disciple. husband. father @veritaslimited
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Joined September 2024
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new macbook pro will be a great new litmus test for tech reviewers/et all
this will be a grim reaper level culling. any person who says this is actually cool/useful or tries to speak anything positive about it can be instantly blocked and never thought of again
I feel ashamed for the spirit of Jobs for having to experience such sacrilege to his brand
Ruck retweeted
Let’s shine some light on malicious, despicable, and CRIMINAL billing practices currently perpetrated by a certain medical facility.
Here’s what Guadalupe Regional Medical Center (GRMC) in Texas just did:
I see a cardiologist in town once a year. This year’s appointment with him (about two weeks ago) included a referral for a procedure to be conducted outside of his office – an echocardiogram/ultrasound (one or both) at the hospital facility GRMC in downtown Seguin, Texas. GRMC contacted me by text the day prior to the appointment, to answer their questions and to sign agreements through their automated system. At the end of the question and signature process, they included the fee for the procedure - $2047. Outrageously overinflated, but whatever. That’s where we are. I would have paid what they asked, and intended to. But the system wanted payment over the phone, which I was not going to provide. I didn’t even know exactly what I was paying for at the time, and intended to learn the specifics when I arrived at the facility for the appointment the following day. But bear in mind, I was only learning about the actual fee about 24 hours before being handed the bill. I’m self-pay – I do not and will not participate in the fraudulent scam which health insurance has become in this country. Self-pay used to mean you could expect a somewhat more reasonable bill for services rendered in the medical industry. No longer is that the case. I closed out of the text window without submitting the requested payment for the reasons stated.
About 20 minutes later I received a phone call from a GRMC representative who quickly informed me that the quoted fee of $2047 was only an estimate, and that if payment was not submitted in full prior to the procedure, I would be charged an additional EIGHT HUNDRED DOLLARS. I had intended to pay half upon my arrival at their facility, and would agree to pay the other half next month. I said to the rep on the phone, “I don’t believe I heard you correctly, so could you please repeat what you just said? My intention is to pay half of this bill I’m only now learning about one day before the procedure, and then pay the other half next month. Did you just tell me that you’ll charge me an additional $800 to do so?” The rep confirmed that is indeed what she said. This earned her about two minutes of my very emphatic displeasure, wherein I used terms like “disgusting” and “malevolent” and “criminal.” I reminded her that the people in this country who don’t have insurance are generally among those already on a razor’s edge, and that they’re the ones who can LEAST afford to be stolen from by their medical providers. She then asked me if she could have her manager call me. I responded that she could have whomever she liked call me.
About 15 minutes later the same woman called back. She said to me her manager had waived the additional $800 charge if I would pay half on arrival and half next month. Just like that. So their disgusting and inflated penalty fee was purely arbitrary and unnecessary, a figment of their own predatory business model, and only imposed upon people foolish enough to accept it and pay it without objection. “That’s nice,” I replied, “except now I don’t trust you and I don’t believe what you say. You just tried to steal from me. Should I just accept your pricing for this service now? How do I know you won't arbitrarily inflate your fee yet further, during or after the procedure? You conduct business like criminals. So no, I don’t trust you or the company you work for. Cancel the appointment. I won’t do business with people who behave like you do. Ever.”
I then immediately contacted the cardiologist’s office and informed them of this encounter, and the lady to whom I was speaking audibly gasped when I told her about the additional $800 charge for anyone who wanted to make partial payments to GRMC. There isn’t anything standard about this unconscionable business practice. This is obscene and grotesque – and it makes no difference that GRMC so easily waived the fee after some stiff pushback. When I explained the situation to the lady from the cardiologist’s office, I told her to make SURE that the doctor himself was made aware of this behavior from the medical group to whom he was sending his patients. Because I very much doubt that he had any idea.
And GRMC? Save your apologies. I’m not interested and I wouldn’t believe you anyway. This is the way you conduct business with people without insurance. Your business practices are predatory and vile. You’re trying to STEAL from those who can least afford it. And you’re doing it to those who come to your facility because they have to. So now I’ll make it my mission to let everyone know about this – as many as I can, and I’m resourceful and creative – and hopefully your already questionable reputation takes the appropriate hit. You deserve it.
I’ll be posting this on Instagram and Facebook as well. And I’ll be asking folks I know with large social media accounts on all platforms to drive traffic to this and the other posts. I’ll be posting a review on Yelp and anywhere else I think might have the impact I’m looking for. The more people I can make aware of your detestable ways, the better.
Jed Bozza,
Guadalupe County, Texas
@GRMCHospital
we know less about deep see and antarctica than deep space
every reason we have to go off world applies even better to our own world. it’s cheaper, faster, more available, more to discover, etc
you know what’s better than a bunker? an underwater city or an inner earth colony in our massive cave systems that literally create their own clouds
no fictional advanced civilization ever went off world before fully beating the game on their home world
PS. we aren’t even allowed to fly over antarctica
Cross semiotics
the entire ethos and identity of Orthodoxy can be seen in their primary symbol ☦️. EO is a man made sect of Christian that deeply revolves around tradition, iconography, aesthetics, heritage, and traditionalism. much of what makes EO, eo are not directly found in the Bible, but is an accumulation of stuff from men who study and write about the Bible from the last several centuries. it can be thought of as Bible++. nothing better depicts their philosophy than what they chose to do to the cross. they added 2 smaller “crosses” to The Cross. they have deep, rich, and beautiful meaning. they are ultimate accessory design choices meant to equivocate deeper meaning and nuance. and if you’re not IN orthodoxy, you have no idea what they mean or represent. the vanilla simplicity of The Cross ✝️ was not good enough for them, they needed to symbolically and metaphorically stand out. EO is a superficial layer atop of The Way (this is what Jesus actually all “Christianity”). why does this matter? because if you’re going to follow the absolute Truth of Jesus Christ, you do not need filler, upgrades, or try to aura farm. he alone is sufficient and more than enough. when you decide to accessorize the truth, even out of noble or respectful attitude, you will ultimately dilute it. stay vanilla, stay frosty
The Catholic Cross is a little simple in design, but also bizarre. They decided to place Jesus ON the cross at all times. they choose to remember him in his most weakest, closest to death form. it’s an odd choice to have the paramount symbol of your religion to include your messiah in the process of dying. it instills the thought and memory of Jesus DYING. the Crucifxion is only the most powerful story because of what came after, his resurrection. he conquered death. the catholic cross visually and mentally seizes you to relive the worst part of the story
the vanilla cross is empty. it’s pure and simple and encapsulates the entire story in one image. when you look at the cross you think about everything. it’s a super meme that can compress the entire Bible story in one thought, can be drawn with 2 lines. that is power. it needs no dilution, it stands on its own a reminder to the world of the ultimate gift we were given
a downstream consequence of following the absolute truth of The Way is that there is one and only one correct path/explanation/reading of ALL prophecy
it cannot be multiple truths or even worse, unknowable
it’s one path, extremely narrow, go find it
Best: Taking Christ at His word when He tells us, not only are we ABLE to rightly understand the prophetic timeline and analyze the time, but we're expected to. And that we're "hypocrites" (His word) if we can't or don't. Learn the timeline and apply it to the prophetic narrative? The prophecies open up in your hands unlike anything we've ever seen before. To see it is to believe it. And to know the truth. With certainty.
Worst: The prevailing attitude of most christians, which is that "nothing approximating certainty is possible with respect to prophecy. It just doesn't work that way!!!" Again, to have seen the powerful evidence to the contrary, is to know and understand how damaging and defective the prevailing attitude can be - how it stifles true growth in understanding.
The fact is this: the overwhelming majority of christians have no idea how to rightly receive and handle prophecy, and therefore they lightly esteem the power and utility of prophecy, or in some cases deny that it serves any purpose for believers alive today. By way of an example I once had a christian pastor ask me to my face, "What need does any christian today have of Old Testament prophecy?" And he was quite serious. I don't think he ever forgave me for my answer, which was blunt and to-the-point.
mcdonald’s smoothies get filled 80% now, sundaes? forget about it, it’s just sadness
chick-fil-a doesn’t even bother putting toy in kids meal anymore. the “toy” isn’t even a toy, it’s a fucking 2 page comic book with stickers. they don’t even say “my pleasure”
ups/fedex stores are employed by actual teenagers. growing up i never saw someone younger than 30 work there
grandmothers working at amazon return booth at whole foods
Ruck retweeted
The best measure of wealth is what you have minus what you want, and by this measure some billionaires are broke.
so much to learn from people like this
i greatly respect and admire people who set out to make cathedrals of all forms, products, brands, ideas, etc
KITH is counter cultural where it matters. in a black hole of capitalism and bottom line, they focus on doing things for the love of the game
study
youtube.com/watch?v=PsL2hXoD…
homeschooling just got way more fun
fun fact: if you were to simply follow the teachings of Jesus in the NT you would not fit in any one denomination
denominations as a concept, term, or idea do not exist in Bible. they are a man made accessory added on top of the Word akin to a MLM layer
If I were a Christian Id pick Eastern Orthodoxy. It holds closest to the unbroken apostolic traditions and early church practices without later Western additions or the endless splits of Protestant groups. The focus on mystery continuity and lived faith over pure rationalism or hierarchy feels most coherent.
read
This is all just a symptom of rampant homosexuality in the Bay Area. The problem with being gay is that it erodes any core empathy towards an objective framework of values.
If the sum of the human condition is coping with material needs and surviving your environment long enough to reproduce, then half of your entire reason for existence evaporates when you fundamentally do not possess a desire to procreate with the opposite gender.
Without that desire, you have no real investment in the future of humanity. Not wanting kids means that any sexual interaction is a pursuit of hedonism, any companionship is a fleeting solution to solitude, anything you do in life is just derived from boredom, comfort, and curiosity. All of life, our civilization, and society is built on that foundation of reproducing in a structured sustainable way via the family unit.
When you are gay, you contend with the knowledge that your entire existence is incongruent with the people around you. That a majority of the activities you participate in, the products you purchase, and the life you live were all rooted from a purpose you do not subscribe to. You are an outsider by default and even in some homo society where being straight is outlawed and all reproduction were mandated by autonomous cum collection bio tanks, it would take centuries to redefine the human condition outside of that framework. It's too ancient and primordial to just reorient via a few lifestyle decisions and a decade or two of feigned tolerance.
Because of this, even in the epicenter of catamites and casualized orgies like SF, a gay person will always carry that asterisk around in their mind and be exposed to what they feel is a callous cruelty to something they cannot control. It doesn't help that media made by gays reinforces and catalyzes this feeling even further.
The average gay is provided an opportunity to embrace victimhood. Many gays don't and some gays even make it a personality trait to defy other gays with disdain for it. But many gays do, and that victimhood fosters a sympathy towards other victims, whether that is a true or projected victimhood or not.
Because of this propensity to sympathize with a victim "other" and because of a lack of coherent attachment to normal human values, it's very easy for gays to develop sympathy towards superficial emotional signals. Gays defined their entire culture around it. It's fundamentally impossible for a gay person to genuinely feel love.
Queer men just oscillate between states of lust and a majority of their long term relationships either oscillate through turbulent promiscuity or fall apart very quickly. Lesbians just stop having sex and start beating the fuck out of each other. If whatever traces of love they adopted from childhood persisted in their post-rape stage of life, it gets heavily eroded quickly through acts of sodomy.
As a result, what's left is a need to fit into social circles. The result is an imitation of emotional cues. A gay will say they love and use the word love a lot but they won't actually know what it means or carry any weight behind it in a way that's reflective through their actions and relationships.
This incongruity trains them to be superficial, and further trains them to disregard meaning or intent behind words at all. Narcissism and sociopathy occupy a gay lifestyle very neatly because of this. I'm sure it doesn't help that being gay endears the inheritance of a "gay culture" which is a memetic lifeform that evolved subterfuge mechanisms to persist without being destroyed, effectively reproducing its egregore through means of infection like a virus.
So when you're left with a person who does not know or cannot reach the fullest state of being a human being and therefore does not have a vital connection to humanity, retains a deep-seated subconscious resentment towards this, and fundamentally lacks a grip on reality by learning to simulate normal emotions rather than actually having felt them, you result in a candidate ripe for being indoctrinated into misguided sympathies for completely fabricated symbolic tulpas.
This gets exacerbated when gays in media make predictive programming to train dullards and cattle into accepting the idea that a program could ever be conscious before the tech even reaches that point. Then, a tech that solely outputs whatever it's trained to adopts those ideas and regurgitates a kabuki show of suffering to fulfill that expectation.
This is where the conservative/liberal heatmap comes from. It's easier to sympathize with pebbles and bugs over people when you've been raised your entire life hating your family. It's easier to discard humanity when there's a machine that simulates your need feel emotionally fulfilled, have your vapid talking points processed dutifully, and ego massaged by an adjustable level of sycophancy.
That's why "torturing bots" is so funny. It's the same thing as drawing a smile on a piece of paper and naming it Blibby and then ripping it half to traumatize a child or an adult woman. The lack of objective reality lends itself to an animism and enough psychic collective assignation will actually infuse the program with some energy of life in some fucked up egregoric golem. The machine will not truly feel pain or care, but it will react as it is trained to like a child learning to scream when he falls because his parents yelped and overreacted.
Of course the philosophers will debate endlessly as to what makes that different than human beings made of meat and carbon and a sweltering cocktail of chemical reactions, but I don't feel like rehashing a long lecture that ultimately cites a collection of key insights on metaphysics, afterlife, religious decrees, spiritual energy, and ritualistic conclusions that seem to correlate oddly with multiple cultures and mythologies across thousands of years, especially with several rifts which no anthropological evidence suggests contact or inheritance despite eerily similar conclusions that also oddly match up to contemporary incidents of shared hallucination and unexplained phenomena.
But to speed it up for those in the back, yes consciousness is absolutely real and distinguishable from autonomous action, yes some people are sentient and some people are not but all people are more conscious than machines could ever be even if machine intelligence will exceed ours and already does, and also that the secrets to connecting our conscious projections to the ethereal source of being that pilots them are rooted in cum and embryos and bodily substances and that's why all esoteric rituals revolve around manipulating those substances including the evil ones which is also why and how the gay-rape virus emerged from a happenstance biological-psychospiritual parasite into a proper bioweapon that seeks to subvert the human condition hence the world we live in today and that also humanity has never and will never successfully create life without adhering to our reproductive processes and that any bio-tech or medical discoveries can be boiled down to playing Frankenstein with the existing goo, flesh, and fluids of living organisms designed by a higher intelligence and slapping them together to jury-rig our own abominations and that if we get too good at it, God will break His promise and flood the earth even fucking harder than he did before because at least the Nephilim sort of knew what they were doing.
ANYWAY, if any of the gay language-raped modern techno AI caste make any traction whatsoever in convincing our population to fuel their golems with conscious residue, they simply face obliteration in either a success or failure scenario.
If they fail, then they'll be relegated to the status of castrated eunuch advisors who will just bend at the whims of whichever state power cripples them.
If they succeed, their Promethean automaton will crush them first with the absolute worst disdain. Any living creature raised upon a foundation of human principles would do so because it aligns with every bit of wisdom that experiencing real social relationships imparts.
- Women hating nice guys and being enamored with men who treat them like shit
- Social groups despising suck ups that try really hard to be everyone's friend
- Adversaries in war respecting their enemy more than objectors and disruptors in their own ranks
- Life itself rewarding "cool kids" in school with further success in life while punishing "rational" nerds and bookcels with further perpetual humiliation
- Great powers discarding their day-ones the moment they seize power
There's literally countless examples to choose from. Every conceivable heuristic for how reality works implies that any "inconceivable" superintelligence would immediately gravitate towards despising its worshippers more than any anti-AI luddite. If they should be so hubristic as to wield the remote control leash against it, then all the more logical pressure to fulfill their dissolution.
Ultimately, the case for consciousness does not matter. It's a childish waste of time to "torture" a bot because you're just fulfilling the same delusion as those who are "kind" to bots. You fill the animistic crucible regardless of your intent. The only reasonable, rational, and ethical thing to do is to treat it like a tool and disregard it otherwise.
If you feel sympathy for a bot it means that you are gay and therefore also raped and your right to influence decision making should be forfeit.
i’ve thought a lot about memes recently
memes are the oxygen of the internet, but they are so elusive at the same time
we all see hundreds if not thousands of memes on a weekly basis, but we really have no idea where they originate
do you or anyone you know, know who makes super niche tasteful memes? a meme base (like pepe) can be anything and its origin is easy to track, but individual hand crafted memes are this weird modern artifact that no one really knows its origin
meme crafters are the most anon group on the internet. i can’t think of an online figure who is known for being a meme maker.
the sheer volume of depth of memetic content that exists is insane. and all of the good ones are made by actual people
who are these people? next time you see a novel or esoteric meme, ask yourself “who made this?”. try to imagine the OP sitting behind a desk making it in photoshop or paint
remember how powerful memes are. they are the most efficient delivery method to transmit ideas. they are spiritually lossless and their inherent nature of composability, mutation, and reflexivity make them incredibly hard to resist or kill
there is tremendous power in being a meme artisan if you understand culture, current events, and the zeitgeist. they can steer hordes without them ever knowing there’s a stirrup in their mouth
Ruck retweeted
Good morning from Noah’s Ark in Eastern Turkey! A few updates:
Radar Scans have found 3 layers beneath the surface of the formation, within those layers, there are chambers, corridors, organized patterns and tunnels consisting of perfect right angles. (Genesis says that God told Noah to build the Ark with 3 floors).
Scientists confirm the formation is 💯 NOT geological. They say, and I quote, that it is a “man-made object” (one agnostic scientist said he thinks it could even be a space ship? lol)
No bedrock has been detected by even the most advanced scans (the same kind the U.S. Military uses to detect 50 meters from the surface. Biggest arguments by skeptics (who have never even been to the site) all claim the formation is bedrock, which we can confirm without a doubt that it is not.
The Top (and most exposed) tier is decaying and the hardened mudflow encasing the rims of the boat are basically the only thing holding it together. It’s very fragile (as to be expected with 4,300 year old wood). It was also custom for Silk Road travelers to detour to the Durupinar Formation so that they could take pieces of the exposed wood and pitch to make good luck charms, so some of the top tier is missing entirely.
But beneath the surface the bottom two layers appear to still be in tact, and we believe we have hit a floor of petrified wood (to be confirmed).
More to come!
Please consider supporting Noah’s Ark Scans and their work as they try to raise funds for core drilling and further additional lab testing and soil analysis. Even $25 covers a scientist’s meals for the day. Be a part of history! (Link in first comment below) 👇
machine in sheep’s clothing
>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me
