walljm

most of the available services (anthropic, google, openai, xai, deepseek) have a free tier. you can't use it extensively, and have to wait... but its there.

programming has always gates... today is no different. arguably, there are quite a lot more free options than there were when i was coming up.

and there are free models available. and free ways to run them...

was it developed for free? he has a computer, which i'm assuming he paid for. and you can run LLMs locally. and those will catch up eventually.

there has always been a moat, with varying levels of depth. do you have electricity? do you have a computer? can you afford internet?

yes. precisely.

Ah, ok. Thank you. If you add in the 2.7% for military personel (which doesn't seem to be included here) then you get to about 6-7% of total spending.

Ah, thank you. That's helpful.

this was pulled from the 2024 monthly budget report from the treasury.

1% ??? that can't be true. the DoD's personel budget, by itself is 2.7% of the total budget for the whole federal government.

6% seems suspect. I would expect it to be higher... at least in the 20% to 30% range. Do you have a source?

I had the exact same pleasant experience. I had a Gen 2 ring with battery issues, and support was fast and painless with a new ring on its way in a couple of days.

I wouldn't want to assume the details or the difficulty someone else has or is going through related to this.

What I have found helpful, when I went through something like this, is to distinguish between the "feeling" of certainty and the "choice" to put my faith in something. A lot of the time, we talk about "faith" and we conflate those two. I can choose to trust something and not feel confidence in it until after the fact. How much confidence I feel in a choice varies for a lot of reasons, but I may still choose to accept the risk and act on the little information I do have because I don't have better alternatives.

In that sense, you can choose what you believe. Or at least, you can choose what you put your faith in.

Hm... but in my example, in order for the Church to do that, they would have to formally excommunicate that individual. That isn't something done often, and doesn't really support what you seem to be saying it does (unless I misunderstand you).

The Church doesn't get to just point at a person who commits a sin and say that person isn't a Christian. There is a formal process for evaluating if that individual meets certain criteria (laid out in scripture). Its not done without serious consideration.

And there is a significant difference between saying that a person "isn't a Christian" and saying that some practice by a christian "doesn't represent Christianity".

For a practice to be considered "Christian" it should resemble the established and agreed upon tenets of the Christian faith, as laid out in the Bible and generally agreed upon by the Church at large.

Its like, I can claim to be a lawyer, but to actually be one, I need to pass the Bar. And a lawyer can be disbarred, if their actions show them to unable to execute the duties of a lawyer in accordance with the standards set by the state they practice in.

Similarly, a licensed Lawyer can claim something is lawful, but that be false when compared to the actual written code of that state. Someone can then come along and say that the advice and practice of that Lawyer does represent the actual law of that state.

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Look, I get it. Its frustrating to see christians do bad things, and for the church to not take responsibility when it should. And I'm not defending that. It is also frustrating for the Church when people do not represent it fairly. This is a common issue with any organized group of people, because People aren't always reliable. A fact the Bible has much to say about.

I don't know enough to comment on the specifics of your thread with the other poster, but I thought I would offer a suggestion for "Core Tenents".

Though there are many instructions in scripture that many christians ignore or fail to live up to, there are a set of core beliefs that comprise the essential nature of the Christian faith. The Apostles Creed summarizes most of them for Christianity.

As an example, if you deny the deity of Jesus, then you can not reasonably claim to be a christian. This is the case with Mormon's, who are sometimes called Christians, but whose theology differs in significant ways from Christianity.

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There is also another way to approach the idea of "that person isn't really a christian". Though it is in fact, impossible for a human to judge definitively, Jesus does say that "you shall know them by their love one for another" (John 13:35). And the bible does teach that under certain circumstances, the Church is to treat someone claiming to be christian as though they are not, because they refuse to acknowledge and/or address behaviors that are instructed in scripture.

The Church isn't generally good at that, which may be the point of the OP. But, it does allow the Church to say that someone who unrepentantly practices sinful behavior doesn't represent Christianity.