Notices by Ooze 𓁟 (ooze@aus.social)

@SeaFury Using AI to write is 100% plagiarism. It is also dumb because it is paying for something to do the job that academics are trained to do but which is worse at it than they are. And it's a great way to male the next generation of academics worse.

@CStamp @MisuseCase @mekkaokereke @tob @wendinoakland The concept of a preacher is limited to a very small set of religions so you are mistaken.

@bedast Just another reason why using Discord for your instances' moderation is a big mistake.

@bedast Some mastodon instances use discord to run their moderation process. There is a bot on the server that sends a message to a discord channel to alert the mods to view reports.This is a bad choice for a number of reasons.

Why did I spend five hours on my tractor today so that I now ache like a motherfucker? Because it is awesome fun and way better than spraying poison on weeds! I will regret this tomorrow. Pray for me.

https://www.choice.com.au/consumers-and-data/data-collection-and-use/who-has-your-data/articles/connected-cars-tracking-your-data Excellent work from Choice yet again.

#privacy #enshittification

@HistoPol @resilienceSci "One of the most common patterns that has jumped out is how extreme inequality shows up in nearly every case of major crisis. When big gaps exist between the haves and have-nots, not just in material wealth but also access to positions of power, this breeds frustration, dissent and turmoil."

@tokyo_0 Deleting your account will stop it entirely.

@tayledras @johncarlosbaez What you call balkanised I call diversified. Calling Mastodon a mess when Twitter is as it is is completely unjustified.

So Academia.edu is using an AI to alledgedly summarise academic works. I was able to see part of the summary for my PhD thesis in the source of the page where they were trying to get me to pay them for this nightmare. I cannot speak more clearly than this about the trash that their abomination had output. THAT IS NOT WHAT I SAID AT ALL!!!!!

Today I contacted them to ask them to remove this feature or to make it opt in only. If they are unwilling to do either I shall be morally obliged to remove all my work uploaded there.

#AcademicChatter #AI #LLM

Death Drives A Pale Limousine

Humans love anthropomorphisms! It makes it easy for us to think about concepts if we dress them up as humans. Death is no exception. Western culture has the grim reaper with his long black robe, scythe and his pale horse. But where did this Death come from and what came before him?

What is possibly the earliest known representation of Death, found at the Neolithic settlement at Catal Huyuk in Anatolia, shows Death as gigantic black birds, of vulture like appearance, who menace headless human corpses1. But this culture is mostly unknown to us so an understanding of this representation is beyond us at present. But they are black, which is the first attribute of our Death.

In Mesopotamian times the personification of Death was Nergal. In early lore he was handed charge of the underworld by his parents Enlil and Ninlil2, but it later times he was said to have obtained his dominion by marring Ereshkigal, Queen of the Great Below3. He is the first known representation of Death wearing a black robe, and he is armed with a scimitar and a staff4. Nergal is not a punishing Death but he is an inflicted death, which is reflected in his also being the god of war and pestilence. He is the essence of destruction, but there is no intent, no sense of death as a moral consequence, though deaths are sometimes brought about by him by means of daemons.

Read the rest of this post at https://ooze.net/death-drives-a-pale-limousine/

#Death #histodons #Religion #History

Dogmatic religion is a bitch. It destroys the very core of people.

Humans are social creatures. So when our cherished others share with us that it is possible to know the love of a perfect being, to be enfolded in the bliss of union with it, if only we follow some rules, we naturally strive to seek this perfection. But the rules are the thing. When we submit to rules we want to know that they are justified. That they will be efficacious. But dogma, the insistence on unquestioning faith, does not give us such reassurance.

Any dogmatic set of rules is functionally unattainable in the long term because of the power of doubt. Dogmatism is not a natural part of what it is to be human. We thirst for understanding. And, while there is a great truth in not being a slave to the why of things, in sometimes accepting things as they are even though we cannot yet understand them, we will never cease completely to ask why.

Whenever there are rules they are broken. Always. If there is a rule, someone is breaking it. But with dogmatic religion it is always the rules held in the highest regard that are broken. Not just broken, smashed. The most proscribed precepts serving only to indicate the nature of the depravity of the oppressors. Our tender bliss seeking hearts recoil from this hypocrisy. And we instantly see the deception that these others have perpetrated upon us. And we hate them for it.

And if we are hurt enough, we defensively reject the entire possibility of the blissful union ever existing at all. We want our money back, because the thing they sold us does not exist. Or so we think. We think this because the hypocrites who taught us are hooked on the idea that there is only one way to characterize the perfect thing, and it is their characterization. All the other ones are evil. The god of Abraham boldly declares that all other gods are evil and untrue, false and deceiving, or even, the big lie, simply nonexistent. Like a spoiled toddler, his every utterance an insistent cry of There Can Be Only One.

This is often the first clue to us that the god of love they say they are recommending might not be quite as loving as they make him out to be. Even though we reject them once we see their hypocrisy rear its so, so ugly head, we have been so traumatically conditioned by the purveyors of the One True God™ that we can’t easily escape from the bounds of monotheism. Once we have found that particular god lacking we fall back on that conditioning and we believe that there must be no gods at all.

But the blissful union with the perfect thing is still there! If we continue to be prisoners of the conditioning foisted upon us by the damaged peddlers of the one single truth lie we shall be forever beholden to their conceptualizations. Forever locked in a trap of their design. Forever believing that it is their way or nothing...

Read the rest of this piece at:

https://ooze.net/dogmatic-religion-is-a-bitch/#blissful

#religion #theology #philosophy #pagan

Home.

This is my gata.

Home.

This is my gato.

@Felipe_B @jwildeboer Because @Gargron is so naive he though this would never happen.

@HistoPol @JdeB @EU_Commission This chart shows nothing planned for Australia in the coal production chart. In fact Australia has over a hundred planned coal and fossil fuel projects. https://australiainstitute.org.au/report/new-fossil-fuel-projects-in-australia-2023/

I feel like everyone has forgotten that #SilentSunday posts were supposed to not have any text.

@aral because only money matters.

Here's a conference talk I did about this https://archive.org/details/lca2019-Im_sorry_Dave_I_cant_do_that_Ethics_in_Software_Development

Though I am encouraged that more people are speaking up than before.

This is the result of spruiking how only STEM matters.

I reckon people who moved to Mastodon and stayed are the kind of people who would pass the get a second marshmallow in 15 minutes if you don't eat the first one till then test.

#Mastodon

@Daojoan This is the way.