harpersealtako

Not at all, actually. In fact that's the opposite of what I'm arguing. There are countless things left to invent. It's just not worth doing most of the time.

As a trivial example, Unicode is not a 100% perfect text encoding scheme. Why don't we have something better than unicode? Why is there no interest in making a unicode-but-better format which solves all the problems with unicode? The reason is, unicode is sufficiently good that the cost of switching would outweigh any marginal benefits.

Perhaps because the tools that we have already are already good enough.

"Why don't we have any new programming languages" or "Why don't we have any new web frameworks" or "Why don't we have any new operating systems" or "Why don't we have any new container orchestrators" might be the same kinds of questions as "why is the design for washing machines still basically the same as it was 50 years ago?" or "why are we still using English, where are all the new conlangs to replace it?" "why are we still using email/SMTP instead of inventing a better system" "why haven't we invented a new calendar?"

Well, I imagine they aren't fans of Francis either, and the Gospel of John does say "many antichrists have come", so it's entirely possible Pope Francis is also the antichrist.

That said: while he was conservative in many ways, Pope John Paul II was well-known for his ecumenicism, especially mending relations with Jews and Muslims, which might ruffle the feathers of the sort of sedevacantist whose problem with post-Vatican-2 Catholicism is that they got rid of the antisemitism.

In the same way that all conspiracy theories are all slightly different in their own unique interpretations, making them fun to learn about, I am fascinated by the fractal nature of religious heresies and schisms. I had to look up this one because it's pretty damn obscure and I ended up spending all afternoon trying to figure out exactly what flavor of crazy the "Most Holy Family Monastery" are.

TLDR: they are a fringe group of sedevacantists who think all other sedevacantists and catholics are heretics and promote lots of insane infowars-tier conspiracy theories, run by two brothers living in an isolated compound in upstate New York. SPLC lists them as a hate group for being holocaust deniers.

So, the background context: in the 1960s the Roman Catholic Church held a big reform council (Vatican II) where, among other things, they decided to switch from the old Latin Mass to the modern one which celebrates mass in the vernacular, which is what nearly all of the world's 1.4 billion Catholic attend today.

A small fringe, called "sedevacantists", hated Vatican II so much they declared it was heresy, and that every pope since then is fake and there hasn't been a real pope since the 1950s. Hence the name: sede (chair) vacante (empty). Wordlwide, sedevacantists probably number around 30,000 (maybe as many as 200,000) and include all sorts of groups with various wacky beliefs.

Another small fringe is "Feeneyism", the belief that only baptized Catholics can go to heaven, with no exceptions for e.g. good people who never heard of the Church or who died before they could be officially baptized. The Catholic Church rejected this view in 1949 and the founder was excommunicated for disobedience. There are a few thousand of them left, mostly in rural New England. Some of them are still in communion with the mainstream Church, which quietly tolerates them.

This brings us to Most Holy Family Monastery (MHFM), currently run by brothers Michael and Peter Dimond in New York (which the above poster linked extensively). Neither of them is ordained, and no bishop recognizes them. The MHFM was founded by a guy named Joseph Natale in the 60s. He was a benedictine drop-out who broke away from the Catholic Church. Natale started an unofficial traditional latin catholic monastery in New Jersey which preached that Vatican II was a secret plot by the freemasons and the communists to destroy the Church, and predicted the world would end in 1999.

Weirdly, despite believing that Vatican II was a Communist Freemason conspiracy, the MHFM weren't sedevacantists under Natale; Natale just believed the pope was real, just a puppet controlled by the conspiracy. when Natale died in 1995, Michael Dimond took over with his brother Peter. They moved the operation to a rural hamlet in western New York and promptly declared that actually, the Pope wasn't just a puppet, he was a fake pope. Under them, MHFM became sedevacantist (which by their own logic makes their founder a heretic). But they also decided to become Feeneyites! So, being sedevacantists puts them outside the Catholic Church. Being Feeneyites means they consider every other sedevacantist group heretical, and vice versa. And being Sedevacantist makes them heretical to other Feeneyites, who mostly still accept the pope.

Some of their actual beliefs, as far as I can tell:

- Most everybody is going to hell except for them and and maybe some of their youtube followers

- Stage magicians use real magic, not illusions, which they get from demons

- UFOs are real and actually they're demons

- The covid vaccine was a cover-up

- John Paul II was the antichrist

- Holocaust denial. (if I had a nickel for every time I look up a sedevacantist group and find out they are holocaust deniers...)

The Southern Poverty Law Center lists them as a hate group due to that last point.

Thanks for the links btw, I have no idea if your comment was a joke or not but I had never heard of them before and I had a fun time going down this rabbit hole

No, I kill innocent animals because that's my hobby and I enjoy it immensely. I just usually stick to deer because they taste better, are overpopulated in my area, and give a greater meat yield. The seasons are very generous and the tags are very cheap, making it quite economical as a source of protein.

In addition I also shoot nuisance animals, such as groundhogs (which damage fields), rabbits (which eat plants in the garden), and crows (which occasionally get aggressive). This is a very common thing people do in the countryside. The only uncommon thing I do is eat them; most people wouldn't bother with plucking or even breasting out a crow because there's so little meat on it and they have a reputation for not tasting good. But I eat everything I shoot on the principle of it.

Crows are clever enough to be dangerous (they can remember a face, connect it to a past incident, carry a grudge over that incident, communicate this grudge to their friends, and actively plan violent revenge) but also dumb enough that this intelligence is often self-defeating and counterproductive (randomly attacking people unprovoked). They are a great example of "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing". Thankfully, they are intelligent enough to understand credible deterrence: a surefire way of resolving an ongoing dispute with crows is, of course, by using a gun. Thankfully crow hunting season is quite generous in my state and they taste pretty good.

The Sheetz disparate impact case was in 2024, post Ricci. Griggs is still the law of the land even though some justices have signaled they might want to revisit it.

You're free to make whatever mistaken assumptions you like about the kind of places I go and the kind of travel I do. You're wrong, obviously, but it's not like I can prove that any more than you can.

Some unlikely places where I've found Tabasco, though:

- at a cockfighting ring in rural Mindanao, Philippines.

- in a yurt camp in rural central Kyrgyzstan only accessible by horse

- at the galley on a Taiwanese container ship transiting the Panama canal

- seemingly everywhere in Japan, from cafes to fancy restaurants to izakayas to convenience stores on remote islands to random old peoples' houses in the countryside. "Tabasuko" is literally the Japanese word for hot sauce.

You are perhaps directionally correct if you say that many places have a non-tabasco table condiment which is their first choice for spice, and if that's the point you are trying to make then I will agree and let that be that. But in the "hot sauce" category, if they have "hot sauce", it's more likely than not that "tabasco" will be an option, if not the first choice, if not the only choice, and that is the point I am making here. There are of course certain places where it is more or less common, but that's hardly surprising. However I reiterate: in my (probably 99th percentile well-traveled, mostly in out of the way places, especially in asia) experience you can find tabasco basically anywhere on the planet, including some somewhat surprising places, to the extent that I think that, if there is such a thing as "the world's hot sauce", it is without doubt which hot sauce it would be.

part of the issue is that there are multiple laws and legal frameworks even at the federal level in the US that are kind of contradictory here. See "disparate impact" law, where using a neutral standard (such as a background check, or an ability test) that affects different protected groups differently can be considered illegal discrimination. 2 might be illegal, but 1 might be illegal too in the other direction! It kind of seems like the only solution is to basically maintain plausible deniability and try your hardest not to leave an auditable paper trail about any of the reasoning you use to hire a candidate or not.

I've traveled to about 50 countries, on every continent except Antarctica and I've found Tabasco in every country I've been to, from Tajikistan to Tunisia to Turkey to Taiwan. At a minimum, it can be found at 99% of hotels that serve an "international" style breakfast with scrambled or fried eggs, and I have found it in enough convenience stores in some of the most remote places that it is highly unlikely that western visitors at hotel buffets are the entirety of the domestic market. It may not be the first option for adding heat to food, or even the second, but it's basically always an option, basically everywhere I've seen.

Seems like there is obviously a spectrum of positions here and various people have found themselves calling certain positions "DEI" or "anti-DEI" or "affirmative action" or "racist" depending on which positions they hold and where a particular institution lies on it. For example:

1. A company that hires mainly based on on-paper qualifications (which, due to existing disparities in experience and education, means in practice that they hire fewer historically disadvantaged minorities)

2. A company that, believing that talent or merit is more equitably distributed among groups than on-paper qualifications may suggest, goes out of their way to interview a greater proportion of historically disadvantaged minority groups than necessarily would naturally apply to their positions (to discover those as-of-yet-unrecognized talents), and tries to hire based on actual merit and ability rather than on-paper qualifications.

3. A company that has the goal of creating a more equitable and diverse workforce with groups that more closely matches their proportions of the population. They spend a lot of time and effort actively recruiting and seeking out employees from underrepresented minority groups, meaning that it is effectively easier for minority groups to get interviews at this company for this position, but still tries to hire based on actual ability and talent once they get to the interview stage

4. A company which, accounting for the disparities in distribution of measurable abilities of groups, tries to hire based on within-group ability rather than between-group ability; for example trying to hire the top 10th percentile of black, or top 10th percentile asian, or top 10th percentile male, rather than top 10th percentile of all applicants in aggregate (which would likely be overrepresented by over-performing groups). This in practice means using a different standard for different groups, but using the within group distribution of talent; they may say they are "considering race/sex/disability as one of many factors they take into account"

5. A company that in practice has an explicit hiring quota based on the race/sex/etc. of applicants, in order to create a more equitable or diverse workforce that matches the relative sizes of those groups in the local population.

6. A company that, in order to reverse historical and current disparities in achievement within society, actively discriminates in the opposite direction as historical trend, with the goal of evening the playing field more quickly.

7. A company that, in order to address historical grievances and grant some amount of justice to victims of discrimination and oppression, actively and purposefully discriminates against privileged majority and overachieving groups, favoring underprivileged and underachieving groups, up to and including reparations for past injustices to remedy current disparities.

I'm pretty sure 1-3 are legal and 4-7 are illegal, but I'm not a lawyer so that's just my guess. Some hardliners might attack 2 as going too far, but somewhere between 3 and 4 is probably the more common point at which anti-DEI people draw their line.

The history is more than a little complicated. I model it as a set of separate overton windows in different institutions that have shifted, widened, and contracted over the last 60 or so years. So in this picture, courts arguably expanded it to 4-6 in the 80s, but have retreated back to around 2-3 since then. Legislature has mostly stayed around 2-3 with a handful of radicals pushing higher or lower with low-to-moderate success. Academia has been around 5-7 since the 70s. Executive has mostly hovered around 3-5 until Trump. Media/popular culture, big shift up to 6-7 in 2014-2021, retreating back to 3-4 now. Also, motte-and-baileys are common here; pro-DEI activists sometimes frame it as something like 2, but often advocate up to 6 or 7 (e.g. "antiracism" in the 2020s peak). anti-DEI activists often say they simply oppose quotas and illegal discrimination (4-7), but in practice sometimes attack even 2-3 as being too much.

I feel like "don't agree" is a weird framing, because it assumes that all technological innovations must have the explicit and affirmative consent of all parties they could directly or indirectly affect. Not to mention that "artists" are not a monolith any more than "AI bros" are.

I could sort of get behind something like this in theory (weighing each new technology based on whether it furthers the values of the community, and rejecting it if it doesn't, kinda like what the Amish do), but I'm not sure it's being applied neutrally or consistently here, nor do I think it works in practice especially for something as decentralized as a diffusion model, which are surprisingly simple to build and train and can run on a home GPU.

Then they presumably are fine with open weights models made by hobbyists by scraping publicly available art on boorus and such, yes? because they are neither made by corporations nor are they selling any product.

(to be clear, I don't think this is an accurate description of how artists feel about e.g. publicly released diffusion models. The core is not that it's made by "corporations" or the for-profit aspect or even the copyright infringement part, it's simply the understandable and not-at-all-unique-to-artists resentment at having your job or passion automated or displaced)

I mean, the obvious way it's better than the Chinese open-weight models is literally the fact that it's not Chinese and is therefore less likely to be banned or restricted. Chinese models cannot be used on certain government systems already in the US, and regulators are actively considering expanding these restrictions more generally (such as adding it to the Entity List).