saalweachter (u/saalweachter)

saalweachter commented on Early Christian Writings earlychristianwritings.co... · Posted by u/dsego

Given the borrowing of ideas, why then do modern Christians, including evangelicals, dismiss other cultures so aggressively? For example Greek and Roman beliefs in god are described as “pagan”, which is a negative term. And obviously evangelicals are very hostile to other faiths even today, whether it’s Buddhism or Islam or Hinduism or whatever.

saalweachter · 4 days ago

It's not the only answer, but I would direct you to the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy.

Around a hundred, hundred and fifty years ago when our understanding of the universe had finally reached the point where it became obvious that (a) all of our creation stories were just stories and (b) we actually kind of knew the actual story now, everyone had a big crisis over how to deal with that.

The two options on the table where fundamentalism -- doubling down on Biblical literalism and faith -- and modernism, taking the Bible as more a spiritual message, adapting our understanding of it for the modern world.

Some churches went one way, others the other, but over the following century the fundamentalist churches have proven to be better at attracting, retaining and motivating their members.

There are still modernist churches, but the loudest Christians in America are almost all of the fundamentalist bent.

saalweachter commented on A new bill in New York would require disclaimers on AI-generated news content niemanlab.org/2026/02/a-n... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

Retric · 5 days ago

They didn’t make $60B in Q4 2025 in Texas. 1.4B was 100% profit from Texas for years, that a big fine.

saalweachter · 5 days ago

You also have to ask "how much is the specific thing in the lawsuit worth to Meta?"

I don't know how much automatically opting everyone in to automatic photo tagging made Meta, but I assume its "less than 100% of their revenue".

Barring the point of contention being integral to the business's revenue model or management of the company being infected with oppositional defiant disorder a lawsuit is just an opportunity for some middle manager + team to get praised for making a revenue-negative change that reduces the risk of future fines.

Work like that is a gold mind; several people will probably get promoted for it.

saalweachter commented on The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein scottaaronson.blog/?p=953... · Posted by u/pfdietz

decimalenough · 6 days ago

The kind of piece of shit who donates basically his entire fortune to charity? And actual charity at that, not Ellison style "Larry Ellison Research Foundation for Prolonging the Life of Larry Ellison and Getting Some Tax Breaks Along the Way".

saalweachter · 5 days ago

Listen, billionaires just have to do three things to be beloved:

  1. Donate 5-10% of their fortune to random unobjectionable charities.
  2. Don't abuse children.
  3. Stay off Twitter.

It's not a high bar, we don't need to give a silver medal to those that fall short.

saalweachter commented on Flock CEO calls Deflock a “terrorist organization” (2025) [video] youtube.com/watch?v=l-kZG... · Posted by u/cdrnsf

verdverm · 6 days ago

the line from authoritarians is often predictably to proclaim their opponents "terrorists" and the like

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/weakness-strongmen-step...

saalweachter · 6 days ago

Twenty-some years back, I attended a talk by a classicist who was talking about how the Romans, Caesar specifically I think, basically used "pirate" the same way.

saalweachter commented on An interactive version of Byrne's The Elements of Euclid (1847) c82.net/euclid/... · Posted by u/tzury

seanhunter · 6 days ago

There is a button at the top right that says “old English “. Set it to “modern English “. By default it’s trying to faithfully reproduce the original.

saalweachter · 6 days ago

They call it "old English"? That's disappointing.

saalweachter commented on An interactive version of Byrne's The Elements of Euclid (1847) c82.net/euclid/... · Posted by u/tzury

amadeuspagel · 6 days ago

Beautiful, and would be so much more beautiful if it used a modern font, without these weird cs and fs. I actually had to copy-paste "reproduction" to convince myself that this is a c character, and I'm not reading something in some ancient version of english with characters that I've never seen.

saalweachter · 6 days ago

Sergey Slyusarev re-typeset it!

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1684932289

There are a bunch of people reprinting it, because it's easy to just reprint scans, but this copy actually re-typeset it.

If you already know the subject the old typesetting is bad enough but you really don't want to try teaching someone who's never been exposed to Euclid from it, or they'll be wondering why it spends so much time talking about furfaces.

saalweachter commented on Tractor incoherency.co.uk/blog/st... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

AloysB · 6 days ago

I came here to say the exact same thing. This is so refreshing.

I thoroughly enjoyed it. No BS, no ads, no sale pitch, no AI, no pretending, nothing. Just a stranger sharing with the world a project he built at home.

Those picture of the welds are inspiring. It is as honest as it gets. Loved it.

Thank you.

saalweachter · 6 days ago

It's a thing made with no attempt to become rich and famous.

What the heck is it doing on HN's front page?

saalweachter commented on xAI joins SpaceX spacex.com/updates#xai-jo... · Posted by u/g-mork

rainsford · 8 days ago

We also shouldn't overlook the fact that the proposal entirely glosses over the implication of the alternative benefits we might realize if humanity achieved the incredible engineering and technical capacity necessary to make this version of space AI happen.

Think about it. Elon conjures up a vision of the future where we've managed to increase our solar cell manufacturing capacity by two whole orders of magnitude and have the space launch capability for all of it along with tons and tons of other stuff and the best he comes up with is...GPUs in orbit?

This is essentially the superhero gadget technology problem, where comic books and movies gloss over the the civilization changing implications of some technology the hero invents to punch bad guys harder. Don't get me wrong, the idea of orbiting data centers is kind of cool if we can pull it off. But being able to pull if off implies an ability to do a lot more interesting things. The problem is that this is both wildly overambitious and somehow incredibly myopic at the same time.

saalweachter · 8 days ago

I feel like the proposal also glosses over why a merger is necessary and desirable to accomplish the goals.

Why couldn't xAI just, you know, contract with SpaceX to launch its future Datacenters In Space?

Wouldn't a company focused on a single mission, Datacenters In Space, be better at seeing that goal to fruition, instead of a Space Launch Company with a submission of Datacenters In Space, which might decide to drop the project in three years to focus on their core mission of being a Space Launch Company?

Even granting the goal as desirable and possible, why is a merger the best way to pull it off?

saalweachter commented on xAI joins SpaceX spacex.com/updates#xai-jo... · Posted by u/g-mork

senectus1 · 8 days ago

yeah, I am not a huge fan of Musk, but this move is just going to bring down arguably the only decent thing he's produced.

Leave SpaceX alone you child. Gwynne has it in excellent hands.. find some other way to pay for your juvenile brainfarts.

saalweachter · 8 days ago

I think we're around stage 4 of:

  1.  Elon is a genius, a real world Tony Stark.
  2.  How dare you!  You're just jealous!
  3.  Ok, regardless, he's done more to advance EVe and space travel than anyone else alive.
  4.  Oh God, he's going to cripple US development of EVs and rockets, isn't he?
  5.  Eh, Mars was never happening in my lifetime anyway.

saalweachter commented on Scientist who helped eradicate smallpox dies at age 89 scientificamerican.com/ar... · Posted by u/CrossVR

dgacmu · 10 days ago

It really is eradicated - it's the only human disease we've truly eradicated. There are literally no more cases of smallpox in the wild, period.

The problem is that there are samples of viable virus in the labs of the US and Russia. So - it's eradicated but we have to keep stockpiles of vaccine around anyway. But nobody gets vaccined for it any more; it has an unfavorable risk-benefit ratio when the virus simply does not circulate. Smallpox kills ~30% of people who get infected with it; the first-generation vaccine had a mortality rate of about 1 in 1,000,000.

(There are newer-generation vaccines developed and being developed that have an even better safety profile but we still wouldn't use them because the cost - the literal cost and the side effects and general "meh, why get another shot?"-ness outweighs the benefit of protection against something you don't need protection against.)

saalweachter · 10 days ago

Actually, do we need to keep samples anymore?

mRNA vaccines go from sequenced DNA to vaccine without any need to store or culture the original virus in the lab.

We could destroy our existing stockpile of smallpox and be ready to produce vaccines based on it faster than we could thirty years ago.

We couldn't validate new vaccines without access to the live virus, but then, if we aren't willing to expose hopefully-volunteers to a disease with a 30% mortality rate, we weren't really validating it anyway.

But yeah, I think we could probably unilaterally "disarm" and destroy our smallpox samples, and from a national security standpoint, I don't think we'd be significantly worse off; if the weaponized strain is significantly different from the old strain, enough to bypass vaccination, we'd need samples of the new thing in any case.

I'm not even sure we'd be substantially limiting new research on it, given that smallpox doesn't infect animals, I'm not sure if there's even any animal testing we could do with a live virus.

So yeah. Destroy the samples already.