It's mentioned in this really good Verge article about SEO. I don't think it's a good sign for Reddit to just allow such blatant spam and makes me think how much subtler spam is out there too....
I’m not clicking a link to that site to get any additional context, but “Bots talking to bots” for the sake of stealth/viral advertising has been happening on Reddit for at least a decade (and almost certainly longer). Sorry this will be a novel of a comment.
My awakening happened when I noticed a specific trend of posts and comments in subs related to things like nutritional supplements, personal grooming, and things of that nature and it would be most easily detected in small subs with low user activity.
I’d see a post like “I need to find a new body wash, has anybody tried BoShiWah?” It would usually be the most highly upvoted thread in the sub with far more comments and replies than anything else in the sub. Comments were all posted within minutes of each other and shortly after the post was submitted, which would be highly unusual for a sub that only gets a few posts a week. These submissions would all be highly upvoted. The “conversations” would all be positive regarding the product and/or ask questions about it that would sound suspiciously like the script from a tv or radio commercial. And there would always be at least one comment like “where are you planning to buy it from” with a reply that contained a link to a vendor or someone saying something like “XYZ company has it on sale right now, here’s the link”.
I got curious and started looking at the specific user accounts involved in these posts and the comments/replies. It was a never ending supply of different accounts, some new, some old. The part that surprised me is that these accounts were also active and doing the exact same thing in larger and more active subs that were otherwise actively moderated. The activity that made them so obvious in the tiny subs was almost invisible in a post with hundreds of comments.
Reporting them rarely ever resulted in any kind of removal. The smaller subs aren’t actively moderated. The admins don’t (or didn’t) really ever respond to direct reports. I would sometimes comment on my observations in hopes that it would persuade less savvy folks from falling for it. Sometimes, though, I’d end up with dozens of down votes for doing that (again, very odd thing to happen in a small and inactive sub).
At one point I got “noticed” and I was invited to a private sub run by users who report and track that specific kind of spam. Also very eye opening to see how pervasive it was.
Odd Thomas annoys be to no end. He’s a Mary Sue in the worst way. He succeeds at literally everything he does. It’s extremely lazy. Oh and he’s “quarky”.
I’ve read a lot of Koontz books. If you just think of them like TV movies they’re fine.
One Dean Koontz book isn’t a great sample size. He writes a LOT and most of it isn’t very good, but every once in a while he gets it just right and puts out a really good one.
Though tbf, I haven’t re-read his stuff in probably 10 years so I don’t know if it holds up to modern scrutiny. Odd Thomas was always my favorite of his.
“Almost nobody says we should have the richest pay the least. And yet when we look around the country, the vast majority of states have tax systems that do just that.”...
For this of us accused of buying too many #books - Umberto Eco was on our side:
'It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones'
It is a welcoming home that has bookcases in odd corners and books scattered through the rooms. It is a display of personal pleasure and fascination to have books around, read or not. It is an invitation to discussion and a permission for peaceful quiet.
My main revenue isn’t $100/month. It’s a lot more l that I use to live indoors and eat. If you removed it, that would be a huge and consequential penalty. Its odd that you think losing a lot of money permanently is not a punishment.
As to the EU, the US has no such privacy laws. The FTC just established at least part of them with this action. Sad as it is, that’s huge progress for this country that shouldnt be brushed off.
I have just plain stereo and wouldn’t change it for the world. Have had all sorts of setups throught the years… it’s so much easier when I don’t have to worry about speaker mapping or what the player/browser would do with a plain stereo signal on a 5.1 or a 7.1 setup. Sometimes, everything’s kosher, most of the time it’s a mess.
Like it or not, stereo has been the default way to record audio for the last 80, 90 year, and it has proven that it’s simple, yet effective at making the music “come alive” in the listener’s mind. Sure, surround does it better, but there is too much maintenance into it, plus mastering albums in surround is a real PITA, especially electronic music (not real instruments, so how are you gonna map that effect/sound 🤷). Most TV stations also air plain stereo. Cameras, phones - plain stereo. Most series - also, plain stereo. Movies are basically the “odd ball out” because they’re a combined multimedia experience (video and audio) and they’re usually just shots of real world stuff happening in front of a screen, so it’s not that difficult to surround map the sound on them (i.e. the video tells the story of how the auido should ”move").
First off, keep in mind that the numbers are arbitrary. They were decided by early scholars who we now know spent 50 years misclassifying it as a Gnostic text.
Then consider that the very next line is the only one in the entire work preceeded by a numbered saying but beginning with a conjunction.
So take the two together (and let’s throw in the one after for good measure):
Jesus said, “Lucky is the lion that the human will eat, so that the lion becomes human. And foul is the human that the lion will eat, and the lion still will become human.”
And he said, “The person is like a wise fisherman who cast his net into the sea and drew it up from the sea full of little fish. Among them the wise fisherman discovered a fine large fish. He threw all the little fish back into the sea, and easily chose the large fish. Anyone here with two good ears had better listen!”
Jesus said, “Look, the sower went out, took a handful (of seeds), and scattered (them). Some fell on the road, and the birds came and gathered them. Others fell on rock, and they didn’t take root in the soil and didn’t produce heads of grain. Others fell on thorns, and they choked the seeds and worms ate them. And others fell on good soil, and it produced a good crop: it yielded sixty per measure and one hundred twenty per measure.”
So first you have a saying about how no matter if man eats lion or the other way around man will be the inevitable result.
The part about the net mirrors Habakkuk 1:14-17 with a metaphor of man like a fish caught up in a net, but here “the human being” is like a big fish selected from small fish.
Then the next saying is about how with randomly scattered seeds it is only the seeds that survive to reproduce which multiply.
The only group recorded following the Gospel of Thomas had this to say about the sower parable:
For the ends, he says, are the seeds scattered from the unportrayable one upon the world, through which the whole cosmical system is completed; for through these also it began to exist. And this, he says, is what has been declared: "The sower went forth to sow…
Elsewhere this group describes these seeds as “indivisible, like a point as if from nothing,” and “making up all things.”
See, 50 years before Jesus was born the poet Lucretius writes a poem in Latin about the Epicurean philosophy, and instead of using the Greek atomos to describe indivisible parts of matter, he refers to them as ‘seeds’.
For example:
Especially since this world is the product of Nature, the happenstance Of the seeds of things colliding into each other by pure chance In every possible way, no aim in view, at random, blind, Till sooner or later certain seeds suddenly combined So that they lay the warp to weave the cloth of mighty things: Of earth, of sea, of sky, of all the species of living beings.
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura book 2
In fact, Lucretius used the metaphor of “seed falling by the wayside of a path” to describe failed human reproduction. This is how it is phrased in both the version of the sower parable quoted in Pseudo-Hippolytus and in all the canonical gospels - “on the path” in Thomas may have been an attempt to correct the translation as it made it’s way into Coptic.
See, Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura is the only extant work from antiquity that explicitly described what is basically evolution from the idea that it is a doubled seed with one part from each parent that passed on traits to the idea there were intermediate mutants that didn’t survive because they weren’t as adaptive as others in order to survive and reproduce. We tend to think these ideas are only as old as Darwin, but they predated Jesus by decades.
And the Epicureans were known to Judea where one of the sects (the Sadducees) had similar perspectives about no afterlife and where the Talmud has a Rabbi in the first century saying “Why do we study the Torah? To know how to answer the Epicurean.”
Lucretius even explicitly described man as originating from nature as well:
I cannot hold The race of mortal beings was lowered on a rope of gold To the fields down from the lofty heavens, nor that mortals came From the sea, nor from the waves that smash the rocks. It’s from the same Earth that feeds them from her body now that they were born.
Lucretius De Rerum Natura book 2
And many of the ideas in Lucretius we see paralleled in Thomas.
For example, in terms of if intelligent design was the origin or evolution, you have saying 29 where the spirit arising from flesh is the greater wonder over flesh arising from spirit.
In response to Lucretius’s points about there not being an afterlife because the soul depends on bodies, you have sayings 87 and 112 bemoaning a soul which depends on a body.
In response to Lucretius’s claim about the notion the cosmos was like a body that would one day die, you have saying 56 about how the cosmos is already a dead body.
While outside the scope of this comment, effectively most of the Gospel of Thomas seems to be a rebuttal to Epicurean philosophy by incorporating ideas from Plato such that it claims this is a non-physical copy of an original physical universe, and because of that there actually is an afterlife as opposed to the Epicurean ideas.
So back to saying 7, in combination with 8 and 9.
TL;DR: These seem to be, in this broader context, an embrace of Lucretius’s views of survival of the fittest but applied to humanity, as in that the human being is like a big fish selected from small fish, so no matter if lion ate man or man ate lion, man was was going to be the inevitable result.
It also goes a long way to explaining why in Mark the sower parable was so dangerous it is the only parable given a “secret explanation” at odds with John 18:20’s “I said nothing in secret” and Papias describing the parables as “up to each person to interpret as best they could.” The net parable also ends up with a secret explanation later on in Matthew, where in one of his other secret explanations he tips his hand that he had a copy of the Gospel of Thomas (or an earlier version of it) in front of him.
One of my favorite things about the internet are creators like this guy. Someone I’ll never meet can show you something that at first glance seems odd and inconsequential and make it totally riveting. Now I’m in the rabbit hole of their YouTube channel learning about monuments and fountains.
If this if your channel OP, keep it up, your passion is contagious. If you’re not, thanks for sharing.
Edit: there’s so much more here! They’re like that college friend you’d put a quarter in, wind up, and let go loose on any wild topic. Awesome.
Alaska flight incident reveals another feature Boeing didn’t inform pilots about - Federal investigators said that Boeing didn’t make pilots aware that when a plane rapidly depressurizes, the cockp…::undefined
AI generated content has a lot of unanswered legal questions around it which can lead to a lot of headache with moderation and possibility of illegal content showing up (remember that not only “well meaning” devs will use these tools). It’s seems reasonable for a company to try minimize the risk.
There were never any unanswered legal questions would prevent you from being able to use generated assets in a game. That’s why Valve’s old stance was so odd. I’m not sure what you mean by the possibility for illegal content, can you elaborate?
HP customers claim firmware update rendered third-party ink verboten | Then the company cranked up the price of cartridges, complaint alleges::Then the company cranked up the price of cartridges, complaint alleges
Oh, I fully blame HP for this, but I am also just asking the question. Now that you mentioned colouring pages, I remember that I used a printer pretty heavily while my kids were home during quarantine.
For the odd time I have to print something, it’s more worth my while to just go to Staples or whatever and get it printed for me there.
The only other thing I cam remember printing in the near term has been amazon return labels.
Looking for a term that identifies someone as a person that, for example, likes to fart in a car and not let people out so that others are forced to smell it.
The suffering of Palestinian civilians “cannot go on,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock warned Tuesday during a visit to Cairo, urging more concrete measures to deliver humanitarian aid to the besieged Gaza Strip....
When Scholz says “Germany’s only place now is by Israel’s side”, and Baerbock says “the suffering of Palestinian civilians can not go on” I’m reminded that they’re technically in different parties, but they formed a coalition government, and one that is regularly at odds with itself.
Where did you hear about that? It sounds odd, because surely Google could’ve filtered out the swearwords, and at the end of the day users still had to solve the captcha correctly sooner or later if they wanted to post.
How odd, I’ve never had an issue with them across multiple devices and ISP’s. Have you had issues accessing them outside your home network and/or through a vpn?
I was raised vegetarian, and as such it was normal to me and my brother. My mom did it for environmental reason because she is fucking awesome and I have decided to stay vegetarian as an adult.
It was around 10 when I started encountering this oddness. I would be at a friend’s house, they would offer to give me food, I would say I’m vegetarian, and they would act like I was an alien or make comments about my parents being abusive to me. And then as I got older I got all these comments about me not being a man because I don’t eat meat.
For fucks sake, being a man doesn’t mean conformity. As far as I can understand, it means being brave enough to not give in to stupid gender norms and to find out who you are for yourself.
Of course the people who made the most asshole type comments were always right-wingers, too. What a surprise!
Our automation tests run on Firefox on odd days and on Chrome on even days. I don’t think it ever made a difference, tho. It’s getting harder to create bugs that are specific to Firefox or Chrome. Safari, on the other hand, is a fucking mess.
I’m rewatching TNG and season 1 was pretty… Off. Most of the characters seemed to be cheap knockoffs of their established personas. The most distinctive for me was Brent Spiner (Data), where, I can’t put my finger on it, but he just seemed off the the data that I know and love.
I chalk it up to him coming off of being a comedic bit actor and he was still finding himself for the more dramatic role of data. He hadn’t really nailed down the robotic methodology of his actions and speech that really makes data stand out. His responses were often quick, to the point of speaking over others, and his actions were fairly fluid and organic, which isn’t Data at all.
It really didn’t take long for him to work his way into the role (and into our hearts), I’m not criticising Brent by any stretch. He was and I’m sure still is, an incredible actor… Judging by his fairly recent role reprising Data on Picard, he really hasn’t lost his touch.
There’s plenty of other things about season one that are odd, but I found Data to be the most notable. Still, worf was a lot more brooding, Picard seemed almost more timid, Riker didn’t have a beard… The only person from season one who I can point to with certainty and say that they didn’t seem off from season 1 (compared to how I know the character), was Dr. Crusher. She was hitting it out of the park from day 1.
No matter the oddity, almost all of it was simply gone by the end of season one. I’m partway into season two now and I wouldn’t be able to differentiate the characters on screen from any other season of the show, or from their movies.
If that is a defining quality of touch typists, I guess I’m far from one. My hand position moves all over the place as I type, but I haven’t had to look for a key (or where my hand should go for whatever task) in a decade or so (I do have to look for a couple odd keys occasionally, only symbols I don’t use frequently).
Just easier to crtl + a lot of keys with the same hand, then the hand slides right back to where it was (similar to how some people hit crtl + alt + del with one hand while others use two).
"Bots talking to bots." Came across this subreddit that appears to exist only to take advantage of how appending "reddit" to search terms is being favored in SEO. (www.reddit.com)
It's mentioned in this really good Verge article about SEO. I don't think it's a good sign for Reddit to just allow such blatant spam and makes me think how much subtler spam is out there too....
poor Dean (lemmy.ml)
You can have anything you wan... (sh.itjust.works)
hyperlink
In 41 US States, Richest 1% Pay Lower Tax Rates Than Everyone Else (www.commondreams.org)
“Almost nobody says we should have the richest pay the least. And yet when we look around the country, the vast majority of states have tax systems that do just that.”...
FTC bans X-Mode from selling phone location data, and orders firm to delete collected data (techcrunch.com)
Why are so many people downloading the movie Paul all of a sudden?
imgur.com/a/diDzw63...
No wonder Jesus didn't get a fair trial... (startrek.website)
Last words on the cross:...
Why Do People Keep Destroying This Headstone? | Dime Store Adventures (www.youtube.com)
Alaska flight incident reveals another feature Boeing didn’t inform pilots about - Federal investigators said that Boeing didn’t make pilots aware that when a plane rapidly depressurizes, the cockp... (www.politico.com)
Alaska flight incident reveals another feature Boeing didn’t inform pilots about - Federal investigators said that Boeing didn’t make pilots aware that when a plane rapidly depressurizes, the cockp…::undefined
Steamworks Development - AI Content on Steam (steamcommunity.com)
Key points:...
HP customers claim firmware update rendered third-party ink verboten | Then the company cranked up the price of cartridges, complaint alleges (www.theregister.com)
HP customers claim firmware update rendered third-party ink verboten | Then the company cranked up the price of cartridges, complaint alleges::Then the company cranked up the price of cartridges, complaint alleges
Is there a term for someone that likes other people to smell their farts?
Looking for a term that identifies someone as a person that, for example, likes to fart in a car and not let people out so that others are forced to smell it.
One in 100 people in Gaza has been killed since October 7 | CNN (www.cnn.com)
Monthly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing?
Tell us what game you are currently, or recently played, greater than 6+ months old....
German FM: Suffering of Palestinians ‘cannot go on’ (www.politico.eu)
The suffering of Palestinian civilians “cannot go on,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock warned Tuesday during a visit to Cairo, urging more concrete measures to deliver humanitarian aid to the besieged Gaza Strip....
"There are thousands of volunteers who donated their labour to Duo... Bit by bit all of our work was hidden from us as Duolingo became a publicly-traded company." (aus.social)
China Says Cracked Apple AirDrop to Identify Message Sources (www.bloomberg.com)
Men on vegan diets perceived as less masculine, highlighting gender stereotypes in diet choices. (www.theinnovativehorizon.com)
It is essential to stop using Chrome. Under the pretense of saving users from third-party spyware, Google is creating an ecosystem in which Chrome itself is the spyware. (mastodon.world)
Every time I'm trying to decide what new show I should check out (i.imgur.com)
Microsoft is adding a new key to PC keyboards for the first time since 1994 (arstechnica.com)
Copilot key will eventually be required in new PC keyboards, though not yet.