throwaway91827

5 gün öncediscuss

Have you experienced Silvesterabend (New Year's Eve) in a major German city? It feels like a warzone. In the context of fireworks specifically, this image of Germany as an over-regulated nanny state feels particularly at odds with my experience of Germany.

throwaway91827

9 gün öncediscuss

I don't think you have it right- the analogy to woodworking and craftsmanship is a category error and probably misses the broad thrust of the essay.

The goal of a woodworker or craftsman is the production of a finished good. He's arguing that, although it's been convenient to position a mathematician as a "theorem-producer", that's never really been the aim of mathematics, and that the actual products of mathematics are some kind of "mental software"- see his references to neuroplasticity. Basically, he's saying that the goal of mathematics is to create abstract structures that allow humans to reason about increasingly complex concepts, and that the "mathematician as theorem producer" is more like a convenient fiction that mathematicians have allowed to persist for too long, and now threatens to endanger the whole practice of mathematics.

throwaway91827

18 gün öncediscuss

"Building an application used to mean orchestrating roles over time: one person designed, another challenged the architecture, a third tested, a fourth deployed."

What? That's not my experience at all, this lost me very quickly.

throwaway91827

geçen aydiscuss

What historical examples are you thinking of?

throwaway91827

4 ay öncediscuss

I don't disagree that you got a window into American values, I just don't agree that proximity to American values is the same as civilization versus primitivism.

throwaway91827

4 ay öncediscuss

Just trying to understand your point here- so non-westerners are primitive and irrational, unlike the West, led by Donald Trump, champion of rational, elevated discourse?

throwaway91827

6 ay öncediscuss

Revolutionary terror in 1789 wasn't about killing the Bourgeisie- the French Revolution was a Bourgeois revolution- the Revolution was about overthrowing the Aristocracy, the nobles, the people with, as you say, titles- Being Bourgeois generally meant that you're common-born but well-educated and moneyed.

The fact that the Bourgeois of France were growing in real power, but completely unrepresented in the formal political systems in France, was one of the major pressure points that caused the entire system to explode into Revolutionary violence.

I think you're right to point out the irony that revolutionary violence mostly affected the common man, and not the aristocracy, but the "enemies of the revolution" were nobles, clergy, and their sympathizers (perceived or otherwise), not "the bourgeoisie".

Proletarian revolutions against the Bourgeois don't really happen until there IS an urban proletariat in the first place- in pre-industrial 1789, the bourgeois and the sans-culottes were grouped together socially in the "Third Estate".

throwaway91827

7 ay öncediscuss

So I should listen to 4Chan but not Pakistanis?

throwaway91827

7 ay öncediscuss

How do you square your directive that leaders use X as a way to get an option poll or pulse of a nation with phenomena like this: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/23/rightwing-in...

where a huge amount of influential accounts posing as American patriots were actually essentially content-farmers from the global south?

For my 2 cents, I consider X in 2025 (which is very different from Twitter in 2011!) to be basically an anonymous imageboard like 4Chan, mostly full of straight-up noise and largely decoupled from reality, with the only reliable signal being a bias towards information that is personally flattering or aligned with Elon Musk.

I don't know that I'd ever seriously listen to a place like 4Chan for guidance about how to tie my own shoes, much less how to govern an entire nation.

throwaway91827

8 ay öncediscuss

I decided to put this to the test.

What I would expect a human to reply:

"Um... OK?"

What Claude Sonnet 4.5 replied:

"Hi there! I understand you're planning to repeat the same sentence. I'm here whenever you'd like to have a conversation about something else or if you change your mind. Feel free to share whatever's on your mind!"

I don't think I've ever imagined a human saying "I understand you're planning to repeat the same sentence", if you thought this was some kind of killer rebuke, I don't think it worked out the way you imagined- do you actually think that's a human-sounding response? To me it's got that same telltale sycophancy of a robot butler that I've come to expect from these consumer grade LLMs.

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