> You do realize software engineering is in the midst of a tectonic shift?
As an everyday user of AI, both at work and privately, I am not that convinced. The biggest effect I've seen so far is demand for faster work because "everything is faster with agents", but software quality is slowly dropping in software I see around me.
Current AI is very useful as a trivia engine and as a language manipulation tool - i.e. it can quickly extract information from a huge amount of text. But it still sucks when writing new things.
Admittedly, here has been much progress, but it seems to be slowing down. Money is drying out, models are getting nerfed, and only better scaffolding and workflows are making it better. Unless they build 100x more data centers, I don't see models getting significantly better.
This is what happened with the Language Server Protocol.
Prior to 0.9 (if I recall correctly), you had to install a plugin to be able to interface with LSP servers, and in 0.9 they integrated the support into NeoVim itself.
Not only that - one could argue that all observed phenomena are experiments, and the way we behave in the world is based on predicting them.
A religious person - if not honest enough to simply say "existence of God is an axiom and cannot be derived from reason alone" - uses the very predictions of experiments to reason God into existence: everything that exists has a cause; universe exists; therefore universe has a cause.
Epistemically speaking, the existence of God is not axiomatic. Your second claims is more accurate, though not entirely. Knowledge of God's existence is derived from observed features of reality. However, these features are very general and not scientific per se; rather, they are presupposed by empirical science. Examples include the reality of change, causality (especially per se vs. what science is generally concerned with, per accidens), or the existence of things. The denial of these general features would undermine not just the possibility of science, but the very intelligibility of the world. You would hang yourself by your own skepticism.
These are also not axiomatically accepted features either (except perhaps in the sense that they are in relation to the empirical sciences, as science presupposes their existence).
Did you read my entire post? I already explained to you why this isn't the case. We known that, for example, change is real through general observation, but it is not something belonging to any empirical science per se. Rather, it is presupposed by each of those sciences.
Of course, the classical definition of "science" is more expansive, including what would be the most general science - metaphysics - so in that sense, yes, you can say the existence of God is a "scientific fact". (God here is self-subsisting being, not some ridiculous "sky fairy" straw man of New Atheist imagination.)
Yes I did, but the rest of the comment hangs on the initial claim I replied to.
If you redefine God to mean "fundamental assumptions of the universe", its existence becomes tautological. But that is not what most people mean (including the author of the article we're commenting on) when they say "God".
> Yes I did, but the rest of the comment hangs on the initial claim I replied to.
It does not, because the crux of the matter isn't observation as such, but that there is a difference between observing particular events or "special facts" (those the special sciences deal with), which carry with them greater uncertainty and error, and general observations and general facts. It is more certain, not less, that change is a feature of the world, that things exist, and so on, than whether the universe is expanding or whether some species has a mating ritual or whatever.
Otherwise, I have no idea what your point is.
> If you redefine God to mean "fundamental assumptions of the universe", its existence becomes tautological. But that is not what most people mean (including the author of the article we're commenting on) when they say "God".
This is confused.
The first thing one must do is distinguish between the epistemic order and the metaphysical order. That is, the order in which we know things is not the same as the causal order of things known. In fact, it is generally the reverse, because we see the effects of things before we come to know their causes. Thus, while God is metaphysically speaking the first cause, epistemically we begin with everyday general observation and through rational demonstration arrive at what must be the first cause, what must be true of of the first cause, etc, in order for general facts under consideration to hold. (And axioms are, strictly speaking, entities belonging to the epistemic order; in the causal order, you can talk about first cause(s).)
What the author means by "God" is exactly what I wrote - self-subsisting being. I know this because he is a Thomist, and this is the archetypal notion of God of classical theism (unlike views like so-called theistic personalism). It is irrelevant what most people (ostensibly) believe "is God", because we're not interested in taking a vote. We're interested in determining what the ultimate cause of everything is, what must be true of this cause, and so on. "God" is the traditional name for this first cause.
> It is irrelevant what most people (ostensibly) believe "is God", because we're not interested in taking a vote.
This concedes exactly the point I was making. You are stripping the word "God" of its established attributes (such as intellect, intent, and agency) and reducing it to a highly specific technical definition of a "self-subsisting being" or "first cause".
> "God" is the traditional name for this first cause.
This is a linguistic bait-and-switch. You cannot use a strictly literal, narrowed definition of a term to construct a logical proof, and then implicitly rely on the common interpretation of that same term to assert a broader reality. Labeling a mechanical first cause as "God" deliberately smuggles in the classical theistic baggage that your general observations about causality do not actually demonstrate.
Observing that change exists and positing a fundamental necessity for it does not prove a deity. Calling that fundamental necessity "God" is just a tautology designed to shield a religious premise behind sterile metaphysical jargon.
> That's a straightforwardly circular argument - creating your own definition, then using it as a proof.
Which definition? That of "God"? I didn't "create" that definition. It is the archetype of classical theism. It is the product of analysis from which we get the famous distinction between existence and essence. Only in God is there no distinction between existence in essence, as the first cause's essence is "to be".
And besides, when do you not define something before proving it? This isn't circular. I don't see where you are noting circularity. In fact, I didn't prove anything at all. Others have.
> Change is not presupposed by science. Various experiences/models of change are described by science, which is not the same thing at all.
Of course change is presupposed. It isn't explicitly stated, just as the presupposition that the world is intelligible isn't explicitly presupposed, but it is tacitly presupposed by the scientific enterprise itself. Science cannot deny such basic presuppositions without upending itself.
If you can't see that w.r.t. change, then consider some of the other presuppositions, like the fact that things exist.
> There are block universe interpretations of cosmology which do not require change.
So much worse for the block universe! It is as self-refuting to deny the reality of change - the very act of denying it involves change - as it is to claim that it is true that there is no truth, or that it is true that we cannot know the truth.
Scientific models - or more likely their interpretations - are not always faithful to reality as such. They can have observational correspondence without fidelity. Interpretations are where people often read in their bad metaphysical presuppositions into bona fide scientific results, forgetting the distinction. For instance, a Platonic interpretation of mathematics might lead some to think that the world represented by their physical model is actually static and eternal, but even though that is bogus, that physical theory can still function predicatively. Evolution suffers from similar problems, where evolutionism is presented by some as a necessary reading of evolutionary theory.
> Examples include the reality of change, causality (especially per se vs. what science is generally concerned with, per accidens), or the existence of things.
How do any of these things allow you to derive knowledge of God's existence?
I’m not sure which user we’re talking about, but it’s up to the video.js user to decide if and when they use ads. Just like it’s up to YouTube. Video can get expensive, so some video wouldn’t exist without some form of monetization.
In this case, you're talking about the browser user, and not the dev user of video.js, but I feel like you know this and are just trying to rail against ads in a manner that's just not relevant.
If someone providing video content wants to run ads as part of making the video available to you, that's up to them. It's also up to you if you want to attempt to view the video without those ads or skip watching altogether. But to the dev of video.js, you're personal choices of consuming AVOD content are irrelevant.
It's a kind of crappy slide deck, not a proper home page. Even worse, the link drops you into the middle of the deck. (TBF, it wouldn't be so bad if you know that it's a slide deck when you load the page.)
Try using the arrow keys to navigate. It took me multiple tries to get it figured out.
Use up/down to navigate within a chapter/topic.
Use left/right to switch between topics.
As an everyday user of AI, both at work and privately, I am not that convinced. The biggest effect I've seen so far is demand for faster work because "everything is faster with agents", but software quality is slowly dropping in software I see around me.
Current AI is very useful as a trivia engine and as a language manipulation tool - i.e. it can quickly extract information from a huge amount of text. But it still sucks when writing new things.
Admittedly, here has been much progress, but it seems to be slowing down. Money is drying out, models are getting nerfed, and only better scaffolding and workflows are making it better. Unless they build 100x more data centers, I don't see models getting significantly better.
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