homura1650

@homura1650@lemmy.world

• ⁨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??⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Going well beyond my competencies to answer, but I think a lot of it comes down to monotheism changing the nature of god.

  Judaism thinks of itself as starting monotheism; and that is largely true. However, the old testament is still littered with vestiges of it’s polytheistic origins.

  If there are multiple God’s, then those God’s will come into conflict. That is simply the nature of human storytelling.

  Looking at the old Testament, probably the most violent God has been was during exodus. In addition to freeing the Jews, he smite the Egyptians with 10 plagues, among which was the death of all firstborn sons.

  For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the LORD. (Exodus 12:12)

  Note the polytheistic origins of this story. God is not merely intervening in the Earthly affairs of us lowly humans. The Jewish God is fighting with the Egyptian gods. He does not have the luxury of being nice and good. Even if he wins this fight without resorting to such drastic measures; he still needs to do so to act as a deterrent against other gods acting against him. That is not so much a specific tactical calculation in this case, but the way humans tend to imagine polytheistic gods working (reflective, of course, of the way human conflict tends to work).

  By the time we get to the new testament, the situation is different. Beyond merely declaring that their god is the only God, the early Christians believed it, and had believed it for generations of storytelling. Their view of God had shed the vestiges of polytheism and morphed into what is truly possible under monotheism. God can be good because he lacks a peer rival. There is no narrative reason for God to be mean, because he can simply win any direct confrontation he faces.

  We see similar dynamics play out in modern story telling. When we have vastly overpowered characters, the nature of the conflicts they get in us not fights. Perhaps they are trying to mediate between lesser parties. Perhaps they want to get something while respecting the rights and interests in weaker parties. A story where a vastly superior force wants something and just takes it is boring; so we don’t tell it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can you think of any now?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  China is the most populace country.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨nooo my genderinos⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Where in those axioms does it say that ↑ = {0|∗} = {0 | {0|0} } is not a number? No where, that’s where!

  The actual reason that ↑ is simply that it is too ill behaved. The stuff I thought were the “numbers” of combinatorical game are actually just called Conway games. Conway numbers are defined very almost identically to Conway games, but with an added constraint that makes them a much better behaved subset of Conway games.

  I suppose you could call this an axiom of combinatorical game theory; but at that point you are essentially just calling every definition an axiom.

  <s> Getting back to my original point; this distinction just goes to show how small minded mathematicians are! Under Conway’s supposed “reasonable” definition of a number, nimbers are merely games, not proper numbers. However, the nimbers are a perfectly good infinite field of characteristic 2. You can’t seriously expect me to believe that those are not numbers! </s>

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨nooo my genderinos⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I was going to make a comment about surreal numbers not being numbers. But I did a bit of fact checking and it looks like all of the values I was objecting to are not considered surreal numbers, but rather pseudo numbers.

  I find this outrageous. Why can’t ↑ be a number? What even is a number that would exclude it and leave in all of your so-called numbers?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨USA 🇺🇸 USA 🇺🇸 USA⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m going to take this as an opportunity to point out that bees are a type of fish in California.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tiger Predators⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  All models are wrong, but some are useful. Thinking of evolved features as having a purpose is wrong, but it is also incredibly useful.

  Why do we have eyes? In some sense, there is no reason, just a sequence of random coincidences, combined with a slightly non-randon bias refered to as “survival of the fittest” (itself an incorrect model).

  However, saying that we have eyes to see has incredible explanatory power, which makes it a useful model. Just like Newton’s law of Universal gravity. We’ve known it that is wrong for a century at this point, but most of the time still talk as if it’s true, because it is useful.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I wish⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  No. The alternative is to not use a float. Testing if a float is even simply does not make sense.

  Even testing two floats for equality rarely makes sense.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I wish⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  If you are using floats, you really do not want to have an isEven function …

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Groundhog Day II⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, the endless 8 approach.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don't forget to tip⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It is standard in the US. Adjustable rate mortgages are available as well, but they have not been popular since the 2008 crisis.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Uno reverse 🔁⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago⁩:

  Facebook the product is still Facebook. The only name that changed was that of the company that owns Facebook, which makes sense as that holding company also runs other products like Instagram.

  Google made a similar move in 2015 when it created Alphabet to hold the non Google parts of Google.

  In both cases the renaming was on the coorporate side. They made no effort to loose the old trademark, and continue to operate under it today.

  The only high profile case that comes to mind that is simmilar to Twitter is when Comcast rebranded itself as Xfinity in 2010. In that case, it worked because: A) Comcasts reputation was way worse than Twitters and B) people don’t have that much of an option anyway. In the otherhand, the rebranding failed in the sense that everyone still knows them as Comcast.