Note that Christianity is a religion that was grafted onto a previous one that is entirely different by intended recipients and worldview. Christianity is a universalistic religion centered on mercy and forgiveness, ancient Judaism is a transactional pact between God and one People: God gives the land and protection, the People worships God and follows the rules. I was in a church a few days ago and it was almost funny how the priest read from the Old Testament and turned a quite literal passage about the People of Israel, protection from regional enemies and the promise of a kingdom into a metaphor about all humanity and the fatherly care of God towards all. Unfortunately Christianity decided to incorporate the Old Testament and read it as a metaphor and a prophecy, and this allows some Christians to revert to a language of violent conquer and triumph against the enemies whenever it suits them.
The strain(s) of Christianity we have today are in large part the result of chance and power plays, it's a fascinating history.
More to your point: the Old and New Testaments are so different that a significant proportion of Christian apologetics consists in finding ever more convoluted mental hoops to explain this away.
A few centuries after JC, one of the dominant interpretations, Gnosticism, held that the two Testaments were about two different gods. The old god was angry, cruel, capricious, sadistic, while the new god, as described by Jesus, was the exact opposite. One ordered populations to be killed for nothing, the other turned the other cheek. The Gnostics thought that the first god was the demiurge, the god of matter (like Morgoth), while the second god was the supreme god (like Iluvatar).
A much simpler solution to this dilemma. Unfortunately, the non-Gnostics were better at organised religion/politics, and the rest is history.
Do you have any recommended reading on the history of Christianity? I find it challenging to find unbiased / purely historical explanations of how we got to this point.
He is going around talking about biblical prophecies and the antichrist so regardless of whether you consider thiel a Christian or whether he considers himself a Christian the comment you are responding to is entirely accurate in saying he is interested "only in the hate and doom parts of [Christianity]".
Peter grew up in an Evangelical household which probably shaped his framing/worldview. As an adult he still identifies as a 'heterodox protestant'. Which in America usually means he's not really Christian, he just picks and chooses some ideas from it. The way he uses 'Antichrist' to talk about politics and tech (not just a single person or religious entity) seems to confirm that idea.
He is someone who plugged his fingers into the power outlett that is the final mile of the enlightenment. Those guys all have that same shellshocked face and the same mission: to get humanity stable, progress is every step towards a sort of global "home for the handicapped and prone to selfdestruct" everything else is just soothing sounds.
Christianity is supported because it has shown itself to be the only culture capable to produce working institutions and a rule of law. He is all for that, as the alternative is basically permawar with nukes.
Every step taken, every plan, every endavour is part of a scenario tree with fallbacks towards that goal. Selfsurveilance, a hardened education system (ai), if you start to look at the world from that angle a ton of what they do, starts to make way more sense. Also from that point of view, money itself constantly looses value, as the scenario falls down the three. Its capabilities increasing the odds that are valuable. The last billionaire gets a potato for all of it.
His anti-christ is the loop deformation damage of humanity, a species stuck in a low tech environment, unable to ever regain complexity even if history throws it a mounttain of ressources. Look at he middle east for understanding.
> Christianity is supported because it has shown itself to be the only culture capable to produce working institutions and a rule of law.
I'm really sick of these christian nationalists deciding that their chosen religion is the best thing for humanity and forcing it onto the rest of the world. "Working institutions" and "rule of law" for whom?
> Look at he middle east for understanding.
How comically reductive. Would you care to delve into the history of the middle east and of christian/western intervention?
> He is someone who plugged his fingers into the power outlett
Children harm themselves by plugging their fingers into power outlets. That's why we teach them not to.
> He is someone who plugged his fingers into the power outlet that is the final mile of the enlightenment.
The fact that you used this analogy is amusing - something so obviously stupid and self-destructive being recast as a necessary step towards enlightenment does indeed reveal a lot about Thiel’s intentions and the attitude of his boosters.
There can never be such a thing as destructive information, as 0ermanent as a disability, no such thing as a loadbearing retardation. The tools we gain can not lead to our distruction, we do not self destruct under stress, in factcwe should embrace degrowth, for utopia is neigh. We should pool all together into a prosthesis god, the comon good, we shall overcome, the final mile of the hamster wheel. I wish you could for one day hear yourself, screeching at the poor guy trying to bath you, that he is a nazi
It’s because it helps their addiction to wealth. By saying that being against economic progress is the biggest evil, he’s saying everyone must say yes to what these tech elites push onto the world. Like you might dislike 1 million satellites polluting the night sky but don’t speak up against it unless you’re the antichrist.
Religion is also leverage for their goals. Like they support evangelical driven age verification for porn (defacto porn ban) because it lets them push age verification more broadly, to let them advertise more.
HN would be an entirely different place if people could just arrange to get their stuff upvoted onto the front page! We've spent hundreds of hours working on this over the years. Still not perfect of course.
My theory is that a lot of people may have looked for a story like this on the home page and then searched ‘Delve’ to see if anything was submitted recently and then upvoted one of those recently submitted posts.
They're not publicly traded (they appear to be pre-IPO "startup", made out of acquisitions), but it seems weird to me that there can be such a thing as secret layoffs.
My local karate school used them in the COVID era to build an app for practicing at home. I've used it off and on, though the occasional oblique reference to COVID is a bit amusing sometimes. Never mentioned by name but there's an occasional reference to "as we're stuck at home" and such. They use Vimeo to whitelabel the service.
Whatever they're paying for it, it is too much. Video availability drops in and out. Sometimes the video works. Sometimes it doesn't work at all and gives a weird error. Sometimes it doesn't work and it claims that it "can't guarantee the security of my connection", even though other videos work fine. Sometimes videos that didn't work yesterday work today. I've been tempted to go to their app developer and try to show them how to just host it themselves in S3 or something, which would probably still be much cheaper than what Vimeo is charging. The Vimeo player embedded into the app is extremely minimalistic, for instance, it can't cast to anything, which is a pretty useful feature for something you don't want to be staring at your phone for.
I found I can Favorite a video, which then makes me log in to a Vimeo account, then it adds it as a Favorite to my Vimeo account despite being private, and then I can view it through the Vimeo app proper, although that also seems to have lost the ability to cast to anything in my house lately. Casting is a clusterfuck of its own with the mismatched capabilities matrix of what can cast to what under what circumstances anyhow, but Vimeo seems distinctly behind on that front. It's honestly significantly worse now than the default video player a browser offers at this point.
But it was probably relatively easy for them to set it up ~5 years ago, before Vimeo collapsed.
A notable difference to their (somewhat) contemporary, Nebula. Nebula made the choice to develop their own services, to also own the customer billing relation. Dropout relies on Vimeo for all that.
Are there other services doing whitelabel video sites? (Apart from porn, I'm sure there is a few) I only know of Floatplane providing whitelabel for William Osman's sauceplus.com recently.
I know this wasn't an entirely honest question, but yes, absolutely. You probably see Vimeo videos every day without realizing it, because most of the viewing isn't done on vimeo.com. It's videos on other sites, and the customers can pay to have their branding, not Vimeo's, so if you're buying something online and it has a product video... might be Vimeo. Or one of those websites that have big header splashes with full-video backgrounds. Or a subscription "channel" like Martha Stewart TV with mobile and smart-TV apps. Or a million other things.
Once at Vimeo, maybe 7 or 8 years ago, I was working on putting out the fires of an extremely weird operational issue where a bug in a cloud provider's software-defined networking stack led to corrupted HTTP responses, which got stored in CDN caches, causing persistent playback issues for users (playback not starting, or locking up in the middle). The cloud provider had reported it as a "packet loss" issue, because for the most part the misdirected packets would get rejected by the receiving TCP stack for having the wrong sequence number or whatever, but one time in a billion they would get through and wreak havoc... and we were moving enough traffic that those one-in-a-billion flukes were happening constantly.
I was musing in the shared chat with one of our CDN partners that, with no real way to tell what files were affected, the only way to fix the playback issues for everyone (short of waiting a month for all the cached objects to age out) would be to simply purge the whole cache. I immediately got a bold all caps DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT DOING THAT in response. If we flushed the whole cache, the origin traffic to refill it would have saturated some internet links to the point of DoSing other customers and probably getting on CNN that evening. And that was then. Traffic levels got significantly higher later on.
They have 1000s if not 100s and 1000s of customers. I know because my company is an edtech platform and we have a lot of customers using vimeo as their video host.
I recently used it to watch "Revolution of our times", a documentary about the 2019 Hong Kong protests. As far as I could tell, this is the only legal way to stream the movie.
If they're hiring performance engineers then they're hiring for exactly these sets of skills.
It's a take-home test, which means some people will spend more than a couple of hours on it to get the answer really good. They would have gone after those people in particular.
When I say "I feel bad for people who feel a need to own guns", I'm not saying I feel bad for people who feel a need to lock their doors at night.
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