Maybe look over my comment history esp re language usage

Nah, too much effort, like proof editing a comment. Better to just plop out comments into the lemmy commode & flush them away with a press of the Post button. Right? 😉

ducking

This is lemmy: pretty sure you can write fucking without burning our virgin eyes/ears. Maybe. Don’t quote me on that.

Definitely, especially when the “damage” is meaningless, imaginary, clearly not even directed at them, and well within someone’s capacity to disregard & not take personally.

They really need to bring back the “Sticks and Stones” nursery rhyme: cultivating all this fragility & learned helplessness ain’t serving humanity.

The Mesopotamians had some cool myths extolling humanity’s ability to endure the gods’ multiple attempts to exterminate them with disease, pestilence, drought, great floods. I think people have some capacity to get over themselves & endure some ridicule not directed at them. Imagine if the Mesopotamians instead wrote legends of the gods exterminating or curtailing humanity with the slightest hint of ridicule directed elsewhere.

Enki, however, as always never at a loss for creative ideas, devised a way that he hoped would finally solve the problem caused by the quarrelling gods themselves. He decreed that from now on the humans’ lifespans would be severely limited from the outset (in biblical terms to 120 years) by the indirect ridicule of their peers.

Beyond pathetic.

That’s…such a non-issue. If that totally devastates someone, maybe they should work on their resilience or fortitude? Do we really need to pull out the world’s tiniest violin for every contingency?

Glad you understand it, though.

Where’s the innocent person?

While I get what you’re saying

You do? I don’t, because why should anyone give a fuck?

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 /

Aren’t there already other progressive parties? Look how they’re doing.

but…

That’s where you lost me.

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?