Because it's interesting as hell. I'm Catholic, and clicking around in here there's practically nothing religious in it to me at all. No part of my own faith engages with Celsus Description of the Ophite Diagrams. But it sounds like something out of a Clive Barker book --- and, behold, it is like something out of a Clive Barker book:
He is the Demiurge of this world, the God of Moses described in his creation
narrative. Of the Seven archontic demons, the first is lion-shaped; the second
is a bull; the third is amphibious and hisses horribly; the fourth is in the
form of an eagle ; the fifth has the appearance of a bear, the sixth, that of
a dog ; and the seventh, that of an ass named Thaphabaoth or Onoel.
This is like a weird parallel of Greek mythology. But it's got a little extra charge because it ostensibly plugs into a modern religion. Super fascinating.
Can I ask why do you identify as "Catholic" and not as "Christian"? I have seen that a few times and it does seem like attempt from you to essentially state that you are making your own religion. How much splintering off can you do and still call yourself Christian?
Can't speak for anyone else, but it is not unusual (nor new) for someone to describe themselves as "Catholic." Briefly, they usually mean that they are a member of the Roman Catholic Church. Wikipedia will provide a great deal of reading about it.
Neither is it unusual for someone to describe themselves as a particular Protestant denomination: Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, et al. Again, Wikipedia is a good starting place.
People who simply describe themselves as "Christian" are what, in my experience at least, is relatively new. Going back, say, fifty years, it was somewhat unusual in many parts of the US to find people who described themselves that way.
In my experience, most of these people belong to one or another of what might be called non-denominational Christian churches. My preferred term for many of them is "contemporary American fundamentalist Christian," but that is not a widely used term, at least not that I know of.
Your question is strange enough that I'm honestly not sure whether or not you're trolling. If you are, as it seems you might be, a member of a contemporary American non-denominational Christian church, it is very weird, whether you know it or not, to suggest that a church that has existed for roughly two thousand years and has many more than a billion members wordwide is "splintering off" and "making [its] own religion."
That's weird to me because most Catholic people I know (Chicago is a very Catholic city) would identify themselves as "Catholic", not as "Christian". If you ask us "are you Christian", we'll say "yes", but it's not the word we use.
Maybe that's totally different for evangelicals or some other mainline denomination. I wouldn't know.
"Catholic" is just a Greek word that means "general, universal", derived from "kata holou" ("in accordance with the whole"). It's the opposite of a splintering off, though there is a viable argument that they splintered off of Orthodox Christianity (due originally to the filioque controversy, and arguably with broader differences relating e.g. to the worship of graven images, and the like).
I will actually argue that it is very useful and wish that more people started to be more specific about their faith. Firstly, stating that one is Catholic/Lutheran/... demonstrates that one understand that one is not representing the entire Christianity. Secondly, it is useful for discussion as it makes one's dogmas/axioms more explicit. And thirdly, it allows better granularity as some general teachings are really Christian (like the resurrection and most of the Credo) while other are specific to the tradition one follows (like the sacraments).
For example, a Catholic would hesitate to receive a "Christian eucharist" as the Catholic and protestant understanding of the Eucharist is so profoundly different
A final point, given the subject of the thread, is that since the Catholic Church regards itself as founded by Christ, it is older than the Bible, and that the Bible was primarily written by the Church, for the Church, to complement Tradition. They would consider splintering off Tradition and leaving Catholicism as moving away from Christ (as Christ is head of the Catholic Church)
I often experience this. I saw that a co worker had written something about God in their Twitter bio. "Are you a Christian?" "I'm a Catholic" they replied. Any other denomination would say "yes I'm a Christian" (there are no denominations in heaven, nor was there in the early church).
To understand this behaviour, it should be known that Catholics have introduced man made rules that they have additionally decided are not up for discussion (infallible) even if the Bible appears to say otherwise. Catholics teach that there is no salvation outside the church. By definition, this makes sense - the church is by definition a body of people who belong to Christ.
However what the catholics actually mean is "the Roman Catholic church". Whether your average Catholic realises this or not it's debatable, but the common clarification "I'm a Catholic" is because they have absorbed a corrupt teaching that only catholics can be saved.
Read this and the linked article at the bottom https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/is-there-re...
"I often experience this. I saw that a co worker had written something about God in their Twitter bio. 'Are you a Christian?' 'I'm a Catholic' they replied. Any other denomination would say 'yes I'm a Christian'"
I'm going to suggest that if you would find it surprising to have your question answered with "Yes, Greek Orthodox," or "Yes, Southern Baptist," or "Yes, United Methodist," or some similar variation, your personal experience may not be as broad or definitive as you seem to think it is.
Well it's a common question I've asked of people during my life, and only catholics ever make that distinction, almost a correction. And there's a reason why - because they think it's the one true church.
I'm not in the USA btw.
OK. I'm curious, roughly where are you? And if non-denominational, sort of generic "Christians" are common there now, what was the situation historically?
I'm in the UK.
Normal conversation: what did you do on Sunday? I was in church. "Oh are you a Christian" "yes".
Now, if the first person is not a Christian , that's often the end of the conversation.
If first person is also a Christian they would say "oh me too! What sort of church do you go to".
They might then answer, oh I got to st Luke's, have you heard of it. Or I go to so and so in the town. The baptist church? Yeah that one"
It's very unusual for a non Catholic to go straight to denominations in answer to the "are you a Christian", because that's not the question, and due to the appeal to unity, because of the belief that we're all part of god's family, rather than go straight for dividing lines. And never would anyone identify as "I'm a protestant", that would be odd.
OK thanks. By the UK, do you mean Great Britain? England? Something else?
As far as I know (admittedly not far), Christians in the UK are about one-third Church of England, one-third non-denominational, one-fifth Catholic, and the rest other. I think most of the growth in non-denominational Christian churches in the UK has taken place in my lifetime.
There is a particular part of the UK where, in fairly recent decades, I think self-identifying as "Protestant," as quite specifically opposed to "Catholic," was not at all odd, to use your word. Not sure of the extent to which that's still the case.
Here in (South-adjacent) Texas, if someone asks if I'm Christian, I'm likely to respond, "Well, I'm Episcopalian, if that counts" — because to some folks in this neck of the woods, Episcopalians aren't really Christians.
A lot of people assume "Christian" implies American evangelical values and beliefs (especially online), and many people want to make it clear they do not share those - e.g. biblical literalism.
Its common for people of many denominations to specify their denomination. People often say they are Anglican or Orthodox or whatever.
Edit: Nevermind apparently this is incorrect. This is just my take from trying to understand why we were Catholic and not Christian, and then avoiding being mistaken for 'Christian' later in life and not clarifying and staying in my lane. But I guess there is something else I don't understand going on.
'Christians' in the US don't consider Catholics 'Christians' (using quotes to show it's a group identifier based not solely on following Christs teachings). They (Christians) are also the newer splinter group. So Catholics have taken to identifying themselves as Catholics to 'stay in their lane' or to self identify to the 'Christians' that they aren't part of the accepted/in group. Catholics were lower status historically, look at the talk around Kennedy. Also Christians might not want to be friendly with Catholics but they would with Christians, so you out yourself as Catholic from the start to avoid that bullshit (so back to 'stay in your lane').
The two have very different approaches to religion, with Catholics following the 'love they neighbor' 'care for the poor' live Jesus' teachings and Christians building mega churches and following prosperity gospel. Or most upsetting to my grandma, the Christian holy roller stuff. Or more upsetting to the Christians Mother Mary in the Catholic church.
When I was a kid there was also a huge racial element. WASPs versus Catholic congregations made up of Italians, Irish, Filipinos, Latin Americans, Middle Easterners and Germans.
But from my experience it's largely the 'stay in your lane' thing. I've had people be friendly with me because since I was christian they assumed I was Christian christian, and when they found out I was Catholic they stopped talking to me (past tense as I'm not really religious).
I don't think any of this is really true? If I was Lutheran, I assume I'd just describe myself as "Lutheran".
This whole subthread is pretty weird. There's no deeper meaning to my describing myself as "Catholic". It's how any Catholic would describe themselves.
I encountered such discussions living overseas. For people who come from traditions from outside the Christian world, few know the differences between the various branches or the complex history or rites or terminology, and tend to lump them all in together regardless of the identity or faith of the person they’re speaking with. This is also true of outsiders regarding Islam, Buddhism, or other religions with long and splintered histories.
TBH it’s hard for many people who were raised in a specific Christian faith to concisely explain many of the differences themselves … I would struggle when asked “what’s the difference between Catholicism and Christianity“ or “Catholics and Baptists” back then.
This is not an online bible, it's an archive of the surviving material from a movement that has had unimaginable reach and impact on the world we live. You can see first hand how diverse their thelogy was prior to canon and orthodox enclosure.
Why not? I have been on this particular website quite a few times, but there have been other pages linked on here which I haven't been to so much. It's good to have a variety of interests. I am getting a broader range of websites and articles off here than mainstream media.
Are you looking for a yes/no answer, or for someone else to do the legwork for you?
I'll save you some time, the answer to you question is unequivocally: no. There are no other such archives for other religions or cultures. Just this one website.
Mileage may vary! The basic problem for an English speaker is that some languages are more translated than others. There are far more people translating from Greek, Hebrew and Latin works, than from Tibetan or Ge'ez (an Ethiopian language).
I've heard about the Taoist canon recently, which is seemingly vast, and despite Chinese being a major language, and a substantial number of people knowing both Chinese and English... Only a fraction of the Taoist canon is available in English.
There is a basic problem with some eastern texts, i.e. that many have not been translated into English. I was watching a video on Taoism recently, and a huge number of their scriptures are unavailable in English.
The link includes all sorts of stuff that modern Christians generally consider heretical, so I don't think it's proselytizing.
Most people underestimate the diversity of beliefs in early Christianity. A lot of that was violently suppressed by Constantine, to the point that some of it was only dug up in the last century.
Or perhaps those who are saying otherwise are trying to spread their own mind virus.
It is interesting how derisive your comment is compared to those who are in support of interesting and diverging content.
I am, however a bit confused by your comment as I have read several posts this week that had absolutely nothing to do with software/technology and most interestingly only two having to do anything with a compiler. Are you saying we should only post about compilers.
I am waiting to be enlightened by your list of acceptable topics and content.
I find it all fascinating, and I'm closer to being an atheist than any sort of Christian. There are so many religions in the world, and people have worshiped so many different Gods. And most of them think theirs is correct and all the rest are misguided, at best.
I am absolutely not a Jesus freak and I find it interesting because I find ancient culture, sociology and mythology interesting.
But I do get where you're coming from. Whenever a topic like this comes up a Christian will inevitably show up to proselytize (it should be considered a corollary to Godwin's Law.)
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
This satisfies people's intellectual curiosity, therefore it's "Hacker News."
One of the current top 100 posts relates to western religion. It’s easy to avoid if uninterested. I enjoy that every now and then we have an ancient history, archeology, theology, literature, futurism or etc. post make the front page.
As a game developer, I'm really rooting for open source game engines.
Unity and Unreal are dinosaurs that target the shrinking console market. Godot is being built in their image. My hope is that something more versatile like Bevy becomes common so that we have something that could potentially compete with the next generation of Roblox.
I really hope not, but I wouldn’t bet against it. The nature of products that take high capex to build and then have nearly zero marginal cost to reproduce is monopolies.
Worse than that, the main vehicle it compares everything to is the Model Y. There may have been one or two things related to Tesla this year, and not other EVs, that might have hurt resale values for some reason...
Hilarious! My son is taking Honors English in the 10th grade and I am constantly finding those kinds of mistakes in his writing assignments because he gets distracted by his phone a lot. He also adds a lot of extra sentences that say nothing of value, which I remove. I guess I'm his editor.
It's crossed my mind that a couple of a certain class of typos in a document has become a signal of authenticity. It's only a matter of time* before we see prompting or even manual editing adapt to falsify that signal.
* before this comment gets a single upvote, somebody will have vibe-coded this
And when it's offered for free once, it's then a race to the bottom. People in general don't understand the value of curation nor quality, especially when it comes to information. So it's hard for well-curated high quality information to remain because it costs money to make it.
The AI would, hands down, write a better sentence if you compared the output quality of an author writing 10,000 words per day with an AI writing 10,000 words per day. Or make the AI write 100,000 words per day, it could write sentences better than that 24/7 without breaking a sweat, while the human would literally be incapable of achieving this goal.
But if you gave both a month to write the best 400 word article they could possibly generate on a particular subject, the human author would dominate. Give them time to make a few drafts, to research and think and talk to people, to edit and reorganize and restart and rehearse, and they'll produce something that's worth being read and re-read and considered thoughtfully by thousands of people.
The problem is that the journalism industry has become optimized to generate content to be skimmed by a few people and read by thousands of bots.
> But if you gave both a month to write the best 400 word article they could possibly generate on a particular subject, the human author would dominate.
The only use-case I've heard for cryptocurrencies that doesn't just sound like a get-rich-quick-speculative-betting-scam is providing financial services to the un-banked.
That’s not how unfair monopolies are judged in the US. It’s based on harm to consumers.
As far as how hard is it to compete, it’s not the governments job to force people to use your alternate search engine. Choosing another search engine is literally just a click away.
It will be impossible soon (already almost there) to determine what is real content by real humans and what is AI generated <slop>. Human-to-human experiences will become a priceless commodity.
I understand the concern about AI slop. That's actually not what we're building toward.
Think of Trendly more like Google Trends or BuzzSumo - it's a research tool with content assistance features. Most of our users are doing market research, tracking brand mentions across languages, or understanding cultural conversations they wouldn't otherwise have visibility into.
The "instant content" angle was poor messaging on my part. The real value is in the discovery and insights, not automation.
For continuous you need to either go for a polar orbit or go very far in space. Most launch centers & providers are not well situation for polar orbits because its not a common use case, so you need to sacrifice launch mass. The same goes for far away orbits - you need to sacrifice launch mass to go further. Also if you are far then you get latency issues.
So it skews the economics pretty harshly. I think OP is right - you need good batteries somehow.
I think the proposal suggested an orbit where the solar panels are always in sun and always properly aligned and always clean due to space gophers.
But more seriously, GPU loads are super spiky. Ground-based power grids and generators and batteries have trouble keeping up with them. You can go from 1MW idle to 50MW full power in 10ms. Unbuffered solar cells are right out.
> "GPU loads are super spiky... You can go from 1MW idle to 50MW full power in 10ms."
That sounds like something that could be addressed in software, if necessary? Cap/throttle the GPUs according to the available power, and ramp power up/down gradually if spikiness is the issue.
