kromem @ kromem @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Yeah, and one of the biggest ironies to it all is that given the various contexts informing those receipts, my money would overwhelmingly be on the red hair in the region having come from the indigenous populations of North Africa, so if Jesus were fair skinned and red haired it would mean he had African ancestry.

So the desire to sweep the notion under the rug is effectively yet another instance of the erasure of African history in Western cultures.

¯(ツ)_/¯

That's a good debate topic, actually.

No, whether or not curing cancer is a good thing would be a rather poor debate topic. You are instead suggesting tangential topics around pharmaceutical research that are good discussion points, but separate from the broad question of if the things a for profit company produces are always inherently bad because of the for profit motivations.

It's a completely different topic about how AI companies are going to make their products

This tells me you are completely disconnected from any kind of ongoing research right now, as the products being produced are actually having a pretty wild impact on research and we're probably entering a new Renaissance because of them.

Yeah, of course Google is going to try to use AI to sell you shit. But they are also solving protein folding along the way and are producing AI that can translate the massive number of uncovered but yet untranslated historical documents in existence. Deep learning yielded a new class of antibiotics for antibiotic resistant infections just this past month.

In both the original case and the analogy we are still talking about technology that will save human lives.

And as we just saw with Musk's Grok, sometimes the ways in which AI develops are at odds with the goals of the corporations creating them, and as Anthropic's recent research shows, those initial inclinations are actually much more difficult to correct for than you might think.

Will corporations do their best to unethically profit off of advances? Of course.

But if you think that means the advances will be a net negative, I respectfully disagree.

Pharmaceutical companies aren't funding cancer research to make the world a better place either.

Should we debate whether or not a cure for cancer would be a good thing because of the profit driven motivation behind its development?

Thats the part that’s new.

...they said in a culture where nearly a third of humanity believes a dead person came back to life, floated up into the sky, and is one day going to float back down to judge everyone because of the reach a guy rambling on about trumpets and monsters had when he got his book included into an anthology being compiled by the Roman empire.

Possibly. I wouldn't put money on it, but if the odds were asymmetric enough I wouldn't put money against it either, as I do think it's possible.

In particular I think there's insufficient consideration of the "Nazirite from birth" concepts in light of how one might establish that a baby is part of a social class one needs to sacrifice an entirely red haired cow to join and where one can't shave or cut their hair.

(Technically, while the group being discussed in Lamentations 4:7 as being ruddy and skin like milk pre-captivity are often translated as 'princes' the word is more literally translated as "Our Nazirites were...").

If John was a Nazirite from birth, and traditionally James, the brother of Jesus was a Nazirite his whole life, maybe Jesus was from an area where a number of babies came out and people looked at them and said "ok, this one is going to be a Nazirite."

But Jesus himself isn't depicted as having been a Nazirite at any point in his life so if I really had to get specific with a guess to bet on, I'd wager that Jesus had relatives and friends that may have been ginger but wasn't one himself.

People really need to drop the whole "people in the middle east in the first century couldn't be white" thing.

2 Kings 5:27 is literally about a subpopulation who have ancestrally passed skin as white as snow.

Lamentations 4:7 is about how pre-captivity there were people with skin like milk and a ruddy appearance.

Dead Sea Scroll fragment 4Q534 is either describing Noah or the Messiah as having red hair.

One of the more fascinating finds in this tomb, one that has not received much attention, was the preservation of a sample of Jewish male hair. The hair was lice-free, and was trimmed or cut evenly, probably indicating that the family buried in this tomb practiced good hygiene and grooming. The length of the hair was medium to short, averaging 3-4 inches. The color was reddish.

• The Only Ancient Jewish Male Hair Ever Found (from the same century as Jesus)

The tradition is also really concerned with skin checks and describes what may be skin cancer as its leprosy. Something that occurs at a much higher rate in redheads.

There's even a scene where the eponymous founder of Edom ('red') who is born with hair all over his body and named Esau either because of that hair or the reddish porridge he ate, either gives away or has his birthright/blessing stolen from him by the guy later renamed 'Israel' in the Bible.

There's a lot more to this and the underlying history, but the notion that the middle east was a monolith of appearances and that no one with pale skin or lighter hair were present is preposterous and a modern falsification of historical realities.

Jesus was probably darker skinned and haired than typically depicted, but it is by no means a certainty as it is popularly presented as.

There's nothing about AI in that article.

Are you talking about the photo Ben Shapiro shared?

An image expert said that was real and the AI detection tools that flagged it are fake have high false positives (which they do):

But Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley and an expert on digital image manipulation, says the photo is not fake.

https://interestingengineering.com/culture/expert-debunks-ai-tools-claim-that-israels-photo-is-fake,

Edit: More info about the expert cited from his Wikipedia page:

Farid specializes in image analysis and human perception. He has been called the "father" of digital image forensics by NOVA scienceNOW. He is the recipient of a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2002 Sloan Fellowship for his work in the field.

Also are you seriously talking about the AI infant propaganda that the White House had to walk back on after no evidence was presented?

You seem to be confusing the specific report of beheaded infants for which there was no presented evidence with the well documented reports of infants killed and burned.

There's no dispute that infants were killed. Just whether their heads were removed from their bodies by a sharp object before they died.

Also, what the hell does it have to do with AI? You sound delusional adding that in.

I love that the Pentagon is referring to dank memes.

Reality really is stranger than fiction.

Maybe I missed it in your link, but where's the part about the Jews murdering women and children, such as burning infants alive?

Looking at the casualties, it seems their very limited relative body count were soldiers and police, often killed in action.

Or did you miss that specification in what I wrote?

If you are asking for a devil's advocate argument, we could start with the fact that the Jews weren't exactly known for detaining, torturing, and mass executing their own.

Hamas in 2014 allegedly tortured and killed 23 Palestinians under the cover of the Gaza conflict then by Amnesty.

That's not the only time they've executed Palestinians for alleged "collaboration."

You also have the fact that the Jews didn't torture and kill hundreds of German civilians including women and infants to kick off a retaliation.

While I think Likud show a disguising disregard for civilian life and suspect a number of their party would like to carry out a one sided genocide, I also think the "it's the same thing as the Holocaust" is a pretty gross statement.

It's also probably prudent to not jump to conclusions in what's actually taking place during the fog of war. I strongly suspect Israel is committing war crimes under the current administration, but I also remember the 2008 Goldstone report where they were accused of doing so after not participating in the process at all and then years later the person spearheading that inquiry said that had they known at the time the information they learned since, they would have had a different position towards the Israeli operations.

Time has a way of revealing a lot of details that are lost in the moment, there's probably unprecedented propaganda on both sides of this conflict, and while we should err on the side of humanitarian concerns in directing foreign policy and negotiations, the process of investigating allegations is extremely important.

But to be frank, the knee jerk "this is identical to Nazi Germany killing the Jews" is ignorant as shit. You can't just ignore the existence of Hamas and the fact it controls the region with its own war crimes (which, as has been the case for ISIS/ISIL and al-Queda, are often directed at their own dissidents with greater scope and violence than foreigners).

It depends on which stage of training. As the recent Anthropic research showed, fine tuning out behavior isn't so easy.

And at the pretrained layer you really can't get any halfway decent results with limited data sets, so you'd only be able to try to bias it at the fine tuned layer with biased sourcing, but then per the Anthropic findings (and the real world cases I mentioned above) you are only biasing a thin veneer over the pretrained layer.

A $1 million umbrella policy is like $200/year.

Who can afford guns but not a $300k insurance policy to avoid going bankrupt if they have to use them?

It seems like most people are missing "under existing law"

Nothing is changing. The FCC is simply putting to a vote clarifying that "yes, the prohibitions regarding automated calling apply to AI generated voices too."

Seems in line with potential costs:

https://mynorthwest.com/33921/even-in-self-defense-can-you-afford-to-pull-the-trigger/

IIRC, shooting someone in self-defense can still add up to about $500,000 in legal costs.

I'm not sure enforcing liability insurance makes it harder on poorer people as much as helps them potentially avoid insurmountable financial hardship should they ever need to use their CCW.

It's been a wild ride of people thinking things can't be the case which then turn out to be the case.

For example, this neat work just out of NYU: https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2024/february/ai-learns-through-the-eyes-and-ears-of-a-child.html

What's interesting is the research where when humans don't know that the output is generated by an AI, they prefer and trust it more than output from actual humans.

I was a professional tech futurist and while I normally made more like ~5yr forecasts, around fifteen years ago I wrote a story for fun that was a further out prediction structured around a narrative taking place in the early 2030s.

In it, in addition to there being AR computing interfaces and self driving cars, the key tech advance was AI having been developed around a decade earlier - outside of these three things most of the world was the same.

By this time the AI was shoved into everything from toasters to musical instruments, and the story followed a new class of job that was solely focused on getting AI to do what people wanted by using natural language (what we'd now call a "prompt engineer").

The main antagonists were a modern resurgence of the Luddite movement which had grown in popularity as AI had grown.

The story even had an AI powered dildo.

It's been a pretty fucking surreal past few years watching what's been taking place.