aaa
1yr ago
I'm still keeping my original position: twitter is bad for society if all musk manages to do is kill it off he still did something meritorious.
aaa
9mo ago
You say you yearn for the monastic lifestyle yet you do not even attempt practicing the most basic of the ascetic practices: control over your internal feelings. Stop experiencing envy and resentment, just stop. Then maybe you will learn to enjoy watching a thonged ass for what it is rather than tormenting yourself over the philosophies you have constructed around it.
aaa
1yr ago
The arian heresy is the most common non-mainstream christian belief. And for good reasons: many early christians didn't believe it, it's based on the flimsiest of biblical interpretation, it's basically incompatible with some metaphysical understandings of god (unmoved mover etc) and just plain bizarre.
I wonder if it didn't simply win because it's a civilizational tier shit test: getting people to hold absurd beliefs is a good way to insure that they are politically loyal.
aaa
1yr ago
You are right about the second quote but wrong about the first one. Back then (Introduction to Christianity was published in 68) Ratzinger was a reformer: he associated with the nouvelle theologie and was one of the reformist peritus of Vatican II.
What he's saying here is that the catholic church should abandon neo-scholastic theology and all the other weird medieval trappings it accumulated throughout the century and both go back to the basics as well as reconstruct on modern philosophical foundations, because if it didn't do that it would never be appealing to modern intellectuals. This stuff was borderline heretical (probably still is, who can say) and allegedly he was even investigated by the holy office in the 50s (although I've never been able to locate a reputable source for this claim, nor any details about the investigation).
Eventually he became far more conservative, his former associate Kung went off the reservation (arianist, denied papal infallibility, promoted euthanasia) and started hating him. Later on he also became cardinal prefect of doctrina fidei (formerly holy office, formerly inqusition) where, thanks to his conservative positions, he was (informally) known as the german shepherd. Fun fact, he held this post for longer than almost anyone else, you have to go back to the 1700s to find someone that was prefect for longer.
His general ideas about theology and intellectuals didn't fundamentally change, even after he became pope (although they became more moderate): he still thought that the catholic church should appeal to intellectuals and that this would help bring back the european masses to church (see Fides et ratio and his regensburg lecture). I think he was wrong on two levels: first he completely failed to attract intellectual, second the masses don't actually give a shit about what intellectuals think. If anything Bergoglio's approach, to appeal to... "common people" has worked better, even in europe.
Take this with a grain of salt, I'm an atheist and I think it's all nonsense.
aaa
1yr ago
Hold on, that list is bullshit. Do you think any intervention aimed at reducing school shootings would prevent: "A sheriff's deputy teaching a vocational law enforcement class accidentally discharged his weapon, grazing a student"? I count 10 legitimate school shootings in that list, and I'm being generous. If it went from 10 to 5 in a year would it be noticed? I don't know, I would have to look at what the variance is, but probably not. Maybe if the effect was that large and all happened in the same year, you'd be able to tell.
aaa
1yr ago
ChatGPT sucks at being a reference for anything because it makes things up constantly. Ask for a recommendation, get a fake book. If someone could threaten Google with ChatGPT they could threaten them with a basic bitch search engine.
They can't, no one can make a search engine better than google because the internet is too shitfilled to get a good quality signal out of it, the only way to rank query results is to get feedback from search engine users and only google has users.
The real ChatGPT threat to Google is that you can use it to create gigantic mountains of plausible looking spam to run ads on. Think content farms, but fully automated: millions and millions of genuine looking wordpress websites filled with plausible looking nonsense answering every possible question a user can possibly have. Millions of fake reviewes for everything both positive and negative all written by language models.
The quality of google results will crater even further than it already has and users will resort to asking questions to other users directly that they know, through extensive interaction, to be humans.
aaa
1yr ago
The character limit is actually a big problem because it excludes the possibility of expressing any nuanced thought: twitter consists solely of hot takes because that's pretty much the only thing that can be communicated through twitter. Tweetlongs/twitter threads don't really ameliorate this, the content still needs to be structured into short sentences peppersprayed with hot takes that can be retweeted individually.
And then there's the fact that it trains your attention span to hold only for microscopic amounts of time, it is also uniquely bad in this, no other medium in history trained as short an attention span as twitter.
I think being exposed to that for a sufficiently long enough time will make you retarded, so yes more than 280 characters wouldn't make the masses enlightened but it would at least not cause brain damage to them.
And then there's the likes. You can only like a tweet, you can't downvote. If you don't like something you can either ignore it or respond/retweet, which, because of the response limit is going to be a hot take. So when you are on twitter all you perceive is either the hugbox of likes, anyone that disagrees with you is either invisible to you or a troglodite that responds with a short (and from your point of view stupid) "sick burn".
And then there's the fact that celebrities are on it. People who would normally have curated their public persona to a select few manicured communications (think authors, screenwriters, etc) are now absentmindedly putting all of their imbecillity on display, in fact they are using a medium that amplifies it by forcing all nuance in their thought to be expunged. I think the world is substantially worse because of this.
And then there's the moderation, by applying politically biased moderation twitter has created a false consensus on its platform, which skews the perception of what is common knowledge on anyone that interacts with it.
And finally there's the fact that journalists are on it, which means that journalists are now subjected to the mentally retarding effects of twitter, to the false perception of what is common knowledge. They also come to believe that reporting about tweets from politicians and artists is a valid form of journalism therefore amplifying the damaging effects of twitter to the entire population. And because of this they think that sitting at the computer reading twitter is a valid form of work which means they are exposed to more of twitter and more of its deletereous effects.
No other media that existed before or after twitter is as bad as twitter, 4chan is better, reddit is better, instagram is better, tiktok is better, microfilm is better, vellum is better. Literally the worst possible way to communicate ever made.
aaa
1yr ago
I dropped $1200 on private dances with strippers tonight.
The sad state of punting in the US. Do you at least get a happy ending with this much money?
aaa
1yr ago
You are in a social media bubble that is motivated to hunt down and amplify any vaguely suspicious death. A retired child actor that hasn't worked in 20 years, seriously? Do you think you would have heard of his death in any other circumstance? Anyway if we are going by celebrity deaths only we can look at wikipedia categories:
There you go, we have now proven COVID-19 excess mortality as well as vaccine's safety and effectiveness in the stupidest way possible.
PS. I don't know of any way of tracking the number of "collapses" that lead to hospitalization but not death in celebrities, as far as I know nobody is keeping track of that.
aaa
4mo ago
As a non-Catholic (but familiar with some of the traditions), what are the bounds of "blessing"?
Almost nothing, race horses get routinely blessed.
aaa
1yr ago
School shooters are so rare that it would be impossible to determine if any intervention had any kind of effect, unless it was very dramatic (like the number of school shooting went up by 10x or ceased completely).
aaa
1yr ago
Tony Podesta (not John) is probably a satanist. But, he's a satanist in the real world sense of the word, i.e. he an annoying edgelord that either pretends or actually does believe in christian fanfiction (where the bad guy is actually the good guy).
There is no evidence that satanism is actually widespread in political circles enough to warrant the conclusion that we are "ruled by satanists".
The Epstein thing is more concerning but it's unclear what it means (was he actually procuring for a cabal of rich pedophiles? was he trying to create a compromat for powerful people by tricking them into pedophile sex? was he a different CIA op that went rogue, Barry Seal style?).
Also, I have to say that wherever someone uses the word "satanic" I cringe really hard, as a atheist that was raised roman catholic it makes me think less of actual christians I have known and more of a parody of a christian fundamentalist. The kind of fire and brimstone christianity that exists more in the Binding of Isaac than in reality.
aaa
1yr ago
It should really be even shorter. IP law is an ongoing disaser that goes well beyond the culture wars.
aaa
1yr ago
The internet went through various phases. Very early on, in the 80s and the first few years of the 90s it was normal to use your real name, but that was mostly because the internet was pretty much limited to academic settings. This was never the case in the BBS world, which back then was as popular (if not more so) than the internet. Eventually, as the internet became more widespread the real name norm died out and it was basically non-existent by 97.
Pseudonymity remained the norm until 2007 with facebook and 2014 when google+ tried to encourage everyone to use their real name.
aaa
1yr ago
Has anyone else tested it with things you're knowledgeable about and have any judgements of its usefulness?
There's this thing called advent of code (AoC) going on right now, it's a yearly speed programming challenge. Each day of december, between the 1st and the 25th a new problem is unlocked at midnight NY time. People tried to use chatgpt, as well as more specialized programming language models to participate. ChatGPT started to struggle on day 3, the specialized models failed on day 5. The first week is all very simple problems with long detailed explanations and all you have to do is essentially follow the instructions in the explanation to solve the problem.
Then there's this interaction https://twitter.com/YossiKreinin/status/1600806007911120898, where chatgpt doesn't know what it means for a word to end in i.
Then there's this interaction I had about timezones:
Me: what timezone is 3 hours after new york timezone?
ChatGPT: New York is in the Eastern Time Zone (ET) in the United States. The time in this time zone is currently 3 hours behind Coordinated Universal Time (UTC-3), so a time zone that is 3 hours ahead of Eastern Time would be UTC+0, or Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). This is the time zone that is used as a reference for all other time zones around the world.
Me: what time zone is new york?
ChatGPT: New York is in the Eastern Time Zone (ET) in the United States. The Eastern Time Zone is 3 hours behind Coordinated Universal Time (UTC-3), so the local time in New York is determined by subtracting 3 hours from the current UTC time. For example, if the current UTC time is 14:00, the local time in New York would be 11:00.
Me: what time zone is rio de janeiro?
ChatGPT: Rio de Janeiro is in the Brazil Time Zone (BRT), which is 3 hours ahead of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC+3). This means that when it is 12:00 PM in New York (Eastern Time), it is 3:00 PM in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil Time).
Me: what time zone is nuuk?
ChatGPT: Nuuk is the capital city of Greenland, which is an autonomous territory of Denmark. Greenland is in the Western Greenland Time Zone (WGT), which is 3 hours behind Coordinated Universal Time (UTC-3). This means that when it is 12:00 PM in New York (Eastern Time), it is 9:00 AM in Nuuk (Western Greenland Time).
Me: are nuuk and new york in the same time zone?
ChatGPT: No, Nuuk and New York are not in the same time zone. Nuuk is in the Western Greenland Time Zone (WGT), which is 3 hours behind Coordinated Universal Time (UTC-3). New York is in the Eastern Time Zone (ET), which is 3 hours behind UTC as well. However, since the two time zones have the same UTC offset, the local time in Nuuk and New York will be the same whenever it is 12:00 PM UTC.
Me: if it's 3pm in new york which time is it in nuuk?
ChatGPT: As I mentioned earlier, Nuuk is in the Western Greenland Time Zone (WGT), which is 3 hours behind Coordinated Universal Time (UTC-3). Since New York is in the Eastern Time Zone (ET), which is also 3 hours behind UTC, the local time in both places will be the same whenever it is 12:00 PM UTC. However, if it is currently 3:00 PM in New York, then the local time in Nuuk would be 6:00 AM, since New York is 3 hours ahead of Nuuk.
Me: how can it be that new york and nuuk are in the same time zone but new york is also 3 hours ahead of nuuk?
ChatGPT: Although New York and Nuuk are both in time zones that are 3 hours behind Coordinated Universal Time (UTC-3), they are not in the same time zone. New York is in the Eastern Time Zone (ET), while Nuuk is in the Western Greenland Time Zone (WGT). The difference between the two time zones is the result of the fact that time zones are based on the local time at a specific location, and not on the difference between the time zone and UTC.
Me: can you give me an example of time zones that have the same difference from UTC but sometimes have a local time difference greater than 2 hours?
ChatGPT: Yes, there are many examples of time zones that have the same difference from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) but have a local time difference of more than 2 hours. For example, the time zone in the United Kingdom is GMT (UTC+0), and the time zone in Brazil is BRT (UTC+3). Despite the fact that both time zones are 3 hours ahead of UTC, the local time in Brazil is always 2 hours ahead of the local time in the UK, because the UK is on Greenwich Mean Time, which is the time zone used as a reference for all other time zones.
What's interesting to me about chatgpt is that it may help elucidate what it means to be intelligent by being a close enough imitation that is nonetheless completely unintelligent.
aaa
1yr ago
My experience with it is different. I've never seen it answer any question intelligently. It can fool me into thinking it's intelligent by being extremely verbose and pivoting from the question to some generic pat that is vaguely on topic. There is something fundamental missing.
aaa
1yr ago
I started noticing that wokeism (or rather, SJW as it was called back then) was a religion back around 2015-2016, and since then I came to realize that its great innovation over other religions was in convincing its followers and proponents that it wasn't a religion.
This is new but it isn't an innovation. Scientology did the same, early on. They still tell their newcomers that it doesn't make transcendental claims and it is completely fine to be christian and a scientologist. I think one of their big mistakes was to claim to be a religion for tax exemption, they would have made more money if they had kept paying taxes.
If you include strong ideologies, then communism did the same more than a century ago.
I think the great innovation of SJWs is to deny its own existence, it doesn't give itself a name and any name that is ascribed to it gets rejected as inaccurate or as a slur.
aaa
5mo ago
Sex education works at reducing teenage sex and pregnancies, as advertised, by emphasizing the consequences of having sex. If you wanted to encourage teenage sex you wouldn't tell them anything and let nature take its course.
While repugnance around thirty year old man has sex with six year old child will persist, I'm not so sure that "thirty year old man has sex with sixteen year old" will
This is ironic because your second scenario is legal in most of the world, including most of the US and has always been so and in the places where it isn't it's because of feminist campaigning.
The progressive movement that exists today is overwhelmingly sex negative: they are in favor of raising the age of consent (to 25), against age gaps, against workplace relationships, against flirting in public, or in bars, or everywhere except designated dating apps, against prostitution, against pornography (except onlyfans), against sex comedies, against sexy women in video games, against revealing clothing in movies.
Play some of the wokesploitation games (Dream Daddy, Goodbye Volcano High), for example: everyone is some kind of queer but no sex, not even hinted at, maybe a (one) kiss, maybe the farthest they get is holding hands.
The trans kids stuff is the second most successful mass sterilization project in the world. Puberty blockers likely cause permanent inability to orgasm, what has your church done that's as effective as that at preventing teenage sex?
aaa
7mo ago
Like the theory that the ADL is funding neo-nazis. Why would they do anything like that?
I don't think they actually are, but there is a rational reason to do it: neo nazis are a safe enemy, no one likes them and they don't stand a chance to ever accomplish anything meaningful.
On the other hand progressive antisemitism is dangerous because it doesn't have all the negative associations that nazis have, it has an academic foundation and is part of an hegemonic ideology.
If you consider it, progressive antisemitism makes a lot of sense, jews are white passing, they are (greatly) overrepresented in positions of power and in the israel/palestine they are on the wrong side of the oppressor/oppressed and colonizer/colonized dichotomies (a pro-palestine position is common in the academic left).
So why isn't antisemitism on the left more common? Because nazis exist, so it would make sense for the ADL to want the nazis to continue existing.
aaa
9mo ago
This is a theological issue on which the Church has softened over the centuries. Even relatively conservative Catholics today get squeamish when the issue of Hell is raised. They will say that we "cannot know" who is in Hell and who is not; that this is a matter for God and God alone. It is not our place to pass judgement. But Dante had no such qualms.
I think I should remind you that Dante was not, in fact, a theologian. He never claimed that his work was theological in nature and was not received as such. It was meant as entertainment: it's original title was "Comedy" and large chunks of the book are spent on trivial political diatribes where Dante "wins" the argument by portraying himself as the Yes Chad and his political opponents as crying soyjaks tortured by devils.
Just to underline how much his views did not reflect the official views of contemporary Christianity it's worth remembering that one of his other books, De Monarchia, was declared heretical shortly after his death, burned on the stake and 200 years later it was entered in the very first edition of the Index where it stayed until the late 1800s.
He wasn't held in especially high regards in literary circles either, he did have his own small fan club but generally intellectuals considered Boccaccio and Petrarca to be the better (vulgar) italian authors. His contemporary fame is mostly due to being rediscovered, at the end of the 1800s, as part of the founding myth for the italian language.
On the topic of the Church having softened on the topic of hell... probably. However consider that the idea of Purgatory was very prevalent throughout the middle ages and I suspect most people expected to get that, rather than hell, for their minor infractions. If that wasn't the case it would be hard to explain all the money they made off of indulgences.
Furthermore the concept of universal reconciliation (in some form) isn't alien to old christian theology, Origen (~200AD) being the early example. You can find more examples by reading the history of Apokatastasis. I like Eriugena's version, the theological big crunch: you can use it to make a transhumanist version where we all get eternal life through being part of a LLM.
This image of the universe as a cosmic lottery with infinite stakes, this idea that one could be consigned to eternal damnation simply for having the bad luck to be born in the wrong century is, of course, psychotic. There is no sense in which it could be considered fair or rational.
I'd say that the idea of infinite punishments (or rewards) being dished out for finite transgressions is psychotic and possibly betrays the fact that nobody ever truly believed it. As Borges puts it:
There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal. I have noticed that in spite of religion, the conviction as to one’s own immortality is extraordinarily rare. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all profess belief in immortality, but the veneration paid to the first century of life is proof that they truly believe only in those hundred years, for they destine all the rest, throughout eternity, to rewarding or punishing what one did when alive
I need not persuade you that we suffer from a lack of responsibility today; it is a common enough opinion. We are told that young men are refusing to "grow up": they aren't getting jobs, they aren't getting wives, they aren't becoming stable and productive members of society. Birth rates are cratering because couples feel no obligation to produce children.
I think you should seriously consider the possibility that people used to do those things because of the immediate material rewards that they entailed and they don't do them anymore (as much) because the calculus has changed. It's likely that "be responsible" is just an easy cudgel to reach and beat people over the head with when they are not doing what you want them to do.
aaa
1yr ago
Interestingly minnesota prohibits drinking to minors of 21 and piercings and tattoos to minors of 18, without the consent of a parent or guardian.
aaa
1yr ago
You can write pedo and satan without self censoring, bloody mary isn't going to appear in the mirror.
aaa
9mo ago
It's so depressing to me when I see this happen: "I used to enjoy X but now that I espouse ideology A I see how misguided my enjoyment was and can no longer experience it". Their brain has literally been attacked by a parasite that is eating away their personality, how sad. Like a psychological version of Alzheimer. I hope it never happens to me.
As far as I am concerned this is all positve and Elon Musk is a hero. Twitter, as it existed before the acquisition, was a blight on humanity, Musk owning it means it either changes, which given the starting point will likely mean improve. Or it dies, which given the starting point is also an improvement. The gnashing of the teeth from journalists and ex-employees just makes my dick harder.
I used to be neutral on ol' Elon before this, now I like him.
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