SatanicNotMessianic

In my experience, at least in the US, non-denominational when associated with an institution generally means “Christian” but not affiliated with a sect. They’re (typically) still quite Christian, and the phrase can be and is applied to churches ranging from the ones flying Pride flags and declaring that they’re open to everyone to ones like Westboro - some of the most radical Christian churches are non-denominational because their views are too conservative for even the more conservative right wing religions.

The phrase itself is an organizational status and does not indicate what kinds of beliefs a person has. It’s not unlike someone describing themselves as “politically independent.” You don’t know if they’re Greenpeace types, libertarians, or far right of the republicans.

Edit: The usual term in the US for what I think you’re describing is “Spiritual, but not religious.” That’s the way it’s usually written in census and survey forms.

I started with MMOs back in the MUD days, both on dial up BBSs and (eventually) on university servers. I will always remember the sysop who walked me through signing up for his BBS MUD while I was giving responses like “y” and “go north” because I thought he was just an infocom game and not an actual person. Twelve year old me was so embarrassed that I never went back. If you’re out there, sysop, or if you’re just someone who has tried their best to support online communities despite the best intentions of absolute idiots, I salute you.

I played EverQuest since it came out, stupidly choosing a ranger and studying fletching all very badly because I didn’t know about gaming the game mechanics and had read too many fantasy novels. I played a lot, mostly by myself, and didn’t get too far. I also tried EQ2 when it came out, and when Diablo 2 released I decided to experiment with gaming the trading market.

I was an early WoW adopter. I played through the level caps two or three times. I joined a more serious raiding guild when I hit 60 (instead of my old rpg guild) and cornered the market on cotton a couple of weeks in a row here and there. I eventually fell out of it - end game content turned into feeling like a job, where you had to study and rehearse in order to get past bosses, your loot dropping was like a 1 in 20 chance, and if you screwed up a single person could cause a group wipe. Honestly, it just got boring compared to being a level 8 warlock wandering around.

What is keeping me from trying new ones is that there’s a massive disadvantage in starting an MMO that’s already been going on for years and years. You can fire up Skyrim for the very first time this afternoon, and have the exact same experience (honestly, a much improved one) as if you fired it up on launch day. I can launch Baldur or Disco or Stray and just not have to worry about getting ganked other than what was already intended by the devs. There was a time in EverQuest where another player challenged me to 1v1 and finally talked me into trying it, then proceeded to beat the living shit out of me but then bandage me right before I died. He kept on doing it until I disconnected. As funny as that was in retrospect, it’s also a problem with MMOs in general.

I would love for there to be a new WoW - something that restored the magic of the game when you could solo or group up and both explore the world and feel progress. I’m still waiting.

Okay, I think I must absolutely be misreading this. They started with 1500 potential accounts, then picked 500 that, by hand, they could make guesses about based on people doing things like actually posting where they live or how much they make.

And then they’re claiming their LLMs have 85% accuracy based on that subset of data? There has to be more than this. Were they 85% on the full 1500? How did they confirm that? Was it just on the 500? Then what’s the point?

There was a study on Facebook that showed that they could predict with between 80-95% accuracy (or some crazy number like that) your gender, orientation, politics, and so on just based on your public likes. That was ten years ago at least. What is this even showing?

The answer to which came first would be the male proto-chicken.

The problem with this question is that its assumption is so wrong that it is rebdered meaningless. Chomsky once wrote the sentence “Colorless greed ideas sleep furiously” as an example of a sentence that has syntactic correctness but no semantic meaning. Also, why a chicken, in particular? Why this animal who has been so successfully domesticated and differentially bred over centuries that calling it out is like Roy Confort calling out the similarly domesticated banana as evidence of god and creation?

In any case, eggs came first. The egg, if you will, is basically a big cell. It has a lot going on, but it got figured out long before modern birds, much less the domesticated chicken.

But of course, that’s not what they really mean. What they really mean is - how do you get from not-chicken to chicken without the biological equivalent of a big bang (and I’m not even touching on how cosmogenesis gets misunderstood)?

And the real answer is that, whether we’re talking about natural or human driven evolution, there’s no line between chicken and not-chicken. Its fairly easy for us to say that a cat is not a chicken and that a jellyfish is not a chicken, but as you get into the later dinosaurs and early birds, you start to move into grey areas.

Which brings us back around to semantics. As humans, for some reason, we like hard categories around things. That’s often not how the real world works. There’s really a lot of just continuous blessings, and ideas like species are a convenient label for us to understand gross differences but whose utility starts to fall apart once too closely examined. The definitions written in textbooks for high school students are unhelpful, as they represent the ideas as if they were handed down from on high, rather than “this is a convenient way of organizing things for some of our purposes.”

You would need

1. A database of all of the videos a particular user watched
2. A database of many other users and everything they’ve watched, so you can build profiles
3. A database containing metadata about the videos so you can organize and recommend topically and based on things like recency

I could put something like that together, but it’d take a lot of people and a lot of work, and we’d probably have to pay for it either with advertising or by charging a fee for users who don’t want ads.

One of my first computer jobs was working in a student computer lab at my undergraduate university. This was back in the mid 90s-ish.

We had three types of computers - windows machines running 3.1 or whatever was current then, Macs who would all do a Wild Eep together when they rebooted en masse, and Sun X Windows dumb terminals that were basically just (obviously) unix machines for all intents and purposes. This was back when there were basically like 5 websites total, and people still hadn’t heard of Mosaic.

So everyone wanted the windows and Mac boxes, and only took the xterms when there was nothing else open. I was the primary support person for them since none of the other people wanted to learn Unix and I was the only CS major.

The X boxes suffered from two main learning hurdles. One was that backspaces were incorrectly mapped into some escape key sequence, and the other is that it would drop you from (I think) pine into emacs as a mail editor as soon as you hit it. 90% of my time was telling people how to exit emacs. It was that, putting more paper into the printers, and teaching myself more programming than I was learning in classes.

Isn’t that the same woman who has a currently circulating stock photo with a very badly gripped .45?

No you literally cannot. I’ve done this for a living. This is beyond the pale in scientific ethics and would be absolutely fatal for a career.

This is not the FBI or the NYPD. There is no court. There is a panel of your peers who have been through exactly all of those questions, and who consider the entirely morally offensive.

And the think is that it’s not even needed. If you’re in a position to work with this kind of data, there are legitimate sources of the data that will be made available to you which are documentable.

And you literally can’t sneak stuff in with parallel construction because you have to meticulously cite everything that you’re basing your research on. I don’t know how to be more plain than saying I would see a student expelled for this faster than I would for plagiarism. And now that I’m working more in the commercial side, working with stolen data would get you fired. There is a zero tolerance policy.

We have access to this level of data and more. If we need it, we will write a check for it and jump through the hoops to get it, and it will have gone through review for ethical research by people whose entire careers are grounded in studying scientific ethics so that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past.

I’m sorry if I’m being a bit enthusiastic about defending this point, but it’s something that the western scientific community has quite honestly fucked up for centuries and it involves something that makes almost all of us extremely concerned about companies like 23 and Me even existing. It’s a thing that we’re still figuring out, and that’s even under the legal and licensed access to that data. This is like talking to Richard Stallman about Palantir.

No, you will not be able to get a grant by stating you’re going to do a population study using stolen data.

When you do research involving people or data about them, you have to go through your institution’s Human Subjects Board (or equivalent). They’re looking for things like informed consent and that the study population in particular (as opposed to humanity in general) will see some benefit and will not be harmed. Your proposal then goes through similar reviews by the grants committee, and will probably have been looked at by your department.

Even to access survey data that’s already been collected and has been used in hundreds of studies already, you have to jump through those very necessary and important hoops.

I can’t even see commercial researchers being allowed to use stolen data if they want their work published and accepted by the scientific community. There’s not even a grey area there - it’s just straight up unethical.

There was a study done by Facebook about a decade ago where they pushed negative articles to some users and positive ones to others and then looked at the emotional content of later posts by those people, finding a small but statistically significant correlation. They were excoriated in the literature for not securing consent and for running an unethical study that, for instance, could have led to episodes of depression or self-harm in parts of vulnerable populations. I’m not sure if the authors received a penalty for their work, but it violated scientific ethics pretty severely.

You have to go through training, sometimes multiple times per year, if you’re permitted to work with human subjects data, whether you’re conducting the study or using existing work. I could see accessing a cache of stolen data to be a career ending offense.

Okay, good note.

What if we made Canameximerica first and then joined?

I mean, I’m feeling a vibe here.