Islam, just like Christianity, has many different groups that believe the same basic doctrine but disagree on many points. The main splits in Islam (that echo some aspects of the Catholic vs. Protestant split) as Sunni and Shia. Each divides and divides again into small communities centred on one mosque (just as, eg, Protestantism divides and divides down to individual congregations).

The big question is: how do groups of people decide which parts of the religious documents, history and practice are more relevant or even correct?

Some groups are quite ‘secular’ (like the Church of England) while others are quite ‘fundamental’, meaning that they much more strictly follow whatever the group decides are the foundation of the religion.

Is it possible to be able so say which of these groups is right? It seems to me that we have been fighting over this since before records began, so we most definitely do not have a way to do this that any majority agrees with. I don’t think anyone can say:

Islamist groups purposely … twist actual Islamic ideology while the Christian Right just doesn’t understand the religious text they claim to follow.

Remember the incident at the docks when the revolutionaries threw the T-Mobile imports into the harbour? Talk about high tariffs!

Linux was not muscled like that in 1991 - it’s first, barebones kernel was released in September of that year.

I remember installing Linux on a 90MHz 486 in the mid 90s and it barely ran X server with a simple window manager. And if the machine was turned off while Linux was running, you might not be able to boot again.

Linux now, however, is unrecognizeably better.

“asked”

Without him, America is a little greater again.

I’m guessing that exactly the same LLM model is used (somehow) on both sides - using different models or different weights would not work at all.

An LLM is (at core) an algorithm that takes a bunch of text as input and produces an output of a list of word/probabilities such that the sum of all probabilities adds to 1.0. You could place a wrapper on this that creates a list of words by probability. A specific word can be identified by the index in the list, i.e. first word, tenth word etc.

(Technically the system uses ‘tokens’ which represent either whole words or parts of words, but that’s not important here).

A document can be compressed by feeding in each word in turn, creating the list in the LLM, and searching for the new word in the list. If the LLM is good, the output will be a stream of small integers. If the LLM is a perfect predictor, the next word will always be the top of the list, i.e. a 1. A bad prediction will be a relatively large number in the thousands or millions.

Streams of small numbers are very well (even optimally) compressed using extant technology.

If you’d read the article you will see that this is a report from a network of church abuse survivors and the person speaking has first hand evidence from speaking to Prevost. If you discount them, you are basically saying that witness statements count for nothing. You are silencing the victims.

You will also know that Prevost blocked the ‘real investigation’ you claim you want and this is core to the point of the article.

Woah there, that’s leftist woke propaganda, talking about human wills and desires. I was brought up apolitical so I’m sensitive to these things - I can only vote for the Republicans because every other party is just too political.

/s

Is UPF food with ultra high fibre bad?

I don’t know.

My thoughts are that your total daily intake is more important than considering any single food item. As such, having some UPF in your diet is ok. The problem becomes epidemiologically measurable when, like the UK and US, 60% of calories consumed by some demographics are from UPF food.

And there are almost certainly multiple different things ‘wrong’ with UPF and so if you fix one problem, you may still be at risk from another. For example in your question, there are a lot of studies showing the importance of fibre in the diet, including those that add bran to whatever the person normally eats. So UPF with lots of fibre, all things equal, is likely less bad than UPF without.

Is UPF with ultra high vitamin A bad?

Fat soluble vitamins (A, D, E and K) are interesting in that they don’t show benefits above RDA, and in high doses cause a long list of nasty symptoms. In particular, vitamin A in excess is correlated with increased risk of multiple major diseases and even death.

Scientists only use terms like ultra processed food after defining them in their scientific papers. The problem here is that the media find it difficult to write a short article for the general audience if they have to define things scientifically.

What specifically is bad about UPF foods is still being researched. A few leading ideas are:

• Very little fibre
• Starches are all immediately accessible to digestion and so blood glucose spikes much more than for the non-UPF equivalent
• UPF foods are soft and dry (so weigh less) making it very easy to eat a lot very fast, so you eat too many calories.
• Relatively high in salt and sugar
• Use of emulsifiers. These may change your gut microbiota and also make your gut more leaky causing inflammation
• Use of preservatives and artificial colours
• Frequently have a lot of oil

Low fibre, emulsifiers and preservatives, while lacking variety of phytochemicals found in fresh food is known to change your gut health. People on UPF diets tend to eat more and have higher blood glucose spikes leading to heart disease and diabetes.

Altogether this is a recipe for a shorter, less healthy life

This is the correct answer.

Another way to distinguish the good from the bad: Good bread goes stale in a few days, it also is harder to chew. UPF bread will sit in your breadbin for 7 days without noticeable changes and is fluffy and relatively light.

The reason for the fluffiness and the shelf life is all the chemical additives.

You can see why the corporations love UPF bread - and why (if you didn’t know the health impact) you might want to buy UPF bread on your weekly shop.

What are you talking about, the victims weren’t white?

/s

Ah yes, but you forgot when, during the campaign, Trump said “Fake news! I don’t know anything about Project 2025” which then allowed all the press to ignore it.

This changes everything life hack: Whenever you’re caught in a lie, just say “fake news” and go on as if nothing has happened. Works for rape, bribery, theft, corruption and some say even murder.

I’m hoping for a draw. After 12 brutal rounds.

Well, he had met King Charles and Camilla earlier that week, so he is giving audiences - at least to people he respects.

Almost every survey will get 6-10% of people answering yes to the most extreme or batshit crazy option, no matter what.

Probably the main reason is that people are pissed off that they are being approached by survey takers and punish the survey for revenge.

And there are some batshit crazy people out there.

It seems you misunderstand the goal of goverment.

This is your opinion of what you want governments to be, not what they actually are.

What is the point of not researching and having bigger budget, if it can’t buy thing that did not get created?

What a lot of negatives and hypotheticals. All solved by getting a return on investment and having that money to do more things with, including research.

And then on goverment level there is no such thing as copyright or patent.

I’d like to introduce you to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) which is an intergovernmental organisation that does precisely what you say doesn’t exist.

They STILL need to put in money to create their own product.

Sure, but the cost to duplicate the product is tiny compared to researching, developing then creating a production run for it. And this fake normally severely impacts the profits for the inventor.

But now we’re just repeating the same arguments.

You appear to want to completely burn down a system you don’t understand because of some examples of misuse. For example, as there are slumlords, should we make all property free? Or should we solve the underlying problem (of massive capital flows to the rich?)

You also have no idea how to read and understand a patent. The way they are written is horrendously verbose and highly confusing, but so are medical research papers or legal case summaries, and for the similar reasons: these are highly technical documents that have to follow common law (i.e. a long history of legal decisions taken in IP disputes).

The real problem in the US IMHO has been the constant defunding of the patent office that has allowed a large number of very poor patents to be filed. The problems you are screaming about largely go to that root cause.

But don’t throw the baby out with the bath water - you have no idea how bad that would be for everybody but the mega corporations.

Manufacturing lines are built all that time for unpatented products,

And cheaply, because the research and productisation has been done by somebody else - this is an argument for patents

plus a competitor can’t just “take all of that work and investment”, they will need to put in money to create their own product,

Not true. One major issue is that many competitors literally copy the product exactly. Fake products wreck the original company

even if it’s a copy they still need to make it work,

That is 100x easier when you have a working product to clone

They’ll be second to market, and presumably need to undercut price to get market share… This is a very risky endeavour, unless the profit margins are huge, and in which case, good thing that there’s no patents…

The point is exactly that the fake product undercuts the original by a huge amount (they had no investment to pay off).

If the research is so costly and complex (pharmaceutical, aeronautical,…), then it should be at least partly funded by the government, through partnerships between universities and companies.

I agree that the government model makes sense for a lot of areas and products. But note that a government won’t invest millions or billions in developing a product if another country immediately fakes the product and prevents the government from collecting back the taxes it spent on the research.

As I discuss above there are lots of criticisms to the current IP laws - adjustment is 1000x better than abolishing a system that has driven research and development for several hundred years

All evidence points to the opposite of your conclusion.

In places where IP laws are weak or non-existent, very little fundamental or expensive research is done by companies - because the result is immediately cloned by 100 competitors. In medicine, companies will not research and develop new drugs to market unless they can get a return on the investment. Even in places with strong IP laws, development of drugs that can’t produce a return in the limited monopoly window is simply not done (eg with a small number of patients or when 1 course of a drug will permanently cure the patient), so many diseases do not have treatments.

In countries where there is strong IP laws, innovation jumps because innovating creates new things that people/companies can sell for profit. A personal area of interest is development of small-arms - every single advance from muskets to modern weapons is documented in patents in the US and Europe; the rate of innovation in the 19th and 20th centuries was incredible - and that is via patents and profit in the free market.

Now, we can have a productive argument about state sponsored research - but unless the state undertakes all research in an economy (which would be staggering overreach), we need IP laws.

We can also discuss patents on software (which IMHO are not needed because companies do fundamental research without patent laws like in the UK).

We can also discuss what is the appropriate time that copyright should remain - the Disney law in the US is a ridiculous overreach. It was 25 years or until the death of the author/artist - that worked very well for centuries.

You don’t need government promises of monopoly rights to create innovation in the marketplace, competition drives innovation.