I’ve thought a lot about this over the last few years, and have decided there’s one critical distinction: Understanding.

When we combine knowledge to come to a conclusion, we understand (or even misunderstand) that knowledge we’re using. We understand the meaning of our conclusion.

LLMs don’t understand. They programmatically and statistically combine data - not knowledge - to come up with a likely outcome. They are non-deterministic auto-complete bots, and that is ALL they are. There is no intelligence, and the current LLM framework will never lead to actual intelligence.

They’re parlour tricks at this point, nothing more.

In other words, “fancy auto-complete.”

WTF do you mean?

We can have it RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW. Nobody is censoring you, but you refuse to engage in the debate you claim you can’t post about.

You keep demanding an answer to your question, so I will give you one.

I am not aware of any instances that allow or encourage discussions based on a position of bigotry and intolerance.

To be clear, you present your question in bad faith, and demand good-faith responses only. You claim that calling bigotry is censorship, and that intolerance is a valid stance in a discussion. You also repeatedly refuse to acknowledge that we are in fact having the discussion right here about your opinions on transgender issues.

EDIT: In fact, you are actively refusing to engage in the discussion you claim to be impossible. Pretty clear now that you’re just a troll - an oblivious troll.

None in isolation.

CBC is a pretty reliable go-to although they’re more than a bit pandering these days. BBC is similar. Al Jazeera is pretty reliable for things not related to Islam and Palestine in particular (although they’re not as biased as they could be). AP is fairly neutral. Aside from that, it’s non-legacy Canadian sources like the Walrus and the Tyee, which all have their problems but are good at exposing reality.

Short answer: easier than most people think.

Read Ken Thompson’s article Reflections on trusting trust for some tangential hacks.

No thanks. They can either move here outright, or our (excellent) universities can expand to fill the need.

I said go there for some reliable sources.

You want evidence of the historical Jesus, that article contains almost 300 references and about 40 external sources.

The existence of Jesus of Nazareth is widely accepted. If you believe otherwise, you need to provide extraordinary evidence for your extraordinary claims.

No. In fact, I’d say hardly ever.

We have books that are thousands of years old. Without explicitly copying and translating formats, media, etc., I wouldn’t count on any digital format to survive more than a century - and probably be undecipherable at the end of it anyway. Some scholars have suggested that we’re in the midst of what will be a digital dark age because of this very reason.

Let’s also consider the sort of degradation that can creep in. I’ve got a 110 year old document I’m deciphering at the moment, and there are parts of letters where the ink has faded or the paper has torn. I can usually make out from the remaining bits what the letter should be. You’ve probably done this on old letters: "Is that an ‘a’ or an ‘o’? On the other hand, if I have a lower-case f in UTF-32, its binary representation is “00000000000000000000000001100110.” If I have minor data corruption, one or more of those bits will flip (1–>0 or 0–>1). Since it could be anywhere in the sequence, I could end up with something totally unrelated to an ‘f’ either in character shape or alphabetic proximity.

Then there’s the reading, indexing, and searching abilities in a physical book - no “add a bookmark” feature compares to sticking a finger on the page you want to flip back to, or comparing a few pages side-by-side. Physical bookmarks, stickies, or earmarking (noooo!) are all ways that people reference books which don’t translate well.

Visually, lit displays are harder on our eyes than paper books in good ambient light.

e-books of course have some advantages, especially for technical material. Being able to hit “ctrl-f” and search for a single word or phrase is incredibly valuable. Constant updates of product documentation means not having to throw away books whenever a new version of the item/software is released. Linking to references (e.g. dictionary lookup) is much more convenient than going to get another book out.

But for just sitting down and reading, the tactile experience of a real book rules over everything else in my opinion. Sitting in a coffee shop with a book in hand is a profoundly human experience. Walking through the endless aisles of books at a library is both inspiring and humbling.

So in short, yeah - there is HUGE doubt that e-books are superior.

No, not true. Go read Wikipedia for some reliable sources on the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth.

There is actually a hell of a lot of evidence he did.

You can read a capsule summary with references on Wikipedia, but it is accepted fact among historians - not just religious scholars - that Jesus of Nazareth was born in Judea under King Herod, was baptised by John the Baptist, and was cruxified under the orders of Pontius Pilate.

Here’s a fun excerpt: “There are at least fourteen independent sources for the historicity of Jesus from multiple authors within a century of the crucifixion of Jesus such as the letters of Paul (contemporary of Jesus who personally knew eyewitnesses), the gospels, and non-Christian sources such as Josephus (Jewish historian and commander in Galilee) and Tacitus (Roman historian and Senator).”

I’m an atheist, but a historical Jesus almost certainly did exist.

I absolutely love Star Wars - I saw the first movie four times in the theatre back in 1977/78 as a kid.

But let’s be clear: Star Wars is “cowboys and indians in space.” (Yes, that’s a dated and culturally inappropriate comparison - it is also perfectly appropriate for the era.)

Technology has never played a significant part in it - light sabres are magic swords, FTL travel is a well-worn convenient trope that ‘just happens’ (unless it doesn’t). Droids are servants.

Basically, tech has never been a core aspect of the SW world, mostly because the show has never been science fiction.

Because you love in the US.