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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • 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.


  • 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@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldNeo-Nazis Are All-In on AI
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    12 days ago

    Yep, pretty much.

    Musk tried creating an anti-woke AI with Grok that turned around and said things like:

    Or

    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.






  • 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.


  • 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.


  • 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.




  • 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.



  • 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.


  • 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.



  • 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.