Pascal’s wager is a defense of theism in general, not a specific flavor of theism. If you accept that there is a God, any God, then you can reason and argue about which way to worship her is correct.

If you do not believe that God exists, however, then the particularities of which godhead you worship are irrelevant trivia.

If God or Brahman or Kamisama exist, then they are aware of the imperfect worship flavors that they receive and have appropriate accommodations included, if they are worthy of worship at all. (Please note that Zeus is not included in this list, because that guy’s just a rapist bastard.)

You’re right, the behavior of how Iraq and Afghanistan were handled was entirely different from either Germany or Japan after WW2.

My assertion is that the USA did too much “occupation” and not enough “governance”. Both Iraq and Afghanistan essentially had anti-government resistance movements forced into pseudo-national rule without any time to develop local governance.

Once the states were broken W wanted to get out, essentially since he feared accusations of imperialism. Which kept a good twenty year plan from being implemented, and instead led to a twenty year quagmire with one of the two essentially being a failed state.

(Man, that’s a lot of essentially’s)

I don’t mean to defend either invasion as either good for the people or necessarily for American security. I just want to point out that W’s position was “go and break things then go home” which is about as imperial as a viking raid.

Spoiler alert : it was just a survey of the reported confidence of folk who admitted to using AI.

So, AI users exhibit a reduction in literally the one skill that the AI expects them to actually have?

I should probably go read that link and see if it’s actual degradation or just selection.

“I just do what I want” isn’t a philosophy, because it doesn’t give guidance as to what someone else should do . It’s just childishness.

Even Randism / Objectivism stretches selfishness into “rich people should do what they want”. Trump doesn’t even get that far

I’ll grant that the orange felon is consistently selfish, though.

Even Bush jr wasn’t as much imperial as he was militaristic. Iraq and Afghanistan would both have arguably benefited from a time as an American protectorate like Germany or Japan, but W handed over “sovereignty” while the wars were still ongoing.

Trump isn’t coherent enough to have an understandable philosophy

A wizard drops you on the moon. You immediately panic about not being able to breathe, plus your salivia is boiling and your blood is…well, it killed you pretty darn quickly.

Thankfully, the wizard noticed and set spells that puts a tiny bit of atmosphere right over your head, and , repairs the damage inflicted already. There is a chair and a go-board in front of you.

“Wait, that’s it?” you ask the wizard after he explains what the spells did. “Arent I going to burn, or freeze, or something?”

“Eventually, yeah,” says the wizard as he sits down. “But the human body’s great at homeostasis. Since your blood isn’t boiling it can circulate heat within you, you can burn calories to add heat as needed, and sweating is absurdly effective since the relative humidity of a vacuum is pretty much less than zero.”

“But, didn’t the Apollo capsule spin to manage heat, and aren’t there huge radiator fins on the ISS so they don’t slowly burn? I thought managing heat was hard?”

“It is. For an inanimate object. Especially one that isn’t filled with water or surrounded by a thermo exchange medium. You ever see a capsule bleed or a probe sweat?”

4567

While 0 has no value and is often placed after 9 on keyboards, you asked about digits in a base and not numbers. This becomes clear if you describe the various bases.

• Binary is 0-1
• Octal is 0-7
• Decimal is 0-9
• Hexadecimal is 0-F

If you sort zero at the end, you’d need to spell out the digits or label them all as 1-0, which isn’t very descriptive.

Mind you, “zero-first ordering of digits” is not a fundamental rule, since the glyphs only have a need to be sorted when they stand for a numerical value . And if you used a phrase like “first X digits” without noting a range the omission would be a composition error.

I see you understood the point made by the example.

For nuclear weapons specifically, the activation code was supposed to be a command and control measure to prevent unauthorized use. Having it both be an easily remembered code and one widely known made that whole system meaningless theatre.

Are there any real-world examples where encryption backdoors have been successfully used without compromising cybersecurity?

No. Adding a backdoor to cybersecurity is fundamentally introducing a vulnerability that can be exploited by an attacker.

A backdoor in your IT security is like a hidden button to bypass the lock on the impenetrable front door of your impenetrable house. Sure, it makes the police serving a warrant easier, but now there’s a button that anyone can push to bypass your door.

What you will find are instances with no apparent violations. Just like setting all the nuclear weapons to have the exact same easily remembered activation code didn’t actually lead to a nuclear exchange.

Do tbey still mindlessly phone home so MS can censor what you do on your own PC?

When the standard is a big interoperability push that leverages MORE functionality as a bribe to be implemented.

This is how USB (plug & play!), Bluetooth (wireless headset!), HDMI (high def, single cable!) , and USB-C (both sides are good!) all beat the entrenched pseudo standards.

I think it’s a good idea to foster a social place, or places,.where you just go to talk. Be as kind as humble as you can, and just post new topics you want to talk about or on-topic replies to things that seem interesting. The Mastodon / bsky model is probably a little better than Lemmy in this regard, since the basic unit is “account” and not “subreddit”.

And I obviously have no idea what we call these things on Lemmy. What do you think they should be called?

Who the fuck demands people present pronouns? You either do it, or you accept either sometimes being misgendered or getting an indeterminate “they”.

Or are you just trying to start the new year bitching about people insisting on common courtesy after helpfully specifying their own preferred pronouns?

So, EVERY radio on the planet is suddenly overwhelmed by broad-spectrum jamming from orbital sources? Every cell phone, wifi, broadcast TV, satellite, AM/FM?

A bunch of people die,.due to distracted-driving car accidents with no way to call for help. News and government adapt modestly quickly, since the Internet itself runs mostly on already-shielded wires. There is a run on ethernet cables and phone modems for a bit, though, since not everyone has one. Navigation and timekeeping get harder, since no GPS or radio time sync, but humans adapt to those fairly quickly.

Long-term consequences depend on how long the aliens keep it up. It’s definitely a holy crap there are aliens! moment, though, since a bunch of sudden radio transmitters would be detected in the sky and identified as alien tech way before the toilet paper shortage even starts.

Sure, you and I can kick anyone out of your houses for any reason or no reason. But it’s kind of a duck move to not tell the person you’re booting what they did.

American English has three languages that we do most of our cultural trade with.

1. Commonwealth English
2. Mexican Spanish
3. Franciscan French

In both of the latter, multiple casual negative modifiers are additive instead of inverting. That is, they have the semantics of “bad” instead of “not.”.

Consider :

“i do not not want a million dollars”

and

“That is a bad, bad cookie.”

You’re assuming that the dramatically segmented and stratified experience is the “exact same service”, which is patently not true.

There’s a world of difference between a black officer who managed a supply line, a white non-comp who maintained aircraft, and a queer rifeman who witnessed half his unit die to an IED. And that’s ignoring rape, gang infiltration, religions discrimination, and plain ol “was your CO a jerk or awesome?”

Sleeping on the couch isnt gping to bed, though…

I dont think you’ve ever been really cold if you dont recognize the difference in utility between “heat up my whole room a very little amount” and “heat up something i can feel.”

To explain it simply: having heat trapped locally can help get heat into the human, which is far more important than putting heat into the air.