Using Jesus as a reference is unfortunate, yeah, but any other world calendars have to pick a nearly equally arbitrary way to contextualize the start and end year.
I personally use “2024 CE” for “common era”, with BCE referring to “before common era”. This allows us to communicate relatively clearly with other people who use the Gregorian calendar without explicitly endorsing the birth of Jesus as the important event defining the switch-over between CE and BCE… A bit of a cop out, but
Anyway have fun, there are lots of options
Edit: also the one you’re referring to in your post is the Holocene Calendar
Thing is that at the time where people were looking for answers in the sky rather than in science, the birth of the messiah was the best possible starting point they could think of. And it took many centuries to get over it (with quite a few still being stuck in the past), so it’s really hard to collectively move on to something better. And at this point I’m not even sure “better” wouldn’t be anything but simply different for the sake of being different.
Many things us humans do are “unfortunate” because we don’t know any better. 2000 years from know, humans might say that it was “unfortunate” that humans used fossil fuels, or wore high heels. Instead of regretting the past, be the change you want to be.
Those people are mostly just a meme, I rarely see people actually doing that anymore, although I’m sure they exist. If you want my personality out of it, spend more time customizing. You can look into optimizations, theming, or delve into window managers if you really want to make it your own. There’s a lot of options.
I’m always intrigued by this sort of hypothesis, can you recommend a good link to an alternative explanation for the early church?
Like I get that early Christians worked in a lot (LOT) of existing mythology to make Christianity palatable/ relatable to various local groups. But where could the early Christians have come from if not a Jesus like figure?
Er, saying the birth date of Jesus is off by a few years isn’t the same as saying he didn’t exist at all.
Our AD system of years was devised in the 6th century by a dude Dionysius Exiguus who probably wanted to replace an existing dating system based on the reign of Diocletian, the Era of Martyrs.
But no one really knows how Dionysius worked it out exactly, or if he even actually used the birth date and not some other shit like nativity. The bible itself doesn’t give exact dates, people commonly dated it by a passage saying he was about 30 during the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius, so you have to work out how long ago Tiberius’ reign was and then go from there, but it also doesn’t say he was exactly 30…
Then there’s other shit like how the diocletian era system had a different start date and some confusion over exact ruling lengths of emperors which would mess up counting back through the years.
So this, coupled with scholars trying to figure out dates of things in the bible based on trying to date events mentioned like the census has led to biblical scholars dating the birth to like 4 or 5 BC and that the dude who was trying to figure that out 600 years after the event got it a bit wrong.
It’s wiki so not the greatest source, but this article goes over most the issues about trying to date the birth
Dating ancient events can be tricky when people were using different dating systems based on shit like when roman consuls or emperors reigned, or when the Olympics happened, or from years since the biblical creation (anno mundi, still used in the Hebrew calendar for religious purposes).
Adoption of the AD system of counting years by most of Europe by the 10th century has made dating since then a lot easier. But even then you have some annoyances like the adoption of the Gregorian calendar which not everyone did at the same time or in the same way leading to differences of up to 2 weeks between the different systems: like how the Russian February Revolution of 1917 actually took place in March because the Russians refused to adopt the Gregorian calendar until after they overthrew the tsar, and a bunch of Orthodox Christians still use the Julian calendar for the dates of religious holidays like Christmas.
So to end this long rambling diatribe: dating old shit ain’t an exact science and dates of ancient events can be a bit blurry.
Might want to do your own research on the historical existence of Jesus. I might be wrong, but I think there is evidence if a man having a really lived and fitting Jesus’ story. Don’t just listen to random dudes in the intern because they wrote a long text and linked Wikipedia!
Well, I’m talking about two different things here, the first being the hypothetical date for Jesus’s birth.
A close reading of the events points to 4 BC as being the year, and the time of year being sometime in Spring “when shepherds watch over their flocks by night.”
As for if Jesus was real at all… well, there’s absolutely no contemporaneous evidence from his lifetime that he was ever real, no written record, no first hand account, nothing.
The first mention of Jesus was by Flavius Josephus around 93-94 AD, some 60 years after the Crucifixion, but even that may be a 3rd century insert by a Christian transcriber known as Eusebius of Caesarea.
The problem with the Josephus text is two fold: 1) We don’t have the original, just copies of copies of copies. 2) None of the works quoting Josephus prior to Eusebius make any mention of the Jesus quote which makes it highly suspicious.
The bulk of the New Testament isn’t a result of Jesus at all, it’s all because of Paul, formerly known as Saul of Tarsus.
Saul had his own thing going on, which wasn’t entirely popular, then he claimed to have this amazing conversion experience on the road to Damascus, changed his name to Paul, and started talking about this Jesus fellow.
We know Paul existed, we have his letters, other writings, and peers talking about him. How odd none of that exists for Jesus…
A couple of really good books to read about Saul/Paul and the early days:
Yeah I get that there isn’t much direct evidence of Jesus. But when you say “Saul had his own thing going on, which wasn’t entirely popular” aren’t you referring to his persecution of Christians?
I thought my question was pretty simple: if Jesus didn’t exist, where did the early Christians (that Saul was persecuting) come from?
We have letters from Paul, because he sent them to other Christian communities. Where did those communities come from?
My experience is it’s not worth it unless you’re looking for maybe a one-handed keyboard and want to type blindly (like, send a quick text while talking to someone without looking at your phone much).
Otherwise, I’m pretty happy with the default AOSP keyboard and Gboard. 70 WPM is more than good enough for texting, Slack, emails, and posting on social media.
I just Googled “typing test” and picked the first result which was typingtest.com. I don’t know if it’s good or accurate but it checks out for the score I expected.
A bit of an addendum: I think the limiting factor of a mobile keyboard is going to be that you have 1-2 fingers available for use rather than all 10.
A lot of those alternative keyboards seem to rely on some swiping gestures or drawing symbols. That’s good when you’re not looking at it as it’s very tolerant to misalignment, but if you already move fast and precisely, that feels like it would get in the way.
Looking at my fingers while I type, I’m already moving my thumbs as fast as I can without getting too sore: where it goes next doesn’t matter, it’s the same amount of time. Having to press and then move and release, in theory should only slow me down because by the time I finish the drag motion and lift the finger, I would have just moved my finger over the next key and pressed it. So that kind of layering is out of the window.
I can’t think of a way to type faster without involving mnemonics and chorded entry, but with two fingers you don’t gain that much.
Also I feel like the bottleneck there is how fast I can think of what to say next anyway.
While I found ubuntu’s business practices (all the upsells, mostly) the most grating, really the thing that pushed me off of Ubuntu was packages being behind inexplicably and all the forking/modifying they did to gnome and just always being like 1-2 major versions behind, especially since gnomes been shipping tons of features the last few years and Ubuntu wouldn’t get them for ages.
Outside of the snaps that Ubuntu seems to force you back into if you purposely try to turn it off, its not the worst to avoid otherwise. Or just deal with for a few apps.
If they want the ubuntu stack of tooling, suggest debian. If they feel intimidated by Debian, Ubuntu is fine. Debian is really solid out of the box for a primary devices nowadays. no need to wait for Ubuntu to bless packages since the Debian ppa’s are usually much faster to update. But as long as they aren’t doing really weird stuff, they can always move off of Ubuntu to Debian or any other debian descendant easily if they want a smooth transition since its the same package manager.
As long as the immutable distro paradigm isnt a turn off for them, Vanilla OS is also really neat, including cross-package manager installs. V1 is Ubuntu based, v2 will be Debian based (if it isnt already GA’d… I know thats soonish)
I’ve mostly switched to using Debian for dev containers and servers, and 99% of the time any ubuntu-specific guides are still perfectlh helpful. I moved to Arch for main devices.
(Side note: I abandoned manjaro for similar reasons as I abandoned Ubuntu: too much customization forced upon me, manjaro’s package repo was always behind or even had some broken packages vs the arch repos, and some odd decisions by the maintainers about all sorts of things. EndeavourOS has been just way better as someone who likes to have a less-dictated setup that is closer to the distro base and faster to get package updates)
Edit: I guess my tl:dr is… If one thinks “Ubuntu”, first ask “why not debian?”, and then proceed to Ubuntu if there are some solid reasons to do so for the situation.
I used a non standard keyboard a long time ago and while it did deliver, the most important thing I learned is that non standard things tend to disappear and the time spent learning it was wasted.
There’s a public modlog with all removed posts and comments along with the reason, so you can get the pitchforks when a mod goes authoritarian (or, more often, have a look at what a complaining user actually meant by “freedom of expression”).
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