Ferk

And please, get all countries to actually start properly accepting ISO 8601 format for dates as a mandatory universal standard…

Obligatory reference: https://xkcd.com/1179/

someone painting him as a morally righteous

The first thing @seSvxR3ull7LHaEZFIjM said was: “Assange is a bit of a scumbag” …

The closest thing to “righteousness” said was: “his efforts for freedom of information should not land him in US torture prisons like many others.”

Which, being true, it’s absolutely not challenged or contradicted by anything you said in response.

Note that “freedom of information” is totally compatible with “picking and choosing” the manner in which you exercise that freedom. In fact, I’d argue that the freedom of “picking and choosing” what’s published without external pressure is fundamentally what the freedom of press is about.

Assagne (like any other journalist) should have the freedom of “picking and choosing” what facts he wants to expose, as long as they are not fabrications. If they are shown to be intentionally fabricated then that’s when things would be different… but if he’s just informing, a mouthpiece, even if the information is filtered based on an editorial, then that’s just journalism. That’s a freedom that should be protected, instead of attacking him because he’s publishing (or not publishing) this or that.

But C syntax clearly hints to int *p being the expected format.

Otherwise you would only need to do int* p, q to declare two pointers… however doing that only declares p as pointer. You are actually required to type * in front of each variable name intended to hold a pointer in the declaration: int *p, *q;

Yes… how is “reducing exclamation marks” a good thing when you do it by adding a ' (not to be confused with , ´,‘or’` …which are all different characters).

Does this rely on the assumption that everyone uses a US QWERTY keyboard where ! happens to be slightly more inconvenient than typing '?

be nice

What niceness level exactly?
The most nice I can be in my system is -20… but being too nice to one process leaves others with less time and resources in their life.

Yes, the way his hand is positioned, it would not have worked if they had wanted to make it hold the wooden stick. They’d have needed to edit the hand too much and it would have likely been noticeable / even weirder.

Probably they decided: f*ck it, let them grab it however they want. Maybe it’ll even become a thing.

And it looks like it worked, since we are talking about it and spreading the ad. Smart advertising, imho.

Yes, his relationship with the idea of “Others” is strange… like a love/hate relationship. In fact, the cat which you mentioned (named after a racial slur, though it seems it was not him who named it) was deeply loved by him… he using his cat’s name in one of his works was more of a way to honor it rather than anything else, there’s letters from him claiming he was still mourning even though it was more than 20 years since it vanished.

Other-phobic

Honestly, the “cosmic horror” or the mere fear of the unknown kind of plays into that as well.

One could argue there’s something inherently racist in sci-fi horror that depicts aliens as monsters when in fact they might just simply be different intelligent lifeforms with their own set of needs…

There might be sometimes problems among intelligent lifeforms to properly understand / communicate, or conflicts in our goals. But painting everything alien/unknown as inherently scary is kind of racist, even if in some situations it might be written in our instincts to not trust that which is unfamiliar.

I mean, it would technically be possible to build a computer out or organic and biological live tissue. It wouldn’t be very practical but it’s technically possible.

I just don’t think it would be very reasonable to consider that the one thing making it intelligent is that they are made of proteins and living cells instead of silicates and diodes. I’d argue that such a claim would, on itself, be a strong claim too.

Note that “real world truth” is something you can never accurately map with just your senses.

No model of the “real world” is accurate, and not everyone maps the “real world truth” they personally experience through their senses in the same way… or even necessarily in a way that’s really truly “correct”, since the senses are often deceiving.

A person who is blind experiences the “real world truth” by mapping it to a different set of models than someone who has additional visual information to mix into that model.

However, that doesn’t mean that the blind person can “never understand” the “real world truth” …it just means that the extent at which they experience that truth is different, since they need to rely in other senses to form their model.

Of course, the more different the senses and experiences between two intelligent beings, the harder it will be for them to communicate with each other in a way they can truly empathize. At the end of the day, when we say we “understand” someone, what we mean is that we have found enough evidence to hold the belief that some aspects of our models are similar enough. It doesn’t really mean that what we modeled is truly accurate, nor that if we didn’t understand them then our model (or theirs) is somehow invalid. Sometimes people are both technically referring to the same “real world truth”, they simply don’t understand each other and focus on different aspects/perceptions of it.

Someone (or something) not understanding an idea you hold doesn’t mean that they (or you) aren’t intelligent. It just means you both perceive/model reality in different ways.

sea, sir, its, if, all, ball, car, sent

Just like building up your muscle, it takes time. Which is why you don’t see memes/people saying: “So weak that you can’t lift 100kg? just say no, raise your arms while holding a 100kg weight. It can’t legally fall if you don’t drop it.”

I mean, logically stopping depressive thoughts is the only way to stop depression, the same way as how lowering the caloric intake is how you get rid of obesity, or lowering the resistance to insulin is how you stop being diabetic type 2. Or how the only way to be someone who lifts 100kg is to actually lift a 100kg weight.

But that’s so obvious that it’s not helpful. It’s not like people don’t know what makes them depressed… or obese… or weak… what they want is advice in how to train themselves, not someone telling them they should “just” stop being the way they are (which is probably something they already keep reminding themselves about! …most of the time, that’s the one thing they don’t need help with).

You mean saying “no” to depressive thoughts?
I feel that if you can combat depression that way, then you are not really having clinical depression.

It’s like asking a type 2 diabetic to stop being so resistant to insuline. If your body can stop resisting insuline, then it’s not diabetic.

Yep, this is akin to: “Depressed? Just say no.” “Depressive thoughts cannot legally enter your mind if you don’t have them.”

People don’t realize that overfeeding is not the real cause of the problem, but rather a consequence.

+1 on this. Kobos actually use Linux under the hood. And although the default UI is proprietary, it’s super easy to install KOReader.
You don’t even need to hack into it some custom firmware, just a sideloader, which normally doesn’t break even if you actually updated the base firmware.
Here the official tutorial on how to do it: https://github.com/koreader/koreader/wiki/Installation-on-Kobo-devices