Likely NT here, but meditation is awesome. Sometimes when I am particularly stressed or overwhelmed it’s kinda hard to get in the right state of mind, it’s as if I forget how easy it is to meditate, but when it does click it makes everything that much more simple.

Highly recommended to anyone going through rough times or even people who are fine but would like to have their brain shut up for a little while.

OP’s account is on SJW and that instance does not require email verification. Plenty of instances don’t.

LMAO. As much as restrictions of this kind suck, at least DNS makes more sense than IP without any transparency.

It really does sound like whoever came up with the IP solution had no idea of what the hell they were talking about.

I mean, you shouldn’t stay on here if you don’t like it, that goes without saying, but I think all in all the benefits outweight the few very annoying issues that this platform has. For instance, I think that the smaller number of people tend to mean that if you leave a comment somewhere you are likely to find someone to chat with and discuss whatever it is that you brought up in your comment.

Often times on Reddit there are so many comments that you either blow up getting over 20 replies or get forgotten and ignored. No inbetweens.

Do they? I think most of Lemmy still prefers online freedom, it should be one of the reasons that brought us here. Plus, the people you are gonna meet even by changing instance are going to be more or less the same. The number of instances you are barred from by staying on .world is pretty small.

One can hope…

You know, in a way I am glad that we managed to implement such a piss poor implementation of a PiRaCy ShIeLd. They are going to have to roll back or disable this piece of crap in a matter of days and that will hopefully be the end of these silly internet restrictions for good.

Had the implementation not sucked ass this bad, we would have needed to wait for some EU infringiment procedure or ECJ order to shut it down. Instead, this way it’s gonna end way more quickly.

Nah it should not. It would hurt decentralization and small instances. We already have a tool for curbing spam, it’s called the Fediseer. You may or may not have heard about it, but most admins have.

Thanks for sharing, OP, just sent a report to my authority, the Italian Garante per la Privacy.

His work in eradicating gang violence was impressive, I get why the few Salvadorians who aren’t behind bars would vote for him. Although I can’t help but wonder about how many people might have gotten unjustly incarcerated because of how much power he’s given to the police.

Like others have said I am a bit concerned by the privacy implications, but I like how nice the model is. Defintiely wouldn’t consider it as an alternative to therapy or even real conversations (the sentences it generates look very fake at times, plus I wouldn’t want to trust a machine’s advice anyway), but it’s pleasant to talk to and that’s probably all that matters.

Great if you have some time to kill or maybe need someone to take your head off something you’ve been thinking too much about, just gotta be careful on what you reveal to him.

EDIT: as I was chatting I got a prompt asking me to log in to continue the conversation. I logged in with my Google account, then kept going for a bit, then singned off and closed the conversation. After I told him I was going to close the tab he greeted me with my real name without me ever have mentioned it in the convo (of course, he took it from Google), but it still weirded the heck out of me. Be careful with what you share lol.

I am no expert either, but I once trained and ran an AI chat bot of my own. With a decently powerful Nvidia GPU it could output a message every 20-ish seconds (which is still too slow if you want to keep the conversation at a decent pace). I also tried it without a GPU, just running on my CPU (on a PC that had an AMD GPU which is about the same as not having one for ML applications) and it was of course noticeably slower. About 3 minutes per message, give or take.

And bear in mind, this was with an old and comparatively tiny model, something like Pi would be much more demanding, the replies my model produced hardly made any sense most of the times.

Not familiar, but from what I just read online it looks pretty similar yeah. I believe the idea behind DCC was recreating exactly that simpler old school fantasy.

My dad used to play red box D&D (which I believe was the first edition ever released). Still has some manuals, which I got the chance to read.

Not only it was encouraged to play humans, it was assumed! You didn’t get to pick a race, only a class. And while the classes of “elf” (think like 5e’s ranger) and “dwarf” (5e’s barbarian, sort of) were a thing, all of the other classes assumed for the player to be a human. You couldn’t play an elf wizard: you either are an elf OR a wizard. Wild stuff, compared to some of the crazy stuff we get to do in modern D&D.

Exciting stuff! In particual I really like how neatly organized the project roadmap is, with a quick glance at the project GitHub page I can tell what you guys are working on and how development is proceding.

Also, props for using a widely established language like Java. I know Rust has lots of advantages and is all in all an awesome language, but having to learn a new language just to be able to contribute and submit PRs to your favourite open source project kinda kills the hype (and takes away a bunch of time).

Ok so first off, thank you for typing out a well thought argument.

I posted a summed up version of the five ways, rather than the full text, and now I realize that probably was a mistake. I just wanted to make sure people would have read it, most would have ignored a wall of text. Instead, I will directly quote the full text in my answers here.

Here is a TL;DR, cause this will be long:

Thus beginning a long standing religious tradition of using scientific rhetoric where its helpful and attempting to shoehorn philosophy in where it contradicts or fails to uphold.

I don’t think he tried to use scientific rethoric at all, nor that any philosophical shoehorning has happened. Rather, it’s entirely philosophy. Doesn’t mean it’s perfect or necessarily correct, but we gotta call it the way it is. I also think you might be trying a bit too hard to interpret it as science, while that’s not really what the Summa was meant to be. Some of your conclusions were drawn from the summary I posted not being accurate (sorry about that, btw) and I adressed them by quoting the full text.

Starting from the fourth way:

Among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like. But “more” and “less” are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum, as a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles that which is hottest; so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest and, consequently, something which is uttermost being; for those things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being, as it is written in Metaph. ii. Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus; as fire, which is the maximum heat, is the cause of all hot things. Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.

You correctly criticized his mistake in using fire as the source of maximum heat and mixing in scientifical evidence with philosophy, but the full text tells a more nuanced story.
Fire here is more of an example, rather than pure scientifical evidence. It’s also not the basis of the point he is adressing here. That would instead be more abstract (and wouldn’t you know it, philosophical) concepts like “good” and “true”. So while your discussion on splitting natural sciences and philosophy makes a lot of sense, I don’t think it applies here.

Onto the fifth way:

The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.

In truth, I think this is the most beautiful of the five ways and the one that, to me,makes the most sense from a scientific perspective. I remained of the opinion that Aquinas wasn’t trying to bring in natural sciences into this one, but since you brought up “modern scientifical understanding” I will do my best to make some sense of it, according to modern science.

The message here is not as easy as water flowing because of gravity. It’s also not as easy as “what was before the Big Bang?”, because that would be, like you said, vulnerable to the “God of the gaps” counter argument.
Rather, starting from the universal constants such as the Boltzmann constant which regulates all of thermodinamycs; the speed of light in a vacuum, which regulates all existing radiation or the gravitational constant, which regulates how all matter and time interact; through science we get a very clear picture of how many pieces needed to fall into place for reality as we know it to come together, let alone life to be possible. According to this modern interpretation, the fifth way states that in order for the universe to exist as we know it, defined according to these specific constants, it must have happened through a higher being, a creator. Here, actually, is the only place where I see a possible mistake, because on a logical level he doesn’t prove definitively that the existence of God is the only solution to the problem, the hypothesis of a coincidence remains on the table. However I personally think, when put in this perspective, the religious hypothesis remains the more believable one.

On your last point, I don’t see how the fifth way would violate what he has established from the first way. The fifth claims that motion of inanimate objects happens naturally and repeatedly because of “some intelligent being […] [whom] we call God”. The first instead says that God was the first who put everything in motion, and that because of that things have been kept in motion ever since the universe began. I think these two point go hand in hand, rather than being opposed:
God first created the universe, by putting things in motion. God also defined the patters according to which things should have moved after his initial “push”. This makes perfect sense to me.

Quite funny really

I know, right? Like I said it was mostly a semantics issue, I wasn’t sure what OP meant. When they kindly clarified their question I gave them my answer, coming from a different perspective from most of the commenters.
Then in you came, and started slandering my religion. Like you might have guessed it didn’t quite sit right with me. Assuming you are an Atheist, it’s like I came at you saying that “Atheists have no morals” or “Atheists are nothing but hedonists”. I don’t think you would have liked it. So I tried my best to provide sensible answers to your remarks. I guess that makes me too an apologist; I don’t really have a problem with that label.

Everything before your last sentence presupposes your personal interpretation of your god.

No, it is the interpretation of the Catholic Church, which is the church followed by most Christians on this planet.

I’m not looking for philosophical evidence […]

Alright, you do you then. It seems to me that you are trying to explain God through science, and I’m not sure whether that is possible. Science, from a Christian perspective, is the study of God’s creation. Inferring knowledge about the creator from His creation seems like an arduous task to me. I think using reasoning and philosophy would be a more reasonable option.

Clearly this is the Christian god of the Bible and definitely not any other god humans have believed in […]

One step at a time. Once we are both on the same page that a higher being exist and the universe and life aren’t just the product of mere coincidence we can discuss why I think the “Christian God”, like you called him, is the right interpretation. But first you would need to accept religion(s) in general.

I literally quoted a source. Want more? This is the Cathechism of the Catholic Church on the topic of free will:

1730

1730 God created man a rational being, conferring on him the dignity of a person who can initiate and control his own actions. “God willed that man should be ‘left in the hand of his own counsel,’ so that he might of his own accord seek his Creator and freely attain his full and blessed perfection by cleaving to him.”

1739

1739 Freedom and sin. Man’s freedom is limited and fallible. In fact, man failed. He freely sinned. By refusing God’s plan of love, he deceived himself and became a slave to sin. This first alienation engendered a multitude of others. From its outset, human history attests the wretchedness and oppression born of the human heart in consequence of the abuse of freedom.

If instead you were looking for philosophical evidence for God’s existance, I recommend reading Thomas Aquinas’ Five Ways.

That is spot on. Contrary to Protestant (and in particular Evangelical) belief, the Catholic Church teaches that there are four senses through which one can read Scripture: one is literal, while the other three are spiritual (allegorical, moral and anagogical) and can help us interpret Christ’s message and how we should or should not behave during our earhthly lives. This is the relevant section from the Catechism.

I am not familiar with Orthodox theology, but I would assume they would have a similar position on the topic.

I’m sorry that you felt the need to compare those who spread Christian doctrine with rape apologists and Nazis, but there are some things I don’t like about your comment. Chances are you are not interested in hearing them (at least judging from the wording you used), but someone else in this thread might be.

Yes, God is an absolute good. Yes, we cannot understand Him. Most “atrocities”, like you called them, come from men being given free will by God and drifting away from His teachings, thus doing stuff that isn’t good. God is good.

If a baby dies and is baptized they go straight to Heaven. If a baby dies and isn’t baptized we don’t actually know for sure what happens (it is never explained in the Bible), but by interpreting other aspects of Christian dogma we can hope and assume that they too would be saved. On this topic I recommend the following read, by the International Theological Commission

[There are] grounds for hope that unbaptised infants who die will be saved and enjoy the Beatific Vision. We emphasise that these are reasons for prayerful hope, rather than grounds for sure knowledge. There is much that simply has not been revealed to us.

If there are other “atrocities” that you can think of and you’d like to discuss, I’d be happy to.