papasquat's recent activity

  1. Comment on Modern, abstract art makes me angry in ~arts

    papasquat
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    I think this comment is art in it of itself

    I think this comment is art in it of itself

    5 votes
  2. Comment on Modern, abstract art makes me angry in ~arts

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    Taped a banana to my wall a little earlier. Stayed stuck. Don't have Sistine chapel available to paint, my drawing of it didn't look accurate though.

    Taped a banana to my wall a little earlier. Stayed stuck. Don't have Sistine chapel available to paint, my drawing of it didn't look accurate though.

    9 votes
  3. Comment on Modern, abstract art makes me angry in ~arts

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    Sure, but taping a banana to a wall takes a lot less skill than painting Sistine chapel.

    Sure, but taping a banana to a wall takes a lot less skill than painting Sistine chapel.

    3 votes
  4. Comment on Modern, abstract art makes me angry in ~arts

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    I understand the point they were trying to make, even though I wouldn't have jumped to a Nazi comparison to do it. Criticism of modern art was basically part of Hitler's appeal to populism. It was...

    I understand the point they were trying to make, even though I wouldn't have jumped to a Nazi comparison to do it. Criticism of modern art was basically part of Hitler's appeal to populism. It was "degenerate" because it supposedly wasn't produced by hard working blue collar German men. It's the same playbook Trump is running now; highlighting things they view as elitist or decadant and holding them up as examples of a society in moral decay.

    It's a very, very popular opinion that modern art is self absorbed naval gazing wankery done by kids with trust funds who haven't worked a day in their lives. Thus, for a fascist, an easy way to score brownie points with your base is to denigrate it and instead point to real art done 500 years ago with mostly Christian themes.

    The reason why it works is that most people think modern art is bullshit though. You can't really call someone Nazi adjacent because they share a belief that most people share. After all, the Nazis jumped on it because it was popular. It's not the other way around.

    13 votes
  5. Comment on Modern, abstract art makes me angry in ~arts

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    It really depends on how a person views art. If you view art purely as a medium for conveying human meaning, then you won't have any issues with abstract modern art. If you view it as a...

    It really depends on how a person views art. If you view art purely as a medium for conveying human meaning, then you won't have any issues with abstract modern art. If you view it as a demonstration of human skill, you'll have problems with many examples, because there are many modern art movements that intentionally de-emphasize the role of technical skill in art.

    7 votes
  6. Comment on Vatican declares Society of St. Pius X in schism, excommunicates bishops in ~humanities

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    I don't see how. Theres a lot of philosophy that was first postulated by people who have extremely different world views from most people today. Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates all came from a...

    I don't see how.

    Theres a lot of philosophy that was first postulated by people who have extremely different world views from most people today. Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates all came from a society which was famously perfectly ok with slavery, and they defended the practice on philosophical grounds.

    That doesn't mean that the basis all the philosophical work that rests on them is somehow invalid.

    In the same way, you can rely on all the good scientific and philosophical work that the Catholic Church has done over the years while also disavowing God. There's nothing tone deaf about that at all.

    You don't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

    3 votes
  7. Comment on Did Kamala Harris's silence on Gaza cost her the White House? in ~society

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    As @eji1700 says below, that becomes past the point of reasonableness. Potentially coordinating with one guy to miss the president intentionally is kind of plausible I guess? You'd need someone to...

    As @eji1700 says below, that becomes past the point of reasonableness. Potentially coordinating with one guy to miss the president intentionally is kind of plausible I guess? You'd need someone to cook up the scheme, someone to handle the shooter, maybe someone else to secure access to the site. We've already covered why that is not realistic though.

    Rigging up a squib to damage Trump's ear though? Now we're talking about a whole other thing. Coordination with the secret service, Trump's makeup people, everyone around him that would have clearly seen a device on his ear, all the doctors and medics that would have examined him afterwards, anyone who happened to be standing behind him. It's completely beyond any level of plausibility, and you'd still need the shooter, because people really did get shot and killed, including the shooter himself.

    3 votes
  8. Comment on Vatican declares Society of St. Pius X in schism, excommunicates bishops in ~humanities

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    Oh, I don't disagree with you, that's not what I was trying to say. I think calling anyone's spiritual beliefs silly is pretty rude if they're not hurting anyone. I was just saying that an atheist...

    But what's frustrating is to see an atheist with a Protestant worldview pretend that liturgical languages (a practice going back to Sumer and Akkad) are obviously silly, and vernacular languages so obviously better. Neither is better than the other, it's just different religious traditions.

    Oh, I don't disagree with you, that's not what I was trying to say. I think calling anyone's spiritual beliefs silly is pretty rude if they're not hurting anyone. I was just saying that an atheist can still have a worldview, ethics, culture and so on that is derived from Christianity and Christian societies and still be entirely logically consistent. You don't have to throw out all of Christianity to count as an atheist. Just the god parts.

    5 votes
  9. Comment on Vatican declares Society of St. Pius X in schism, excommunicates bishops in ~humanities

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    I did notice the qualifiers, but they're not actually relevant to what you brought up. If you're criticizing atheists for "not believing in God while simultaneously doing X", it's already a flawed...

    I did notice the qualifiers, but they're not actually relevant to what you brought up. If you're criticizing atheists for "not believing in God while simultaneously doing X", it's already a flawed argument. Atheism isn't like Christianity. There's no inherent worldview associated with it beyond not believing in gods. You can be atheist but have all of the same views as a Protestant, minus belief in God. You can be an atheist and believe in bigfoot. There's no conflict there.

    So an atheist agreeing with a Protestant about the nature of divinity, what constitutes virtue and so on isn't a problem for either atheism or protestantism, regardless of if they're a modern internet atheist or not.

    4 votes
  10. Comment on Vatican declares Society of St. Pius X in schism, excommunicates bishops in ~humanities

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    Probably for similar reasons why people go to operas without knowing Italian, or why people listen to music sung by people that don't speak a language they understand. You don't need to understand...

    Probably for similar reasons why people go to operas without knowing Italian, or why people listen to music sung by people that don't speak a language they understand.

    1. You don't need to understand the literal vocabulary of the words to get some sort of meaning from it
    2. People with enough familiarity with the content do understand what the message being conveyed is, because they've heard the same liturgy hundreds of times, without actually knowing how to speak the language
    3. It's a ritual, and people find comfort and belonging in rituals
    10 votes
  11. Comment on Vatican declares Society of St. Pius X in schism, excommunicates bishops in ~humanities

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    I mean... The only defining feature of atheism is not having belief in God. It's not hypocritical to be an atheist but also have protestant worldviews about literally every other aspect of life....

    I mean... The only defining feature of atheism is not having belief in God. It's not hypocritical to be an atheist but also have protestant worldviews about literally every other aspect of life. You're an atheist because you don't believe in God, not because you believe absolutely nothing that protestant churches do.

    8 votes
  12. Comment on Did Kamala Harris's silence on Gaza cost her the White House? in ~society

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    Normally the reason they're accountable is primaries, but we barely have those for incumbents, so... I hate the convention of the incumbent being the automatic party pick and just completely...

    a lesser-of-two-evils candidate has no reason to improve if they aren't accountable to you.

    Normally the reason they're accountable is primaries, but we barely have those for incumbents, so...

    I hate the convention of the incumbent being the automatic party pick and just completely ignoring the primary because it just assumes that the person in power is automatically the best one for the job, which is totally nonsensical. Presidents should have to fight for their jobs every four years, not just from the opposing party, but from their own.

    I also wish the DNC would get their thumb off the scale more generally. The name is the United states democratic party, so be democratic. If democratic primary voters nominate an establishment candidate after all, so be it, and at that point if you're not showing up to the election because of sour grapes about your preferred candidate losing the primary, basically everyone can agree that you need to grow up and stop being a child. If we don't actually have a real choice in candidates at every election though, I mean, it's still an irrational choice to not vote for the least bad candidate, but I at least understand why someone would.

    4 votes
  13. Comment on Did Kamala Harris's silence on Gaza cost her the White House? in ~society

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    It would make no sense to stage something like that. At 150 meters away with an AR-15 and a reflex sight like the shooter used, it would be extremely difficult to intentionally graze someone in...

    It would make no sense to stage something like that. At 150 meters away with an AR-15 and a reflex sight like the shooter used, it would be extremely difficult to intentionally graze someone in the ear instead of hitting him in the head, especially for a relatively untrained shooter. Trump would be taking a massive risk of blowing his own head off to maybe potentially win an election. Like, it would be more likely to hit him in the head or completely miss than graze him like what actually happened.

    The shooter fired a bunch of shots in pretty rapid succession and only one grazed Trump. I'm all for a good conspiracy theory, but this one wouldn't make much sense.

    It's a lot more likely that someone who really hated trump (no shortage of that) and didn't really have much to live for decided that this was his moment to do something about it, and his lack of training and planning made it so it didn't go how he thought it would.

    6 votes
  14. Comment on Reddit will require you to be logged in to use old.reddit.com in ~tech

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    People in the techie sphere seem to overestimate how many people in the world care about the same things they do. Normal people don't really care about privacy, user hostile UI design,...

    People in the techie sphere seem to overestimate how many people in the world care about the same things they do.

    Normal people don't really care about privacy, user hostile UI design, advertising, forced app downloads, or quality of discussion. They care about what site has, ragebait, memes, sexualized content, and their friends.

    All of that stuff that people were so vocal about reddit killing are not things that most people who use the site, or any social media site care about. The people who care about that stuff run adblockers, don't post lowest common denominator content, and don't click on affiliate links, so reddit not only doesn't care about them, they actively want them gone.

    That's something that is missed a lot in these discussions. Tiktok, Instagram, reddit, Twitter and so on do not want you on their sites. You just use bandwidth and complain. You don't watch ads or buy things or go along with their plan of extracting every possible dime out of your attention as possible, so you're not being catered to, and features are intentionally being introduced so that you leave the site.

    That's why the reddit "protest" didn't work. All of these users left in droves with the intention of sticking it to reddit and forcing them to realize that they are alienating their users, but reddit just said "oh no this is horrible! Anyway, let's get back to the memes about women versus men and onlyfans posts"

    It's the fate of any social media site with a profit motive. Tech savvy users are not profitable.

    18 votes
  15. Comment on AI adoption and IntelliSense in ~tech

    papasquat
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    It's something I've been thinking about for a little bit. All the major ai studios have been marketing their models, and more importantly, their apps as omni tools that are suitable for every...

    It's something I've been thinking about for a little bit. All the major ai studios have been marketing their models, and more importantly, their apps as omni tools that are suitable for every single task involving data in any way. The idea is that if the model itself can't handle the task (people are becoming much more aware of the limitations of what an LLM is good at and what it's bad at) it can quickly code up a one shot python script to do the task and use an ephemeral VM environment to run it, all without the user actually having to worry about what's under the hood. I can barely keep up with what the companies are falling their new ai features, but I believe Anthropic calls this Claude cowork. I think they've built some of this functionality into the normal Claude chatbot as well. I'm sure OpenAI, Google, Twitter and Microsoft have their own versions of this too.

    That's all well and good when it produces the results you want. It very often does do that. But as anyone that's done any sort of data manipulation knows, when it doesn't, the failures are subtle and hard to detect unless you're the one that's been knee deep in the data and the code that manipulated it.

    I hope people start seeing the flaws in this approach and come up with a solution. I don't know if we're ever going to go back to the days of bespoke, handcrafted small tools and add-ons to perform data manipulation tasks for us though. It's hard to make stuff like that for every edge case you run into, and people don't like doing hard things or paying people for their time to do hard things.

    2 votes
  16. Comment on AI job grief in ~tech

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    Yeah, the whole article fell flat on its face because of that presupposition. It completely shatters the central premise that this is somehow a new phenomenon. You're telling me that the artisan...

    Yeah, the whole article fell flat on its face because of that presupposition. It completely shatters the central premise that this is somehow a new phenomenon.

    You're telling me that the artisan woodworker who created bespoke furniture with careful precision and finely honed skills from decades of experience doesn't use his job as part of his identity, but Kelly, the accounts receivable clerk at Allstate who took the job because it was the first position to call her back does? Kelly takes being laid off because of the new AI accounting tool harder than the woodworker did by being replaced by IKEA?

    Nah, sorry. That angle doesn't hold.

    20 votes
  17. Comment on I made a satirical AI detector in ~tech

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    Yeah, that's what I mean. Like, sorry if the sentence construction you've always used before LLMs got caught in the crossfire bro. It's cliched and cloying even without the AI association though,...

    Yeah, that's what I mean. Like, sorry if the sentence construction you've always used before LLMs got caught in the crossfire bro. It's cliched and cloying even without the AI association though, learn to write better if you want people to take you seriously. It's the corporate memphis of phrasing.

    4 votes
  18. Comment on I made a satirical AI detector in ~tech

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    For me, the most dead giveaway is the "it's not just x—it's y" sentence framing. For me it's to the point where I actually don't even care if the writing is AI generated or not once I read that....

    For me, the most dead giveaway is the "it's not just x—it's y" sentence framing.

    For me it's to the point where I actually don't even care if the writing is AI generated or not once I read that. It's so cliched and annoying I immediately stop reading anything past that.

    7 votes
  19. Comment on My partner says our relationship has always felt suffocating, but she does not know what she wants. What would you do? in ~life

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    Good job! Breaking up is hard, and it takes guts to finally end something that is going nowhere. There are so many people that have wasted so many precious years of their limited life putting...

    Good job! Breaking up is hard, and it takes guts to finally end something that is going nowhere. There are so many people that have wasted so many precious years of their limited life putting themselves through misery with another person that they shouldn't be with.

    I would say don't worry about dating right now. Enjoy being single. I always miss it a bit when I'm in a relationship. Don't rush to find someone, just enjoy doing whatever you want to do, whenever you want to do it right now.

    4 votes
  20. Comment on Grand Theft Auto VI - Pre-orders and Edition information in ~games

    papasquat
    Link Parent
    They can't do it because then they wouldn't be able to milk people for all they're worth who will buy the same game twice.

    They can't do it because then they wouldn't be able to milk people for all they're worth who will buy the same game twice.

    2 votes