barsoap

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 12 hours ago

I'm not Christian so I don't really have a skin in the game but insofar as I'm still Lutheran: No, those people aren't Christian. Well, actual Lutherans would never say it like that but talk about "people regrettably being in grave error" but same difference.

Point being is that you can't profess to follow a religion if you ignore core tenets. You can't be a dancer if you never dance. And you can't be a Christian if your creed boils down to "Jesus was too woke".

Your religion is evil and always has been.

Christianity has always been self-righteous and arrogant (see the Lutheran "charity" above), but that's not the same as evil -- otherwise the French would also be inherently evil. They can, indeed, be quite rad on occasion.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

A narrative that conveniently ignores that the Dalai Llama was, and is, more of a socialist than the CCP ever mustered to be and was always very much on board with reforming everything. Or, well, the current incarnation always was. The split only came after it became clear that tankies gonna tank, that is, the CCP cared less about the freedom of the people (both in a spiritual and material sense) than about having full control over a mineral-rich mountain fortress to build a military-industrial base that couldn't be shelled from the ocean. Tibet alas is, geographically, the Switzerland of the Himalayas. Another factor was the sheer popularity of the Llama in Tibet, spiritual leader + socialist is a sure-fire double whammy to popularity but threatened the party's prerogative of interpretation not to mention orthodox Marxist doctrine, opium for the people and everything.

You know what's the most absurd thing about all this, especially considering Marxist materialism? That the CCP is claiming that it can legislate on reincarnation. And not in the "yeah this is all BS" sense, that'd be par for the course, but in the "ok here is how it's going to be done" sense. Went so far as to accuse the Dalai Llama of blasphemy for suggesting that whether and how he reincarnates will be up to him. And I guess the CCP is stuck on insisting that incarnation is real because otherwise the can't blame the current Dalai Llama for the politics of his previous lives?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

It is not those who hear the law, but those who do the law, who shall be delivered.

It's astonishing how many self-professed Christians straight-up ignore Romans 2.

Epictetus puts it even better though:

Never call yourself a philosopher, nor talk a great deal among the unlearned about theorems, but act conformably to them. Thus, at an entertainment, don't talk how persons ought to eat, but eat as you ought. For remember that in this manner Socrates also universally avoided all ostentation. And when persons came to him and desired to be recommended by him to philosophers, he took and- recommended them, so well did he bear being overlooked. So that if ever any talk should happen among the unlearned concerning philosophic theorems, be you, for the most part, silent. For there is great danger in immediately throwing out what you have not digested. And, if anyone tells you that you know nothing, and you are not nettled at it, then you may be sure that you have begun your business. For sheep don't throw up the grass to show the shepherds how much they have eaten; but, inwardly digesting their food, they outwardly produce wool and milk. Thus, therefore, do you likewise not show theorems to the unlearned, but the actions produced by them after they have been digested.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day 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 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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] 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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] 6 points 1 day 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] 28 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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 1 day 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 1 day 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 2 days ago

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

 

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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