V17

Actually no. Self-defense + concealed carry is allowed in Baltic states as well and home defense (=no concealed carry) is also allowed in Italy and Austria.

It’s just guns for self-defense, isn’t a thing.

Not really, it is a thing in Switzerland and Czechia for example.

And even outside of that, not every country has laws as strict as Germany or UK.

Czechia: To get a gun for self-defense, you need to get a permit, which includes mandatory training, tests and a psychological evaluation (which, from what I’ve heard, is not hard to get). You need to have a clean criminal record and they check your misdemeanors too (you may not be allowed to get a permit if you’ve had issues with public drunkenness for example). However, after that you can not only buy a gun but also are automatically allowed to concealed carry.

There are several types of permits and getting a permit for sports or hunting is slightly easier. You need to be 21 years old to get a self-defense permit, you can get a hunting or sports permit when you’re 18 or in special situations (used under supervision) when you’re 15. The permits last 10 years, but you can lose them if you get a criminal record. The gun permit registry is managed by the state police, so it’s easy for them to check the validity of your license if they need to do so.

Gun violence is very rare, so I’m happy with this and see no reason to change it. The people that I know who have a permit (it’s quite uncommon) are very responsible with it.

There are restrictions on which weapons a civilian can buy. No automatic weapons for sure, but I think you can get some semi-automatic guns with a suppressor (cause I’ve heard a guy recommending one such gun with sub-sonic ammo for potential home-defense, stating “if I really have to use it, there’s no reason why my family should go deaf in the process”, heh).

I mean, ignorant, fine, but propagandist??

Deimos is a dumb piece of shit. Evidence is that Tildes is somehow still invite only after like five fucking years.

Why do you think this is a bad thing? The best discussion board that I’ve been a member of by a wide margin (not mentioning names, it’s all in Czech anyways) has been invite only for 20 years now. It’s a tried and true way to limit eternal september as long as the community is active enough to not die out, which hasn’t happened yet on Tildes.

Well the rules are pretty clear in that you can call other people’s ideas stupid, but not other people stupid. Personally I prefer spaces with hands-off moderation and focus on free speech, but those generally don’t work in a general discussion platform without any implicit gatekeeping to keep idiots away, so I’m giving this style a chance and so far the results have been far better than most places on Reddit on Lemmy.

Did you mean “social democracy”? I don’t think there’s actual socialism anywhere there - that’s still capitalism, only with a strong welfare system, which has downsides, but it’s obviously viable at least in some societies.

I’m mostly staying in an invite-only board in my local language that’s been functional for like 20 years now and is smarter than Reddit has ever been, but I’m also spending some time on Tildes, which is honestly not bad. Like lemmy, it has a pretty strong leftist bias (which is a problem for me because not being from US or western Europe I don’t really fall into their left-right division), but it’s much smarter and less toxic, so disagreement without too much bullshit is possible.

I agree, with one exception:

Reddit’s early days were similar, but internet culture has definitely gotten more intense since the early 2010s.

Has it really been that way? I’ve been on reddit since 2010 and from what I remember it was definitely much more nerdy and full of tech people who live on the internet, but I don’t think it had much in common with what we call “terminally online” today. I associate “terminally online” with people who really care about things like culture wars and trying to push their views on others, spending a lot of time arguing about it. Whereas reddit in 2010 was much more homogenous - the stereotypes about forever alone IT nerds with nerdy hobbies were much more true than now, but that meant there were nowhere near as many cultural things to argue about. People sometimes had really weird or controversial opinions, but there was not a lot of added toxicity about it that’s omnipresent now in the discussions.

Ime the “terminally online” problems with toxicity and culture wars only started around 2014-15 with the rise of “online feminism”, that seemed like the first big division into two hostile groups that spent significant time just attacking each other.

I don’t think you understand what I mean, so I’ll try to rephrase.

Knowing that bad shit is happening and accepting that it’s bad shit is one thing. Wallowing in it and pointlessly arguing about it (not normally discussing it in a measured way) is a separate thing that is not necessary and helps neither the ones participating nor the community in general. It’s possible to do it differently and many are capable of it.

My experience is that firstly Lemmy is not that diverse and secondly that there are platforms that are not that diverse either but are much more open and capable of discussion. Tildes for example is in general too progressive for me (I’m not from the US, so I don’t really fit into its politics/culture wars left-right division, though I’m closer to the left), but it’s nowhere near as toxic as political threads around here and it’s normally possible to have discussion and disagree in a civil way.

The problem is that the people OP complains about generally don’t want to see anything else and pointlessly argue with you if you do it. Personally I’m slowly ending my Lemmy experiment and posting somewhere where the majority cares and is capable of normal discussion.

This is the problem though. It’s fine to mention them and be informed, but there is no need to wallow in how horrible the world is and shut down anybody who disagrees, which is what OP is complaining about (and what IME really is happening in news-like and political threads). Those are two separate things, the second one is a choice and there are places where it doesn’t happen.

RANT: While I know that language changes all the time, I find it very unfortunate that this little fellow o/ and possibly his slightly more formal friend o7 have become synonymous with “nazi salute”. First off, it’s the wrong arm! And second off, what do you have against “man waving” and “man saluting”?

Have they really? Never seen o7 used that way, with o/ it’s more understandable, but since one can easily just use \o (or use an actual unicode swastika) I just don’t see it getting that controversial. Seems even less known than the triple parentheses thing, which is something that most people who don’t spend their lives on the internet never heard about.

Yeah, don’t do that anymore then. Firstly the video doesn’t really find overall 2x speedup, but mainly Cycles X came out since then, where most of the codebase has been rewritten from scratch, and after that numerous significant optimizations happened as well. That video is pretty much irrelevant now.

Afaik Blender since 3.0 does not support OpenCL anymore and AMD rendering uses HIP instead. I have not found any information about dramatic performance differences, though CPU rendering does seem to be somewhat faster on Linux - but more like 10% faster and the amount of computation practically done on the CPU is not that big.

Also this represents the biggest headache in Linux, lots of gamers insist they can only use Nvidia cards. Nvidia treats linux as an afterthought as best or deliberately sabotages things at worse.

Personally I use NVidia because of CUDA, gaming is an afterthought. I wish CUDA just fucked off and we got some universal compute API instead, because that’s what would reduce the NVidia stranglehold on the market, perhaps OneAPI is going to catch on at some point, but at this moment those options are not practical.

the best example is Blender which works almost twice as fast on Linux

People say this, but what exactly do you mean? I mostly model on windows because it’s my primary system (I use applications that simply don’t work well enough with wine), but mostly finish and render stuff on linux because of windows’ retarded automatic updates etc. that can just cancel rendering without asking. And the only difference I’ve seen is how fast Blender starts - I’d say that’s more than 2x as fast on linux, it’s a huge difference. But rendering is the same (NVidia GTX GPU) and other work inside blender also seems to be about the same.

(shortened your quotes, message was too long)

IQ tests can be studied for. […]

As far as I know, for properly administrated tests the scientific consensus is that this is not true, with a few small sample size studies showing some improvement and a lot of larger studies repeatedly failing to show anything. You provide no evidence, which in this particular case (something that goes against most of IQ research) would be warranted imo, so I can only guess what you mean in particular. As far as I know, even with potentially neglected children from environments with not enough stimulation, where the theoretical potential clearly exists, the results have been mixed.

(and it’s utterly ludicrous, incidentally, to conceive of “intelligence” as a single thing that can be boiled down into a single number!)

I don’t think this is a popular claim in psychometrics and I haven’t said so either.

IQ tests have major cultural components. […].

A lot of effort went into mitigating this issue, and while it cannot be erased, it doesn’t really invalidate IQ as a concept in any way. It is one of the reasons why we don’t call people from more significantly different societies that one might very crudely describe as “primitive” unintelligent (and yes, some meanings of IQ can lose relevance in such societies), but afaik available evidence shows that there’s not much difference between the results and usefulness of IQ in the US, Germany or China.

IQ test results vary by the quality of education available. […]

Without more information you cannot say whether it indicated what you say or whether it indicates that more intelligent people tend to be more successful, which creates generational wealth/education differences on its own.

I am not claiming either, but let me give you a counter anecdote: Czechia doesn’t really have bad neighborhoods and terrible schooling, we were forced to all be equally poor during 40 years of communism, which has only been changing quite slowly - there are about 2 real “ghettos” in the whole country, it’s safe everywhere and schools are paid from state tax money, wages set by law etc. So there’s almost no difference in funding between a school in a poor area and a “rich” area (with significant quotation marks), and most schools are on a similar level of quality.

Despite that, the studied qualities of IQ still apply here, and have done so since IQ research started here, even during communism where the societal differences were even smaller outside of the ruling class.

The obvious exception: you’re too poor to provide proper nutrition to your children, you for live under constant existential stress etc. These likely lower your IQ and likely contribute the Flynn effect (see below).

IQ numbers have been rising over time to the point that someone who got an IQ score of 140 in the 1970s would score as a borderline idiot today.

This is incorrect and all it would take to know that is opening the wikipedia page on Flynn effect. Since different tests measure different types of intelligence and are standardized individually, it’s not easily possible to say “IQ xxx in 1970 would be IQ yyy in 2020”. But it seems to change by about 3 points per decade, the change has been slowing down and in some cases even reversing in some developed countries in recent decades, and the change has always been the most prominent in the lower end of the scale and not very visible in the high end.

Based on that we can be reasonably sure that a person with an IQ score of 140 in the 1970s would still be considered gifted at the least, and it is possible that they would score around 140 today as well. I’m sure that with some effort you could find some mathematician or physicist who was measured around that score in the 1970s and is still considered obviously briliant.

(if anything it might be a negative trend, given American politics in particular!). Yet if there wasn’t a built-in corrective factor applied that changes each year IQ scores would be rocketing skyward. Again this hints at something learned, and not intrinsic.

See above. I’m too lazy to go find if the US suffers from reverse Flynn effect, but there have been researchers claiming that median IQ has been going down, though I think it’s not a mainstream consensus opinion. In any case, IQ has not been skyrocketing in the US for some time as far as I know.

Furthermore, the Flynn effect is an effect widely studied by actual scientists, it’s not a thing that disproves psychometrics, it’s an area of research of psychometrics.

So IQ measures something … but nobody can say what it is.

Literal books have been written on this. You just have to read them. The IQ is used because we know that it’s a useful metric for many things, it’s pretty much as simple as that.

My experience so far has been:

• “default” reddit, like /r/popular etc. has been worse, because reddit started using some form of “the algorithm” which pretty aggressively pushes controversial subreddits with high engagement, and those tend to be dumb and toxic. Amitheasshole, twohottakes etc. are the most obvious ones.

• customized, highly selective reddit with as much crap from the frontpage as possible unsubscribed from is not significantly worse than a year ago, but then again, it was already pretty bad a year ago. Since the API changes I’ve had 3 people block me to get the last word in an argument, for simply disagreeing with them, without me being an asshole. This is quite annoying in a small subreddit where such a person posts regularly, but it may have just been bad luck.

• Lemmy… Well, 3 things that I probably dislike about reddit the most, not because they’re the worst things that happen there, but because they’re so damn prevalent, are overmoderation (heavy handed deletions of posts and comment trees, unnecessarily locking threads that are even mildly controversial, things like banning people for ever posting in a controversial community etc.), strong american partisanship where if people realize you don’t agree with them on everything with regards to society/politics/culture wars, they immediately assume you’re from the opposite american camp and that you must have bad intentions, and finally simply people not being very smart on average.

Well, all three of those problems seem to be just as prevalent on large Lemmy instances, the first two even more in some places. And whereas on reddit many people understood that you’re probably not realistically going to be able to create an alternative subreddit to some huge default with hundreds of thousands of users, so the “go make your own subreddit” copout is not very practical, here “go make your own instance” seems to be one of the default reactions to any criticisms.

That said, Tildes seems to be doing okay. It’s even smaller and it doesn’t really try to be a reddit alternative, but it’s considerably smarter and more sane on average than both Reddit and Lemmy.

I don’t think this is an argument against the usefulness of IQ. Firstly not all countries use standardized tests with such an influence (I’m from Czechia and we don’t, there’s a standardized high school leaving examination, but it’s only necessary to pass, the score is generally unimportant for university admission). Secondly all you’re saying is that the tests correlate with IQ. That does not make them or IQ invalid, it may just as well simply mean that they test how well a student does in school, and having a higher IQ tends to make studying easier.

But mostly, again, psychometrics is the one field of psychology that has relatively rigorous and reliable methodology. The idea that you disprove decades of research, from large scale statistic studies made with cooperation of state institutions to expensive and rare research like various twin studies, simply by saying “actually IQ doesn’t matter” is naive at best. There really isn’t a lot of reasons to say that apart from ideological ones.