Could you edit that with a link or text for the accessibility of it all?

They need to put out an advisory to stop breeding with that man.

Nah, that’s ignoring context irrationally. Context matters. I’ll show.

He’s not saying “This retard thinks the SSA uses SQL”.

Can SSA not be called “the government”?

He is saying “the government” which means all of it.

So, let’s try your suggested interpretation.

This retard thinks all the government uses SQL.

That seems to agree with mine.

However, you denied ambiguity of language, and that context matters, so let’s explore that: which government? The Brazilian government? Your state government? Your local government? No? How do you know? That’s right: context.

Why stop there? There’s more context: a Social Security database was specifically mentioned.

Does “the government” always mean all of it? When a federal agent knocks someone’s door & someone gripes “The goddamn government is after me!” do they literally mean the entire government? I know from context I or anyone else can informally refer to any part of the government at any level as “the government”. I think you know this.

Likewise, when people refer to the ocean or the sky or the people, they don’t necessarily mean all of it or all of them.

Another way to check meaning is to test whether a proposition still makes sense when something obvious unstated is explicitly written out.

This retard thinks the government uses SQL. Why assume they use SQL here?

Still make sense? Yes. Could that be understood from context without explicitly writing it out? Yes.

A refrain:

Use context.

Were those his exact words? When words are ambiguous, are we selecting interpretations that serve best in the contention? Does the context suggest something obvious was left unstated? Yours seems like a forced interpretation.

1. He complains about 1 specific database.
2. Some rando assumes it’s SQL & retorts he doesn’t know it.
3. He literally writes “This retard thinks the government uses SQL.”

Always, sometimes, here? In typical Twitter fashion, it’s brief and leaves room for interpretation.

In context, always or here makes the most sense as in “This dumbass thinks the government always uses SQL.” or “This dumbass thinks the government uses SQL here.” Does it matter some other database is SQL if this one isn’t? No. With your interpretation, he pointlessly claims that it does matter for no better reason than to discredit himself. With narrower interpretations, he doesn’t. In a contention, people don’t typically make pointless claims to discredit themselves. Therefore, narrower interpretations make more sense. Use context.

All I did here was apply textbook guidelines for analyzing arguments & strawman fallacies as explained in The Power of Logic. I welcome everyone to do the same.

A problem with objecting to a proposition that misrepresents the original proposition is that the objector fails to engage with the actual argument. Instead, they argue with themselves & their illusions, which looks foolish & isn’t a valid argument. That’s why strawman is a fallacy.

The fact is there’s very little information here. We don’t know which database he’s referring to exactly. We don’t know its technology. Some of us have worked enough with local government & legacy enterprise systems to know that following any sort of common industry standards is an unsafe assumption. No one here has introduced concrete information on any of that to draw clear conclusions, though there’s an awful lot of conjecture & overreading.

He seemed to use the word de-duplicated incorrectly. However, he also explained exactly what he meant by that, so the word hardly matters. Is there a good chance he’s wrong that multiple records with the same SSN indicate fraud? Without a clear explanation of the data architecture, I think so.

I despise idiocy. Therefore, I despise what Musk is doing to the government. Therefore, I despise it when everyone else does it.

Seeing this post keep popping up in the lemmy feed is annoying when it’s clear from context that there’s nothing there but people reading more into it.

We don’t have to become idiots to denounce idiocy.

Some may be so old that they predate RDBMS/SQL.

I don’t follow. Wouldn’t that lend credence to his assertion that it’s incorrect to assume that everything in government is SQL?

People here are being irrationally obtuse about the possibility that an agency that’s existed since the 1930s may keep business-critical records on legacy systems predating relational databases. Systems serving a national agency may not migrate databases frequently.

Elisp has a nice notation for maintainably composing regexes like any other programming expression. Only language I’ve seen offer that. So instead of "/\\*\\(?:[^*]\\|\\*[^/]\\)*\\*+/", the regular expression to match C block comments could be expressed (with inline comments)

(rx "/*"                          ; Initial /*
    (zero-or-more
     (or (not (any "*"))          ;  Either non-*,
         (seq "*"                 ;  or * followed by
              (not (any "/")))))  ;  non-/
    (one-or-more "*")             ; At least one star,
    "/")                          ; and the final /

dictionary entry

ran·sack
/ˈranˌsak/
verb
past tense: ransacked; past participle: ransacked

• go hurriedly through (a place) stealing things and causing damage.
  “burglars ransacked her home”
• search through (a place or receptacle) to find something, especially in such a way as to cause disorder and damage.
  “Hollywood ransacks the New York stage for actors”

even you wrote ransack … for to denote the other sense

you can ransack your house looking for your keys

At risk at seeming like I sympathize for Musk (I don’t), anyone else read parts of the article that raise questions?

In the United States, Musk has found a powerful ally in Trump. Together, they have ransacked the federal government

ransacked? Doesn’t that usually mean plunder? They’re damaging the government in many horrible ways, however, Musk outright stealing from the government would lead to easy challenges making headlines: I wish he’d make it that easy.

Ransack for as in vigorously searching through something could be another sense, but it wasn’t used that way here. I guess it could mean rush through, causing damage. Curious word choice that I can overlook. Reading on…

She filed a complaint with a local market regulator, requesting a refund and compensation. Teslas are among the most computerized cars on the market, so Zhang asked the automaker to turn over the full pre-crash data from her car, hoping it might help explain what went wrong. Tesla refused.

“Tesla’s employees were very arrogant and tough in dealing with my complaints,” Zhang said in an interview. “I was burning with anger.”

no mention of Zhang receiving compensation

So it looks like Tesla is resisting compensating Zhang & releasing pre-crash data.

A top executive speculated to Chinese media that she “had someone behind her” and said Zhang was making a fuss because she just wanted higher compensation.

Wait, did Zhang receive any compensation? I thought she hadn’t. I still don’t know. Does the article clearly say?

Back in court as a defendant, Zhang was unable to prove that the brakes on her Tesla had indeed failed.

Besides Zhang’s words of her father’s panic that the brakes aren’t working, did she have solid evidence that the brakes did not work? Post-crash analysis? Independent analysis of untampered logs directly off the car’s hardware?

While I was ready to condemn Musk & Tesla and to ridicule the Chinese government over this, this isn’t satisfying. Not to understate all the other reasons to condemn them, which are clear & also covered in the article, this article leaves unanswered a number of critical questions that it could answer.

This would be much better with citations.

I do find this to be a little odd, kind of drastic.

Rather than drastic, there could be additional, medically informed factors that would make this totally reasonable.

According to the book Blind Spots, fallopian tubes begin certain highly deadly cancers lacking effective screening tests & that are often incurable when discovered. For someone who’s decided not to bear children, their physicians may reasonably recommend fallopian tube removal. It’s a highly effective oncological intervention.

but…

That’s where you lost me.

Transgenders are different: under no circumstances can we put America’s transgenders in danger. They are far too precious to risk in combat. Like for the sake of homosexuals 16 years ago, it has been the solemn oath of every man in uniform to lay down his life in defense of America’s precious, precious transgenders.

I mostly pointed out the different definitions one might use so that people wouldn’t read my examples of rights violations and think “what’s that got to do with democracy?”.

Yet you wrote

That’s not even true in a very minimal definition of democracy

Are you contradicting yourself later by conceding (flawed as it may be) it fit “a very minimal definition of democracy”?

Other common restrictions in ancient Greek democracies were being a male citizen (who was born to 2 citizens), a minimum age, completed military service. Still, rule wasn’t restricted to oligarchs or monarchs. I think we’d still call that a democracy in contrast to everything else.

Your writing seems inconsistent.

If it existed today it would probably not even be called a democracy by western standards.

Do good, objective definitions vary by time & culture? Seems problematic.

Seems you’re claiming something doesn’t fit a minimal definition of democracy while using a non-minimal definition of democracy. Sure, it’s a flawed democracy, but we can repudiate it on those considerations it fails and clarify them without overgeneralizing.

So if you mean democracy in a very literal and minimal sense[…]

If you mean in it a more general sense[…]

Where would ancient Greek democracy fall in this spectrum?

Passkeys or WebAuthn are an open web standard, and the implementation is flexible. An authenticator can be implemented in software, with a hardware system integrated into the client device, or off-device.

Exportability/portability of the passkey is up to the authenticator. Bitwarden already exports them, and other authenticators likely do, too.

WebAuthn relying parties (ie, web applications) make trust decisions by specifying characteristics of eligible authenticators & authentication responses & by checking data reported in the responses. Those decisions are left to the relying party’s discretion. I could imagine locked-down workplace environments allowing only company-approved configurations connect to internal systems.

WebAuthn has no bearing on whether an app runs on a custom platform: that’s entirely on the developer & platform capabilities to reveal customization.