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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • my favorite answer so far. it is exactly what i meant but i did not realize that it being the same secret (which is technically just half implied by the grammar i think) is what breaks the dynamics.

    if it’s 1000 different secrets, then it kind of works but only if the guesser knows/assumes the distribution is uniform. (if it’s the same secret then the guesser knows it’s the same secret then that’s the extreme, maybe a “degenerate” case, like having 1000 doors to one bank.)





  • Socrates is one of the most well know ln philosophers of all time and there isn’t any proof he ever lived.

    when is the fact about the level of certainty we have about Socrates’s existence relevant, though? it depends.

    • if someone just mentions some specific idea that is often attributed to Socrates, then it’s probably totally irrelevant and you would be just "well, actually"ing someone. (which will backfire esp. if they actually know that full well and can/will stand for themselves)

    • if someone is defending a specific idea using an argument from authority of Socrates himself, then it’s probably pretty relevant. at best it’s an invitation to skip a bad argument path and take the focus back to the potential merit of the idea itself. (ofc this is regardless of whether you like that idea or not, learning what the other person perceive as valuable about the idea is usually more interesting than who they think came up with it)

    • if someone does the same but based on moral authority, then it’s the same principle, but probably much more important

    • if someone creates religion based on teachings of Socrates, then it’s pretty much important (although often seemingly ineffective, and in some cases, risky)

    • If someone starts asking questions about Socrates as a historical person (and heck, even questions specifcally about history of Socrates’ state of mind–see title of this whole post), then it’s obviously the most important thing they need to learn before continuing their research or pondering.

    The last point bullet point describes what @Phoenixz did here, in the beginning of this sub-thread. (Just for Jesus Christ, not Socrates, of course.)



  • plumbers exist, so do people named starting with M or J. so do people who walk around and yap about end of the world and/or resurrection. and even people who listen to them.

    however…

    plumbers that can jump 5 times their own height? people named with M that grow 2x when they eat a mushroom? people that turn water into wine? that’s a completely different story.

    sentence like “Jesus did not exist” always need to be interpreted in context. when someone says it in context of religion or adjacent, and you respond by “but people called Jesus existed” then you’re just being obtuse.

    or rather, playing Motte and Bailey: f…ing OF COURSE you can defend the that Bob—different one than in the story, in particular, a tigerless Bob—exists, but that’s not what is being disputed. what’s being disputed is the existence of Bob with the tiger, and the motivation is to challenge the whole story.


  • So what you’re saying is if Bob tells me (your name) has a flying tiger, and I later find out you don’t have a flying tiger… you no longer exists?

    They did not say someone named Jesus did not exist.

    There’s a difference between believing “Joe who had a tiger and a bear and an elephant”, and assuming that there might have been 3 different Joe’s, one with a tiger, one with a bear and one with an elephant, each of them in a different period. Saying “Joe with 3 animals did not exist” does not imply that those Joe’s did not exist.

    I’m not a historian but what I’ve heard (must have been on Alex O’Connor’s podcast) is that even some of the possible historical Jesuses (or “Jesusi” :D) had things going on that were not compatible with what the biblical Jesus was all about. (Such as being cult leader proclaiming that world will end in few years.)



  • Regarding my original comment, it’s mainly frustration at the hypocrisy some people have who make every excuse to avoid using someone’s preferred name or pronouns, but then have no problem switching when it’s someone else’s pet

    yeah I got that message. it really shows the hypocrisy, and it makes me wanna scream.

    I wonder if a far away vision of a world where the gender just slowly disappears from the language is really the best. (When i get asked about preferred pronoun, i feel i want to answer “i don’t care and no one should, let’s collectively try to really not give a f*k”.) I feel like in the ideal world all pronouns would just be gender-neutral.

    But language vs. gender is yet another fascinating rabbit hole. My first language is Czech, where basically every word – even unanimous and abstract concepts like “book” have gender, and the grammar is such that effect of word “gender” spreads to other words as inflections and such. Eg. “ona spala” ~ “she slept” vs. “on spal” ~ “he slept” but “ona spal” is an obvious grammar mistake. I wonder if this makes it worse or actually better: while it makes it harder to have a gender-neutral language (the plural trick does not work: “ony spaly” ~ “they (females) slept”, “oni spali” ~ “they (males) slept” … siiigh…), I also feel it could make it less problematic in the sense that the concept of gender in language is not actually tied to identity of a person–it’s just a weird thing present in the language.

    Of course, none of that applies to intentional misgendering, which is just being a huge asshole, with little to no excuse.


    Edit: I missed the last–the most important—part of your post, so I was just replying casually (and nerd sniping myself on the language part).

    Yeah, that’s really disgusting and alarming. I totally believe. I don’t know what to do about it but I do believe and wish nothing but failure to these hateful, cruel people.


  • keeping all these containers up to date

    Updates are a good way to get the security holes fixed, but unfortunately it’s also often how the holes get in in the first place.

    I mean, for most projects it’s kind of sensible to assume that over long time, the code will become rather more secure and less buggy, so eventually the pros/cons might come out in favor of a strategy of updating every time. But it’s good to know that every update is inherently a double edged sword.

    That’s why I like the model that distros like Debian do: they keep the code stable for long time, and only send updates for which a typically independent party (package maintainer) has already decided that a given update indeed is a necessary bugfix, or even specifically a security fix. Similar policy of course could be applied to a Docker container as well, but I don’t know how many projects do this, and it would be a per-project policy, most probably not quite independent.




  • (As a trans person, I have more to say on how easily people pronoun switch for animals but that’s a different topic for another time)

    It is different topic, although I’d love to hear more about that as well. Eg. as a cis male with no transgender friends (well, not that I know of), I find myself thinking ruminating about how impolite/distracting it is to misgender a trans person, provided one can just switch after being corrected and move on… How bad it is to make the (honest) mistake repeatedly? How is it compared to other kinds of faux-pas, like, messing up someone’s name? (Eg. repeatedly calling someone John when they are Joe, or forgetting someone’s occupation. These things do happen to my distractable mind that seems to love lossy data compression.)

    But yeah, it’s a huge, fascinating topic, but a different one from my intention in the OP. :)