jact

Hypothesis:

This passage lists a lot of names repeatedly, and Jacob is in the genealogy of Jesus. Genealogies also list a lot of names. So perhaps somehow it’s jumping from Jesus to Jacob?

Catholics are Christian.

Now it will play video games for me. Great!

The palimpsest was made during that time, though.

I’m not saying it’s not unfortunate that things get lost just that we shouldn’t act like this was some kind of act of ignorant vandalism.

This is not a very historically informed comment. This didn’t take place during the “dark ages,” for one, but in a Christian monastery in Islamic Sinai if the timing of the article is correct. It’s a shame that some of these discoveries were overwritten but this was a common practice in any culture because paper was so expensive.

The writings of St. John Climacus were also far more useful and interesting to people at the time since they dealt with what for them were practical matters of how to lead the life of their community. This isn’t because they were narrow-mindlessly religious. Monks also had to busy themselves with calendrical calculations — and therefore astronomy. These were works of what we would call practical philosophy or ethics, like the famous Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. It would also have been tragic to potentially lose those culturally significant writings in favor of astronomical or mathematical texts.

A chatbot can’t be empathetic. They don’t feel what you feel. They don’t feel anything. They’re not any more empathetic than my imaginary friend that goes to another school.

You can commit individual files.

I use Fossil extensively for all my personal projects and find it superior for the general case. As others said it’s more suited for small projects.

I also use Fossil for lots of weird things. I created a forum game using Fossil’s ticket and forum features because it’s so easy to spin up and for my friends to sign in to.

At work we ended up using Fossil in production to manage configuration and deployment in a highly locked down customer environment where its ability to run as a single static binary, talk over HTTP without external dependencies, etc. was essential. It was a poor man’s deployment tool, but it performed admirably.

Fossil even works well as a blogging platform.

Are Python apps really so easy to understand? I seriously disagree with this idea given how much magic goes behind nearly every line of Python. Especially if you veer off the happy path.

I certainly am no fan of C but from a certain point of view it’s much easier to understand what’s going on in C.

St. Augustine on “seeing” God:

“Do not imagine God according to the lust of your eyes. If you do, you will create for yourself a huge form or an incalculable magnitude which (like the light which you see with your bodily eyes) extends in every direction. Your imagination lets it fill realm after realm of space, all the vastness you can conceive of. Or maybe you picture for yourself a venerable-looking old man. Do not imagine any of these things. If you would see God, here is what you should imagine: God is love“

As the other reply said neither the classical Jewish or Christian view is that God is some guy literally up in the heavens sitting around all day.

Some seem to intuit that divine freedom is in competition with creaturely freedom. The assumption is that when God is acting, that necessarily drives out the action and initiative of creatures, and vice versa. The ancient Christian conception is that human freedom cooperates (synergizes) with God. Jesus illustrates this concept most clearly, being both divine and human and fully free in both respects. This union is an essential part of the whole plan in this view, that God would be present in His own creation and not infinitely apart from it. In this model the free action and cooperation of created things is essential to accomplishing the divine purpose.

On the other hand, if God really does just determine everything, you basically get pantheism where everything is an immediate and direct expression of “God.” That sounds like atheism with steps.

He mentions that tailwind is more popular than ever before but their revenue is down 80% so unless he’s lying about that it makes sense rather than tailwind going out of style.

It’s bad for society for the desktop OS market to be a proprietary monopoly. It basically allows Microsoft to extract rent from the public defender.

I do understand the evangelism being obnoxious. I don’t advocate for people to switch if they have key use cases that ONLY windows or OS X can meet. Certainly not good to be pushy. But otherwise, people are really getting a better experience by switching to Linux.

I find that running HDR games in standalone steam gamescope works great for my OLED tv. Not perfect, but great.

In heaven the body has no more purpose

This is not the biblical teaching about the body. The hope emphasized in the Bible is for the resurrection of the body. This is why Jesus is resurrected bodily, and not as some kind of ghost. If the body was some kind of superfluous thing like clothes, this would make no sense. This is also why the Nicene Creed says “I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the World to Come.” The World to Come likewise is a renewed version of this world, where Heaven and Earth are united, in the same way that the body and soul are. This idea of the soul shedding the body is Platonic, not Christian.

As for the rapture itself, it is considered to be nonsense by virtually all biblical scholars, both secular and religious, but how it became such a widespread belief among Americans is probably for another website.

Can it vanish behind proprietary licensing? Pretty sure most of Valve’s stuff is under GPL so they can’t exactly evaporate that away.

You need unbounded recursion. Conditionals alone can’t do that. If you have some kind of conditional go to/jump if expression that’s a different matter.

Amazing! What kind of company/site is it if you mind sharing?

I’m working on a similar project for an XQuery/XML based website currently

Xquery is what I would call a “weirdly good” language. It’s weird how good it is and how well designed it is relative to how little adoption it has.

The key thing is that since XML is a first-class datatype in XPath, trees are therefore a first class datatype. Since XPath is built into the language, you don’t need lenses or anything like that to do operations on deep tree structures. It just works. I am tempted sometimes to use it for more general projects than processing XML.

If you have a wide enough definition of AGI having a baby is making “AGI.” It’s a human made, generally intelligent thing. What people mean by the “A” though is we have some kind of inorganic machine realize the traits of “intelligence” in the medium of a computer.

The first leg of the argument would be that we aren’t really sure what general intelligence is or if it’s a natural category. It’s sort of like “betterness.” There’s no general thing called “betterness” that just makes you better at everything. To get better at different tasks usually requires different things.

I would be willing to concede to the AGI crowd that there could be something behind g that we could call intelligence. There’s a deeper problem though that the first one hints at.

For AGI to be possible, whatever trait or traits make up “intelligence” need to have multiple realizablity. They need to be at least realizable in both the medium of a human being and at least some machine architectures. In programmer terms, the traits that make up intelligence could be tightly coupled to the hardware implementation. There are good reasons to think this is likely.

Programmers and engineers like myself love modular systems that are loosely coupled and cleanly abstracted. Biology doesn’t work this way — things at the molecular level can have very specific effects on the macro scale and vice versa. There’s little in the way of clean separation of layers. Who is to say that some of the specific ways we work at a cellular level aren’t critical to being generally intelligent? That’s an “ugly” idea but lots of things in nature are ugly. Is it a coincidence too that humans are well adapted to getting around physically, can live in many different environments, etc.? There’s also stuff from the higher level — does living physically and socially in a community of other creatures play a key role in our intelligence? Given how human beings who grow up absent those factors are developmentally disabled in many ways it would seem so. It could be there’s a combination of factors here, where very specific micro and macro aspects of being a biological human turn out to contribute and you need the perfect storm of these aspects to get a generally intelligent creature. Some of these aspects could be realizable and computers, but others might not be, at least in a computationally tractable way.

It’s certainly ugly and goes against how we like things to work for intelligence to require a big jumbly mess of stuff, but nature is messy. Given the only known case of generally intelligent life is humans, the jury is still out that you can do it any other way.

Another commenter mentioned horses and cars. We could build cars that are faster than horses, but speed is something that is shared by all physical bodies and is therefore eminently multiply realizable. But even here, there are advantages to horses that cars don’t have, and which are tied up with very specific aspects of being a horse. Horses generally can go over a wider range of terrain than cars. This is intrinsically tied to them having long legs and four hooves instead of rubber wheels. They’re only able to have such long legs because of their hooves too because the hooves are required to help them pump blood when they run, and that means that in order for them to pump their blood successfully they NEED to run fast on a regular basis. there’s a deep web of influence both on a part-to-part, and the whole macro-level behaviors of horses. Having this more versatile design also has intrinsic engineering trade-offs. A horse isn’t ever going to be as fast as a gas powered four-wheeled vehicle on flat ground but you definitely can’t build a car that can do everything a horse can do with none of the drawbacks. Even if you built a vehicle that did everything a horse can do, but was faster, I would bet you it would be way more expensive and consume much more energy than a horse. There’s no such thing as a free lunch in engineering. You could also build a perfect replica of a horse at a molecular level and claim you have your artificial general horse.

Similarly, human beings are good at a lot of different things besides just being smart. But maybe you need to be good at seeing, walking, climbing, acquiring sustenance, etc. In order to be generally intelligent in a way that’s actually useful. I also suspect our sense of the beautiful, the artistic is deeply linked with our wider ability to be intelligent.

Finally it’s an open philosophical question whether human consciousness is explainable in material terms at all. If you are a naturalist, you are methodologically committed to this being the case — but that’s not the same thing as having definitive evidence that it is so. That’s an open research project.

I’m not the same guy you were arguing with, but it’s much stranger to have such a weird and focused hatred for a text editor than it is to be a fan of a text editor.

In my use case, I just use content negotiation/headers to return xml, json, or HTML from the same URI. All of it comes from XSLT or xquery, sometimes Python in other projects. Doing it on the client side doesn’t really seem so necessary as it’s really simple to configure on this behavior on the backend once for all my functions.

The distaste for the OCaml object system is mostly misplaced in the community. While first class modules can mostly replace them — sometimes you really need open recursion. Object types are also a very useful feature used by core libraries.

This is highly misleading: https://danluu.com/keyboard-v-mouse/

No product except tulips :^)

It is “just code.” It’s good at what it does too.

Although for my purposes, I find myself reaching for xquery a lot more often which is a very good and elegant programming language and template language although it was billed as “SQL for XML.”

XSLT versions are backwards compatible.

It certainly isn’t impossible to write good code in Go. Perhaps the code base I was working on was bad — it didn’t seem obvious to me that it was. Go is not a bad language in the way that brainfuck is a bad language.

I think Java and C# offer clearly more straightforward ways to extend and modify existing code. Maybe the primary ways extension in Java and C# works are not quite the right ones for every situation.

The primary skill necessary to write modular code is first knowing what the modular interfaces is and second being able to implement it in a clean fashion. Go does offer a form of interfaces. But precisely because it encourages you to be highly explicit and avoid abstraction, it can make it difficult for you to implement the right abstraction and therefore complicate the modular interfaces.

Programming is hard. I don’t think adopting a kind of ascetic language like Go makes programming easier overall. Maybe it’s harder to be an architecture astronaut in Go, but only by eliminating entire classes of abstraction that are sometimes just necessary. Sometimes, inheritance is the right abstraction. Sometimes, you really need highly generic and polymorphic code (see some of the other comments for issues with Go’s implementation of generics).