I mean, GPT 3.5 consistently quotes my dissertation and conference papers back to me when I ask it anything related to my (extremely niche, but still) research interests. It’s definitely had access to plenty of publications for a while without managing to make any sense of them.
Alternatively, and probably more likely, my papers are incoherent and it’s not GPT’s fault. If 8.0 gets tenure track maybe it will learn to ignore desperate ramblings of PhD students. Once 9.0 gets tenured though I assume it will only reference itself.
Physical proof? No. But if that’s the criterion for proof that someone existed, then that mean 90% of historical figures can’t be proven to have existed. We don’t have the remains of Alexander the Great or any artefacts we can be sure are his. We have no remnants of Plato, none of his original writings remain.
Did a person name Jesus live sometime during the first century AD? Scholars are fairly certain of that. We do have textual evidence other than the bible that points to his existence.
It is highly unlikely that he was anything like the person written about in the bible. He was likely one of many radical apocalyptic prophets of the time.
We don’t have too many details about his life but because of something called the criterion of embarrassment we have good reason to believe he was baptized by a man named John the Baptist and was later crucified. (i.e. most burgeoning religions seeking legitimacy don’t typically invent stories that are embarrassing to their deity)
then that mean 90% of historical figures can’t be proven to have existed
Well for most of those we tend to use independent verification for their existence. And in the case of jesus, we have literally zero Credible examples of independent verification.
Even assuming the passage is totally genuine, two fires had destroyed much in the way of official documents Tacitus had to work with and it is unlikely that he would sift through what he did have to find the record of an obscure crucifixion, which suggests that Tacitus was repeating an urban myth whose source was likely the Christians themselves,[3]:344 especially since Tacitus was writing at a time when at least the three synoptic gospels are thought to already have been in circulation.
Scholars have differing opinions on the total or partial authenticity of the reference in the passage to the execution of Jesus by Pontius Pilate.[15][30] The general scholarly view is that while the Testimonium Flavianum is most likely not authentic.
Respected Christian scholar R. T. France, for example, does not believe that the Tacitus passage provides sufficient independent testimony for the existence of Jesus [Franc.EvJ, 23] and agrees with G. A. Wells that the citation is of little value
A. The first line of the Tacitus passage says Chrestians, not Christians.
Suetonius says Chrestus was personally starting trouble in Rome during the reign of Claudius.
Suetonius is writing years after Tacitus yet doesn’t mention that Chrestus died.
So Chrestus can’t be Jesus because it’s the wrong decade, wrong continent and missing a death.
B. The second line in Tacitus that mentions Christ and his death was never noticed until after the mid-fourth century. So this second line is fake.
P.S. Even if the second line was somehow authentic, the information would have come from Christians. This would be the equivalent of deriving Abraham’s biography by talking to Muslims.
This is why Bart Ehrman specifically dismisses Tacitus and Josephus. As do most other biblical scholars.
In the immortal words of Christopher Hitchens, if this is all you got, you are holding an empty bag.
Even assuming the passage is totally genuine, two fires had destroyed much in the way of official documents Tacitus had to work with and it is unlikely that he would sift through what he did have to find the record of an obscure crucifixion
Why? If it was a popular myth, why assume he wouldn’t try to confirm/deny it
According to Bart Ehrman, Josephus’ passage about Jesus was altered by a Christian scribe, including the reference to Jesus as the Messiah
So? I’m not presenting evidence for him being a Messiah. I am saying there is some independent evidence of him existing.
B. The second line in Tacitus that mentions Christ and his death was never noticed until after the mid-fourth century. So this second line is fake.
I agree that is bizarre, but not proof of it being fake. Though should be taken with a grain of salt.
This is why Bart Ehrman specifically dismisses Tacitus and Josephus. As do most other biblical scholars.
Who is Bart Ehrman and why relay his beliefs rather than speak for yourself?
If you mean Jesus as described word for word in the bible? Yes you are right. Such a mythical figure never existed.
A man name Jesus from the first century AD? Who preached in the Levant? Who was baptized by a man named John and was later crucified? There is good enough evidence of such a person existing. This isn’t even a debated question among new testament scholars anymore.
I see you are familiar with Bart Ehrman, Even he doesn’t dispute that a historical Jesus existed.
We do have textual evidence other than the bible that points to his existence.
Idk why you would need textual evidence besides the Bible to be certain the guy existed. It’s not like these are magical books that sprung from the earth. They have historical reasons for existing and the most likely reason includes the existence of the dude.
I tell my SO when I’m proud of my work in the bathroom (once a week or so). It’s been >10 years and they haven’t thrown me out, so I don’t see any reason to stop. I’d hang this.
While I can’t provide you with a proper scientific answer I can offer a basic explanation - it’s effort.
Browsing through the never ending amount of content online requires no effort but provides you with a dopamine rush as if you actually managed to accomplish or do something with your time. Other stuff, like watching movies, playing games, reading books, etc. requires attention and active participation, the payoff on the other hand is largely delayed (especially compared to the lazy option).
As for hacks… I don’t know any. The only ways I know how to deal with it is limiting your time scrolling through this stuff and forcing yourself to do other things - it can be rough early on but you’ll eventually get used to the “normal” way of functioning.
I would also like to add motivation to the list. If you’re not particularly hyped about any game, playing games isn’t going to feel engaging. Once you do find a game you enjoy, you won’t have much time for doomscrolling any more.
That doesn’t seem to do much for me unfortunately. In my case the potential time I need to reserve for a gaming session tends to take precedence over hype whenever I’m in a lazy, scroll-focused rut. Still trying to get back to a recent(ish) release I was super hyped playing during its beta period… At least I have a semi decent explanation for this one, I guess.
It’s just a name change, again. It’ll be android pay again in a few months. Then if you’re really sad about loosing Google pay you’ll just need to wait a year or so and it’ll be rebranded Google pay again.
.world pre-emptively blocked the piracy comms because they are ostensibly based in Germany and have to abide by EU rules re: promotion/discussion of copyright infringement.
Despite the fact that they were never even issued a warning for such an obscure internet forum, and plausible deniability because the content wasn’t even theirs, they thought it’s better be paranoid safe than sorry.
ETA: so now .world has a stricter and more draconian policy regarding the discussion of piracy than Reddit, a publically traded entity based in the US, which has even harsher copyright infringement laws.
That’s a really interesting question, but I’m having a hard time seeing how one can look this up without direct access to an SQL database of all married people. Can we pay off some government sysadmin?
The data is mostly already there and publicly maintained. Ancestry/familysearch/etc should get us something interesting at least, data is a little bit light outside the us but someone would just need to go through it.
This sounds like a job for a weird spaghetti code contraption consisting of selenium, perl, DBI, postgres, and shitloads of caffeine. I’ll give it a look tomorrow, hoping that the captcha I assume is there can be circumvented or automated one way or another.
I’m not really interested in the people, as I’m not from the US and am unlikely to be related to any of them. I’m just curious about the dataset itself, especially in relation to OPs question.
And yes, I wrote perl and not something newer. Suck my camel hump, it’s how I roll.
If you accept that there are moral/ethical problems with eating meat (contribution to climate change, health concerns, animals being killed and eaten, whatever), and choose to eat meat anyway, and encounter a vegan, what has to happen?
You can accept that they are making a better choice, but then you have to accept that you’re making a worse choice. Most people are cowards and protect the ego at any cost. Rather than shrugging and saying “yeah, i should eat less meat. Good for you taking the high road”, which requires accepting that you’re not being the best, you can instead grab onto any reasons why no it’s really them that sucks. That’s easier, more comfortable, and doesn’t require any painful introspection or changes.
It’s the same mechanism when people get mad at cyclists, pedestrians, people who go to the gym, people who don’t shop at Walmart, whatever. They’re doing something that makes you feel bad in comparison. Most people are terrible at that and will lash out instead of doing anything productive.
Alternatively, or maybe additionally, people are really tribal, and once they adopt the idea that vegans (or cyclists, or people driving small cars, or people wearing sandals, whatever) are in the outgroup, then they enjoy being hostile to them.
People are ego driven emotional morons. All of us. Me, too. It’s terrible.
You can accept that they are making a better choice,
That’s exactly where it starts. You simply assume that vegans are the better people. And then you preach. That’s exactly what people dislike in vegans and similar people.
If we remove the ethic argument from the conversation, veganism is definitely a better choice for the planet, factually.
People have a hard time detaching their ego from the issue at hand. Since veganism is better for the planet, they are “better” in that specific area of their life.
But it doesn’t mean that vegans are better people than non-vegans, because we don’t know what else they do.
Eat meat if you want. I do. But I don’t feel personally attacked because vegans are right about the carbon footprint of meat, and they preach for it.
That choice is steeped in privilege though, and I think it’s worth acknowledging that. Food choices are just something we shouldn’t be judging other people on, regardless of what those choices are. “Fed is best” applies through all stages of life.
You are right, but we use this privilege to eat more meat instead of more vegetables. So my point still stands.
And even then, meat is way pricier than vegetables, so the privilege argument is shaky.
But as I said, assume the fact that you eat meat and that it is more damageable for the environment and after that, if you are in a position where you can afford to eat less or no meat, do it if you feel like it.
Some people do, but it’s not as easy as “just eat better” for everyone. If we were arguing about how people aren’t eating healthy I think very few people would be frame it as just a choice.
Cheap meat, fast food (few if any veggie options, and basically no vegan ones) - these are staples of the poor. There’s a limit to how much rice and beans anyone wants to eat, especially when just getting a couple pounds of ground beef is a luxury. I don’t think it’s right to shame people for taking the beef. Or judging them for taking it.
I think if vegans want to change the world they should be campaigning against poor practices in the industry, not attacking the guy who just worked 16 hours at a minimum wage job and is choosing to grab a mcdouble rather than going home to cook a beyond burger. Is one better for the environment and world? Sure. But it’s not that guy’s fault the system is rigged in favor of the mcdouble, and reminding him of the fact that he’s making the world worse isn’t furthering the goal of making the world better.
“Making a better choice” doesn’t “make you a better person”, necessarily.
And also like I said in my post, just accept that you’re not always going to be a perfect person. None of us are. You don’t have to get mad at anyone else for that.
You can accept that they are making a better choice, but then you have to accept that you’re making a worse choice.
No, people don’t dislike vegans or vegetarians because of their choices, they dislike them because they lord their, what they think “better” choice over others. And create in- and out- groups via labeling.
Being vegan or vegetarian means that you have to spend more money in the store to buy food, because meat is heavily subsidized compared to vegetarian options. Also, because being vegan/vegetarian is not the default, many products are overpriced.
Another point is that a healthy and varied diet using only vegan or vegetarian food doesn’t come so natural, so you have to research this more, which means you have to spend time, which again is a commodity.
So it is not just about good or bad, it is also about privilege and class. So people should not go around making statements about other people making “worse” choices.
I’m not sure why you are making up imaginary arguments. Have you ever heard anyone ever accuse someone else of “not being vegan anymore” because they ate a non vegan product? I know quite a few vegans, I try to be vegan myself (but quite often cave, cheese is delicious), and all the vegans I know would be simply thrilled to know that someone was making an effort at all. Literally no one cares if you aren’t 100% vegan, basically no one is anyway. But if you decide once a week to eat a vegan meal instead of a steak, great!! That’s still helping the planet, better for the animals, etc.
But making up these ridiculous vegan cliches doesn’t help anyone, it just makes more people annoyed at each other.
The fact that you just think people should live more poorly and with less nutrition if they can’t afford the fru fru stuff is really disturbing.
I’ve been rive and beans only poor before. It sucked a lot. And on the rare occasion I could get some meat or cheese in my diet I definitely wasn’t in a position to be worried about which choice was “worse”. I just wanted some freaking variety. I should be able to have that. Everyone should.
I just stated a fact. Not what I think nor what others should do. I do however think you underestimate how healthy vegetables are. I never said people should only eat rice and beans.
Now go and enjoy your flesh, because otherwise there won’t be variety (that sounds really dumb btw).
Being vegan or vegetarian means that you have to spend more money in the store to buy food
no it doesnt? Im 1,000% willing to bet youve never been vegan before. Plant based diets are way cheaper, just go to your local store and look at eh price for a kilo of carrots or potatoes vs a a kilo of chicken.
Another point is that a healthy and varied diet using only vegan or vegetarian food doesn’t come so natural, so you have to research this more, which means you have to spend time, which again is a commodity.
Pardon my flippant remark. I couldn’t help myself. I appreciate you weighing in on this thread.
I can appreciate how avoiding animal products can seem challenging if you have no direct examples to refer to, but it’s really not. There are literally entire ethnic groups that live cradle to grave without eating meat.
Like for me growing up poor, a defacto vegetarian diet was the norm for us, so it’s just how I eat 90% of the time. Likewise, if you grew up around people who know about nutrition, you get used to planning your meals without relying on meat/dairy/etc to fill in the gaps.
I do believe it’s more ethical to avoid meat entirely, even though I myself don’t. I just try my best to keep it lower impact.
No, people don’t dislike vegans or vegetarians because of their choices, they dislike them because they lord their, what they think “better” choice over others.
I’m not sure we agree on what “lording over” is. Like if someone says “Sorry, I can’t eat that, I’m vegan” is that lording it over you? Pretty much every vegan I’ve encountered has been polite, and at about the level of someone with a food allergy. Sometimes they check the ingredients label.
Hey no worries. My landlord has a specific agreement that guarantees we have to choose either the one true service provider or nothing for our services.
In exchange, the landlord company gets kickbacks, and when your landlord is richer, everyone is happier.
Given the hundreds of billions it would cost for an actual competitor to build out their own infrastructure, it’s likely the most we can realistically expect.
Science has no goal. It cannot determine policy. It can tell you how certain policies may affect certain metrics, but it matters who decides what metrics matter ie. do we care if people have food, or if line go up.
Self evident to whom? We are ruled by ghouls who care more about profit than people’s lives. Shouldn’t it be “self-evident” to Biden that committing genocide is bad? Shouldn’t it be “self-evident” that corporations shouldn’t be getting away after poisoning millions of people? Shouldn’t it be “self evident” that if people work all day their wages should be enough to allow them to live decently?
These things may obviously be good, but it won’t be done until we have a system that puts people over profit.
Star Trek has an economic system, it’s not run “on science.” Star Trek is functionally fully automated luxury communism. Under capitalism we have the technology to have no scarcity, but that’s not profitable, so capitalists create scarcity by destroying excess product and not giving it to those in need. In Star Trek they have a duplicator thing so no one is in need and no one can make a profit. It is a communist utopia. If you want to see a rational society that implements policy for scientifically planned good look at China. Their ultimate goal is communism, but today for now their achievements include lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty, heavily subsidizing green technology allowing it to be cheap and accessible, and lifting people’s living standards so that the life expectancy is higher the wealthy western countries.
I don’t know too much about Star Trek, but with that extreme post scarcity, what do you need a government for? The reason we communists support abolishing police is because you don’t need any coercion if everyone has whatever material thing they could want or need.
The breathless enthusiasm for the military industrial complex while dropping scary descriptions of terrorism that hasn’t happened gave me exactly the same impression.
I hate this kind of content, especially from someone who seems like a pretty genuine person.
Probably on some design stuff. If you look at his videos he never makes anything impressive. Just some mediocre junior tier engineering with good video production.
This video is no different. Backyard Scientist shows up with a functional shockwave blaster. Mark puts some elastics on rocket shaped foam and calls it a day.
Not necessarily. Making a great product would only attract a younger audience more and make the videos far cooler. But that takes a ton of time. Way more than just painting a large cannon and strapping some elastics to it
Mark clearly tries to only deliver a minimum viable product for a single shot rather than an actually functional product.
He falls under the “shittyrobots” engineers that don’t just make shitty robots for fun, but because they can’t actually make non shitty robots which accomplish the desired goal of their video well. Some people such as “I Did A Thing” don’t try to hide it and make it part of the content. Mark is in the twilight zone of pretending he’s engineering complex stuff while not actually doing that.
Dude was a nasa engineer. Just because he doesn’t do the complicated stuff on yt doesn’t mean he’s not capable of doing so. I do wish he did complex stuff though.
Dude was a NASA engineer. This also says more about how low the bar is for NASA engineers than about Mark, as we can clearly see Mark is incapable of good engineering.
As people above have pointed out there are plenty of real engineers making real cool stuff and get views with it. It is not necessary to make a bad robot whatsoever. Hell there’s a reason Backyard Scientist got featured on the thumbnail.
Stuff made here. Tom Stanton. Peter Sripol. Backyard Scientist, James Bruton, Collin Furze, and many more. These people make amazing videos about prototypes that are actually functional and accomplish the goals they set out.
Mark does not meet the list of people who make amazing inventions for their videos that actually work. He makes painted trash that falls apart when touched. He makes shitty robots not because he wants to, but because he can’t make good ones. If any more people need to be triggered, Micheal Reeves also doesn’t meet this list.
Its pretty clear that Mark and Micheal Reeves don’t focus as much on design and iteration so much as the ideas behind their creations. The content formula for their videos is different from the other youtube creators you mentioned. If that style of video isn’t your cup of tea, thats ok.
As for the inventions themselves, I have to disagree. I think some of Mark’s creations are fairly well designed, such as the later versions of the glitter bombs.
They don’t push any limits. They just make fun gadget that works by connecting a Pi or Arduino to some servo, and possibly connect a joystick to it. This is fine for any beginning engineer of course. But they never push any limits. The glitter bomb you mentioned is very similar. A decent engineer can make that in a single day.
Anything created by them can be made by a university student, often a first year one if they have prior engineering experience during their youth.
The other guys are desiging custom hardware, custom electronics, write custom firmware. It’s a lot more than a single input > output www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPXN0QejqM0
If you want to see some fucking crazy engineering (and I don’t mean crazy impressive…) one of his variations of his glitter bomb used 4 Samsung phones hidden in a 3d printed enclosure. If you’re ever in a spot where you are building a box and shoving 4 phones inside, you have fucked up.
I mean, he chose them because they already include a camera, mic, battery, gps, and the ability to record and send data to cloud storage without a wifi connection. Yeah, you could individually buy all those components and get them to work, but why bother when you can grab a few $100 phones that do the same thing? Engineering is a much about practicality as it is design and fabrication.
I’m not trying to go up to bat for Mark Rober, I get a little bit of the ick from weaponry videos, too (and the dude clearly doesn’t need my help, anyway). I just think the reaction to him is a bit overblown.
I just checked his Wikipedia page for his credentials. Worked for 9 years at NASA, of which 7 working on the Curiosity rover (yeah, the one that’s on Mars now).
If you want a real engineer, watch “stuff made here” perhaps the most competent engineer on YouTube.
If you want to watch top quality unbiased science content, there’s “smarter every day”, “veritasium” and “3blue1brown”. They’re all great, I highly recommend them all.
If you want a good combo of engineering and science, and probably the smartest person on YouTube, “the thought emporium” will blow your mind. The projects they come up with… I never knew any of that was possible.
If you want to watch top quality unbiased science content, there’s “smarter every day”, “veritasium” and “3blue1brown”. They’re all great, I highly recommend them all.
Add to that any and all of Brady Haran’s channels: Numberphile (maths), Periodic Videos (chemistry), Sixty Symbols (physics), Deep Sky Videos (astronomy)…
The year 2024 is notable for the large number of elections, with 8 of the world’s 10 most populous nations (Bangladesh, Brazil, India, United States, Indonesia, Pakistan, Russia, Mexico) voting; countries that are home to nearly half of the world’s people will hold elections in 2024. Around 2 billion voters - approximately a quarter of the world’s population - are expected to be heading to the polls this year.
Stay blissful my friend.
But yes, American social media platforms are targeted during American elections, so you aren’t ignorant about one thing.
There’s a very easy way to stop division: Have a set of values based in reality, and use that to determine what is not up for debate. The first thing a good troll will do is push at the fabric of what is acceptable and erode the community from there. Some people are inherently unreasonable and therefore shouldn’t be listened to. Give them a chance to see the light and if they refuse, give em the yeet.
The reason why neo-nazi communities are so quick to fall apart is because their values are not based on reality, so all you have to do is point out a single contradiction and then watch as they passionately debate themselves into increasingly splintering groups. My favorite that sits on the mantle of shit-stirring pot is “Trump is pro-Israel” which absolutely decimates any far-right community it touches.
Ask the devs. I haven’t bothered asking so far. There’s fp github.com/DLopezJr/fp but I don’t like workaround if it’s easily fixed upstream and it’s not like they wouldn’t know that it’s bullshit. Maybe they can’t decide upon a solution. Or are waiting for another important and relevant update.
It would also be nice if it could alias to the normal command, for example, LibreOffice with CLI commands like lowriter or localc.
Did you know you can evoke LibreOffice from the terminal to convert one file format to another? It can do what Pandoc does, but also works on old .doc files. Flatpak’s weird CLI behavior makes it difficult to use though.
This is extremely simple to fix with scripts that can be automatically created on install time. Here is a quick script I just wrote. It will search for first matching app and run it. Just save the script as flatrun, give it executable bit and put it into $PATH. Run it as like this: flatrun freetube
I personally don’t think that creating a script is a bad solution. The entire Linux eco system is based around composable components (especially when we talk about terminal commands). Most of the Flatpak applications are available through GUI menus (.desktop files) and that’s the focus of Flatpak. And I think it’s a design decision not to expose every application as a separate program in the $PATH by default. This way there is less of a chance to collide with anything random on the system, if they have the same name.
Having said this, I still agree it would be beneficial for most users if there was a way to automatically create scripts in a special bin folder, that is available in the $PATH. The problem is, what application name should it have? What about different versions of the same program? The entire Flatpak concept was not designed for this, so creating a script for your personal use is not a bad solution.
Please read my reply before you repeat. How should the different versions of an application be handled? What if the shortname is already taken? There will be collisions, which the longname tries to solve. Flatpak is not a repository where all names can be checked against, this is the job of a repository like Flathub. What about different versions of an application?
This is not a simple case of forcing to specify shortnames.
flatpak run com.github.iwalton3.jellyfin-media-player
You can use /var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin/com.github.iwalton3.jellyfin-media-player instead. and then create aliases or symlinks (for example in ~/bin/) for that.
@lemmyreader@barbara it’s a bit annoying but I kinda like that I have to manually link it a bit. So I create sh scripts in the usr/local/bin that just execute the flatpak run command
It’d be dangerous if an installed app claimed to be something like sudo or bash. Even if a mechanism was created for flatpak apps to claim a single shell command, there is no centralized authority on all flatpak apps to vet them. If there was for flathub, and each uploaded package was checked, that still leaves every other non-flathub flatpak repo which must implement the same vetting. Because there’s no way to guarantee to do it safely, and because flatpak devs are unwilling to compromise, this is just what we get.
However in the same way, compromised flatpak app can also put a malicious .desktop file in ~/.share/applications, which also allows execution of arbitrary command, even outside of the flatpak sandbox.
User home permission is just incredibly dangerous on linux, I think we need special permission to explicitly allow access to these folders in home. Fortunately more and more app starts to support portal, which makes them much more secure.
Although, I do wish portal would have a access per session vs access forever option. For now if you open a folder through portal, the app was granted r/w permission to that folder forever.
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