ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
No bio...
User ID: 626

I'm saying the exietence of the universe will never be answerable by science. You can't get an answers for "why is there something rather than nothing" by looking at it from within the something.
It's not even a particularly controversial observation from what I understand.
Serves me right for replying from the raw comment feed.
I'm saying that "existence is amazingly extraordinary" (backed by hours of hypnotic monologues by Sagan, Dawkins, or Tyson) has been literally what secular humanists were saying in order to generate a sense of awe similar to that of religious epiphanies.
Your particular argument destroys any such attempt. Even if secular humanism remains ubdeboonked, it's left barren of any higher goal.
I don't think that this is the definition of "miracle" used by the Bible, or any other religious text, written before the scientific method was established.
Can that which encompasses all ever be extraordinary?
Isn't that literally what secular humanism was trying to sell as an alternative to religion?
Not just that, the trend seems to be upward since early 2024.
The existence of the universe?
and $1780 dollars per person
Was that when every $20 was backed by an ounce of gold?
Don’t express the virtues of collectivism. Don’t criticize the preference for libertarianism or small government. Don’t say anything critical of Zelensky. Don’t doubt the inherent virtue of unnamed people.
What? I don't know what you mean by the last one, but I disagree with all the other ones, and I'm pretty sure I could write something doing all thr things you're telling people not to, and get lots of updoots.
I'm not questioning a bias existing, but you're getting in comically wrong.
You wouldn't need to charge $60 for your game if you only needed to pay 3 salaries. And on the other side, there are lots of cheap indie games that are crap in comparison. Why can't all of the 3 people studios produce games of this quality?
I'm not in the industry so my impression might be off, but there's a few reasons I can think of:
- Programming is hard. For as long as I remember there was some gray-suit asshole that tried to come up with a paradigm that would make it work like all other forms of engineering - you get one guy that sits at the drawing board for a while, you pay him relatively well, and when he's done you send off the blueprint to an army of worker ants, that get paid peanuts. This had several manifestations like trying to ship IT jobs to India, or trying to ship India into the west, I think now they're hoping they can hand it off to AI. For whatever reason this has always been a disaster. I can't explain why, there's just something whimsical about the entire field, that makes it resist cookie-cutter solutions, and ends up requiring talented people who are quick on their feet. It's actually counter-intuitive for me, I'd expect IRL engineering would be the thing that would keep falling flat on it's face, due to the inherent dirtiness of the physical realm, but somehow it's the opposite.
- Programming games is even harder. All the things I said apply to your run-of-the-mill, boring-ass, web applications. Games are insanely complex systems where a tonne of stuff is interacting with a tonne of other stuff in unpredictable ways (and that's before the user input is taken into account), in real-time. Every paradigm that was invented to make the boring forms of software engineering a little bit more legible, go right out the window in game programming - at least if the code from games that ended up open sourced is any indication. This makes it even more resistant to standardization.
- You know what else games need? Art. That other thing that doesn't go quite well with soulless, standardized, production pipelines.
- You know what big organizations really like? Soulless, standardized, production pipelines. This one is the actual core of your question, and I now realize I don't actually have a good answer. Why? I don't know, but companies will literally eat massive costs if it buys them a sliver of predictability. In theory it should make no difference, if you have a lot of money, you can just throw it on thousands of creators, and more than make up for the money with the few good hits you get. Maybe it's because the good ones start acting like divas? Once they make a name for themselves, you need them more than they need you. No self-respecting industrialist wants to be in that position, so they prefer to throw half a billion dollars at a game with a list of credits longer than a Holocaust memorial, and get a billion dollars back, and rely on a million mindless drones, than to get the same amount of profit for a fraction of the investment, and risk your drones getting uppity.
- Why do all the other indies suck? Well, see all the "this shit is hard" points. Yeah, this one might have been made by 3 people, but I'll bet blindly that each of them is in the top <= 0.1% of their respective field. On top of that, finding 3 talented people is not enough. You need to find 3 talented people that get along well, and can work with each other.
There was some "free speech" festival (possibly several) that he showed up for and did it live, but I'm blanking out on the name. Honestly, I think there was a time when he would have qualified, but between Trump II and Adderal (/all the other drugs he seems to enjoy) taking their toll, he seems to be falling apart at a rather rapid pace.
Soros doesn't personally show up at enemy territory in an attempt to persuade them by means of dialogue, he throws money at causes he likes. He's more like than the Koch brothers than Charlie Kirk.
One day you guys need to do a roundup of all the "best" filtered posts you get. We appreciate your service, but it sounds like there's a whole world we're missing out on.
I kinda think that it does.
I never said that Trump lying is right, just that it's far from the worst. As to your point about how all the little lies add up to an atmosphere of mistrust, I just flatly disagree. Politicians being dishonest was seen as cost of doing business in a democracy for as a long as I have lived, and almost certainly long before that ("How do you know a politician is lying? His lips are moving! HAR! HAR! HAR!" is probably one of the boomerest jokes one can think of), so the idea that Trump can move the needle feels rather off.
I thought that's why they came up with polygamy to begin with...
The administration overestimates its cultural clout. The perception of Kirk as a hero is entirely in-group: post-incident polling shows most Americans didn't know who Kirk was, and among those that did, he was quite unpopular, disliked at a 2:1 ratio -- worse than even Trump himself.
And you don't think you might overestimating the degree to which these polls are reflective of anything deeper? I didn't like Kirk either, and I'm not even American, but I still think deserves to be put on a bit of a pedestal just due to being the target of a political assassination.
That sounds more like "stop having fun" than "speak plainly", but if what I said was so unclear, than just check professorgerm's response above, my point is nearly identical to his, though I'd go less for "forgetting" and more for "we have always been at war with EastAsia".
The fixation I’ve observed on this forum with the 2020 riots is certainly interesting.
Riots are not exactly an uncommon part of political life, yet judging from what I’ve read from many posters here these seem to have been the formative event for many right wing posters.
My gym teacher in primary school was an alcoholic. All the kids would watch him show up for work obviously drunk, do the bare minimum required by the bureaucracy (check if all the kids are present), throw us a ball and tell us to play, and he'd lock himself in his office to drink some more.
He never did anything terribly bad because of it, but he did neglect his duties rather egregiously, and possibly the most frustrating thing about it was all the adults gaslighting all the kids about it. I told my parents, and they'd say "can't be, someone would have done something about it". We'd tell the teachers and they'd either change the subject, or go off on us for impugning our coach's integrity.
Anyway, some years passed, I went on to go to high-school and forget about the whole affair. I then ran into an old friend from that school, we catch up on what we've been up to, and then he tells me some news he heard recently - our old coach was fired, got caught red-handed by the principal. So I take these news to my parents and they say "why are you acting so shocked, you were telling us all these years that he was an alcoholic!".
Story unrelated.
Where were we? Ah, yes. Riots happen, you're absolutely right. There was nothing special about this riot, or the way the Blue Tribe, including half this forum (which included moderators) talked about it.
A lot of right-wingers around here like to spread this whole idea of high and low trust societies. Okay, fine. Here is a mini-society, and Trump is almost singlehandedly making it a low-trust relation full of perpetual suspicion and mistrust. Maybe he's "owning the libs", but at what cost?
I agree with you that trying to quantify it is a futile task, but I would like someone to explicitly take into account some very obvious counter-arguments before making their conclusion. If we juxtapose Trump's lies with things like "racism is a public health emergency, therefore protests are perfectly fine", maybe it will still turn out that he is the worst in terms of damaging societal trust, but it's far from obvious to me, and I don't think people should get to just assert that, and act like everybody agrees with them.
Another thing I'd like to see is some direct comparisons to past presidents. Even if you want to go with the "Republicans bad" framing, it is again rather counter-intuitive for me that anything Trump said could be as bad as George Bush lying the country into the war in Iraq.
across the country and a couple dozen extra murders?
*Thousand.
There may have been only dozens of deaths directly connected to the riots, but the increase in the murder rate following the police withdrawal (which not only merely followed the riots, but was explicitly demanded by the protesters) accounted for thousands of lives lost.
Cynically, I think if the rioters had decided to loot in the suburbs, the Dems would have been more likely to send the cops.
Wasn't the place where the Rittenhouse affair took place a suburb?
Not much to report, been refactoring as per last week. I think it will have some pretty cool cnsequences, like simplifying the import code, but I actually have to get there first.
Anything on your side @Southkraut?
It's not true speech, it's a lie that uses truth to mask itself, making it more dangerous, because it's more likely to be believed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_or_misleading_statements_by_Donald_Trump
So? Wikipedia is well known for slanted coverage of anything political, it's no surprise their edditors would autistically catalogue every misleading statent from him, and refuse to do the same for other politicians.
Anyway, don't many of his supporters acknowledge that he lies a lot, but say his lies are good car salesman style lies, whereas other politicians may not lie but they are selective with what they include and what they omit?
Yeah, and I think it's dishonest to pretend the former is worse than the latter.
in a country presided over by one of the most prolific liars in history seems absolutely risible.
Where are you getting the idea he's any worse than any other politician, or even journalist or academic?
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I do have a bad habit of replying directly from the comment feed.
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