I've been thinking about this a lot, by coincidence, as I read Unsong by Scott Alexander (unsongbook.com). It's a beautifully written somewhat comic and somewhat tragic story about the kabbalic-turned-capitalist search for the powerful Names of God.
It occurred to me that, if the Abrahamic God exists, and the origin of Adam is anything more than a mere metaphor, God must have had to make a decision at some point. "There!", He/She/It said as the last vital chromosome fell into place in generation Aleph-1, "All this work is finally done. Whew! I could use some rest." Or something.
But maybe it's all metaphor (except for the God existing part). Maybe the Garden of Eden was Us (big-us, all the hominids) co-existing without technology, and the rise of flint-knapping/agriculture/representational art/whatever was the "eating of the fruit and gaining of knowledge".
Or any other variation you like, as long as you're not intentionally bound from thinking by a literalist view of the Torah's Book of Genesis. In which case, I have bad news: "Adam" wasn't even named that in the early writings, presumably closer to God's word. So, your translation is a bad start for you.
So, maybe the "Twelve Tribes of Israel" are themselves metaphoric for the whole set of hominin branches. Maybe "Ham" was Paranthropus. Accepting that "seven" in the bible sometimes implies "an important big number", maybe "seven" generations later (give or take a few 100) Paranthropus died out completely. Poor Ham. He was just checking to make sure Dad didn't oversleep.
Or maybe, there is no God, and it's just fun to play with myths, which are culturally powerful.
It's not hard to see how "leaving the garden" can be interpreted as us leaving nature. We're the only animal that doesn't really jive with the rest of the ecosystem.
He seems to have been "Adamah", or "dirt" - which is not far removed from "Adam", I'll grant.
But "Eve" is the one that really changed. She was named by Adam "Ishah", feminine version of "ish"/man. Or maybe "Chivah", a variation on the Hebrew word for life. I'm not clear. Then the Greeks made her "Zoe".... Fast forward a few hundred years, and a couple languages, and it becomes "Eve".
An early computer translating program took "out of sight, out of mind" to Russian and back, and returned "invisible insanity". A fairly reasonable translation, in some respects.
My point is really this: Biblical literalists who only read it in their native tongue are making indefensible claims about meaning.
open-weights, not open-source (sorry to be that one but open source in this case would mean you can build it yourself from provided "source", which you can't, because it's not provided)
I totally get your underlying point, but sometimes it comes down to pragmatism.
If one’s goal is for the world to work as efficiently and with as little friction as possible, then things like a single common language make a lot of sense.
For example, in most spheres of international business English is the common language. It’s not a value judgement about the importance of English or the inferiority of other languages – it’s just pragmatism as English is the commonest shared language that most people understand, whether as a first or second+ language.
People remember famous scientists like Einstein, Feynman, or even Bill Nye the Science Guy, and believe it's obvious that white men are more qualified in STEM, and anyone denying it is in denial. They ignore that before the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, discrimination was legal in the US, and that Ivy League universities only started admitting women from 1969 to 1981 (depending on the university).
People who say they can tell the percentage of DEI hires on sight—up to two significant digits from a data set, like "99%"—imagine that the past was a meritocracy, because they never grew past these simple stories to encourage children to pursue science.
Is it an accident that your example consists of three Jewish people and would you argue that they did receive less discrimination compared to other demographics regarding access to education?
The Nazis, who were white supremacists, persecuted Einstein and dismissed his theory of relativity as "Jewish science". Einstein fled to the US, which was a much less racist environment compared to Nazi Germany, and Einstein's theory helped the US create the atomic bomb that defeated the Nazis.
The US had a "Jewish quota" to limit the number of Jews allowed in universities, so "white" Jews experienced more discrimination than white Christians. However, racial segregation between white and black people was legal until 1954-1964, so white Jews generally experienced less discrimination compared to black people.
If Germany and the US wasn't so racist, science would have advanced further than it is today. Famous Jewish scientists (and science communicators) proved that white supremacy was wrong, not right.
> white Jews generally experienced less discrimination compared to black people.
Perhaps. And yet your initial statement would assume that you would want to discriminate against them.
This is more or less exactly what I believe DEI policies would lead to. There are enough people that believe Jews are advantaged but the opposite is mostly true. Still under the metrics DEI generally proposes they would need to be discriminated against.
This is why having the premise to treat everyone equally is the better solution than what DEI proposes. And criticism of DEI is not white supremacy.
Einstein moved to the US well after he became a famous scientist. The University of Zurich, where he got his degree, has been open to women since the mid 19th century.
The Ivy League first started admitting women in 1870 (Cornell). The rest, however, were far later.
For Many people on Hacker News, DEI has become synonymous with unqualification, implying that if a non‑white person works at a company, they're only there because of these programs, and are taking opportunities away from more qualified white men.
In their view, these employees don't truly deserve their positions.
This is an exaggeration - a bad faith interpretation based on the most extreme opinions (unless you are defining "many" relatively - i.e. if 10 out of 100 people in a room are openly racist, that's "many" by colloquial usage, because being openly racist is so dramatic, not because 10% is an intrinsically big number).
Productive out of the box, comes with bootstrap 5, jQuery( yeah i know).
It's has amazing documentation easy to learn. It uses PHP for templating, so you can prototype very quickly.
Collection of wisdom:
- A single dev will be more productive with a mature framework 10+ years, most of it has been documented, bugs fixed, tooling matured. Old is tried and true
- JavaScript libraries rot very quickly. Try running any node project from 2 years ago? Now try running any PHP, Django project from 15 years ago see the difference.
-C# and .Net is amazing
-Sqlite is amazing
- I was an angular/react dev for many years, now I'm pumping server side html templates and jQuery like there's no tomorrow. It's so easy, so simple. Why push json on the backend, then another project to consume/validate that JSON on the front-end, when I can just push everything as HTML.
- It's not just easy to develop, it's also ease of deployment.
The syntax of php is a little awkward and setting up debugging can be hard.
But the frameworks are solid: Symfony, Yii are really nice and modern.
My ideal framework would be, the syntax, typing and of c# , the tooling and libraries of php, the admin and forms of Django, the easy deployments of JS.
I think PHP is wonderful to work in, but it's no longer in fashion (minus the still-big Wordpress/Drupal space, of course). C# is nice to work in too but only certain types of companies use it.
Software dev is rarely someone sitting down and going through all the possible stacks to work in and doing side-by-side evaluations... it's just someone's pet preference, usually a senior or founder, following the macro fashion trends of the last few years =/
Which is to say... the job availability market is not based on language merits, sadly.
Or the history really began once the other Humans were no more ?
Just passing thoughts