MudMan

No, I’m getting what you’re saying.

I’m saying what you’re saying is wrong because it demands you consider only the statements they are explicitly making and disregard any statements they are not enumerating but that need to be included for it to follow some semblance of logic.

You are arguing that “I believe” has the capacity to contain all the false premises and justify them as long as every action that isn’t belief-based remains internally consistent.

I am saying that… well, no, you need to assess the premises included in that belief to evaluate the entire statement.

“I want to drain the swamp so I vote for Trump because I believe he’ll drain the swamp” or “I want to protect children from pedophiles and I believe Trump will do that” are just as valid of a statement, regardless of whether Trump is a convicted criminal or a sex offender.

As long as you are willing to collapse all incorrect arguments into “belief”, you can justify the logic of any premise at all by just assuming the speaker is incorrect somewhere else that you’re not evaluating. It’s entirely tautological at that point. All human action follows some perceived set of incentives. Not all human action makes sense.

You’re also presuming that the incorrect statements that make sense to you are fixable, which they absolutely are not. None of these people are working down that logic chain that you’re stating. Let me be clear, you won’t convince an antivaxer by changing their factual basis. Their factual basis is built to reach the conclusion they want to reach.

It’s also important to point out that even if that was possible, “we have a population crisis so we need to close the borders” is a contradiction, and it’s exactly what these guys are saying. They aren’t saying “we prefer the effects of the population crisis to the changes to our culture immigration brings”. That’s not the statement in the first place.

The statement is fundamentally incongruous because it’s incomplete and backwards. The real train of thought here is as follows:

“I hate foreigners” “Our population is shrinking” “I miss when women worked for me having babies and cleaning after me” “Foreigners are coming here because our population shrinking creates demand for them” “If women worked for me again having babies and cleaning after me we would be able to grow our population without creating demand for foreigners I hate”

The statement being provided is strategic. They won’t say what they want, they will act to reach it. That includes misrepresenting their argument.

I mean, all due respect, to the guy, but this doesn’t go down until 2027. At least give them a minute to get in the position where they could feasibly fuck up before you berate them for it.

If you look at the Internet they are apparently definitely dismantling the company to sell the pieces but also definitely continuing to make what they make but with MAGA politics but also as a muslim theocracy and trimming down and speeding up but also doubling down on live service at the same time somehow.

And man, one or multiple of those may happen, but almost certainly not all of them and none have happened yet. Given how much of a public-ass public company chasing short term gains they’ve been historically I can’t help but think there’s a fair amount of projection going on.

Here’s my stance: I have no idea what this means and I have no idea what they’re going to do. This is all weird and I have zero frame of reference for how the new owners are going to gel with that organization or what their new objectives are going to be when compared to the old “make more money this quarter than last quarter” thing.

That’s… not how that works when you make statements about the world. Your unicorn example is all well and good in a universe where there are only hypothetical animals, but you’re eliding big chunks of that chain. “Unicorns are pink” is a valid statement in the abstract, but if you’re arguing about animals in the real world that’s not where the chain starts. The chain goes: unicorns exist, unicorns are pink, all pink animals eat clouds.

And of course in this situation you need to evaluate each statement. Unicorns exist is going to be a big fat FALSE, which means you can’t claim all unicorns eat clouds and argue it’s a logical statement. It’s a meaningless statement by itself because it depends on a false assumption.

Which is my exact point. You are claiming the argument is logical because you’re assuming the only requirement is that it is internally consistent when all their premises are accepted. But the premises are false, so it’s not. I appreciate that you’re getting stuck when the chain of statements they cherry pick changes over time (see the free speech example), but they’re not meaningfully different. If you let them cherry pick the clauses they need to verify and ignore everything else they can make a consistent argument in the moment about anything, including vaccines and flat planets and jewish space lasers.

I mean, no they can’t because they suck at this. But still, they can make something close enough to one that if they speak fast and loudly enough on the Internet they can get more morons to follow their channels than to block them, so… here we are, I suppose.

Sure, but that’s taking the concept of what’s “logical” to absurd extremes. Any sort of paranoid delusion is logical if you accept all of its premises.

Is being antivax logical? Not at all. It requires amazing mental gymnastics to ignore centuries of scientific research. Things that are “logical if you believe them” is a great way to describe things that aren’t logical. Vaccines do not, in fact, by all available measures, cause more dangerous issues than the diseases they prevent. If your “logic” requires a rejection of the entire epistemological framework upon which shared scientific kknowledge is established it’s not “logic”, kind of by definition.

This is the same thing. Its internal consistency isn’t “logic”. It can be shown to not be logical. If you suspend yourself from that conversation, deny the parameters of anybody who disagrees with you and cherry pick your values to specifically support your instinctively desired conclusion, then it doesn’t matter how well you can through your train of thought, it’s still indefensible.

I think that’s why the MAGA thing stumps you a bit. Their train of thought isn’t any better or worse than this. It’s, in fact, identical. Information that supports it gets magnified, information that disrupts it is ignored. They are fun about it in that they add this cool temporal dimension, where that selection is applied regardless of how it was applied before, so they’re all for free speech when people tell them to shut up, all for limiting speech when people criticise them. But that’s not different to the fundamental contradiction of being concerned about a population crisis when you are trying to turn women into walking incubators but concerned about the massive influx of people when you’re trying to be racist.

It’s a lot of things, but it’s not logic.

It is only logical if you’re… well, a supremacist.

I mean, it requires a mental framework of how culture and identity work that is fundamentally supremacist.

Culture works by aggregation, it’s entirely unrelated to borders and it is in perpetual shift. This assumption requires misunderstanding culture from a very specific perspective.

So no, not logical.

Internally consistent, yes: make women into reproductive vessels and men into the defenders of a fossilized culture enforced through violence. That’s a consistent worldview.

But not a logical one if you apply it to reality. The difference matters.

I keep hearing racist nationalists say stuff like this worldwide, and not matter how hard I squint it remains a non sequitur.

I mean, “we have a population crisis” and “don’t let people come here” seem entirely contradictory unless you are… well, a supremacist.

Which they are, it’s just the leap that gets me. So obvious, so rarely called out and never addressed.

I suppose it makes more sense the less you want to do and the older your hardware is. Even when repurposing old laptops and stuff like that I find the smallest apps I’d want to run were orders of magnitude more costly than any OS overhead. This was even true that one time I got lazy and started running stuff on an older Windows machine without reinstalling the OS, so I’m guessing anything Linux-side would be fine.

After a OS update? I mean, I guess, but most things are going to be in containers anyway, right?

The last update that messed me up on any counts was Python-related and that would have got me on any distro just as well.

Once again, I get it at scale, where you have so much maintenance to manage and want to keep it to a minimum, but for home use it seems to me that being on an LTS/stable update channel would have a much bigger impact than being on a lightweight distro.

I’m sidetracking a bit, but am I alone in thinking self hosting hobbyists are way too into “lightweight and not bloated” as a value?

I mean, I get it if you have a whole data center worth of servers, but if it’s a cobbled together home server it’s probably fine, right? My current setup idles at 1.5% of its CPU and 25% of its RAM. If I turned everything off those values are close to zero and effectively trivial alongside any one of the apps I’m running in there. Surely any amount of convenience is worth the extra bloat, right?

Well, yeah, but those principles don’t typically relate to videogame companies nor to purchase habits regarding 30 year old videogames.

Voting with your wallet is ultracapitalist, self-serving non-activism people deploy performatively to make themselves feel better about stuff they don’t care that much about, not “principles”. No offense.

In social media? Not much.

Here I block any and all threads and communities that focus on US news. Specifically stuff that just has a generic name (“News”) but is 100% US-focused content.

Night and day improvement, frankly.

With the exception of NVidia, all GPU vendors build their drivers on Mesa, so they are more homogeneous than Windows.

This sentence is written in some form of alien language that looks like human writing but clearly isn’t.

Alternately, it may or may not be a particularly playful segment of Alice in Wonderland.

“Principles”? Man, is that self-indulgent.

It’s been EA since a different millenium. I think it’s time to get over it.

FWIW, the remake itself was made by an external studio including members of the original team and they apparently collaborated closely with some sort of consulting group of modders and preservation-focused community people.

It’s pretty good. Comes with both C&C and Red Alert, plus a bunch of extras. Definitely worth it.

I mean, they published Split Fiction and Tales of Kenzera this year and their Star Wars games were more than decent (let’s hear it for the atrociously underrated X-Wing revival they made with Squadrons). They also published the C&C Remaster that same year, which I feel doesn’t get enough credit despite getting a lot of credit. Probably one of the best examples of one of those in recent memory.

Let’s not be disingenuous, none of that is their bread and butter, but it’s not like they were entirely dormant.

“Want” isn’t my concern. Presumably no developers want to give Google a piece of anything they generate, open source or not.

My concern was not understanding how this interferes with F-Droid and that has been explained above: F-Droid builds their own APKs for verification and this process potentially makes that a lot harder while not providing a replacement for their verification from Google.

That makes sense and it is indeed a dealbreaker. The other thing much less so.

Oooh, gotcha. That makes sense.

I guess it’d make sense to take that first option as far as it will go, at which point the issue becomes litigating this the first time Google has their own weird censorship issue in the Apple mold. I’d expect if they ban all of F-Droid explicitly that would at least make more ripples than going after a single torrent client app or whatever. It may play out different from a regulatory perspective, too, if the practical effect is they ban third party stores.

Side note, I’m really mad at the very deliberate choice Google made of categorizing all potential apps as either “apps meant for Google Play” or “student or hobbyist apps”. You know they know why that’s wrong, but it still makes you want to explain it to them.

I’m confused by this:

The F-Droid project cannot require that developers register their apps through Google, but at the same time, we cannot “take over” the application identifiers for the open-source apps we distribute, as that would effectively seize exclusive distribution rights to those applications.

If it were to be put into effect, the developer registration decree will end the F-Droid project and other free/open-source app distribution sources as we know them today, and the world will be deprived of the safety and security of the catalog of thousands of apps that can be trusted and verified by any and all. F-Droid’s myriad users5 will be left adrift, with no means to install — or even update their existing installed — applications.

My understanding is that developers need to sign up with Google and once they have an account they can sign their own apks.

How would this impact F-Droid in any way? Presumably by the time F-Droid enters the picture the developers of the apps they distribute would have already gone through that entire process, right? The apks will be tied to that new Google certificate, but after that they can still be distributed anywhere.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, this has genuine, very serious, dealbreaking issues, in that Google can just cancel the account of a developer making apps they don’t like, the same way Apple has done in the past. That’s not great. But from F-Droid’s perspective all of that has happened upstream, they are not anywhere in that loop, unless I’ve misunderstood the changes.

No, for sure, it’s a good thing. I just found the expression funny in the context. The Crew is what it is.