simiones

> How could it be otherwise? If there were reproducible evidence, then the phenomenon in question would be classified as natural.

Imagine that we found, today, the burning bush, still on fire but not consumed by it, thousands of years later. Say someone tried all known techniques to extinguish it, but it wouldn't. We may be able to study and characterize it precisely and call it "natural" in that sense, but I think many would agree that it would be very clear evidence that this claim in Exodus was actually historically based.

Similarly, say that we had credible videos, and other instrument recordings, of the blue fire that the Orthodox Patriarchs claim descends from the heavens on Jesus' tomb every year on Orthodox Easter. We may even develop a theory of what the substance is and what it represents and where it originates (spatially) and so on - but if it happens spontaneously and only affects certain things (candles held by the faithful) and not others (say, gasoline-soaked rags prepared by a scientist to test this out), then even a scientist would have to conclude that this phenomenon is real and outside the realm of physics as it is understood today.

Both "immigrated to" and "emigrated to" are correct, and mean the same thing; they just emphasize, slightly, different things.

You wrote:

> One can easily see the events leading to the Exodus being enabled by (or causing, depending on who you ask!) the weakening of Egypt

I think that if I'm right that the events of Exodus simply never happened that would quite thoroughly refute any possible link to the historical bronze age collapse. It would be like saying that the events of the Epic of Gilgamesh being enabled by the weakening of Egypt.

I didn't mention it, but the events in the Book of Joshua are also very much non-historical - there are no signs whatsoever of a conquest of parts of Canaan by any other group at a time that would be consistent with the Biblical narrative. The historical, linguistic, and archaeological evidence is most consistent with the ancient Israelites simply being a specific group of Canaanites that established a kingdom in the area in which they had lived for millennia.

> But personally, I think the book of Judges very much feels set in the kind of post-apocalyptic world that the Collapse would have created.

The Book of Judges is also regarded as mostly non-historical by modern day scholars.

Elijah (who, unlike Moses, is probably a real historical figure) lived long after the events depicted in Exodus. And Exodus ends with the all of the Israelites faithfully following Yahweh's commandments, after narrowly avoiding death for their worship of the golden bull idol. The book of Kings presents a time long after that, when the people of the now divided Israel have lost their way and started worshiping Baal - as opposed to their ancestors who only worshiped Yahweh.

Thanks! I found it quite interesting the first time I read about the current scholarly consensus around this, as I had before only ever heard of the mainstream religious (Christian, in my case) view of these events. Even after becoming an atheist, I had for a long time assumed that, while of course the parting of the Red Sea and similar miraculous events were not historical, the overall narrative was, and that Moses had existed and been some kind of spiritual leader, similar to the historical Jesus.

I think it's quite extraordinary how little the scholarly and historical consensus on these narratives has penetrated mainstream culture, even among a secular audience, so I like to bring it up whenever it is mentioned.

This was not idolatry, as depicted in Exodus - this was full blown state religion, held in the same esteem as Yahweh, and co-existing with worship of him. So much so that El later became identified with Yahweh, and now most people reading the Bible (including Jewish people, Christians, and Muslims) believe El is just another one of Yahweh's names, or maybe the name of one of his angels.

It describes it as a sectary offshoot relatively quickly corrected - while the historical evidence suggests that it was part of the main religion of these people for a long time. Note also that, while Baal became an adversary of Yahweh and/or a false god in later narratives, Asherah and El were ultimately identified with Yahweh - to the point that mentions of El in the Bible became identified as referring to the same being as Yahweh.

No, they don't. But they do claim lineage to Alfred the Great, whose lineage is traced by legendary sources to Woden/Odin, and from there to Noah and Adam. In some versions, Beowulf is also part of that lineage.

Yes, Troy existed - we know that because we found it. If we found evidence of a mass migration of slaves from Egypt to Canaan, we'd also know that certain aspects of the Exodus narrative are true - but no such evidence has ever been found.

The biblical flood has been connected to various possible historical floods, but any such connection is highly speculative and tenuous, because the details simply can't match the original claims.

Similarly, some kernel of the Exodus narrative is quite possibly related to real migration events that actually happened, though they would necessarily be much smaller in scope. They also couldn't be the sole origin of the Ancient Israelites, as there is overwhelming evidence that they are simply a subset of the native people of Canaan, which had continuously inhabited that region for a very long time. We also know that the monotheistic/henotheistic religion described in the Exodus narrative was not the religion practiced by the people of Canaan, nor of the early kingdoms of Israel and Judah, which worshiped several other gods in addition to Yahweh (there are temples and inscriptions attesting to worship of Asherah, El, and even Baal in addition to Yahweh, at least).

If there had been a massive migration of hundreds of thousands of people, and even more so hundreds of thousands of slaves, from late bronze age Egypt (a powerful, old, highly literate kingdom), we would expect to find significant evidence of this (inscriptions, local stories, migration sites, etc). The absence of any such evidence, while not conclusive proof of course, constitutes evidence against this event happening.

We also know for example that the types of beliefs detailed in Exodus, especially the idea that the Israelites worshiped Yahweh alone as the only God, are not historical. Belief and worship of other gods were common in both the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah long after the supposed time that the Exodus happened - in particular El (who was later associated with Yahweh) and Asherah (who was sometimes seen as the wife of Yahweh). So at least this aspect of the Exodus narrative is directly contradicted by archaeological evidence.

This is similar to the reason we believe the stories in Genesis are not historical, e.g. the flood, - if they had been historical, we expect that they would have left behind certain marks; those marks haven't been found, so we have a reason to believe that they didn't happen.

The Exodus is an entirely fictional account though, it's not based on any real historical events. Even King David seems to be mostly mythical, though there is some vague evidence of a "House of David" being something some real kings claimed descent from.

Edit: I should say "almost entirely fictional". The main scholarly agreement is that it may record some stories of some small numbers (hundreds, at most some thousands - nowhere near the 600k in the Bible) real semitic slaves' escape from Egypt and migration to the area of Canaan, mixing with the local Canaanite population that were the precursors of the Jewish populations of later Israel and Judah.

I really wonder where this idea that the world was less polarized before social media is coming from. It's not even 100 years ago that we had some of the most extreme ideologies in history taking hold all over both Europe and the USA (fascism, socialism, and others). People literally went to war over these things. Another ~100 years before that, French people were cutting off the heads of their ruling class, and setting prisoners free.

If anything, social media has inspired far too much passivity in our societies. People feel relieved that they could vent their frustrations online, instead of taking to the streets and seriously threatening some of the power of those putting them down.

Also, a big part of why the elites of society dislike social media is the huge democratizing effect that it has had on information. Of course, not so much in the more authoritarian societies where our leaders were hoping for this effect, but in their own backyards. The biggest example of this by far is the information about the Gaza genocide - that is presented at best equivocally in the mainstream press (with some exceptions like The Guardian), but that was clearly visible on TikTok and other social media. This led to perhaps the single largest policy conflict between the vast majority of the population and the vast majority of government elites in the current day EU.

What is the false positive rate that you would be comfortable with such a scan having? What would be the risk of your personal photos and videos being recognized as CSAM and reported to your local police (and thus being shown to your local police) that you would be happy to accept?

Would you also be ok with not being allowed to send any mail unless you first scan the contents of everything in that envelope and include a generated signature that might tell the post office that you're sending CSAM? And then having the envelope delivered directly to police if the scan did indicate that?

FTA:

> What changes with the return of Chat Control 1.0—and what stays the same:

> What is coming back: US tech companies are once again allowed to scan private messages without a warrant or prior suspicion. This affects direct messages on platforms like Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, Skype, and Xbox, as well as emails via Google’s Gmail and Apple’s iCloud.

> What remains unchanged: Public social media posts and files hosted in cloud storage could already be scanned without this law. Furthermore, private messages can always be reported by users, or monitored by authorities using targeted, court-ordered wiretapping.

> What is still NOT being scanned: End-to-end encrypted chats, such as those on WhatsApp, have always been exempt from these scans. Additionally, European providers of messaging and email services have never implemented chat control measures.

> It’d be hard to pass its test suite and not be as robust as the original.

This is not true, even in principle, even for Postgres itself. You'd be right to say that it'd be hard to pass the test suite and not be robust at all to some extent. But even in Postgres, I bet that you can quite easily introduce a change that will pass the whole test suite but reduce robustness compared to the latest release (for a somewhat silly example, add a call to `exit()` on a timer that's longer than the longest duration test in the suite - that will significantly reduce robustness while still passing the entire test suite).

You answered at more or less the same time as an OpenAI engineer confirming this is the case, explaining why they did it, and pointing to their docs that also very explicitly explain this "made-up nonsense". You should really consider why you felt so certain about something you were plain wrong about.

Not always, it depends on the defect. There are many, many design defects that do not significantly impact the working of the device that will not get repaired, but would usually be patched in regular software (especially for visual design or bad UX like a literal rough edge on a physical product). Recalls in particular are very rare - they generally only happen for very serious faults, usually those that affect the safety of the device.

Also note that expectations can vary quite a bit between physical and software products. For an example, my vacuum cleaner fairly often shuts down if I stop and re-start it too soon. If this happened with an app, I would certainly consider it a pretty ugly bug, and might ask when they plan to fix it. But I would never consider sending the vacuum cleaner to a service station to try and get rid of it - and I think there is little chance they could fix it even if I did.

If you invest 100B dollars into compute while asking for 1T, but in reality would need 100T dollars to meaningfully move the needle, you're still significantly underestimating the amount of compute needed, despite not getting as much as you wanted.

The biggest tension between software and one-off purchases is related to bugfixing, and especially security. It makes sense that you don't expect new features for a product that you paid for once. But, what is the case with bugs? If the product mostly does what it promised to do, but sometimes crashes, do you expect those crashes to be fixed for your version, or not? What it you're using a 10-year old version and a new critical (say, unauthenticated remote execution) vulnerability is found in it? Do you expect to get it resolved as part of the price you originally paid, or would you be ok with being told you have to buy a new version if you want this ?

Interesting, I hadn't noticed... Though related to the critical mass, keep in mind that Waze has been acquired by Google many years ago now (13, specifically).

> Android Auto does try to distract me with attempts of engagement like "Is the construction site still there?" and other shit.

That's not Android Auto, it's Waze doing that (and it would do it on Apple too). And it's not "an attempt at engagement", it's a cost for keeping the real-time map and traffic data that Waze is chosen for up-to-date. Use Google Maps if you don't like the interruptions.

Oops, I confused some history, thank you for the corrections!

Well, it's not exactly engineering, but physics often uses quite informal math. For a pretty modern example, the Dirac delta "function" was used long before it was formally described; and I have heard it said that even today String theory uses some math that is not fully formalized - though I can't say I know what specifically, so I may be wrong. Newton expressed calculus in terms of inifinitesimals (the dx notation was simply an infinitesimal delta x, not merely notation for derivation), which were not not formalized until much later, after they had already fallen out of favor and had been replaced in formal math by the delta-epsilon limits-based constructions.

Edit: one better example from modern physics - the path integral formulation, used in both string theory and other areas of QM/QFT, is not fully formalized and formally proven to work. Also, a more concrete example of a widely used but actually still unproven conjecture in string theory is the famous AdS/CFT correspondence.

This is a bit reductive about what "proof" actually means in mathematics. Even in math, the kind of formal proofs that tools like Coq can automatically verify are an extreme, and lots of accepted and practiced math is not doing that. Proofs are often more abstract and even occasionally hand-wavy (for example not proving "obvious" statements or minor lemmas).

Mathematicians also occasionally build on top of unproven foundations (e.g. all popular asymmetric encryption schemes are built on top the assumption that certain problems such as integer factoring are hard, for which there is no formal proof), or at least explore both possibilities for statements with unknown truth value (e.g. you can find lots of work that explores the consequences of P = NP and/or P != NP).

However, there is a major separation between math and programs that I think mostly invalidates your proposal - most math we're talking about here is simply not applicable directly to the real world in any way. It's only studied for the interest of mathematicians. There is no real world consequence for Fermat's last theorem, for example - it was just a really interesting to prove theorem. In directly applied math, such as engineering, it is in fact much more common to work with unproven but well tested conjectures.

> How is the government supposed to be able to regulate them impartially when they're literally invested in them.

That is exactly the point of this move, especially during the Trump administration.

2500 kcal is waaaayyy above the TDEE of most people (especially most women - who hover around 1200-1500 TDEE; but even for men, 2000 TDEE is quite common for a regular office worker lifestyle). So most people would get quite fat quite rapidly eating that.

That's why Skittles-based diets tend to perform so well!

> a group who who broke a policewoman's back with a sledgehammer?

This was tried in court, and the conclusion was that this was an accident during a fight, not an intentional act [0] (after violence was initiated by security forces and the police during a PA break-in against an Israeli weapons manufacturer).

So this is quite deceptive framing.

[0] https://novaramedia.com/2026/05/05/four-palestine-action-act...

Maybe his views are more heterodox and he was counting Puerto Rico as 51st! (sarcasm, in case this isn't clear)

That's not the problem, and this is not just pedantry. It's just not correct to say that n/0 = inf, nor even to say that positive_n / 0 = inf, in any normal math context.

For example, if you accepted that n/0 = inf just like n/1 = n, then you'd conclude that n/0 + 3 = inf + 3 = inf, so n/0 + 3 = n/0, so 3 = 0. Or you'd want to do weird things like asking what is sin(inf).