domain:dynomight.net
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
54m ago
uh, sure, I guess. The following is speaking very generally and aiming for as neutral a view as I can manage.
Jews (speaking very broadly here as I will for all groups) think they have a revelation from God, and that revelation is at a certain point closed. Then they have a system pertaining to how that revelation interfaces with their community, which may not be closed per se but where thousands of years of tradition usually vastly outweigh present concerns.
Christians believe the Jewish revelation is valid, but don't see it as closed, and believe there was a subsequent revelation which at a later point closed. They likewise have a community-interface system which likewise draws on thousands of years of tradition, which is completely incompatible with the Jewish system. So while both Jews and Christians think the Old Testament is the word of God, Jews think the New Testament is heretical pagan nonsense and the church and its traditions have no valid connection to God, while (many) Christians think Jews missed the boat, the rabbinical system is in the same way heretical nonsense, made up to paper over the fact that Judaism ended with the destruction of the temple, when it became impossible to fulfill the requirements of the Law.
Mormons are to Christians as Christians are to Jews. They have what might be described as a Newer Testament, which they see as a subsequent revelation to the Christian one, which is, you guessed it, now also closed. And they have their own community-interface system which is only a couple hundred years old but hey give them awhile, sheesh. And to their credit, a couple hundred years ain't nothing, and they do seem to be going fairly strong to date, but this system is likewise incompatible with the Christian system in the same way that the Christian system is incompatible with the Jewish one. Christians think the Newer testament is bad fanfic, in the same way Jews think the Christian New Testament is bad fanfic, for similar reasons.
In each case, you have the older version rejecting the newer version as a heresy, and the newer version thinking the older version missed the boat. ...Only, I'm not actually sure whether Mormons think Christians are fine as-is, or should ideally become Mormons, the way Christians think Jews should become Christian. I'd assume so, just on a naïve application of memetics.
Stellula
57m ago
Jesus and Paul both believed that God was The Universal Prime Mover, that is: there is nothing before God. He set the universe in motion. Mormons do not believe this, but rather that God was a human that lived in an existing universe, and through good works ascended to God status.
No. Mormons are substantially less Christian that Christians are Jewish.
The mormons believe that God was once a man who then became a God, and their version of enlightenment/ascendance/heaven is that they will themselves become God. Christians and Jews believe in the same God. Mormons do not believe in the same God as Christians, Jews, or Muslims.
Here are some mormon redditors trying to figure out how to square this, btw.
I know there are quite a few mormons who post here. Feel free to just ignore all this, btw. I love a good debate about religion, but I love you guys more, and don't want it to come at your expense, or to feel like people are kicking you while you're down - what happened yesterday was horrific.
Mushguffler
1hr ago
And it's not like foreign foods and music never make it to the US without mass immigration. We've all eaten pad thai and listened to flamenco, yet there's few or no Little Bangkok neighborhoods or ghettos full of Catalonian gypsies.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1hr ago
I have a few vibes benchmarks:
-
Asking a model to rewrite an essay (usually mine) in the style of an author I am familiar with. Can it redo a few chapters from novel in the voice of Banks, or Morgan? Most models flanderize them, or settle for a shallow pastiche. Some get them, and you'd be fucking surprised which models those are. Some aren't even SOTA, but beat the best reasoning models.
-
Throw in as much of my profile as patience and context windows allow, and then ask it to mine it for insight.
-
Do the above, and then ask it to do an intentional emulation. Call that fine-tuning on a budget. Can it capture my voice? Can it write something I see myself writing? This is a hard problem, most of them suck ass. Gemini 2.5 Pro flanderizes me, Sonnet 4 did a decent job (after a lot of prompting), but paradoxically, Sonnet 4.5 often refuses, gets confused, or simply does poorly.
-
Ask it to solve physics or maths problems (where I have access to ground truth). I'd use medicine, but models are already so competent that my ability to evaluate them there is limited.
That's it for semi-formal assessment. For the rest, I build up impressions through sustained usage, till I have a firm grasp on model capabilities and personality.
For reasoning tasks:
GPT-5T is the best, almost matched by Gemini 2.5 Pro.
Quick answers, where I don't want to wait around:
Claude Sonnet (4.5 is too new for me to know how good it is)
Diversity candidates who have interesting capabilities in one domain or the other:
Kimi K2, GPT 4.1
(I refuse to use GPT-5 Instant. It's ass, and is dominated on the Pareto Frontier by other models)
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
1hr ago
But can you provide a more detailed explanation?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
I wasn't sure whether to frame them as Christians (new revelation outside the law) or Jews (human prophets, perceive incarnation as blasphemy), so left them out as more confusing than the point was worth, but yes, essentially. "I'm his son, but he claims he's not my father."
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
1hr ago
On the one hand, Mormons aren't Christians.
...how come?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
I'm more interested in the exact meaning of its '30 hours +' of continuous coding. What does that mean? 30 hours in series, or 30 hours over parallel, many sub-agents...
Can you really leave it on overnight and come back to see a good result? I wouldn't know, I'm a peasant stuck on the Pro subscription...
OliveTapenade
1hr ago
Would it help to go through the Creed line by line?
It seems pretty clear that Jesus believed in one God, the father almighty, maker of heaven and earth. Did Jesus believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only son of God, eternally begotten of the Father? Jesus does not offer a programmatic Christology in the gospels, unless you want to go fairly deep into John, but even in the synoptics it seems fair to say that Jesus identifies himself with the Father in a profoundly intimate way, even if he does not spell it out in these terms.
Did Jesus believe that he came down from heaven for us and for our salvation? That seems pretty clear in the gospels - he talks about the Son of Man coming to save sinners. Did he believe he was born of the virgin Mary? Well, certainly he knew who his mother was, though depending on which gospel you read some might argue about the virgin birth. If we accept the Resurrection at all, presumably Jesus believed that he was crucified and rose again and ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the father, and in the gospels Jesus mentions the future coming of the Son of Man and judgement of the nations plenty of times.
Did Jesus believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life? Jesus doesn't talk about the Spirit that explicitly outside of the gospel of John, though he does mention the Spirit a few times. I'm happy to give this one a check though I'll admit that a lot of things are a bit hazier if you don't accept John.
Did Jesus believe that the Spirit spoke through the prophets? That one's easy. In one holy catholic and apostolic church? He does talk about the church or the community of his disciples a bit in the synoptics - I think that counts. Baptism for the forgiveness of sins, absolutely, if we accept the Great Commission as historical. That was his idea to begin with. And the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come - yes, Jesus is recorded arguing in favour of those beliefs.
It seems like most of it is pretty safe. If you're interested in the quest for the historical Jesus and you're skeptical of the gospels, especially John but also to an extent Luke (for the virgin birth), you might question whether Jesus believed most of this, but if you do accept the gospels (and surely Christians do), the Nicene Creed seems quite consistent with how Jesus described himself and his Father. It is sometimes more specific or explicit than Jesus himself was, but that doesn't seem fatal to me.
DiscourseMagnus
1hr ago
...huh. I didn't realize until this link that I would really want his take on recent events.
DiscourseMagnus
1hr ago
Or in the same sense that Muslims are Christians, no?
It's a pertinent question and deserves a good response. I've come at it a few times before but am happy to keep doing so.
One answer would be: Consider the narrative arc of this chapter. Consider the level of abstraction necessary to plot this course through the conceptual cloud. By using a simplifying thought experiment (lower resolution), I can point out higher patterns which would be challenging if not impossible to portray accurately at a higher resolution. Imagine spending all day looking at the tile fragments in a mosaic at the inch-scale, appreciating the nuance and subtlety within each, only for someone to grab you by the scruff of your neck, off the floor, and haul you up high enough that you can see that it is a picture of a tiger.
Forest vs. Trees.
And no, Hajnalis aren't 'white people' and Tropicals aren't 'blacks'. For one, you could replace 'blacks' here with any of, e.g.,: Tahitians, Equatorial Amerindians, Malays, bottom-cast Indians, or several others and get results which, while varying in specific flavour, yet have enough in common to hit most of the same notes. Tropicals are tropicals. And being a Hajnali isn't about skin colour; both are about certain constellations of genetically-rooted phenomenological traits with external traits correlative but not really actually important per se.
This chapter might feel like a random, jeering diversion, just an atlas with the names filed off, but it does in fact tie into and build off the previous ones, and supports what's to come later. It has several of its own points to make. One of these is that the historical engine of human advancement, i.e. pre-industrial warfare among warrior aristocracies, has been so badly disrupted as to leave us in wholly-uncharted territory, facing general genetic meltdown, with no real plausible solution.
Put it this way: Human history has been a successively-occurring drama of a man coming in from the cold, having his way with a woman in a warm place, and making babies with her. The babies have some of the better and worse features of each. The better ones are mostly-conserved, but the worse ones are mostly-corrected when the next man comes in and does the same. Things got better and better for a long time.
Until, one day, the inhabitants of the warm place finally, permanently, got the upper hand, and had no extant credible suitors. What happens next? The question is intentionally left open. But it's clear, given the patterns I've laid out, that things are going to get very bad unless something very out of the ordinary happens. This is going to be recapitulated again next week from the perspective of sex relations.
In neither case is my goal to complain about non-whites or women. My goal is to illustrate a deeper, recurrent pattern which may be viewed from multiple angles and still holds true. The pattern is that of Male and Female, which recurs and plays out fractally across this thing we call reality, or Being.
This is my goal for at least five reasons.
- I want a cliff-notes version of who we are and how we got here to help explain this stuff to my kids when they're older, and serve as a jumping-off point to dive deeper into the truly fascinating real-life complexities of these patterns. It's taken me most of my life to put these pieces together and a lot of the bridges I used to get here have been retroactively burned by the servants of the Lie. I'm worried the perspective itself may become lost; the fire itself may go out, unless it is very intentionally-tended. I won't be around to do that forever, but I do want to play my part in making the task easier for current and future generations. If not a hearth, at least a sort of 'comet' or kangir. I sense that dark times are ahead and this may be the best that can be done.
- All of this is only the beginning. We're going to leave race and (literal) sex almost entirely behind for a long time in book two and look at the playing-out of abstract concepts amongst themselves. It will be very helpful to have higher-order, more-abstract 'Male and Female' well-established as a go-to example, since many other concepts impinge upon and tie into this. A scaffolding if you will. And also a proof of concept.
- Hilariously-enough this book grew from the seed of an effortpost which was trying to answer a long-lost redditor's question about why woke media is the way it is, and the patterns in this chapter are required infrastructure to get to that point. The point itself is almost laughably incidental in the context of the waters necessary to cross in order to get to it, but it is nonetheless the target at which I aimed, the endpoint of the spine of the structure I built to explore the other things in the book. So, propriety demands that it be satisfied, even if it's... beyond asinine, in the scope of things.
- This tiger I keep mentioning is real and it is trying to eat you. And it's not black people or even Tropicals, or women, or Jews, or anything human at all. (If that sounds completely deranged to you, what I'm talking about is at least cousins with what Nick Land describes in Meltdown). It will take me time to build this out but I think it's a real and important thing to talk about, and our society, which once had the vocabulary for such things, has all but lost it, such that I must go back and rebuild the infrastructure or else it's game over, man, and for much more important things than Hajnalis. I mentioned Lie-servants burning bridges. Many books I read as a youth which can no longer be found anywhere; many departments shut down such that generational knowledge carried for millennia is disappearing at a pace unimaginable a century ago. Who even speaks Latin or Greek anymore? How many know our founding myths, or why they matter? Those myths are metaphors, yes, but they are not only metaphors. They are signposts, vital descriptions of reality, and without them we are already finding ourselves lost in deeper and deeper fog. In general there is a trend of order arising from chaos, but as of a few hundred years ago that seems to have started to reverse. From where I'm standing this is clearly enemy action, and little is more worth doing than trying to throw a wrench into the process. Step one is to try to inform people that they have been so-domesticated as to be literally-unable to even perceive the thing which intends to have them for lunch, which process is indeed already alarmingly-advanced.
- Some people know a lot of these things but have never had them put together in a coherent narrative before and I realized that I could and that it would be fun and useful and also help work off some of this nervous energy I'm always carrying about the future. Fill in a bunch of gaps along the way for the worldviews of others who are already on the same path. Save them some time and energy; maybe show them a thing or two they were liable to miss on their own.
Thanks for the question.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
1hr ago
I see you, Arius of Cyrenaica, trying to spread your homoiousian nonsense. Of course we know Jesus agreed to it, because Christ was of the same substance as God the Father, as decided by a council of bishops brought together by God's chosen representative on Earth, Constantine the Great. Being of the same substance logically follows that Christ knew of the true formulation of God's church, even after his death.
The Motte is no place for you or the Arians who hold to your corrupted image of the triune nature of God.
OliveTapenade
1hr ago
Is Christ himself a follower of Christ? It seems like a bad case to build your definition on.
The point of the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, at any rate, is to clarify and define the apostolic faith, particularly in order to draw clear lines that include the orthodox and exclude heretics. Obviously Jesus himself didn't know the Nicene Creed in its exact terms, but considering that the Creed is defined in particular reference to Jesus' life, words, and death, I think it's reasonable to say there's some relationship between him and the Creed?
In any case, as regards Mormonism specifically, the point is that when we talk about 'historical' or 'orthodox' Christianity, we talk about a large community or set of communities which has defined its belief in particular ways. Creeds are among the various tools that the church has used to do this. It is, I think, objectively the case that Mormonism exists outside of these historical definitions. Mormons themselves would accept this - Mormons believe that there was a great apostasy that led to pretty much the entire Christian world falling into error and unbelief.
When I say "Mormons aren't Christians", what I mean is that Mormon beliefs are outside of and contradictory to historical definitions of orthodoxy. We can dispute the exact words appropriate to describe that situation - non-Christian, heretic, unorthodox, heck if you ask a Mormon they might prefer 'restoration' or something - but I think the words point to a real fact about the world.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
So you are saying that the people who control social media do not care about narratives? The amount of Gaza content consumed by American public directly influences how they see Israel in polls. These polls directly influence how much aid US politicians are willing to give to Israel. It also shapes the consensus reality of the viewers, who might decide to organize later.
Watching hostile narratives trend while saying this is fine, as long as nobody is trying to organize them seems the kind of rookie mistake not even a boomer tinpot dictator would make. After all, you might control some social media platforms, but not all of them. If people suddenly want to organize, they will find a way (unless you turn the internet off, which is not really an option for dealing with the US population).
Goodguy
1hr ago
If you didn't believe that you wouldn't profess it, but how do you know that Jesus agreed with it? I'm no New Testament scholar, but from what I've read from it, I don't see how it would be possible to be sure that Jesus actually agreed with it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
Every Christian who professes the Nicene Creed does so because they do know that Jesus professed its tenets. If we didn't believe that we wouldn't profess it.
Quantumfreakonomics
2hr ago
European food is bad across the board, but my life would be materially worse if I didn't live in a city with lots of ethnic food options.
SkoomaDentist
2hr ago
Large horseflies are even worse in some ways. When they’re circling you they look like angry wasps and then you can’t quite know if you should smack them or run from them. And the fuckers keep following you unless you run tens of meters.
daguerrean
2hr ago
As I felt when similar arguments were had about Kirk’s assassination, I don’t even really care about the act of violence in itself but the reaction. I’m not aware of any widespread right/conservative celebration of either of these attacks. As a consequence, even if they are in some degree influenced by right beliefs there is no real danger of organized support from the right or escalation beyond a tiny group of loner lunatics.
The left’s reaction to Kirk seems to indicate there is a very large base of support liable to offer funding/material support/legal support for left leaning terrorism, which poses a risk for this to expand beyond loner lunatics into organized groups of functional people like The Weather Underground
quiet_NaN
2hr ago
A few centuries ago, there was no German state. Instead you had a bunch of larger and smaller states, which were certainly not above rent-seeking whenever they saw a profit to be made. At small state sizes, there is some kind of force unification happening: the taxman and the highwayman merge into the robber baron.
At the very least, 'civilized' countries have formalized the process for bribing the government so its mostly done in plain sight and with an air of plausible deniability. [...] individual cities/local governments in the U.S.
I think that Trump has mostly done away with the air of plausible deniability, as far as the federal government is concerned. Politicians were always beholden to big donors and willing to bent over backwards to make sure they got their wishes, but Trump is pimping out the US for cheap. Trouble with the DOJ? Buy some of his shitcoins to signal that you are on Team Trump, and your troubles will disappear, after all, his DOJ is meant for going after his enemies, not random criminals.
But then why are Mormons not Christians in your view? Granted I don't know much about their views, but from the little I know, it doesn't seem more different from the Nicene Creed than Matthew 24's Jesus quote: "But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."
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