debit-freak

I'm not sure what "logic" has to do with this, but I am confused why one would presume others share this mindset.

Oh absolutely, I'm just shocked at the idea the author would presume others feel this way too.

There comes a moment in life, often in the quietest of hours, when one realizes that the world will continue on its wayward course, indifferent to our desires or frustrations.

Is this not trivially obvious at all moments of consciousness? The assumptions here make no sense.

Can you quote the evidence here? The link is paywalled.

Is there any materially demonstrable evidence that tiktok is worse than other social media networks?

SpaceX control system also has to compensate for the fuel moving inside their rockets so the control algorithms probably involve some kind of fast numerical fluid simulation.

Surely this isn't necessary with a small enough sensor granularity or whatever the terminology is. You can have very dumb software if it reacts quickly enough to changes in perception.

Your 1st sentence is just classic whataboutism

It would be if I were arguing against sovereignty for tibetans; I am not. I merely ask that people don't treat the movement as any more or less urgent, necessary, or obvious than any other sovereignty movement.

Granted, it was facetious to insert this viewpoint into the conversation about tibet; but arguably it was just as facetious to insert an argument for sovereignty into a conversation about Tibetan script.

(Bell Labs researchers -> C -> Oak -> Java -> JavaScript.)

It seems like Javascript inherits more directly from lisp than any of the other languages mentioned, except for the syntax. As a result Javascript is a lisp without macros, which is a sad concept. (In this sense, I very much agree with you.)

but this was changed to a more Algol-like syntax due to the prevailing opinion among many that an Algol-like syntax would be easier for C/Pascal/C++ programmers to adopt

Did this not cripple macros?

How does zen buddhism rank on the ‘major world religion’ scale? Or (by followers) Taoist/Daoists?

Well if you're just going off "popularity" then yea, you're going to end up with a lot of dogmatic belief that is the result of millennia of use by states. That's a big part of how ideas consistently spread and are maintained over time. That doesn't strike me as very useful and you're likely to offend a lot of people if you treat this understanding as accurate. But the closest parallel in the east—namely, confucianism—is almost entirely secular, which is a strong sign that you're actually talking about the dangers of authority. Arguably belief in "market forces" as a rational form of resource distribution today form another such secular religion worldwide, and indeed when you watch political figures discuss macroeconomic forces the effect is largely similar to the Pontifex Maximus slaughtering a bird and inspecting its liver to understand the future.

there is one objective view of reality

Yes, this is fundamentally contrary to the Tao (or Dao if you prefer). It's also very rare for most animist beliefs to have anything like this sort of understanding of the sort. I don't know as much about Buddhism or Hinduism, by I understand this is also trivially incompatible with that from my layman's chair.

For the most part humans just need to agree insofar as we have to in order to form a society. It seems like what you're actually complaining about are the effects of Abrahamic religions and their historical relation to state authority, which very much emphasize the importance of believing certain historical events are true. That's actually quite rare by enumeration of what people refer to as "religion", "faith", "spirituality", etc.

I quoted the James bible for a reason—not because it's a good translation (it's obviously not) but it formed the English preconceptions that people structure their understanding of christianity around in the anglo sphere. I chose it to best place the centrality of belief in the culture I assumed we both shared, given that we're speaking English. As I'm sure you're very aware, first century christianity would be nearly unrecognizable to basically any denomination today and is likely very different even from the fourth century when the canons were gathered and the roman state adopted the religion forming the roman church, but we're still stuck using a language that inherited much of its christian diction from the James bible. So that's the relevant text to unlocking understanding of much of what constitutes anglo christianity.

Regardless, you also see this issue with earlier latin translations, too—"credere" has similar semantics, and for all intents and purposes "trust" and "loyalty" have similar semantics, too. (I am not able to profess the same understanding of biblical Greek you do, and presumably neither of us know Aramaic or Ge'ez... which is fine, because neither do most christians.) This is fundamentally an expression of faith in the same sense that was expressed with the story of the binding of Isaac; the same sense of existential faith that Kierkegaard expressed in "Fear and Trembling". You're reverting to quibbling over precise interpretations of the text when it's not clear why this is more meaningful or any more correct than how people actually interpret it, nor more meaningful or correct than the culture that is widely accepted as universal in christanity—e.g. canon itself, the church, marriage sacraments, the Lord's Prayer, etc. Even original sin, although rejected by some protestants, has little textual basis and still permeates denominations post-schism. (Hell, christian values and worldviews still dominate western secular society to an extent most people probably don't process.) These things are just as much "christianity" as anything in the canon texts.

I mean, why is "canon" meaningful to you at all?

Anyway, I'm not trying to attack you for taking this approach (I, too, like trying to understand texts as closely as I can to understand the author), I'm just saying I don't see why gnosticism is any more "problematic" than any other interpretation. the Bible, like most texts written by humans, is fundamentally contradictory and incoherent. People are gonna interpret things how they interpret things—the beauty of texts like the Bible is the value you receive doesn't come from correctness at all but belief or some other subjective, internal reverberation (in my case—mere appreciation of connecting with an ancient author). The neuroticism you see with e.g. Aquinus over interpreting it originates in the problem that they had no better tools at the time for reasoning about the universe and morality aside from appealing to the worldviews and diction people already had in common and trying to wrangle consistency from it by applying Aristotle. If there were people who had other approaches that firmly reject the coherency of the Bible (at the time), we didn't bother to record them.

Personally, I like the theory that gnosticism is basically Egyptian revenge for being, as they saw it, slandered in the Old Testament. If you identify the demiurge as the god "Set" this is rather poetic. However, there are many varieties, so this is unlikely the only source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sethianism

what's more effective than having a pre-defined term be what it means, rather than what the speaker intends internally?

Trying to understand the speaker, presumably, and not wielding your pet definition like a semantic argument. It's fundamentally boring conversation with no benefit to either party and it makes you look like an illiterate ass.

How is that a problem? Even within christianity the bible is not considered "true" or "absolute" or "the word of god" or "sacred" outside of niche literalist communities. If you're chasing coherence with texts written by humans you're likely to end up bitter and confused (or openly exploitative) rather than benefitting.

EDIT: Especially in the context of christianity, the importance of faith/belief cannot be overstated. Even the very act of looking for proof that you're doing the right thing can arguably undermine the entire point of the "religion". cf John 3:16—"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

NB, as awkward as I am to quoting the bible, I am an atheist. I'm just saying this doesn't need to be a barrier to understanding other people.

No major world religion I’m aware of is all that friendly to anyone who disagrees with the answer once ‘given’

Eastern worldviews (tao, buddhism—particularly zen buddhism) are inherently contradictory. Regarding these your perspective is simply nonsensical. Most worldviews have contradictory aspects that require inward judgement rather than just looking to a given bureaucracy to determine value; it's very rare for opinion to have any meaning at all outside of the christianity and islam.

Of course, this comes back to what you consider a "religion". If you're looking for something like the catholic church where belief in a specific worldview is necessary for salvation of the soul it's a pretty natural to be dismissive of anything other than what you already believe in as you presume that other people even care what your opinion is (metaphysics, worldview, belief-system, whatever you want to call it) when likely your opinion is entirely beside the point.

The costs of propagating such a text are significant enough this act implies serious buy-in from the community (if only its ruling class).

I don't think that's a serious barrier in this case. The above poster just would rather dismiss a statement rather than give it serious thought. It's easier to simply claim to know the one true meaning of "simple" rather than actually communicate effectively.

Referring back to your example of Abrahamic religions, their most famous work opens with an explanation of how the world was created. Was that not the work of somebody interested in how the world works?

I absolutely agree! Although in the context of authorship during exile I'd hazard a guess that there was some motive of community cohesion and development.

When I hear the word religion I specifically think of people that are curious and critical.

I hear a far more ambiguous term, and the term will have different connotations if you ask a catholic vs a protestant vs jewish person vs a sunni vs a sufi vs an atheist, &c. I have no clue how others perceive the term, but I sense that it's a rough match at best and completely nonsensical at worse.

But broader than that, our (i.e. those of us in the western tradition) entire conceptions about interpreting metaphysical/ontological language have been shaped by western religious conflict and an impossible to enumerate number of people being very, obviously, proudly incoherent, preserved in writing at massive, massive cost. The terms we use—faith, belief, god(s), spirit, afterlife, heaven/hell, sin, evil, guilt, salvation, &c—are difficult to detach from the above conflict and often have zero parallel in the metaphysics of people outside this culture.

This also results in people not realizing how much they've internalized the connotations of what might be basic descriptive words for common internal phenomena outside of the framing of religous rhetoric—for instance, you often see atheists proudly rejecting the concepts of faith and belief entirely, unaware that their own worldviews are formed around confidence about metaphysical concepts formed on less-than-certain grounds. as Hume would point out, and as should not be a surprise to anyone who identifies as an empiricist—we all have faith or belief that the sun will rise tomorrow without any line of reasoning to allow us to find deductive, 100%, absolute certainty in this. After all you never know when a pulsar might just completely obliterate our solar system, or that the laws of physics won't arbitrarily change. This might seem facetious until you realize that language only binds to reality in terms of personal confidence that these words are actually descriptive, regardless to what extent this is actually relevant to reality wrt established inductive reasoning.

Meanwhile, if you go back far enough, or even just speak in another language that hasn't marinated in christianized latin for millennia, "gods" and "spirits" might as well just be code for "unknown force that drives the mechanisms of the world and human relations". Anthropomorphization of these forces is a social process that allows people to reason about these concepts in abstract ways. Atheism in this context wouldn't necessarily mean you're rejecting a "sky wizard who wants you to deny evolution" (for a particularly facetious example); such beliefs might be perceived closer to a person abandoning the sole basis people had for reasoning about the world without providing an alternative other than "skepticism" (particularly in the case of Socrates, whose actual worldview we have very scant knowledge of). It takes a lot of time, resources, and pain for people to create concepts we take for granted today—even things like "truth" and "encoding words and numbers to strings of symbols we can algorithmically reason about" had to be invented. Of course this would have been bootstrapped on whatever reasonable substrate was available, if only for the sole purpose of communicating your reasoning to others.

Naturally this is just my 2¢.

In other words, average Americans exhibit similar limitations on their reasoning as good LLMs.

It's not even clear this is a good example of "reasoning". You can progress all the way through multi-variable calculus with just decent pattern-matching, variable-substitution, and rote memorization of sufficient lists of rules. I imagine for "reasoning" ability to apply you need to be able to detect incoherency and reject an approach—and incoherency detection seems to be a big missing ingredient right now (...which many humans lack, too!).

On the other side—any such ability would cripple a chatbot's ability to answer questions about the real world as our world is characterized (via description with informal language) by incoherent and contradictory concepts that can only be resolved through good-faith interpretation of the questioner. A large mark of intelligence (in the colloquial sense, not the IQ sense) is the ability to navigate both worlds.

using language wrong

There is no wrong use of language; there's just people who don't bother to communicate well in the most effective language available. In this case you could simply cohere the two viewpoints since you have insight rather than blaming one party and calling them wrong (...which is wrong).

the original small talk-y beauty of The Good Parts

Javascript seems much, much, much closer to Lisp than to Smalltalk. Granted, all three are very dynamic, but message passing needs to be bolted onto javascript. Meanwhile pretty much all of lisp is included "for free" (...via some of the ugliest syntax you've ever used).

I feel like a large slice of JS’s complexity comes from footguns you aren’t really supposed to use anymore

I'm not inclined to use a language that can't be fixed.

Any distinction is likely only about 500 years old at most. Though I do very much dislike the term "religion" for interpreting history as it connotes so much that's specific to abrahamic religions and in particular Christianity and Islam. Such framing really doesn't prepare you well for empathizing with people who were likely as curious, critical, and wanting to understand the universe as we are.

Presumably you're not chewing on or eating from synthetic textiles. Meanwhile an enormous amount of food is shipped in, and even cooked in, plastic directly.

Of course you're right in the sense that when it comes to our general environment textiles produce far more environmental microplastics than most other sources. Particularly in our water systems.

...or someone attempting to blame palestinian activists. This smells a lot more like someone trying to ape activist language.

The model breakup for antitrust people was the breakup of Standard Oil, and the owners (the Rockefellers) were richer after it was broken up, and still had control. Exxon (Standard Oil New Jersey) is still the largest oil company.

This happened over 100 years ago and does not reflect contemporary judgement. Furthermore the court has firmly indicated its desire to break from all but the aesthetics of jurisprudence—I see no reason why the court might be bound from by judgements when it's rejected the concept of any binding language outside of literal statute.

Being political, antitrust enforcement is often largely a ritual to display for the public when corruption has become too obvious for anyone sane to deny.

Most political actions are rituals designed to fend off the public from interference with the state.

It has no explicit goal (except benefit to the consumer, defined arbitrarily), so it can't actually do anything, because officially nothing is wrong other than "market manipulation" that "harms the consumer."

Yes, we have pathetically weak anti-trust laws, particularly when statute does not bind the court to determine what constitutes anti-consumer behavior. Perhaps we should begin with abandoning the concept of the "consumer", who is a ridiculously stupid entity only designed to buy from a market with no other attributes. Perhaps we should embrace the concept of the "citizen" again.

Presumably the public will either demand stronger protections or suffer further.

It's like forcing a rich guy to keep his money in two different wallets. With people making a living arguing about whether two wallets are enough, or should it be three, or even (as argued by dangerous radicals far outside of the mainstream) ten wallets?

Yes, partial satisfaction of public demands do not make rational sense. These make political sense, though, in the fact that states tend to comply with demands only insofar as the public is satisfied enough to stop bothering the politicians.

The main reason antitrust should be pursued far more aggressively is because there is no harm to the owners other than that their ability to manipulate the market through anti-competitive means (something that they claim not to have anyway) is weakened. It's really just paperwork.

Anti-trust should be pursued more aggressively because this tactic seem to produce better environments for humans to live in. "anti-trust" is certainly already narrowly defined to only pursue narrow private behaviors, but it just as certainly has no rational basis to be confined to such terms. We could easily define it in terms of harms to humans in betrayal of the idea of an actually competitive market. It certainly produces a higher cost for the government to only portray anti-competitive semantics in terms of purely monopolistic terms.

Real positive change to markets comes from forcing individuals to divest from competing companies, or by holding companies and their owners responsible for crimes that they commit.

Absolutely—this is the ideal goal of anti-trust legislation. The statute and your conception of what is right or just are not contrary concepts—except in the statute's extremely limited vocabulary of what constitutes behavior that is anti-competitive.

How do you figure?

Sure, a lot in absolute terms. A pittance in relative terms.

I’d argue that more so than anyone alive having “chosen” this structure, it’s what the structure itself wants to perpetuate. Eg people who go to elite colleges tend to see elite colleges as a reflection of “the system working” or whatever and view other concerns other than perpetuating this as secondary concerns. Same with government jobs, industry, etc etc.

I think a lot of the traditional teachings of "rhetoric" can apply to coding very naturally—there's often practically unlimited ways to communicate the same semantics precisely, but how you lay the code out and frame it can make the human struggle to read it straightforward to overcome (or near-impossible, if you look at obfuscation).

Presumably they would be forced to formally divest.

I had assumed that the division would simply force all alphabet companies to operate fully independently.

I'm not sure this makes sense if the same party has a controlling interest before and after.