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Joined 30 days ago
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Cake day: August 28th, 2025

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  • whoa, I didn’t know there were Churches that don’t follow Paul. he’s one of my biggest issues with Christianity.

    I felt like Christianity suffered a lot from so many gentiles streaming in early on without becoming Jews, and by the time it became the religion of Rome it blended with Sol Invictus, Greek Platonism and other Roman mythology, and became incomprehensible. Jesus was Jewish, the Disciples were all Jews, all the context of his teachings only make sense in a context the fresh converts lacked.

    I kinda wonder about an alternate universe where a sect of Jews accept Jesus as Moshiach but not as literally God. there’d be no trinity, the parables would go into the Talmud, he’d be seen as a rebbe like Hillel I guess.





  • HOG and Hough transforms bring me back. honestly glad that I don’t have to mess with them anymore though.

    I always found SVMs a little shady because you had to pick a kernel. we spent time talking about the different kernels you could pick but they were all pretty small and/or contrived. I guess with NNs you pick the architecture/activation functions but there didn’t seem to be an analogue in SVM land for “stack more layers and fatten the embeddings.” though I was only an undergrad.

    do you really think NNs won purely because of large datasets and GPU acceleration? I feel like those could have applied to SVMs too. I thought the real win was solving vanishing gradients with ReLU and expanding the number of layers, rather than throwing everything into a 3 or 5-layer MLP, preventing overfitting, making the gradient landscape less prone to local maxima and enabling hierarchical feature extraction to be learned organically.


  • I recently told my mother that I’m probably the most intelligent person she will ever meet

    and so humble, too! seriously though, this is a major red flag. I rarely find smart people to brag about how smart they are.

    also, telling someone that their beliefs are wrong because they’re dumb, and that your beliefs are right because you’re smarter than them, has literally never worked. it will just make them resent you, your beliefs, and anyone they meet in the future who believes what you do. this kind of smugness has been the Achilles heel of Dems for years.


  • I was taught that serious academics favored Support Vector Machines over Neural Networks, which industry only loved because they didn’t have proper education. oops…

    also, Computer Vision was considered “AI-complete” and likely decades away. ImageNet dropped a couple years I graduated. though I guess it ended up being “AI-complete” in a way…




  • I have no scientific basis for this, but my suspicion is that what you do with your brain is more important to cognition than whatever raw intelligence you start with. the more languages you study, the more music you play, the more subjects you study and skills you develop and hobbies you tinker with and deep conversations you have… you learn to learn, you learn to think, it all gets wired up and cross-connected and you become more than the sum of your parts.

    how much decline is truly biological vs. being stuck in a rut?

    also there’s nootropics that could be helpful for concussion recovery/etc. but they haven’t been too well-studied, there’s many different ones with different sketchiness and sources aren’t always trustworthy… but piracetam (iirc) is actually prescribed in the EU for recovery from brain injury, and it’s fairly safe and well-studied. I’m not recommending it either way though.




  • my sibling in Christ, Reps. Mace and Jackson literally shouted the t-slur yesterday and called for all trans people to be forcibly institutionalized. Trump said he “wouldn’t oppose” banning the trans flag when a reporter asked about “transtifa.” Musk retweeted someone who called trans women “perverted, deranged bioweapons” and trans men “osteoporotic, androgynous goblins,” calling us to be contained and forbidden to communicate with each other. along with someone else calling for a total ban on HRT for all ages. we’ve been kicked out of the military, and stripped of security clearances. the DoJ has floated banning us from gun ownership by ruling that we’re “mentally defective.” my passport has an M on it because Trump reverted all the rules on his first day in office. it’s a literal felony for trans women to use the women’s bathroom in Florida, and for trans office workers to use their own pronouns. coverage for trans health has been stripped from nearly every public service. trans protections have recently been eviscerated in Skrmetti.

    it’s really not going great.





  • Certainly!

    Peking (KNT) -Chinese at one time experimented with fertilizing a chimpanzee with human sperm in an attempt to create a “near -human ape,” and they may try it again. The chimp was three months pregnant before the first experiment was halted, one of the original researchers claims. Western science long has scoffed at such an experiment as medically impossible, but Dr. Ji Yongxiang says the research, if it ever resumes, has the potential to develop creatures with higher animal intelligence who could speak and perform simple tasks. A second researcher at the Chinese Academy of Science said there were plans to resume testing.