Thanks

“The first rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two twice the price?”

Great work. Can you give some examples of how this works in practice?

Tagify leverages AI to automatically generate and manage tags for files

Lovely :)

Can we carve out a part of the internet please where we go back to super basic html pages that are a mix of self hosted hobby blogs and university research sites? It was good then. Everything’s gotten so noisy, and busy, and shit.

There is some logic to it… or so the thinking goes:

In the bible maleness is a God thing before it’s a human thing. It’s not that God chooses to be male, it’s the other way round, what we call male conveys something fundamental to the reality of God that has existed for all time and independent of everything else. When God makes the first human, he’s male, because he’s in God’s image (not that God invented maleness to create Adam, instead God’s imprinting something of his eternal self onto his creation, and we call that eternal quality “male”). Likewise when the Word becomes flesh, he’s male.

Stands to reason that all the other heavenly creations of God (his messengers, “angels”, including the “angel of the lord” which always appears as a man) are all what we’d call male. But this isn’t in a procreation sense, that’s something that was given to Adam. Rather the idea is that there’s something fundamentally “ideal” about the pure essence of masculinity in ancient Jewish thought.

Ha that was my thought too. Joking aside, it’s actually one of the weirder anti-gay arguments from the new testament, that the reason Jesus is saying “obviously” there’s no marriage in heaven is that everyone is like the angels, who are all male. So Jesus was appealing to the “absurdity” of male-male marriage.

Not the strongest argument but definitely one of the weirder ones I’ve heard…

It’s widely celebrated that Jean Baptiste Kempf, who could have easily sold VLC for tens of millions, declined to do so (or more accurately lead the steering group that jointly decided) keeping the enormously popular video player free and open source

https://old.reddit.com/r/VLC/comments/x0azkz/this_is_jeanbaptiste_kempf_the_creator_of_vlc/

Unstable for a variety of historical reasons…

Original primitive animist beliefs and Christian groups seem to have amalgamated in the first centuries CE.

The region was overcome by Islam coming from the Arab peninsula which then dominated its northern population centres and set up slave raid expeditions to the predominately animist / Christian south.

In the 1800s Egypt had taken control of the region and then Britain by virtue of their control over Egypt.

When Egypt rebelled and demanded independence from Britain in the 1950s the (soon to be) president demanded the same for the Sudan region as he was Sudanese. It’s unclear if Sudan was remotely ready for this kind of independence the way Egypt was.

Discovery of oil and a predominantly conservative Islamic Arab northern population has caused Sudan to function like a gulf petro-state with about half of its economy being due to gold / oil extraction but very little of this helping the general population which remains in crushing poverty.

More extreme Islam since 1983 has seen academic independence suppressed (authors, poets imprisoned, islamic studies mandatory if studying anything etc).

Sudan’s list of civil wars (Darfur etc) are generally characterised as animist / christian resistance movements against an oppressive islamic government. (Or, to take an opposite view, are wars of conquest by a disenfranchised rural population because in Sudan’s petro economy, the controller of Khartoum is winner takes all)

Animist / Christian South Sudan finally managed independence in 2011. The peace apparently being bolstered by the economic coercion of gulf and Chinese corporations who seek a peaceful extraction of South Sudan’s oil…

TL;DR blame Britain, or conservative Islam, depending on how long it’s been since you were a student

These were a couple of PhD geeks who hit it big, it’s certainly not inevitable that intelligent people get absorbed with money, see the creator of VLC for example. It’s just sad that these guys could have been rich AND kept the internet ‘pure’ and research focused. But instead commerce has crept in and taken a shit on what was once a clean simple brilliant search service.

Bezos + Lauren Sanchez apparently binge watch Fallout, Baby Reindeer, Presumed Innocent and Severance…

“My favorite time is when the house is calm and quiet and Jeff and I are deciding what show we’re going to binge that night,” Sánchez told the magazine.

“It takes a little bit of time to decide,” she added. “You can imagine our tastes are a little different. But I love our TV time, we just have the best time.”

Among their favorites is “Fallout” – a post-apocalyptic drama based on the video game series of the same name. The series airs on Bezos’s own Amazon Prime TV. But the couple also watches shows on rival platforms Netflix and Apple TV.

“We recently saw Baby Reindeer, which of course everyone saw,” Sánchez told People. “We also just finished Presumed Innocent, which was incredible. Oh, and we loved Severance.”

https://qz.com/lauren-sanchez-jeff-bezos-reveal-favorite-tv-shows-1851636860

Now that I think about it I’m not sure why they had to accept investor money at all. I wonder if it would have turned out differently if they had remained 100% privately owned?

Yes that’s the context - Jesus saying no one will be married in heaven. Either angels are asexual or they’re all male. The latter is a little more likely given all angels in the bible are presented as male. Which if that’s the case has weird implications for what female Christians become when they’re resurrected. Some weird male equivalent? So now we’re “all like the angels”?

I don’t get it. They were rich beyond most people’s wildest dreams. Why did they jump aboard the enshitification bandwagon?

“But many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first.”

However it’s obtained it’s something very hard for the well resourced and powerful to do. Jesus anticipated it’s the “very least” in this life who have the capacity to be recognised as “first” in the Kingdom.

The sentiment is there though…

2 Thessalonians 3:10 “While we were with you, this we commanded you: If someone won’t work, then neither shall they eat”

Matthew 20:30

“At resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.”

I think that’s where the sentiment comes from. It’s explicit in Mormonism (I think). In mainstream Christianity the saved don’t become angels, they become like angels.

Matthew 19:28

Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.

[end quote]

Whether “12 tribes of Israel” here is figurative of the global church or not, there still definitely some role in judgement delegated out to the apostles.

Can’t speak for Catholics but most reformed protestants (evangelicals) will be being taught their sins are already washed away and any judgement for the ‘saved’ after death is only about their quality of walk with god and quality of reward in heaven, it’s not a heaven/hell judgment. That’s only for the ‘unsaved’.