homura1650
@homura1650@lemmy.world
- Comment on Not to get all religiony but why in the old testament God was all fire and brimstone and fatal consequences? But the new testament God is all about forgiveness and such?? 6 days ago:
Going well beyond my competencies to answer, but I think a lot of it comes down to monotheism changing the nature of god.
Judaism thinks of itself as starting monotheism; and that is largely true. However, the old testament is still littered with vestiges of it’s polytheistic origins.
If there are multiple God’s, then those God’s will come into conflict. That is simply the nature of human storytelling.
Looking at the old Testament, probably the most violent God has been was during exodus. In addition to freeing the Jews, he smite the Egyptians with 10 plagues, among which was the death of all firstborn sons.
For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the LORD. (Exodus 12:12)
Note the polytheistic origins of this story. God is not merely intervening in the Earthly affairs of us lowly humans. The Jewish God is fighting with the Egyptian gods. He does not have the luxury of being nice and good. Even if he wins this fight without resorting to such drastic measures; he still needs to do so to act as a deterrent against other gods acting against him. That is not so much a specific tactical calculation in this case, but the way humans tend to imagine polytheistic gods working (reflective, of course, of the way human conflict tends to work).
By the time we get to the new testament, the situation is different. Beyond merely declaring that their god is the only God, the early Christians believed it, and had believed it for generations of storytelling. Their view of God had shed the vestiges of polytheism and morphed into what is truly possible under monotheism. God can be good because he lacks a peer rival. There is no narrative reason for God to be mean, because he can simply win any direct confrontation he faces.
We see similar dynamics play out in modern story telling. When we have vastly overpowered characters, the nature of the conflicts they get in us not fights. Perhaps they are trying to mediate between lesser parties. Perhaps they want to get something while respecting the rights and interests in weaker parties. A story where a vastly superior force wants something and just takes it is boring; so we don’t tell it.
- Comment on Can you think of any now? 1 week ago:
China is the most populace country.
- Comment on Exactly Six Months Ago, the CEO of Anthropic Said That in Six Months AI Would Be Writing 90 Percent of Code 3 weeks ago:
New hires are often worse than useless. The effort that experienced developers spend assisting them is more than it would take those developers to do the work themselves.
- Comment on Desiccant dehumidifiers are fascinating... but not for everyone [29:19] 4 weeks ago:
If you are running an AC, you might be able modify it to reduce the humidity.
AC units naturally dehumidify (as TC points out, they are essentially the same thing as traditional dehumidifiers). However, the amount of moisture they pull out is mostly related to how long they are running, not how cold they can get. This means that if you have an overpowered AC, you get less dehumidifying effect because the AC is on less.
Some ACs let you reduce their power, which will increase their duty cycle and increase the amount of water they pull out of the air. It also helps improve their lifespan as they need to cycle less.
- Comment on nooo my genderinos 1 month ago:
Where in those axioms does it say that ↑ = {0|∗} = {0 | {0|0} } is not a number? No where, that’s where!
The actual reason that ↑ is simply that it is too ill behaved. The stuff I thought were the “numbers” of combinatorical game are actually just called Conway games. Conway numbers are defined very almost identically to Conway games, but with an added constraint that makes them a much better behaved subset of Conway games.
I suppose you could call this an axiom of combinatorical game theory; but at that point you are essentially just calling every definition an axiom.
<s> Getting back to my original point; this distinction just goes to show how small minded mathematicians are! Under Conway’s supposed “reasonable” definition of a number, nimbers are merely games, not proper numbers. However, the nimbers are a perfectly good infinite field of characteristic 2. You can’t seriously expect me to believe that those are not numbers! </s>
- Comment on nooo my genderinos 1 month ago:
I was going to make a comment about surreal numbers not being numbers. But I did a bit of fact checking and it looks like all of the values I was objecting to are not considered surreal numbers, but rather pseudo numbers.
I find this outrageous. Why can’t ↑ be a number? What even is a number that would exclude it and leave in all of your so-called numbers?
- Comment on Women are anonymously spilling tea about men in their cities on viral app 2 months ago:
And what is the EU going to do about it? Governing bodies can declare extraterritorial laws all they want, but they are meaningless unless they have a way to enforce them.
- Comment on People angry that Superman represents kindness are outright admitting that they don't want to be good people 2 months ago:
So he’s an anchor baby? The reason we need to repeal birthright citizenship?
- Comment on USA 🇺🇸 USA 🇺🇸 USA 2 months ago:
I’m going to take this as an opportunity to point out that bees are a type of fish in California.
- Comment on Attorney General: ‘Everyone is Welcome Here’ sign cannot be displayed in Idaho schools 2 months ago:
Tolerance, inclusivity, and integration.
To put this into perspective, the legal fact that “everyone”[0] is welcome in a given public school was not established until 1954 with Brown v Board of Education. And segregationists lost there mind over this.
In 1957, president Eisenhower had the 101st airborne division invade Little Rock High School, after Arkansas deployed it’s national guard to block black students from entering.
[0] In terms of race. Restricting access to schools based on home address remains common, and has ended being used as a way to effectively segregate schools without violating Brown.
- Comment on Tiger Predators 10 months ago:
All models are wrong, but some are useful. Thinking of evolved features as having a purpose is wrong, but it is also incredibly useful.
Why do we have eyes? In some sense, there is no reason, just a sequence of random coincidences, combined with a slightly non-randon bias refered to as “survival of the fittest” (itself an incorrect model).
However, saying that we have eyes to see has incredible explanatory power, which makes it a useful model. Just like Newton’s law of Universal gravity. We’ve known it that is wrong for a century at this point, but most of the time still talk as if it’s true, because it is useful.