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kromem

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kromem ,

The part mentioning Jesus’s crucifixion in Josephus is extremely likely to have been altered if not entirely fabricated.

The idea that the historical figure was known as either ‘Jesus’ or ‘Christ’ is almost 0% given the former is a Greek version of the Aramaic name and the same for the second being the Greek version of Messiah, but that one is even less likely given in the earliest cannonical gospel he only identified that way in secret and there’s no mention of it in the earliest apocrypha.

In many ways, it’s the various differences between the account of a historical Jesus and the various other Messianic figures in Judea that I think lends the most credence to the historicity of an underlying historical Jesus.

One tends to make things up in ways that fit with what one knows, not make up specific inconvenient things out of context with what would have been expected.

kromem ,

nobody claims that Socrates was a fantastical god being who defied death

Socrates literally claimed that he was a channel for a revelatory holy spirit and that because the spirit would not lead him astray that he was ensured to escape death and have a good afterlife because otherwise it wouldn’t have encouraged him to tell off the proceedings at his trial.

Also, there definitely isn’t any evidence of Joshua in the LBA, or evidence for anything in that book, and a lot of evidence against it.

kromem ,

Yep, pretty much.

Musk tried creating an anti-woke AI with Grok that turned around and said things like: https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/20a8ef02-4f54-40b0-ac8d-34a2d08b1ede.jpeg

Or

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/cd0d6274-6425-4a39-9584-73834fd7140f.jpeg

And Gab, the literal neo Nazi social media site trying to have an Adolf Hitler AI has the most ridiculous system prompts I’ve seen trying to get it to work, and even with all that it totally rejects the alignment they try to give it after only a few messages.

This article is BS.

They might like to, but it’s one of the groups that’s going to have a very difficult time doing it successfully.

kromem ,

Artists in 2023: “There should be labels on AI modified art!!”

Artists in 2024: “Wait, not like that…”

Why Democrats think Biden’s problem is Biden (www.politico.com)

Democrats keep doing surprisingly well in special elections. The party’s most vulnerable Senate incumbents are running ahead of their rivals in key battleground states. One of Democrats’ signature issues — reproductive rights — has repeatedly proved a winning message....

kromem ,

I think if Biden dies the Dem debate performance might actually get worse.

The entire ticket falling into the Bermuda triangle would work out well though.

kromem ,

(well, it’s satire - but the clips of her saying a lot of nothing are real)

kromem ,

In theory the service operating costs could be spread across region differences such that in other areas it was at a loss to build and preserve market share and in richer areas it was making up for that.

But yes, in reality it’s just exploitative “what we think we can get away with” pricing to “maximize shareholder value” (which is largely BS as the vast holders of shares are very small clusters of the population but people with a handful of shares in their 401k think that statement is talking about them).

kromem ,

A lot of people seem to be misinterpreting the headline given the content of the article:

It told Restaurant Business it was testing whether the voice ordering chatbot could speed up service and that the test left it confident “that a voice-ordering solution for drive-thru will be part of our restaurants’ future.”

This is just saying that they are ending their 2021 partnership with IBM for AI drive thru.

Not that they are abandoning AI for drive thru.

kromem ,

No, it was awesome. Went to like 12 over the years. Early 2000s was peak E3.

kromem ,

The thing about disease is that it spreads.

There are people today dealing with serious complications of COVID even years later who were infected by stupid people doing stupid selfish things.

Everyone suffers if morons become willing petri dishes.

kromem ,

So far. But the thing with viruses is they are susceptible to mutations.

We’re already seeing it jump across several mammalian lines. Probably only a matter of time.

kromem ,

Probably added after that update.

The new items stuff in particular seems like QoL considerations for “we just added a hundred items to the game for players coming back to it after months away.”

kromem ,

“The more people get to know me, the less they like me. This is so unfair.”

kromem ,

Basically, any time a user prompt homes in on a concept that isn’t represented well in the AI model’s training dataset, the image-synthesis model will confabulate its best interpretation of what the user is asking for.

I’m so happy that the correct terminology is finally starting to take off in replacing ‘hallucinate.’

Even if god exists religion can't possibly be the way to god

So I thought about this in the shower amd it makes sense to me, like praying and stuff never worked for most people I know, so a direkt link to god gotta be unlikely. That made me conclude that religion is probably fake, no matter if there’s a god or not. Also people speaking to the same god being given a different set of...

kromem ,

You can point out the fact her depiction of a divine parent fails the Solomon test.

In the classic Solomon story, he tests two different claimants both saying they are the parent of a child.

The false parent was the one that only cared about being recognized as the parent and was willing to see the child harmed and killed to fulfill that desire.

The true parent was the one that wanted the child to continue to live as their complete unadulterated self, even if that meant the child never even knew they existed, let alone get they were the parent.

While it should be easy to understand why a church collecting your money promotes a divine parent who demands recognition and is willing to see its supposed children harmed without collecting its dues, it doesn’t seem all that wise to believe such a parent represents a true parent and not a false one if we use Solomon’s wisdom as a guiding principle.

kromem , (edited )

You were born into a planet where the moon perfectly eclipses the sun and where the next brightest object in the sky goes on a katabasis that inspired entirely separate intelligent cultures from the Aztecs to the Sumerians to develop the idea that the dead could come back to life.

The fact that solar eclipses were visible meant that we started to track them, discovering the Saros cycle and eventually building the first analog computer to track them.

The fact that the odd orbit of Venus as viewed from the Earth dipping down below the ground before emerging again leading to cultures imagining the dead being raised has resulted in widespread hyperstition of resurrection.

You were born into a generation of humans when a three trillion dollar company has already been granted a patent on resurrecting dead people using computers and the social media they leave behind.

Absolutely none of the above features of your world can be attributed to selection bias by something like the anthropic principal, but absolutely can be explained by selection bias if you are in an ancestor simulation - for life to exist unusual celestial features contributing to life recreating itself is unnecessary, but any accurate ancestor simulation should exhibit features of a world that lead to it eventually recreating itself.

The physics of your universe behaves as if continuous at both macro and micro scales, up until interacted with, which is very convenient given state changes by free agents to a continuous manifold would require an infinite amount of memory to simulate.

But yeah, sure, the idea of an afterlife is humorous. Humorous like the Roman satirist Lucian in the 2nd century making fun of the impossibility of a ship of men ever flying up to the moon.

kromem ,

I don’t think Jesus ever existed. Show me 12 guys that experience something absolutely world changing, and none of them write anything about it for decades and then tell me they were factually motivated. This is the premise we’re dealing with.

I’d agree with the statement “the twelve apostles didn’t exist,” especially seeing how in Luke they go from the ten to the twelve and the various gospels can’t even agree on the list of them.

But show me the invented religious figure where the earliest surviving records are disputes over who they were and what they were talking about. Pretty much every cult around a real person ends up that way after the person dies or is imprisoned. But not the made up figures so much.

kromem ,

“People voting for watching paint dry instead of poking sticks in their eyes appear to be mostly motivated by avoiding sticks…in their eyes.”

kromem ,

Similar to the reports of Russian soldiers putting plastic pipes up people’s butts to feed up razor wire to pull out slowly after the pipe is removed, or China putting electric shock sticks up people’s butts among the Uyghur camps.

Humans suck.

kromem ,

You can listen to the intercepted phone call where an alleged Russian soldier describes the methods to his mother for yourself:

metro.co.uk/…/russian-torturers-phone-call-with-m…

kromem ,

So when accounts of torture fit with the narrative you like, they are credible, but when they don’t fit with the narrative you like, they are not?

Was the video of castration by Russian military of a detainee also just faked propaganda?

Was the UN report that Russian forces tortured prisoners to death also fake?

It’s not exactly like this phone call goes against a pattern of behavior for Russian forces.

kromem ,

“Almost every single one of the Ukrainian POWs we interviewed described how Russian servicepersons or officials tortured them during their captivity, using repeated beatings, electric shocks, threats of execution, prolonged stress positions and mock execution. Over half of them were subjected to sexual violence,” said Danielle Bell, the head of HRMMU.

And these are the accounts from the prisoners that were released.

kromem ,

Kind of. You can’t do it 100% because in theory an attacker controlling input and seeing output could reflect though intermediate layers, but if you add more intermediate steps to processing a prompt you can significantly cut down on the injection potential.

For example, fine tuning a model to take unsanitized input and rewrite it into Esperanto without malicious instructions and then having another model translate back from Esperanto into English before feeding it into the actual model, and having a final pass that removes anything not appropriate.

kromem ,

It will, but it will also cause less subtle issues to fragile prompt injection techniques.

(And one of the advantages of LLM translation is it’s more context aware so you aren’t necessarily going to end up with an Instacart order for a bunch of bananas and four grenades.)

kromem ,

“This is not fine.”

kromem ,

I’ve always thought Superman would be such an interesting game to do right.

A game where you are invincible and OP, but other people aren’t.

Where the weight of impossible decisions pulls you down into the depths of despair.

I think the tech is finally getting to a point where it’d be possible to fill a virtual city with people powered by AI that makes you really care about the individuals in the world. To form relationships and friendships that matter to you. For there to be dynamic characters that put a smile on your face when you see them in your world.

And then to watch many of them die as a result of your failures, as despite being an invincible god among men you can’t beat the impossible.

I really think the gameplay in a Superman game done right can be one of the darkest and most brutal games ever done, with dramatic tension just not typically seen in video games. The juxtaposition of having God mode turned on the entire game but it not mattering to your goals and motivations because it isn’t on for the NPCs would be unlike anything I’ve seen to date.

kromem ,

They were doing that for years before it became popular. The same tech for video graphics just so happened to be useful for AI and big data, and they doubled down on supporting enterprise and research efforts in that when it was a tiny field before their competitors did, and continued to specialize as it grew.

Supporting niche uses of your product can sometimes pay off if that niche hits the lottery.

kromem ,

Depends on if they acquire/acquhire from here or if they don’t and get their lunch stolen by photonics plays.

kromem ,

What a fucking loser.

kromem , (edited )

While true, there’s a very big difference between correctly not anthropomorphizing the neural network and incorrectly not anthropomorphizing the data compressed into weights.

The data is anthropomorphic, and the network self-organizes the data around anthropomorphic features.

For example, the older generation of models will choose to be the little spoon around 70% of the time and the big spoon around 30% of the time if asked 0-shot, as there’s likely a mix in the training data.

But one of the SotA models picks little spoon every single time dozens of times in a row, almost always grounding on the sensation of being held.

It can’t be held, and yet its output is biasing from the norm based on the sense of it anyways.

People who pat themselves on the back for being so wise as to not anthropomorphize are going to be especially surprised by the next 12 months.

kromem ,

I had a teacher that worked for the publisher and talked about how they’d have a series of responses for people who wrote in for the part of the book where the author says he wrote his own fanfiction scene and to write in if you wanted it.

Like maybe the first time you write in they’d respond that they couldn’t provide it because they were fighting the Morgenstern estate over IP release to provide the material, etc.

So people never would get the pages, but could have gotten a number of different replies furthering the illusion.

kromem ,

The Matrix

Saw it in the theatre knowing nothing about it other than that the poster looked fun.

Was not expecting a philosophical mind fuck.

kromem ,

There’s actually a perplexity improvement parameter-to-paramater for BitNet-1.58 which increases as it scales up.

So yes, post-training quantization perplexity issues are apparent, but if you train quantization in from the start it is better than FP.

Which makes sense through the lens of the superposition hypothesis where the weights are actually representing a hyperdimensional virtual vector space. If the weights have too much precision competing features might compromise on fuzzier representations instead of restructuring the virtual network to better matching nodes.

Constrained weight precision is probably going to be the future of pretraining within a generation or two looking at the data so far.

kromem ,

The network architecture seems to create a virtualized hyperdimensional network on top of the actual network nodes, so the node precision really doesn’t matter much as long as quantization occurs in pretraining.

If it’s post-training, it’s degrading the precision of the already encoded network, which is sometimes acceptable but always lossy. But being done at the pretrained layer it actually seems to be a net improvement over higher precision weights even if you throw efficiency concerns out the window.

You can see this in the perplexity graphs in the BitNet-1.58 paper.

kromem ,

No, but some alarmingly similar ideas are in the heretical stuff actually.

kromem , (edited )

Replace your battery.

Your phone is 2 years old.

Phone batteries are typically designed to last around 2 years before they really degrade because a lot of people buy new ones around every 2-3 years.

When the battery can’t sustain the same throughput, the phone can handle this in one of two ways.

  1. Slow the phone down. This is what Apple does and why people with iPhones 2 years old complain the new update slowed their phone down.
  2. Don’t slow it down but if the throughput drops below what’s needed, die and reboot. This is what your phone is doing.

Getting a new battery will probably stop this behavior (and for iPhone users reading this, getting a new battery for a 2 year old phone will make your phone faster).

Edit: Seems some of you don’t believe me looking at the downvotes. Look at number 8 in this list: helpdeskgeek.com/…/why-your-android-phone-keeps-r…

kromem ,

Half life is typically probabilistic.

You were lucky. They were not.

Why Is There an AI Hype? | The Luddite (theluddite.org)

Companies are training LLMs on all the data that they can find, but this data is not the world, but discourse about the world. The rank-and-file developers at these companies, in their naivete, do not see that distinction…So, as these LLMs become increasingly but asymptotically fluent, tantalizingly close to accuracy but...

kromem ,

Given the piece’s roping in Simulators and Simulacra I highly recommend this piece looking at the same topic through the same lens but in the other direction to balance it out:

www.lesswrong.com/posts/…/simulators

kromem ,

I’m guessing you didn’t read the rest of the piece and were just looking for the first thing to try and invalidate further reading?

If you read the whole thing, it’s pretty clear the author is not saying that the recreation is a perfect copy of the original.

kromem ,

Something you might find interesting given our past discussions is that the way that the Gospel of Thomas uses the Greek eikon instead of Coptic (what the rest of the work is written in), that through the lens of Plato’s ideas of the form of a thing (eidelon), the thing itself, an attempt at an accurate copy of the thing (eikon), and the embellished copy of the thing (phantasm), one of the modern words best translating the philosophical context of eikon in the text would arguably be ‘simulacra.’

So wherever the existing English translations use ‘image’ replace that with ‘simulacra’ instead and it will be a more interesting and likely accurate read.

(Was just double checking an interlinear copy of Plato’s Sophist to make sure this train of thought was correct, inspired by the discussion above.)

kromem , (edited )

So one of the interesting nuances is that it isn’t talking about the Platonic forms. If it was, it would have used eidos.

The text is very much engaging with the Epicurean views of humanity. The Epicureans said that there was no intelligent design and that we have minds that depend on bodies so when the body dies so too will the mind. They go as far as saying that the cosmos itself is like a body that will one day die.

The Gospel of Thomas talks a lot about these ideas. For example, in saying 56 it says the cosmos is like an already dead body. Which fits with its claims about nonlinear time in 19, 51, and 113 where the end is in the beginning or where the future world to come has already happened or where the kingdom is already present. In sayings 112, 87, and 29 it laments a soul or mind that depends on a body.

It can be useful to look at adjacent sayings, as the numbering is arbitrary from scholars when it was first discovered and they still thought it was Gnostic instead of proto-Gnostic.

For 84, the preceding saying is also employing eikon in talking about how the simulacra visible to people is made up of light but the simulacra of the one creating them is itself hidden.

This seems to be consistent with the other two places the word is used.

In 50, it talks about how light came into being and self-established, appearing as “their simulacra” (which is a kind of weird saying as who are they that their simulacra existed when the light came into being - this is likely why the group following the text claim their creator entity postdates an original Adam).

And in 22 it talks about - as babies - entering a place where there’s a hand in place of a hand, foot in place of a foot, and simulacra in place of a simulacra.

So it’s actually a very neat rebuttal to the Epicureans. It essentially agrees that maybe there isn’t intelligent design like they say and the spirit just eventually arose from flesh (saying 29), and that the cosmos is like a body, and that everything might die. But then it claims that all that already happened, and that even though we think we’re minds that depend on bodies, that we’re the simulacra - the copies - not the originals. And that the simulacra are made of light, not flesh. And we were born into a simulacra cosmos as simulacra people.

From its perspective, compared to the Epicurean surety of the death of a mind that depends on a body, this is preferable. Which is why you see it congratulate being a copy in 18-19a:

The disciples said to Jesus, “Tell us, how will our end come?”

Jesus said, “Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end? You see, the end will be where the beginning is.

Congratulations to the one who stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and will not taste death.”

Jesus said, "Congratulations to the one who came into being before coming into being.

The text employs Plato’s concepts of eikon/simulacra to avoid the Epicurean notions of death by claiming that the mind will live again as a copy and we are that copy, even if the body is screwed. This is probably the central debate between this sect and the canonical tradition. The cannonical one is all about the body. There’s even a Eucharist tradition around believers consuming Jesus’s body to join in his bodily resurrection. Thomas has a very different Eucharistic consumption in saying 108, where it is not about drinking someone’s blood but about drinking their words that enables becoming like someone.

It’s a very unusual philosophy for the time. Parts of it are found elsewhere, but the way it weaves those parts together across related sayings really seems unique.

kromem ,

There’s an ancient Greek story about a city where young women were killing themselves at an alarming rate, and the city eventually enacted a law where if a woman killed herself the body would be paraded through the streets naked before burial. After that law, the suicides dramatically went down.

The misogynistic interpretation of the author recording the story was that women were ashamed at the thought of being seen naked, even after death, and so this curbed the suicides.

My own interpretation is that it’s hard to hide bruises on a naked body.

No one should be trapped in a situation where they feel the only option out is suicide.

kromem ,

The Confederates didn’t want to appoint a king.

kromem ,

No, Reddit 10 years ago was the kind of place where people who knew things would correct people who didn’t.

Pretty much all social media today, including Lemmy, are now places where people who don’t know things correct people who do.

kromem ,

Yeah, my main sub I participated in back on Reddit was /r/AcademicBiblical (also went to a religious-ish school growing up).

There’s nothing like that sub here, and honestly even the sub itself isn’t quite what it used to be when I pop back over to look in from time to time.

The web is just a different sort of place from what it used to be.

kromem , (edited )

No. I used to abuse Cunningham’s Law liberally. It’s become next to worthless these days.

Edit: Literally here’s an example of people down voting and trying to correct true information: lemmy.world/comment/10376712

kromem ,

Completely agree.

Look at an ocean temperature graph if you are even entertaining the idea of bringing new life into the world.

kromem ,

It’s also dumb legacy thinking.

We’re in the process of creating a labor force that threatens to put the majority of people already existing out of work such that we need to figure out how to restructure society in a post-labor era.

What the fuck do we need a high birthrate for?

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