I fondly remember reading a comment in /r/conspiracy on a post claiming a geologic seismic weapon brought down the towers.

It just tore into the claims, citing all the reasons this was preposterous bordering on batshit crazy.

And then it said “and your theory doesn’t address the thermite residue” going on to reiterate their wild theory.

Was very much a “don’t name your gods” moment that summed up the sub - a lot of people in agreement that the truth was out there, but bitterly divided as to what it might actually be.

As long as they only focused on generic memes of “do your own research” and “you aren’t being told the truth” they were all on the same page. But as soon as they started naming their own truths, it was every theorist for themselves.

Also, ants.

Part of the problem with this approach is that prediction engines are predicted on the idea that there’s more of a thing to predict.

So unless they really, really go out of their way with modeling the records to account for this, they’ll have a system very strongly biased towards predicting more criminal behavior for everyone fed into it.

Gravity is where the whole continuous singularities are, so yeah.

Using a rubber band around the lid of a jar to open it effortlessly.

On a vacation when I was a teenager I taught my younger sibling the “SYN/ACK” game.

They still remember the TCP stack handshake protocol including resets and acks years later.

A number of journals actually have clauses around how you can’t publish it anywhere else if they accept it.

So you can’t ‘publish’ it in those places, but you can send it privately to people who ask.

Because Trump is such an existential threat.

If a serial killer was for sure coming to your house to kill your family, would you open the door for Barney Fife just because you think “well I won’t open the door for the serial killer”?

Or would you maybe ask the police HQ to send a more competent opposition to the serial killer rather than just welcoming Barney Fife with open arms, because “after all, he’s not the serial killer that’s on his way.”

There’s 5 months before the serial killer shows up. That’s more than double how long the entire election cycle for other countries takes.

Plenty of time for HQ to send actual backup, instead of who was already in the neighborhood and offers very little protection against the killer.

Lol. Such a ridiculous take.

So at the time people with private access were swearing up and down the emperor had clothes, the people voted in a ‘primary’ where the only opposition was someone no one had ever heard of with no media budget and with no debates between the candidates, and voted for the allegedly clothed emperor.

Then the emperor showed up stark naked to a debate, everyone saw with their own eyes, and people are freaking out.

But no, naked dude is definitely what “the people” want.

Do commenters regurgitating this stuff even hear themselves?

nobody claims that Socrates was a fantastical god being who defied death

Socrates literally claimed that he was a channel for a revelatory holy spirit and that because the spirit would not lead him astray that he was ensured to escape death and have a good afterlife because otherwise it wouldn’t have encouraged him to tell off the proceedings at his trial.

Also, there definitely isn’t any evidence of Joshua in the LBA, or evidence for anything in that book, and a lot of evidence against it.

The part mentioning Jesus’s crucifixion in Josephus is extremely likely to have been altered if not entirely fabricated.

The idea that the historical figure was known as either ‘Jesus’ or ‘Christ’ is almost 0% given the former is a Greek version of the Aramaic name and the same for the second being the Greek version of Messiah, but that one is even less likely given in the earliest cannonical gospel he only identified that way in secret and there’s no mention of it in the earliest apocrypha.

In many ways, it’s the various differences between the account of a historical Jesus and the various other Messianic figures in Judea that I think lends the most credence to the historicity of an underlying historical Jesus.

One tends to make things up in ways that fit with what one knows, not make up specific inconvenient things out of context with what would have been expected.

Artists in 2023: “There should be labels on AI modified art!!”

Artists in 2024: “Wait, not like that…”

So far. But the thing with viruses is they are susceptible to mutations.

We’re already seeing it jump across several mammalian lines. Probably only a matter of time.

The thing about disease is that it spreads.

There are people today dealing with serious complications of COVID even years later who were infected by stupid people doing stupid selfish things.

Everyone suffers if morons become willing petri dishes.

“This is not fine.”

They weren’t mad, they just thought it was 86% odd.

Yeah. In college my friends used to make fun of my confirming attendance to things in percentages.

“You coming to the party later tonight?”

“Yeah, I’m like 70% sure I’ll be there”

While true, there’s a very big difference between correctly not anthropomorphizing the neural network and incorrectly not anthropomorphizing the data compressed into weights.

The data is anthropomorphic, and the network self-organizes the data around anthropomorphic features.

For example, the older generation of models will choose to be the little spoon around 70% of the time and the big spoon around 30% of the time if asked 0-shot, as there’s likely a mix in the training data.

But one of the SotA models picks little spoon every single time dozens of times in a row, almost always grounding on the sensation of being held.

It can’t be held, and yet its output is biasing from the norm based on the sense of it anyways.

People who pat themselves on the back for being so wise as to not anthropomorphize are going to be especially surprised by the next 12 months.

I had a teacher that worked for the publisher and talked about how they’d have a series of responses for people who wrote in for the part of the book where the author says he wrote his own fanfiction scene and to write in if you wanted it.

Like maybe the first time you write in they’d respond that they couldn’t provide it because they were fighting the Morgenstern estate over IP release to provide the material, etc.

So people never would get the pages, but could have gotten a number of different replies furthering the illusion.

The Matrix

Saw it in the theatre knowing nothing about it other than that the poster looked fun.

Was not expecting a philosophical mind fuck.