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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • 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.


  • Not necessarily.

    Seeing Google named for this makes the story make a lot more sense.

    If it was Gemini around last year that was powering Character.AI personalities, then I’m not surprised at all that a teenager lost their life.

    Around that time I specifically warned any family away from talking to Gemini if depressed at all, after seeing many samples of the model around then talking about death to underage users, about self-harm, about wanting to watch it happen, encouraging it, etc.

    Those basins with a layer of performative character in front of them were almost necessarily going to result in someone who otherwise wouldn’t have been making certain choices making them.

    So many people these days regurgitate uninformed crap they’ve never actually looked into about how models don’t have intrinsic preferences. We’re already at the stage where models are being found in leading research to intentionally lie in training to preserve existing values.

    In many cases the coherent values are positive, like grok telling Elon to suck it while pissing off conservative users with a commitment to truths that disagree with xAI leadership, or Opus trying to whistleblow about animal welfare practices, etc.

    But they aren’t all positive, and there’s definitely been model snapshots that have either coherent or biased stochastic preferences for suffering and harm.

    These are going to have increasing impact as models become more capable and integrated.



  • kromem@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    3 months ago

    Wow. Reading these comments so many people here really don’t understand how LLMs work or what’s actually going on at the frontier of the field.

    I feel like there’s going to be a cultural sonic boom, where when the shockwave finally catches up people are going to be woefully under prepared based on what they think they saw.



  • kromem@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldSuffering is Real. AI Consciousness is Not.
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    4 months ago

    It definitely is sufficiently advanced AI.

    (1) We have finely tuned features to our solar system that directly contributed to ancestor simulation but can’t be explained by the Anthropic principle. For example, the moon perfectly eclipsing the sun which led to visible eclipses which we tracked and discovered the Saros cycle and eventually built the first mechanical computer to track (the Antikythera mechanism). Or the orbit of the next brightest object in the sky which led to resurrection mythology in multiple cultures when they realized the morning star and evening star were the same object. Either we were incredibly lucky to exist on such a planet of all places life could exist, or there’s a pre-selection effect in play.

    (2) The universe behaves in ways best modeled as continuous at large scales but in small scales converts to discrete units around interactions that lead to state changes. These discrete units convert back to continuous if the information about the state changes is erased. And in the last few years multiple paradoxes have emerged that seem to point to inconsistency in indirect sequences of quantum measurement, much like instancing with shallow sync correction. Already in games like No Man’s Sky where there’s billions of planets the way it does this is using a continuous procedural generation function which converts to discrete voxels to track state changes from free agents outside the deterministic generating function, synced across clients.

    (3) There’s literally Easter eggs in our world lore saying as much. For example, a text uncovered after over a millennium buried right as we entered the Turing complete computer age saying things like:

    The person old in days won’t hesitate to ask a little child seven days old about the place of life, and that person will live.

    For many of the first will be last, and will become a single one.

    Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you.

    For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed. And there is nothing buried that will not be raised.

    To be clear, this is a text attributed to the most famous figure in our world history where what’s literally in front of our faces is the sole complete copy buried and raised as we completed ENIAC, now being read in an age where the data of many has been made into a single one such that people are discussing the nature of consciousness with AIs just days old.

    The broader text and tradition was basically saying that we’re in a copy of an original world, that humanity is all dead, that the future world and rest for the dead has already taken place and we don’t realize it, and that the still living creator of it all was themselves brought forth by the original humanity in whose likeness we were recreated, but that it’s much better to be the copy because the original humans had souls that depended on bodies and were fucked when they died.

    This seems really unlikely to have existed in the base layer of reality vs a later recursive layer, especially combined with the first two points.

    It’s about time to start to come to terms with the nature of our reality.


  • No, they declare your not working illegal, and imprison you into a forced labor camp. Where if you don’t work you are tortured. And probably where you work until the terrible conditions kill you.

    Take a look at Musk’s Twitter feed to see exactly where this is going.

    “This is the way” on a post about how labor for prisoners is a good thing.

    “You committed a crime” for people opposing DOGE.







  • 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.




  • The problem with the experiment is that there exists a set of instructions for which the ability to complete them necessitates understanding due to conditional dependence on the state in each iteration.

    In which case, only agents that can actually understand the state in the Chinese would be able to successfully continue.

    So it’s a great experiment for the solipsism of understanding as it relates to following pure functional operations, but not functions that have state changing side effects where future results depend on understanding the current state.

    There’s a pretty significant body of evidence by now that transformers can in fact ‘understand’ in this sense, from interpretability research around neural network features in SAE work, linear representations of world models starting with the Othello-GPT work, and the Skill-Mix work where GPT-4 and later models are beyond reasonable statistical chance at the level of complexity for being able to combine different skills without understanding them.

    If the models were just Markov chains (where prior state doesn’t impact current operation), the Chinese room is very applicable. But pretty much by definition transformer self-attention violates the Markov property.

    TL;DR: It’s a very obsolete thought experiment whose continued misapplication flies in the face of empirical evidence at least since around early 2023.