yewler @ yewler @lemmygrad.ml

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2 yr. ago

That's a really great question. The answer is that mathematicians keep their statements general when trying to prove things. Another commenter gave a bunch of examples as to different techniques a mathematician might use, but I think giving an example of a very simple general proof might make things more clear.

Say we wanted to prove that an even number plus 1 is an odd number. This is a fact that we all intuitively know is true, but how do we know it's true? We haven't tested every single even number in existence to see that itself plus 1 is odd, so how do we know it is true for all even numbers in existence?

The answer lies in the definitions for what is an even number and what is an odd number. We say that a number is even if it can be written in the form 2n, where n is some integer, and we say that a number is odd if it can be written as 2n+1. For any number in existence, we can tell if it's even or odd by coming back to these formulas.

So let's say we have some even number. Because we know it's even, we know we can write it as 2n, where n is an integer. Adding 1 to it gives 2n+1. This is, by definition, an odd number. Because we didn't restrict at the beginning which even number we started with, we proved the fact for all even numbers, in one fell swoop.

Yeah I had a similar situation. My dad was a toxic person who thought it was wrong when I cried (which I did a lot; I was a very emotional kiddo) and my mom did everything she could to protect me from that. They eventually separated the year I went into high school, and guess which one I still talk to now in my adult life.

So I'm not an app developer, so I might be completely off base, but I don't really understand a lot of the arguments against this.

Firstly, there's an ad free one time cost that in my opinion seems very fair. Secondly, as I'm looking through the feature for Ultra, most of the features seem to be things that require an external server. I'm not sure how push notifications work so I can't comment on it, but syncing settings across devices for example doesn't happen at the instance level. That kind of thing could only be done through a server owned by the dev. However, it is very likely that the dev doesn't own a server, and is instead renting on a VPS, which is a subscription for them. So in order to provide these particular services, the dev has to pay a subscription. So would it not make sense that those that enjoy the benefits of this subscription the dev pays, also have to pay a subscription? In my mind that simply seems fair, in order to support a dev that has clearly put a lot of time and effort into making a great app.

The user base for Lemmy is significantly smaller than Reddit. The dev needs a smaller number of people to be able to support the operating costs of the app (as well as the wellbeing of the dev) which means that necessarily a different (and steeper) pricing model would be necessary.

I do not think it's fair to claim that Lemmy API access is free and therefore there are no operating costs, because there's more to the app than API calls. It is indeed correct that API access is free, which seems to me to be the precise reason why there exists a free version of the app that you don't have to pay for in the first place. All API calls within the app are free. There are no paywalled Lemmy API calls, at least from what I can tell. But again if I'm wrong I'll admit it if someone can inform me.

Aww adorable! Also Smudge was the name of my dog. He's no longer with us, but he was the best.

Idk sounda kinda based. Maybe the devs should get on that