Political cartoons and memes

[eish]

dontzu.png (2.11 MiB) Viewed 352 times

[Barbara]

We KNOW to WHICH DonTzu THIS refers !

[Suaidan]

I dunno, I'm unsure

[eish]

ozempic.png (402.33 KiB) Viewed 215 times

There are no shortcuts. Those of us who do not submit ourselves willingly to suffering by discipline shall be made to suffer unwillingly. I, too, am guilty.

The hubris of modernity--encompassing nearly the entire scientific movement--is the implicit assumption that physics lies at the root of the phenomenal world, and that principles of ethics and behaviour flow from it. This is exactly backwards.

God did not come up with a bunch of physical laws, from which chemical and then biological laws were derived, only to create men inside of that system giving them principles of good living which would work inside of the system. Ditto for the materialistic assumption that evolution did the same. The modernist, starting from such assumptions, thinks discipline and self-control, moral and good living in general, to be at most rules of thumb (“love thy neighbour is good business,” “iterated prisoners' dilemma,” etc.) following from the “laws of nature.” He believes that there is a shortcut to biological immortality, to health without discipline, to hedonism without consequence, just around the corner. That every single attempt ever has failed, is to him merely an indication that a small mistake was made last time from lack of knowledge or lack of investigation, but that now he knows better and this time it will succeed.

Instead, we may say that God wanted a godly, rational (“noetic”) being in the first place and created the laws of nature so that they would house that man and support him in that cause.

That is the real reason why the shortcuts always turn out to be dead ends. THAT is the fundamental law of nature, biology merely flows from it. Physics is merely what it needs to be, to support Man's body with biology and his mind with wonder. Truly, it is as the Church teaches: God really did create the cosmos for Man.

The heavens declare His glory, as do the atoms!

[Barbara]

What is that [pill ?] you mentioned, eish ?
Did it just start up being popular ? I have seen mentions recently but I hate the name. Sounds like a tooth pic.

The picture of the bone loss is scary !
Everybody remember to take your Calcium to avoid that !!!

[eish]

ai_programming.png (203.58 KiB) Viewed 3 times

Partly true--lacks nuance. “Vibe coding” is an incredibly stupid idea for anything that needs to Work For Real. You can't just loose a pattern-matching machine on a codebase expecting it to make things anything other than buggier and unmaintainable. The machine does not think.

However, there are uses for AI as a tool. Today's coding assistant tools are not just LLMs--as revealed by the Claude code leak--but sophisticated expert systems. The LLM classifies instructions, directing them to the correct submodule. It enters feedback into iterative processes which are pre-programmed to try different solutions--designed by very experienced software developers to diagnose the problem in the same order they would check the different possible root causes. They can diagnose many known classes of bugs and security holes by pattern-matching the source code against the known features of those bugs.

And they can help enormously with documentation, because they were designed for translation between languages, which fundamentally a significant portion of documentation is just translating source code from programming languages to natural languages. For the same reason, they can take technically detailed specifications and translate them into rough draught source code.

Current subsidised prices are worth the expense for a wide class of tasks. Even the true cost would be worth it for a narrow set of problems just because of the sheer amount of engineering time which can be saved. Unfortunately, this means that the current crop of juniors are both being deprived of entry-level jobs and of the opportunity to learn without AI.

Useful tools for experts in the field. Dangerous in the hands of someone who imagines that the machine can think. I'll leave you with a local saying: “Like a razor in the hand of a monkey, is a little knowledge in the head of a fool.”