Exactly. Using them to actually “generate content” is a sure fire way to turn your brain into garbage, along with whatever you “produce” - but they do seem to have fulfilled Google’s dream of making the Star Trek computer reality.
Most all words have more than one sound. There are big sounds and small sounds though. The big parts - "word sounds" — that we don't want, the word "sounds" has just one. It needs no break. You might say that the word "school" has two but that word has just one as well.
There are larger minds than ours, and they've been well-attested for millennia as celestial entities, i.e. spirits. Approaching it purely within the realm of the kinds of minds that we can observe empirically is self-limiting.
Well attested to is different from convincingly attested to. You may have noticed that people will say just about anything for lots of reasons other than averring a literal truth, and this was particularly true for those many millennia during which human beings didn't even know why the sky was blue and almost literally could not have conceived of the terms in which we can presently formulate an explanation.
The "people in times before the enlightenment just attributed everything to spirits because they didn't understand things" argument is tired and boring. Just because you're not convinced doesn't mean that it's not true, modern man.
That isn't my assertion. I actually think people in the past probably did not seriously subscribe to so-called supernatural explanations most of the time in their daily lives. Why I am saying is that its quite reasonable to take a bunch of incoherent, often contradictory and vague, accounts of spiritual experiences as not having much epistemological weight.
Then we disagree about the basic assumption. I do think that people throughout history have attributed many different things to the influence of spiritual entities. I’m just saying that It just was not a catch-all for unexplained circumstances. They may seem contradictory and vague to someone who denies the existence of spirits, but if you have the proper understanding of spirits as vast cosmic entities with minds far outside ours, that aren’t bound to the same physical and temporal rules as us, then people’s experiences make a lot of sense.
Okay, you have proposed a theory about a phenomenon that has some causal influence on the world -- ie, that there are spirits which can communicate with people and presumably alter their behavior in some way.
How do you propose to experimentally verify and measure such spirits? How can we distinguish between a world in which they exist as you imagine them and a world in which they don't? How can we distinguish between a world in which they exist as you imagine them and a world in which a completely _different set of spirits following different rules, also exists. What about Djinn? Santa Claus? Demons? Fairies?
We can experimentally verify spirits by communicating with them. Many such cases.
Now, do you mean measure them using our physical devices that we currently have? No, we can't do that. They are "minds beyond ours" as OP suggests, just not in the way that OP assumes.
Djinn: Demons. Santa Claus: Saint (i.e. soul of a righteous human). Demons: Demons. Fairies (real, not fairy-tale): Demons. Most spirits that you're going to run across as presenting themselves involuntarily to people are demons because demons are the ones who cause mischief. Angels don't draw attention to themselves.
I don't know, it seems reasonable to conclude that the experiments you describe point strongly to an endogenous rather than exogenous source of these experiences, especially since people who have these kinds of experiences do not all agree on what they are or mean and the experiences are significantly influenced by cultural norms.
An electron is a bit like a demon in the sense that you can't see one directly and we only have indirect evidence that they exist. But anyone from any culture can do an oil drop experiment and get values which aren't culture bound, at least in the long run. People have been having mystical experiences forever and the world religions still have no agreement about what they mean.
I'm conflicted about this. I want to dislike it, but frankly I don't appreciate the actual musicianship in music the majority of the time. If I'm listening to something that has broad and long-lasting culture impact like Bach, or Britney Spears, it really matters more about how it's been received than the actual quality of the music.
Or, if I'm listening to music just for the vibe, I really don't care how it's created, as long as it doesn't offend me auditorially. I'm really not listening actively. So I suppose that's a bit of an indictment of myself, but I don't think it's a serious character flaw in myself. I should probably just try to pay more attention to the people around me at all times.
I have a lot of fun putting my own poetry in here and mashing it up with the styles that I enjoy listening to, or that I think would work well with the poem. Again, I don't want to like it, but I do.
This is the concept of Theosis, still very active in the Orthodox Church. Salvation is not just having your problems ignored — it's actually becoming "gods by grace"
I don't understand how (if?) WordPress has popularity among serious professionals. Extending it without plugins, many of which are paid, is a nightmare. Adding custom fields is laborious, configuring post type display modes is a slog as well.
HN seems to grumble about Drupal but even if your only requirement is a PHP server with a MySQL database connect, Drupal (8+) is just as simple to set up as WordPress and infinitely easier to configure. Older versions may have been less user-friendly but really, just click "Content->Add New->Page" and you're already running at the speed of WordPress.
Wordpress is clunky but it never broke backwards compatibility.
HN grumbles about Drupal because many got burnt by picking the wrong horse. Drupal was the biggest CMS in the world and like a safe bet until they told their users they would have to rewrite their 7 code to go to 8 and their users decided they would rewrite to WordPress[1]. Drupal never regained the trust they lost. They extended the life of d7 over and over but never made a compelling replacement. To this day, 7 is still more widely deployed than 8,9 or 10 ever were[2].
I think it's interesting to observe the fate that Python 3 narrowly avoided. Python 3 wasn't a compelling replacement until at least 3.5. In a nearly parallel universe they're all using torch.rb instead of pytorch.
I don't understand how `serious professionals` continue to try to trash WordPress using superficial and often uneducated arguments, completely ignoring the fact that it has huge flexibility, a rich ecosystem, many options for using modern development practices and 40%+ global market share.
I worked in exclusively WordPress for many years. "Flexibility" doesn't mean jack if it doesn't adhere to modern development practices itself. "Many options," yes but the core is just cobbled together by amateurs. It has nothing to do with modern PHP development practices; it's basically just a collection of functions. It doesn't use composer; most of the development stacks I've seen are tricks to basically gut its dependency management and rewrite it themselves.
As for a "rich ecosystem" and "40%+ global market share" — popularity has nothing to do with quality.
>> Extending it without plugins, many of which are paid, is a nightmare.
Many of are free, and you can often build your own. You can easily extend it without plugins, but you're doing your future self a favor if you stuck your new features in one (so you can update themes etc easily in the future).
>> Adding custom fields is laborious, configuring post type display modes is a slog as well.
Hard disagree here. Whether you are using ACF for custom fields or post types, doing it manually takes more time but is not that difficult. Its typically a set of actions you wouldn't do often either.
It's the same way products like salesforce become popular. Network effects. As much it's an architectural nightmare, it is a thing that everyone is familiar with. When you are looking at ecommerce tools, email marketing, analytics, etc they all have some kind of one-click integration with wordpress. If you need developers, wordpress freelancers are a dime a dozen. It's just the thing everybody knows.
Hate the codebase, don't mind the front-end mostly. A compatible SQL schema rewrite in a different language with lower exposure to risk, and some of the auth issues resolved, I think a lot of people would shift camp.
I have seen national broadsheets using WP as their publish engine. How they actually write copy and approve the article stream might be another matter.
Here in Lithuania it's mostly due to customer demand - customers want for open source systems that could be easily modified, would work "just like the old site did", finding developers would be cheap/easy and if launching and hosting site is cheap too, it's all the better.
When you write down all the demands, there aren't much options left. Drupal and Opencart are used, but WordPress is used for 90% of the sites mostly due to demand/requirements.
I see these questions a lot, but mostly the feel disingenuous. People aren't really that dumb, and most large, functioning systems usually have a material history that leads to where they are at.
The answers really are helpful and will tell folks a lot about the world. If you don't understand how WP and Drupal ended up where they did (and why Joomla, Cake, etc ad infi are no longer around), then I suggest that you try to answer the question your asking, or at least pay some attention to the answers you get.
WP had, for quiet a while, a much better and conceptually easier admin system. Even that system was clunky and hard to train non-tech folks to use. But it was better than Drupal and more interactive than Joomla.
You might not accept that answer, but that really was a lot of it in my experience.
I hate WP for a lot of reasons, but its not like the many "serious professionals" who have built software for it were doing so for unworkable reasons. I found it much of a pain the ass, but if you know what you're doing and develop the correct skill sets it is far from a nightmare.
Drupal should be the obvious choice here. Still PHP-based, still fieldable entities, and a much saner data structure with infinite extensibility. It gets weird hate on HN so I expect that kind of pushback but hey, it's put food on my family's table for more than 6 years and powers some huge and popular sites so I'm not concerned.
It gets weird hate because it has (had?) an insanely steep learning curve and no setup looked like the other. With wordpress at least, it's pretty consistent across plugins and implementations and very easy to pick up
Must be "had" — I've used it since D8 first came out and while there's weirdness, it's never been anything beyond what WordPress threw at me.
In terms of setup, it's just like — enter database credentials and start making pages. There's plenty of themes out here and HN users aren't stupid — everyone knows how to compile their own CSS and use composer if they want to.
