The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.

  • 5 Posts
  • 679 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
cake
Cake day: January 12th, 2024

help-circle

  • Two* empty cardboard boxes. One is roughly the width and length of my desktop tower; another is ~1/3 of the size of the first.

    My desk used to have two drawers, right below the surface top. I was always hitting those bloody drawers with my thigh. Eventually I had enough, unscrewed them, and threw them away.

    …ok, but what about the stuff that I stored there? Inside the big box, that is now over my desktop tower. The smaller one and its lid became divisions for the bigger one. It’s organised, within the reach of my hands, and far from my thigh.

    *actually three. One of my cats saw it on my chair, as I was organising the stuff here, and went into “if it sits, I fits, I call dibs” mode. It’s in my living room now.



  • In English, the simple present often implies a general truth, regardless of time. While the present continuous strongly implies that the statement is true for the present, and weakly implies that it was false in the past.

    From your profile you apparently speak Danish, right? Note that, in Danish, this distinction is mostly handled through adverbs, so I’m not surprised that you can’t tell the difference. Easier shown with an example:

    Danish English
    Jeg læser ofte. I read often. (generally true statement)
    Jeg læser lige nu. I’m reading right now. (true in the present)

    Note how English is suddenly using a different verb form for the second one.


  • On itself, a simple claim (like “copyright destroys culture”) cannot be fallacious. It can be only true or false. For a fallacy, you need a reasoning flaw.

    Also note that, even if you find a fallacy behind a conclusion, that is not enough grounds to claim that the conclusion is false. A non-fallacious argument with true premises yields a true conclusion, but a fallacious one may yield true or false conclusions.

    The issue that you’re noticing with the title is not one of logic, but one of implicature due to the aspect of the verb. “X destroys Y” implies that, every time that X happens, Y gets destroyed; while “X [is] destroying Y” implies that this is only happening now.


  • Eh, sounds like a conspiracy theory.

    Not really, even if false. It’s just a hypothesis.

    It’s the kind of thing that would look really bad if it got out, but doesn’t have much upside.

    We [current and former Reddit users] babble a lot about shit the admins do. If this got out, it wouldn’t cause much damage to the already barely existent reputation of that shithole; and as HelixDab2 said, the ones still in that shithole would outrage for 15min then go back as if nothing happened.

    If it significantly affected profits, maybe, but this doesn’t register there.

    I think that a system like this would actually increase the margin of profit, in the medium term. Because it would allow them to cut some slack to the cash cows, while you’re still removing some users who are pissing the others off.



  • What I’m going to say is just a hypothesis from my part. It might be bollocks. But.

    For a long time I’ve suspected that Reddit runs some sort of algorithm to predict the profitability of each user, based on factors like

    • platform used (desktop vs. mobile)
    • running / not running an ad blocker
    • if not running an ad blocker, clicking on ads or not
    • likelihood of that user to buy Reddit junk (e.g. the “coins” of the past)
    • likelihood of that user to attract newer users
    • etc.

    and then the output of that algorithm is taken into account when handling rule violation. As in: you can go rogue and they’ll give you a short ban if you’re deemed profitable, or a small offence will give you a permaban if unprofitable.

    With that said I don’t think that they manually review your earlier posts/comments before enforcing the rules.





  • For my main thoughts on this matter, refer to this comment. I’ll only mention what’s different from this source to the other:

    “We are more transparent than many players in this industry who have used public content to train their models and products,” Meta said.

    “Since some people kill puppies, just kicking one is totally fine” moral reasoning might perhaps give you some breach in countries following Saxon tribal law, but not in countries following Roman civil law. In those, what matters is the law, not how the relevant organs handled other similar cases.

    The law in this case being the LGPD (Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados - Data Protection General Law). If it’s found that Meta’s activities violate the LGPD, well, cry me a river, “I dun unrurrstand, Google does it worse, I’m so confusion…” won’t save Meta’s skin.


  • Fuck no. A religion dictates:

    1. what you think to be true or false. I’m a human thus an ignorant; there’s no fucking way that I’d establish a system of beliefs that would be completely true. And the very fact that people would sheepishly look at my religion and say “its chrue cuz our faith says so lol” makes it counter-productive.
    2. what you judge as good or bad. Except that my moral values might not hold so well across the time. Worse - once you gather a thousand people, most of them braindead muppets, some will care about the letter of those moral rules instead of the spirit.
    3. what you do or don’t. I’d be effectively removing agency from the people who follow my religion, telling them what they should be doing, be it on rituals or whatever.






  • [Reader, beware: take what I say with a grain of salt. I’m not trans, I just happen to have a few trans friends here and there.]

    I think that people in general confuse the symbols too much with what they represent. Third person pronouns in English might symbolise your gender identity, but they aren’t the identity itself; first and foremost, you’re still you, regardless of those words. Just pick whatever you feel more comfortable with - be it “he/him”, “any”, or any other choice.

    And remember that your choice of pronouns doesn’t dictate who you are. Even if you see yourself as effeminate, and even if you have an unclear identity, and go for he/him, there’s no contradiction. Same deal if you pick “any” and see yourself as a man.

    And I feel like a lot of trans people have the same identity struggles as you do, or at least know someone in the same situation. Based on that I don’t think that the ones in good faith would bat an eye towards something like “he/him/any”.