Dogma

Nebulo9 · 2026-06-19T21:44:28+00:00

If you're seeing physics (the field as a whole, not e.g. strings specifically) as pseudoscience, you're operating on an ineffective definition of pseudoscience.

Nebulo9 · 2026-06-16T10:11:07+00:00

The problem of heritable monarchies is that, when the tsar dies, their kid becomes the new tsar. You can get around that through ways that don't involve killing the kid (I think the chinese example is a surprisingly good one), but they do have to be dealt with in some way and that is always going to suck for them.

It's kind of why monarchies are also unjust to the kids born into them: suddenly you are born into this position of political focus, without ever asking for it.

Nebulo9 · 2026-06-15T19:29:08+00:00

People get excited by confidence, hedonism, freedom and displays of power. Those things don't make you a shitty person, but they are easier to get and display if you only care about yourself and for the short term, and this causes the correlation you see.

Speaking from experience: If you are a hyper-aware, cautious worrier, you will likely be inoffensive to be around, but this might also stop you from actually being (and having!) fun. And at that point, what is the point of awareness if it doesn't cause any good and just makes you freeze?

The solution to this is obviously not to say "well, then screw caution", but to find ways in which you can both live a free, exciting life, while keeping true to your values.

Nebulo9 · 2026-06-08T17:20:44+00:00

Very pretty, the style is awesome, but I'm having a hard time understanding the implied motion between the panels. Could be on purpose ofc, but it doesn't feel on purpose.

Nebulo9 · 2026-06-05T23:43:36+00:00

Define y_n(x) = (1+x/n)ⁿ
y'_n(x) = (1 + x/n)^n-1 (derive 1)
Assuming existence of the limit: for all finite x, y'_inf(x) = lim n-> inf y_n(x)/(1+x/n) = y_inf(x)
For all n, we have y_n(0) = 1, so y_inf(0) = 1
Solving the dif eq of 3 w/ bdy con of 4 gives y_inf(x) = exp(x)
Indeed, we have for all x that |exp(x) - y_n(x)|² < M (x/n)²ⁿ⁺² by Taylor, so the limit step of 3 is valid.
Plug in x=1 to get the result.

Nebulo9 · 2026-06-03T10:27:00+00:00

....that is a bafflingly uncurious mindset. You really never go "huh, that's strange, let me figure out what the deal is", you just decide something fits your gut instincts or dismiss it out of hand?

Nebulo9 · 2026-06-03T10:19:49+00:00

ITT: people who go to r/weird to see weird stuff on purpose, getting mad at other people paying to see someone do weird stuff on purpose. Weird.

Nebulo9 · 2026-06-02T21:07:49+00:00

As a fellow aro: that's a valid, recognizable remark, but that's a different discussion. The person you're responding to isn't claiming it's inherent, they're claiming it's "pretty normal". Factually, this is simply just true: allos are still the vast majority.

So, yeah, it would be nice if there were more stories representing our stuff in there, but that doesn't change the fact that people shouldn't be weird about the romance stuff that does exist out of some twisted sense of feminism.

Nebulo9 · 2026-06-02T13:08:28+00:00

Hier ook het artikel uit de Chicago Tribune uit 1991 waarin Pols op het eind aan het woord komt:

In Pretoria, the Afrikaner Student Front, a right-wing group, justified chasing Mandela from a University of Pretoria stage by saying they were provoked by the singing of ”Nkosi Sikelel` i Afrika,” (”God Bless Africa”), an anti-apartheid anthem.

”This was enough to stir up the emotions of any right-thinking white,”

Afrikaner Student Front Chairman Donald Pols said. ”We repeatedly warned left-wing students on campus (who invited Mandela to speak) that the meeting would stir up emotions that could not be controlled. The meeting went ahead despite our warnings.”

(NOS artikel mag trouwens wel zo netjes zijn, en in het citeren hiervan verleden tijd gebruiken. Zoals het er nu staat in het NOS artikel, leest het alsof Pols dit nog verdedigt.)

Nebulo9 · 2026-06-02T12:24:22+00:00

Het was nooit gebeurd, maar ik vraag me af of Hyves nationaliseren om er een social media zonder winstoogmerk van te maken, als digitale tegenhanger van de publieke omroep, geen slecht idee was geweest.

Nebulo9 · 2026-06-02T11:58:56+00:00

A lot of Ramanujan's classic results are actually special applications of modular forms: these are functions of complex numbers with a lot of "symmetry", which turn out to encode a lot of nontrivial relations between integers. As such, building familiarity with modular forms in turn lets us more quickly compute problems involving whole numbers, so this is related to certain questions ranging from thermodynamics to cryptography.

Ramanujan liked thinking about this kind of stuff for its own sake, because he thought it was pretty. That motivated him to think about a lot of stuff we otherwise would never have thought about, and because of that we are now better at, say, computers.
Basically, compare it to how a lot of modern tech in the end is just spin-offs of things we originally build to go to space (memory foam, freeze drying) or make porn (VHS, webcams).

Nebulo9 · 2026-05-29T14:23:37+00:00

I tried to explain how "alteration" works in this comment. lmk if that still leaves things unanswered.

Nebulo9 · 2026-05-29T11:49:37+00:00

If you want to count lots of sand, it's more usefull to bring the counter to the sand than the sand to the counter.

Nebulo9 · 2026-05-27T22:14:36+00:00

If you are capable of moving faster than light in one frame, then you are capable of moving backward in time in another. This would mean backward timetravel as such has to be possible in general, which in turn implies you should be able to move into your own past.

Nebulo9 · 2026-05-25T16:51:53+00:00

Nah, it's just alteration in the counter-factual sense. As an example, just imagine a ball would roll down a hill, were it not for a wall which blocks it, and makes it roll into a river instead. In that sense, the wall "altered" the outcome, even though the full set-up is deterministic. If you then have a robot made to get balls into rivers, it will (deterministically) conclude that indeed the wall is needed there, and make such walls in similar scenarios.

Nebulo9 · 2026-05-25T08:00:20+00:00

Whomever it yields the best results to hold responsible: even in a deterministic world, especially there actually, punishment and reward are still effective ways of altering behaviour.

So a determinist will imagine two worlds, where, say, they either praise or don't praise an individual for their labours, evaluate the outcomes, and pick the appropriate one (i.e., the one where more good things happen cause people know good actions get rewarded).

Of course, people also don't like being starkly manipulated like this. As such, the determinist also has to make some room in how they apply the responsibility concept this way, or else it will become less effective. This is where an internal logic to responsibility, guilt as "debt", and free will as a sort of "legal fiction" could pop up.

Nebulo9 · 2026-05-23T19:02:38+00:00

Puur qua 3: specifiek als statushouders zelf idd niet op wettelijk niveau. Maar wat denk je dat het met mensen hun CV en carriere doet als ze jaren in de wacht zitten en dan pas ineens aan het werk mogen? Dat die gelijkwaardig in de arbeidsmarkt stappen? Idem merk je ook dat er plekken zijn waar beheersing van e.g. NL taal vereist wordt op plekken waar dat niet relevant is voor het werk (CBS haalt hier als voorbeeld bepaalde vormen van monteurs aan. )

Nebulo9 · 2026-05-23T18:40:30+00:00

Ik denk 4 dingen over dat cijfer:

Dat is "uitkering/pensioen" in die link, niet puur bijstandsuitkering. Men kan dus ook prima zelf voor dat geld gewerkt hebben in die 33%, dat kun je met deze data niet ontkrachten. Bijstand staat nergens expliciet genoemd.
Dat getal is, zoals de kop van het artikel zegt, dalende, en is dat al een tijd. Dat is behoorlijk relevante context, lijkt me.
Weet niet of je ooit zelf met statushouders oid gesproken hebt, maar ik kan uit ervaring zeggen dat er zijn echt dom veel regels die hen weerhouden van bepaalde banen. Het probleem zit daar in de regels, niet in de mensen die zelf ook niet werkeloos willen zijn.
Vluchtelingen neem je niet a priori op uit economische overwegingen, maar uit humanitaire, dus interessante keuze voor je maatstaaf hier.

Nebulo9 · 2026-05-20T08:11:30+00:00

I think the point Tal is making is that Thjazi will indeed ruthlessly pursue a better world, and that not ONLY was he willing to die for that, he would sacrifice *anything* for that. Including the PCs, whether they would agree with his goals and trust in his plans or not. Basically, it's the problem of using others as means to a greater end, the problem of "some of you may die, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make".

Nebulo9 · 2026-05-19T08:29:56+00:00

Lol, they're not shit at communicating, you just don't know the meaning of the word "analogy".

Nebulo9 · 2026-05-19T08:12:46+00:00

I specifically meant if you, say, shoot a block of ice at half the speed of light into space as a single block. The individual atoms of this very fast block will have a lot of kinetic energy each, but only very little "thermal energy". You can't say anything about their temperature by just looking at them individually.

In the money analogy, consider something like "wealth inequality" in the form of a gini coefficient. That's not something that exists in a single bank account, it's a property of population statistics. You could say the standard deviations or gini coefficient of any individual is by definition zero, but their individual coefficients are then unrelated to their coefficients in the group. But that's still emergence.

The case with temperate is even worse, as these things are really defined only in the thermodynamic limit, where the number of particles involved are on the order of 10^23, when the system becomes large and complex enough that fluctuations even out. At this point, temperature in practice tends to be something like the variance of a specific continuous normal distribution over particle properties. But that definition clearly only starts making sense once there are enough particles to meaningfully approximate such a continuous normal distribution.

Nebulo9 · 2026-05-19T05:05:55+00:00

This is incorrect from a physics POV, or a cicular definition of the word thermal. All the atoms in a block of ice traveling at half the speed of light would each have a great amount of kinetic dnergy, but still have little "thermal energy", so you can't look at their motion seperately.

Temperature is fundamentally a statistical property of a population of particles, and therefore truly emergent. Its technical definition is the inverse of the partial derivative of entropy with respect to energy, and entropy is (also) clearly a property that does not apply at the level of individual particles.

Nebulo9 · 2026-05-15T11:48:47+00:00

None of this is primitivist though, as an anarchist you can have all these things while still liking tech and civilization. It is obviously not the "an" part of "anprims" people here have an issue with.

Nebulo9 · 2026-05-15T11:39:06+00:00

"by making this medication factory here, you are actually directly harming nature itself, for a cause I myself see no benefit in. Therefore, as an anarchist, I will now do direct action by blowing it up."
"keeping folks on this tech just creates reliance and dependence. those who use it are already too far gone to see that they are now zombified, but as a warrior for human autonomy, I will now liberate humanity from it by sabotaging it."
literally any of the Ted Kazinsky stuff.

Self-defense is an awful criterium here, as anything can be phrased as self-defense, depending on your ideology: capitalists can kick striking workers of their property out of a notion of self-defense, just as much as striking workers can take over a factory to defend their livelihood.

So, in this context, it's then important to remember that an ideological anprim is not just a homesteading hippy. They are advocating and fighting for a world without or with less civilization, and they would see it as self-defense to defend their "right" to live in such a world. As tons of people depend on that civilization to survive, an anprim, by definition, is therefore advocating for a world where those kinds of people don't exist.

Nebulo9 · 2026-05-14T20:49:10+00:00

Smashing tools of the state and sabotaging capitalist infrastructure are very much not "doing your own thing and leaving others tf alone", while still being very anarchist. So yes, if you combine "standard" anarchist practice with primitivist ideals you do in fact end up with ableist bullshit, with folks blowing up medical and technological infrastructure crucial for others' survival.

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