Andy

I shouldn’t bother responding to this, but I have to point out that this weird assumption that scholars of Christianity are all Christian partisans seems pretty similar to people who say that climatologists are all biased in favor of a global warming hoax.

You don’t think anyone goes into studying a field to challenge the orthodoxy? That’s the fastest way to get famous. Even if the rest of your field hates you, you can make an incredibly lucrative career out of being “the outsider”. I literally linked to a collection of experts who agree with you.

If you don’t believe the experts, I guess it’s fine. But it’s weird when people use expertise on a subject as proof of bias to discredit expertise. It’s just such a silly thing to do.

I didn’t say which side I come down on. I just said that there is lots of information with plenty of high quality citations.

I’m really happy that everyone is a winner.

It’s weird how many people in this thread are vaguely debating the validity of the historical research into this question when one person has posted a link to a well cited article on this very very heavily studied subject.

There’s even a link to a well cited article examining the skepticism of the historicity of Jesus: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_myth_theory

I don’t feel compelled to argue an interpretation. The facts are well documented and their interpretations by experts available. What anyone chooses to do with these are of no real concern to me.

I think maybe execs and investors might feel it’s all the same, but if you’re a project manager for cloud infrastructure for enterprise services or you’ve been working for years on releasing a new component of Bing search that you think is a real gamechanger and some muckity-muck at the top says, ‘Oh, don’t worry about that anymore: a property manager that’s owned by a private equity partner of one of our big investors wants the chatbot that schedules apartment viewings in Huntsville to be more flirty, so go massage the prompts to make it convincingly laugh at bad jokes,’ some of those folks are liable to start grumbling that this isn’t the role that they were pitched when they took this job.

I have good news: It exists! http://retrographer.org/

A lot of them are unrecognizable, but here’s an example of a good one: http://retrographer.org/photos/4215

The bad news is that’s a bit limited. It was the senior project of a CMU student in 2010. It only exists for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. If you wanted to make one for another city, though, I think you could contact the creator, ask for the code, and then recruit people to get a ton of photos from another city’s historical institutions, and then crowdsource geotagging them (which is what the guy did).

http://retrographer.org/learnMore

That’s fascinating.

Well, I guess these things are complicated.

A lot of people have pointed out inherent ideological components of this platform, but I would also suggest that the lean is likely in part from network effects.

How did each of us find our way here? Someone likely mentioned the platform on another social site, or linked a meme, or shared other content.

If the site has lots of left leaning content that gets shared by left leaning people in places where such people gather, it’s going to bais the new arrivals in a similar direction. This is true of most social spaces, I think. And it’s good! I want right wingers to hang out in right wing spaces like Twitter, just like I want them to hang out at their own bars and clubs, away from me.

This sucks. I was really holding out hope that they might chart a better path forward than most of the alternatives.

Which part? I think this is all subjective opinion.

Yeah, but the training set is nowhere near clean. That’s my point. “Close” is no where near good enough within this context,

I posted a comment impulsively, then saw that you already gave the same answer better.

I’d like to go a bit deeper.

I don’t think people invented socially controlling practices because they found religion, I think they found religion to frame the invention of socially controlling practices.

Masturbation is a gratifying act that relives pressure to settle into a rigid domestic arrangement that serves to make more workers and soldiers, and create dependents that need fed, and whose well-being would be threatened if a parent became defiant and provoked the ire of elites.

Masturbation is good for the individual at the expense of the nation and its rulers. So it’s inevitable that priests would decry it as an affront against god, as that’s historically been their purpose.

Why do you guarantee that? It seems obviously wrong, on a technical level.

The point I’m making is that even if we take it as a given that a shrewd enough AI could correctly distinguish sex at birth – which I think is obviously impossible based on the appearances of many ciswomen and the nature of statistical prediction – you’d still need a training data set.

If the dataset has any erroneous input, that corrupts its ability, and the whole point of this exercise is trying to find passing transwomen. Why would anyone expect that training set of hundreds of thousands of supposed cis women wouldn’t have a few transwomen in it?

This is a great point.

The technology that excludes transwomen from the app is the clear warning that the app is populated exclusively for transphobes. It’s obviously wildly dangerous for a transwoman to be on the app.

The notion that AI is going to clock them is absurd AI hype. There’s no reason to expect AI to be capable of this kind of discernment, and that assumes you even had a training set. Where in the absolute fuck would someone find a training set like that?

Edit: I didn’t read the article. It seems it’s a lesbian dating app. Well, probably less dangerous for transwomen, but still not technically sound.

Yeah. And it’s so bad that I feel like the functionality barely goes down.

They should release the following:

‘Out of an abundance of caution, we advise against any user charging this device and attempting to rely on it for communications or regular assistance. Fortunately, we’ve found a workaround and suggest customers looking to continue enjoying the benefits of the Humane pin consider wearing it down in an unpowered state. This will provide infinite battery life and a 100% reduction in unwanted heating while enabling users to continue to receive nearly all the same functionality to which they are accustomed.’

First, thanks for that explanation. That’s interesting.

Is there a good place to learn more? I can see why having custom feeds and 3rd party moderation tools are good, but I still have a lot questions.

First, is there a genuine benefit to dissociating a users identity from their server? I think the connection between users and their home instances are a brilliant innovation. They seem to bring village culture back to the internet. They help people associate within networks below just the global level. I think the atomization of people online has been a part of why there is so little trust.

I don’t understand how any of these visions fundamentally differ from Mastodon.

Decentralized? Yep. It’s got no center. Open source? Yep, you can fork it and make your own if you want. Unmoderated? Sure, if you want that, you can set up an instance and host whatever illegal content you want. You’ll have a lot of legal problems and most people don’t want it, but the option exists.

Is there any point besides money and crypto bullshit? If you want to post short comments that your friends can subscribe to that isn’t controlled by a big corporation that gives your data to the government… well we have that. It exists. It’s pretty okay. Go use it.

Thanks for this clarification!

Honestly, I don’t recall the details. What I shared was my best recollection. I think what you said sounds reasonable, but I can’t reliably say.

Hi. I’m not a doctor, but I can opine as a biologist.

The transplanted cells have blood vessels, because all cells need a supply of oxygen to avoid expiring. If they didn’t have a supply of blood, they’d quickly turn necrotic.

When you deplete your short term energy stores, the body converts fat molecules within fat cells into sugar, then shuttles those through the body in the blood stream.

The body doesn’t draw on fat stores within the body in a totally even way, so I don’t know how quickly it would draw from the transplanted cells, but it works presumably still burn fat from these cells when needed.

And the reverse is true as well: when excess sugar is available, the body would generate new fat molecules to fill those cells, and if necessary make new fat cells as well.