I've always taken particular note of how wisely scope-limited Pandoc is. Markup that aligns with natural language convention[1], is tightly converted, but the further from natural language, the less fidelity Pandoc can promise. Until, at the DITA or S1000D stage of "this ain't natlang, brah", Pandoc says "forget it" and just won't even pretend that such markup is even convertible.
Because, spoiler, it's not.
Constructs like tables and bibliographies challenge natural language markup - resulting in an explosion of different formalisms - but component content system artifacts for transclusion and conditionals shatter any pretense that these file types are "documents" at all. Both of those artifacts must draw formal structure from outside of language, i.e., from their own product / domain. They're parts of a system that make documents, but are not themselves documents or natural language. They are meaningless - or, worse, full of wrong meaning - outside of their runtime environment inside an explicit knowledge domain. Something that newer component content formats like Typst recognize explicitly.
The proof of all this is, as they say, in the pudding. What do people write documents in today? Well, they stick to natural language formats, sometimes they let the document system handle tables in some bespoke way, but conditionals are viewed with justified suspicion. DITA and S1000D projects, and the cursed migrations that lead to them, are sparse and driven almost exclusively by regulatory requirements, or, more often, program offices misreading regulatory requirements[0].
And here we all are in the LLM age, where natural language is being vindicated in ways both awe-inspiring and devastating. While component content systems force an LLM to expand its context window to the entire repository to make sense of any single sentence.
The crap of all this is, this is stuff that computer / information science has known since at least the 1980s. There are papers written about it. But high-complexity component content systems are sellable to non-technical writer groups because they don't see the tripwires in the fundamentals, or they think[2] that their product domain is so structured that the tripwires can be rigged as structure.
[0] No, converting to a pile of S1000D 040As doesn't magically fix your MTAs or your ILS or anything else.
[1] I do realize that proximity to natural language is correlate, not cause. Markdown converts well as a low-power notation whose instances denote values; it reads like natural language because that's what low-power does. The operative variable is whether the artifact denotes a document or a function from configuration to documents. AsciiDoc with `ifdef::[]` and `include::[]` converts every bit as badly as DITA, although without the fundamental nonsense of XSD and Horn's Information Mapping.
As an unapologetic generalist[1] this has also been my experience. Many tools that would have been "eh maybe if I get bored over Thanksgiving holiday" have become "hold on, gimme fifteen minutes".
Tiny, isolated, but awesomely useful CLI scriptlets, for me, seem to be the sweet spot. Little shining rays spreading out from the veins of my own familiarity.
The downside, the Achilles Heel of LLMs, so far as I can tell, is using the system to assist in maintaining large, sprawling, and largely pointless legacy codebases. Somewhere you have to keep many many many stupid things alive. I swear I can almost sense Claude's frustration with some of this shit. Then you get frustrated, and then Claude wants to agree with you so it acts even more frustrated, and the gyre thus widens. You're just cussing at everything with a machine. Which can be fun - Claude is often surprisingly funny - but not productive.
[1] I know absolutely nothing about positively everything, but have the attention span of a squirrel.
I've found Claude Code absolutely amazing for the sorts of 100-500 line data cleaning/analysis/visualization tasks that used to take me a couple hours to knock out. They're often self contained (boss wants a graphic for a slide or some numbers), and I tell it which packages I would prefer it to use.
On the other hand, I've been using it to make small changes to a ~4000 line codebase, and it takes a lot of wrangling to keep changes in scope.
Today I'm translating a 5,000 line VB6 codebase to C#, and I've been spending the day chopping up the job, passing it to Claude, and manually validating it.
I went to VB.NET first using a previous generation of LLM's (that was quite manual back then) and then from VB.NET to C# or just keeping the VB.NET around worked very well. The code was not highly complex but more than just CRUD. The porting from VB6 to VB.NET included building tests which helped.
Have they thought about the expenses in running continental Death Pits?
OK, dumb attempt at funny over, but certainly someone is thinking about instability costs? Even if everyone is super cool with literal Death Pits, they don't run for free. And not everyone will be cool with watching their entire family die, which will mean substantial costs in security - and money spent on security, that's just setting money on fire, that money doesn't work any more.
I know they've batted around the ideas of "compliance collars" and suchlike for the guys running the Death Pits, but I haven't seen anything that wouldn't be ultimately defeated by a typical zoo chimpanzee, let alone a psychopathic Delta Force guy with more advanced degrees than your entire family. He will not be pleased with your "compliance collar" thing.
And the brain control chips they've been trying to get working . . well, they're not ready yet. You'll just make the Delta Force guy even crazier .
It's arguable that - pre-Exile - the majority of the vague coalition we today refer to[0] as "Israelites" did not practice monotheism outside of rural cult centers[1], if then.
Deuteronomy 32:8–9 (Qumran/LXX) Elyon apportions nations among divine sons, with Yahweh receiving Jacob - Yahweh one of El's sons (Masoretic fixes this). Kuntillet ʿAjrud, c. 800 BCE, blesses by "Yahweh of Samaria and his asherah" and "Yahweh of Teman and his asherah" -- i.e. plural localized Yahwehs, exactly how Near Eastern polytheism works. Psalm 82, God sentencing other gods to die like men.A flat denial of other gods arrives only with Deutero-Isaiah (44:6, 45:5–7), i.e., post-Persia.
I'd add a few things to your a-b-c list.
First, Mesopotamian and Egyptian summodeism: Marduk in Enūma Elish, the Ramesside Amun hymns. Akhenaten radicalized this trend.
Second, and this is unappreciated, soooooooo much of the faith passes through Greek[2] - Xenophanes "one god, greatest among gods and men," then Plato, Aristotle's unmoved mover, Stoics. Divine simplicity, immutability, omniscience, creation ex nihilo. Philo fuses all this crap, and Origen, Maimonides, Aquinas all run through Philo.
[0] "Refer to" aka with all the late-19th Century European baggage of what a "people" or a "nation" actually is.
[1] Note that even in the Bible, many centuries later, the prophets always come down from the hills into the cities, and once in the population center they generally yell at people and get yelled at. Solomon, as in biblical Solomon, built loads of temples to other gods, and it's extremely likely that the big temple - THE Temple, capitalized - was a multi-cult site. Good luck studyin any of this in the academy - I've known professional archaeologists who have changed their university rather than dip a little toe in biblical archaeology, due to how fraught everything is, and how nasty it gets very quickly.
[2] Unsurprising, since the foundational texts actually get written down in the Hellenic period. But I would argue even further than that, and would posit that the Hellenic period is the birth of the faith proper, where all the threads come together. Judaism and Christianity aren't parent and child, but more like a pair of siblings, with the latter child being something of a caboose baby. Although one could argue Islam would be the true caboose baby.
He's definitely a messenger of something but I'm not sure I can speak its name.
"A narrow head, bulging, watery blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears. His long, thick lip and coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed almost beardless except for some sparse yellow hairs that straggled and curled in irregular patches . ."
I think that the problem might be even more fundamental than that. Ownership of a strategic nuclear deterrent seems to short circuit some of the internals of the modern Westphalian state apparatus. Possible mechanisms include 1) centralizing the threat of force into one singular technical system, and 2) making any condition of peer conflict necessarily existential.
With such technical systems under state control, the state is able to focus on little other than its own powers of destruction. It becomes a zombie state, a tottering shell around an ever-growing national security apparatus. Looking around at the world, this seems to be a common morphological stage in the development of nuclear powers. There is no "collapse of commmunism" nor "collapse of financier capitalism", but different shadings on the same depressing chrysalis.
One aspect of being stuck in such a chrysalis is the utter inability to solve non-existential conflicts. There is an overwhelming tendency to make all conflict existential so the full power of the state may be brought to bear, but it's a tendency offset - so far - by the presence of deterrence. The zombies can smell each other.
The most dangerous scenario, by far, is when a nuclear power has uncertain territorial borders. Ukraine, Taiwan, Korea, Kashmir, a fair hunk of Israel - there is a reason we focus on these places in the news.
This also transforms non-nuclear states into "half sovereign" states, something which we have been seeing play out especially with the end of the SU-US Cold War.
What I'm seeing here, reading this thread, is that "intelligence" isn't a thing.
"Thing" in terms of a quantifiable that you can measure with tools and reason about, reproducibly. Everyone's got some idea what it is, so you get lots of different angles, but no one has an Intelligence Ruler we can hold up to a text output and say, yep, this one's got an INT of 14.
It's deceptively undefined I'd say. People can argue under the impression that everyone shares their idea of what "intelligence" means, before realizing that their counterpart actually has an entirely different idea of what it means.
I'm leaning towards there being a divide between those who feel "intelligence" is entirely separate from "sentience" and those who feel that one implies the other.
I can't believe I had to scroll down to see this. Victory always flows down; you can have the most badass of technical equipment or cunning tactical victories in the field, then still quite enthusiastically lose the war, due to bad strategy or even the original political goals of conflict.
Or because the political goals were impossible or - almost breathtaking that this state can even exist - because the goals are entirely absent. Incidentally, having a "rotating roster" of different political goals probably counts as something worse than "absent", due to the illusory impression that it gives of "someone deciding something".
I have heard it confidently stated, repeatedly, by extremely technical coder types, that "once we have enough data, we don't need Statistics"
It's a pretty funny sentiment.
It's also, unfortunately, reflective of how even talented individuals pass through advanced accreditation programs without locking blades with - or at least entering a general understanding of - fundamentals. Old timey British boarding schools would have called it "Logic" back in the day.
I am reminded once more of the differences in MSFS and Xplane: one uses a statistical table based model based on existing aircraft, and the other uses laminar flow analysis, fluid dynamics, and physics. One of them tells you something about unknown aircraft, and the other most definitely does not.
My first decent *NIX computer was an SGI Indigo that I rescued from a dumpster at a military-adjacent subcontractor that was also my first tech job.
Hmmm. Probably it wasn't sterilized by the book.
I took that beast home and loved it. It was actually reasonably beefy even into 2001, and IRIX was very slick *NIX by 2000 standards. When you turned it on you could see my electric meter spin faster.
Came with a huge-for-the-time monitor, probably a 19", which caused some envy among friends.*
Because, spoiler, it's not.
Constructs like tables and bibliographies challenge natural language markup - resulting in an explosion of different formalisms - but component content system artifacts for transclusion and conditionals shatter any pretense that these file types are "documents" at all. Both of those artifacts must draw formal structure from outside of language, i.e., from their own product / domain. They're parts of a system that make documents, but are not themselves documents or natural language. They are meaningless - or, worse, full of wrong meaning - outside of their runtime environment inside an explicit knowledge domain. Something that newer component content formats like Typst recognize explicitly.
The proof of all this is, as they say, in the pudding. What do people write documents in today? Well, they stick to natural language formats, sometimes they let the document system handle tables in some bespoke way, but conditionals are viewed with justified suspicion. DITA and S1000D projects, and the cursed migrations that lead to them, are sparse and driven almost exclusively by regulatory requirements, or, more often, program offices misreading regulatory requirements[0].
And here we all are in the LLM age, where natural language is being vindicated in ways both awe-inspiring and devastating. While component content systems force an LLM to expand its context window to the entire repository to make sense of any single sentence.
The crap of all this is, this is stuff that computer / information science has known since at least the 1980s. There are papers written about it. But high-complexity component content systems are sellable to non-technical writer groups because they don't see the tripwires in the fundamentals, or they think[2] that their product domain is so structured that the tripwires can be rigged as structure.
[0] No, converting to a pile of S1000D 040As doesn't magically fix your MTAs or your ILS or anything else.
[1] I do realize that proximity to natural language is correlate, not cause. Markdown converts well as a low-power notation whose instances denote values; it reads like natural language because that's what low-power does. The operative variable is whether the artifact denotes a document or a function from configuration to documents. AsciiDoc with `ifdef::[]` and `include::[]` converts every bit as badly as DITA, although without the fundamental nonsense of XSD and Horn's Information Mapping.
[2] Almost always wrongly
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