mobyduck648

Bold argument from someone whose worldview is entirely reddit-tier pop science and affected rather than earned rationality.

Come on, this whole thread is basically Americans shitting on Britons because Britons don’t generally put American PoV goggles on when discussing racism.

This isn’t the ‘gotcha’ you think it is. I could just as well ask the fedora fanclub how they respond to someone saying ‘bless you’ when they sneeze. The point is there are local truths and there are global truths, and you don’t have undistorted access to the latter. None of us are playing with a full deck.

To use your own example of fiat money, we all know it’s a society-wide fiction but it is kept up willingly and enthusiastically for the reason there’d be a very non-fictional economic meltdown if we didn’t do that. We are pretending a small-t truth is a capital-T Truth for practical reasons alone. The danger comes when we forget we’re doing that and mistake our aggregate belief for reality itself in my opinion.

I cannot stand people who think they are personally exempt from this kind of thing; people who insist their imperfect senses give them full and perfect access to objective truth. These kind of people are dangerous whether they’re religious or secular, I would much rather date a superstitious person who was aware most of what they believe is vague and wooly than someone who calls themselves a rationalist and makes these massive sweeping metaphysical judgements about things.

Nor can you select the worst examples of someone else’s country to defend America’s conduct on patriotic grounds which is blatantly what’s happening here.

There’s a massive Americentrism problem in the wider West that both the US left and right wingers absolutely hate being challenged, they are exactly alike on this issue as far as I am concerned.

It’s a cherry-picked example if I ever saw one, I could just as well go and point at Wilberforce to underline early 19th century attitudes to slavery and I’d be making the same error as this.

Are you physically incapable of taking your Amerigoggles off for a millisecond?

You’re bringing up fucking Kipling of all people, the one poet everyone knows for being mega into colonialism. That’s like me pointing at the Grateful Dead while saying Americans need to lay off the acid.

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Honestly while I’m secular myself, this stance would lead to me politely refusing a second date.

Yes astrology is daft, but most of the things you and I believe are daft too or at least only locally true and culturally constructed rather than globally true. I don’t care if someone is religious or secular, what I do care is to what extent they believe humanity can know unfiltered truth in the first place. This is a much more important and useful axis in my view than whether they are religious or secular.

In my view no human can know direct truth, they are forced to rely exclusively on the unreliable narrator of their senses and for this reason I don’t trust people who make excessively confident claims about the nature of reality at all, whether religious or secular ones.

But in fairness said partners are often into that.

We’re definitely of the same mind, we’d have a fun Christmas!

Genuinely Christmas would be so good if we had a rule that presents were abolished the minute you became an adult. I love Christmas but I genuinely hate the wanky consumerism associated with it, and the stress of Christmas shopping. It’s just a bunch of manipulative bullshit to get your wallet out for Bezos.

Let’s just get drunk and stuff ourselves with turkey, bollocks to consumerism.

Cheers, me too! Was educational as an intern to say the least. I think the firm went belly-up a few years later.

Yeah I’m not a fan of slop merchants and PRs the size of battleships but anyone solving merge conflicts by hand because they hate LLMs is being a tad masochistic in my opinion. I’m in two minds about how much coding itself ought to be automated, but I’m a strong advocate of automating the tedious donkey work we’d absolutely have got rid of years ago some other way if possible.

It’s also good for avoiding tarpits, sometimes I literally don’t want to learn something because it’s too expensive relative to the value of retaining it. I would rather crawl over a mile of broken glass and hot coals than learn the detailed ins and outs of WSDL just to support a legacy feature which is firmly in the crosshairs of my deprecation gun, to use a totally neutral and not driven by personal bitterness example.

Can’t be worse than when I was an intern, the product was literally based around parsing arbitrary HTML with regex and not even decent regex, POSIX regex from like the '80s for reasons known only unto the programming gods.

I run a valve (tube) amp as my daily driver for audio and yeah, you do have to have a screw loose in this day and age. They’re a lot better with modern passive components but modern valves are pretty hopeless in terms of longevity. For EL84s you basically have to buy old Soviet military stock (thank fuck Gosplan was so hilariously inefficient) or your amp will burn through them fairly quickly.

On the other hand if you look after them will probably outlive you. The valves are consumable components but the transformer is literally a big chunk of iron and copper, and they’re dead simple to work on usually. Modern capacitors don’t dry out and turn into resistors nearly as readily too.

^ Individual who pisses in public pools

Knock and Run in my part of the UK growing up.

I’m the kind of contrarian who thinks we should have stuck with 4:3 in general, it’s a better framing for a lot of content and it also makes the vertical video problem a lot less annoying in my view.

That’s harsh, though I guess you could argue it’s no worse than jury service as it’s done here in the UK which is at least two weeks usually.