bobthechef

26 ms·

91.
by bobthechef 5y ago
"In general the web was at its best decades ago, when people published because they knew things and were internally compelled to share." What does this mean, "internally compelled"? If someone is providing systematic rev
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by bobthechef 5y ago
The neocons, who have ties to the Israel lobby, have been running the Republican party for some time, so this is not surprising.
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by bobthechef 5y ago
I don't see an explanation anywhere. Why are they resigning? The reason given (a lack of accountability?) doesn't really tell me anything. If you're going to resign, it helps to clearly explain why with sufficient detail. May
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by bobthechef 5y ago
The analogy is problematic. The neighbor is broadcasting his light out into the neighborhood in a "unidirectional" way and as an incidental loss. It is leaving his house as a side effect of him lighting his home. It's like bo
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by bobthechef 5y ago
The meatverse is where people meat. Only meat meats. You are the meatverse. Supreme Meathead Zuckerberg controls the meatverse. We're not quite sure he's meat. He may be a machine from the metameatverse seeking to control the meat
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by bobthechef 5y ago
He wrote that he wasn't rich.
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by bobthechef 5y ago
> It’s really hard to be a Catholic, or a Christian, and not lean left. I would be careful here. You are operating under a very peculiar view of left/right (not a very accurate view in my estimation). Left/right are generally l
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by bobthechef 5y ago
Worth noting that computers don't actually compute functions. They are used to simulate computation, but they're not computing per se. Any claim that they do is an anthropomorphic projection onto an object that lacks that capacity
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by bobthechef 5y ago
> whether the system as a whole understands Chinese. "The system" isn't the kind of thing that understands. If I give n people a letter each and a number indicating the position the letter should occupy on some grid, it do
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by bobthechef 5y ago
"But the Russian military called the U.S. response “hypocritical,” saying in a statement translated by NBC that “the United States knows for certain that the resulting fragments” from the ASAT test “did not and will not pose a threat t
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by bobthechef 5y ago
There's a difference between "abstraction" as used in computer science and software development, and "abstraction" as an intellectual act or process. The former itself seems to have a few different but related uses,
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by bobthechef 5y ago
By "invent" I presume inventio which is to say "finding or discovering of something"[0]. The concept of risk is virtual in the comprehension of all human beings and it takes abstraction[1] and analysis to extricate the
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by bobthechef 5y ago
Entirely possible. Think Clinton and the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Hybrid warfare is the 21st century way.
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by bobthechef 5y ago
Are you comparing Trump to Stalin and Mao? (Also, there was no EU when Hitler, Mussolini, etc. were around, and the EU is not a monolithic bloc with a meaningful identity today either.)
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by bobthechef 5y ago
This is where I'd differentiate between taste and beauty. Taste is a property of people. Beauty is a property of things. Taste is the ability to recognize and respond to the beauty of things in proportion to how beautiful they actually
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by bobthechef 5y ago
Absolutely true, being genuine doesn't mean being an asshole. Lots of assholes are not genuine, or they're genuinely assholes. However... > It's called being a decent person. Engaging in small talk can be inconsiderate,
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by bobthechef 5y ago
Why not build a system of dikes around the island? What about poldering? Is that feasible here? The island is only 26 square kilometers.
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by bobthechef 5y ago
Hopefully, much of the oppressive and ugly modernist rubbish will wither away over time. Shaming bad architecture openly and mercilessly is a public service (after all, we must live in the damned world built by these architects, and they se
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by bobthechef 5y ago
> Logic can work on anything. In fact, it exists to serve emotions. That's a frightening idea (a riff of the classic Humean quip). Luckily, it is false. Emotions have their place. Properly developed and proportioned to reason, they
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by bobthechef 5y ago
What we seem to lack is an education. The Greeks, for example, and later the Scholastics, already had a much more sophisticated way to speak of love than we seem to. As I wrote elsewhere, love can be erotic and agathonic. Within each we can
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by bobthechef 5y ago
Sexual attraction is different than lust. The first is good as such because it leads to procreation; the second is a vice, an excess of sexual appetite that darkens the mind and, like all vice, corrupts you from the inside. So ultimately, i
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by bobthechef 5y ago
What are your definitions for "nationalist" and "internationalist"? You seem to be using meanings which are not operative here or even meaningfully coherent. For example, nationalism doesn't preclude cooperation or
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by bobthechef 5y ago
Subcultures are attempts at substitutes for ethnic identity especially in the absence of religion. People in countries like the US are particularly vulnerable. According to the triple melting pot theory, as members of ethnic communities int
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by bobthechef 5y ago
As always, nothing in the world can take the place of prudential judgement. When proposals should be written up to avoid senseless action and short-term thinking, and when they should be avoided because they would constitute bikeshedding or
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by bobthechef 5y ago
The view that function is strictly tied to some particular piece of the brain like a machine is simplistic.
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by bobthechef 5y ago
Leaving everything to “personal choice” is nice, if you live in an alternate universe where no one has any causal effect on anyone else. In this case, you are inflicting a harm on others. An acceptable compromise is one where restaurants an
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by bobthechef 5y ago
I would rather say an ability to be "well-adjusted".
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by bobthechef 5y ago
I don't know about "hacks", rather observations. If most people didn't have to work to survive, they wouldn't know what to do with the time. An observation about slavery is that you've traded in the burden of r
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by bobthechef 5y ago
The article certainly betrays an ideological alignment that is routinely denied by those who moderate Wikipedia, but nonetheless is often fairly obvious. But my general attitude toward Wikipedia is not to take it too seriously. These modera
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by bobthechef 5y ago
Christians can’t “sell” their souls as it is a category mistake in the first place. And even if you could “sell” it, in the sense that you could reject God and thus one’s own good and choose instead your own self-destruction (hence the irr

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