rwhitisissle @ rwhitisissle @lemmy.ml

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2 yr. ago

I know nobody asked, but the reputation Macs have amongst IT industry professionals is insanely annoying to me. I guess it's a difference between what I like in a laptop versus what other people like in them.

I've seen developers working for FAANGs unironically praise the M1 Macbooks as work machines. And I'm just sitting here, like...why? You are locked into an inferior operating system that becomes progressively more janky the deeper you get into its configuration. I have one and the damn thing has an option to change the "modifier key" for the fucking mouse, so you can change your mouse's modifier key to its ctrl or shift key, apparently. Y'know, in case your standard 20 dollar Logitech wired mouse, like the one I'm using, has shift and modifier keys. Just super useful /s. It randomly had slack muted after installing it, so I could never get message notifications until I figured out what to alter after digging through the guts of its terrible system configuration UI. It can't remember the order of attached displays and half the time I have to rearrange them after resuming it from hibernation. If you want to do basic window manager things, like press the meta key (also referred to as the windows key on non-macbooks) + direction arrow to have a window snap to a quadrant of your screen, you have to install a 3rd party application with Homebrew. Its keyboard is that weird, unresponsive, flat form factor that makes it a nightmare to actually use as a portable device. With any luck you don't have to compile anything for it, because...you probably won't be able to. Perhaps most annoying is the fact that, even if you want to use it as a full desktop replacement and plug in 3 monitors with the same resolution into it at a desk (most Macs have at least passable 3rd party dock support), the Mac just won't let you. It only lets you plug in 2 and it duplicates one of those two onto the 3rd one. If you want to plug in 3, you technically can: you just have to download 3rd party displaylink drivers, which, knowing Apple, probably won't fucking work and might permanently fuck up your display.

I get that it's a relatively powerful computer for the ludicrous amount of battery life it gives you, but that's purely because it's an extremely optimized ARM based processor that's only designed to work with this specific operating system. I also get that machines running Linux also have their own problems, but you aren't paying for whatever Linux distro you're running (probably) and you also have the power to change things with a little bit of effort. If I'm buying a machine like an M1, where the OS is presumably part of the whole "package," it should just work well out of the box.

Beyond those complaints, it's got good speakers and never produces any heat. Honestly, the only good things about the machines are those hardware elements: the speakers, battery life, and lack of heat. If they could run linux and had decent keyboards, I might like them. But Apple is practically an antonym for FOSS at this point. I also have a Thinkpad X1 Carbon, which is physically a worse machine: it gets hot, has a fraction of the battery life, etc. But you can install any Linux distro (that isn't Nix based, sadly) to it without issue and its keyboard makes it actually tolerable to code on for extended periods. I wonder if the people that really like the M1s like them because it's the laptop equivalent of an iPhone.

It's a lot of fun. I remember taping it on VHS back when it was still airing on t.v. I would pause the VCR when commercials started so that it recorded episodes mostly unbroken.

And in python, no less. Sloppy.

yet you choose to keep engaging which is the funny part to me.

Yeah, because I like arguing with people on the internet. I'm fairly up front about that.

you don’t like how I speak

Indeed I do not. I don't think you're very good at it. But life's all about the destination, not the journey, and we all have to start somewhere.

People even pointed out land clearing and we went back and forth on that

This seems tangential to the initial topic. I'm glad you got something productive out of it but if you wanted to talk about industrial farming and the impact of human agricultural practices on the environment, which is a fine topic of discussion, you could have, y'know...lead with that.

there was no argument

There were plenty of arguments to be had, but they weren't good arguments. Nobody's perspective or understanding of the world was improved by it, and I'm pretty sure nobody's mind was changed.

I dismissed it as quick as you dismissed my anecdotal stuff, is that not fair

Of course it's fair. But it's also a waste of everyone's time because you should have known before starting the discussion that this was what was going to happen. Like, this is so obviously going to occur and it's going to waste most people's time. If you ever go into a debate, you have to anticipate your opponent's responses and have arguments prepared ahead of time. What was your plan for dealing with the obvious response to your hypothetical for "I have a different definition of what constitutes veganism?" Because you either didn't anticipate that, or didn't care. You also didn't provide a lot in the way of initial details of the hypothetical. Seriously, you know you can fill out the body of a text post with quite a lot of text, right? You literally just asked the question in the title "Settle a debate: would eating a Venus fly trap be considered vegan?" and then, in the comments, clarified that your hypothetical was couched in a definition to which most people did not subscribe. If you had lead with "Settle a debate: would eating a Venus fly trap be considered vegan [if your definition of veganism is this specific definition of veganism]" we wouldn't be having this discussion. Because the entire argument I'm making is that you went about engaging with this topic in a way that is, quite frankly, annoying. You posed a hypothetical and then moved the goal posts in the comments by adding additional criteria after the fact. Just ask the entire question up front next time.

the biggest thing your mad it is that I phrased a comment in a way that didn’t invite argument or logical fallacy

You literally asked a question with the intent of "settling a debate." Of course it's annoying that you phrased your comment in such a way that didn't invite argument, because it reduces the debate to a pure difference of subjective definition. It seems like you just wanted to be right, so you moved the goal posts to include your definition, saying "well, if you look veganism like this, it's not okay to eat this particular plant or other plants grown as a result of industrial farming." Which...yes, we are all culpable for the iniquities of the world in which we live. There's a reason so many vegans are also anti-capitalists. This is not a new perspective. Fuck, the t.v. show The Good Place has this facet of modern human life as one of its foundational premises in the later seasons, that people are so wrapped up in a web of causality that their actions have innumerable unforeseen and unintentional negative affects on the world, rendering all of us incidentally guilty of a host of accidental evils. And having a discussion about that topic is all well and good. But you didn't do that. You asked people if venus fly traps as a food would be considered vegan. Which is, by comparison, a stupid fucking question.

If you wanted discussion I’d imagine we’d be talking about definitions of veganism in any capacity other than an anecdotal rebuttal of an anecdotal assertion. Not even a proposed definition in it stead, simply “that’s not a correct definition” which is a really weird thing to say for someone who thinks the definition of veganism is on a continuum

Do me a fucking favor: cite me. Seriously. Quote the exact phrase where I say your definition of veganism is objectively wrong in ANY reply I've given to you. In fact, I will do you one better. I will give you the links to my replies in this thread.

https://lemmy.ml/comment/5331374 https://lemmy.ml/comment/5331573 https://lemmy.ml/comment/5338345 https://lemmy.ml/comment/5344857 https://lemmy.ml/comment/5376311 https://lemmy.ml/comment/5385702 https://lemmy.ml/comment/5397623

I've commented on my perspective of how you've expressed your understanding of the lifestyle. I've said it seems superficial. That's my reading of it. But something being superficial or shallow and being "objectively wrong" are fundamentally different. You can't have an "objectively incorrect" opinion on a topic like this. You can have one that comes across as underinformed or which others think is weird, but those are themselves just opinions about your opinion, and they can't be objectively right or wrong, either.

In fact, I think we should try to make something very clear: I am not talking to you at any point about the actual topic of debate (which is to say the nature of veganism or, for some reason, venus fly traps). I agree that veganism is a fluid concept and its definitions muddled. But, once again, that's irrelevant.

Rather, think of me more as an English teacher commenting on how you have elected to construct (or perhaps more accurately, failed to construct) a logical argument or provide a well structured discussion, at the very least, of a particular topic that you yourself chose. You are approaching this like a student who thinks that your teacher disagrees with your conclusions: maybe you didn't like the book you were writing about and said as much and you feel you got a bad grade on your essay because the teacher disagrees with your criticism because it's a book she really likes. The reality is that she doesn't really fucking care what you think; she cares how you think, and how you construct and present your ideas. Nobody likes reading a shitty paper. I'm similarly annoyed by someone who starts a thread and fails to present a full argument up front and then proceeds to add additional qualifying information when they get responses that they don't like because they (presumably) just assumed everyone would be working off of the same definitions as them.

I'm pro the message and anti whatever font this is. It looks like the slightly less annoying cousin of comic sans (yes, I know it's good for people with dyslexia, shut up).

you ignoring my foundational premise

I'm not ignoring your foundational premise. I'm pointing out to you that your foundational premise is at odds with that of the people with whom you are speaking, and that at no point have you attempted to address those differences. What is happening is that you are basically saying "I think eating Venus fly traps is non-vegan because..." and other people saying, "okay, I disagree with that perspective." There's no synthesis to take place. You just have thesis and anti-thesis and no attempt at making anything new from that difference of opinion.

Of course im not moving beyond that definition because my whole premise was dependent upon that definition AS I SAID IN THE FIRST COMMENT COMPLETE WITH A BIG ‘IF’

I'll reiterate my initial question: if this is the case, then what did you hope to get out of this discussion? Because as I've already said: either people agree with you or they don't. There's no wiggle room, here. The best course scenario was people going "I agree" or "I disagree" and then never talking to you ever again.

You’re whole arguement is that it’s wrong of me to not change the definition that I already stated my arguments depend on because then people either agree or won’t.

No, my whole argument is that you came into this thread with that and seemed to be expecting people to agree with you when they had different definitions. But once again, like I said before, if my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bike. So, once again, what were you expecting to happen? Either people are going to agree with you or not, and if they don't, then they're going to tell you why. And they did. And then you got upset when they did. So, once again, what did you expect to happen?

I know and have spoken with plenty of vegans who use that definition

I cannot emphasize how little your personal experience or relationship with "plenty of vegans" matters to a discussion like this. One one very basic level, it's because your sample size is so astronomically low as to be meaningless. On another because it's the internet and lying is trivially easy. I could also point to websites that define veganism as something different from your definition, but that would be equally worthless because you wouldn't care and because you would say your personal knowledge of people with the definition you're using carries more weight. Which, it doesn't, but you probably believe that it does.

Or do you really think your definition is the only way someone can be a vegan?

I don't really care about veganism or how it's defined. What I care about is how arguments are structured and the mechanisms of language. Language is a descriptive tool and veganism is a complex lifestyle choice whose goals are tied to equally complex ethical values. There's probably multiple different and equally "valid" ways of practicing veganism, but your argument is founded upon a very specific, very narrow definition of that label. Your discussion with most people here can be summed up as you saying "according to this narrow definition of veganism, this act is not vegan" and multiple people responding with "that isn't my definition of veganism" and you responding with "yes, but I know a lot of vegans who have that as their definition, therefore it is more legitimate than your definition, and, also therefore, it wouldn't be vegan" and people responding again with, "I don't believe you, but, yes, changing the meaning of words will fundamentally alter the outcome of a hypothetical syllogism that relies on specific definitions of those words. What is your point?"

And what is your point? Like, I am serious, when you went into this discussion, what, in your mind, did you want to get out of it? It feels like you just wanted people to blindly agree with your position without providing their own perspectives on the hypothetical.

You even tacitly admited to that saying that within the framework I chose, one can only agree or disagree.

Yes, but that point is that that isn't productive as far as discussions go. If you frame a hypothetical in narrow conditions around a binary label, such as "vegan" or "not vegan," such that someone can either agree or disagree with the applicability of that label, there is no point in having that discussion. It's like if I said, "if I define good food as food I like, then pizza is bad food, because I don't like pizza." That's a completely useless statement. There is no reason to voice it because it leads to nothing.

No one forced anyone to respond to my comments but if I make a point completely within a common framework, the least one could do is not ignore the framework simply because it’s easier to respond that way.

Here we are again with competing foundational premises: you believe the definition of veganism you are applying is valid, common, and, in some ways, universal. The people responding to you think differently and have provided their own perspectives, which you have largely dismissed, in much the same way you feel like yours has been dismissed. It's a conflict of foundational premises, and the premises are so entrenched and inflexible as to prevent any kind of meaningful discussion. Competing definitions are fairly common in any kind of ideological debate, but they're also fairly useless and ultimately dissolve into No True Scotsman fallacies. So, once again, you came in here, said something people thought was dumb and incorrect, and then got defensive when they told you as much. So, yeah, you didn't force anyone to respond, but nobody forced you to post your inane question in the first place, either, did they?

but short of that my anecdotal evidence from the vegans I know is by definition just as good as any anecdotal evidence provided against it, and that’s all thats been provided

Yeah, but that means your anecdotal evidence is as equally worthless, not as equally valuable, because neither has any real value. It's an ideological label whose edges are innately fuzzy or fluid. It's not like you're a radical empiricist debating the geometric definition of a triangle. You're debating whether or not a very specific act is itself "allowed" by a lifestyle choice. Let it go. If you don't want to eat Venus fly traps, I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who wanted to force you.

you still won’t even acknowledge theres not simply one type of vegan with only one definition

Remember that part of my previous comment that said you wouldn't actually understand the argument being made and instead narrowly focus on a very small part of the reply while ignoring every other part of it? Because I remember that. My entire argument is founded on two points: one is that the definitions of veganism are fluid and open to interpretation and that the particular definition of veganism to which you subscribe is so central to your hypothetical as to render the hypothetical largely pointless as a topic of debate.

Sure, but also on a very basic level organ donating is not the same thing as selling yourself into a lifetime of inescapable slavery.

The literal first thing I did was acknowledge that everyone has a different version of veganism

In that case, since the definition of vegan is relative, what did you hope to get out of this discussion beyond people agreeing with you?

your whole thing about foundational premises is pretty moot

It's really not, though, and the fact that you think it does strongly supports what I've said about reading comprehension.

I defined a clear scope of my arguement and stuck to it

It's not an "arguement" (also, not how argument is spelled), it's an opinion you are voicing. You think it's not vegan. Other people think it is. It's a discussion purely couched in competing definitions. You never try to work beyond those competing definitions so whatever it is you're "arguing" for is DOA.

veiled personal attacks

They aren't veiled.

"If a plant has to eat animals to survive then that plant is a product of animal suffering. Thats why vegans don’t drink milk or eat eggs too. So if that’s the definition of vegan that someone subscibes to then the flytrap is not Vegan "

And if my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bike. Pretty much everyone here already said "that's not really the definition of veganism." And you proceeded to argue with them about it. That's not productive discussion or "lively debate" - it's just bickering.

Once again, you don't understand the argument I made. You are not doing anything to move beyond competing foundational premises and competing definitions, so there's no point to the hypothetical you posed. Either people agree with you without argument, or they won't, and there's nothing beyond that. And that's because of how you chose to frame the discussion.

Id like to know what specifically you have issue with?

I take most issue with the fact that you just don't seem to really understand the conversation you're having or the arguments people are making. No one thinks you are personally attacking veganism. Not that I've seen, at least. What people find frustrating is the fundamental fact that they are arguing that suffering, the act of profiting from it, and the "guilt" that comes with that does not have some kind of transitive property, and you are, it seems, arguing that it does, and you can't seem to understand the fact that the discussion and difference of perspective deadlocks there.

In other words, you don't seem to realize that you and the people to whom you are speaking are operating on different (and this is a very important concept in any kind of debate) foundational premises. These are things that are core ideas on which any argument sits. Most of the time they're incredibly philosophically or ideologically basic, like 1 + 1 = 2, or "a child should not be held responsible for the crimes of their parents." To make matters worse, you also seem to be coupling this foundational premise with a definition of veganism which most people in the thread simply find to be objectively incorrect at worst, or remarkably obtuse at best. Honestly, if it seems like people are pissed at you for how you talk about veganism, it might be the fact that your understanding of it seems superficial, because your argument about fly traps comes across as an attempt at deconstructing the "rules" of veganism while ignoring the ethical intent behind it as a lifestyle.

This leads to a just awful discussion, because you 1) have your own definition of veganism that fundamentally differs from nearly everyone else's and 2) that definition is premised upon an understanding of animal suffering and what constitutes a human being "profiting" from it with which almost everyone here also disagrees. The worst thing, however, and which I personally find the most frustrating is that your reading comprehension skills are just frankly abysmal. You're probably going to read this comment, have a hard time following it, and not really understand the argument being made, and instead latch onto small details that are superficial at best to this reply, probably doubling down on your belief that you are unjustly maligned because people refuse to acknowledge your extremely illogical perspective as more reasonable or intelligent than it really is.

So, summing it up, what I specifically have issue with is that you, from doing the above, have managed to craft a perfect storm of completely useless and unproductive debate. Everyone here is dumber for having partaken in this discussion. Me included. Actually, probably especially me.

People from Atlanta really love to gatekeep the city, though. You live ITP? You live in Atlanta. OTP? You live in some redneck shithole whose name isn't worth remembering.

I think people have found the way you chose to approach the discussion to be counterproductive and frustrating. If you aren't willing to reflect on the frustration voiced by the people who took the time to reply and engage with you seriously, you are either entitled or simply unwilling to reflect on your expressive shortcomings.

Yes, this was always the correct course of action.

In that case, your issue seems more to be with a semantic definition of veganism. You've framed it in the terms of "is eating a plant that eats meat non-vegan," but conceptually what you're asking about is the transitive nature of suffering and accountability and how that intersects with a particular, very specific lifestyle choice. Which is a fine and ostensibly interesting discussion to have, but the way you elected to frame that conversation is...less than ideal.

When you eat that organism, its cells that feed you were produced because it ate flies, those cells are not products of the flies death?

Isn't the logical extension of this that nothing is vegan? Think about it: animals in nature get preyed upon constantly. A wolf kills an elk, eats part of it, and then its corpse decomposes. The carbon from the decomposing body is then used by plants in the biosphere to build new cells. These plants are now the products of dead animals. Are these unethical to eat because they had their cells built from recycled carbon that once belonged to an animal? Probably not. And this is true of all plants everywhere. And if you were to say "yes, but those plants didn't kill any animals themselves," then that argument would also have to apply for humans eating venus flytraps: humans didn't kill any animals themselves; they're just consuming something that did.

Vegans also don't eat honey, which is not really a byproduct of animal suffering. And a vegan also wouldn't eat eggs, even if they kept and raised their own free range chickens who were laying unfertilized eggs which were just going to rot if not consumed. Because veganism isn't about the "suffering" of an animal. You could genetically engineer an animal that was incapable of feeling pain or fear and made it so that it felt ecstasy while being butchered, but killing and eating it would still be unethical for a person to do, and still be in violation of veganism's core principles, because it's about conscious beings exploiting the labor or nature of animals without their consent. An animal like a wolf or lion (or in this case a venus fly trap) eating meat is not "unethical" because it exists outside of ethics: it's just a component of an ecosystem in which predation is a natural element. Humans have functionally removed themselves from whatever ecosystem they evolved to be a part of, so our exploitation of animals and their natural behaviors is just that: exploitative.

I always find it funny: the internet is a lot softer and more inclusive than it ever used to be. Explicit sexism, racism, homophobia/transphobia, etc. are treated with zero tolerance most places. But straight up ageism? That's the last truly accepted form of bigotry. Because getting pissed at a group of people who will be dead soon for not fixing all the world's problems is easy when you're young. When Gen Z gets to be 40 and there are no more Boomers but nothing is still being done to address the world's myriad problems, I like to think there will be some self-reflection on the nature of the world in which they live and the innate difficulty of addressing complex problems driven by societal inertia. But we both know there won't be and they'll probably pivot to hating Gen X and Millennials. Or maybe they'll go the other direction and blame young people.

I understand it's fun to blame boomers for climate change, but this was something that started before their generation existed and it will continue to be a problem after they're gone. You can also blame them for inaction in addressing it, but given that the only real solution is an extreme degree of collective austerity across multiple civilizations, which is something innately at conflict with the expansionist nature of capitalism as an economic system (something which also predated boomers and which will continue to be a problem after they're gone), then I would say that if you expect the problem to start being solved as soon as that generation is dead and buried, you're going to be sorely disappointed.

Jokes on john locke, i’m an organ donor anyways

Right, but there's no more harm that could come to you after you're dead, so being an organ donor wouldn't really qualify in this context. Your organs being donated after death diminishes you in no way and also potentially enriches the lives of others.

This situation kinda reminds me of John Locke talking about slavery. He says that for some rights to be truly inalienable, that people themselves should not have the ability to willingly surrender them, such as by willingly selling themselves into slavery. Now, yes, John Locke owned stock in a slave trading company, so he's a hypocrite in that regard, but I digress. I feel like this is one of those things where people shouldn't be allowed to physically sell parts of their body for consumption, as "not being eaten by other people" is one of those inalienable rights we should have as a society.

Certain lines in scripted media should come with a "sponsored by" attached to them.