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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 25th, 2023

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  • The post didn’t ask for ethical requirements to be included in the advice.

    Right… everything does have ethical requirements though. As soon as a member of a society does make something that impacts themselves and others it has ethical requirements. Some examples :

    • voting (obviously)
    • buying a Xmas (avoiding slave labor)
    • selecting toilet paper (limiting pollution)
    • buying a coffee (fair trade)
    • paying an electricity bill (source of the energy)
    • posting on Lemmy (avoiding centralization)

    Everything, literally everything we do, has ethical requirements. We don’t have to say it because it’s implied.

    Now… if you are genuinely curious about the topic I can only recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_in_mathematics showing that even in the most abstract field, there are ALSO ethical requirements. Nobody can avoid that.








  • I bet, but that’s just my intuition, that being a linguist and an academic, again just by the very practice of having to study the tool that is language and writing about it, makes it a very different situation compared to “most people” who have never written essays since high school and I possess only a very basic understanding of grammar, etymology, etc. I bet the very topic and context makes his situation not normal.

    That does not mean he does not have cognitive capacities that most people might not have, but, again the practice itself most likely changed him, not solely “selected” him for the practice.


  • there’s just specialists, people who get lucky, people who work hard.

    I believe the point is to dispel myths about geniuses. I don’t know about Elsburg but wouldn’t you say Chomsky is both a specialist (linguist and politics) while being working very hard? He is 95y/o and STILL working affiliated to institutions like MIT or University of Arizona, publishing, answering interviews, writing reviews, etc.

    How I interpret it is that he is putting such amount efforts in such a concentrated fashion, probably even strategically, that it is “normal” that he is so good relatively to the vast majority of people. He did not became so knowledgeable by “just” being.






  • For years… well pretty much since I had a PC, I had a Windows partition. Why? Well because I (sadly) paid for the damn thing (damn OEM deals). Plus, I admit, sometimes they were things that only ran on Windows.

    For few years now though, everything, literally, from the latest tech gadget to playing games to VR, works on Linux.

    Few weeks ago I deleted the Windows partition. I didn’t have to. I didn’t boot on it for months. It didn’t affect me.

    Still, I now feel … safer, more relaxed, coherent.

    When I see shit like that, I feel even better!





  • What I meant to say is that a lot of commercial keyboards are sold with some “customizable” they are. And it’s partly true, you have tool allowing to make some shortcut on popular OSes. It might be sufficient for some people … but it is NOT the same as putting your own firmware in it.

    I’m not advocating for a $300 keyboard over a $30 one, “just” for genuine customization. Some that doesn’t have arbitrary limitations from the manufacturer and doesn’t have support for only some OSes which in turns (well Windows and MacOS not to name them) also promote a consumer only with limited control options, as OP is saying about enshitification.