i made her in treal (trans real) life btw if u care

トレーニング中の唐突なコロンチャレンジ
(おおむね成功かと思ってたけど本兎的には不満だったようです)

#うさぎ
#Blueskyうさぎ部

knowing of it, but never experiencing it, it sounds very distressing and annoying. i imagine after a while your body expects it.

new ways of thinking about our scriptures, of debate and hermeneutic, and given me funny stories to pull out

This unusual looking sea slug has an unusual name–Bullock's Hypselodoris. hese vibrant creatures are nudibranchs, a type of shell-less marine gastropod mollusk often referred to as sea slugs.

THIS COULD BE US

you can just 🫪 no one can stop you

how did you do this!!

like what

Special issue on “Symbolisms and Representations of the Kaʿba” now available in Open Access from Annales Islamologiques, with articles from (among several others) Harry Munt, Simon O’Meara, and me. Examines interpretations of the Kaʿba among Ismaili, Sufi, and other early and medieval Muslim groups

Books should take forever to write. They should torture you your entire life and the things you could have said slightly better should haunt you forever. This is what art is for, transferring the discomfort of being human into something relatable to the other humans

Because we get asked a lot. The Technological Republic, in brief. 1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation. 2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible. 3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. 4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software. 5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed. 6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.

7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way. 8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive. 9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret. 10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed. 11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice. 12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet. 14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war. 15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia. 17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives. 18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.

19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all. 20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim. 21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful. 22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what? (and cut from the previous alt text for word count: 16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn. )

Palantir posted their manifesto on Twitter and the mix of supervillain ranting and petty whinging about cancel culture is truly something else

yeah, that’s right, albeit with caveat that i think x is worse than 4chan. you take the atmosphere of a particularly nasty 4chan subboard and then scale it up to a website where heads of state and ceos of leading corps all post

One of the only Aramaic sentences in the Mishnah, attributed to Hillel (M Avot 6:2) beholding a skull floating in water, contemplating the cycle of violence:

על דאטפת אטפוך וסוף מטיפיך יטופון

"Because you drowned [people], they drowned you; and in the end, the ones who drowned you shall drown."

nowadays גַּלָּח a slightly rude term and most christian clergy are called כְּמָרִים, which is ironic seeing as THAT word originally referred to idolatrous priests and was entirely meant to be an insult when first used, but it’s largely lost that implication

it’s fascinating seeing how non-christians describe tonsure. in medieval Hebrew as well as in Yiddish a priest is called גַּלָּח, meaning “shaven one”

An exceedingly fluffy moth sitting on a grey cardboard egg tray from my moth trap. It's got a shape like a triangle with rounded mothy corners, and its wings are dark grey with tiny black spots. Its body is super fluffy like a plush toy. Its Legs are also super fluffy like it's wearing fur trousers, ending in little black feet. It also has long black comb-like antennas. It's a male muslin moth. Perfect fluffy moth pal, no notes.

Side view of another delightfully fluffy grey male muslin moth sitting on my hand. This moth has warm grey wings with little black spots, and a very fluffy grey body on top. Underneath, it's fluff is white and orange. It has orange fluffy legs that look a bit like its wearing fuzzy trousers, with little black feets, long black comb-like antennas, and big round black eyes. Perfect moth pal, A+, would recommend.

Important news update: it's fluffy-pants season.

Male muslin moths. They have excellent fluffy trews.

That is all, thank u for your time.

The quoted person is basically phrasing common AGI delusional belief; they think Altman is building God in his basement, basically, and "portal that summons aliens" is just expressing the idea that a notional superintelligent AI wouldn't necessarily share our values, goals, or ways of thinking.

And it goes on to describe another sect that live in mountains and shave their bodies. im assuming puns here which are difficult to parse in translation without knowledge of the language

to be fair..

Libat appears to be a term for Venus. at this part it seems is referring to sects of the "Seven Stars" and so it is associating the planets in a similar way as what is called "Archons" in other sects

the Ginza Rabba had a lot of rather problematic passages to me, though uh interesting... like these

(no alt text for now because i am on my phone and they are rather difficult and i dont assume you need them)

the Mandaean language has many cognates with Hebrew, uses unique terms found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and many of their practices resemble what we know of the Essenes

we talked about this before. i actually have a translation of the Ginza Rabba on my desk right now. But what is more fascinating is the Haran Gawaita which is an exodus story explaining themselves as Nasoreans leaving Judea and migrating to modern day Iran

Gershom Scholem's work on gnosticism and how it inherited some kind of corrupted transmission of earlier Jewish ideas, as least according to his theory, is fascinating

it is but it tended to be also heavily platonic in the sense that there is a Demiurge but there is a True G-d as well, just the former is ignorant/deceiver due to being a lesser emanation. then you have the Sophia idea which begins to resemble later Lurianic Kabbalah with the Shechinah

ooo

Well yeah thats what makes this funny is its saying the gnostic False G-d is actually good

why

same