Arrogant much? There are many 'philosophers' on the other side of the debate who believe in determinism. It is a most excellent journey to read through their views. I recommend you start with Spinoza.
Humans are not digital processing systems, an identical copy of a human (or indeed any animal) cannot be made and the exact same combination of data and initial conditions cannot be produced.
Technically neither are AI running on computers. Cosmic radiation may flip a bit, the system, although rare, will be affected by externalities, and if we're talking speed of the result and the timeframe from when the input is started to when you get an answer, we're really talking about analog measures as temperature affects all the conditions.
I don't think a digital universe is required for us to have determinism. When you say a human can't be copied and the input exactly recreated this is also true of the AI, but the real problem is that you're blurring what 'can' means. Can by whom? Future humans? It might be quite possible, who can say? Can because we're limited? Theoretically unable to? I assert we would be able to 'theoretically' copy the state and inputs to the same degree we do the computer program and you've not said anything I find persuasive to suggest otherwise.
To put it in other terms, what you mean by copying the program and putting in the same inputs... you and I can do this. But, not a tribesman born and living in the amazon whose never encountered a computer before. The notin of replicating the pogram and its inputs are just as opaque as replicating a human being is to you and I. You cannot know its not possible.
Whats more, the alternative, that we don't have determinism, is incredibly more complex than if we do have determinism. With "free will" we have a process which is not affected by the universe and yet affects the universe and its going off in six billion or so humans and however many animals you choose to give this property. Uncaused causes on a massive scale. What is more, it is obvious that this free will property IS affected by the "physical universe" because people do not make choices that are available to them if they do not know they are available to them but which they would surely make if they knew. Even that notion that we can generally predict people will make choice x or y suggests feedback from the physical universe. The very notion of making choices first assumes that you have choices you're perceiving are there to make, so we have something even more complex, something that is affected by the physical universe but only indeterministically. Thats so sufficiently complex to me as to be unlikely in the extreme faced with the idea that our perceptions and our vanity, things more tangible and predictable to me, lead us to believe we have some mysterious power.
Why is it easier to 'justify'? That is kind of lame. If it is true, then morality is a compulsion. You could just as easily argue that recognizing you have this compulsion allows you to serve it better, and thus become more moral. In my mind, I've never seen a determinist be heinously immoral. If we're talking about experiential wisdom, it is precisely the crowd that believes in free will, as I see it, that is most prone to hurting other people. So, I dispute your quote, its fallacious and and smacks of precisely the same 'moral superiority' which has so turned me off about the "free willers."
I've never seen anyone define free will in a way that isn't either circular or intended to be taken axiomatically. Frankly, this strikes me as a knock against it since it's described effects are so complex as to suggest it is non-obvious. In determining if other people have this enigmatic free will, come up with a better definition than, it is hard to predict their ultimate choices.
Yes, I do! I find it quite amusing that America was schooled by Putin on exceptionalism.
For a country one who claims to boast its own national exceptionalism and moral superiority. Yet, forgets to mention they are the holders of the largest national debt known to man. If you ask me. I find this fact hardlyexceptional or superior... heck it's not even moral!
Film is not "biased" towards people with "light skin." Quite frankly, I don't see how any visual medium that's designed to capture an accurate colour spectrum could be racially biased.
I think this whole article is a trollish attempt to inject a "racial issue" where there is none.
Apparently, gone are the days when fox-news-esque comments like yours wouldn't be modded down past most decent people's filters. You've said nothing of persuasion and apparently barely even understood the summary. They're talking about a bias in the technology so that you do not get an accurate color spectrum. Following up by ascribing such a base motive to the poster of the article itself without any real evidence is another way to play to prejudices and score that elusive +5 informative without actually saying anything of merit.
hmm, wordiness is irritating, I'll grant you, as is boilerplate. But, it just stops being irritating the moment that your IDE starts taking care of all of that for you. Writing Java from the command line is an exercise in extreme torture, but Eclipse makes it just fine. Liberal use of ctrl-1, ctrl-space, and the refactor functions on context menus and the actual menu make most of these annoyances trivial. Also, I have yet to see something that can refactor javascript as well as eclipse refactors java.
Also, cool I define by how powerful, flexible, and quick a language is to accomplish tasks. Boilerplate in the age of modern IDE's seems to have almost a negligable impact on those metrics. Boilerplate and language redundancy also often helps with human parsing of the language, imo, so it might even have a bit of a positive effect.
Lastly, I almost never agree that 'terse' is elegant. Elegance should only be clever in what it is actually doing, not in how it is being expressed in the language.
I only use two Java applications: Liferea (after google reader died) and Jitsi. When I start them, I can feel the sadness in my computer. They take ages to startup, but granted, after they've started they're just like any regular native application. Though Jitsi doesn't integrate well with gtk3, but overall it is pretty good.
You can't know this unless you purposefully don't want to count using web apps as "using an app". My understanding is the backend of much of the google stuff is written in Java, just as an obvious example.
As if features are the only thing that makes a language a language. I'm not saying Lisp isn't nice, but which lisp? And, after you select which lisp, which library to do the thing you're trying to do? Oh wait, they often don't exist. So you hand roll your own, because it is easy in lisp, due to lisp's powerful nature. So now you can't hire people who know about the things you're doing right out of the gate because you choose a specific lisp and hand rolled a bunch of stuff. Need to integrate with xyz technology? There's probably not a lisp library for it that is standard, if it exists at all. Its also rarely mature...
In the end, some version of lisp might still be a really good choice for some project. However, it has significant disadvantages to overcome. Adding lisp like elements to a language like Java is a much nicer thing than your quip seems to appreciate because it gives you some of the advantages of using lisp while retaining all the advantages that java will provide. Maybe lisp should try to invent java by standardizing the language and writing a lot of mature libraries?
I'd be interested to know what line of work you do, programming wise. My experience tells me that a lot of programming that is being done is meant to be powerful and meant to be built quickly. Running quickly and with low tolerance for faults is a little less important because very few things are mission critical. While anathema to the academic, it demands a certain skill set, which is the ability to very quickly assimilate new arbitrary knowledge about libraries, software, and code, that the programmer hasn't seen before. The result is a fragile sort of knowledge that often lacks formality and granularity but is sufficient enough to accomplish a task very quickly.
This skill is not exclusive with the ability to write everything from scratch, but understanding a system through and through seems to often undermine the coder's speed at getting the product out because they want to do it 'correctly'. This specific tug of war, between programmatic idealism and pure ease of use often ends up being a major concern in the work I do because I am rarely satisfied with the 'easy' solution. Sure, sometimes doing it 'correctly' amortizes quickly and thus the up front cost should be paid, but other times it really just badly trades one resource (dev time) for another (execution time, time of the humans managing the software, time to market).
I've met coders who talk like you, and when they do, they're so impractical in their overarching decisions that often the software is DOA because it doesn't do enough, or it took too long to write, or it was endlessly being refactored.
You're probably doing work at a more basic systems level than I am. And, maybe that is why you have this philosophy. I used to think work at the level I'm doing now was uninteresting, but the problems are shifted into ones of integration, forward planning, and multi-discipline and away from algorithm, pure transaction, etc. There are also a buttload of programmers working at this level, and while I would love to say that we must hire only candidates who can write a minheap backed up by a btree... I think by far the more important qualification is that skill I was talking about, which is a lack of 'not invented here' syndrome and an ability to read other people's code / technical documentation very quickly and see how their architecture can fit into our needs with the minimal of fuss.
To put it another way, most of the low level problems have been solved adequately enough for this level of work, but there are a whole slew of emergent problems that require more than just Pattern A + Pattern B to solve, and are just not that helped by understanding the machine instructions or by algorithmic knowledge. I believe that to be true for probably the many of the programmers that are gainfully employed. So, I could not agree with the notion that your hiring strategy would work well for most positions.
Is it not obvious to you that one of the things that Tesla Co has to work against is the anti-environmentalist faction? Individuals who want Tesla to fail only because they perceive it as a challenge (eventual or otherwise) to their personal right to pollute? Someday, electric self-driving cars may be the only sensible option for reasons of pollution and road safety and practical enough to enforce with a law.
People in love with the romance of driving these 'powerful combustion engines' talk about this and claim it is a personal right to drive a combustion vehicle and seize upon news like "Tesla car fire" as further argument for their agenda. Look at how carefully constructed and persuasively written Elon Musk's letter is. We shouldn't have to be reminded that this is a sample of one and that combustion engines catch fire (other than in the appropriate way) all the time. But, the politics surrounding the Tesla means this is necessary and a big part of those politics is the anti-environment faction.
He might have listened to RMS but nobody might be listening to him. Maybe we need RMS but we also need an OSS hero that is more practical than RMS, and we have that in LBT.
No, it doesn't. It gives them a potential advantage at sports.
This is exactly the problem with making such a big fuss about the differences between the sexes, whatever they may be. My Y chromosome did not make me particularly athletic (like many Slashdot readers, I suspect), and my girlfriend can out-wrestle me. But your casual phrasing suggests that this should be impossible, because it paints both of us with an extremely broad brush.
It gets worse with fuzzier aptitudes like math, which is stereotypically believed to be a male discipline for... some reason or another. But today's NYT article suggests that perhaps there are fewer women in math and sciences because we tell women they can't do math and sciences.
So yes, all else being an equal, a man will probably be stronger than a woman who's done the same training. But a woman who's done any training at all will be stronger than the vast majority of men who haven't, and insisting that "men are better at sports" will discourage women from bothering at all (and earn scorn towards both men and women who don't fit the mold).
What is the use in such a distinction between potential advantage and just plain old advantage? A larger size really does seem to be a plain old advantage in many sports and a disadvantage in others.
Why can't it be a little from column A and a little from column B? Or a lot from one and a little from the other? Of course the golem effect is probably discouraging women from science, but on average, they may also just be worse at it, simultaneously. If that is the case, then is it in our best interests to acknowledge that fact? I'm not saying we shouldn't have female scientists, but it does impact the discussion on what, if anything, we should do about the numbers imbalance.
Many mathematicians believe that 'imaginary number' is a bad name because people will read into it a false idea, that the number is no less meaningful or valid for use against natural phenomena than integers, another concept very difficult to 'observe' in nature. The 'belief' in imaginary numbers has led to electronics, amongst many other inventions. I assume by your posting to a website that you believe this to be a good thing. Without imaginary numbers being incredibly testable and reliable, you wouldn't have been able to post. On the other hand, I wondered if you could have managed it consistently by praying? (The word consistent is super important here...). Imaginary numbers are a very 'real' concept in the sense that their use leads to very testable very reliable results.
A scientist is not a fool if all he has to explain an observation is a theory that would be considered weaker than, say, the theory of gravity. He would be a fool if he continued to believe in the theory's validity when there was an incredible amount of evidence to the contrary and nothing to suggest his theory. Especially if it was as absurd, complicated, and appealing to human vanity as religion is.
My 'belief' in various scientific theories isn't, to my lights, at all similar to a theist's belief in a divinity. My methodology is not at all based in faith, but rather seeks simplicity, testability, reliability, and is derived from the most simple and obvious axioms to which even theists tend to agree on. I think your notion of proven and mine are also dissimilar. A theory is proven to me when it is usable and reliable. I have found 'God' to be exactly not that, but your mileage may vary, I suppose.
If it is bigoted for me to think theists foolish, then you are bigoted for thinking me bigoted. There is no bottom to this definition, no clear line where having a judgement about other people doesn't also imply bigotry. For instance, I don't think you're a bigot for thinking I'm bigoted. I still think you're a fool. I suspect that you think the same about me, so why should your comment be modded up? Why are you not a bigot?
The first thing that I see that I dislike is the presence of images. I want to read articles at work and I love that Slashdot is minimalistic and looks like a tech site. My employers understand people reading tech sites as a way to keep on top of things, clear the mind, read something relevant to the profession, etc. etc. Whereas, if I were to cruise perez hilton, they might have some concerns.
Slashdot is also awesome in that it mostly lets the words do the communication. Images might be in the linked to articles but I feel like a natural degradation will come in the quantity and quality of the words if the editors feel they can get away with just posting an image to communicate the same ideas.
The contrast between posts is so low that on my shitty work monitors its very difficult to visually separate the content. At first, the images seemed to be a detail of the post above the image, not below. It is prettier, but it is less "readable". I don't want a slashdot that mimics every clean responsive design site on the planet. I want visually parsable ideas. Actually, I kinda want it to be ugly, and techlike in general.
Cinnamon is making headway, and with good reason. Its gnome without the dogma of gnome 3. I've fallen in love, switched to mint when cinnamon stopped playing nice with ubuntu, and never looked back. I just want to get shit done, not wrestle for days with the window manager to get whatever workflow defaults some opinionated designer thought he should push on to everyone. Cinnamon isn't perfect, but its heart is in the right place. When I read the summary text I lolled.
A religious person is foolish for believing in something they can't see that doesn't help them consistently and accurately predict things they can observe.
The two games are not completely analogous, but I take some issue with the characterization that chess requires greater memory. There is something fundamental about the "rigidity" of chess and the "fluidity" of starcraft, but as skill rises, fluidity heavily diminishes for the first "phase" of most games. Pattern recognition, and thus, the underlying memory of patterns, is, to my perspective, as crucial to SC2 as it is to chess, even though SC2 is real-time. Execution in chess is about as deep as a puddle, (you lift a piece, you set it down), and you can lose a game in SC2 even if you know better what to do than your opponent because execution in sc2 has almost an infinite depth. In practice, however, execution remains somewhat similar for the top players and pattern recognition and decision making are essential to win consistently. The patterns are "fuzzier" in SC2, but they are just as varied, just as important, and just as memorized as chess.
Slashdot Mirror
Arrogant much? There are many 'philosophers' on the other side of the debate who believe in determinism. It is a most excellent journey to read through their views. I recommend you start with Spinoza.
Really it is your mother that has free will then since she initiated you... Wait we can go further up this stack.
Humans are not digital processing systems, an identical copy of a human (or indeed any animal) cannot be made and the exact same combination of data and initial conditions cannot be produced.
Technically neither are AI running on computers. Cosmic radiation may flip a bit, the system, although rare, will be affected by externalities, and if we're talking speed of the result and the timeframe from when the input is started to when you get an answer, we're really talking about analog measures as temperature affects all the conditions.
I don't think a digital universe is required for us to have determinism. When you say a human can't be copied and the input exactly recreated this is also true of the AI, but the real problem is that you're blurring what 'can' means. Can by whom? Future humans? It might be quite possible, who can say? Can because we're limited? Theoretically unable to? I assert we would be able to 'theoretically' copy the state and inputs to the same degree we do the computer program and you've not said anything I find persuasive to suggest otherwise.
To put it in other terms, what you mean by copying the program and putting in the same inputs... you and I can do this. But, not a tribesman born and living in the amazon whose never encountered a computer before. The notin of replicating the pogram and its inputs are just as opaque as replicating a human being is to you and I. You cannot know its not possible.
Whats more, the alternative, that we don't have determinism, is incredibly more complex than if we do have determinism. With "free will" we have a process which is not affected by the universe and yet affects the universe and its going off in six billion or so humans and however many animals you choose to give this property. Uncaused causes on a massive scale. What is more, it is obvious that this free will property IS affected by the "physical universe" because people do not make choices that are available to them if they do not know they are available to them but which they would surely make if they knew. Even that notion that we can generally predict people will make choice x or y suggests feedback from the physical universe. The very notion of making choices first assumes that you have choices you're perceiving are there to make, so we have something even more complex, something that is affected by the physical universe but only indeterministically. Thats so sufficiently complex to me as to be unlikely in the extreme faced with the idea that our perceptions and our vanity, things more tangible and predictable to me, lead us to believe we have some mysterious power.
Why is it easier to 'justify'? That is kind of lame. If it is true, then morality is a compulsion. You could just as easily argue that recognizing you have this compulsion allows you to serve it better, and thus become more moral. In my mind, I've never seen a determinist be heinously immoral. If we're talking about experiential wisdom, it is precisely the crowd that believes in free will, as I see it, that is most prone to hurting other people. So, I dispute your quote, its fallacious and and smacks of precisely the same 'moral superiority' which has so turned me off about the "free willers."
I've never seen anyone define free will in a way that isn't either circular or intended to be taken axiomatically. Frankly, this strikes me as a knock against it since it's described effects are so complex as to suggest it is non-obvious. In determining if other people have this enigmatic free will, come up with a better definition than, it is hard to predict their ultimate choices.
What if someone gave you absolutely irrefutable proof that there's no such thing as free will, but you chose not to believe it?
Then you were compelled, by your lack of free will, to not believe it. Sort of like forcing a computer program to state its not a computer program.
Yes, I do! I find it quite amusing that America was schooled by Putin on exceptionalism.
For a country one who claims to boast its own national exceptionalism and moral superiority. Yet, forgets to mention they are the holders of the largest national debt known to man. If you ask me. I find this fact hardly exceptional or superior ... heck it's not even moral!
It fits my definition of exceptional.
With the same malapropisms and spelling errors? Or did you not really mean verbatim?
Film is not "biased" towards people with "light skin." Quite frankly, I don't see how any visual medium that's designed to capture an accurate colour spectrum could be racially biased.
I think this whole article is a trollish attempt to inject a "racial issue" where there is none.
Apparently, gone are the days when fox-news-esque comments like yours wouldn't be modded down past most decent people's filters. You've said nothing of persuasion and apparently barely even understood the summary. They're talking about a bias in the technology so that you do not get an accurate color spectrum. Following up by ascribing such a base motive to the poster of the article itself without any real evidence is another way to play to prejudices and score that elusive +5 informative without actually saying anything of merit.
hmm, wordiness is irritating, I'll grant you, as is boilerplate. But, it just stops being irritating the moment that your IDE starts taking care of all of that for you. Writing Java from the command line is an exercise in extreme torture, but Eclipse makes it just fine. Liberal use of ctrl-1, ctrl-space, and the refactor functions on context menus and the actual menu make most of these annoyances trivial. Also, I have yet to see something that can refactor javascript as well as eclipse refactors java.
Also, cool I define by how powerful, flexible, and quick a language is to accomplish tasks. Boilerplate in the age of modern IDE's seems to have almost a negligable impact on those metrics. Boilerplate and language redundancy also often helps with human parsing of the language, imo, so it might even have a bit of a positive effect.
Lastly, I almost never agree that 'terse' is elegant. Elegance should only be clever in what it is actually doing, not in how it is being expressed in the language.
I only use two Java applications: Liferea (after google reader died) and Jitsi. When I start them, I can feel the sadness in my computer. They take ages to startup, but granted, after they've started they're just like any regular native application. Though Jitsi doesn't integrate well with gtk3, but overall it is pretty good.
You can't know this unless you purposefully don't want to count using web apps as "using an app". My understanding is the backend of much of the google stuff is written in Java, just as an obvious example.
As if features are the only thing that makes a language a language. I'm not saying Lisp isn't nice, but which lisp? And, after you select which lisp, which library to do the thing you're trying to do? Oh wait, they often don't exist. So you hand roll your own, because it is easy in lisp, due to lisp's powerful nature. So now you can't hire people who know about the things you're doing right out of the gate because you choose a specific lisp and hand rolled a bunch of stuff. Need to integrate with xyz technology? There's probably not a lisp library for it that is standard, if it exists at all. Its also rarely mature...
In the end, some version of lisp might still be a really good choice for some project. However, it has significant disadvantages to overcome. Adding lisp like elements to a language like Java is a much nicer thing than your quip seems to appreciate because it gives you some of the advantages of using lisp while retaining all the advantages that java will provide. Maybe lisp should try to invent java by standardizing the language and writing a lot of mature libraries?
I'd be interested to know what line of work you do, programming wise. My experience tells me that a lot of programming that is being done is meant to be powerful and meant to be built quickly. Running quickly and with low tolerance for faults is a little less important because very few things are mission critical. While anathema to the academic, it demands a certain skill set, which is the ability to very quickly assimilate new arbitrary knowledge about libraries, software, and code, that the programmer hasn't seen before. The result is a fragile sort of knowledge that often lacks formality and granularity but is sufficient enough to accomplish a task very quickly.
This skill is not exclusive with the ability to write everything from scratch, but understanding a system through and through seems to often undermine the coder's speed at getting the product out because they want to do it 'correctly'. This specific tug of war, between programmatic idealism and pure ease of use often ends up being a major concern in the work I do because I am rarely satisfied with the 'easy' solution. Sure, sometimes doing it 'correctly' amortizes quickly and thus the up front cost should be paid, but other times it really just badly trades one resource (dev time) for another (execution time, time of the humans managing the software, time to market).
I've met coders who talk like you, and when they do, they're so impractical in their overarching decisions that often the software is DOA because it doesn't do enough, or it took too long to write, or it was endlessly being refactored.
You're probably doing work at a more basic systems level than I am. And, maybe that is why you have this philosophy. I used to think work at the level I'm doing now was uninteresting, but the problems are shifted into ones of integration, forward planning, and multi-discipline and away from algorithm, pure transaction, etc. There are also a buttload of programmers working at this level, and while I would love to say that we must hire only candidates who can write a minheap backed up by a btree... I think by far the more important qualification is that skill I was talking about, which is a lack of 'not invented here' syndrome and an ability to read other people's code / technical documentation very quickly and see how their architecture can fit into our needs with the minimal of fuss.
To put it another way, most of the low level problems have been solved adequately enough for this level of work, but there are a whole slew of emergent problems that require more than just Pattern A + Pattern B to solve, and are just not that helped by understanding the machine instructions or by algorithmic knowledge. I believe that to be true for probably the many of the programmers that are gainfully employed. So, I could not agree with the notion that your hiring strategy would work well for most positions.
No idea why you are modded funny.
Is it not obvious to you that one of the things that Tesla Co has to work against is the anti-environmentalist faction? Individuals who want Tesla to fail only because they perceive it as a challenge (eventual or otherwise) to their personal right to pollute? Someday, electric self-driving cars may be the only sensible option for reasons of pollution and road safety and practical enough to enforce with a law.
People in love with the romance of driving these 'powerful combustion engines' talk about this and claim it is a personal right to drive a combustion vehicle and seize upon news like "Tesla car fire" as further argument for their agenda. Look at how carefully constructed and persuasively written Elon Musk's letter is. We shouldn't have to be reminded that this is a sample of one and that combustion engines catch fire (other than in the appropriate way) all the time. But, the politics surrounding the Tesla means this is necessary and a big part of those politics is the anti-environment faction.
He might have listened to RMS but nobody might be listening to him. Maybe we need RMS but we also need an OSS hero that is more practical than RMS, and we have that in LBT.
they're both.
Are you saying there are no genetic factors for intelligence? Because, that seems like a nice pc thing to say but totally erroneous.
If our discussions of race are pure 'nature' or pure 'nurture', then I think we're just appealing to one human vanity or the other.
> Being larger makes boys better at sports.
No, it doesn't. It gives them a potential advantage at sports.
This is exactly the problem with making such a big fuss about the differences between the sexes, whatever they may be. My Y chromosome did not make me particularly athletic (like many Slashdot readers, I suspect), and my girlfriend can out-wrestle me. But your casual phrasing suggests that this should be impossible, because it paints both of us with an extremely broad brush.
It gets worse with fuzzier aptitudes like math, which is stereotypically believed to be a male discipline for... some reason or another. But today's NYT article suggests that perhaps there are fewer women in math and sciences because we tell women they can't do math and sciences.
So yes, all else being an equal, a man will probably be stronger than a woman who's done the same training. But a woman who's done any training at all will be stronger than the vast majority of men who haven't, and insisting that "men are better at sports" will discourage women from bothering at all (and earn scorn towards both men and women who don't fit the mold).
What is the use in such a distinction between potential advantage and just plain old advantage? A larger size really does seem to be a plain old advantage in many sports and a disadvantage in others.
Why can't it be a little from column A and a little from column B? Or a lot from one and a little from the other? Of course the golem effect is probably discouraging women from science, but on average, they may also just be worse at it, simultaneously. If that is the case, then is it in our best interests to acknowledge that fact? I'm not saying we shouldn't have female scientists, but it does impact the discussion on what, if anything, we should do about the numbers imbalance.
Many mathematicians believe that 'imaginary number' is a bad name because people will read into it a false idea, that the number is no less meaningful or valid for use against natural phenomena than integers, another concept very difficult to 'observe' in nature. The 'belief' in imaginary numbers has led to electronics, amongst many other inventions. I assume by your posting to a website that you believe this to be a good thing. Without imaginary numbers being incredibly testable and reliable, you wouldn't have been able to post. On the other hand, I wondered if you could have managed it consistently by praying? (The word consistent is super important here...). Imaginary numbers are a very 'real' concept in the sense that their use leads to very testable very reliable results.
A scientist is not a fool if all he has to explain an observation is a theory that would be considered weaker than, say, the theory of gravity. He would be a fool if he continued to believe in the theory's validity when there was an incredible amount of evidence to the contrary and nothing to suggest his theory. Especially if it was as absurd, complicated, and appealing to human vanity as religion is.
My 'belief' in various scientific theories isn't, to my lights, at all similar to a theist's belief in a divinity. My methodology is not at all based in faith, but rather seeks simplicity, testability, reliability, and is derived from the most simple and obvious axioms to which even theists tend to agree on. I think your notion of proven and mine are also dissimilar. A theory is proven to me when it is usable and reliable. I have found 'God' to be exactly not that, but your mileage may vary, I suppose.
If it is bigoted for me to think theists foolish, then you are bigoted for thinking me bigoted. There is no bottom to this definition, no clear line where having a judgement about other people doesn't also imply bigotry. For instance, I don't think you're a bigot for thinking I'm bigoted. I still think you're a fool. I suspect that you think the same about me, so why should your comment be modded up? Why are you not a bigot?
I think I could tolerate the new design with those tweaks... they're certainly a massive improvement.
The first thing that I see that I dislike is the presence of images. I want to read articles at work and I love that Slashdot is minimalistic and looks like a tech site. My employers understand people reading tech sites as a way to keep on top of things, clear the mind, read something relevant to the profession, etc. etc. Whereas, if I were to cruise perez hilton, they might have some concerns.
Slashdot is also awesome in that it mostly lets the words do the communication. Images might be in the linked to articles but I feel like a natural degradation will come in the quantity and quality of the words if the editors feel they can get away with just posting an image to communicate the same ideas.
The contrast between posts is so low that on my shitty work monitors its very difficult to visually separate the content. At first, the images seemed to be a detail of the post above the image, not below. It is prettier, but it is less "readable". I don't want a slashdot that mimics every clean responsive design site on the planet. I want visually parsable ideas. Actually, I kinda want it to be ugly, and techlike in general.
Cinnamon is making headway, and with good reason. Its gnome without the dogma of gnome 3. I've fallen in love, switched to mint when cinnamon stopped playing nice with ubuntu, and never looked back. I just want to get shit done, not wrestle for days with the window manager to get whatever workflow defaults some opinionated designer thought he should push on to everyone. Cinnamon isn't perfect, but its heart is in the right place. When I read the summary text I lolled.
A religious person is foolish for believing in something they can't see that doesn't help them consistently and accurately predict things they can observe.
aptly put! We all get caught up in the spells of our generation.
Not true. It can be quite easy. From hoarderbot's source code:
def bin_or_save(item): return SET_ASIDE
sigh, python coders!
The two games are not completely analogous, but I take some issue with the characterization that chess requires greater memory. There is something fundamental about the "rigidity" of chess and the "fluidity" of starcraft, but as skill rises, fluidity heavily diminishes for the first "phase" of most games. Pattern recognition, and thus, the underlying memory of patterns, is, to my perspective, as crucial to SC2 as it is to chess, even though SC2 is real-time. Execution in chess is about as deep as a puddle, (you lift a piece, you set it down), and you can lose a game in SC2 even if you know better what to do than your opponent because execution in sc2 has almost an infinite depth. In practice, however, execution remains somewhat similar for the top players and pattern recognition and decision making are essential to win consistently. The patterns are "fuzzier" in SC2, but they are just as varied, just as important, and just as memorized as chess.