debit-freak

Surely this isn't necessary with a small enough sensor granularity or whatever the terminology is. You can have very dumb software if it reacts quickly enough to changes in perception.

Comment · 2 years ago

> Your 1st sentence is just classic whataboutism

It would be if I were arguing against sovereignty for tibetans; I am not. I merely ask that people don't treat the movement as any more or less urgent, necessary, or obvious than any other sovereignty movement.

Granted, it was facetious to insert this viewpoint into the conversation about tibet; but arguably it was just as facetious to insert an argument for sovereignty into a conversation about Tibetan script.

Comment · 2 years ago

> (Bell Labs researchers -> C -> Oak -> Java -> JavaScript.)

It seems like Javascript inherits more directly from lisp than any of the other languages mentioned, except for the syntax. As a result Javascript is a lisp without macros, which is a sad concept. (In this sense, I very much agree with you.)

Comment · 2 years ago

> but this was changed to a more Algol-like syntax due to the prevailing opinion among many that an Algol-like syntax would be easier for C/Pascal/C++ programmers to adopt

Did this not cripple macros?

Comment · 2 years ago

> How does zen buddhism rank on the ‘major world religion’ scale? Or (by followers) Taoist/Daoists?

Well if you're just going off "popularity" then yea, you're going to end up with a lot of dogmatic belief that is the result of millennia of use by states. That's a big part of how ideas consistently spread and are maintained over time. That doesn't strike me as very useful and you're likely to offend a lot of people if you treat this understanding as accurate. But the closest parallel in the east—namely, confucianism—is almost entirely secular, which is a strong sign that you're actually talking about the dangers of authority. Arguably belief in "market forces" as a rational form of resource distribution today form another such secular religion worldwide, and indeed when you watch political figures discuss macroeconomic forces the effect is largely similar to the Pontifex Maximus slaughtering a bird and inspecting its liver to understand the future.

> there is one objective view of reality

Yes, this is fundamentally contrary to the Tao (or Dao if you prefer). It's also very rare for most animist beliefs to have anything like this sort of understanding of the sort. I don't know as much about Buddhism or Hinduism, by I understand this is also trivially incompatible with that from my layman's chair.

For the most part humans just need to agree insofar as we have to in order to form a society. It seems like what you're actually complaining about are the effects of Abrahamic religions and their historical relation to state authority, which very much emphasize the importance of believing certain historical events are true. That's actually quite rare by enumeration of what people refer to as "religion", "faith", "spirituality", etc.

Comment · 2 years ago

I quoted the James bible for a reason—not because it's a good translation (it's obviously not) but it formed the English preconceptions that people structure their understanding of christianity around in the anglo sphere. I chose it to best place the centrality of belief in the culture I assumed we both shared, given that we're speaking English. As I'm sure you're very aware, first century christianity would be nearly unrecognizable to basically any denomination today and is likely very different even from the fourth century when the canons were gathered and the roman state adopted the religion forming the roman church, but we're still stuck using a language that inherited much of its christian diction from the James bible. So that's the relevant text to unlocking understanding of much of what constitutes anglo christianity.

Regardless, you also see this issue with earlier latin translations, too—"credere" has similar semantics, and for all intents and purposes "trust" and "loyalty" have similar semantics, too. (I am not able to profess the same understanding of biblical Greek you do, and presumably neither of us know Aramaic or Ge'ez... which is fine, because neither do most christians.) This is fundamentally an expression of faith in the same sense that was expressed with the story of the binding of Isaac; the same sense of existential faith that Kierkegaard expressed in "Fear and Trembling". You're reverting to quibbling over precise interpretations of the text when it's not clear why this is more meaningful or any more correct than how people actually interpret it, nor more meaningful or correct than the culture that is widely accepted as universal in christanity—e.g. canon itself, the church, marriage sacraments, the Lord's Prayer, etc. Even original sin, although rejected by some protestants, has little textual basis and still permeates denominations post-schism. (Hell, christian values and worldviews still dominate western secular society to an extent most people probably don't process.) These things are just as much "christianity" as anything in the canon texts.

I mean, why is "canon" meaningful to you at all?

Anyway, I'm not trying to attack you for taking this approach (I, too, like trying to understand texts as closely as I can to understand the author), I'm just saying I don't see why gnosticism is any more "problematic" than any other interpretation. the Bible, like most texts written by humans, is fundamentally contradictory and incoherent. People are gonna interpret things how they interpret things—the beauty of texts like the Bible is the value you receive doesn't come from correctness at all but belief or some other subjective, internal reverberation (in my case—mere appreciation of connecting with an ancient author). The neuroticism you see with e.g. Aquinus over interpreting it originates in the problem that they had no better tools at the time for reasoning about the universe and morality aside from appealing to the worldviews and diction people already had in common and trying to wrangle consistency from it by applying Aristotle. If there were people who had other approaches that firmly reject the coherency of the Bible (at the time), we didn't bother to record them.

Personally, I like the theory that gnosticism is basically Egyptian revenge for being, as they saw it, slandered in the Old Testament. If you identify the demiurge as the god "Set" this is rather poetic. However, there are many varieties, so this is unlikely the only source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sethianism

Comment · 2 years ago

> what's more effective than having a pre-defined term be what it means, rather than what the speaker intends internally?

Trying to understand the speaker, presumably, and not wielding your pet definition like a semantic argument. It's fundamentally boring conversation with no benefit to either party and it makes you look like an illiterate ass.