musou

musou wrote (edited )

Reply to nice article against Popper's falsificationism by mm_

Popper's falsificationist strategy of conjectures and refutations can only deliver negative knowledge. It shows certain scientific theories are false, but it never shows that any theory is true.

i don't understand why he calls this a flaw. refuting positivism was one of the main purposes of popper's argument (as i understand it, anyway). in both of the counterexamples he brings up-- that smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer and that matter is made of atoms-- neither needs to be strictly capital-t True in order for us to be able to apply those theories to make useful predictions about the world. in fact neither statement is capital-t True in the sense accepted by most skeptics. plenty of people smoke cigarettes and never develop lung cancer, and no one has directly observed an atom via their senses. Popperian falsificationism has a lot of implications about the nature of knowledge revealed by scientific methods but i don't necessarily think those implications are so disagreeable as to render his argument unusable. in fact i think we might be better off if this kind of understanding of the nature of scientific theories were more widespread.

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musou wrote

Reply to The Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one by devtesla

when i streamed quake champions every night for a few weeks just as the beta NDA lifted, i had a total of 3 random viewers, two of whom never talked in chat in any way (i think one was my mom or something), and one of whom was just some horny on main dude who PM'd me dick pics with no warning and wouldn't shut up about all the stuff he was fantasizing about doing to me.

haven't tried it since. i wanted to try to teach newbies how to play better but even tho i'm pretty decent at quake, i'm not rapha, and he streams a lot so i think that niche is filled. i don't have the right temperament for it.

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musou wrote

Reply to Kubrick on the ending of 2001 (includes some info I didn't realize) by mm_

if you like this i highly recommend the book! it expounds on a lot of things like this that are (imo) insufficiently explained by the visuals of the movie. the first time i watched it i was pretty lost, but i gave it another shot after reading the book and it meant a lot more to me with that context.

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musou wrote

Reply to comment by noordinaryspider in Fireworks Are Trash by devtesla

yeah, i have a dog too and he hates fireworks. when i say "in the sticks" i mean miles from any building. still probably spooks some deer and opossums but i'm less worried about nature than domesticated animals that can't survive without humans.

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musou OP wrote

Reply to comment by neku in matchmaking sucks by musou

that's a really good question! i never really got into minecraft multiplayer so i don't really have any experience on the subject. one thing i wish i had expanded on more in the original post is how increasingly homogeneous the communities of different games are now compared to before. i can't speak with any authority but if i had to hazard an unsupported guess, maybe some of it is spillover from other games contemporary with minecraft that did have managed servers. i don't really know though.

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musou wrote

Reply to Fireworks Are Trash by devtesla

i like fireworks a lot but we always used to go way out in the sticks to shoot them off to not bother neighbors. they deserve all the same considerations as if you were doing recreational shooting, at least. i think banning them within city limits or anywhere else that's not a good long distance away from where folks live is perfectly reasonable.

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