You seem to think he doesn't know the facts, but I suspect that he does. He just doesn't care about facts or truth. He is the sort of person who likes to win debates and get hits on people he dislikes. So trying to correct him on these points is a waste of your time. I say this from experience with him.
I've tried talking to him before. I shared about something I find so very fascinating - that approximation via abstraction is provably better than perfection in many learning situations because of its relationship with computational complexity. He asked for proof; I provided it. I won't repeat the proof here, but know that this isn't an obscure and unknown result - here is Peter Norvig in Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach discussing related ideas:
> Page 172. "One way to deal with this huge number is with abstraction: i.e. by treating similar hands as identical. For example, it is very important which aces and kings are in a hand, but whether hand has a 4 or a 5 is not as important, and can be abstracted away."
> Page 173. "Because calculating optimal decisions in complex games is intractable, all algorithms must make some assumptions and approximations."
I earnestly engaged with random314 on this topic. He ultimately concluded that he had won the argument, taught me something, and condescended that I ought to have known better than to have talked with him. Along the way he compared me with people he found foolish, claimed I was incoherent in order to avoid addressing my points, gaslit with regard to the thread topic, accused me of jargon, and even made the absurdist point that when I said that not all numbers were computable that because some numbers were computable it followed that I didn't understand what computable numbers are.
One might suspect that he merely misunderstood the point I was making. The thing is - I have strong reason to reject the notion that he did not understand. Initially, I think he didn't. He entered into the conversation under the presumption of my idiocy because my point was counterintuitive - it tricked him into thinking I was wrong. How he handled himself afterward showed me that he knew I wasn't. When I thought deeply about his choice to make the absurdist argument with regard to computable numbers it occurred to me to be the sort of thing one would only choose to do if they understood that not all numbers were computable - understood the thrust of the proof - and wanted to deny it rather than to accept the obvious truth. It was an attempt at sophistry. By making my point with regard to not all numbers being computable seem in error, he hoped to obscure that I was correct.
Simon, I strongly suspect that the reason he doesn't seem to know pertinent facts is not because he doesn't know those facts, but rather because he finds them inconvenient and because the rhetorical appeal of fanboyism is better setup by being wrong, but in a popular way.