barsoap

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago

Flashback: Once upon the time, 2014, the DFB (German football association) required the FC St. Pauli to "neutralise" their grounds as they were having the national team as guests for training before their friendly against Poland. As far as the club understood the thing, that meant obscuring all the sponsor ads, fair enough. The DFB interpreted it differently: Also any and all political slogans shall be obscured, and St. Pauli, famously, sports a big "Kein Fußball den Faschisten" in the stadium, installed permanently. ("No football for fascists" -- as in they're not supposed to have any at all, not this football isn't for them). The DFB then improvised and, with limited means, covered the slogan to read "no football". It was a draw, nil nil. Uninspired, one might say.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

No union without social interaction to found and preserve it. It's why small businesses are much worse at ganging up on big businesses that exploit them than workers are at ganging up on bosses: Businesses aren't people, they don't have social interactions. Workers are and do, thus unions can and do form.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

"Modern" is a bit misleading, x87 had fldpi. The whole x87 part of the standard has been deprecated with x86_64 in favour of the whole sse series of instructions and those don't come with pi. You instead load a constant from program memory, just like any other.

As processors (as of yet) still support those legacy modes they will also contain the constant somewhere in probably microcode storage, calculating it on the fly makes literally no sense at all: It's (for x87) 80 bits of data, much shorter than any imaginable program, smaller than any circuitry able to compute it so you'd be spending time to save no space which is pointless.

ARM, RISC-V etc. come from the RISC tradition so they wouldn't be caught dead including such an instruction. Both have zero registers though as zero is an absurdly useful constant, simplifying things drastically, both on the hardware front as well as within the instruction set (move is add zero to source, save to destination, clear is add zero and zero, save to destination)


Now, that's finite constants. In particular, it's about floating point arithmetic, which is a wonder of maths and a deep rat's nest of numerology, but has finite precision, it's not true real arithmetic. Real real arithmetic is undecidable, in particular comparison and expansion to decimal form are undecidable. Printing infinite strings of digits is usually not what we want to do, and limiting precision of comparisons is... not ideal, but better than having limited precision at every operation: You can decide once you're comparing how accurate you want things to be and don't have to worry while writing down your formula (btw Herbie exists, and that's why packages like this exist. In that case pi is not a constant but a formula, which can be expanded as needed. Quite slow compared to floating point hardware but when you need it you need it and even if you don't it's still useful as a sanity check, gives you an idea of how far off the floating point results are without having to call in a favour with a mathematician.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 12 hours ago

Also Hitler was Austrian. Also Austrians are Bavarian.

Coincidentally, the current German minister of the interior is Bavarian and facing multiple criminal complaints regarding inciting subordinates to commit crimes.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (5 children)

It's not a world war if it's not from the Austrian region of Germany, otherwise it's just sparkling aggression.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 14 hours ago

Humour is a defence mechanism. Altruism is a defence mechanism. And with those two, camaraderie is a given.

Also it would be a sorry state of affairs if workers under capitalism had their defence mechanisms, but not canalisation workers shovelling literal shit.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 15 hours ago (4 children)

I guess it's a poor choice of words but there's definite value in workplace camaraderie. Don't let your jadedness fuel the bosses' union busting.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

You don't understand that's just Hanseatic understatement.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

That's two different things there:

  • Life imprisonment is a sentence of indeterminate length and minimum of 15 years until you can even apply for parole, unless the court declares special gravity of guilt and ups that term. Average is parole after 19 years (median: 17), 13% serve 25 or longer, including actual life. Record is 59 years, died shortly after parole, age 85. The previous record holder died in prison. Well, prison hospital.
  • Preventive detention is separate from that, and doesn't just apply to life sentences. It applies after the sentence is over or has been paroled and is essentially an asylum for the not criminally insane, that is, people who can comprehend their guilt.

In short: He's been sentenced to therapy until healed or life, whatever comes first, and minimum 20 years (or such I didn't read the verdict, but German press mention special gravity of guilt).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Right-out tankie. But then broken clocks are right twice a day.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

I know what they mean when clutching their frozen peaches. It also never works out as they imagine because paradox of tolerance.

 

Nach drei Jahren intensiver Recherche will ein ARD Podcast den Ersteller des ikonischen Döner-Logos gefunden haben. Doch trotz des beachtlichen Aufwands – und der öffentlich-rechtlichen Finanzierung – wirkt das Ergebnis überraschend oberflächlich. Deshalb habe ich jemanden getroffen, der die wahre Geschichte kennt – und sie besser erzählen kann.

Ein großes Dankeschön an Orhan Tançgil, dass er mir die Möglichkeit gegeben hat, seine unglaublich schöne Geschichte zu dokumentieren. Ebenso vielen Dank an Tobias Jochheim von der Rheinischen Post, mit dem ich gemeinsam zu Orhan gefunden habe.

Zur gesamten Geschichte:
https://shop.kochdichturkisch.de/2025/05/die-geschichte-des-doener-logos/

 

This is a follow-up to America's coming Weimar Moment, having a look at the situation in the US from the perspective of German experience with fascism, looking not at partisan stuff and tactical skirmishes but the overall state of the polity.

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submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Have you ever wanted a waffle so bad that you bought a literal ton of obsolete machine tool to make it happen?

 

Chris' release videos are always more of a highlight reel, here's the full release notes.

 

Chris' release videos are always more of a highlight reel, here's the full release notes.

 

I know, I know, the duration. Not just pushing the community rules beyond the breaking point, but a 72 minutes video on focus, of all things? Bold move.

On the flipside, consider: You can already start listening while cooking, also, you should not rush eating. I rest my case.

Blurb:

Distraction is one of the hottest button issues today. Everywhere there seems to be assaults on our focus. Recently I came across two wonderful videos by the inimitable Jared Henderson (‪@_jared‬) on our declining focus rates, and it took me on a long research journey into the true terrifying effects of our limited focus.

 

Life is meaningless, but how do we cope? That is the question asked by Albert Camus in his landmark text The Myth of Sisyphus. Here I will draw upon this work amongst others Camus penned like The Stranger to give an overview of how Camus thinks we should live in a world where everything seems meaningless, and the universe will not hear our calls for a higher purpose. I will also focus on some of his more radical ideas as they are often glossed over or made more palatable by many popular interpretations of his words. Think of this as a slightly more provocative version of my genuine interpretation of the great thinker's ideas.

 

Long story short, found a paper. Abstract:

It is often thought that, for the Stoics, assent and the suspension of assent to kataleptic impressions is voluntary in the sense that one can deliberate about assenting or suspending assent. Against this view, I examine the relevant sources closely and argue that they point in a different direction: assent and suspension of assent to kataleptic impressions is not a matter of deliberation. Instead, kataleptic impressions force our assent in the absence of obstacles that make it difficult to discern kataleptic from non-kataleptic impressions. Surprisingly, neither is the act of withholding assent to kataleptic impressions a matter of deliberation; instead, the presence of obstacles that make it difficult to discern kataleptic from non-kataleptic impressions triggers the activation of a disposition to withhold assent. However, we can acquire this disposition through training in dialectic. This means that deliberation can be involved in the acquisition of this disposition. However, the act of assenting and the act of withholding assent to kataleptic impressions is not guided by deliberation.


I think you'll find your way to libgen yourself, it's chapter 13 in the book, haven't read anything else from it yet though some stuff looks interesting.


Overall this characterisation of katalepsis strengthens me in my assumption that what the Stoics are trying to get at is the exact same thing that Zen folks call "direct knowledge".

The best subjective (hey, this is phenomenology) experiment to demonstrate the clear distinction between this stuff and ordinary thoughts I know of, as in, "doesn't involve faith or decades of staring at the wall" comes from a technique the lucid dreaming community came up with to trigger lucid dreams: Ask yourself whether you're awake. If you're awake, the response to that question will be right-out unassailable, you just know, kinda feels silly to even ask. When you ask yourself that question regularly throughout the day, after maybe a week or two, the mind gets used to regularly posing that question and will also do it when you're sleeping, and if you get it right in that context, your dreams will become lucid (You'll be dreaming and simultaneously know that you're dreaming, allowing you to consciously steer them to at least some degree). If you get it wrong, which shouldn't be hard to do, the qualia, the spot that the wrong answer comes from will be quite different, which can be remembered when you're awake, again. "Qualia" and "spot" both kinda bad terms it's not a thing that can really be put into words, just suspend disbelief will you. The wrong answer comes from, as the paper puts it, an obstacle to assent, obscuring the view of the kataleptic impression: Your mind could tell your consciousness the truth but it has other plans for tonight, you knowing that you're asleep-yet-conscious would only get into the way of that.


Furthermore I think the first rule of this sub should be "Never assent to non-kataleptic impressions". Yes I'm going to Cato this.

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