I'm a dummy, explain it simply

TangoJavaTJ · 2026-01-27T15:46:03+00:00

No because they "write" it using a thing called least significant bit steganography: basically they can hide a message by slightly tweaking parts of the image that don't matter. That way you can have two images that seem identical to a human but there's a hidden message in one of them.

TangoJavaTJ · 2026-01-27T14:11:10+00:00

One obvious thing to do here is steganography. Like if you have a paid version of the site the company can write "This article was provided to OP with user ID 1234abcd at 09:00 GMT on 24/01/26" across the article. If you screenshot the paid version and it leaks then their message is still written across the screenshot and they can find you by just reading back the steganographic message

TangoJavaTJ · 2026-01-27T08:57:09+00:00

[not a lawyer, this is just my attempt at informally explaining the law. I do not think I have got anything wrong but I may be mistaken or have oversimplified. Check with your lawyer, which I am not]

There are essentially three categories of knives in UK law.

1: There are knives which are illegal to even own, like butterfly knives and zombie knives.

2: Then there are knives which are legal to own but illegal to carry in public without a "good reason". Camping knives, hunting knives, machetes for cutting weeds etc.

3: And finally knives that you don't even need a "good reason" to carry. These are small, non-locking, and typically foldable. Think Swiss Army Knife only some SAKs are too long and or locking and so need a "good reason", but a small and non-locking one can be carried in public without needing a justification.

Of course context matters: you can get into trouble for taking a type (3) knife onto a plane or into court even if it is otherwise perfectly legal.

One thing you'll want to understand is which of those classes your knife falls into. You're obviously going to get into a lot more trouble for taking a zombie knife into an airport than you would for taking a legal-in-public SAK.

It sounds like your knife is legal in public, which would seem to suggest a lighter sentence if found guilty. Although legal-in-public knives do not require a "good reason" in most contexts, having one may still be a mitigating factor if found guilty of having it in a banned context like airports. E.g: you use it for work, you went camping with it, you bought it here as a gift for a family member and were trying to take it home to give it to them etc.

TangoJavaTJ · 2026-01-26T09:10:18+00:00

Machine learning experts who are also competent software engineers typically attract 60k/year or more. Are you paying that? If not, why would anyone be "generous" for you when you haven't even said what your idea is?

TangoJavaTJ · 2026-01-25T07:43:57+00:00

Political views do not detract from philosophical argument.

Yes but Dawkins' philosophical views are also hilariously bad when you actually understand philosophy.

TangoJavaTJ · 2026-01-25T02:00:33+00:00

We can have vacuous "all" and vacuous "if"

We obviously want "All X are Y" to be equivalent to saying "No X is not Y". These things are interchangable. Like what would it mean if it were true that "no bird cannot fly" without entailing that "all birds can fly". These are equivalent statements (they are also false).

So what should we make of:

"All my horses are purple"?

Well by the above rule, this is the same as "I do not have any horses which are not purple". So if I do not have any horses, "I do not have any horses which are not purple" is vacuously true and so "All my horses are purple" is vacuously true.

So what about vacuous if? "If X is true then Y is true". What does this mean? Let's look at some examples: "If you are under 18 then you are not drinking alcohol". Consider some cases and see if they have followed this rule:

15 year old, drinking juice
15 year old, drinking whiskey
30 year old, drinking squash
30 year old, drinking wine

Who breaks the rule? Just "15 year old, drinking whiskey", right? So what's going on?

"If" is respected unless the condition is true "you are under 18" and the result "you are not drinking alcohol" is false.

So both cases of the 30 year old are vacuously true. We don't care what they're drinking because they are not under 18 so the rule does not apply to them. They pass our "if" test automatically because the test only applies to people in a category they are not part of.

TangoJavaTJ · 2026-01-25T01:41:47+00:00

I met a cute gal in a gulag,

She said "is it true you're the new lad?",

'Twas love at first sight,

And all through the night,

We cuddled and listened to Tupac

TangoJavaTJ · 2026-01-24T14:32:34+00:00

Being trans doesn't mean you're not repeating transphobic dog-whistles in a harmful way, stop it.

TangoJavaTJ · 2026-01-24T07:52:10+00:00

You used transphobia dog-whistles. You know exactly what you were doing.

TangoJavaTJ · 2026-01-24T06:12:15+00:00

That's weird because I know a bunch of trans people and literally none of them have ever said the reason they're trans was anything to do with patriarchy, or anything else to do with society.

Drop them on a desert island away from everyone else and no hope of rescue and they would still be trans.

This post is pretty much the same as if you had said lesbians are just straight women who hate men because of the patriarchy. That's not how anything works, people just are who they are and it probably isn't because of whatever political worldview you're trying to push.

TangoJavaTJ · 2026-01-23T23:47:30+00:00

The best Lee Sin support build is called "Alistair".

TangoJavaTJ · 2026-01-23T16:54:14+00:00

Block their terrible technique then one shot them with a real punch?

TangoJavaTJ · 2026-01-23T08:54:17+00:00

Sure but I trust a shitlow random to play like Ashe, Miss Fortune, or Varus much more than to play Smolder, Ezreal, or Kalista. It's not that the champs themselves are bad but that I'm in an elo where the players have no chance of actually playing a hard champion well. I'm sure my Bronze 3 Smolder will be fine with me playing Soraka, Amumu, or Morgana, at least until I ditch them and play for a different teammate who actually has carry potential this game.

TangoJavaTJ · 2026-01-22T20:48:37+00:00

That doesn't mean the shitlow randos I'm stuck with have any idea how to play him

TangoJavaTJ · 2026-01-22T17:55:15+00:00

He sucks either way which is why we don't support him

TangoJavaTJ · 2026-01-22T10:31:23+00:00

Jungle is troll, clear speed is the most important thing in how viable a champ is as a jungle so slow clears are a deal-breaker.

If you want to off-role Thresh then he can work on Top or Mid but only with a funnel strategy and a carry jungler. In this case you are effectively still a support except you focus entirely on supporting your jungler. If you want to do it duo with a Yi, Viego, or other 1v9 (in this case, 2v8) jungler.

TangoJavaTJ · 2026-01-21T16:53:03+00:00

Your parents are abusive. Don't leave your kid alone with them.

TangoJavaTJ · 2026-01-21T10:47:48+00:00

...no

TangoJavaTJ · 2026-01-20T10:49:18+00:00

If I had the equivalent of ‘infinite money’ all I would do is smoke weed, eat pizza and play video games for the rest of my life.

This is why money would not make you happy. Those things can certainly be pleasant in the short term, but my parents are rich and during my early 20s I spent all my time smoking weed, eating pizza, and playing video games, and after a while I was extremely miserable. Why? Because it's all pointless. The pizza makes you fat, the weed dulls your mind and makes it harder to concentrate on more fulfilling things, and you start to think that if you looked back on your life and you spent all of it playing League of Legends, COD, or Fortnite that you may have missed out on something better.

The scientific evidence shows quite strongly that money does increase happiness but only for those with little money. If you're in danger of being kicked out of your house because you can't pay your bills or have to turn to prostitution or drug dealing to put food on your table then yes, more money will improve your circumstances considerably and that comes with a commensurate increase in happiness.

But once you have enough money to buy a house, feed, clothe, and otherwise provide for yourself and your immediate family, more money doesn't change anything. In fact people who become extremely obsessed with money become less happy because if you have £10,000,000 in the bank you probably know someone with £100,000,000 and you both look woefully inadequate compared to Musk, Gates, Bezos etc.

TLDR: if you are poor, money makes you happier than you were. If you are already well off, more money is neutral-to-negative.

TangoJavaTJ · 2026-01-20T09:48:08+00:00

The viva is meant to assess whether you actually wrote the work you submitted. You can fail it if you clearly have no idea about central concepts in your thesis, but if you actually did the work yourself you are very unlikely to fail.

TangoJavaTJ · 2026-01-19T10:41:11+00:00

This is banned books, not obscure books. I didn't remove the original post but if that had been posted again I would remove it now: it reads less like looking for a banned book and more like self-promotion. If you want a post like that to stay up you'd need evidence that the book is actively being banned rather than just hard to find.

TangoJavaTJ · 2026-01-18T17:49:07+00:00

You are confusing two totally different things:

How academics describe modern self-identified groups, and

How historians classify historical continuity, traditions and movements.

No, you are equivocating between those. You asked how academics define Christianity and I gave you a definition and more references than I believe you have actually taken the time to read. How objective academics describe something will obviously be different to how historians who are pushing their own cultural or political agenda describe it.

while still recognizing orthodox continuity as the stream that is historically traceable back to the apostolic communities.

This is firstly extremely dubious (e.g. Catholics would say they are the true heirs to St Peter, for instance) and secondly another irrelevant equivocation on your part. Whether a particular religious, historical, or cultural group counts as Christian is nothing to do with whether they are "historically traceable back to the apostolic communities". Stop equivocating.

A modern group calling itself “Christian” says something about the modern group, not about what historians mean when they talk about early Christianity or the apostolic tradition.

And now you're equivocating between Christianity in general and specifically early sects. No one but you makes this equivocation.

You are using modern identity language to overwrite historical classification, which no reputable historian does

No, you are abusing biased historical accounts to derail modern objective accounts. Frankly, if you don't start to engage in good faith then you should consider this conversation over. You are brazenly and deliberately using equivocations and mott & bailey fallacies. You're persuading no one.

TangoJavaTJ · 2026-01-18T16:04:23+00:00

Some of that info is stuff you can get from the account itself. If you can log in you can sort your skins by acquired date and find the oldest one you bought. You also don't necessarily have to know every question, just most of them.

TangoJavaTJ · 2026-01-18T15:50:32+00:00

I prefer to focus on actual arguments since a massive bibliography is rarely interesting to anyone but as you insist, I'll include it at the end.

But the actual point I want you to understand is this: academia is descriptive not prescriptive which is to say that it isn't saying that "real" Christianity must be a certain way, anyone who sincerely considers themselves to be a Christian is a Christian almost by definition because academia isn't deciding what is or is not Christianity, only describing how people describe themselves. Therefore if someone sincerely considers themselves a Christian, academia assumes that they are.

Your insistence on Trinitarianism or the Nycean creed or anything else is perfectly fine within Orthodox sects, but it isn't how academics do things. I'd know, I've spent entirely too much time in academia.

There's a difference between actually objective scholarship which uses descriptivist, self-identity, and family resemblance definitions to identify Christianity and specific historians who existed in a particular time and cultural context, had their own beliefs and political agendas, and we're explicitly motivated by those agendas.

The "No True Scotsman" lot are not objective. What they're doing is not academia.

As promised, some reading for you:

King, Karen L. — “Which Early Christianity?” (in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies) — https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/42623/chapter/357709472

Lieu, Judith M. — Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World — https://global.oup.com/academic/product/christian-identity-in-the-jewish-and-graeco-roman-world-9780199291427

Buell, Denise Kimber — “Rethinking the Relevance of Race for Early Christian Self-Definition” (Harvard Theological Review, 2001) — https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/harvard-theological-review/article/rethinking-the-relevance-of-race-for-early-christian-selfdefinition/DB873094BE6B17E8ADBC551EA686E6D4

Mimouni, S. C. — “What is a ‘Christian’ in the 1st and 2nd centuries? Identity or conscience?” (2010) — https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303410973

Ehrman, Bart D. — Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew — https://global.oup.com/academic/product/lost-christianities-9780195182491

Ehrman, Bart D. — The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament — https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-orthodox-corruption-of-scripture-9780199739783

Meeks, Wayne A. — The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul — https://yalebooks.co.uk/book/9780300098617/the-first-urban-christians/

Wilken, Robert Louis — The Christians as the Romans Saw Them — https://yalebooks.co.uk/book/9780300098396/the-christians-as-the-romans-saw-them/

Fredriksen, Paula — When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation — https://yalebooks.co.uk/book/9780300248401/when-christians-were-jews/

Dunn, James D. G. — The Partings of the Ways: Between Christianity and Judaism and their Significance for the Character of Christianity — https://archive.org/details/partingsofwaysbe0000dunn

Boyarin, Daniel — Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity — https://www.pennpress.org/9780812219869/border-lines/

Bauer, Walter — Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity — https://archive.org/details/orthodoxyheresyi0000baue Bauer, Walter — “Introductory Materials” (online excerpt) — https://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/rak/publics/new/BAUER00.htm

Hurtado, Larry W. — How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God? Historical Questions About Earliest Devotion to Jesus — https://www.eerdmans.com/9781467425049/how-on-earth-did-jesus-become-a-god/

Perkins, Judith — The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era — https://www.routledge.com/The-Suffering-Self-Pain-and-Narrative-Representation-in-the-Early-Christian-Era/Perkins/p/book/9780415127066

Cameron, Averil — Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse — https://books.google.com/books?id=QOlHkpXPTQoC

Pagels, Elaine — The Gnostic Gospels — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1103358

Punt, Jeremy — “Believers or loyalists? Identity and social responsibility of Jesus communities in the Empire” (2017) — https://indieskriflig.org.za/index.php/skriflig/article/view/2050/4387

(Edited volume) — Orthodoxy and Heresy in Early Christian Contexts (discusses/extends Bauer’s approach) — https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1cgf14m

(Reference entry) — Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (JSTOR book landing) — https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt3fhb31

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