There are two kinds of people with pet causes I appreciate
The altruists, who dedicate years of research and learning to finding and giving freely medical or other breakthroughs to make a better world. I am glad they exist, please give them my tax dollars, but I stopped trying to fix the world around 35 years old.
The other kind is patio11 kind - sorta altruistic - but getting paid altruistic. Since my Damascean conversion at the age of 35, I appreciate this kind too - you cannot have my tax dollars but you can persuade me to buy
The world needs both kinds. Well, it needs the first kind, it will never be short of the self-interest altruism. And since his pet cause is about making me money, I like his self interest.
That would refer to the Apostle Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus. Paul was a murderer of followers of Jesus, but then became a follower himself. So, I assume the commentator believed in altruism through commitments to poverty by the altruistic, big government spending, or something, but now believes in a more competitive free-market form of it.
I studied theology and scripture under a pastor and a rabbi for two years and they never described Paul's conversion as "Damascean". The contextualization is poor as well.
Obscurity and speaking out of your head for your own benefit rather than to be understood is postmodern frippery not the mark of a solid education.
Man, seriously, chill out. Neologisms are fine. Just like "patio11ian rate increase" is fine.
As far as I can see you're just engaging in personal attacks and character assassination here while not saying much in the way of argument besides, "I'm more educated than you."
I mean, you could just say something non-inflammatory like, "I'm confused, what do you mean by 'Damascean'?" and then when given an answer reply, "Oh I see, thanks. In theology circles 'Damascean' isn't really used to describe that situation."
Anyway here's a counter-argument: the Bible has long been a work of popular culture outside of religion, this isn't a theology circle or a church, and if people want to lightly abuse the stories and language in it then so what?
(I would have responded to your post where you say "strawmanning", but HN wouldn't let me. EDIT: You've now amended that post to say that the word is actually "Damascene". If you knew this, why all the drama? Something tells me that this was learned recently via Google.)
When I read your other posts they came across as mean, arrogant, and holier-than-thou. This could be a limitation of the written word and my emotional projections onto it, it could be an accurate perception and a lack of self-awareness on your part, or it could be a mixture of both. My vote is for both. I'm willing to believe you thought and felt you were writing in jest and in mirth and were not trying to be cruel, but I'm saying it didn't come off that way to me and what seems like a few others.
I would go through and highlight each sentence that reads as mean or belittling in some way, but it's literally every sentence, usually multiple times. (Except here, where you're being polite but defensive, which makes sense since I did criticize your actions.)
At the very least, please just try to understand that telling someone that their words are "not the mark of a solid education" is abusive.
which will far better argue and illustrate myriad points on the invention of language, its beauty and wonder and value to differentiate us as a species and to bring us joy and fulfillment and illustrate the challenges and quirks that make its study such a joy and illustrate language's evolution as a thing of wonder.
Then again, you see something like the Rossetti archive
and you are awe struck at the meticulous rigor and academic sensitivity it takes to understand permanence and context and format and physicality as intrinsic to the right of artistic expression.
Would these works have as much meaning if we OCR'd them, slapped them in times new roman, and beamed them to your twitching sweaty little palm sized cubes? Probably not.
It took a lot of time, a lot of arguing, a lot of hard questions and personal growth before I felt qualified to make statements like, "I don't think its a good idea to build a game engine that uses a Barthes-esque narrative decomposition to dynamically construct compelling storylines for video games." I don't think a religious education qualifies you as arbiter of language. I think his word is fun and quirky. Interesting. Highly relevant and timely.
You're not responding to anything I said, but rather you're strawmanning me to make a point you've been waiting for an excuse to make.
You might also consider using the return key to break up your text a little better. You'd be less likely to be perceived as a colleague of the unabomber. (Edit: they fixed it)
You don't need to be an arbiter of language to find out what is and isn't a word. Damascean isn't a word. The word is Damascene. The phrase is Damascene conversion. Using the unword Damascean only harms the form and function of the prose.
This term applies to both kinds of people. The first kind of people you listed are also self-interested.
The only difference is what kinds of things motivate them. The first kind are motivated by the pursuit of knowledge and/or sharing it with others. The second kind have a similar motivation, but include money into the mix.
What's up with ABsoluteMaybe? Are you still using it. I implemented my own EF storage interface, but after six months the queries started bogging down and I had to kill it. I've been meaning to get it back running.
Your out of the box storage is just a serialized file, right? The whole data set is stored in memory? How does that scale?
Out of the box is just a flat file, yes, which absolutely won't scale over time. I haven't been using the project recently (was out of the .Net world for a bit) but may be using it again soon and with a need for actual production scale. I'd love to chat more about the limits you hit. Ping me at troygoode@gmail.com.
