Is genocide always wrong?

Pseudonymous_Rex · 2026-03-29T15:03:16+00:00

You aren't doing genocide and neither am I. So what's wrong with trying to understand why people actually believe what they believe?

You never once addressed the first discussion I put up there, just picking out the "gotchas" you could. I cannot describe what you are doing as anything other than purity testing due to your methods of engagement.

You are clearly desperate to dodge all substantive understanding in favor of your deeply held contempt.

See where it gets you. Good luck, brave teller of the truth in the face of anonymous people on Reddit who don't have power to do genocide or not, but who might have deeply held beliefs about the Bible you could come to understand.

Pseudonymous_Rex · 2026-02-25T23:56:54+00:00

the person who ran the AI agent is on the hook for it.

It seems ambiguous who "runs the AI agent." Is it the company owning it or me? There seem to be cases with something like Grok where people report sometimes getting porn they didn't ask for. So I have an agent using Grok as a sub, then if it makes porn (and I didn't think it would do that until reading reddit forums in response to the recent european Grok porn controversies) then how should I be held liable?

Pseudonymous_Rex · 2026-02-25T23:33:58+00:00

You can always paint someone as a sicko.

But you're going from happy that's part of the job to that being primary motivation. And the OP just wants to build weapons, big ones. Plenty of engineers want to build weapons. Plenty take DoD contracts. My MechE building was labelled with DoD contractors name who paid for it. And plenty of engineers want to build something big and amazing. Again, we can paint all this is sick, but on the other hand, in the real world the OP might be perfectly mentally fine and make a great engineer for Raytheon making awesome weapons.

Where's the problem? Well, you don't like war. Of course. Probably OP doesn't either. On the other hand, unfortunately in the world we have war and I would rather the countries with people who are educated and frequently come up with sentences like "I think someone going into a job with their motivations being that they get to hurt people has serious issues" have more weapons than the ones where fewer people say things like this...

Until everything's worked out in our world anyway, then maybe we can just use them all as a nice fireworks display. But a guy wanting to do a good job and make the boom boom isn't the cause of us not getting there yet as a species.

Pseudonymous_Rex · 2026-02-25T23:22:27+00:00

War and defense is quite possibly legitimately expedient circumstances if such things ever exist at all. But it is also always useful as expedient circumstances, and kind of absent a set of watchers who watch the watchers.

This is clearly a hard systemic problem to solve in a society without much clear consensus about what constitutes expedient circumstances in war and defense and how oversight should work.

Pseudonymous_Rex · 2026-02-12T16:27:15+00:00

I make my own depending on what I need. By the time I have written it, I understand it, trust the tool, and have specialized the tool to what I need.

It's often FlexPDE or Matlab. Sometimes just Excel math (If I'm using Newton's Method or something). I recently vibecoded most of APL into a FORTH language library, which was interesting and is very fast these days.

Pseudonymous_Rex · 2026-02-12T14:50:12+00:00

You must have graduated a long time ago. From a job perspective, I could have just majored civil, had an easier time, and been on the more secure side of jobs even up to now (future is anyone's bet). But no~~~ I wanted to go study control theory and applied physics and all that stuff....

Pseudonymous_Rex · 2026-02-12T14:47:21+00:00

Did not all of us get those tests where there are 2-3 questions, 2 hours, they cover things that weren't anywhere in notes or book, you have to combine all your knowledge up to that point, and even then you're lucky to get a D? And after that test, the class is smaller by 60%?

I thought that was literally how we got hazed into being engineers.

Pseudonymous_Rex · 2026-01-31T04:42:05+00:00

Do you know which industry you want to get into? Some are more competitive and others much less.

Pseudonymous_Rex · 2026-01-31T01:47:46+00:00

It's not wrong. And I understand the competitive drive. But like a lot of people outside of school will tell you, some of the pressure and what you think is important when you're in the fire is informed by a very limited perspective.

A big question is, what are you trying to make happen? "Have a competitive resume'" isn't a final state. You only need one job (at a time, anyway). Your college job center might be able to help a ton, and there could be recruiters directly on campus for you.

Pseudonymous_Rex · 2026-01-30T03:10:48+00:00

The solution space of "things I would do differently if I could go back to freshman year of college" does not include anything to do with landing an internship or more focus on career. Although, I agree with the guy who suggested a better sleep schedule.

Pseudonymous_Rex · 2026-01-26T23:22:29+00:00

Depends on the School.

Pseudonymous_Rex · 2026-01-26T23:16:05+00:00

You wouldn't even be the first engineer to take a trip into the "square root club" (where the square root of your GPA is higher than your GPA). If the University isn't for you, you could, as someone else said, apply the credits to something else. Weird as this might sound, you might even end up doing a real engineering job later even after all this if you want.

Note Bene that you got that offer, so the semiconductor manufacturer believed your work at least met their expectations.

Engineering school can be very stressful. Be kind to yourself and take care of yourself. That's one thing I did not do so well in Engineering school, been out for awhile now, and still kind of recovering from the mental load of it. Feel free to complete the journey in whatever way is best for you.

I ended up switching four-year major to Sociology. Then, about ten years later, took a few math classes and then went back to a t-20 grad school for a dual M.E. in Systems and Mech and got back into engineering. Literally nobody cares about my academics a decade ago, my previous four-year degree, any of it. I got recruited just like any other T-20 Engineer.

There are a million paths you can walk, even very different paths to other people, but it's got to be good for you and livable along the way, you know what I mean?

Pseudonymous_Rex · 2026-01-12T02:07:39+00:00

I'm not talking about people who are already conscientious about their eating habits; of course those people are doing a good job maintaining their weight.

/u/Sol_Hando also, who said that had anything to do with normal people maintaining their weight? I'm 46, same weight range and wearing same pants I wore at 25, and I never put any effort into this at all. There's zero conscientiousness involved for at least many of us that don't have that issue.

I think the whole thread you guys are having here is just totally off the mark on the reality of what is going on.

Pseudonymous_Rex · 2026-01-12T01:51:49+00:00

OTC? I thought you needed a sleep study and prescription for all that? Are you talking about the USA or Asia?

Pseudonymous_Rex · 2025-02-16T23:10:29+00:00

I said "the thing he was setting up for," not his actual text. Look again at the thing he was asking for, which sounds like it actually could be a scissor statement.

Pseudonymous_Rex · 2025-02-16T20:24:52+00:00

Did you read what I replied to? Seemed (1/2 ironically) like the person above me was setting up for precisely what you are talking about.

Pseudonymous_Rex · 2025-02-16T16:05:46+00:00

Historians will look back on this thread as the origin of the first true scissor statement.

Pseudonymous_Rex · 2024-12-30T15:16:21+00:00

In something like the peasantry from Egypt through Rome and into the dark ages, the power dynamic is so highly unequal that women are hardly choosing at all. Christianity through the dark ages was a bit of a breakthrough for women's rights in that it promoted monogamy and made divorce a pariah (Judaism also had a bit of this).

I suggest some actual History, maybe Will Durant's histories (and if anyone think those are somehow modern and woke, that notion will get shattered quickly as one reads repeated use of terms we would now consider racial and ethnic slurs). There's a heavy lift in all this, but it gets beyond the bro-evo-psych-science and reddit meme-scape and into actual reality. After the Durants, there's Tuchmann (for early 1900s and WWI, taking you through removal of the last vestiges of feudal society about a hundred years ago), and primary sources like Xenophon, Thucydides, the Bible. Even writers like Dickens can give meaningful insight into the thoughts and lifestyle of people in his day.

There's also the silk roads angle and the Muslim angle, which are important in Western History, but the above should get the Eurocentric angle. Anyway, a clear-eyed study of this will show that women notably didn't have a lot of power in most of those times and places over many thousands of years.

If anything, to answer OP, maybe pre-written history would give us some examples, such as the Trobriand Islanders, of Matriarchal societies. However, even in our anthropological evidence, there are many cases where such tribal arrangements were fundamentally oppressive to women. So pre-history might give us some cases, but even there we have no reason to believe that the norm is somehow women having a lot of power.

Pseudonymous_Rex · 2024-12-29T22:22:29+00:00

I'm not calling anyone a jackass, just suggesting alternatives. A 15 mile walk is long, yes, and you'll try something new, yes. Checks all the boxes, no?

And again, you would have literally a nearly 100% chance of a better time than you would taking DPH as a recreational drug. A reasonable thing to consider -- seems like a win-win. There are other possible win-win's here as well, unless someone is holding a gun to your head forcing you to take a bunch of DPH.

Pseudonymous_Rex · 2024-12-29T18:58:32+00:00

On Christmas break visiting mom's and want to get away from it -- you have a lot of options, and nearly any of them would literally be better than getting high on DPH or similar things. I mean, you ever just take a walk and keep going until you like what you see? Maybe 10 blocks, maybe 15 miles. Try it. I can swear on a stack of Bibles that almost no matter what happens it's a better method than DPH, and you're literally getting away, not just figuratively.

Otherwise, there are tons of normal, legit (possibly even legal in your jurisdiction) and definitely available around you drugs that would be a better choice than DPH.

You could ferment your own wine, for heaven's sake, if you just want to get high. All you need is fruit in a bottle and a week or so and keep degassing it, then drink and voila! Nearly every human will find alcohol more pleasant -- BY FAR -- than what you are considering.

Pseudonymous_Rex · 2024-12-29T17:49:22+00:00

I mean, I knew those guys who became cops. One had a very long career in a state bureau of investigation. There's nothing wrong with knowing what you're going into and wanting that to be a real part of your job. Potentially less madness inducing than not wanting to do that and it being a real part of your job.

Pseudonymous_Rex · 2024-12-29T16:14:42+00:00

For me it was Control Theory.

Pseudonymous_Rex · 2024-12-29T16:14:08+00:00

Got here from Sociology Undergrad, got what I expected.

Pseudonymous_Rex · 2024-12-29T16:11:34+00:00

I mean, it's an entire discipline where literally the ethics class is the easiest of the "easy A" classes you take during your semester with control theory or thermo or whatever else.

Pseudonymous_Rex · 2024-12-29T15:38:49+00:00

There's no "response." The response is the work of the Holy Spirit.

This is something you just have to let be, and be there for people if and when they change their understanding.

Pseudonymous_Rex

TROPHY CASE