I found it has replaced a large percentage of google searches for me - particularly programming related. I can literally put the same keywords in ChatGPT that I used to put into google, and I'll get answers from various programming language docs, with examples I can follow-up on, with no SEO spam / ads.
....So that's how Google fell... their enemies that stood before them
With the power of its Gemini - Google was able to inject product ranking placement tokens into any prompt sent through its tentacles to the deep blue datacenter where, beneath the North Sea sits a kraken of subliminal advertising.
The new concept is to put secret subliminal ads in the responses AI makes across the board in order to secretly drive sentiment while the users believe they are educating themselves, they are secretly indoctrinating themselves to be the clickslaves Google sees them to be.
>"Looking up from the deck of golden gate bridge at the towers and metal work, the towers rise and arch back in an ominous and foreboding manner. more artistic, like an alphonse mucha propaganda poster - slightly fish-eye feeling" -- https://i.imgur.com/vyNg79f.jpg
B2B startup in the sales/financial space. We were solely targeting Salesforce customers in the USA at the time, who conduct all transactions in USD ($).
So sprinkled throughout our very large app were thousands of dollar signs - some rendered on page load in the HTML, some constructed via JS templates, some built on graphs in d3.js, and some built in tooltips that occassionally popped up on the aforementioned graphs.
One day, a Sales guy pops in with "Hey, I just sold our app to a big player in Europe - but they need the currency to display in Pounds instead of Dollars" (might have been pounds, might have been some other European currency - memory is a bit hazy).
CEO steps in and supports Sales guy, says their demo starts in a few days - and the demo needs to take place with the client's data, on their instance, and show Pounds instead of Dollars.
Wat?
Small dev team, 5 members. We gather and brainstorm for a couple hours. Lots of solutions are proposed, and discarded. We get access to client's instance to start "setting things up" and poke around a bit.
We discover that all the field names are the same, and SF was just storing them as numbers. No currency conversions had to be done. We literally just needed to display the pound symbol instead of the dollar symbol.
One of the devs on my team says "Hey guys, I have a dumb idea..."
In short, he remembered an extension from back in the day called "Cloud2Butt". When you loaded a page, it would scan all html on the page and transparently and instantly replace all instances of the word "Cloud" with the word "Butt". Recollecting this, the dev wondered if we could look at their code, and write something similar to crawl the DOM tree and just replace all dollar symbols with pound symbols. The resulting "fix" would then just be a simple JS function we put on top of our stack, instead of refactoring thousands of files.
So... we tried it. With one small addition (making it do it on a setInterval every 100ms, which took care of the tooltips on the graphs) it worked flawlessly. We intended it as a stopgap measure to buy us time, but there were no complaints so we just let that run in production for several years, and the app expanded to several more currencies.
I've used ChatGPT 3.5 (not 4, too expensive) to translate most of the Latin writings of Jerome, Ambrose, and Ambrosiaster (from Migne's Patrologia Latina) - the translations have been put in this repo in the public domain:
- ChatGPT did excellent with about 3 sentences max at a time. Exceeding 3 sentences would cause it to often truncate the response (e.g. translating 3ish of 5 sentences, or hallucinating more).
- ChatGPT would originally return the translation, sometimes randomly prefixed with a variant of "The translation is" and sometimes wrapped in quotes, othertimes not. Using the function interface to ChatGPT eliminated this problem.
- When it comes to quotations from Bible verses, ChatGPT sometimes "embellished" (not sure what else to call it). E.g. if part of Ephesians 2:7 is quoted in Latin, in the English ChatGPT would sometimes insert Ephesians 2:7-8 in full.
I don't really understand what the value in posting these kinds of takeaways about using GPT3.5 here is. GPT4 is significantly better, and improved models are coming. There's just not a lot of point to benchmarking 3.5 when likely every issue you've pointed out is solved by 4.
An open source database that pulls up all historical Christian commentary on a verse in the Bible - e.g. see how the early church fathers interpreted a verse, it's often illuminating.
Was inspired by CS Lewis' comments about the "Old Books": "Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books."
This is awesome! I'm certainly going to be taking a look. I've been reading from C.S. Lewis's letters recently and found a lot of value, so it is especially nice to read this!
> The non-partisan factor we've found to help accomplish this is a rare, but well-documented history of a site's complete lack of news reporting standards, such as routinely using spam or clickbait to artificially inflate traffic, consistently publishing stories without citing sources, censoring stories due to operating with very limited press freedom, or misleading readers about who owns, funds, and authors stories for the site.
Do you publish these scorecards publicly?
If there is no transparency, we cannot assume your assessment is non-partisan.
In addition to programming, I'm a huge church history buff. So here's a contrarian view in a slightly different direction from many in this thread:
--------
Protestantism is dead, it just doesn't know it yet.
Protestants have a Bible that differs from Catholics/Orthodox - it excludes the Deuterocanonical books (like Maccabees). The central tenant of Protestantism is Sola Scripture - that the Bible is to be the determining factor on whether a doctrine is biblical or not.
John Calvin (one of the founders of Protestantism) says in his Antidote to Trent that Catholics added the Deuterocanonical books to the Bible as these books prove doctrines like Purgatory and exorcisms. Or to put in the inverse, that IF the Deuterocanonical books were in the Bible, doctrines like Purgatory and exorcisms would be biblical - but the Deuterocanonical books are NOT part of the Bible.
The problem Protestantism is facing is that their justification for their canon (excluding these Deuterocanonical books) has fallen apart with the findings published concerned the Dead Sea Scrolls in the last 20 or so years (especially by DSS researcher Emanuel Tov).
Protestantism's justification for excluding the Deuterocanonical books tends to boil down to one of two arguments - pointing back to Jerome or pointing back to a Jewish canon prior to the time of Jesus.
Jerome's arguments for excluding the books boiled down to two things, since disproven:
1) That Jesus and the Apostles quoted exclusively from the Proto-Masoretic text (which excluded the Deuterocanonical books) against the Septuagint (which included the Deuterocanonical books) whenever the two texts differed, and thus Jesus affirmed the Proto-Masoretic as original. However it's now universally accepted that Jerome was wrong and Jesus and the NT authors vastly preferred (and quoted from) the Septuagint [e.g. Matthew 21:16 and Psalm 8:2], with only a handful of the 300+ NT citations of the OT preferring the Masoretic.
2) When comparing the Hebrew text in Jerome's day (AD ~400) to the Septuagint text, Jerome noted many discrepancies. Noting that the original text of the OT was Hebrew, Jerome asserted that the discrepancies must have been from errors in translation of the Septuagint - that the Septuagint was a poor translation of the Hebrew text of his day. The Dead Sea Scrolls prove the existence of multiple ancient Hebrew text traditions, including a Proto-Septuagint Hebrew text, showing that the Septuagint was a good translation of this Proto-Septuagint Hebrew text, not a poor translation of the Proto-Masoretic text.
And the Jewish canon argument has no standing on anything. There is a lack of evidence of when the Jews finalized their canon - specifically their "writings" section. All existent evidence among rabbinic writings indicates it did not finalize until after the Christian era (when the Christians had already settled on the Septuagint's canon). Many Protestant scholars (see Sundberg) and Dead Sea Scroll researchers (see Tov) have written much on this, as the DSS provide further evidence of the lack of an established Hebrew canon at the time of Jesus.
Protestants are in for a reckoning. They insist on their scriptures having ultimate authority, but which scriptures? Their justifications for excluding the Deuterocanonical books have fallen apart, and there really aren't any substantial arguments remaining. Eventually they will have to deal with this - their doctrine of Sola Scriptura, and their innate push to seek for truth, demands it.
> The central tenant of Protestantism is Sola Scripture
No, it's not. There were from very early on many different Protestant traditions, and sola scriptura isn't even part of all of them, much less the primary and universal foundation of Protestantism (Anglicans and Methodists, for instance, are Protestants, but have only ever held prima scriptura, not sola scriptura.)
> Protestants have a Bible that differs from Catholics/Orthodox - it excludes the Deuterocanonical books
Many mainline Protestants include the Deuterocanonical books in their Bibles, and in their lectionary, but give them lesser theological roles.
Anyhow, some Protestants hold to strict literalism as fundamental despite direct contradictions in the Bible. I think you misunderestimate the ability of people to maintain a religious tradition in the face of even flat logical contradictions in fundamental doctrine, much less a lack of clear justification for doctrine.
> Scripting language runtimes such as Python, Ruby, and Perl are included in macOS for compatibility with legacy software. Future versions of macOS won’t include scripting language runtimes by default, and might require you to install additional packages.
That's probably for the best, as the ones that ship are often old and buggy, and Apple doesn't seem to care for maintaining them (even if they pretend to care about developers). As long as there's a way for actual developers to install these tools themselves (such as Homebrew), things will work out fine.
Actually, since the discovery of the multiple Hebrew text variants (including Pre-Septuagint) found in the Dead Sea Scrolls invalidated Jerome's argument against the Deuterocanon, I have yet to see a valid reason against their inclusion stand up against inspection.
Reviewing yours:
> * They were never included as part of the Hebrew canon of books
There is no evidence that there was a closed Hebrew Canon prior to the time of Jesus.
The Hebrew scriptures were divided into three parts - The Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. While it's true the Law and the Prophets had solidified by the time of Jesus, there is no evidence that the Writings were closed, and every reason to indicate that they weren't (see Rabbi Akiba and his comments regarding Sirach, Esther, and the Gospels around 100 AD).
> * There is no evidence that they were included in the original versions of the Septuagint
I'm not sure why you think that is relevant?
> * Historian Josephus made clear that those books were not part of the canon
> * Not one New Testament writer quoted from the Deuterocanon
Numerous Old Testament books, like Esther, that Protestants believe to be inspired are not quoted in the New Testament - does that make them not canonical?
Numerous non-canonical works, like the Book of Enoch, are quoted in the New Testament - does that make them canonical?
And anyway, it's interesting to know that the original KJV of 1611 (which included the Deuterocanon) included 11 cross-references in the New Testament to Deuterocanonical books, where it believe New Testament authors were quoting from or alluding to parts of the Deuteronincals. [https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/6316/what-d...]
> * Early church fathers did not consider them part of the Bible canon
> * John Wycliffe, a catholic who included these books in his translation, still did not consider them of the same authority as the rest
"As Jerome saith" echoed down through history. Jerome, around 400 AD, mistakenly had some doubts, and those same doubts reverbated over the next thousand years. Both of Jerome's two core reasons for his doubts are now known to be wrong.
> * Even the council of Trent did not accept all the “apocryphal” books (e.g. 1 and 2 Esdras were excluded)
> * The content of the books testifies against themselves with their inaccuracies, contradictions, and other problems that are not found in the traditional Bible canon
Actually that's not the case - their "problems" are the same as those from the rest of the Protestant canon. See https://youtu.be/tRmlW954PwI?t=651
> There is no evidence that there was a closed Hebrew Canon prior to the time of Jesus.
If that's the case, then any argument that predates Jesus in favour of the Deuterocanon would also be invalid.
> I'm not sure why you think that is relevant?
My argument against the Septuagint is relevant because it's often used as an example of why the Deuterocanonical books should be included in the Bible canon. The Septuagint is a direct translation of the Hebrew books (i.e. what would eventually become the Hebrew canon). If the Hebrew canon (even if it was just a loose canon at that time) never included the Deuterocanonical books, then there is no reason to assume the Septuagint would suddenly include them in its first copies.
> Numerous Old Testament books, like Esther, that Protestants believe to be inspired are not quoted in the New Testament - does that make them not canonical?
No, of course not. I provided a body of evidence against the Deuterocanon. This is just one part of that argument. The argument is strengthened by all the points, not just one of them.
> Numerous non-canonical works, like the Book of Enoch, are quoted in the New Testament - does that make them canonical?
No. Again, same as above. The point alone isn't extremely meaningful until you consider all the evidence.
> And anyway, it's interesting to know that the original KJV of 1611 (which included the Deuterocanon) included 11 cross-references in the New Testament to Deuterocanonical books, where it believe New Testament authors were quoting from or alluding to parts of the Deuteronincals.
I think the key word there is "believe". Unless a writer says something along the lines of 'the prophet says...' then the argument is weak at best.
> This is inaccurate, look at the historical record:
Well, according to Wikipedia: "Early church fathers such as Athanasius, Melito, Origen, and Cyril of Jerusalem, spoke against the canonicity of much or all of the apocrypha, but the most weighty opposition was the fourth century Catholic scholar Jerome who preferred the Hebrew canon, whereas Augustine and others preferred the wider (Greek) canon."
So it's certainly debatable, but there's much evidence to support what I said, as far as I can see.
> Actually that's not the case - their "problems" are the same as those from the rest of the Protestant canon.
Examples: Tobit claims to have seen events in his lifetime that cover more than 250 years, but Tobit 14:1-3 says he died at 102 years of age. Judith contains geographical oddities that can't be resolved except with miraculous assumptions. Ecclesiasticus 25:33 blames Eve for human sin instead of Adam, which contradicts Apostle Paul's writings. Baruch says the Jewish exile would last '7 generations', contradicting the Bible canon which says it would be 70 years. That's just a small sampling.
