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Cake day: August 26th, 2024

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  • The whole culture of writing “system prompts” seems utterly a cargo-cult to me. Like if the ST: Voyager episode “Tuvix” was instead about Lt. Barclay and Picard accidentally getting combined in the transporter, and the resulting sadboy Barcard spent the rest of his existence neurotically shouting his intricately detailed demands at the holodeck in an authoritative British tone.

    If inference is all about taking derivatives in a vector space, surely there should be some marginally more deterministic method for constraining those vectors that could be readily proceduralized, instead of apparent subject-matter experts being reduced to wheedling with an imaginary friend. But I have been repeatedly assured by sane, sober experts that it is just simply is not so



















  • No, that sounds about right for many Catholics I know in the US. I was trying to be charitable towards the intent of the practice and use it as an example of something similar to occult practice in mainstream religion. Of course it’s diluted in content and commitment compared to more intense cults, otherwise their base of adherents would only be shrinking. And don’t forget, the veneration of saints is something the weirdo Protestants hold against the Catholics, accusing them of idolatry! So I’d say it does stand as a lightweight form of “inner door” teaching, especially as the saints are pointed out as examples of how to live in accordance with the church’s teachings here on the mortal plane.