In 1930s Germany an edition of The Republic was printed with a swastika on the cover.

They really liked what he had to say about an ethnicly superior society where the government controlled all commerce and decided what children could be exposed to in school.

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.

Artists in 2023: “There should be labels on AI modified art!!”

Artists in 2024: “Wait, not like that…”

No. I used to abuse Cunningham’s Law liberally. It’s become next to worthless these days.

Edit: Literally here’s an example of people down voting and trying to correct true information: https://lemmy.world/comment/10376712

Yeah, my main sub I participated in back on Reddit was /r/AcademicBiblical (also went to a religious-ish school growing up).

There’s nothing like that sub here, and honestly even the sub itself isn’t quite what it used to be when I pop back over to look in from time to time.

The web is just a different sort of place from what it used to be.

No, Reddit 10 years ago was the kind of place where people who knew things would correct people who didn’t.

Pretty much all social media today, including Lemmy, are now places where people who don’t know things correct people who do.

So the paper that found that particular bit in Othello was this one: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07582

Which was building off this earlier paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.13382

And then this was the work replicating it in Chess: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yzGDwpRBx6TEcdeA5/a-chess-gpt-linear-emergent-world-representation

It’s not by chance - there’s literally interventions where flipping a weight or vector results in the opposite behavior (like acting like a piece is in a different place, or playing well he badly no matter the previous moves).

But it’s more that it seems unlikely that there’s any actual ‘feeling’ or ‘conscious’ sentience/consciousness to understand beyond the model knowing what the abstracted pattern means in relation to the inputs and outputs. It probably is simulating some form of ego and self, but not actively experiencing it if it makes sense.

So there’s two different things to what you are asking.

(1) They don’t know what (i.e. semantically) they are talking about.

This is probably not the case, and there’s very good evidence over the past year in research papers and replicated projects that transformer models do pick up world models from the training data such that they are aware and integrating things at a more conceptual level.

For example, even a small toy GPT model trained only on chess moves builds an internal structure of the whole board and tracks “my pieces” and “opponent pieces.”

(2) Why do they say dumb shit that’s clearly wrong and don’t know.

They aren’t knowledge memorizers. They are very advanced pattern extenders.

Where the answer to a question is part of the pattern they can successfully extend, they get the answer correct. But if it isn’t, they confabulate an answer in a similar way to stroke patients who don’t know that they don’t know the answer to something and make it up as they go along. Similar to stroke patients, you can even detect when this is happening with a similar approach (ask 10x and see how consistent the answer is or if it changes each time).

They aren’t memorizing the information like a database. They are building ways to extend input into output in ways that match as much information as they can be fed. In this, they are beyond exceptional. But they’ve been kind of shoehorned into the initial tech demo usecase of “knowledgeable chatbot” which is a less than ideal use. The fact they were even good at information recall was a surprise to most researchers.

You tell me the trusted source, and I’ll give you an article on China’s zero COVID woes. Here’s CNN, with details IMO much worse than the link I previously shared from a site you seem to have a beef with:

https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/28/china/china-covid-lockdown-explainer-intl-hnk/index.html

China’s handling of COVID-19 isn’t exactly perfect either.

Ok, but what variable is 🐈?

Even if there’s a working class revolution, things are still completely fucked.

The biggest issue isn’t who is in charge, it’s the fact that humans are fundamentally incapable of cooperating across large groups.

We couldn’t even get the population to wear masks during a global pandemic killing so many people that hospitals needed to bring in refrigerator trucks to store the bodies.

But those same salt of the earth workers are going to negotiate climate controls with China?

Yeah, right.

Literally just after talking about how people are spouting confident misinformation on another thread I see this one.

Twitter: Twitter retains minimal EXIF data, primarily focusing on technical details, such as the camera model. GPS data is generally stripped.

• Source

Yes, this is a privacy thing, we strip the EXIF data. As long as you’re not also adding location to your Tweet (which is optional) then there’s no location data associated with the Tweet or the media.

• Source (9 years ago)

People replying to a Twitter thread with photos are automatically having the location data stripped.

God, I can’t wait for LLMs to automate calling out well intentioned total BS in every single comment on social media eventually. It’s increasing at a worrying pace.

I have indeed. Some interesting ideas in there.

There aren’t, and an increasing number of reasons it probably is.

It’s just been such a gradual process of discovery, much of which predated the explosion of the computer age, that we have an anchoring bias preventing us from seeing it. We think “well no, the universe has always behaved this weird way, that’s just a coincidence it’s similar to what we’re starting to do in simulating our own virtual worlds.”

How different might Einstein and Bohr’s argument have been around if the moon existed when no one was looking if they were discovering the implication that it might be the case in a world where nearly every virtual world with a moon has one that isn’t rendered if no one is looking at it?

In antiquity it was assumed that the world was continuous because quantization of matter was an impious insult to divine design. It was a huge surprise that people took very hard when it was experimentally shown to be quantized. And then the behaviors were so odd - why was it going from continuous to discrete only when interacted with? Why did it go back the other way if you erased the information about the interaction?

Would this have been as unusual if we’d already had procedural generated virtual worlds generated with a continuous seed function but then converted to discrete units in order to track interactions by free agents determined outside the seed generation (such as players or AI agents)? Would the quantum eraser have been as puzzling through this lens when we’ve seen how memory optimizations would ideally discard state tracking data for objects that are no longer marked as having changed?

A lot of the weirdness we’ve discovered about our world makes a ton of sense through the lens of simulation theory - it’s just that the language with which to interpret it this way postdated the discovery of the weirdness by nearly a century such that we’ve grown up accepting that weirdness as normal and inherent to ‘reality.’

And just to be clear, absolutely nothing in our universe can be shown to be mathematically ‘real’ and everything is either confirmably mathematically ‘digital’ or indeterminate (like spacetime). And yet people are very committed to calling it real and disturbed at the idea of calling it a digital world.

We absolutely have bugs we’ve recently discovered.

Consider the sync errors when you have multiple layers of quantum observers such that two eventual observers don’t agree about facts.

Which in conjunction with another recent similar paradox led to my favorite recent paper title: Stable Facts, Relative Facts

You very much do live in a universe where there are sync errors, they are just well below the threshold where you’d notice them due in part to a built in consensus protocol which effectively corrects for them.

What if homo sapiens died out and the Neanderthals who succeeded instead decided to simulate how history would have gone if it were the other way around, effectively resurrecting the extinct humans, additionally adding in ethical considerations such that everyone born into the simulation would have an unending post-life existence optimally fitted relative to their own preferences?

Just because we only see part of the picture doesn’t mean the whole is as unethical as the part we can see seems to be.

That’s not…no. Not at all.

The uncertainty principle doesn’t have anything to do with the double slit experiment.

The uncertainty principle is that you can’t know both the position and momentum of a quantum at the same time. The more you know of one the less you know of the other.

The double slit has to do with superposition and wave particle duality.

They have a similar quality of weirdness, but are entirely different principles and concepts.

And it’s worth noting almost no physicists would agree with the way you interpret it at the end. That is one way of solving Bell’s paradox, but the rejection of realism is probably only slightly more popular than the rejection of free will. Generally it’s assumed that quanta absolutely are there before interacted with or observed.

The really freaky part is that if you erase the information about the interaction, it discards the discrete behavior.

That looks eerily like a memory optimization.