What other wonders can we blame on shit-posting?

Possible, unlikely, worse. The most accessible content is native text with the full content structure of the original. Quoting without compromises & feeble games would be better.

what’s stopping me from just screenshoting

Images of text? Accessibility.

So, another sacrifice at the altar of social media to deliberately break a straightforward feature at the expense of people who need accessibility.

• ableism +1
• accessibility 0

Social media can be such trash.

I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.

Source unclear, often attributed to Richard Feynman.

Nah, that’s ignoring context irrationally. Context matters. I’ll show.

He’s not saying “This retard thinks the SSA uses SQL”.

Can SSA not be called “the government”?

He is saying “the government” which means all of it.

So, let’s try your suggested interpretation.

This retard thinks all the government uses SQL.

That seems to agree with mine.

However, you denied ambiguity of language, and that context matters, so let’s explore that: which government? The Brazilian government? Your state government? Your local government? No? How do you know? That’s right: context.

Why stop there? There’s more context: a Social Security database was specifically mentioned.

Does “the government” always mean all of it? When a federal agent knocks someone’s door & someone gripes “The goddamn government is after me!” do they literally mean the entire government? I know from context I or anyone else can informally refer to any part of the government at any level as “the government”. I think you know this.

Likewise, when people refer to the ocean or the sky or the people, they don’t necessarily mean all of it or all of them.

Another way to check meaning is to test whether a proposition still makes sense when something obvious unstated is explicitly written out.

This retard thinks the government uses SQL. Why assume they use SQL here?

Still make sense? Yes. Could that be understood from context without explicitly writing it out? Yes.

A refrain:

Use context.

Were those his exact words? When words are ambiguous, are we selecting interpretations that serve best in the contention? Does the context suggest something obvious was left unstated? Yours seems like a forced interpretation.

1. He complains about 1 specific database.
2. Some rando assumes it’s SQL & retorts he doesn’t know it.
3. He literally writes “This retard thinks the government uses SQL.”

Always, sometimes, here? In typical Twitter fashion, it’s brief and leaves room for interpretation.

In context, always or here makes the most sense as in “This dumbass thinks the government always uses SQL.” or “This dumbass thinks the government uses SQL here.” Does it matter some other database is SQL if this one isn’t? No. With your interpretation, he pointlessly claims that it does matter for no better reason than to discredit himself. With narrower interpretations, he doesn’t. In a contention, people don’t typically make pointless claims to discredit themselves. Therefore, narrower interpretations make more sense. Use context.

All I did here was apply textbook guidelines for analyzing arguments & strawman fallacies as explained in The Power of Logic. I welcome everyone to do the same.

A problem with objecting to a proposition that misrepresents the original proposition is that the objector fails to engage with the actual argument. Instead, they argue with themselves & their illusions, which looks foolish & isn’t a valid argument. That’s why strawman is a fallacy.

The fact is there’s very little information here. We don’t know which database he’s referring to exactly. We don’t know its technology. Some of us have worked enough with local government & legacy enterprise systems to know that following any sort of common industry standards is an unsafe assumption. No one here has introduced concrete information on any of that to draw clear conclusions, though there’s an awful lot of conjecture & overreading.

He seemed to use the word de-duplicated incorrectly. However, he also explained exactly what he meant by that, so the word hardly matters. Is there a good chance he’s wrong that multiple records with the same SSN indicate fraud? Without a clear explanation of the data architecture, I think so.

I despise idiocy. Therefore, I despise what Musk is doing to the government. Therefore, I despise it when everyone else does it.

Seeing this post keep popping up in the lemmy feed is annoying when it’s clear from context that there’s nothing there but people reading more into it.

We don’t have to become idiots to denounce idiocy.

Some may be so old that they predate RDBMS/SQL.

I don’t follow. Wouldn’t that lend credence to his assertion that it’s incorrect to assume that everything in government is SQL?

People here are being irrationally obtuse about the possibility that an agency that’s existed since the 1930s may keep business-critical records on legacy systems predating relational databases. Systems serving a national agency may not migrate databases frequently.

Elisp has a nice notation for maintainably composing regexes like any other programming expression. Only language I’ve seen offer that. So instead of "/\\*\\(?:[^*]\\|\\*[^/]\\)*\\*+/", the regular expression to match C block comments could be expressed (with inline comments)

(rx "/*"                          ; Initial /*
    (zero-or-more
     (or (not (any "*"))          ;  Either non-*,
         (seq "*"                 ;  or * followed by
              (not (any "/")))))  ;  non-/
    (one-or-more "*")             ; At least one star,
    "/")                          ; and the final /

$ value and value $ are both seen in Canada for example, former being more common in English, latter in French

Canadian conventions vary by language. In English, I’ve only ever seen $ then figure.

• Canadian government price indexes
• BBC report on Canadian supermarket prices
  • photo of multilingual price tag
  • price comparison table shows currency symbol £ C$ $ precede figures

The ISO currency code can go after (eg, 1 USD, 1 CAD).

It’s a national convention: Wikipedia claims that in all English-speaking countries (and most of Latin America), the symbol precedes the amount.

If they’re a non-native English writer, I guess that would explain it. An awful lot of people in the US seem to do this, too. 🤷

Are you new to natural languages? They’re highly irregular. Appealing to speech to argue that writing should correspond is senseless, because look at the rest of the language! Look at the unpronounced letters, inconsistent spellings, irregular punctuation that exists only in writing: English writing isn’t English speech, doesn’t model it accurately, never has. They’re clearly distinct systems following different rules that only loosely relate such that writing doesn’t directly correspond to speech. Complex irregularities are common across natural languages, so it’s weird to pick 1 small irregularity across a whole ocean of them and claim oh yeah, this part needs to be consistent.

If breaking established conventions for written English is a ploy to draw attention, then mission accomplished I guess?

Hexbear.net now at 710$ (Update: it’s now 1921$)

figure before $

image shows conventional placement of $ before figure

Can someone explain selective blindness of where to place the dollar sign ($) when correct examples stare people right in the face?

but…

That’s where you lost me.

That clears it up, and I missed it earlier: we appear to have a merely verbal dispute over the word tolerance.

You mentioned speaking out against the objectionable (an act lacking force) as an instance of not tolerating it. This is not the notion of tolerance defined in the wikipedia article or SEP article that discussions of the paradox go by. Tolerance is permitting ideas, action, practices one considers wrong yet not worthy of prohibition or constraint. Typical formulations of the concept consist of 3 components:

1. objection component, the object considered wrong or bad
2. acceptance component, reasons to permit it regardless
3. rejection component, the boundary from tolerable to intolerable where reasons to reject outweigh reasons to permit.

Not tolerating something—not permitting it—implies prohibiting or constraining it somehow. Wherever someone could express/do/be something intolerable that usually means force to prevent/limit them from doing so. Acts (such as speaking out, not sharing your things) that don’t prohibit or constrain the objectionable still permit & therefore tolerate it.

Tolerance has a number of paradoxes identified in the SEP, and the paradox in discussion is more precisely called the paradox of drawing the limits. By permitting the objectionable & merely objecting, it’s still tolerated & the paradox of drawing the limits isn’t really an issue here.

As you point out, general rules (on harm, violence, force, etc) mostly resolve these paradoxes without special embellishment needed.

If there’s an unacceptable use of Force against the intolerant, then is there one which is acceptable and if there is

I don’t see how that follows: spell out the logic?

use of Force against intolerance

I’m mostly confused, because I was thinking of violence/force used by the intolerant for intolerant acts: that can be justifiably constrained.

Legal constraint implies force by legal authorities: violators go to jail or get legal penalties.

The argument isn’t rational to begin with, rationality cannot disprove it in the minds of those who believe it.

So, people are just powerless to do anything but follow at the call of bigotry & disinformation, and they’re witless masses totally unamenable to reason? Got it.

The KKK has largely been expelled from society for the past century (not entirely).

That’s a weird example: white supremacists & KKK spoke openly and terrorized with complicit support of local & state authorities during the civil rights movement. Despite that, the civil rights movement prevailed. Without understating the difficulties, challenging reprehensible ideas is evidently possible.

Speaking with a Nazi posits that their ideology has the same value as yours.

No: association fallacy. Now you’re being irrational. You were before, but are now, too. It merely means we disagree, same as rebutting someone who is wrong.

Nazis should be expelled from society in their entirety.

Unless we exterminate them or deport them (where?), I don’t see how we do that. Maybe you mean suppress them from freely expressing themselves? Sacrificing any civil rights to achieve any of that is almost certainly an unjust threat to civil rights. Maybe you prioritize civil rights, too, but think sacrificing them is necessary to defend them?

Neoliberal propaganda has convinced you that all ideas have value.

No. We’re merely convinced bad causes can be defeated justly, because it’s been done before.

Sometimes I wonder if these types of claims discouraging the healthy, open discourse we had decades ago are disinformation designed (1) to make people think the effort is futile and (2) to inflame & harden polarization. Same with comics like this.

The paradox of tolerance doesn’t lead to a unique conclusion. Philosophers drew all kinds of conclusions. I favor John Rawls’:

Either way, philosopher John Rawls concludes differently in his 1971 A Theory of Justice, stating that a just society must tolerate the intolerant, for otherwise, the society would then itself be intolerant, and thus unjust. However, Rawls qualifies this assertion, conceding that under extraordinary circumstances, if constitutional safeguards do not suffice to ensure the security of the tolerant and the institutions of liberty, a tolerant society has a reasonable right to self-preservation to act against intolerance if it would limit the liberty of others under a just constitution. Rawls emphasizes that the liberties of the intolerant should be constrained only insofar as they demonstrably affect the liberties of others: “While an intolerant sect does not itself have title to complain of intolerance, its freedom should be restricted only when the tolerant sincerely and with reason believe that their own security and that of the institutions of liberty are in danger.”

Accordingly, constraining some liberties such as freedom of speech is unnecessary for self-preservation in extraordinary circumstances as speaking one’s mind is not an act that directly & demonstrably harms/threatens security or liberty. However, violence or violations of rights & regulations could justifiably be constrained.

Polysemy is a regular part of language, and rather than accept Warner’s assumptions, Elle could have countered that tolerance (in the stricter sense of allowing or overlooking an objectionable matter) is satisfied.

That said, tolerance is not that confusing, and a looser sense of tolerant (meaning not intolerant) was commonly understood as more live and let live, open-minded, gracious, charitable, inclusive, etc. In the 90s & early 2000s, leftists were more commonly easy-going, freedom loving, unconventional, uncritical like the Dude while rightists were more rigid puritans critical of any provocative influence (non-judeo-christian) they believed would corrupt society & children. When rightists claimed to be tolerant (stricter sense), skeptics might wonder if they’re really that tolerant of objects they frequently complain about. Leftists, in contrast, were largely more tolerant in that looser sense. Later, more critical leftists gained influence and may have increasingly distanced themselves from people with disagreeable ideas even on technologies that could bring people together (can’t platform those pesky ideas).

Consent can have a more open meaning, though it seems you’re trying to load a biased definition. It’s an agreement to participate where rights are at stake. Your negative connotation isn’t necessary: people can consent to share something fun together or take risks. There are certainly other words that could better fit your idea like interest, eagerness, or willingness.

I don’t know what identity is doing here. I think we already knew without much explanation that social identity is made up of multiple, diverse factors: some personally determined, others inherited or socially determined. Buzzy intersectionality isn’t needed to understand that, and it doesn’t blow the imagination.

I mostly pointed out the different definitions one might use so that people wouldn’t read my examples of rights violations and think “what’s that got to do with democracy?”.

Yet you wrote

That’s not even true in a very minimal definition of democracy

Are you contradicting yourself later by conceding (flawed as it may be) it fit “a very minimal definition of democracy”?

Other common restrictions in ancient Greek democracies were being a male citizen (who was born to 2 citizens), a minimum age, completed military service. Still, rule wasn’t restricted to oligarchs or monarchs. I think we’d still call that a democracy in contrast to everything else.

Your writing seems inconsistent.

If it existed today it would probably not even be called a democracy by western standards.

Do good, objective definitions vary by time & culture? Seems problematic.

Seems you’re claiming something doesn’t fit a minimal definition of democracy while using a non-minimal definition of democracy. Sure, it’s a flawed democracy, but we can repudiate it on those considerations it fails and clarify them without overgeneralizing.

So if you mean democracy in a very literal and minimal sense[…]

If you mean in it a more general sense[…]

Where would ancient Greek democracy fall in this spectrum?

Passkeys or WebAuthn are an open web standard, and the implementation is flexible. An authenticator can be implemented in software, with a hardware system integrated into the client device, or off-device.

Exportability/portability of the passkey is up to the authenticator. Bitwarden already exports them, and other authenticators likely do, too.

WebAuthn relying parties (ie, web applications) make trust decisions by specifying characteristics of eligible authenticators & authentication responses & by checking data reported in the responses. Those decisions are left to the relying party’s discretion. I could imagine locked-down workplace environments allowing only company-approved configurations connect to internal systems.

WebAuthn has no bearing on whether an app runs on a custom platform: that’s entirely on the developer & platform capabilities to reveal customization.