Back in the early 1990s, I worked at a small-town hardware store chain (nuts and bolts, not computers) that was computerizing. A few weeks after we rolled it out, a customer came in with two gift certificates to purchase one item.
It seems pretty basic now, but using two gift certificates to purchase one item was simply not a requirement anyone had thought of. The system had no way to ring it up. The assistant manager of the store did the smart thing and rung it up as a gift certificate plus cash for the balance, so that the customer was good to go. They had to do some adjustments on the back end for that one sale and then update the software to allow for that situation.
I always remember that when I’m working on requirements for systems, wondering what obvious things we’re not thinking of…
There’s another verse of the bible that says “all things are possible with god”
However…One thing the bible is pretty consistently against is liars, cheaters and thieves.
To be a mega-church preacher, you need to be a liar a cheater, and you need to know how to run a scam, so that would fall under the category of a thief.
“Give me all of your money and god will cure your cancer!” obvious scam and a lie.
“Give me all of your money and god will make your credit card debt vanish” is another thing I’ve seen mega-church types say.
The one time Jesus was ever violent was when he flipped tables and used a whip to get all the merchants out of the church. But under 100% of other situations, he literally wouldn’t fight anyone even if they attacked him unprovoked.
Does that sound like the kind of guy that wants a church to be a for-profit business? Mega-churches claim they’re non-profit, but all of them live in giant mansions and own multiple private jets and multiple cars that each cost more money that I’ve ever earned in my life.
I’m non-religious, but I’m more in line with what Jesus wanted people to do than 99% of self proclaimed Christians.
Luke 19:45-46: Then he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling things there; 4and he said, “It is written, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer’; but you have made it a den of robbers.”
Yeah, I don’t believe these megachurch pastors believe the word of God at all, or they wouldn’t be in that line of work.
Somehow in being an atheist I’m a more honest Christian than them in that I at least state outright that I’m not a Christian. That’s more honest than pretending to be Christian just to leverage people’s hopelessness to scam them into an even more dire and hopeless situation.
Jesus is actually hiding under my couch right now. When I first saw him down there, I asked him what he was doing there and he said “I’m hiding from the Christians”
The boss upstairs set him up with a pocket dimension with his own utilities down there, but sometimes when it’s just him, the cats and my dog in the house he’ll come up to my room and watch me play video games.
He doesn’t like my taste in video games, he’s put off by the violence in a lot of them. But when I showed him video-essays on how “the flood” works in halo, he compared it to the bullshit megachurches are always doing, how they infect people and extort them into giving up their money.
Jesus is a really cool guy…modern day Christians on the other hand…that’s another story
99% of self proclaimed Christians hate megachurches.
If the figure is that high, it gives me hope. I wonder if there’s data on this somewhere.
Megachurches are definitely among the “principalities and powers” we struggle against.
If they’re not outright thieving, they’re just self-help seminars preaching about how “Jesus and Americanism are actually totally compatible for realsies.”
Consider all of the nations with Christians, and all within. You have large denominations like Roman Catholics who make up the largest portion of Christendom, a sizable amount of Orthodoxy and then protestants. Protestantism itself is divided into denominations. You have classical protestants which also rule out megachurches, such as the Anglicans/Episcopalians (Anglican communion forming the third largest Christian communion) Reformed/Presbyterians and Lutherans. Maybe a little sprinkling of Moravian and Methodist in there. Then you have evangelical Christianity with Baptists, non denominationals, some pentecostals. There’s low church baptists who again would mostly be anti megachurch. Imagine your small rural congregation “me and my KJV” type.
Generally to get to the megachurches you need to go down the pentecostal/charismatic side of the non denominationals. Sure there’s a sizable amount, but when you put all of Christianity in perspective, you can see it’s a small slice.
22“Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ 23“And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; DEPART FROM ME, YOU WHO PRACTICE LAWLESSNESS.’
Matthew 7:22-23
I shudder to think of how these types have deluded themselves. To think they’d meet their Creator and say something like:
“Look, Lord, I know we locked the homeless out during a blizzard and used desperate peoples’ resources to buy a private jet, and undermined the Gospel’s perception across the entire world at every turn…but we raised so much money…for YOU!”
“Give me all of your money and god will cure your cancer!” obvious scam and a lie.
“Give me all of your money and god will make your credit card debt vanish” is another thing I’ve seen mega-church types say.
Incidentally, there’s a conjecture around Christian circles I’ve seen that says these kinds of actions are what the phrase “thou shalt not take the lord’s name in vain” actually warns against.
Not cursing, as it has become commonly associated with, but the literal act of using the lord for vain purposes. Like saying “Give me your money and god will cure your cancer”
Not true. If I have a group of people and they believe I’m extremely wealthy I don’t have to do anything but promise to share my wealth with them according to how much I value them, making them compete with each other for my affection. This counts as work and it takes skill but I wouldn’t say that doing this is useful.
This is wishful thinking. People are not paid according to their productivity, although it is a minor factor. People are paid accordingly for a variety of factors including region, negotiating ability, charisma, job demand (the more a job is objectively helpful the less it is paid because people are willing to do it for its own merits), and network if they are commoners. If they are born into the ruling class or have amassed enough wealth to live through arbitrage, there is no requirement to produce anything other than the idea that you are productive.
The owner doesn’t pay proportionally to their worker’s ability to produce, they pay according to how little they can get away with since in order to profit it is necessary to minimize expenses. If two employees are important but the less productive employee refuses to work for less than a certain amount and the more productive employee is satisfied with what they’re being paid, the less productive employee will be paid more.
I’m an extreme centrist. Between absolute anarchist worker self-management and overreaching socialist government regulation, I think we should reach a healthy middle.
Not seriously, “men’s rights activists” are a specific group of people that only exist to complain about and hate women. They don’t care about men’s rights, they are anti-feminists.
If you genuinely didn’t know this, then I’d love to know what Internet rock You’ve been hiding under. If you’re trying to concern troll, fuck off, MRAs are fucking scum.
Feels good to go with the flow, doesn’t it? And going for the audience’s applause? And while we’re at it, what are “women’s rights activists”, then? The undisputed incarnation of everything that is right and good in the world, I suppose?
I’ve definitely heard of misogynists, and of misogynists disguising themselves as legitimate men’s advocates, but I’d never heard of “men’s rights activists” as a specific group of misogynists before this.
Without this explanation, had someone said “men’s rights activists are misogynists,” I would have thought they were a misandrist, because it sounds like a general descriptor and not a specific group.
So what do you call it when someone who’s not a misogynist advocates for equal treatment in the areas where men get the short end of the stick?
Generally, they’re described as part of the men’s liberation movement. The men’s movement split decades ago into men’s rights movement, which often comes at the issue from a more conservative premise that views feminism as going to far and eroding men’s rights, and the men’s liberation movement which generally is more liberal and wants to critically look at traditional masculinity and how those expectations may harm men.
Hmm, intuition implies the inverse. I would have guessed men’s liberation means “liberation from women” and thus misogyny. I guess unintuitive terminology is just the way things go.
And the problem is that since these dickwads want to close source their neural networks, we wasting billions of watts training on similar data sets repeatedly generating models with minor differences over and over again. If there was a truly awesome open source model, then we could train on top of it and create more complex and complex models targeted at the good of humankind. But no, stakeholders must get profits. When will they understand that the entire humanity is a stakeholder in this planet.
I don’t even know who I would bet on. Trump can’t use stairs and Biden seems more active but he’s at that age where you’re one fall away from a broken hip and becoming bedridden.
I’ve seen like 5 posts about “AI BF/GF” today and it never ceases to surprise me how fucking easy it is to dupe people with these products, like holy shit humanity is fucked.
I’m always waiting for another ethical disaster trend to end but everybody is always in line for Mr Bonez Wild Ride.
If all you need is a one sided conversation designed to make you feel better, LLM’s are great at concocting such “pep talks”. For some, that just might be enough to male it believable. The Turing test was cracked years ago, only now do we have access to things that can do that for free*.
A pretty early chatbot called Eliza simulated a non-directive psychotherapist. It kind of feels like they’ve improved hugely but not really changed much.
Nah, bullshit, so far these LLM’s are as likely to insult or radicalize you as comfort you. That won’t ever be solved until AGI becomes commonplace, which won’t be for a long ass time. These products are failures at launch.
… Have you tried any of the recent ones? As it stands chatGPT and Gemini are both built with guardrails strong enough to require custom inputs to jailbreak, with techniques such as Reinforcement learning from Human Feedback uses to lobotomize misconduct out of the AI’s.
It’s wild that people brag that it’s able to do essentially the same as copying and pasting someone else’s basic code but with only a few extra imagined errors sprinkled in for fun but that just makes it more useful for pretending you aren’t again lljust literally copying someone else’s stuff.
It’s a search engine that makes up 1/8 of all it says. But sure it’s super useful.
Oh thanks, I really wanted to read another defence of an unethical product by some fanboy with no life. I’m so glad you managed to pick up on that based on my previous comments. I love it. You chose a great conversation to start here.
The tech is great at pretending to be human. It is simply a next “word” (or phrase) predictor. It is not good at answering obscure questions, writing code or making a logical argument. It is good at simulating someone.
It is my experience that it approximates a human well, but it doesn’t get the details right (like truthness or reflecting objective reality), making it useless for essay writing, but great for stuff like character AI and other human simulations.
If you are right, give an actual Iogical response only capable by a human, as opposed to a generic ad hominem. I repeat my question, Have you actually used any of the GPT3 era models?
It’s a very nuanced situation, but the people being sold these products and buying them are expecting a sentient robot lover. They’re getting another shitty chatbot that inevitably fails to meet bare minimum companionship standards such as not berating you.
There currently exists no ethical use of LLM AI. Your comment can be construed as defence of malicious people and actions.
I’ve never met anyone who uses them, but I’m also not sure people actually think it’s sentient. I’m sure some do, but I’d assume the vast majority are just looking to have a conversation, and they don’t care if it’s with a person or a (pretty good) chat bot.
Also, there is a way to use it ethically. As the post mentions, run it locally and know what you’re doing with it. I don’t see any issues if you’re aware of what it is, just as I don’t see any issue using auto-correct or any other technology. We don’t need to go full Butlerian (yet).
You are coming at this from your perspective which knows them to not be real. That’s not gonna be how the average moron thinks and there is more of them than you think. And they absolutely believe their is a tiny sentient brain somewhere in there that is alive. I’m all for people doing what makes them happy but also this is a loneliness confirming hole to get trapped in and absolutely opens doors to influence people through their imaginary friends that they think they can trust.
Unpopular opinion: the show was kinda cool. Not because it’s very realistic, but because it had really good writing. Well except for the computer science, but that much is obvious.
I remember reading somewhere that TV show writers/producers are well aware of this and it’s kind of a sport to get the most ridiculous hacking scene in.
Real hacking would be kind of boring to show, it would just be a guy staring at a screen for hours on end and occasionally typing something.
Well except for the computer science, but that much is obvious.
And that’s never good. But as a computer scientist, I am of the opinion that the real thing is rarely as compelling as The Imitation Game, and even that was about people more than math/science. I’m on board with writers having fun with this stuff because it sort of challenges us to do better out in the world.
For instance, Hackers was not a wildly-off-target take on what computing was like. Rather it’s what we wanted computing to look like.
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