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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • Stop arguing semantics. We’re done here.

    Compare to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass:

    “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master——that’s all.

    Yeah, if you want to make up your own definitions to the words you use, and then order those around you to stop arguing semantics, then you’re basically not having a conversation at all.

    Your comment was confusing because you don’t seem to understand what is or isn’t part of an operating system, and the mere mention of the operating system was pretty far removed from any relevance to your own point.

    It’s a proprietary service, and if you want to argue that companies can run proprietary services in a closed manner, denying access to third party clients, cool, that can be your position, but it would be an incoherent position to claim that only OS developers should have that right.


  • the Allies could have kept fire bombing cities and it would’ve caused far more deaths

    This is an underappreciated fact. I grew up in U.S. public schools learning in elementary school about the massive scale of destruction that atomic bombs did bring (and, well, the Cold War was still going at the time). We knew the words Hiroshima and Nagasaki very early on. But it wasn’t until I was in college that I learned about the destructive scale of firebombing Japanese cities (and frankly, I learned it from a film class discussing Grave of the Fireflies, not from a history class).

    And maybe I’m jaded because I’m a combat veteran who has seen firsthand the toll that an extended period of conventional warfare and insurgency brings on urban areas with millions of residents, but I don’t think of nuclear war as really that big a departure from the shittiness of things that are actually within more recent memory. Or maybe that’s a misconception I hold that should be corrected, and these anti-nuclear people are right to express concern about cultural attitudes towards nuclear weapons, I don’t know.