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Comment Re: Cheating on your wife is a bad idea (Score 1) 153

Are Catholics actually still doing that? My understanding is that the pope condemned it over a decade ago, major changes have been made, and while it was an institutional issue, it didn't go straight to the top.

Where do you draw the line? What companies are you boycotting due to their use of slave labor, etc.?

Obviously, when you've been personally affected, that's a pretty easy line. I've got my own list of personal boycotts for similar reasons - but I don't expect you to care, and I doubt your list includes many of those names.

I'm not a fan of the Catholic Church, I just dislike the idea that one cannot possibly support any organization which has, at some point, in some capacity, done something wrong. Pretty much every flag and religion has been used to justify atrocities. Mega-corps aren't doing much better. Buy local, abandon globalism, I guess? But then why are you on the internet?

Role Playing (Games)

Julian LeFay, 'Father of The Elder Scrolls,' Has Died Aged 59 (ign.com) 10

Julian LeFay, widely regarded as the "Father of The Elder Scrolls," has died at age 59 following a battle with cancer. IGN reports: It was announced last week that LeFay, now co-founder and technical producer at OnceLost Games, had stepped back from game development after a lengthy battle with cancer, in order to spend time with his family and loved ones. A statement from OnceLost Games, published today, has now confirmed LeFay's passing -- "with profound sadness and heavy hearts."

Born in Denmark in 1965, LeFay began his career working on early Amiga and NES games, before becoming one of Bethesda's earliest employees in 1987. After working on a string of Elder Scrolls titles, his career next took him to Sega, and then ultimately to found OnceLost Games in 2019 to develop a new open-world RPG, Wayward Realms, that was successfully pitched on Kickstarter as a Daggerfall spiritual successor.
"Julian LeFay was not just a colleague -- he was a visionary who fundamentally shaped the gaming industry as we know it today," OnceLost Games' statement reads. "Known as the 'Father of The Elder Scrolls', Julian directed the creation of legendary titles including Elder Scrolls 1 and 2: Arena, Daggerfall, and Battlespire. His pioneering work established the foundation for open-world RPGs and influenced countless developers and games that followed."

Bethesda also issued a statement, writing: "Without Julian, we would not be here today. If you had the opportunity to work with Julian, you were blessed to know a one-of-a-kind force of nature, who pushed everyone to create something special. His work and spirit will live on both in our memories and in our games."

Comment Re:Can a submarine swim? (Score 1) 103

Well, yes, we can say all sorts of things. I can say "phantomfive is not thinking, either".

I think you are perhaps putting too much stock in your ability to say things, and not enough stock in whether those things reflect reality - it's easy to say LLMs aren't thinking, but there's a remarkably narrow range of tasks they fail on these days, and you're moving the goalposts enough to exclude a number of humans at this point.

Comment Re:I am getting real tired of the AI doom and gloo (Score 1) 189

Ahh, yes, black people, yearning for the freedoms of slavery and segregation.

Or perhaps you were thinking of women, yearning for... oh, hey, it's the freedoms of slavery and segregation again.

Shall we liberate the gays from... oh yay, a new one: the tyranny of marriage!

Or to be more direct: I mostly notice it's white guys idealizing the past, because everyone else gets fucked over even a century back.

Comment Re:Foundling adoption doesn't require ID (Score 1) 151

> For those reading along, this is were dmb reveals themselves as a troll.

Oh wow, they really are. That's some smooth shark indeed. And they just keep going, so I guess they're having fun with the absurdity. Been a while since I saw a genuine old fashioned troll - these days it's all psyops and agendas, but this is just... a very smooth shark.

Comment Re:Nope (Score 1) 173

> Student visa applicants, whom are by definition are not US citizens and not US residents, are not subject to ANY US rights

Ignoring the "residing outside of US" clause:

Non-citizens absolutely have rights under the constitution. That's settled ground. First source off Google is https://libertarianinstitute.o..., but I can find you a dozen others.

Can you concede that much, at least?

> residing outside of US

To be clear, that's a separate topic - I'm just asking about people who are actually in the US

Comment Re:No surprise (Score 1) 139

I comment because I want to actually share and help people understand the topic. My goal is not to "win". I've used language wrong before, I've had people correct me, and I absolutely count those corrections as a "win" because I learned something useful, and "someone learns something useful" is my usual goal.

If you can't understand the difference between "okay, that was a bit sloppy, let me clarify" and "denying", you've definitely lost.

Comment Re:No surprise (Score 1) 139

No, in common vernacular, "there are more oranges" refers to count, not weight. If you wanted to say "the oranges weight more", that would also be a perfectly valid, and common sentence, which instead refers to weight.

Pick a different object and it becomes obvious: if I ask which team on the NFL has more players, you're not going to go check their weights, are you? Have you ever once heard someone say that a team has "more" players in the sense of their weight? It wouldn't be at all unusual to say a team is heavier, or their players are bigger, but you wouldn't say they have "more" players.

Comment Re:No surprise (Score 1) 139

No, you can't "count" mass. You don't go "1kg, 2kg, 3kg...".

You can sum mass. You can calculate mass. But you cannot actually count mass.

  "Countable" is a grammatical term here. The "less vs fewer" distinction might help clarify that: https://www.merriam-webster.co...

(and yes, there is a sense in which "mass counts", but that's a homograph - "count mass" and "mass counts" are using two different words that are simply spelled the same.)

Comment Re:No surprise (Score 1) 139

Rationality justifies rationality recursively: Rationality works because, by the rules of Rationality, it works. So, in a sense, yes, everyone has to choose their axioms.

The first missing piece of the picture is The Lens That Sees Its Flaws ( https://www.lesswrong.com/post... ). A system can be self-improving and continue to approach accuracy, even if it starts in an imperfect state.

The second missing piece is that if you pick any sort of axiom like "believe in things that have been shown to work in the past", you get Rationality. You can of course be obtuse: anti-inference has been wrong every time before, so by the rules of anti-inference it is bound to be the correct system! But if you make that claim, you're rejecting the common ground of "believe in things that work". Communication only really works within groups that can at least approximately agree on certain axioms, and most humans have agreed with that one.

> Someone says there are more oranges than grapes.

"more" is a quantity word, not a weight word. In standard English conversation, this means that "count(oranges) > count(grapes)". One person is right, and one person is wrong. If you want to discuss a different quantity, you can do that, but you have to specify: you're allowed to say "there's a greater mass of oranges than grapes".

> You are insisting that counting (reason) is the only legitimate way to arrive at the truth.

No one is insisting that one is more "valid" than the other - merely that the conventions of English are used differently depending on whether you care about count or mass. There isn't even a disagreement here! If you say "but the mass of the oranges is greater", any rational person would agree with you, and you should be able to agree back with them: "yes, the mass is greater, but the quantity is less". These two observations aren't contradictory, just measuring different things.

> It is however the one you have faith in.

If you want to communicate, you have to play the same game everyone else is playing.

If you don't believe in rationality and reason, why go on a forum and try making reasonable arguments? Wouldn't "squid purple smiley-emoji" be just as convincing?

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