Abbot Agatho frequently admonished his disciples, saying: Never acquire for yourself anything that you might hesitate to give to your brother if he asked you for it, for thus you would be found a transgressor of God’s commandment. If anyone asks, give to him, and if anyone wants to borrow from you, do not turn away from him.
Abbot Agatho – 4th century Christian Saint and Abbot
It’s always interesting when the media covers projects that you worked on. Even more entertaining is to read the wildly incorrect sweeping generalizations that people make when commenting on news. This is a good reason you should just steer clear of comments sections and social media posts online. Instead, go to trusted, well respected, and reviewed sites with actual industry experts.
Incidentally he mispronounces the name Larrabee (as Laura-be). It is pronounced more like Lair-a-bee.
Perhaps you have seen the fantastic series Chernobyl. One of my favorite parts was the ending when Valery Legasov gives this amazing speech. His summary on the cause of the Chernobyl disaster? Lies.
This scene is a clear reference to the Soviet reformer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s amazing “Live Not by Lies“. It was published the day he was arrested and exiled in 1974. In it he exhorts his fellow Soviet citizens to no longer cooperate with the Soviet regime’s lies. It’s a very quick read and definitely worth it.
When violence [the various bloody Socialist Revolutions] bursts onto the peaceful human condition, its face is flush with self-assurance, it displays on its banner and proclaims: “I am Violence! Make way, step aside, I will crush you!” But violence ages swiftly, a few years pass—and it is no longer sure of itself. To prop itself up, to appear decent, it will without fail call forth its ally—Lies. For violence has nothing to cover itself with but lies, and lies can only persist through violence.
And therein we find, neglected by us, the simplest, the most accessible key to our liberation: a personal nonparticipation in lies! Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not through me!
Solzhentsyn
In just 50 years, Solzhentsyn saw how Socialist revolutionaries went from utopian idealism of collective support and ownership by the workers into one of the worst police states in history. One that killed millions of its own citizens. It was a regime that carefully crafted and brutally imposed lies. After the revolutions, the regime quickly changed narratives, erased (canceled) their own revolutionary leaders/party members, and carefully controlled the reporting of every story.
Yet Solzhentsyn was right. Despite a regime that had unlimited control to silence any dissenting voice, in just 14 short years the entire Soviet regime collapsed. Lenin’s grand experiment of Socialism barely lasted 65 years (1923 – 1988). Brought down in large part by a policy of lies.
So what does it mean to live by truth instead?
Truth used to be a simple concept that has been engrained in everything from the court systems to the scientific method. For centuries, all thought was based on the notion one found truth through careful investigation, experimentation, and repeatable work. Truth is universal – others can do that same experiments, investigation, and come to the same answers regardless of who did them, where, or when.
In the US over the last 5 years or so, there is a growing problem with echo chambers and false news. Instead of truth, echo chambers and fake news simply reflect what we want to hear and feeds emotional outrage instead of thought.
How does this slow progression happen? Instead of actually believing that truth is universal – something that can and will stand on it’s own no matter what is thrown at it – we now have come up with the idea of telling ‘our truth‘. ‘Our truth’ is philosophically little more than opinion and all too often collapses in the face of any real science, examination, or facts. This position about truth lets us avoid thinking critically about our own position nor engage in the charitable and necessary hard work of dialoging and debating our viewpoints with opponents so that real truth can be found by all. This notion of proving and debating what we believe is true is the core of scientific discovery and any democracy. Without that, we live under the oppression of whomever is most willing to enforce their views. History shows us this happens both with progressive (Russian/Chinese/North Korean socialist revolutions) and conservative (Fascist) movements.
Solzhentsyn points out what happens next with this kind of thinking. Violence. We now are going down that road with growing US domestic terrorism. Instead of simply fixing corruption or prosecuting bad actors, we have juvenile calls to throw away the notion of truth and replace it with…well, violence. Once relegated to compound dwelling militants, we now see activists of many stripes openly encouraging people to use violence to impose their ideas on others WITHOUT public debate or discourse. Ironically, it is increasingly being seen in left-leaning quarters that previously called themselves progressive and enlightened. Fringe groups like Antifa call themselves anti-fascists while threatening violence and following exactly the kind of views that actual Fascists believe.
Example: this congressional hearing where representative Nancy Mace grills activist Alejandra Caraballo on her Twitter posts. It is a perfect example of what we are increasingly seeing today from activists who are promoting the same ‘self-assured’ violence Solzhentsyn talks about.
Many now choose to believe lies even when those lies fly in the face of science – such as proven environmental or biological science. But reality doesn’t care about your opinion – it exists outside ourselves. If you choose not to wear your seatbelt because you don’t believe in them – the physics of a car crash will correct you. If you choose to ignore vaccinations, changing environmental conditions, or deny your chromosomal makeup – your viruses, storms and your biology will exert themselves no matter what you want to believe is true.
Some lies only hurt ourselves or do injuries to another’s reputation. Chernobyl shows, however, even seemingly simple lies can also cause disastrous consequences. The Soviet Union showed that millions can die and even with complete control and absolute power, it could not stand for more than 65 years based on violence and lies. What began as a utopian experiment became one of the most brutal and murderous forms of government in all of human history – because of lies.
Yet, each of these horrors also showed us that truth always wins. In the end, you are not fighting ‘them’ – you are fighting the truth.
When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there.
But it is still there.
Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.
For the Christian, this is nothing new. Christians went from being a tiny, fringe oppressed group in the Roman empire to completely conquering it in just 300 years – without a single battle. They did this simply by living the Truth. What is the real Truth? It’s the Truth that has lasted longer than every country, government, culture, company, and civilization since it entered the world. It’s the teachings of and relationship with Christ. Unlike the notion of ‘our truth’, Jesus promises us that living as He taught and living daily with Him is real Truth – Truth that is the same today, yesterday, and always. Truth that has overthrown and outlasted the most powerful rulers and kingdoms in the world. If you wish to live in universal and eternal truth, then live by the author of Truth.
Live not by lies. Let the rule of lies hold not through me.
Oregon is one of only 2 states that still has a 50’s era laws banning customers from pumping their own gas. This has been changing though. Several counties in sparsely populated areas of eastern Oregon have been allow you to pump your own gas for the last few years. During recent heat waves, snow storms, and COVID – residents have been increasingly able to pump their own gas.
That might become permanent as a repeal on the ban just passed the Oregon house. It now only has to pass the Oregon senate.
What will that day be like? Some have suggesting Oregonians are utterly doomed like this:
Or maybe this:
You can’t go 5 minutes on the internet or grocery story news stand aisle without some ‘expert’ telling you how to be happy. Getting enough sleep! Doing what you want! Have great sex, eat the right foods, etc. I found Arthur C. Brooks – who happens to be a happiness professor at Harvard. Here’s some scientific findings on happiness. As it turns out, most of this is not new wisdom…
The Harvard Study of Adult Development is probably one of the longest studies done over 75 years of the same people. Some came from the poorest parts of society, while others were Harvard members. What turned out to make them happiest and live longest was not their cholesterol numbers, success, money, nor fame.
The findings? The quality and satisfaction of their relationships is the most important index of longer life, happiness, and health than any other marker. Loneliness was one of the highest indicators of later physical and mental health issues. Even if the relationships had difficulties and bickering – the most important key attribute is that they knew when the chips were down they could count on their partner.
If you want to live longer and happier, it might be time to re-kindle a stagnating relationship or building new healthy relationships. Holding grudges, unforgiveness, or not kindling loving relationships is just as damaging to you as heart disease. Surprisingly, these are the very things that Jesus taught us.
I had not seen Fr Chad Ripperger’s videos before, but I think he’s spot on in his observations about trends we see going on in the world. What’s interesting is that his observations are independently backed up by many scientific studies about happiness, social media, and news reporting.
This shouldn’t be shocking that science is slowly confirming many of the very core beliefs that Jesus and the Catholic Church have taught about what brings us happiness and fulfilling lives. Contrary to Hollywood’s incorrect take on religion as anti-science, Catholics believe religion and science are not in conflict but in unity for centuries. Certainly longer than most every current country on earth. Some of the most famous scientific discoveries such as physics (Newton), genetics (Gregory Mendel), and even the Big Bang (co-discoverer Fr. Georges Lemaître) were theists or religious who never saw a conflict with their faith – quite the contrary in almost all cases.
So when it comes to human behaviors and social trends, it should be no surprise that the teachings of Christ tell us how we should and shouldn’t act as well. What things bring division, hatred, destruction, and evil – and which bring joy, peace, and relationship. Give his talk a listen. Even if you don’t believe in God or don’t like the words ‘spiritual warfare’ – you should see that the core ideas and teaching are still correct whatever words you’d like to use.
Back in the 90’s, computer audio devices were really limited. If you were relatively rich, you could afford a $150 Sound Blaster, or maybe a $75 Adlib. If not, you were limited to the very humble PC speaker. It turns out, however, there was one other option that didn’t get a lot of visibility.
The Covox Speech Thing (and a similar device called the Disney Sound Source) was an external audio device attached to the printer port and could output digitally generated sound. The device was a criminally simple 8-bit DAC created with a resistor ladder, an analogue output plug, and ran off simple digital signals from the printer port of the PC. How simple was it? So simple you can easily make it yourself.
Necroware does a great job covering the device, how to make your own, and gives you a full tour of the device as well as 90’s software you can use with it. Most notably, Tracker software which gave me tons of fond memories.
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Chris Zukowski helps lots of game developers market their games. He goes over the most recent data and shows the best practices for marketing your game on Steam. It’s an interesting mix of understanding your market and how to manage the algorithms on various platforms to maximize your wishlist subscription rate.
Researchers at Osaka University in Japan are among the ranks of scientists using A.I. to make sense of human brain scans. While others have tried using AI with MRI scans to visualize what people are seeing, the Osaka approach is unique because it used Stable Diffusion to generate the images. This greatly simplified their model so it required only a few thousands, instead of millions, of training parameters.
Normally, Stable Diffusion takes text descriptions/prompts which are run through a language model. That language model is trained against a huge library of images to generate a text-to-image latent space that can be queried to generate new amalgamated images (yes, a gross simplification).
The Osaka researchers took this one step further. The researchers used functional MRI (fMRI) scans from an earlier, unrelated study in which four participants looked at 10,000 different images of people, landscapes and objects while being monitored in an fMRI. The Osaka team then trained a second A.I. model to link brain activity in fMRI data with text descriptions of the pictures the study participants looked at.
Together, these two models allowed Stable Diffusion to turn fMRI data into relatively accurate images that were not part of the A.I. training set. Based on the brain scans, the first model could recreate the perspective and layout that the participant had seen, but its generated images were of cloudy and nonspecific figures. But then the second model kicked in, and it could recognize what object people were looking at by using the text descriptions from the training images. So, if it received a brain scan that resembled one from its training marked as a person viewing an airplane, it would put an airplane into the generated image, following the perspective from the first model. The technology achieved roughly 80 percent accuracy.
The team shared more details in a new paper, which has not been peer-reviewed, published on the preprint server bioRxiv.
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