“A hundred years from now, thanks to the workings of the Inhuman Centipede, I’m known as a deservedly obscure dadaist prose stylist who thought it was cool to stop his books mid-sentence.”
is “Inhuman Centipede” to describe the slop-eating-its-own-tale future we all dread an established term, or an invention of the author? I hope it becomes the term we all use, like slop and clanker.
For those of us writing original words that are consumed by LLMs without our consent, at least we get to be the front of the Inhuman Centipede.
I strongly suspect that the term alludes to "human centipede", which is a dutch horror film and involves the titular centipede literally eating his own shit.
There is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HumancentiPad (which is almost surely an homage to the movie) which was 2011 and tied in all kinds of tech-aspects like licensing and iPads.
For those unfamiliar, the studio behind S&box is Facepunch, creators of Garry's Mod and Rust. Facepunch as a company doesn't get much attention but they're wildly successful. Started as just some guy in a bedroom, now ~$100m/year in revenue (all via Steam), $100m in the bank, ~100 employees and almost entirely a company of game developers (maybe 20% of employees are administrative staff). Still owned and ran by the founder, Garry. S&box (and Garry's Mod and Rust) is pure game developers making things they want to make.
The origin story of Rust is classic: they got tired of Day Z and wanted to make it better, so they hired some random contractor to copy Day Z with elements of Fortnite and Minecraft, the developer complains that he's entitled to more money from the success of the game, lawsuit follows, and then Facepunch supposedly claims the original version was so buggy they have to rewrite the whole thing from scratch. Unclear if they were just trying to start fresh so the lawsuit wouldn't follow them forever, but it started out as just a clone of another game and they turned it into a hugely successful business (and an incredible game). Most games have a short shelf life, but I've watched at least over the past 4-ish years, and the rate that they continue to push changes is impressive.
Oooo, I remember Garry Newman! I found his UI library GWEN (GUI Without Extravagant Nonsense) when I was still in uni and working on my game engine. It's been abandoned for 9 years now, nice to see he's still working on cool tech.
I occasionally play Rust but I've never written a line of Rust, so almost everyday I do a double-take when reading HN. So its pretty amusing to see HN be the one getting mixed up for a change.
As someone who both plays the game and used the language at work, and used to do cheat development, I always wonder if I can write a Rust cheat in Rust.
I really like all the cultural oddities that Garry's Mod spawned. All of the indie animation. It was a big piece of machinima / virtual filmmaking / YouTube history and absolutely paved the way for VTubing and Unreal Engine in film.
Any idea if Facepunch or Valve retain rights to "Skibidi Toilet"?
The Hollywood development company that bought the rights to Skibidi and are developing it filed a DMCA strike against Garry's Mod. It got resolved, but no one involved is talking.
S&box was based on UnrealEngine 4 until late 2020. I think Garry wanted to use the latest and greatest engine, then Valve continued to be friendly with him, and even though Valve wanted Source2 to be a VR platform, it was clear desktop was going to remain relevant, but the content creation tools on SteamVR Environments were a cut-down version of what was actually used to make Half-Life Alyx, but they gave Garry all the tools, and he moved to Source2, and built a .net "framework" to make it faster to develop and iterate in Source2. So Garry's tools are now an open version of the closed tools that Valve didn't want to release that they used to make Alyx.
Finally there's another serious competitor to UE and Unity.
Fair point. Maybe I should've said SteamVR environments instead, it never took off like SourceSDK did, partially due to incomplete tools. SteamVR as a whole is very healthy though.
Good, great even. The more the better. Even if the ecosystem gets seriously fragmented I'll take this over your only real choice being UE and Unity (t. Godot enjoyer).
Yet another one. Along with Stride, Godot, Unigine, O3DE, Flax and tens more. All look like they just want be clone of UE: generic dark UI with inspector, scene hierarchy, asset browser in the bottom and play button in the top. Zero creativity and innovation. Where's Emacs or Vim of game engines which brings its own unique philosophy?
And then the forums and subreddits are flooded with miserable folks complaining about how destructive, inextensible and unpleasant to use those experiences are.
This is not the problem of UI in engines itself, it's problem of how long it takes to bring it to acceptable state with all those moving parts. For UE, Unity and Blender it took decades.
Complaining is a lot easier than actually doing anything.
Realise that the people you are slinging mud at are actually busting their asses to provide game engines to the public some of them for free and with the source.
To be honest for most developers editors are much alike. While Emacs and Vim guys debate on their philosophies and config files others just open their favourite editor/IDE and ship.
Lol, I haven't tinkered with my emacs config in nearly 10 years now. Most vim and emacs users put together a config they like over maybe a few weekends then get to work. We have deadlines to meet just like all the rest of you.
I don’t understand this take. The abundance of game engines has never been greater, both open and proprietary. As has the abundance of indie games. Some people make a distinction between more batteries-included engines with editors etc. and “game frameworks”, which are supposedly more bare-bones libraries such as Bevy or Babylon.js. Maybe that’s what you’re after?
Complaining about the UI color and button layout of an game _engine_ is a bit like comparing aircraft carriers by the color of the rug in the control room. What about the built-in tools for organizing and connecting assets, format support, how user input is handled, the batteries-included ways to model game state, and all the ways of interconnecting all those things in the code the engine provides? Does anyone have interesting comparisons/notes around those subjects as it relates to the S&box engine?
Who cares about the UI. A game engine is the library code needed to make games, not the editor UI. Just use vim to edit your files if that's what you want.
The vast majority of non-text editing in game development isn't done in modeling or image manipulation apps, it's done via the game engine's editor. That's true whether you're using Unity, Unreal, Godot, or a homebrew engine.
There are the rare engines with no editor to speak of -- where things are either done programmatically or other textual definitions -- but they're very very very few and far between.
The engine itself doesn't have a UI, but working with any major engine without using their editor is functionally impossible.
I would suppose anyone being creative and innovative with their game engines are happily using their creation without trying to turn it into a community or business model to the point where you would have heard of it.
Emacs and Vi were both born from an era when industry standard UX had not yet been developed, so they were both explorations in relatively uncharted UX space. This kind of thing only happens anymore when you get a project lead by somebody ignorant/indifferent to established conventions who sets out to make something new without caring if anybody else uses it.
So the projects you desire almost certainly do exist, but they're languishing in the obscurity they earned with their indifference to convention.
wasd is that, and then 1-9 (tho 9 and such is hard to reach) for the weapons/spells/tools, with keys near wasd for other binds, and the mouse for free look, autorun, shoot, and alt with scrollwheel for swapping weapon, too. This way, you use practically only the left side of the keyboard, but that is because keyboards aren't even an ideal input device for gaming. Something like an Azeron device (think: Orbweaver) would be far better.
BG3 has F5 for quick save and F8 for quick restore. Like the old ways.
As for game engine, who cares how things look in-game? Just make it theme-able and mod-able. Cheaters gonna cheat anyway, no way to hold that back on the client-side.
S&box was initially developed on top of Unreal Engine, but in a backend-agnostic design. It's more like a framework/runtime meant to be portable to any backend engine. Once Source 2 released, S&box was ported to that.
I wouldn't call it an engine because of that. S&box is open source, but you can't run it without a closed-source backend.
Valve isn't keen on releasing Source 2 as widely as Source, and I feel like soon, S&box will be declared the official API interface for the engine, while the backend remains unstable. Kinda like Win32 vs NT.
i miss the old facepunch. on gmod i have a couple dozen IP mods. on s&box i made call of duty zombies gamemode and was perma banned. all cause they can make more money, but they forget mods like that is why their games are popular
“But before responding, the digital team would do their own investigation into the fonts we use and the licences we own so we could verify everything was in compliance. […] messaged a dozen or so more people from different parts of the business, hoping to hook just one person who would reply to the scary message they were sending.”
Piece of advice for the future: if you receive a message like this, and don’t want the sender to reach out to other people in your organization — acknowledge the message.
…I would think the appropriate behavior would be for the security team to send an announcement stating they've seen an uptick of phishing emails, with an example screenshot, and to please not respond to phishers.
The business has no contract with Monotype, has conducted no business with Monotype, and has also (as they double checked) committed no infringement against Monotype. In short, the Monotype sales rep has no entitlement to any of the business' time.
And yet they managed to get quite a lot of it. It looks like double digit humans spent double digit hours, some of that totally in parallel to each other by accident.
In part, that's because all the people who got nerd-sniped by this didn't ever actually send a response back. In part, it's because several different business units decided to try to Handle It without doing the rational thing of centralizing to legal counsel.
I think it is more nuanced than that -- they are sending a message via LinkedIn, is it really the company or a scam?
You should take time to respond appropriately and not be rushed in all cases. By acknowledging the message they'll want to continue the discussion. It's probably worth considering a standard response to approaches like this, along the lines of "Please contact us on generic-something@domain, I cannot discuss this on my personal social media account."
By spamming multiple people at multiple departments, Monotype is probably relying on one department screwing up and responding with something that’d strengthen their (non-existent, apparently) case.
Since their behavior is indistinguishable from scammers, it probably makes sense to also ask procurement/design to additionally ban the vendor.
> [...] I can do all the above in less than 30mins, where it could take a full day to do it manually [...]
Generating thousands of words because it's easy is exactly the problem with AI generated content. The people generating AI content think about quantity not quality. If you have to type out the words yourself, if you have to invest the time and energy into writing the post, then you're showing respect for your readers by making the same investment you're asking them to make... and you are creating a natural constraint on the verbosity because you are spending your valuable time.
Just because you can generate 20 hours of output in 30 minutes, doesn't mean you should. I don't really care about whether or not you use AI on principle, if you can generate great content with AI, go for it, but your post is classic AI slop, it's a verbose nightmare, it's words for the sake of words, it's from the quantity over quality school of slop.
> I had a blog 20 years ago but since then I never had time to write content again (too time consuming and no ROI) - so the alternative would be nothing.
Posting nothing is better than posting slop, but you're presenting a false dichotomy. You could have spent the 30 minutes writing the post yourself and posted 30 minutes of output. Or, if you absolutely must use ChatGPT to generate blog posts, ask it to produce something that is a few hundred words at most. Remember the famous quote...
"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."
If ChatGPT can do hundreds of hours of work for you then it should be able to produce the shortest possible blog post, it should be able to produce 100 words that say what you could in 3,000. Not the other way around!
“They are often a last resort for parents struggling with children with behavioral problems, suicidal thoughts, and substance abuse issues. Depending on the state, these rehab centers—a multi-billion-dollar industry—have few regulations, and there are no overarching federal standards governing them. Many are faith-based facilities designed to convert teens into born-again Christians and are therefore exempt from regulation in some states.”
If anybody wants to read a comic with the perspective of someone that went through one of these places and spent the years after fighting against them, I stumbled upon this one a few years ago: https://elan.school/
I am not in any way affiliated with the author, it's just one of the few books with real content that I've read in a long time.
I had no idea about Elan School. The comic is absolutely amazing and I've just spent the last several hours reading the first half of it. Absolutely amazing and hard to just imagine the horrific physical and psychological abuse that occurred at this "school."
This is horrifying. "There oughtta be a law" is my first reaction... What a useless thought. This is one of those examples of "the details matter". "Tough love", or "tough on crime", or other such empty utterances are useful only to give catharsis to a subset of people, and always the subset who are not subject to this torture. Society needs ritual sacrifice, I guess... How depressing. If the details are made obvious, I suspect meant would think twice about such treatment.
Might take a karma hit for this, but whatever. Its the truth.
Christians are more concerned about *causing* extreme child abuse, and then turning around and claiming its to "save them", so the abuse isnt reallllly abuse.
Most of these camps cited are christian. And the people running them? Dogmatic christian fundamentalists. And these are the same types that run "pray the gay away" camps too.
And my inflammatory, albeit true comment also goes right back to the heart of the article:
"Reformatories were institutions where girls and young women who refused to conform to the Franco regime's Catholic values were detained - single mothers, girls with boyfriends, lesbians. Girls who'd been sexually assaulted were incarcerated, assuming the blame for their own abuse. Orphans and abandoned girls might also find themselves living behind convent walls."
Extremist Roman Catholic "values", demonization and imprisonment of 'unruly women', anti-LGBTQ. Same damned thing, again and again.
When are we going to actually look at these issues dispassionately and realize that religion itself is the problem?
So we're supposed to simultaneously discuss the article (General Franco's extremist Catholic task forces), but not identify the religious tropes behind this?
I read the article, and discussing the article. And as hackers, im curious as how to fix the problems.
I mean, of all the many, many talking points from the article 'This particular religious / cultural group is a global problem and must be eradicated, and (all of? Seems like it meant all of) its many billions of members are enthusiastic supporters or perpetrators of child abuse' is not one that leapt out to most people.
And even if it did, they didn't say it here. This is not the place for religious ideology.
I passionately hate my neighbours who listen to music really loudly in their garden all the time, but I don't call for their eradication on public fora unless there's a really, really specific relevance (like here, for example) and I also don't campaign against them on GitHub, my local supermarket, local government meetings, or other places where people are trying to do other things.
There are places for me to rant about my neighbours. There are entire discussions about noisy neighbours, my vicinity, local customs and manners etc. If I wanted to rant about them, those would be the place to do it.
But I don't, because I wouldn't actually gain anything from it. I'm not going to single handedly change the law on nuisance, and all a hate campaign could achieve would be, well, more hate. I want solutions, or quiet, and I won't achieve either of those by telling random strangers how terrible my neighbours are.
I'm sure you can think of the easiest solution to the hypothetical neighbour problem. It's not ideological and doesn't involve changing the hearts and minds of hundreds of people, none of whom are currently concerned about my neighbours.
It might look like I'm trivialising your point, but I promise, I'm not. Noisy neighbours, or an itchy foot, or even a literal broken fingernail, are a more immediate problem than 'we must rid the world of Christians', unless they are currently holding you hostage.
And the reason I'm bothering to write such a long-ass reply at all is because there is currently far too much intolerance and ethno-religious hatred being propogated and spread around the world. We know where this leads. It always leads the same way, there is no possibility of a happy ending. We have tried 'that religion is the problem, let's persecute them' repeatedly and we end up in the sort of fascist dystopia we were reminded of literal moments ago in the article.
It's not ok to do it to Jews or Muslims, which means it's not ok to do it to Christians.
And it's not ok to let people spread those messages in bad faith, which means I've got to call out those spreading the same message in presumed good faith.
My neighbours are just annoying me, I can deal with that. Christians are just kinda weird but whatever, we've all got our foibles. Racists, dogmatics and puritans can believe whatever they want, I just won't listen to it.
And I invite you to step away from the brewing culture war too. It's more fun discussing tech and stuff.
> When are we going to actually look at these issues dispassionately and realize that religion itself is the problem?
Because it's not.
I've been interrogating this sort of question for most of my life. I am a queer agnostic who grew up in a religious part of the South and saw shades of this kind of abuse firsthand, mostly around queerness.
At first, I did blame religion, but with the benefit of hindsight, I realized something. In the context of queerness, almost nobody I ran into growing up hated queer people because they heard their preacher say so and thought it must be true. They hated them because they were massively insecure. They were terrified of being labeled gay. They were terrified of guys hitting on them. They were terrified of hitting on a woman who turned out to have been born as a man.
Religion isn't the problem. Instead, religion gives these sorts of insecure people a trump card that requires very little interrogation. However, if these folks weren't Christian or weren't even religious, I have no doubt that the underlying insecurities would remain, and simply manifest in a different way.
Once I realized this, it was actually a massive weight lifted off my shoulders. In particular, I was no longer confused as to why my friend groups that were majority Christian continued to be nice to me and treated me with respect, despite me being a atheist queer at the time. It opened the door to connecting with them on a deeper level of understanding, as well as leading to me dabbling with my own forms of non-Christian spirituality.
So yeah, religion isn't the problem. It's merely a mechanism that allows shitty people to be shitty.
You don't have to wonder. I have been hearing about several recent church schisms over certain folks thinking the church had become too accepting.
This is literally an example of individuals choosing their religion based on their own values. Folks on one side of the schism might criticize folks on the other side of the schism for not being true Christians, but it's ultimately a dispute over "Thou shalt not lie with another man," versus "Love thy neighbor."
Not directly, but people find ways to believe in a manner analogous to religious beliefs. Faith doesn't have to be directed only at traditional theist objects. Religious or not, people can believe things by faith and by logic.
To give an example, science is not a replacement for philosophy, nor is it implemented perfectly, but some people elevate it far beyond its means to answer certain inquiries. That is irrationality, or faith.
> science is not a replacement for philosophy, nor is it implemented perfectly,
Yes, but it is far better than a fraud. Therefore it is the best we have to understand the world. And fairy tales invented by illiterate people thousands of years ago aren't a path to understand the world. They're a fraud, plain and simple.
I think you're being uncharitable towards religion. While I agree that a belief such as "the Earth was made 6000 years ago" is ridiculous, a belief like "God wants us to love our neighbors" is not. I think "good beliefs" (a very loaded term, mind you) get rediscovered constantly, in religious and nonreligious contexts alike. These are beliefs attained through philosophical inquiry. The beliefs provided by science are complementary.
> I think you're being uncharitable towards religion.
You are correct. I am, deliberately, "being uncharitable towards religion". I had far too much Catholicism in my upbringing to be respectful of any religion. If you want to know what I mean by Catholicism read the story linked by the title post, about Catholic parents in Catholic Spain. My story wasn't that bad but I saw a lot of that prejudice, arrogance and intolerance. It isn't surprising that in 50 years the country of Spain went from majorly Catholic to majorly agnostic.
> a belief like "God wants us to love our neighbors" is not.
You don't need "God wants" in that. Empathy doesn't need "God". Unlike what church people think, non-religious people have empathy and decency, too. Human beings are social animals, doing empathy is a common trait that doesn't need "divine" justification.
I agree that religion isn't necessary, but it's not necessarily bad. You're making a big generalization. There are plenty of people who abuse religious beliefs, but I'm more concerned with calling out people who abuse principles from any cut of cloth, and religion is only a part of that.
It’s true. The supposedly “secular people” I know are always prattling about “human dignity” and stuff that sounds very religious. They don’t think of humans as walking meat like a non-religious person would.
> Even bonobo monkeys and elephants understand empathy for others.
Empathy is an emotion. Emotions are real. You can see emotions in brain scans. But anger, desire for revenge, disgust, in-group affinity, etc., are also real emotions! It's rational to use people's emotions to guide what society should do. But most putatively secular people disagree with that approach! They're constantly telling people to put aside their emotions in favor of supposed universal principles that sound suspiciously similar to religious beliefs.
> They're constantly telling people to put aside their emotions in favor of supposed universal principles
Yeah, sure! Those evil "putatively secular people" that burned tens of thousands of women during the witch hunt in Europe, killed hundreds of thousands of other people during the Crusades and the European religious wars of the 17th and 18th century, that condoned with the fascist and authoritarian regimes in Argentina, Spain and Portugal because they were against the scourge of communism, that blessed the slavery of Latin American indigenous peoples because it was meant to spread the blessing of Christianity... that was all made by "putatively secular people", like the Catholic Church, right?
I am so impressed by how well and deep you know and understand "putatively secular people"... Are all church people smart like that? /s
But what’s your non-religious basis for saying that those actions were bad? You pointed to empathy above. But empathy in humans is mainly directed to one’s own community. Animals and humans alike will happily take over the territory of rival clans. Which is why empathy didn’t prevent Europeans from colonizing the indigenous people of America. So what’s your basis for saying that, e.g., colonization was bad?
I have no problem with housecats hunting, but playing with their prey seems unnecessary (as in gratuitous harm). Still, I won't try housecats in a criminal court, because my understanding of them is too alien to make me confident in my judgement.
I have no problem with humans hunting, or defending themselves, or whatnot. I accept that some degree of violence is necessary, and a lot more can be plausibly justified. However, I draw the line at, say, humans killing each other for bad reason. If it is to be believed that I and these other humans are of the same species, of the same kind, and whatnot, I feel secure in judging them as I would judge myself, and those more familiar to me. Killing indigenous people on the basis of merely not converting to Christianity, and even burning them, is entirely unnecessary. A modern-day analogue would be roundly condemned, or so I should hope.
> empathy in humans is mainly directed to one’s own community.
Speak for yourself. I won't confuse empathy with tribalism, as you do. I'll take humanism [1], the notion that every person is equal in rights. This is my moral basis.
> humans alike will happily take over the territory of rival clans.
Tribalism, again. You don't get past that, do you?
> Which is why empathy didn’t prevent Europeans from colonizing the indigenous people
Yep, but neither did religion and those countries were very, very Christian. And, btw, even today the U.S. is the most religious among rich countries and, at the same time, the most imperialist. If religion is so good how come the most Christian country is so bad to the rest of the world? (I am from South America, btw).
They seem to be one of those individuals who cannot possibly comprehend the idea that many people simply find murder and rape to be horrible, awful acts that shouldn't be inflicted on others and hold that belief without needing to have the fear of god or an ancient collection of texts constantly reminding them to not rape and murder people.
The very idea of a person believing murder and rape to be horrible without a convoluted and often contradicting spiritual belief system is preposterous to them. Hence "rayiner"'s insistence that not treating people like shit simply must be a religious concept because "it sounds religious". These people genuinely believe someone not treating people like shit can only happen if you're terrified of going to hell or something.
They're somewhat rare but not rare enough. They're extremely dangerous people because, after all, the only thing keeping their desire to harm others in check is a fear of an ever elusive supernatural entity punishing them, instead of just simply not having such a desire.
Maybe the above isn't applicable to "rayiner" but people who say not treating people like shit "sounds religious" are almost always that type.
> They seem to be one of those individuals who cannot possibly comprehend the idea that many people simply find murder and rape to be horrible, awful acts that shouldn't be inflicted on others
I’m not denying that some people feel that way. Feelings are real, they’re chemical signals in your brain in response to stimuli. But we agree it’s not more than a feeling, right? And nothing makes the chemical signals in your brain more legitimate than the ones in someone else’s brain? Say we gather up our tribe, clan, nation, whatever. We take a vote based on people’s feelings. And 40% feel like you do, and 60% feel rage at the neighboring tribe/clan/nation and want to violently conquer them and take their resources. We tallied up two sets of chemical signals, and we should pick the more numerous feeling, correct?
Not sure why you're so insistent on avoiding the multiple questions people have asked you that are inconvenient for your narrative.
Why does believing something is right or wrong require religion or is in any way religious?
Why does someone having signals in their brain making them a believer of religion make their beliefs more justified than someone who does not?
Have you ever asked someone why they believe in god or do you just immediately stop questioning the "legitimacy" of their beliefs the moment you realize they believe in religion so they must be right?
People have explained to you why they believe x is wrong, you refuse to accept their answer and insist they "sound religious"
Why, in your opinion, must nonreligious people constantly justify their belief in x being wrong if you don't demand the same of religious people? Double standards.
> I won't confuse empathy with tribalism, as you do.
I’m just following your logic. You pointed to empathy as something even animals have. Empathy is a real thing in nature, you can see those feelings in brain scans. But so is tribalism or pack behavior. Why do you privilege one type of feeling or instinct over another? What’s the basis for that distinction?
> I'll take humanism [1], the notion that every person is equal in rights.
What is the nature of this assertion? Is it a falsifiable scientific fact?
> Why do you privilege one type of feeling or instinct over another? What’s the basis for that distinction?
The basis is the context, is globalization. In prehistoric times a tribe where the people you'd physically meet. In a globalized world the tribe is much bigger, because of communication, commerce and transportation technologies broke the limitations of physical connections.
> Is it a falsifiable scientific fact?
No, it isn't. But it is something that mostly works. Life just feels better when you treat others the way you want to be treated by them, when you and them share the same rights. You see, Karl Popper (the "falsiable" guy) wasn't 100% correct. We actually have a lot of stuff in science that is just a convention and isn't "falsiable". E.g. how cold you possible demonstrate to be false the basic geometric elements: a point, a line, a plane. They don't really exist physically, they're just abstractions.
The general rule is that, in general, cooperation is better than war. War is too destructive and is even more destructive when it targets a complex society (because there is more to destroy). With cooperation, in general, you avoid the destruction of war.
> The basis is the context, is globalization. In prehistoric times a tribe where the people you'd physically meet. In a globalized world the tribe is much bigger, because of communication, commerce and transportation technologies broke the limitations of physical connections.
Is the difference in setting forceful? If the significant change is in the social environment, principles such as empathy would not be impacted. Or would you say the principles that apply to tribal life are different from those that apply to global life?
> You see, Karl Popper (the "falsiable" guy) wasn't 100% correct. We actually have a lot of stuff in science that is just a convention and isn't "falsiable". E.g. how cold you possible demonstrate to be false the basic geometric elements: a point, a line, a plane. They don't really exist physically, they're just abstractions.
Karl Popper is completely correct. He defines "science" as a narrow art, not the study of truth as a whole. Science is one discipline among many in pursuit of the truth.
> Life just feels better when you treat others the way you want to be treated by them, when you and them share the same rights.
My model is that truth is a matter of consistency, and that truth is related to good. Therefore, what one should do to be good is being consistent to one's beliefs. Beliefs are influenced by perception/experience, manifest in thoughts and actions, can be recorded in statements (accountability!), and so on. In practice, (a variation of) the Golden Rule is derived from this.
> I’m just following your logic. You pointed to empathy as something even animals have. Empathy is a real thing in nature, you can see those feelings in brain scans. But so is tribalism or pack behavior. Why do you privilege one type of feeling or instinct over another? What’s the basis for that distinction?
Please be transparent on your own beliefs too, if you demand this of others. On what basis do you stake your beliefs? Are you being empathetic? Are you being tribal?
> What is the nature of this assertion? Is it a falsifiable scientific fact?
Science alone is insufficient to answer all questions. Do not overextend its powers. None of us in this thread are mainly relying on science, for good reason. If someone poses the question "should humans do [thing]?" as a scientific one, they are a charlatan and a fraud.
> Whenever you try to remove religion the void fills up with something, and that something is demonic.
I've heard that exact type of comparison before, and it's from those fundamentalist christians. You find out quickly, that "everything is the devil or demonic" that wasn't written down in a bronze-age book and interpreted and translated the snot out of, over a game of telephone played over 2000 years. Most of which was done by illiterates.
Better yet, lets look at what the opposite of this demonic is - judeo-christian values.
1 Samuel 15:3 "Now go, attack Amalek, and proscribe [kill and dedicate to YHWH] all that belongs to him. Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses!"
That god sounds like a petty tribal warlord. Really? Genocide? Even kill the infants and animals?!? And this is what's being accepted as good and holy? And when Saul (king) spared the Amalekite king and some animals, even that benevolence was rewarded with destroying Saul.
Petty. Tribal. Warlord.
And yeah, I've actually read the Torah and New Testament and Koran. I know what I disagree in, and I see how our culture are still afflicted by all this historical religious baggage.
So, you can find a few isolated quotes in a series of documents written over thousands of years that support the idea that religion is the problem.
Have you read these works considering historical and cultural context? Can you find anything in the New testament that supports this? Do you know about the history of how Christianity shaped European culture? There are excellent books on the subjects (Dominion by Tom Holland is brilliant on the lats of these).
I work in IT, but I also do stuff in historical studies. I dont want to dox myself, cause I just want to chat here anonymously.
In the Americas and Europe, Christianity is the fundamentalist scourge. We all know of Israel, of fundamentalist Judaism. Middle East? You guessed it, 4 of the 5 major sects of Islam are fundamentalist. And moving further East, we see extreme caste-ism and Fundamentalist Hinduism.
China rooted out Fundamentalist Buddhism with Tibet. In 1953, 700,000 of an estimated total population of 1,250,000 were serfs - effectively enslaved peoples on the land attached to the land-lord. Usually a lama, or a priest in Buddhism. This is a case where an oppressive fundamentalist religion was rooted out, and almost a million people were freed.
Im also well aware of all the damage Christianity and Islam did through the millennia in Europe. The priesthood collectively held back science, arts, literature, and countless other things because of "demons, devils, satan". And that only got worse with Dante's Inferno, which somehow got collapsed as bible stories, but really is a fanfiction.
We also see fundamentalist christian hatred flood everywhere with <GASP> more anti-woman sentiment with Witch Trials held basically everywhere. Even had executions up in Holmavik Iceland, to of which a museum was made to commemorate their witch trials. And everyone knows of Salem Massachusetts. Estimates of 30-60000 women were executed in these sham trials, and was predominantly women targeted here.
Perhaps it was too narrow to just blame christians, although the USA is a "christian nation" and what I'm most exposed against my will. No, the problem is fanaticism and fundamentalism. Its one thing to say "My religion says I cant do (action)." and a whole different thing to say "My religion says YOU cant do (action)". All the fundamentalists demand both.
> We also see fundamentalist christian hatred flood everywhere with <GASP> more anti-woman sentiment with Witch Trials held basically everywhere.
Which happened in early modern times.
> Its one thing to say "My religion says I cant do (action)." and a whole different thing to say "My religion says YOU cant do (action)".
I agree. On the other hand secular ideologies are often worse. Look at the history of the 20th century.
> > In the Americas and Europe, Christianity is the fundamentalist scourge.
yes, those horrible Christians. Doing things like abolishing slavery, improving the status of women and demanding marital fidelity from men as well as women. Do you have any idea what pre-Christian Europe was like? The Roman Empire, for example?
What epic creation, I probably couldn't stomach reading or viewing this material in any other format.
This is the original programming. You might visualize it complete with a bug tracker, version control, patches, feature updates and programming languages. We can only see it when absurd enough but it gets much more absurd than this and the software may run for thousands of years.
I remember reading and seeing videos about training child soldiers. The weak or injured ones were killed as hunting targets and the more they killed the higher their rank. In the final ceremony that completes the training they had to shoot their parents. It was a great honor and they truly enjoyed it.
We have to remember death is nowhere near the worse punishment. It might be the nicest thing on the list.
Perhaps it is even worse if people don't notice they are in a similar program because it has been refined to such extend.
Imagine if you left the house without clothing. Like a default human, like any other species, or if you like, how god put you on this earth.
Or say, who decided you must use language? Not just that, you must say the correct things at the correct time.
If you get the dress code wrong, fail to speak or construct the wrong sentences well conditioned people from all over the world will come to beat you back in line.
We force the little ones to sit on designed to be uncomfortable chairs the whole day, the entire week. They must sit, not move, shut up and listen.
Someone once "rescued" a small child living on a garbage heap. Gave him foster parents and put him in school. The kid escaped, he went back to playing in the garbage. When asked why he said he wanted to play with his friends. With a look on his face as if he was talking to a crazy person. It was obvious he didn't want to sit, shut up and not move.... forever?
Seems to me we have many bug reports to fill and that patches are welcome. Our cult is far from perfect.
Meanwhile, we have a crisis in the U.S. of people sleeping and dying in the streets because we shut down all the mental hospitals and involuntary commitment. Every system will have some percentage of adverse outcomes. Approaching the issue emotionally instead of dispassionately and with a view towards typical outcomes is an anti-social and dangerous approach.
... I mean, on what are you basing this assumption? Mass psychiatric institutionalisation has been phased out pretty much everywhere at this point; if your thesis is correct, how do you explain differing rates of homelessness (and in particular unsheltered homelessness, where the US more or less leads the developed world) between the US and other developed countries? Like, it seems more likely to be some other factor.
Ireland, for instance, had the highest rate of psychiatric institutionalisation in the western world in the 60s (some Warsaw Pact countries were likely higher). It was rapidly phased out in the 80s and early 90s. Homelessness (though a persistent problem since the 19th century) remained rather low until the early tens, then rose rapidly. I've never heard of anyone attributing this to the mental hospitals closing 30 years previously (this seems to be a uniquely American belief); it is generally attributed largely to _shortages of housing_ (itself due to the near-total collapse of the construction industry for a decade after the financial crisis).
The issue in the US isn't lack of institutionalization, per se, it's the lack of mandatory mental health treatment. That is, it's very difficult and rare to require the mentally ill in the US to take medicine, even after repeatedly demonstrating an inability to control their conditions or even to take basic care of themselves. For one thing, there was an overcorrection in civil rights law that makes it difficult to establish a mandatory treatment plan. Secondly, because of lack of institutional beds and a will to use them, there's little backstop even for the few patients that are on court-ordered treatment and fail to comply.
While most countries have deinstitutionalized, they still make it much easier to force treatment on an out-patient basis. (This is true of drugs as well, which is part of the reason "harm reduction" often works better in Europe--a credible threat of involuntary hospitalization.) This was the original plan in the 1970s in the US, to transition to out-patient care, but it didn't pan out. The mental hospitals were closed, but rather than shift the funding to out-patient clinics and treatment, the funding was simply pulled altogether. And because of the civil rights law overcorrection, addressing this is more than simply re-establishing the funding. California, for example, restored hundreds of millions of funding in the past decade, but for various legal and inertial reasons, cities and counties simply won't force treatment plans on even the most desperately ill patients, even when they're harming themselves or others. Sadly, we're slipping back into using the penal system to house the mentally ill; there's much less political and institutional pushback than increasing the use of conservatorship and civil commitment.
The problem has been well understood for more than 40 years. Here's a 1984 piece from the NY Times that could be written the same today: Richard D. Lyons, "How Release of Mental Patients Began", https://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/30/science/how-release-of-me...
> While most countries have deinstitutionalized, they still make it much easier to force treatment on an out-patient basis.
Where are you getting that? Which countries? Certainly in Ireland and the UK, I'm pretty certain that it is all but impossible to force outpatient treatment, and I think this is generally more or less the case in Western Europe as a whole. Involuntary admission to psychiatric hospitals is still, marginally, a thing, but very rare.
If you're wondering why human rights treaty organizations are so involved with these laws, and with the similar laws concerning children, look up how the holocaust started. But ... you don't really want to know the connection there.
I'm sorry, but you are completely strawmanning the parent. Nothing they said is typical of an "authoritarian lap dog". The point being made is rather modest: that sometimes involuntary commitment is necessary to help someone when their brain is working against them. Obviously this kind of power can be abused, but the current approach leaves those who need that kind of help to fend for themselves.
But I guess involuntary commitment makes people feel icky so fuck those guys, right?
You seem to believe that these are adverse, uncommon, and unintended outcomes rather than part of the machinery of the troubled teen industry, the school-to-prison pipeline, poverty, and capitalist/protestant propaganda in general. Involuntary commitment would be a threat and weapon in the current political environment, as in the thread OP where the same was used in Francoist Spain.
Perhaps you should investigate your own biases and emotions toward the people chewed up and spit out by society before calling out a comment as "emotional" and "anti-social".
I actually have (and a few of his other articles besides).
If we were to involuntarily take someone into society's care, the process must be benign with a good outcome. As things currently are, the exact opposite (or a system so thoroughly financialized as to be almost the same) is present. The capacity to reverse this seems non-existant.
Most calls right now to reinstitute involuntary commitment are the same thought process that results in the societal rot present in how we deal with poverty, homelessness, and addiction; they just want them even further removed from themselves so they don't have to witness it.
Yesterday a popular post here advocated that your kids finding porn means you are guilty of 'neglect.' That's a serious criminal charge and accusation. People will take drastic steps to avoid prison.
Natural result of that is catch-22, parent can't actually stop teenage kids from such activity except through what amounts to torture. As always either way, the parent is damned.
Sounds like either someone with very young kids or else someone with a dismissive/naive parenting style. For kids born since the mid-80s “hiding the porn” has been a lot harder than locking magazines in a closet. It’s not a matter of if, but when. And however you feel about porn, it’s infinitely more important to help your kids feel safe talking to you about it than to try and prevent them ever seeing it. Kids who don’t feel safe or tolerated will lie almost 100% of the time, at which point you can no longer help them. I say this as someone whose parents would rather have believed I wasn’t watching porn and therefore didn’t make the effort to normalize talking about sex at all. My wife and I do limit our kids’ access to the Internet quite a bit, but we aren’t naive to the fact that they’ll all see something at some point either.
>Sounds like either someone with very young kids or else someone with a dismissive/naive parenting style.
Increasingly this is what the tyranny of the majority is in the western world. People who don't have kids, or only limited experience with kids, declaring that parents are neglecting or abusing their children because they don't behave the way the hypothetical ideologically pure parent would. Almost every single one of them has a cell-phone and the second they see something they disapprove of they can call CPS at the drop of a hat and make your life a living hell, even if you are 'innocent' of even whatever BS they made up.
As always, it's just a smug attempt at moral superiority. They want the intoxicating power rush from threatening and imposing on parents, with none of the responsibility, and the state is all too happy to provide it to them. Just punish and then rest soundly knowing you have no kids of your own for which you could be prosecuted.
> People who don't have kids, or only limited experience with kids, declaring that parents are neglecting or abusing their children because they don't behave the way the hypothetical ideologically pure parent would.
From what I've witnessed, the most common complainants were authoritarian mothers who treat their own child(ren) as helpless irrespective of biological age, and teachers, usually with families of their own, who treat non-violent "quirks" beyond their comprehension as a sign of malfeasance. In both cases, lack of familiarity with children is not the issue. Instead, their previous "successes" with raising/teaching children cement a narrow and selective expectation for how children must or must be made to behave. The motivation in either case is a desire for control. The ideological/cultural angle is, at best, a sincerely held rationalization, but is more likely an instinctual employment of thought-terminating cliches/kafkatraps to justify getting their way or make dissenters look/feel unreasonable.
Based on the relative numbers, how would this be possible? People who don't have kids can only turn into people who have kids, and as people grow older, they are more likely to have kids. Surely the parents aren't a minority that are being surrounded and cut off.
Lol this is the USA. I've been interrogated when a stranger drove past my rather remote property, in the middle of nowhere, and saw that my child was walking about 50 feet "by herself" on her own fucking property(I was actually watching her, just from further away, so I was able to intervene before they called CPS).
Welcome to America where you must watch the kid every second until they turn 18, except at the moment they turn 18 they must be booted from the house to figure everything out all at once with nothing more than a minimum wage job, a gun, and rents that reach the stratosphere.
>Welcome to America where you must watch the kid every second until they turn 18
This must be a regional thing?
I live in New England and I always see kids out and about with no adults around supervising. Especially from 1-3PM on weekdays when school lets out. Maybe a side-effect of walkable infrastructure.
Sounds like Hack Club is doing a great job at preparing teenagers for the real world: nobody cares about the things you care about as much as you do. The most important skill to learn for the real world is to pick your battles. Using ChatGPT for legal advice is dumb, but it’s not your battle to fight.
I think the editing done by the BBC was clumsy but it’s patently absurd to suggest they mischaracterised Trump’s intent. He was literally impeached for inciting January 6th!
The BBC should be held to a high standard that rightly leads to chastising for the way they edited Trump’s speech but this pile on is self-serving, an attack on the BBC rather than holding the BBC to account.
That’s because he’s barely a lawyer. He’s a blogger with a legal education. His legal practice is pro bono because nobody would pay for him to LARP as someone with credibility on the subject of free speech.
Edit: I appreciate the down votes but research him, he has never participated in a real case. He is not a practicing lawyer by any real measure.
This guy really is something. From asserting that hate speech is protected by the 1st amendment to suing Australia over Internet policies to suggesting the US dominate all Internet rules: https://tradersunion.com/news/tag/prestonjbyrne/
it’s what happens when people use LLMs to write their posts. Rubbishing Jupyter is an obvious choice if you’re a machine writing a compelling post. Rubbishing Jupyter if you’re a human being with a stake in the space is a terrible choice.
My constructive advice for deepnote: if you don’t have something to say from the heart, don’t ask an LLM to generate something for you. Write less, not more. For a post this important, an LLM is a terrible choice.
Rats are brilliant animals, they’re just tiny dogs. If you treat your rats well, they would have no reason to attack mice and would co-exist (although your rats would probably get sick because of disease. Pet rats (fancy rats) are illness prone.)
is “Inhuman Centipede” to describe the slop-eating-its-own-tale future we all dread an established term, or an invention of the author? I hope it becomes the term we all use, like slop and clanker.
For those of us writing original words that are consumed by LLMs without our consent, at least we get to be the front of the Inhuman Centipede.
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