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Even as a kid, I never understood kids’ fascination with stickers. What’s so cool about a drawing on adhesive paper? I thought.

Not Nigerian enough.

Yet people still decided who to vote for & who not to vote against. People still hold responsibility for their vote or failure to vote: they knew who Trump was. They’d seen his shit before.

Also, why do you think the guy in the trucker hat is a leftist?

it must be a bunch of dorks that pronounce it wrong just because, right?

Yep: I often see people try to “correct” learners at bootcamps pronouncing it Jason. The fact people pronounce it Jason until told otherwise tells us which is more natural. The “correction”, in contrast, is a myth that must be learned.

Acknowledging something happens doesn’t endorse it, and Crawford never endorsed your pronunciation as natural. As I suggested earlier, he said “I strictly don’t care”. Jason is a completely reasonable & natural pronunciation.

There’s the original pronunciation, the suggestive spelling, the common phenomenon of punning in programming, and the natural way people pronounce it as a familiar name when they first see it. Then there’s your camp with a mythical, dorky pronunciation they pull out of nowhere and reinforce because.

I think people are fine to call it Jason & drive you irrationally mad.

You seem in irrational need for validation of your pronunciation despite clear justification against it. Cool ad populum. Fly that insecurity flag high.

You & your buddies can keep pronouncing it jaysawn & sounding like complete dorks if it makes you feel better. However, it was clearly intended to be pronounced naturally as Jason like its inventor pronounces it.

Believing otherwise is almost as bad as the plebs who think the symbol ∅ is inspired by Greek letter φ instead of Scandinavian letter Ø.

No, it’s pronounced Jason. Douglas Crockford was just too laissez-faire to correct anyone on it probably because he didn’t give a fuck.

The US federal government pays interest. The interest rates are quarterly.

I got paid interest on a tax correction & the rate was pretty good: over 5.5 APY, better than a high-yield savings account. I’ll owe taxes on it, though.

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 /

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?

I question your reading comprehension. It’s much easier to claim something causes harm than to demonstrate it would.

History doesn’t support your assumptions: recalling the civil rights & free speech movements in the US, civil rights advanced despite similar free speech constraints I’ve advocated (eg, clear & present danger or imminent lawless action standard) and despite a harsher environment with Jim Crow laws and white supremacists speaking freely. Civil rights can advance with such narrow restrictions on free speech and have before when circumstances were worse.

Complaining about semantics isn’t the argument you think it is. Meanings & distinctions matter.

The distinction between definite, demonstrable harm and lack thereof is crucial to justice. If you’re willing to undermine rights for expressions that won’t actually harm/threaten, then I don’t care for your idea of justice & neither should anyone.

By your argument people beed to be killed before you lift a finger. Yes?

No & already answered.

Your definitions of unacceptable speech & legitimate threat are unclear, and people nowadays make claims loosely. If it means demonstrable harm, then they’re fine & I apologize for the excessive caution.

From context

Rawls emphasizes that the liberties of the intolerant should be constrained only insofar as they demonstrably affect the liberties

and key words

only when the tolerant sincerely and with reason believe

and my direct statement

speaking one’s mind is not an act that directly & demonstrably harms/threatens security or liberty

I’m stating reasons of demonstrable harm are largely absent in speech. Speaking one’s mind doesn’t cause harm. Harm requires an act.

Tolerance is the allowance of objectionable (expression of) ideas & acts. That objectionable acts directly & demonstrably harm/threaten security or liberty is an easier claim that fits Rawl’s conclusion consistently. That speech alone can do so is a more difficult claim: maybe only false warnings or malicious instructions that lead to injuries or loss of rights, coercive threats, or defamation.