everdrive

The internet of the future is an IQ test. Are you smart enough to get in, do your work in a focused manner, and get out so that you live your life? Many, many people will fail this test.

>And as a counterexample: some captchas require you to compute something expensive to prove you're not a llm scraper or whatever.

I've never run into one of these. What do they ask you to compute?

This is called a "ClickFix" attack. There is really _never_ a time when a CAPTCHA will require you to execute code on your machine.

The attack is basically getting someone to accidentally run malicious code.

- ctrl + R brings up the Windows "run" dialogue.

- the code executes a powershell command that reaches out to a remote server

- if successful, the remote server answers and you have installed a dropper or something.

Really, you should never do _anything_ like this for any website. You don't need to protect yourself. This is sort of equivalent (in the strict metaphorical sense) of getting a call from your bank and they ask you for your banking password: you just never do it, no matter what. Same thing here. You don't ever execute code via the run dialogue to solve a CAPTHCA. Never.

https://www.sentinelone.com/blog/how-clickfix-is-weaponizing...

What would stop people from shifting to different kinds of wealth transfer? Extreme investment in education, squirrely work-arounds, nepotism, etc? I don't see how you can attempt to prevent people from providing as much benefit to their children as possible.

>oh my god can we stop acting like the only possibilities are american "capitalism" or soviet "communism", it's exhausting

No way -- I threw in 1600s Europe as well as subsistence farming in there.

I think the Patreon point is really interesting. I really don't like Patreon or anything like that, but is a bit miraculous. There's some really, really, niche art up there. That sort of art would have NEVER found an audience, even as recently as the 90s. If it had to be on TV, or in a book, no publisher or producer would have touched it. And even if they had, said publisher or producer would have never managed to find the 0.001% of the population who was interested in it.

The kind of niche art that's available now was simply never possible in any other time in history.

A potential counter-argument could be something like: yes, in the past artists could not have just produced just what they wanted, but perhaps more artists were previously employable (even if they had to just make paintings or Jesus or some other popular thing they didn't really care for.)

What do you think about that?

>A lot of artists suffer from this last point where they are being productive but not in ways that capitalism values.

I'm just not convinced. If there's not a market for your art, yes you will not be able to sell it and make a living. But, in other systems:

- Your art disagrees with the soviet government, so you are sent to a torture / labor camp to work until you die.

- The soviet government does not care about your art, but you're still in the soviet union and everyone is poor so no one can pay for your art anyhow.

- It's the 1600s Europe, and you're only sort-of in a capitalist society given modern definitions, but the Church doesn't like your writing so you've been locked up.

- Your are a subsistence farmer, and have absolutely no chance of creating art whatsoever given how busy and poor you are.

- You're a subsistence farmer, and somehow you manage to make art, but the only people you have access to are the ~2,000 people in your immediate vicinity, and none of them have any money to pay for your art to support you, and they are not willing to trade a chicken for a song.

vs.

- You have the most niche art you can imagine, (eg: Dark Souls analysis, or Harry Potter fanfiction where Snape gets pregnant and is constantly embarrassed by it) but due to (lousy, imperfect) platforms such as Patreon and the internet you can get enough patronage to support yourself, even if it's just barely.

I'm just not convinced that artists are doing worse now (in terms of per-capita artists) than other times in history, or under other systems.

I bristle a bit when it comes to discussing productivity an an ill that is _specific_ to capitalism. It's certainly an ill of capitalism as well, but I don't know many other systems where productivity is not valued and lack of productivity does not come with downsides.

As another commenter has pointed out, the surest ally in this case is family. Not all families are tight, but families are largely the ones who will take care of the indigent in a compassionate, long-term way.

The productivity topic is interesting. From my view, it really is _people_ that require you to be useful. Different social or political systems can be better or worse about this, but all of them are sort of playing with the same base human behavior.

Try being the one who constantly needs help from your friend. That friend will leave eventually. And they'll leave in an emotional sense. They'll sort of think less of you, or be a bit disgusted.

Try getting a woman to be sexually attracted to you if you constantly need her help or support. Outside of a few interesting fetishists, you're out of luck.

You don't even need to imagine the workplace scenario -- you already know how that works.

But picture a pre-industrial, barter economy. How well would you do when you're not able to contribute? There is history of people caring for the old, infirm, and indigent ... but remember that when you go that far back you're talking about kin-groups. You're taking care of your grandfather, or your great uncle. Not some random guy you happened upon.

Is there anyone who currently thinks that AI could replace the classroom? I'm not aware of anyone making this argument.

People didn't used to own so many clothes. Respective to income, clothing used to cost a lot more. As prices fell off a cliff, people's closets started overflowing.

It's been a long time since we've had a sense for how expensive clothing used to cost, and a "good" pair of boots (just as example) would be an enormous sticker shock to most people.

This might be more tolerable if you only owned a single hoodie (why would you need more than one?) and crucially if it lasted for many years.

In fairness to the victim, he did really need to have that phone. What if there had been a restaurant with a QR-code menu? What would he have done then?

So yes, we've created an authoritarian hellhole, but the alternative is even MORE unthinkable: struggling to pay for parking in some areas, needing to visit a website for a menu or (GASP) visiting a different restaurant, or just having a friend order for you.

No, these are too much to ask of anyone. No one can overcome these challenges. The only answer is to weep for the liberty that we have lost.

Here you are! Whether or not you find them compelling is up to you :)

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xrynt2/why_i...

-- linked from /r/academicbiblical in this discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/1j1qx7q/v...

Thanks, I'll check this out -- it looks really interesting.

I was trying to paint a picture of what it looked like from the eyes of someone with no background and no context. I'm not saying that my conclusions were correct, but instead attempting to argue that a lot of the story is propped up by cultural context, different interpretations, etc. For instance, Milton's Paradise lost interprets Satan's fall from heaven in a way that the original authors of Isaiah almost certainly never intended. To someone who was both unaware of the cultural context with which both Isaiahs were writing, and also was unfamiliar with Milton's interpretations, I would also suggest that much of Isaiah would also make no sense.

Compare this to something like a Stephen King novel. A reader can pick it up, read it without any prep or study, and understand it readily.

I'm not saying that the Bible has no cohesion or anything like that -- but that a totally unprepared modern reader probably cannot make sense of the text. And also that until recently, most Americans would have been prepared with quite a bit of cultural context for the Bible via church and other things which laid out the colloquial interpretations of the text for people from an early age.

Somewhere on /r/academicbiblical there is some refutation of a link between (c) and (b) but I can't find it while I'm at work right now. I can try to dig it up tonight if you're interesting. I'm not claiming it's strictly correct, just that there is at least serious argument against the possibility that Zoarastrianism was the main driver behind the development of Israelite monotheism.

What are some of the other ones?

I've done a lot of reading on this topic lately. What originally grabbed my interest was reading R. Crumb's "The Book of Genesis Illustrated." It's a comic that attempts in a relatively flat way to draw the events of Genesis without any interpretation. Of course, some interpretation and error is inevitable, but it's not a book that attempts to paint things aggressively in one light or another, and people expecting an interesting satire will probably just find themselves bored.

I did not have a Christian upbringing, and outside of a few verses here and there I had really never read the Book of Genesis and could not have described it accurately to anyone. Having initially read R. Crumb's Book of Genesis Illustrated, I was baffled more than anything. This was really my first introduction to ancient writing, so a lot of things which are expected for ancient writing were very, very confusing for me.

The story made no sense. It's not so much that I disagreed with the story, but rather I could not have told you what a reader was supposed to get from the story. If I had read and disliked (as a real example) "The Scarlet Letter" I could have easily conveyed the themes of the book and the intent of the author, at least at a level of moderate competence. But what the hell was going on in the Book of Genesis? I had no idea. Why were all the best stories just a few sentences long? The Tower of Babel is an amazing visual and allegory in a conceptual sense ... but the actual story in Genesis is a mere 8 sentences. And what does it have to do with the rest of the story? It's not coherent at all. And why did people live really long previously? Why was Adam some 800-900 years old? Why is this never explained? If Adam could live to 900 years, but you'd never met anyone who lived past 80, wouldn't you want some explanation for this behavior, if even it was just something hand-wavy such as "we lived longer before the fall?" etc ..

Now, there are answers to a lot of the these questions. Most of the answers (if you ignore the ridiculousness of the apologetics) is simply that the Bible is not one book, but a huge collection of stories with different authors, telling stories for different reasons, for different audiences, and at different times. Genesis in particular is almost certainly an adaption and conglomeration of many previous myths, and many of these would have been familiar to the audience of the time. As a rough example, if you wanted to write a vampire movie in 2026, you would not need to explain to the audience what a vampire is. The audience already knows and you waste words and waste realism by explaining it.

Ultimately, these questions led me to want to read more on the topic. To me, it was impossible to understand how the Book of Genesis could possibly form the foundation of the three major Abrahamic religions, and captivate much of the population of the entire world, for much of recorded history. And again, I don't mean in some sanctimonious fedora-tipping sort of way. I just couldn't make sense of the stories whatever. They were deeply confusing to me.

Ultimately, this sort of sat around in my mind until I bumped into the inscriptions from Kuntillet Arjud (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuntillet_Ajrud_inscriptions) of Yaheh and his Asherah. The visual, of a weird iron-age deity with a weird iron-age consort reignited my interest. From there, I read Mark S. Smith, Thomas Romer, and more.

I think my curiosity has been roughly satisfied, even though there are a lot of unanswered (and potentially unanswerable) questions: for instance, is the Kennite hypothesis correct? What I found is in hindsight what anyone should have expected: the Israelite religion changed significantly over time, is full of its own myth-making and navel-gazing, and of course, was heavily influenced by the local cultures and religions it coexisted and intermixed with.

By all means, cull them all. I'm sure the remaining 3% support (in one way or another) terrible web apps that use 150 MB of javascript and data brokers.

>and you're still stuck with the problem that language is not a complete map of reality.

Definitely agreed, but at least when talking about experience we've been stuck in this position for most of human history. How do I know what it's like to eat a hamburger? Perhaps, like the cute visual in Ratatouille there is a deep inner experience but (also like in Ratatouille) when I need to communicate that experience with another person I'm stuck relying on language, and the language is found lacking.

I know it's just a kid's cartoon, but interestingly Ratatouille was making this exact same point -- he really lacks any meaningful way to convey his inner experience. It's locked behind language. The film tackles this by showing an Remy's complex and interesting visual, but his friend only gets the fuzziest, dullest visual when he attempts to communicate it.

Remy's immediate rat & family peers actually _never_ get to understand his experience, and instead later help him out of love an allegiance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xizttM_Cbuc

I think this is actually a tough one. Yes, I agree that an LLM can never experience this. But -- when a real human needs to translate that experience back into words, it can actually do so just fine.

In other words, when a real human needs to translate an experience into words to share it, A LOT of information is lost. The LLM might actually be better-suited for the the task in your example, even if the point you were driving at stands.

Can you really think of no other problems in addition to cars?

The whole world is California, and the most important thing we can do is pack more and more people into the same space. People from here, people from there. We want more crowdedness, and everyhing that comes with it: crime, noise, pollution, lack of social cohesion. Everything. Every place must be like this, and everything must grow forever.

Pretty sure a lot of people would need a fainting couch if they learned that they might need to avoid restaurants that only have QR-code menus. We seem to have an incredibly-infantilized stock of people these days, which is why I don't know that awareness will really help much.

Agreed wholeheartedly, thanks for the response.

Thanks for the clarification. The interesting thing about the 2024 election was that Trump's turnout was higher than 2016, and in addition, according to the polling and analysis I saw, this was one of the first times in a long time where if _more_ people had voted, he would have had _more_ votes. This is in pretty stark contrast to presidential voting trends for the last 30-40 years. So although I think you could paint 2016 as an "apathy" election (I would still argue that 2016 was more about two deeply unpopular candidates than anything else) I'm not sure that same analysis really applies to 2024. I'm basing a lot of this on this very interesting interview here -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sx0J7dIlL7c -- so to the extent that I'm wrong or you disagree, this at least gives some context to my claims.

Workplace next!

They only win if you buy them. Never purchase subscriptions. At this point, the default position should be to NEVER purchase a subscription. Exceptions can be made with specific research, and in exceptional cases. But that exception process must be singularly critical and rare.

I couldn't disagree with this more. Yes, you individually control whether or not you use your smartphone, but the device itself is terrible in ways that I have no control over:

- touch controls rather than a real UI

- a terrible app store full of monetized garbage

- incredibly bad privacy options

- etc ..

In addition to that, modern society is moving towards requiring the usage of these devices. It's harder to opt out more and more every year. This is very much not a choice I can make. My employer would NOT accommodate me if I did not have a place to install their OTP app.

I forgot it started at $399. That's the model I got. It was a really good value, if not a bit pricey at the time. Steam Deck is my favorite gaming device, but I just cannot imagine dropping $800+ if mine fails.

>It's quite depressing how little society values the night sky, something that's been an important part of every human culture for longer than recorded history.

But what if someone were uncomfortable briefly? Did you ever consider that? Technology exists to infantilize us while slowly ruining everything that makes us human. Shame on you for attempting to interrupt human progress.

>I would say that speaks more to apathy than activism.

Whatever else you'd want to say about Trump supporters, I wouldn't call them apathetic. Maybe I'm reading your comment wrong, but I can't see how anyone could characterize Trump's base as "apathetic."