• 0 Posts
  • 20 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2023

help-circle
  • There seems to be a bit of a difference, even though both involve asking questions. To quote wiktionary:

    sealioning (uncountable)
    A type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity (“I’m just trying to have a debate”), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter, in order to wear down an opponent and incite angry responses that will discredit them.

    Apparently coined by this webcomic:

    https://wondermark.com/c/1k62/

    JAQ off (third-person singular simple present JAQs off, present participle JAQing off, simple past and past participle JAQed off) (slang, derogatory) To ask loaded questions inviting someone to justify their views or behaviours, in an attempt to make tangential claims of little verisimilitude appear acceptable.

    So the way I understand it, “JAQing off” is when you’re trying to guide your audience towards a certain conclusion without stating it outright (e.g. “Are the official numbers of holocaust victims really as solid as people claim? Are there alternative historical interpretations? I’m just asking questions here, not implying anything folks.” when you think just saying “The holocaust didn’t happen!” might make it too obvious you’re a Nazi), while sealioning is more about annoying the other party and trying to make them look bad/unreasonable and yourself polite and reasonable in comparison (e.g. “I’m just curious, is there any actual evidence that fascists are inherently bad people, as you claim? As a person with no opinion on the matter, I would just like to have an honest and open debate on this subject.” so when people reply with something like “Fuck off, fascist!” you can say “Wow, so much for the tolerant left.”). Both tactics are frequently applied by online trolls, especially of the far right, but they have somewhat different goals.



  • 4ce@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mljackpot
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    1 year ago

    That takes something from being completely unreasonable to be understandable.

    Why would taxing a gross income of above a billion US$ by ~66% be “completely unreasonable”? Imo taxes for such incomes should generally be higher if anything.


  • I don’t think anything the author actually said in the article is too far removed from the current mindset of the average physicist. In fact, as far as I can tell none of the statements the author makes are particularly controversial, although I do find the title a bit click-baity, and the “animal” analogy a bit unwieldy. But if you insist on only listening to people who have made a “revolutionary breakthrough”, feel free to read the article by Nobel laureate Phillip W Anderson that the author cites as support (and which makes a similar, although perhaps not identical point in a better way imo).




  • 4ce@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlThe only political map I need
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    As a non colorblind person, I would like to understand how this image could have been modified to include our colorblind brethren.

    In general it is a good idea to use colour gradients that monotonically increase (or decrease) in brightness in addition to (or instead of) hue (see here for an in-depth comparison of different colour maps. It’s from a Python package, but it shows some interesting plots comparing different colour maps when it comes to brightness vs. hue). This isn’t just useful for colour blind people, but also helpful when printing in black-and-white.

    If you absolutely have to use a diverging colour map, you might reach most people by using blue as a major component of one, but only one of the two branches (the map in the OP uses blue as a major component of both branches, which is why red/green colour blind people can have a problem with it). That way most colour blind people should be able to distinguish the branches, since blue colour blindness (Tritanopia/Tritanomaly) is much rarer than red (Protanopia/Protanomaly) or green (Deuteranopia/Deuteranomaly) colour blindness.

    Apart from that it is also possible to mark information visually in other ways than by colour, e.g. by shapes and patterns, like dotted or dashed lines for line graphs, shaded or dotted areas for bar and area graphs, or different geometric shapes like crosses, diamonds, and circles when plotting individual data points, but that is probably more useful when different sets of data are plotted in the same graph.




  • It’s from a longer quote in “A Brief, Incomplete and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages” about the language Haskell:

    1990 - A committee formed by Simon Peyton-Jones, Paul Hudak, Philip Wadler, Ashton Kutcher, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals creates Haskell, a pure, non-strict, functional language. Haskell gets some resistance due to the complexity of using monads to control side effects. Wadler tries to appease critics by explaining that “a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what’s the problem?”

    Some other languages like e.g. Rust also use monads. The point I was trying to make humorously was that many programming languages sometimes do use math concepts, sometimes even very abstract maths (like monads), and while it’s not maths per se, programming and computer science in general can have quite a bit to do with maths sometimes.



  • 4ce@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlI'm tired of the inequality
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    1 year ago

    i read that something like 1/3 of all human caused extinctions are because we keep bringing cats with us

    Do you have a source for that? Intuitively 1/3 of all species extinctions (keep in mind this in general includes plants and other kingdoms of life, not just animals) sounds far too high imo. Maybe you have read that number in a slightly different context, like bird deaths in urban areas, or perhaps in a more specific context similar to the one in your link? Don’t get me wrong, like your link shows, (house) cats can easily have a devastating effect on the local wildlife, in particular birds and small mammals or reptiles (wikipedia has an article on the topic, although I didn’t find anything like your numbers in it). But as far as I know the major ways in which humans have caused extinctions are historically overhunting (mostly affecting large birds and mammals), habitat loss in particular since the advent of agriculture, and more recently of course the effects of the climate crisis since the industrial revolution.


  • 4ce@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlI'm tired of the inequality
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    No, it says

    100 to 1,000 times higher than the background extinction rate

    both in the general intro and in the “Extinction rate” section, and

    10 to 100 times higher than in any of the previous mass extinctions in the history of Earth

    in the “Extinction rate” section (both verbatim quotes from its first sentence).


  • lesser function

    Putting aside that this might be difficult to quantify, why do you think it matters? There are some groups of humans who exhibit severely diminished mental capacities compared to the average human (e.g. babies, severely mentally handicapped people, people in a coma, etc.). Would it be okay to eat them? Because I’m fairly confident that for whatever measure to compare cognitive functions you could come up with, we would be able to find at least some humans who perform worse on them than the average pig, for example.

    different species

    Why does this matter? As a hypothetical thought experiment, do you think it would be morally justified for us to eat aliens who are biologically very different from us but of comparative intelligence (or higher)? Or for them to eat us?

    it’s the easiest, most accessible, most fulfilling, and healthiest way

    Apart from the “fulfilling”, which is arguably subjective, I don’t think the rest is true. At least I don’t see how not eating meat would be difficult or “inaccessible” in a significant way, and considering the last point studies regularly show that vegetarians and vegans are, on average, slightly healthier than other people if anything (which might be in part just correlation, but it does contradict your claim of meat being the “healthiest” way to get nutrients).

    Fuck Tyson though, those bastards can go to hell.

    On this we can definitely agree.


  • 4ce@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlI'm tired of the inequality
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    5
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    they are not sentient

    Science disagrees with you here. Most of the animals being used for meat are in fact not just sentient, but also conscious:

    Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.

    – From the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness


  • nature intended

    Nature doesn’t intend anything, it simply is. We are, in the grand scheme of things, not separate from nature, and in this sense everything we do is natural. If you’re using “natural” to distinguish things from the results of human civilization, then eating animal products stemming from animal agriculture is just as “unnatural” as supplements, as both are products of civilization.