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Cake day: April 4th, 2025

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  • These have been a thing for a while but it wasn’t an LLM it was a video analyzer. I did exactly one interview like that 5 years ago and gave up halfway through the second video they wanted me to send in because the job sucked ass anyway in a shitty part of the country and I realized I was going to be miserable working there even if I got the job degrading myself like that. I ask terrified of getting laid off and having to enter the job market right now and deal with all these new ways companies are coming up with to degrade potential hires and waste their time


  • I don’t understand why some people are so obsessed with this and why they make comments like this. Like what’s the point? To be smug and act like you’re better because you know that it wasn’t actually Kool-Aid used in Jonestown? Do you think it’s actually a public service? Do you have some vested interest in Kool-Aid and feel the need to defend their good name? Let me let you in on a little secret- most people know it wasn’t actually Kool-Aid but was a competitor’s product. However, it doesn’t fucking matter because that’s not the saying. If you say “Oh Jim isn’t using toothpaste because he drank the flavor aid and thinks fluoride is government mind control” the person you’re talking to will just look at you weird. It’s like getting pissed off at someone saying “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” by saying “uhuh well actshually the birds have the same monetary value regardless of whether they are located in a bush or in someone’s hand I am very smart”









  • Yes. God’s name is super interesting because of the extremely strong taboos surrounding saying it, stemming ultimately from the Third of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:7)- “Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD they God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guitless that taketh his name in vain.” Note the emphasis on the name of The LORD, and how the word “LORD” is all caps- this is a sort of censorship of God’s actual name, which goes back to the ancient Greek translations of the Hebrew scriptures. When you see “LORD” in a Bible passage in English, the original passage has God’s name in Hebrew. Jews have historically said the word “Adonai” (meaning Lord) instead of God’s name when reading aloud, and almost all translations follow this and just use the word for “Lord” (Kyrios, Dominus, etc.) instead.

    Anyway, the name is rendered in Hebrew as “” which is roughly equivalent to the letters “YHWH” in the Latin alphabet. Hebrew doesn’t use vowels, and the vowel sounds hsve intentionally not been recorded by scribes. The modern academic reconstruction is “Yahweh” for the pronunciation based on names for people and places that include parts of the name. You may also see “Jehovah” in some contexts which is based on older German scholarship that incorrectly rendered the vowels of the word. The name’s meaning is given to Moses in Exodus 3:14 where Moses asks who he should tell his people to worship and God replies “I AM WHO I AM” “Say this to the people of Israel: I AM has sent me to you” (in Hebrew, I am who I am is Eyeh Asher Eyeh). Modern scholarship agrees that the name has some connection with the word “to be” and means something along the lines of “The Existing One.”

    Myself, I interpret God’s response in the story and the meaning of His name as a declaration of self sufficiency, that God is what exists in His own right, and doesn’t need anything or anyone else to exists. It’s not only a declaration of montheism, but a declaration of supremacy over all of the universe. But yeah, not only does your Bologna have a first name, but God does too if you’re Christian or Jewish.


  • There are definitions of “God” that I feel are hard to prove, but others that are easy. For example, of your definition is “God is the ultimate cause of the universe” then it’s pretty trivial that if everything has a cause there must be an end of the chain. Of course, this the could be a computer program running the universe simulation or even just the laws of physics themselves if those are truly causeless. But nonetheless, it’s still a somewhat satisfying definition of “God” so I’m comfortable saying I believe in God. Harder definitions include “God is an omnipotent being” (which most of God’s traditional attributes can be derived from) and “God is the being described in the Bible/Qu’ran/other religious text” which I feel like are unprovable.

    A lot of religious apologists will make arguments in favor of the easier definition and then try to claim that this means their specific view of God is real. Personally I think that’s insane. Like “there must be some end of the chain of causality therefore God became a Jewish carpenter in the ancient Roman Empire.” Even if you’re Christian that should be a bad logical jump.


  • I’m Western esotericism, names have power beyond simply being signifiers for the thing they represent- they embody some part of the thing they represent. The word “fire” contains some intrinsic “fire-ness” but not the whole picture. After all, everyone has different names for the same thing. It is thought that everything has a “true name” that perfectly encapsulates all things about it in their entirety, and this true name could be found by intense study, meditation, or etymology. The Bible pays a lot of attention to names in this way. Adam, the first man, names all the animals. Genesis pays a lot of attention to the names of places, and a lot of stories in Genesis are essentially folk etymologies of locations. God’s own name is of special importance, and its meaning was revealed to Moses by the Burning Bush. Even today Jews believe that even saying God’s name is powerful and dangerous and that only the High Priest would be allowed to say it once every year during Yom Kippur. Jewish folklore says that even this name is merely a part of God’s true name, and that Moses pronounced a longer more complete form of The Name to part the Red Sea, and some systems hold that there are even longer and even more complete forms that have been known to rabbis in the past.