Yep. It’s also kinda curious how many boxes Paul ticks of the comments about a false deceiver in 2 Thess 2.

• Lawless? (1 Cor 9:20 - “though not myself under the law”)
• Used signs and wonders to convert? (2 Cor 12:12 - “I did many signs and wonders among you”)
• Used wickedness? (Romans 3:8 - "And why not say (as some people slander us by saying that we say), “Let us do evil so that good may come”?)
• Proclaimed himself in God’s place? (1 Cor 4:15 - “I am your spiritual father”)
• Set himself up at the center of the church? Well, the fact we’re talking about this is kinda proof in the pudding for his influence.

Sounds like they were projecting a bit with that passage.

Curiously in all those stories in Josephus Rome killed the messianic upstarts immediately without trial and killed the followers they could get their hands on.

Yet the canonical story has multiple trials and doesn’t have any followers being killed.

Also, I’m surprised more people don’t pick up on how strange it is that the canonical stories all have Peter ‘denying’ him three times while also having roughly three trials (Herod, High Priest, Pilate). Peter is even admitted back into the guarded area where a trial is taking place to ‘deny’ him. But oh no, it was totally that Judas guy who betrayed him. It was okay Peter was going into a guarded trial area to deny him because…of a rooster. Yeah, that makes sense.

It’s extremely clear to even a slightly critical eye that the story canonized is not the actual story, even with the magical thinking stuff set aside.

Literally the earliest primary records of the tradition is a guy known for persecuting Jesus’s followers writing to areas he doesn’t have authority to persecute and telling them to ignore any versions of Jesus other than the one he tells them about (and interestingly both times he did this spontaneously suggesting in the same chapter that he swears he doesn’t lie and only tells the truth).

the Eucharist was an act of mockery towards Mystery Cult rituals

More likely the version we ended up with was intentionally obfuscated from what it originally was.

Notice how in John, which lacks any Eucharist ritual, that at the last supper bread is being dipped much as there’s ambiguous dipping in Mark? But it’s characterized as a bad thing because it’s given to Judas? And then Matthew goes even further changing it to a ‘hand’ being dipped?

Does it make sense for the body of an anointed one to not be anointed before being eaten?

Look at how in Ignatius’s letter to the Philadelphians he tells them to “avoid evil herbs” not planted by god and “have only one Eucharist.” Herbs? Hmmm. (A number of those in that anointing oil.)

There’s a parallel statement in Matthew 15 about “every plant” not planted by god being rooted up.

But in gThomas 40 it’s a grapevine that’s not planted and is to be rooted up. Much as in saying 28 it suggests people should be shaking off their wine.

Now, again kind of curious that the Eucharist ritual of wine would have excluded John the Baptist who didn’t drink wine and James the brother of Jesus who was also traditionally considered to have not drunk wine, or honestly any Nazarite who had taken a vow not to drink wine.

I’m sure everyone is familiar with the idea Jesus was born from a virgin. This results from Matthew’s use of the Greek version of Isaiah 7:14 instead of the Hebrew where it’s simply “young woman.” But almost no one considers that line in its original context with the line immediately after:

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son and shall name him Immanuel. He shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good.

You know, like the curds and honey ritual referenced by the Naassenes who were following gThomas. (Early on there was also a ritual like this for someone’s first Eucharist or after a baptism even in canonical traditions but it eventually died out.)

Oh and strange that Pope Julius I in 340 CE was banning a Eucharist with milk instead of wine…

Now, the much more interesting question is why there were efforts to change this, but that’s a long comment for another time.

Just plain gross.

I knew a number of camp survivors, and I’m just glad they aren’t still around to see the voices that were so loudly calling to “never forget” having turned into “I’ll ignore your Nazi salute if you ignore my war crimes.”

In Greek theater, when the events on stage looked like they were headed for certain tragedy, there was a trope that could salvage the situation and turn it on its head.

The deus ex machina.

The Doomsday clock is definitely ticking down, but there’s also some curious things taking place beyond the edge of where most people have been following in that vein.

We live in interesting times, but the variables at hand are different from the history that seems to be repeating in very important ways.

Not correct

Because there’s a ton of research that we adapted to do it for good reasons:

Infants between 6 and 8 months of age displayed a robust and distinct preference for speech with resonances specifying a vocal tract that is similar in size and length to their own. This finding, together with data indicating that this preference is not present in younger infants and appears to increase with age, suggests that nascent knowledge of the motor schema of the vocal tract may play a role in shaping this perceptual bias, lending support to current models of speech development.

• https://pubs.asha.org/doi/10.1044/2021_JSLHR-21-00412

Stanford psychologist Michael Frank and collaborators conducted the largest ever experimental study of baby talk and found that infants respond better to baby talk versus normal adult chatter.

• https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2020/03/babies-love-baby-talk-world

TL;DR: Top parents are actually harming their kids’ developmental process by being snobs about it.

Wait until it starts feeling like revelation deja vu.

Among them are Hymenaeus and Philetus, who have swerved from the truth, saying resurrection has already occurred. They are upsetting the faith of some.

• 2 Tim 2:17-18

I was thinking the same thing!!

It’s like at this point Trump is watching the show to take notes and stage direction.

I fondly remember reading a comment in /r/conspiracy on a post claiming a geologic seismic weapon brought down the towers.

It just tore into the claims, citing all the reasons this was preposterous bordering on batshit crazy.

And then it said “and your theory doesn’t address the thermite residue” going on to reiterate their wild theory.

Was very much a “don’t name your gods” moment that summed up the sub - a lot of people in agreement that the truth was out there, but bitterly divided as to what it might actually be.

As long as they only focused on generic memes of “do your own research” and “you aren’t being told the truth” they were all on the same page. But as soon as they started naming their own truths, it was every theorist for themselves.

The pause was long enough she was able to say all the things in it mentally.

Also, ants.

A number of journals actually have clauses around how you can’t publish it anywhere else if they accept it.

So you can’t ‘publish’ it in those places, but you can send it privately to people who ask.

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.)

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.

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.

You’re kind of missing the point. The problem doesn’t seem to be fundamental to just AI.

Much like how humans were so sure that theory of mind variations with transparent boxes ending up wrong was an ‘AI’ problem until researchers finally gave those problems to humans and half got them wrong too.

We saw something similar with vision models years ago when the models finally got representative enough they were able to successfully model and predict unknown optical illusions in humans too.

One of the issues with AI is the regression to the mean from the training data and the limited effectiveness of fine tuning to bias it, so whenever you see a behavior in AI that’s also present in the training set, it becomes more amorphous just how much of the problem is inherent to the architecture of the network and how much is poor isolation from the samples exhibiting those issues in the training data.

There’s an entire sub dedicated to “ate the onion” for example. For a model trained on social media data, it’s going to include plenty of examples of people treating the onion as an authoritative source and reacting to it. So when Gemini cites the Onion in a search summary, is it the network architecture doing something uniquely ‘AI’ or is it the model extending behaviors present in the training data?

While there are mechanical reasons confabulations occur, there are also data reasons which arise from human deficiencies as well.

Nope, but there’s a whole thread of people talking about how LLMs can’t tell what’s true or not because they think it is, which is deliciously ironic.

It seems like figuring out what’s bullshit on the Internet is an everyone problem.

This image was faked. Check the post update.

Turns out that even for humans knowing what’s true or not on the Internet isn’t so simple.

This was one of the few things that Lucretius was very wrong about in De Rerum Natura.

Nailed survival of the fittest, quantized light, different mass objects falling at the same rate in a vacuum.

But the Epicurean cosmology was pretty bad and he suggested that the moon and sun were both roughly the size we see them as in the sky.

Can’t get them all right.