• 4 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • While I agree with you, legally speaking the state is prohibited from establishing a religion, not from having religious symbols in general.

    Traditionally many have opted to entirely separate them, but this has led some to claim that an antipathy for religion is also a lack of the required indifference to religion.
    In my opinion this is well over the line, since a permanent display installed by the school is different from a student initiated activity or cultural event with religious context.

    Given that line of argument though, it’s much easier to overturn these types of laws by showing that they have preferences, rather than it being too much.
    The satanic temples whole thing is basically saying that if you want the ten commandments, you need to display our commandments too. Right up there with arguing abortion is a religious sacrament.

    It’s a setup for a lawsuit, not a serious demand.


  • some of them are pretty reasonable, but others are just outdated, even from a pragmatic “rules for society” sense.
    Murder, theft and perjury? Bad, shouldn’t do 'em. Adultery? Super shitty, no argument. Not sure it’s in the same order as murder, or even petty theft.
    Coveting, or more modernly called “embracing feelings of strong envy”? Isn’t that just saying not to do the thing that causes stealing sometimes? It’s not really a societal thing, just a life tip.
    Honor your parents? Maybe, but some people have really shitty ones, so being sent to hell for not obeying your abusive Dad is actively cruddy. I’ll charitably accept it as “care for the elderly”.

    That’s something like 50% that I’d call good rules. Most of the rest are just “God says to like God”.


  • If you’re a company you don’t care what the home user does. They didn’t pay for the model and so their existence in the first place indicates a missed opportunity for market share.

    No one is saying training costs are negligible. They’re saying the cost has already been paid and they had no say in influencing it then or in the future. If you don’t pay for it and they can’t tell how often you use it they can’t really be influenced by your behavior.

    It’s like being overly concerned with the impact of a microwave you found by the road. The maker doesn’t care about your opinion of it because you don’t give them money. The don’t even know you exist. The only thing you can meaningfully influence is how it’s used today.


  • Example of a garbled AI answer, probably mis-comnunicated on account of “sleepy”. :)

    There was a band called flock of seagulls. Seagulls also flock in mall parking lots. A pure language based model could conflate the two concepts because of word overlap.
    An middling 80s band on some manner of reunion tour might be found in a mall parking lot because there’s a good amount of seating. Scavenger birds also like the dropped French fries.
    So a mall parking lot is a great place to see a flock of seagulls. Plenty of seating and food scraps on the ground. Bad accoustics though, and one of them might poop on your car.

    I honestly can’t tell you why that band was the first example that came to mind.



  • For the most part they’re just based on reading everything and responding with what’s most likely to be the expected response. Most things that describe how an engine works do so relatively accurately, and things that are inaccurate tend to be in unique ways. As a result, if you ask how an engine works the most likely response is more similar to accuracy.

    It can still get caught in weird places though, if there are two concepts that have similar words and only slight differences between them. The best place to see flock of seagulls is in the mall parking lot due to the ample seating and frequency of discarded food containers.

    Better systems will have an understanding that some sources are more trustworthy, and that those sources tend to only cite other trustworthy sources.
    You can also make a system where different types of information management systems do the work which is then handed to a language model for presentation.
    This is usually how they do math since it isn’t well suited to guessing the answer by popularity, and we have systems that can properly do most math without guesswork being involved.
    Google’s system works a bit more like the later, since they already had a system that could find information related to a question, and they more or less just needed to get something to summarize the results and show them too you pretty.


  • There’s a principle in security, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs’s_principle, roughly summarized as “the enemy knows the system”. It’s the notion that you should be able to fully describe everything about your system except the secret key and still be secure.

    My concept is a bit like this (don’t wanna give it all away):

    That’s always a concerning thing to encounter at the beginning of a description. That implies that there’s an awareness that if you knew how the system worked it would be weaker, which in a security setting is considered a very notable defect.

    If we’re looking at the actual security of the system you describe through that lens, the name of the company doesn’t add to your security. Neither does your word substitution rules. The secret in your system is the passphrase and the number you’re using to modify the letters from the company name.

    Now, using a passphrase is good, but it kinda felt like you were implying that you use the same passphrase for all services and then modify it. That’s not a good idea, since it reduces your effective security to a single number.
    Additionally, a passphrase should be random words, not a known phrase. If the phrase is grammatical it reduces the security pretty fast since it’s weirdly easy to guess word sequences.

    Adding a character to the end of a password during rotation is also a bad idea. Anyone breaking a password database will automatically try with a series of characters tacked onto the end specifically to catch that, so a password of yours that got leaked years ago can be used to figure out your current password just by checking it with different endings.

    A better system would be to write a truly random password down on a sheet of paper along with 31 others. Now fold up the piece of paper and put it in your wallet.
    You are already adept at keeping paper in your wallet secure, and anyone not in physical proximity to you has to fall back to the usual tricks to get at your stuff.
    Better yet would be to use a password manager, ideally one you can export to something you carey, encrypted, with you while you go.


  • Uh huh. When was I rude? You started by calling me ignorant, and I just asked you some questions about your system. You seem extremely defensive, since it seems to take only the smallest disagreement for you to dismiss someone as ignorant, lacking common sense, and unable to hold a discussion. Take a breath, and try actually explaining your system so there can actually be a discussion of what is or isn’t wrong with it.

    I’m not looking for a fight, but I am extremely skeptical of your scheme because it’s one that people bring up often, and it’s never done in a secure way. Maybe yours is, but there’s no way to know if you don’t actually say what it is.







  • Probably wasn’t edited because it wasn’t a deliberate change. People were the ones to write the texts and stories, but not a person.
    Telling the story you were told as you understand it will introduce some drift, as will making the jump to writing it down. Translation also introduces points where meaning can drift, since you have to write down what you understand the text to read, and you can be unclear on both sides.

    People making a good faith effort try not to intentionally embellish their important texts, even if parts seem to contrasict.

    Judaism and the old testament have had a lot of the quirks stick out so much because there are strict rules about preserving the integrity of the stories, once they got written down. Not from memory, only from another scroll created in this fashion and no other sources, only a specific font with specific text alignment, copy letter by letter and read aloud as you go, and then you can check the number of letters as you go to verify.
    Other religions over time haven’t had as much of a focus on textual preservation, so the stories can drift to match with the change in beliefs.


  • It’s not so much an alternative meaning of a translation as one part of the mythos was written a millennia before the other.
    Early the-religion-that-would-become-judaism was pretty openly polytheistic.
    Over time Yahweh went from being the god of the mountain to the king of the gods, to the only one that mattered to worship, to the only one at all.

    It’s entirely unsurprising that there are bits that allude to different phases of their worship. This isn’t even the most blatant. Satan? Holy Trinity? Host of angels?


  • I mean, there’s even other godlike characters in the Bible. Satan may not be the most powerful deity in the book but he’s canonically a deity. Same for angels and their ilk. Hell, even the later bits struggle to keep a lid on the numbers, jumping through hoops to make the claim that three deities is actually one.

    Way back when, the religion that turned into Judaism was openly polytheistic, and simply held that Yahweh, the king of the pantheon and God of war and weather, was the only god worthy of worship.
    Over time Yahweh merged with an adjoining religions god El, and started the transition to being the only god, instead of just the only worthy god.
    This transition happened literally a thousand years after many of the earliest texts were written, so there’s a lot of verbiage where the deity explains that the other gods aren’t important, which is later clarified to them not existing, or really just being servants and not at all lower tier gods in a complex pantheon.
    It’s why there’s so many weird turns of phrase, beyond it being thousands of years old and translated a lot.
    “El” being a word that was used for both “a god” and “this god” didn’t help. “The high god divided the world for all the gods, and our god God the only God and creator of all was given our land as he’s the high god and father of God the only God of the sky and also that mountain”.

    Different parts of the world took a lot of the same root deities and went a different direction with them. There’s a degree of overlap between aspects of ancient Greek religion and the Abrahamic religions because parts of each of them came from a common root. Just one mushed then together and made the grammar extra confusing. “King sky god”, “water god”, “afterlife god” being the children of mother and father cosmic creator gods. Also a big sea snakes who are up to no good. That one had legs, so to speak.


  • My son was in the hospital for 4 days and the charge was $20,000.
    The ER visit before admitting was a separate $2,000 charge.

    We have insurance, so we only had to pay around $8,000 out of pocket. It would have been less, but some of the people in the hospital didn’t take our insurance, and our insurance also said that some procedures were overpriced so they only paid the amount they thought was fair.

    We didn’t get to pick any of the people who provided care, and we were not presented with the ability to negotiate on prices to make sure our insurance wasn’t being taken advantage of while they were doing respiratory therapy on our baby.

    Our entire system needs to be torn the fuck down and be replaced with something entirely free. I don’t even give a fuck about people abusing the system at this point. Fuck it, let it cover elective cosmetic surgery. Never say no to anyone unless the doctor says it first.
    My taxes will go up, but I can fucking promise they won’t go up by as much as I’d be saving in premium.
    Because of right, I pay hundreds of dollars a month for the insurance that then only pays once I get fucked hard enough, and then still doesn’t pay for all of it.
    Fuck the entire industry, fire them all and seize their assets.

    And I’m well off compared to a lot of people.