Readit NewsWhat if Hipparchus originally charted stars that no longer exist in our sky, due to having gone supernova hundreds of year ago? A thousand year time difference is roughly 1/3rd of a complete equinox precession, which would also be interesting to compare against our modern day observations.
All of this is valuable, both the cultural knowledge and the scientific. I doubt the monks realized the gravity of their choice so long ago.
I’m not saying it’s not unfortunate that things get lost just that we shouldn’t act like this was some kind of act of ignorant vandalism.
It's incredible what knowledge we'd have, if it weren't for Christianity and the Dark Ages it engendered. There are tons of palimpsests like this, like the Archimedes Palimpsest, in which the beginnings of calculus was invented, almost two millenia before Newton, but were scraped off to make yet another Bible. Imagine what the West could have accomplished if monks weren't so busy erasing science and math.
This is not a very historically informed comment. This didn’t take place during the “dark ages,” for one, but in a Christian monastery in Islamic Sinai if the timing of the article is correct. It’s a shame that some of these discoveries were overwritten but this was a common practice in any culture because paper was so expensive.
The writings of St. John Climacus were also far more useful and interesting to people at the time since they dealt with what for them were practical matters of how to lead the life of their community. This isn’t because they were narrow-mindlessly religious. Monks also had to busy themselves with calendrical calculations — and therefore astronomy. These were works of what we would call practical philosophy or ethics, like the famous Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. It would also have been tragic to potentially lose those culturally significant writings in favor of astronomical or mathematical texts.
> she said she was aware that DeepSeek had given her contradictory advice. She understood that chatbots were trained on data from across the internet, she told me, and did not represent an absolute truth or superhuman authority
With highly lucid people like the author's mom I'm not too worried about Dr. Deepseek. I'm actually incredibly bullish on the fact that AI models are, as the article describes, superhumanly empathetic. They are infinitely patient, infinitely available, and unbelievably knowledgeable, it really is miraculous.
We don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but there are obviously a lot of people who really cannot handle the seductivity of things that agree with them like this.
I do think there is pretty good potential in making good progress on this front in though. Especially given the level of care and effort being put into making chatbots better for medical uses and the sheer number of smart people working on the problem.
A chatbot can’t be empathetic. They don’t feel what you feel. They don’t feel anything. They’re not any more empathetic than my imaginary friend that goes to another school.
Very interesting. Looks like fossil has made some unique design choices that differ from git[0]. Has anyone here used it? I'd love to hear how it compares.
[0] https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/fossil-v-git.wiki#...
I use Fossil extensively for all my personal projects and find it superior for the general case. As others said it’s more suited for small projects.
I also use Fossil for lots of weird things. I created a forum game using Fossil’s ticket and forum features because it’s so easy to spin up and for my friends to sign in to.
At work we ended up using Fossil in production to manage configuration and deployment in a highly locked down customer environment where its ability to run as a single static binary, talk over HTTP without external dependencies, etc. was essential. It was a poor man’s deployment tool, but it performed admirably.
Fossil even works well as a blogging platform.
It might be the opposite. Python apps still get written despite the performance hit, because understandability matters more than raw performance in many cases. Now that we’re all code reviewers, that quality should matter more, not less. Programmer time is still more expensive than machine time in many cases.
Are Python apps really so easy to understand? I seriously disagree with this idea given how much magic goes behind nearly every line of Python. Especially if you veer off the happy path.
I certainly am no fan of C but from a certain point of view it’s much easier to understand what’s going on in C.
Hm, as far as I know, it is sort of debated what the "classical christian view" is. But I certainly have seen lots of pictures from god in churches portrayed as the bearded guy up in the sky. It is definitely the common concept. Father, son and holy spirit. Plays a strong role with catholics
St. Augustine on “seeing” God:
“Do not imagine God according to the lust of your eyes. If you do, you will create for yourself a huge form or an incalculable magnitude which (like the light which you see with your bodily eyes) extends in every direction. Your imagination lets it fill realm after realm of space, all the vastness you can conceive of. Or maybe you picture for yourself a venerable-looking old man. Do not imagine any of these things. If you would see God, here is what you should imagine: God is love“
"On the other hand, if God really does just determine everything, you basically get pantheism where everything is an immediate and direct expression of “God.” "
Yes, or mysticism. We all exist within the mind of god. I do like those concepts more to be honest, but is indeed a quite different concept from the creator up in the clouds ruling the universe.
As the other reply said neither the classical Jewish or Christian view is that God is some guy literally up in the heavens sitting around all day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ladder_of_Divine_Ascent
According to this article his writings pre-date the Islamic conquest (639).
Of course, there was also this: https://www.sinaimonastery.com/index.php/en/history/mohammed
And St Catherine's is a fortress in the middle of the desert so who knows what it's status was, it was an interesting time (beginning of Islamic conquests).