Useful definitions! Yes, easy.
Universal definitions? Extremely hard.
296 karma · joined October 5, 2025
Universal definitions? Extremely hard.
Um.
Yes that’s basically true, to the best of science’s reckoning, anyway. Like, you pretty much nailed it.
Political scientists had figured that out with very solid evidence by around the middle of the 20th century (solid evidence in part because this is obviously alarming so they did a lot of double-checking) then spent several decades trying to figure out an angle by which they could say “but it’s, uh, fine somehow?” or maybe even “but actually that’s good” before finally giving up on that and admitting it’s kind of amazing democracy works at all, and the whole thing’s scary-fragile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology
Or: just try, then try your best to find ways your definition fails. You should find it challenging, to put it mildly, to create a bulletproof definition, if you’re really looking for angles to attack each definition you can think of. They’ll end up being too broad, or too narrow. Or coming up short on defining when exactly a non-chair becomes a chair, and vice-versa, or what the boundaries of a chair are (where chairness begins and ends).
And if that one is tricky…
They’re doing great at both those things.
We probably should have taken it as a sign things were heading a bad direction when stuff like that began to change…
Go the Python route and hyphenate the name but use underscores in the import, for maximum confusion and searchability disruption.
If we’re not doing “deserve” then no, they should have had more money if illegal wage suppression hadn’t been happening. Else the illegal wage suppression wouldn’t have been needed.
And one does wonder whether that has anything to do with their enemies being, basically, clever, organized zombies…
But no. I eventually learned it was an hours-long series and gave it another try.
It’s a long, serialized silent film sci fi war epic told without intertitles. And damn, I was invested in it before long!
[edit] I am not joking that I cared more about and paid more attention to the long battle and infiltration mission near the end (at the time—I understand there’s more now?) than I care about or pay attention to at least half of the 30-45 minute final battles in Marvel movies. I would defend the series as outright better than, certainly, something like Quantumania.
I know good developers who’ve done more impressive stuff than that, making at or under this $150k cut-off.
LOL, there are tens of us, I'm sure!
Fixed a production bug on my phone from the passenger seat of a friend's car, somewhere around 2013 or 2014.
Baseball stats aren't a baseball game. Baseball stats so detailed that they describe the position of every subatomic particle to the Planck scale during every instant of the game to arbitrarily complete resolution still aren't a baseball game. They're, like, a whole bunch of graphite smeared on a whole bunch of paper or whatever. A computer reading that recording and rendering it on a screen... still isn't a baseball game, at all, not even a little. Rendering it on a holodeck? Nope, 0% closer to actually being the thing, though it's representing it in ways we might find more useful or appealing.
We might find a way to create a conscious computer! Or at least an intelligent one! But I just don't see it in LLMs. We've made a very fancy baseball-stats presenter. That's not nothing, but it's not intelligence, and certainly not consciousness. It's not doing those things, at all.
It beats the hell out of either laptops or phones, for me, for these tasks:
- Music. Excellent as a sheet music display; can record and edit midi quite well; play tutorial videos; act as a tuner, tone generator, or metronome (my phone beats it on that front due to portability, but still, if I already have the iPad out on the stand...); plenty good enough at audio recording and editing for my extremely-amateur purposes, plus its ability to play loops and beats and such.
- Reading. It's especially amazing for comic books (in landscape mode a 12.9 incher is almost the same size as an open comic book! You can read two-page side-by-side on it, no problem) and PDFs. I prefer iPad mini sized devices for prose books in ordinary ebook formats, but the 12.9" pro is damn near perfect for those two things. Laptops and desktop computers also work for comic books and PDFs, but are a pretty big downgrade, UX-wise.
- Drawing. Obviously.
- Long-form writing. Laptops work great for this too, of course, but you still need a separate keyboard if you want decent ergonomics. iPad doesn't have an attached keyboard taking up space that I could instead use for a separate keyboard.
It's also just as good as a laptop (to me) as a remote SSH terminal, VNC terminal, video/music player, web browser et c. I can't really think of much I do on my (personal! Not work-supplied) laptop that I can't do just as well on an iPad, maybe supplemented by a headless RPi hanging off my router, or a cheap VM rental (or just the Linux server in an old desktop workstation tower that I already have anyway).
It would have been convenient to the effort if left wing leaders had endorsed the murder, or if the language and acts of political violence over recent decades had tended to come from the left, but the lack of those supports didn’t keep them from trying.
Reality and truth-seeking aren’t that important to the outcome of affecting perception, is the thing. That was accomplished, regardless of any “but wait a minute, this doesn’t seem quite right” we can spot. You can watch Fox News and do that all day long with all kinds of things they cover, but it’s simply not important that a lot of their “angles” are really weak—they’d surely prefer they were strong, but it’s also not necessary. In fact a hallmark of the modern version of the thing they engage in is that it doesn’t avoid weaknesses and focus on strengths, but continues unperturbed and with all the trappings of confidence and strength even when all it has at the moment are weak notions.
There’s some version of Trump out there in the possibility space who took a more-measured (but still with more give-a-damn than traditional Republicans have exhibited) approach on immigration, wasn’t fixated on anti-LGBT stuff, went more-credibly forward with cautiously pulling back from the “world police” role for the US, wasn’t quite as into cheesy comic book villain levels of corruption and civil rights violations (this really fucks up his appeal as an “anti-swamp” candidate), approached free-trade skepticism with a less confused and more effective and targeted strategy, followed through on his kinda-“socialist” messaging on healthcare in the first race (a lot of—though not all—republicans would absolutely support stuff like this as long as a democrat wasn’t behind it), didn’t do off-the-charts wacky stuff with NOAA and Dept. of Health et c., pursued actual deficit reduction efforts (you can’t keep cutting taxes if you actually care about this…), and enjoys like a 70% approval rating. He could probably even get away with illegally killing some Venezuelans if he really wanted to, and hardly hurt that approval rating, with the rest of that stuff going on.
One note: I don't think this is right. Trump did very-swiftly take over the party, but not because of Obama and Biden. Republicans and Republican-friendly rich dudes and organizations deliberately built up a propaganda machine after Nixon, and that machine molded an electorate very far right with the aim of ensuring they'd always vote against Democrats—but to support a party that shared very little of their cultivated electorate's far-right aims.
I have also spent a lot of time in red areas and come from a mostly-red family, and typical Republican politicians from Reagan on traditionally have talked a pretty unconvincing game and really just run a pro-(big, monopolist)business/pro-rich party when in office. They could depend on their captive electorate because they'd convinced them the democrats wanted to give illegal immigrants jobs grabbing Republican voters' guns while funding their free abortions with taxpayer dollars and handing the US government over to the UN or something (this is, for readers not familiar with this crowd, a glib presentation but not really an exaggeration of the kind of thing these folks really do worry will happen when Democrats get in office, and probably the least-accurate part of that passage is that Republicans might think Democrats would give illegal immigrants jobs rather than just tons of free money to illegally-vote for Democrats or something like that—that this stuff hasn't happened when Democrats have gotten in office doesn't seem to register as meaningful to them, for some reason)
Trump started talking like a Republican voter, not a Republican politician. "Why don't they just build a wall?" "What does NATO do for us?" "Why don't we just ship illegals out wherever we find them, the constitution doesn't apply to them, probable cause doesn't apply, et c." (dip a toe in social media outside left-wing bubbles and you'll see a truly alarming amount of stuff like that latter sentiment) and disturbing support for military action in "lawless democrat cities", "democratic politicians are all constantly doing crimes up to and including secret murders, we should prosecute all of them"—this is shit their media has been telling them is true and good for decades, Trump's just the first option they've had who's crazy enough to act on any of it. You could hear it on AM radio in the '90s, you could overhear it in a rural diner in the '00s, no problem. This is who their voters are, and have been since before Obama, before Biden, and even before Trump.
He took the party over by exploiting a weakness the party itself had spent enormous resources and decades developing in cynically seeking a powerful tool against the Democrats. Their plan worked really well, but left them vulnerable to the first person positioned to credibly claim to want to do all the stuff Republican voters have been told they should want, but denied by their Republican politicians (because a whole bunch of the ideas are wasteful, insane, totally pointless, or extremely dangerous to democracy or the rule of law, so, to economic stability)
For people who have lived decades in red America before Trump, when he started talking, I think a lot of us saw he was dangerous pretty fast. Not because he was saying crazy shit we'd never heard before, but because he was saying crazy shit we'd heard all the time.
But in the end you're dealing with people who point at a bunch of large but near-empty counties being red and only a few (very high-population) being blue as proof of a "landslide" in a race where their guy won with less than 50% of the votes cast going for him. They don't understand really basic shit. There's not much sense in going out of your way to get through skulls that dense. Whatever you do, if their leaders say "jump" they'll say "how high?" If their leaders say "fraud!" they'll say "yeah! Hang the Democrats and their collaborators!" Bend over backwards with even more safeguards, and they'll just keep being upset over the same stuff if the right people tell them to.
Where's Trump's investigation of this? Any of the Republican governors in the states he or his proxies allege widespread fraud? That should have been a top priority! They're not aggressively pursuing it because there's nothing there, and they know it. Anyone looking critically at their behavior over the couple decades, at least, that they've been alleging organized Democratic voter fraud can tell they don't believe their own allegations, because they don't act like they do when it comes time to put up or shut up.
You can trace right-wing propaganda in the US painting cities as worse and more violent (and, specifically, overrun over by criminally-inclined immigrants who refuse to assimilate...) back to at least the early 20th century. The rhetoric from back then is uncannily familiar, as are the proposed solutions. But of course nobody who needs to realize that the "good old days of the good old days" were full of the exact same complaints (and we're all still here, everything turned out OK) will be curious & interested enough to find that out.
Still, the idea of watching as much video, listening to as much music, et c., as most people do and not putting a little thought & effort into "reading" it better/more-fully seems like an odd choice, yet it's the norm. Apparently not even wanting to engage with the "why did the creator make that choice? OK, this part achieves effect X, but how does it do that? What does it seem like this other part was trying to do, and does that illuminate or enhance any elements of or mysteries in the rest of the work?" side of things seems totally alien to me.