it’s too far from the sun and thus too dark.
It would be idiotic to summarily dismiss every field where there are things we don’t know, and where there are edges to our knowledge that are so far away that we cannot know or understand them.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 4 weeks ago:
“If God created everything, then who created God?”
There’s a lot of places where one can poke holes into faith/the concept of a God, but I don’t think this is one.
The reason being that God’s existence doesn’t actually change anything about the question or the answer. You can rephrase it as “If everything came from the Big Bang, what came before the Big Bang and what created the preconditions of the Big Bang?”
So you could use the same argument to “disprove” literally any world view, including science, or even hypothetical scenarios like the simulation theory (“If we live in a simulation, who is running the simulation?”).
But you can not only “disprove” every potential answer to “where does everything come from”, but you can also rephrase the question to “If atoms are made of quarks, what are quarks made of, and what are their components made of?” or to “If there’s an end to the universe, what is outside of it?”
If you are smart enough though, you will see that none of that is actually disproving anything, because if you rephrase the question further it becomes “Why don’t we know everything?” and that’s a rather simple-minded question to ask. One befitting of a 7 or 8 year old, but not really of an adult.
Before the circumnavigation and the discovery and charting of all of the world, people also didn’t know what was on the other side of the planet and still it would have been dumb to doubt what we knew (e.g. that the British Isles existed) only because there were large white spots on the map elsewhere.