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Recent content by hedrick

  1. hedrick

    Can AI Ever Understand Purpose?

    Currently AI does what you can in a broad sense consider pattern matching. What's stored is a very abstract form of what it was trained on, so that doesn't mean that it just spits back words it learned (though that does often happen). It can get at meaning, in some sense. Still it is a model of...
  2. hedrick

    US Hits Highest Layoffs Since COVID

    There's probably no one cause. Clearly Trump's policies are going to make companies wary of hiring, but AI is having the same effect. It's not that it's currently taking jobs, but there are reports tthat it's making companies worried about hiring. I generally recommend waiting for at least a...
  3. hedrick

    June 2025 - the US had a budget surplus.

    I'm currently an IT guy (with a PhD in Artificial Intelligence), but in grad school I published a couple of papers in major econ journals. One of the frustrating parts about economics is that there are long delays. We'll know most of the impacts of Trump's policy by 2028. Probably a bit by...
  4. hedrick

    June 2025 - the US had a budget surplus.

    Yup. Take a look at the graph in this article: Trump's Hollow Surplus Claim - FactCheck.org. You probably want to use a period longer than a month.
  5. hedrick

    The Kingdom of God

    Allison's proposal could provide an interesting alternative to Jesus' sayings about the Romans. Perhaps saying that Israel should love the Romans wasn't the end of his message about Israel's situation. Perhaps Mark 9:1 was saying: If you want a few years, God will take care of the Romans and...
  6. hedrick

    The Kingdom of God

    There seem to be two requirements: * The thing about not tasting death implies a sigificant time passing. * It has to be a visible event showing the coming of the Kingdom The first rules out the transfiguration and probably the resurrection. The second seems to rule out the fall of Jerusalem...
  7. hedrick

    Is the ESV still popular?

    The same pompous old blokes that said you couldn't use "they" as a gender-neutral singular, a usage that we can actually find before Victorian times, starting in the 14th Cent.
  8. hedrick

    Is the ESV still popular?

    Formal equivalence isn't word for word. Sentence structure is different in English than Greek or Hebrew, and there are idioms and other cases where some level of interpretation is needed to be intelligble. ESV may be a bit more literal, particularly beginning half the sentences in the Gospel...
  9. hedrick

    Is the ESV still popular?

    The big surprise for me in the list is how well the CEB is doing. I think it’s a fine translation, but it wasn’t clear to me that there’s any group interested in it.
  10. hedrick

    People who die as infants go to Heaven, right? Is there a good argument to the contrary?

    Westminster is pretty clear that non-Christians are never saved. As far as I know, conservative Presbyterians would accept that. Reformed tradition typically assumes that children of Christians are normally saved, though there are fairly widespread speculations that anyone who dies in infancy is...
  11. hedrick

    Number of Americans who don't identify as Christian but claim 'personal committment to Jesus' nears record high: survey

    Perhaps. But you'd need to look at all community involvement, not just church. There's a lot more communities available to people, not to mention online interaction. I'd want to look at all participation, not just chuches, before saying that younger people don't value community.
  12. hedrick

    Number of Americans who don't identify as Christian but claim 'personal committment to Jesus' nears record high: survey

    Typically when things like this show up, posts think people dislike churches for various reasonsn. Conservatives think people are rejecting churches becaue they're too liberal. Liberals think they are rejectinng churches because they're too conservative. My own experience with folks like this...
  13. hedrick

    New belief among teenagers. What do you think?

    I think you're getting punked. If they really thought they were animals there couldn't be any Internet groups involving them, since they wouldn't be able to read or write. It might be the basis for an interesting attempt to get out of going to school, but I doubt parents would bite.
  14. hedrick

    As Texas Flood Deaths Rise, Officials Blast Faulty Forecast by National Weather Service

    Based on NYTimes articles, it looks to me like the NWS did what they were supposed to. However the person who retired early had local contacts and thus might have done extra communications. But still, they issued a warning the prevous day. and alerts as the situation developed. Clearly Trump was...
  15. hedrick

    The shrewdly drawn-up big ugly bill...

    How do you know? Adding more red tape doesn't deal with fraud. You deal with fraud by adding staff to inspectors (rather than firing them as Trump did), and looking carefully at your prcesses to improve them. The BBB will force states to come up with new systems to document work, with tight...
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