So he just has to order the CIA to do it.

The… the CIA and many other government agencies have a stories history of doing absolutely insane things that are absolutely crimes…

…And many of those things only get brought to light by a whistle lower or leak ot some Watergate level fuckup of being caught in the act, or years or decades of actual investigation later.

There are so many problems with this ruling its mind boggling.

Yeah, its infuriating that punk has become a suffix.

There is nothing punk about steampunk, dieselpunk, atompunk. They are just fantasy technological scenarios / art styles.

Cyberpunk has an both a recognizable aesthetic and a whole lot of political, social and philosophical views baked into it. You get the punks in cyberpunk as either a direct ideological opposition to the power of corporations, or as an indirect result of said corpos creating a hell world for 99% of people.

There is nothing inherently rebellious about worlds or characters within worlds with more prevalent / advanced steam or diesel or nuclear power.

Solarpunk arguably has some actual punk to it if you actually try to follow the idea of personally minimizing your fossil fuel usage, but mostly its a utopian or post-dystopian setting / art style.

Its now like -gate being affixed to any kind of publicized controversy.

Most people do not understand what Watergate even was and why it was so significant.

Nah, it was my handwriting, used the same lingo and joke I remember using at the time, took up most of the board… which is why I was so shocked it hadn’t been erased.

Most of the time people wrote on it, they were gracious with the space.

Due to typing far more often than writing, and many years later me figuring out oh haha I’m actually naturally left handed, my writing is a fairly uncommon kind of small cap block print, otherwise I am basically the only one capable of reading my non block print scribbles.

I recently returned to a hole in the wall restaurant that I used to frequent in my college days. One of the few actual restaurants in the city that never closed.

A decade later, a semi nonsensical scrawl about being kind and good to people I’d written on a dry erase board while quite drunk… was still there.

It only needed minor updating to be more gender inclusive, which someone else had done without removing any of my writing.

When I was frequenting this restaurant, the whole board was wiped every week or so.

For some reason, what I wrote persisted for a decade.

I couldn’t believe it.

I thought Paulogia’s minimum witnesses argument is basically that Paul could have hallucinated, and that those who witnessed an empty tomb basically did see an empty tomb, but circumstantial confusion led them to misinterpret what they saw?

I’ll have to rewatch some of his vids.

Also, hey, Goju Ryu! I trained in Shito Ryu =D

Howabout a reasonably advanced civilization destroying itself and its homeworld after exploiting and then running out of petroleum?

This stems from the fact that, so far, the earliest dated written fragments we have from what is now the New Testament are some of the writings of Paul.

Paul was not one of the Apostles EDIT: Disciples, and it seems possible that, after persecuting earlier, existing Christians, he could have basically had a stress induced psychotic break and hallucinated the vision of Jesus that he had, then converted.

Thing is though, Christians would have to … you know exist and already be a real thing first, for that to make sense.

It does explain why Paul does not mention some very key elements of the narrative of the Gospels: He just had not actually read about or heard of those parts yet.

This creates some theological problems down the line, and some of those problems were ‘remedied’ by what a good deal of scholars and historians believe to be forgeries… chapters of the Bible that modern Christians attribute to Paul, but do not seem to actually have been written by Paul.

It is also possible to some of the empty tomb accounts in some of the Gospels as similar kinds of trauma induced hallucinations.

Mark famously originally just ends with an empty tomb, and nobody said anything about this because they were scared… and then the last bit of verses giving Mark a more satisfying ending have been shown to be added … decades later.

There exists documented proof in many bits of literature from around 200 BCE to around 100 CE of numerous different figures in what is called ‘Jewish Apocalypticism’, basically a small in number but persistent phenomenon of Jews in and around what was for most of that time the Roman province of Palestine, preaching that the end would come, that God or a Messiah would return or arise and basically liberate the region and install a Godly Kingdom, usually after or as part of other fantastical events.

Jesus was one of many of these Jewish Apocalypticists. Much like the rest of the movement’s key figures, they were wrong, and their lives were greatly exaggerated in either their writings or writings about them or inspired by them.

This seems to be the (extremely condensed) opinion of most Biblical Scholars.

There are a very small number of modern Biblical Scholars that are ‘Mythicists’ of some kind, who believe that Jesus was completely fictional and wholly invented by certain people or groups.

This is an unpopular view amongst scholars and historians of that time and region, as most believe it more plausible that Jesus was just another example of a radical Jewish Apocalyptic preacher, which again, was fairly common for roughly 300 years in that region.

Its like how if you go to a big city theres always that one guy with a megaphone preaching imminent doom. 99% of people think this is silly and ignore them, but tons of people know that people like them exist and do have small followings.

I’ve found Krita to be a less clumsy way to edit images than GIMP, been using it that way for years.

Yes, GIMP is powerful when used correctly, but Krita is far closer to Photoshop in terms of UI and out of the box features.

Obligatory: Do people not know that Krita exists?

I’m going to M A N I F E S T my problems away!

It is amazing to me that millions of idiots whole heartedly believe in some variant of magic/placebo/prayer/astrology, some very slightly different version of it becomes popular when someone figures out some new lingo that sounds neat, and can lie convincingly in a video.

Hold on , I’ll edit this when I find a link.

Edit:

Ok, so here is OpenAI wanting to make… well basically it seems to want to have not only an AI agent in a text support chatbox telling you how to fix a problem…

…but give it the ability to completely take over your computer and just do it for you, presumably via Remote Assistance and whatever the Mac equivalent is.

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/openai-plans-chatgpt-supersmart-assistant-135029243.html?guccounter=1

No way this could go wrong and lead to fake support sites just fucking writing a batch file and executing it in the blink of an eye.

Then we’ve got both Zoom and Otter who yes, straight up, want to build AI powered avatars, based on each employee/user and replace the human entirely in meetings.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/zoom-s-ceo-wants-a-manipulatable-ai-avatar-of-you-to-attend-meetings-instead/ar-BB1nGO5m

https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/could-ai-personas-attend-your-work-meetings-for-you-one-tech-ceo-says-yes-and-by-the-end-of-the-year/articleshow/107797330.cms

Fuck the infinite paper clip making machine, we are intentionally trying to make the infinite meeting machine.

Dear sweet christ, I’ve been the manager of a medium sized non profits databases (everything other than finance because they’re special, as in using an overpriced wacky proprietary tool because they are used to it, oh and probably commiting fraud) and, as the author references, I have actually had one of the members of the board get a bunch of other people with 0 technical competence to try to get me to ‘implement blockchain technology’ on postgres.

Non of those fucking morons could ever provide an actual project outline. None of these fucking morons even knew their own teams processes, and they would all change depending on team member asked and date.

Not relevant to this story, but basically I am now disabled and living off of SSDI after being assaulted and seriously injured.

I am 99% sure, after years of working with completely technically incompetent managers, I am never going to work in tech again.

I would literally rather be poor, do uber eats delivery when I feel like it, and slowly build a video game, by myself, not even to make money, just to give my tech brain something to sate it.

I am too autistic to be able to handle the constant stream of bullshit and social manipulation/pressure from everywhere I have ever worked.

Ive been calling this the reverse turing test:

Can you tell that a known human being is not an ‘AI’ chatbot, based on text correspondence?

Apparently we are now just going to have AI simulacra of ourselves date each other on dating apps and meet with each other on zoom.

The meeting thing in particular is so fucking insane.

Problem: Meetings waste time and accomplish nothing!

Solution: Don’t hire or train competent people, instead, automate meetings, the transcripts of which will presumably still have to be read, and will likely not make any sense, thus necessitating more meetings.

The goal of technological civilization apparently truly is to create maximum misery via maximizing meetings.

<3

This would happen in a just world.

It won’t though.

Reminds me of the recent millionaire guy who got lambasted on YT (i think his actual posts were on TikTok?).

Guys, I am going to lock up my money, my phone have no contacts and go to a new city and start from nothing and earn a million dollars in 30 or 90 days or something.

Whoah big surprise, a few weeks in he has to call the whole thing off for health reasons.

OMG he got robbed? Lost his paper work and thus couldn’t get the right aid? The shelters are full? Sleeping outside in a city is extremely dangerous and unhealthy? Your hygiene suffers? No one talks to you or treats you like a human being?

In a just world we’d put the income tax levels back to around FDR levels and thus be able to actually fund social programs and eliminate a great deal of the wealthy’s massive over representation in politics.

Instead it looks like we will be making a b-line toward theocratic corporatocracy.

Blargh.

Edit: Income and Corporate tax levels.

I appreciate the sentiment, very truly.

Hah, my entire patriarchal lineage is massive alcoholics, so I actually drink alcohol very rarely, maybe a few times a year.

I have managed to never get addicted to the stuff or become abusive from it, I’m basically just an absurdly lightweight drinker.

Two whiskeys like in this pic in a row and I’d be stumbling. Two more soon after and I’d be slurring and stumbling.

Or, the optimistic take on that is I can get a double shot of bourbon and nurse it for 4 to 6 hours and be enjoyable buzzed the whole time haha.

Maybe someday I’ll find somebody, but right now I’m quite happy single.

Maybe a few years go by and I’ll try again haha.

Either way, cheers mate, probst, etc.

I so very hope this idiot asshole winds up either jailed and/or has his wealth severely diminished and most of his businesses fail from being unable to repay loans / convicted of fraud.

He’s the closest person on earth to becoming Horatio from the Endless series, yet he’s also basically a badly written Bond villain.

What a pos.