How do you feel about WWI era Germans funding the Bolsheviks in Russia?

It's too early to tell.

Short-term or long-term?

Short term it was effective. It backfired though.

It got the Bolsheviks to take over, and one of their main goals on international stage was to estabilish Communism in Germany. They didn't get to it only because they were defeated by Poland in 1920, and you can't get to Germany without conquering Poland first. So, Germans funded a party that nearly started a war with their own country. That's a hell of a gamble.

The story doesn’t end there though. After that, what the Bolsheviks created utterly destroyed Germany then occupied it for 40+ years.

Fair, but still this isn’t a local chapter of a national Antifa organization. So it raises the question: is every local group that calls themselves “Antifa” now subject to investigation for domestic terrorism?

Kind of hard to argue against actual examples of said ideology being implemented.

Oh, founded in 07, back when the current president was a democrat donating to democrat races. Interesting!

I for one don't see anything wrong with anime characters, though I suppose neither of us are likely to change our minds.

"sufficiently tasteful/professional/anodyne" != "wrong"

I would say you are being unnecessarily pedantic: the GP said "anything wrong", and the original comment obviously believes that there is "something wrong" which makes the choice not "sufficiently tasteful/professional/anodyne" (/me looking up "anodyne").

The obvious positive reading of the GP comment is that they disagree anime characters make it not "sufficiently tasteful/professional/anodyne".

I am replying to the "parent" comment which replies to the "grandparent" comment on the "original comment".

You seem to be unnecessarily pedantic too, while being wrong at the same time (I would get those relationships wrong sometimes if I thought it was clear enough).

GP is overboard42. mpalmer is GGP / OP.

Debates, especially on highly subjective issues, will not always be resolved quickly and definitively in the absence of bad faith. That "ideological reasons" you're sensing is the worldview of the person you're talking to.

What do you mean by "not actually"?

Edit: do you mean literally impossible?

I mean it's logically impossible to formally and specifically define the natural numbers without introducing a logical inconsistency. The best you can do is define a set that has all the properties of natural numbers but will also define things that aren't natural numbers as well.

As an analogy you could imagine trying to define the set of all animals with a bunch of rules... "1. Animals have DNA, 2. Animals ingest organic matter. 3. Animals have a nervous system. 4. ... etc..."

And this is true of all animals, but it will also be true of things that aren't animals as well, like slime molds which are not quite animals but very similar to them.

Okay so you keep adding more rules to narrow down your definition and stamp out slime molds, but you find some other thing satisfy that definition...

Now for animals maybe you can eventually have some very complex rule set that defines animals exactly and rules out all non-animals, but the principle is that this is not possible for natural numbers.

We can have rules like "0" is a natural number. For every natural number N there is a successor to it N + 1. If N + 1 = M + 1 then N = M. There is no natural number Q such that Q + 1 = 0.

Okay this is a good starting point... but just like with animals there are numbers that satisfy all of these rules but aren't natural numbers. You can keep adding more and more rules to try to stamp these numbers out, but no matter how hard, even if you add infinitely many rules, there will always be infinitely many numbers that satisfy your rules but aren't natural numbers.

In particular what you really want to say is that a natural number is finite, but no matter how hard you try there is no formal way to actually capture the concept of what it means to be finite in general so you end up with these mutant numbers that satisfy all of your rules but have infinitely many digits, and these are called non-standard natural numbers.

The reason non-standard natural numbers are a problem is because you might have a statement like "Every even integer greater than 2 can be written as the sum of two primes." and this statement might be true of the actual natural numbers but there might exist some freak mutant non-standard natural number for which it's not true. Unless your rules are able to stamp out these mutant non-standard natural numbers, then it is not possible to prove this statement, the statement becomes undecidable with respect to your rules. The only statements you can prove with respect to your rules are statements that are true of the real natural numbers as well as true of all the mutant natural numbers that your rules have not been able to stamp out.

So it's in this sense that I mean that it's not possible to specifically define the natural numbers. Any definition you come up with will also apply to mutant numbers, and these mutant numbers can get in the way of you proving things that are in principle true about the actual natural numbers.

It seems you know what you are on about! Thank you for a cracking comment.

I've always had this feeling that the foundations (integers etc) are a bit dodgy in formal Maths but just as with say Civil Engineering, your world hasn't fallen apart for at least some days and it works. Famously, in Physics involving quantum: "Shut up and calculate".

Thankfully, in the real world I just have to make web pages, file shares and glittery unicorns available to the computers belonging to paying customers. Securely ...

The foundational aspect equivalent of integers in IT might be DNS. Fuck around with either and you come unstuck rather quickly without realising exactly why until you get suitably rigorous ...

I'm also a networking bod (with some jolly expensive test gear) but that might be compared to pencils and paper for Maths 8)

What do you mean?

if I'm working in Cursor for example, ideally the entire chat history and the proposed changes after each prompt need to be stored. that doesn't fit cleanly into current git development patterns. I don't want to have to type commit messages any more. If I ever need to look at the change history, let AI generate a summary of the changes at that point. let me ask an LLM questions about a given set (or range) of changes if I need to. we need a more natural branching model. i don't want to have to create branches and switch between them and merge them. less typing, more speaking.

You should ask a LLM to create a VCS that will let you not do all these things you don't want to do.

It does seem strange, but there's a decent chance the author is ESL or just has an unusual writing style

Wikipedia says he was a higher up in al-Qaeda. All things considered, it doesn't seem like that much of a human rights violation.

Or you could add some more sections to object files. Just make clang and/or gcc export function signatures, structs, enums, and typedefs

I wonder if one of the existing interpreted languages (python/javascript/ruby/whatever) could maintain a patch for llmv/gcc which did exactly that and in the process make the most incredible seamless integration ever between itself and C (and also C++ now with its ABI stabilizing!)

If you were poor, you'd be carjacking people?

Quite possibly, especially if I'd be born into poverty. I gather you are quite sure you wouldn't?

This looks like a ridiculous strawman's argument. For example, there's a large difference between stealing food from a produce stand (which I would certainly do if the alternative was to starve) and "carjacking people."

I agree with the OP - as a society, we should look more at aligning incentives rather than instilling morals.

Another huge area this comes up is the war on drugs - if you're caught with drugs, we slap you with a felony that ensures you can't get a real job... pushing you right back to drugs.

>if you're caught with drugs, we slap you with a felony that ensures you can't get a real job... pushing you right back to drugs.

I could say the same thing for any sort of crime. If you're an accountant, and you get put in jail for embezzling, that conviction is going to prevent you from getting another job as an accountant.

While there have been a few controversies about jobs that the law excludes felons from, in a lot of cases there's nothing preventing you from hiring a felony drug criminal. If you personally are fine with drugs and you think that committing the crime doesn't make him a danger to your business, go ahead and hire him. If you won't, it isn't the conviction that's keeping him from being hired, it's the crime; the conviction just lets you know that he committed a crime.

Your last paragraph and comment down-thread I think discounts both the many ways the legal system and drug use are entangled, and the reality of how job hiring works.

It has been my anecdotal observation that it is more common for small, local businesses to "look past" prior convictions when hiring and be more willing to take chances on their neighbors.

Large corporations with big HR and legal departments typically have a dimmer view of things however.

Right or wrong, it is harder to get a job with a past conviction. Without a job, it is difficult to earn a living, feed and house yourself and your family. When people are desperate and unable to survive through legal means, they resort to whatever it takes to survival. It's human nature.

What a weird comparison. Embezzling is abusing a position of trust to become a thief. Who was abused if someone privately consumed drugs?

If you believe that privately consuming drugs doesn't reflect negatively on someone, you can hire them. If you don't hire them and nobody else hires them either, the drug use is keeping them from being hired. It's misleading to claim that the conviction keeps them from being hired rather than the drug use.

> It's misleading to claim that the conviction keeps them from being hired rather than the drug use.

If I'm understanding you correctly, you're arguing that a drug user is less employable (perhaps because you believe drug users are untrustworthy or unreliable), and this is the reason they aren't hired.

But a conviction for a drug crime years ago does not mean someone is a drug user today. It is the conviction, not drug use, keeping them from being hired. A drug test would make more sense if you want to determine whether someone is a current drug user.

And besides, without the conviction you may be unaware of their drug use. If someone has a drug habit, but nobody can tell, what exactly is the problem? There are plenty of "functioning alcoholics" in the workforce.

That's nonsense. If you have a private drug habit and don't get caught, that won't come up on a background check. Lots of people consume recreationally without being addicts or messing up the rest of their lives. A conviction (sometimes just an arrest record) that comes up on a background check will automatically put applicants in the reject pile in many jobs. This is such a common problem some US states (eg California) have passed laws to prevent employers demanding this information of applicants.

Why don’t thieves stop being thieves after they can afford food?

I suspect they often do.