Sentrovasi

Posting the article here so you all can make your own minds up.

People don’t really like to read the articles before commenting, huh.

Knowing Stardew was such a beloved game, I knew I had to get context before judging the author because it could be read both ways.

People who assume games not changing = criticism are telling us more about their own uncharitable view of others than anything else.

EDIT: That said, if I were to offer criticism, I feel like the author gives too much credit to Stardew as though it invented or pioneered the tight gameplay loop: perhaps at least some mention could have been made to Harvest Moon, the game from which Stardew borrows - and perfects - most of its major systems.

Also to be fair, it doesn’t go anywhere with that thought that Stardew hasn’t changed. Felt a little low-effort, like a retrospective on Stardew that just basically listed what people liked about it.

Yeah, kinda puts paid to the idea that piracy is about sustainable, non-DRMed software for all when the one company whose niche is ensuring that such resources are available is being undermined like this.

Wouldn’t it eventually fill up with blood and holy water

It sounds like you’re being sarcastic but you’re getting all these serious replies.

It’s weird cos you’re the only person bringing up pirating first (others are bringing it up as a talking point you’ve raised), and that’s not the dichotomy - it’s not dubious reselling sites or pirating, it’s Humble Choice, the topic of your post, where the games are already discounted, the developers have decided to opt in, and some money is actually going to charity.

Even if you bring up your original post as providing “options for everyone”, it was written in the spirit of advertising grey market sites as an alternative to Humble Choice, and therefore it’s entirely fair that others are bringing up the harms of grey market sites so that everyone knows what the risks are between them. I used to use those grey market sites as a kid more than a decade ago before I understood that they were a tool by scammers to make their money, and now I no longer use them. It would only be honest for you to have talked about that in your original post rather than ignoring it because the only alternative to you is piracy.

It’s probably more a dig at No Man’s Sky’s redemption. But I get the irony.

It’s unfortunate that you’ve chosen to focus on a semantic nitpick as the only thing to reply to rather than all the other more interesting talking points.

It’s also unfortunate that you’ve chosen to condescend throughout all the posts you’ve written, which really makes me want to not rely to you.

That said, you’ve already shown a brutal contradiction:

Wikipedia:
‘to serve as a premise or starting point for further reasoning and arguments’

Tutors:
‘contribute to an axiomatic system’

Wolfram:
‘a proposition regarded as self-evidently true without proof. The word “axiom” is a slightly archaic synonym for postulate.’

What these definitions all say that I think you’re wilfully choosing to ignore (or just not reading carefully enough) is that these are all assumptions meant to make a system internally logical.

It’s also amazing how you can say

‘Saying 1 + 1 = 2 serves as foundation for further deductive reasoning […] is generic, imprecise, and worthless’

when that is literally what half of your definitions also say.

‘Saying 1 + 1 = 2 is Axiomatic is like saying Oxygen is an axiom or axiomatic. To further build the periodic table. No, Oxygen just is, a fundamental piece of reality which is also true!’

You’re still not getting it, which means you’re not reading anything I’ve said at all about human-centric perception (which is a shame given how much time I’ve had to spend trying to parse your poor semantics.)

There’s a difference between the element and atoms of Oxygen that do exist in our world and the name and observed properties of Oxygen that we have derived and given to Oxygen. The strange thing is that I think while everyone else agrees that the testing, observing, and ascribing of properties to something is science, you think that the existence of oxygen itself is science (and therefore science is truth?)

To bring it back to your original equivalences, 1 is true in most languages and systems because along the way, humans decided to use 1 to notate a truth value. If we had wanted (and some systems do), 0 could have been used as the truth value, or even a letter. We’ve then decided to build entire lines of logic from that number, and obviously from within the observational parameters of this framework, 1 must be true for any of our observations to be internally consistent. But two things:

1. These are our observations, not reality per se.
2. 1 is still an abstraction. Is the concept behind 1 an absolute truth? For all we know 0.99 (recurring) is a much more accurate abstraction for the 1s of the universe. 1 is our human attempt to bring some order to a confusing world.

Fundamentally your dogmatic clinging to axioms as somehow underpinning some universal truth when they are meant to be convenient frameworks to build upon shows a very shallow understanding of the building blocks with which humans have built our understanding of the world. I highly recommend you take the scientific method to heart and try posting these “deep” thoughts in other places to see if anyone else agrees that they’re deep. If they don’t, I invite you to revise your hypothesis and reassess whether what’s “true” to you really is true to the mathematicians and scientists of the world.

Edit: Just want to add that I won’t be replying to you anymore as it’s taking a lot of more time and the worse thing is I don’t think you’re even trying to understand what others have to say despite your talk about “no shallow thinking” (lol). There’s no point in talking to a brick wall, especially a condescending one, and I’m sure we both have better things to do with our lives.

We can take your axiom, 1+1 = 2, and break it down into where fundamentally one of your biggest misunderstandings is.

We came up with the equivalence of 1+1=2, and deemed it true. Someone else in this comment section already brought up the idea of axioms, and while 1+1=2 is a theorem rather than an axiom, it is built on axioms that have been defined as fact for the rest of the framework to stand.

Science (and Math) is a purely anthropic system or framework. 1+1=2 isn’t a universal constant if we look at the fusion of two Hydrogen atoms into one Helium atom (with extra energy being released!) The very idea of what 1 is can change depending on your reference point and may not stay the same between observers. While 1+1 may stay the same in the world of pure Mathematics (and a very robust world it is we have created!) it is much harder to apply them to real life (does this make Mathematics “true-er” than reality?)

I think you’re free to believe what makes you happy :)

But making assumptions can be dangerous in science, and misconceptions, especially in the information age, can be very hard to disabuse. I’m happy for shows to not jump to conclusions just so twenty years later we’re not stuck with myths that may actually be harmful to how we understand the animals we all love.

This is really strange in two ways.

One, you’re not describing science but existence. Science is nothing if not a framework of knowledge based on the scientific method. To somehow come up with a definition of science that separates it from the scientific method actually removes all qualities of knowledge from science (do you think religious people also don’t define their knowledge as “what is”?) On the whole, basing your definition of “Science” as how laymen define science seems to be a strange way to try to make a supposedly mathematical argument - from imprecision and abstraction?

Two, to conflate Science with existence essentially is concocting a truism - like when someone asks you to solve for x you’ve chosen to define x as whatever you want then solve it. Science as the sum of empirical human knowledge is an approximation of x, and as a mathematician I’m sure you understand the significance of how an approximation of something is a world apart from the thing itself. You cannot say that science is truth, therefore science is true - that is a pointless statement that completely drops all the reasons why science is more truthful than religious knowledge or any other form of knowledge.

“If the story of Adam and Eve wasn’t true and correct, then there wouldn’t be any humans.”

You have a very binary understanding of what is necessary for something to be true that is almost dogmatic.

The rules of chemistry need not be true and correct for formulas to succeed. People were doing correct things for the wrong reasons, even scientifically, for centuries, if not millennia. Think about things like surgeons not washing hands, inefficient gunpowder, bloodletting, or the attempts at a unified theory of Physics - we know that not everything is correct, yet the formulas don’t fail at small enough scales/slow enough scales/within certain observational parameters.

You’re right that science aims for truth, but that doesn’t mean it can attain anything more than our closest approximation of the truth (limited by human perspectives and resources). We believe in it because it is what works, for now. And the beauty of this is that if one day some incontrovertible proof for a higher being does come up, we will recalibrate all our theories to account for it (presumably after very, very stringent checks.)

Now if your whole point is Science has done very many good things all around us, that is 100% true! But that says nothing about the truth value of Science, beyond that there is a lot of evidence of it working that one time (which is not what you seem to be claiming when you say it exists regardless of belief).

If all it takes to make science truth is to provide quotes of famous people calling it truth, then religion is probably truth a thousand times over.

A lot of the arguments and evidence you bring to the table are circular and only true from the reference point of whatever internal logic you’ve decided to assemble for yourself. Does this mean you’re surrounded by Chinese shills? Probably not, but that is also apparently the truth you’ve decided to believe in, evidence be damned.

What people are trying to make you see is that epistemologically, absolute truth is a ridiculous bar that, if you set as the hurdle for science to meet, is only going to disappoint you time and again.

Scientific knowledge does not have any special status or truth value conferred on it beyond the very educated guesswork of scientists and the time and effort and money that goes into verification. It’s an endeavour that relies entirely on empiricism and the flaws that come with having limited human perceptions.

Does this mean that science is exactly the same as religion when it comes to reliability? Of course not, because the things that you choose to believe in when you believe in science are different, more accurate and reproducible.

To claim that science has some ineffable attribute that puts it above any other belief, on the other hand, is discounting and discrediting the effort and very nature of scientific knowledge, and ascribing to it the kind of mystic quality that is exactly what makes religious knowledge so ridiculous.

In case anyone is wondering, this is a sculpture called The Resurrection in the Vatican.

I don’t think that’s true. I think recognising that a public figure elected to office sending an official communication on official stationery should be obliged to write appropriately, especially when they’re apparently trying to convey their respect, is an important part of the message of Santos’s gross incompetence that he’s trying to convey.

Sure, people on the internet can write whichever way they want and still have “clarity”, but a congressman on congress stationery? I don’t think the public should have such low standards of their elected officials. That person’s conduct on the national and international stage reflects on the entire country. Given the official nature of the communication, I wouldn’t say that’s petty. Maybe that’s because I’m not American though.

100% agree. And if the atheism community was just about sharing in their lack of belief, that would be fine.

However, atheist communities on the whole seem to be more focused on critiquing or mocking religion (probably because it’s hard to make content around a lack of something): fundamentally you should have some knowledge of the religions you’re criticising to not just seem uninformed.

As an atheist myself, such content just seems very cringey.

I genuinely had students believe that what ChatGPT was feeding them was fact and try to source it in a paper. I stamped out that notion as quick as I could.

I think the problem is more that given the short attention span of the general public (myself included), these “definitions” (I don’t believe that slavery can be “defined” as good, but okay) are what’s going to stick in the shifting sea of discourse, and are going to be picked out of that sea by people with vile intentions and want to justify them.

It’s also an issue that LLMs are a lot more convincing than they should be, and the same people with short attention spans who don’t have time to understand how they work are going to believe that an Artificial Intelligence with access to all the internet’s information has concluded that slavery had benefits.

The two examples in your later paragraph are wholly different cases: the second is a completely different use-case and the first one is actually less morally unambiguous than you think.

But even people who like making stuff would be able to devote more time to their work if they were given the means to sustain themselves through their work without needing to work another job, wouldn’t they?