Notices by Louis Ingenthron (louisingenthron@qoto.org), page 4

I am currently actively moving away from #Autodesk products, and the main reason is because of their predatory pricing.

Did you know Autodesk wants to monitor your usage and charge you for *each day* that you want to use their products? And they want you to buy their own special currency to do so, just like shitty F2P phone apps. How dystopian is that?

Especially when #Blender exists as a #FOSS option. Fuck Autodesk.

@freemo And yet you don't apply that same logic to the freemasons?

Any sufficiently large group will attract a few nutjobs, but that doesn't mean the larger group is unworthy of association.

The main reason I find Trump so worrisome is that he's brought this extremist fringe to the mainstream on the right. Whereas on the left, the fringe is still just a tiny minority of loud preachy assholes.

@freemo @volkris I got it a bit wrong. He claimed he did more for black people than any President other than Lincoln, before immediately saying the good Lincoln did was “questionable”.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2020/06/12/trump-claims-hes-done-more-for-blacks-than-any-president-besides-lincoln/?sh=5aceb39522c2

@freemo @volkris Didn’t he say something about being a better President for black people than Lincoln?

@freemo @volkris I mean, Trump, sure, especially because his ego is so unearned. But Biden doesn’t strike me as having that much more of an ego than Obama or W or Clinton. They’re all full of themselves.

@freemo @volkris Has there ever been a president elected without such an ego? I think it’s almost a prerequisite for the job. Nobody without such an ego would even think to run in the first place.

@freemo Right, I’m using the term as it has become popularly applied.

I used to make the exact same argument you’re making, but at this point, fighting that battle is like trying to fight “irregardless”.

@freemo Oh, totally. But, inversely, AI is an algorithm to procedurally generate content. Procedural generation in video games is, in many ways, a precursor to modern ML algos.

@freemo In none of those examples are you doing integer addition.
The first two examples are collision, not addition. The third is procreation, not addition.

One electron added to one positron is two physical things... until they collide, which kicks off annihilation (which is also not addition).

For water, your quantity is not "1", but rather "blob". So, yes, blob+blob=blob, but none of those are integers. When they combine, it's not the math that changes, but rather the means by which you measure it. In different units, such as one gallon plus one gallon, the math holds true.

These universal truths I describe are often incredibly narrowly defined, by necessity. I believe very few things are truly absolute, but there are a few.

@freemo I feel like you're unnecessarily equating labels with their underlying concepts here.

The concept of two is still two whether we write it as "2" in base-10 or as "10" in base-2.

Likewise, the concept of integer addition is distinct from the addition symbol "+" which is also used to denote many similar-yet-distinct concepts (such as the ones you describe). While those may be referred to as "addition", they aren't the concept of integer addition that I'm specifically referring to.

These are, as you initially described them, effectively "definitions" that prove themselves circularly, but a tiny subset of such definitions describe concepts that would seem to be universally constant, that are independently and repeatably verifiable regardless of perspective. If we don't call those "facts", what do we call them?

@freemo Idk about that. If you met someone from 100 years ago, you'd sure seem like an oracle to them. I imagine that's largely true going back through human history. As a species, we seek to define and understand the world around us, and the only way we can truly do that is by finding these universal truths and using them as lenses. I don't think we've found many yet, but we're working hard on finding more.

I don't need confirmation from an omniscient oracle to confirm a fact as true. I just need to be reasonably certain that even totally foreign beings who experience life in a way that's unfathomable to me would still inevitably and independently come to the same conclusion, and I believe that to be true of "1+1=2".

@freemo Right, but in that example, it's "rock" that becomes ambiguous, not "1", which is an abstract concept we can reliably apply to rocks, apples, bananas, whatever.

I believe that somewhere between the theory and the individual applications, there lies an objective truth that remains factual regardless of our perceptions or ability to observe it.

@freemo While I agree with this in general, I feel like there's got to be a limit. Is "1+1=2" opinion?

@freemo Do you mean 2D? Struggling to picture how you'd cross a 1D barrier.

@freemo Also, I have a separate concern with both methods: What happens to the matter that used to be where you appear? When it's just air, nobody thinks about it, but landscapes change over time, so it won't always be just air.

I feel like we would have seen some time travelers fossilized halfway into a mountain by now.

@freemo The delorean method, maybe, but the terminator method seems exceedingly unlikely.

Even so, the only way it could possibly exist is with each travel backward forming a new timeline.

If there was only one timeline, then time travelers in our past or present would definitely leave some pretty obvious clues (hyper-resistant future illnesses, for one), even before you consider the timeless human need to be a shithead.

@freemo You can't come out the other end of a machine that doesn't exist yet.

@freemo Correct. And apparently a lot of constitutional law professors agree. This ruling doesn't seem to be consistent with anything.

@freemo No, my concern is that SCOTUS just prevented the constitution from being upheld based on a rule that doesn't apply to any other part of the constitution.

@freemo The state supreme court made the decision. The federal supreme court overruled it.

In this case, SCOTUS is basically saying it can't enforce the constitution unless congress passes a law first, which is just patently ridiculous. Imagine if they applied that requirement to any other amendment.