Posts by slimboyfat

83

Do You Think Trump Is Done?

by minimus in

jw
friends

certain forces appear to be trying to make sure donald trump never runs for president again.

some republicans are clearly abandoning trump and of course the democratic press has been saying trump is done!

is trump’s goose cooked?

Trump is small scale corruption compared with the mess that is policy toward Ukraine, profiteering arms manufacturers, politicians who promote a war agenda in return for bribes, sadism and abuse among wealthily elites and so on. If only there was a way of elevating honourable, intelligent and competent people to the levers of power then almost everyone on the planet would be better off. (Not the 0.1% who benefit from our corrupt system, but everyone else) As it is we have a system that functions almost the complete opposite. Trump is a clown but he’s far from the most malevolent person or malign agent to have attained high office, or to wield power without actually being in office.

54

Is AI going to change the world?

by Reasonfirst in

jw
friends

had lunch with a friend, whose a lecturer in the accounting dept.

of one of australia's best universities.

he told me he expects to lose his job at some point in the next 5 years, as the accounting dept, will disappear, as all accounting will be done by ai programs, so why teach it.. if his fears are correct, that means that any profession that involves the mind, may one day face the same future.

slimboyfat

Thanks TD, it certainly looked like an improvement, but not knowing anything about “bulge” I didn’t know. These models are only going to get better, plus there seems to be a knack to using them. For example, quirky as it may seem, many report that asking the AI to identify mistakes in their own answers will significantly improve the resulting output.

Thinking further about your example about driverless cars being able to handle the road but being flummoxed by the hand gestures of other drivers, a few things occur to me. First of all, if this is presented as an example of a domain that is ultimately indecipherable to AI, then I think that is very unlikely. A few years ago there was real debate about whether AI would ever be able to distinguish a cat from a dog. Some said the task was simply too complicated and AI would not manage it for many decades to come, if ever. Yet that barrier was overcome very swiftly, and now AI cannot only distinguish cats from dogs, it can identify many thousands of species that no single human can identify. It can distinguish human individuals from their faces or parts of their faces, and much, much more, far beyond the capability of humans. In a few short years we’ve gone from AI that can’t tell a cat from a dog to AI that is much better at identifying at categorising objects in general from visual input than any human.

Therefore, the fact that driverless cars can’t seem to understand human hand gestures is probably simply indicative of the fact that the models have not yet been pointed in that direction. If AI is set the task of analysing a large dataset of hand gestures then it will very rapidly become better than humans at identifying and responding effectively to hand gestures. Plus other physical/visual cues that humans are aware of, such as a car slowing down, speeding, peeking out, hesitating, and everything else, plus sounds and smells and so on. None of these inputs are inherently beyond the capability of AI to categorise and respond to effectively. It’s just a matter of turning the attention of AI in that direction in the first place.

Aha, you might say, there you have it! AI doesn’t even know what to look for unless a human first tells it what to do! That’s true to some extent, but the range of abilities and level of abstraction becomes ever wider, so that humans can give more and more general instructions, and the details can be worked out by AI.

In other words, each time the risk is narrowly defined and effectively completed, humans can step outside the defined area of analysis and ask the AI to move up to the next level of abstraction. In other words you begin by instructing AI to deal with specific situations, but the better it becomes the more general the instructions can be. Starting from telling AI in driverless cars not to collide with other objects, using the rules of the road, then taking into consideration the actions and visual cues of other drivers, all the way up to the point where the AI can be asked to identify all the relevant factors impacting safety in moving vehicles and to optimise for all the relevant factors it identifies.

It can then be asked to analyse its own results recursively in order to identify any safety factors that had been neglected. It can then be instructed to address those factors it identifies in an endless loop, until what you arrive at is a system that copes with all relevant aspects of safely and handles them better than human drivers. This process will probably be very quick because all the gains in knowledge by AI systems can be shared across the network and once learned are never forgotten.

11530

It's been a long 9 years Lloyd Evans / John Cedars

by Newly Enlightened in

original reddit post (removed).

slimboyfat

Posters who complain about others talking about the LE scandal would like to defend him but don’t have the courage. They are using “you all obsessed” as a proxy for their real opinion that what LE did was fine by them. Why not just say it plainly?

10

Warwick PIMO- YouTube WOW

by XBEHERE in

jw
friends

if you haven't seen this exjw redditer's posts or youtube channel check this video.

watch the whole video... you will have a different prespective on what happened to am3's gb ousting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvch8p1mfek .

slimboyfat

When was this? He looks younger and healthier here, or am I imagining it? Is it a few years ago?

I can well imagine he had qualities that got him into the position of GB in the first place. It is relatively uncommon for someone who converted rather than born in to reach the Governing Body these days, so he must have stood out, at least to Ted Jaracz, who was in control of the GB when he was appointed.

But I think he deteriorated significantly in recent years, mentally, physically, and probably with alcoholism too. He was probably too rowdy or nasty when drunk and it just got too much.

72

Romans 9:5

by aqwsed12345 in

na28: ὧν οἱ πατέρες καὶ ἐξ ὧν ὁ χριστὸς τὸ κατὰ σάρκα, ὁ ὢν ἐπὶ πάντων θεὸς εὐλογητὸς εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας, ἀμήν.. na28 transliterated: hō̃n hoi patéres kaì ex hō̃n ho khristòs tò katà sárka, ho ṑn epì pántōn theòs eulogētòs eis toùs aiō̃nas, amḗn.. kit: .

nwt: to them the forefathers belong, and from them the christ descended according to the flesh.

god, who is over all, be praised forever.

slimboyfat

Even the Catholic scholar Raymond Brown says Romans 9.5 is ambiguous. Why does the Trinity doctrine so regularly fall back on texts that are uncertain textually or grammatically?

PetrW thanks for an interesting exposition about non-adorative Christology and the reference to the early Unitarian Ferenc David.

Yet the NT is very clear that Christians should pray to God alone. Jesus instructed his followers to pray to the Father (the one exception, again, is textually in dispute at John 14.14) and the evidence from Paul and the other NT writers is that they followed this instruction. Christians are to pray to God through Jesus and in his name. The German scholar Hans Conzelmann put it this way:

“Calling on Jesus is to be distinguished from prayer. Only God is worshipped. But that one can pray at all is a miracle, mediated through the Lord. Consequently men call upon him; they pray in the name of the Lord.” An Outline of the Theology of the New Testament (1969), page 84.

I also note that there are Trinitarians who in practice agree that prayer is correctly directed to God through Jesus rather than to Jesus himself. For example I have often observed, and had it confirmed from speaking to them, that the Brethren, despite being fully Trinitarian, strictly follow the Bible pattern of prayer to God through Jesus rather than prayer direct to Jesus.

54

Is AI going to change the world?

by Reasonfirst in

jw
friends

had lunch with a friend, whose a lecturer in the accounting dept.

of one of australia's best universities.

he told me he expects to lose his job at some point in the next 5 years, as the accounting dept, will disappear, as all accounting will be done by ai programs, so why teach it.. if his fears are correct, that means that any profession that involves the mind, may one day face the same future.

slimboyfat

TD I put your question “Can you explain how bulge is calculated in mathematics?” to the new AI called Aomni Agent. First it breaks down the question into different components, then it lists relevant sources, then it browses the sources, then it gives its report in the form of “key takeaways” followed by a more detailed explanation. You can read the result here:

https://aomni.com/research/d1e68f94-05f0-4ee0-b094-154714687e50

Is this better than ChatGPT?

11530

It's been a long 9 years Lloyd Evans / John Cedars

by Newly Enlightened in

original reddit post (removed).

slimboyfat

Yep, the fact is LE could probably get away with never making another video, and still keep hundreds of patrons for months, and dozens for years to come. Some people who sign up just never quit for whatever reason. Look at Boogie’s patrons. His support crashed but it took years, and he still has a handful left. He’ll collect that money from the handful of remaining supporters for the rest of his life, or until it’s shut down somehow, which seems unlikely. (Down from over 300 to less than 30 in his case)

https://graphtreon.com/creator/boogie2988

On the other hand, coping with a steadily falling income is not an easy thing to do for anybody and is likely to have a mental toll, especially as inflation is high in many places. (It certainly is in the UK, I don’t know about Croatia) This is why he is frustrated with the very good income he receives at the moment, because it doesn’t match the excellent income he had in 2020. Next year will likely be worse than this year so that, even though he will still be making more than he did in 2018, it will feel a lot worse because it’s heading downward.

I reckon his ad revenue from YouTube has probably tumbled further than his Patreon support because his views are rubbish these days and YouTube is apparently paying out less than it used to.

Plus the downward trajectory of his channel could accelerate rather than level off in the medium term as he is less motivated to produce videos and fewer people support him as a result in a reinforcing downward loop.

15

Can the org's finances be viewed?

by BoogerMan in

does anyone know where to view the wtbts of new york and pennsylvania's financial records?.

i mean, they are registered charities aren't they, so surely their income/expenditures must be open to scrutiny?.

slimboyfat

Can the org’s finances be viewed?

Yes, they can be viewed with some suspicion. 😜

12

Blood Card Check

by NotFormer in

i remember many years ago that apparently there was an annual event where witnesses' blood cards (or whatever they're called) were checked by some visiting wt dignitary.

that the blood cards were current, and that the r&f were carrying them.. given the situation in some countries that kingdom halls can't legally keep data about people who have been visited, is the practice of checking and enforcing the carrying of blood cards similarly illegal in some places?.

are there any places where it is illegal for the hlc to set up camp near the hospital bed of a sick jw?.

slimboyfat

I have never heard of such a thing. If anything elders have become more relaxed about blood and blood cards. I think they still have a reminder at the meeting each year to keep your documents up to date, but publishers are not monitored for what documents they hold as far as I know. Elders don’t chase people to sign the documents, they leave it up to individuals to take the initiative. That’s what I’ve seen anyway.

That’s in contrast with field service reports which are still sought vigorously by elders from their group at the end of each month. So it does seem to be a conscious decision to be more hands off around blood documents in particular.

8

New NWT

by NotFormer in

is it very different from the old version?.

has it changed much?.

how can i get a copy?

slimboyfat

What people consider the “controversial” renderings in the NWT remain pretty much intact in the revision (John 1.1, Col 1.16, Luke 23.43, use of “Jehovah” in the New Testament, and so on). But the language has been thoroughly modernised and some of the quirky aspects have been toned down or eliminated (“time indefinite”, all the “proceeded to”s, auxiliary verbs generally, “soul” for every instance of nephesh and psyche, for example). A few changes do reflect changes in teaching over the decades, such as the reinstatement of “elder”, in place of the original NWT rendering “older man”, which dates from a period when JWs didn’t have bodies of elders as they have then now. The difference in the revised NWT is perhaps most pronounced in places such as the book of Job, Proverbs, and poetic parts of the prophets where there has been a real effort to make the language understandable rather than literal. (The “dungy idols” have been removed for example)

The JWs at the carts probably won’t have a spare copy to hand but if you express an interest in obtaining one they may arrange to bring one for you or else direct you to come along to the KH to pick one up at one of the meeting times.

It is of course also available online in full on their website.