It may be quite dangerous if we train LLMs on Taarof and Ketman... especially considering... what may arise. The masterful art of deception, surpassed perhaps only by the russianes

Arthur de Gobineau, Trois ans en Asie (3 years in asia) 1859:

“There is in Persia a word of which Europeans have no idea, and of which it is difficult even to give them a translation: this word is ketmân. It means the dissimulation of one’s thoughts, the concealment of one’s opinions, the careful hiding of what one truly believes or feels.

It is not considered a shame, still less a crime; it is, on the contrary, a virtue, a duty, and a necessity, imposed on everyone by the conditions of life. To practise ketmân is not merely permitted, it is commanded.

It consists in never allowing oneself to appear as one is, but in always showing oneself otherwise; it is the art of presenting to each person the aspect that will please him most, of adopting his ideas, his tastes, his language, while inwardly remaining quite different.

This perpetual exercise of disguise is carried out with a marvellous ease, and with a kind of pleasure in tricking others, which the Persians feel very keenly. They take delight in this ingenious hypocrisy; it is a game, a triumph of subtlety, in which the winner is the one who has best succeeded in hiding the truth.”

> You could play Silksong's predecessor, Hollow Knight, and not be all that good at it. Hollow Knight was a tough game, but I think you could get through it and fall in love with the environmental story telling and the lore and the music and characters. Silksong has all of this in spades, too, but it is so damn hard that you will not be able to access any of it unless you are willing to put in some serious effort. As a result, I suspect many of the people who enjoyed Hollow Knight will actually bounce off Silksong precisely because it is so hard, and they simply won't have the tenacity.

I think this is an overstatement. I've put about 16 hours into Silksong so far, I've pretty much completed around 8-10 zones or so, unlocked most of the abilities and stuff.

I don't think Silksong is that much more difficult than HK. Honestly it's been so long since I played HK that I'm not even sure it's more difficult at all but it probably is. If you went to Hunter's March as soon as you found it you probably had a bad time but going in there later on was honestly pretty easy. And aside from that and maybe a couple other spots it's been fairly alright in terms of difficulty IMO.

Everything so far has felt achievable and reasonable to me, having played HK, Dark Souls, Elden Ring and other similar games I don't think Silksong is significantly more difficult than any of those - yet.

Maybe it gets crazy later on, but that wasn't the claim in the article. The article claims you can hardly access anything without extreme effort and I don't think that's true at all.

free will is one big reason why god would not reveal himself in a universal fashion. free will includes the freedom to reject god. if god were to reveal himself openly then the freedom to reject him would not exist. we would not have a choice but to believe.

Just my opinion, I think at least a portion of them have to learn to live with "faith" being the answer to some hard questions. You also don't have to look hard for doctrines that are contradictory. For example: was Jesus human or God? (and keep in mind that God is traditinally viewed as tri-omni, meaning omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent)

Many times I've asked that I'm told "he was 100% human and also 100% God." I'm sure different sects believe differently on that, but plenty do accept that. When I ask "how is it possible to be 100% human and 100% God?" you'll sometimes get answers like, "well it's like water in different forms, ice, liquid, and vapor" but that doesn't answer the question (it answers a question about how Jesus and God the Father can both be God yet still be "monotheistic"). When pushed it has always come down to "some things have to be accepted on faith." That is obviously enough for plenty of people, but I personally find it insufficient. Back when I was a believer I had cognitive dissonance over that question that I somewhat learned to live with (obviously not entirely as I am no longer a believer, but it wasn't that question that led me to ultimately lose my faith).

That's cool. I did something similar in the early days with Google Bard when data visualization was added, which I believe was when the ability to run code got introduced.

One question I always had was what the user "grte" stands for...

Btw. here the tricks I used back then to scrape the file system:

https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2024/exploring-google-b...

The NATO phonetic alphabet was one of the highest reward-for-effort things I've ever learned. It doesn't take long to commit to memory and become proficient with and the amount of time I've saved on repeating spelling (or even just "A as in apple, M as in Mary" nonsense) over the decades has added up.

It's clear enough that even people unfamiliar with it previously can follow it when you're using it to spell something and by design it's clear even over poor audio connections (or in a noisy server room).

It honestly should be taught to everyone in elementary school.

Not a Bible scholar, so I am wondering why John is not considered a synoptic gospel. What does his gospel cover? The same ground but not as similar to the other three?

Curious too when the various disciples lived, wrote. I didn't know that scholars assumed that Matthew and Luke already had Mark's gospel to draw from.

I've liked this post for a long time. It articulates a way of growing in this field that I haven't seen in a lot of places. Whenever I've posted it in a slack or similar it seems pretty divisive - some people don't seem to like it.