I’ve seen enough parents at graduations and tourists to know people use it. Assuming they need the big screen because their vision is bad which undermines the need for a high res photo in the first place.
I have a theology background. The key feature of the Antichrist, at least in Catholic Theology, is that he stands as an alternative Messiah to Jesus: a different way by which humanity may be saved or may save itself. Ironically, if you listen to Accelerationists like Peter Thiel, they talk about AGI and Superintelligence in bluntly messianic terms. For them the only way to save humanity is for humanity to put all its energy into giving birth to a Superintelligence, and that Superintelligence will fix everything and usher in an era of peace and prosperity.
Like it is honestly hard for me to put into words how absurdly on-the-nose it is. I'm not saying AI is the Antichrist: the/an Antichrist isn't necessarily a single thing or entity. But it is as probably a good candidate as anything we've thought up in our history.
If AI is his Christ (as in Messiah), then it really is just intellectually consistent for him to label anyone critical of AI as Antichrist.
Slightly tangential: this is one of those language things that tripped me up, and still does on first blush. "Antichrist" reads intuitively like some sort of polar opposite good vs. evil thing. That if Christ is about love and forgiveness, the antichrist is some cartoony evil concept. Then I learned that "antipope" is just a hard fork of the pope and isn't necessarily aligned against Catholicism in any significant way.
I agree with you re: antipopes, but I don't think it applies too well to how "Antichrist" is used in the Bible, which definitely is in a "good vs. evil" sense. Small-a "antichrists" is a somewhat generic descriptor used in 1 John 2 (one of the criterion being that they "[deny] that Jesus is the Christ"), and so it seems to refer to those who actively oppose Christ.
Separately, that passage also refers to "the antichrist" (emphasis mine), who is traditionally identified w/ the "man of lawlessness" in 2 Thessalonians 2 and the "beast" in Revelation. And this figure is pretty unambiguously evil ("man of lawlessness"; "son of destruction"; makes himself out to be God; violently persecutes Christians; makes people have to worship him if they want to buy or sell anything; etc.)—even by secular standards, he's a megalomaniacal despot.
That's interesting. Thanks for the correction and for sharing.
So if I understand this correctly, there's basically both concepts? One is an unambiguously evil figure, while the other is essentially a definition for anyone who denys that Jesus is Christ, even if their ideological differences are begign?
Sorry, this gets into a fuzzy realm that might not be useful beyond just wild conjecture: it gets me thinking about the possible intent to create a sort of strawman. Create a megalomaniacal bogeyman and align to it anyone who doesn't toe the Church's line? I don't mean to be offensive or critical and I'm sure there's a term for this sort of meta theology (or is it just theology?) where I'm fascinated by what might have been the intent of these stories as curated for generations by a historically dominant power structure?
Not a theologian. My understanding is that during Jesus' time on Earth, the Jews were under the heavy yoke of the Romans. At that time, there were many Jewish sects who all claimed secret knowledge and were led by a "messiah" who would deliver the Jews from the Romans and re-establish Judah as a military-political power. The Anti-Christ as mentioned in Revelations and in Catholic texts were a warning to Christians. Christians should not be led astray by demagogues who preached salvation by political or military means. Instead, for Christians, salvation lay in Christ's commandments to love God, love neighbor, and love like he loved us.
> while the other is essentially a definition for anyone who denies that Jesus is Christ, even if their ideological differences are benign?
I don't think this states it strongly enough (sorry for not being clearer originally): In the gospels, Jesus is very black-and-white, e.g. "he who is not with Me is against Me" (Matt. 12:30a). In my reading, the New Testament pretty emphatically denies the existence of "benign" ideological differences, and instead it's a pretty binary you-either-actively-accept-God-or-actively-reject-Him (cf. John 3:16–20 [1], James 4:4 [2], Romans 1:16–32 [3], or Luke 16:19–31 [4]).
Re: your second point about strawmen, I'm a Christian myself and so I suppose I'm gonna have a different take on things :-) Specifically, I think the Bible is true as a matter of fact (e.g. instead of being just a collection of arbitrary books as compiled by the "theological winners" of history [5]). So, I disagree a priori with viewpoints that look at it through a purely political/historical lens. Certainly it's true that the Bible is applicable to politics, and it is a historical document after all, but for me there's not much point in trying to divine the (so to speak) "true motivation" behind it, instead of just taking it at face value. (I'd say something similar about the so-called "historical Jesus", since for me the one presented in the four canonical gospels is the Jesus of history.)
Now, with that said, I do think there's a bit of internal evidence against the idea that the church just wanted to create a vague bogeyman. For one, I think that a literal reading of the relevant passages implies that there is a single (big-A) Antichrist at the end of history. Some Protestants disagree—some denominations consider the Antichrist to be allegorical, while some Lutheran denominations consider the office of the Pope (but not necessarily the person himself) to be the Antichrist—so I'm not claiming that my interpretation is entirely universal, but it is at least fairly common. And so, if there really is only one Antichrist per se, it's harder to apply it to the enemy du jour without looking really silly in hindsight fifty years later (of course, not that this always has stopped people from trying...).
More generally, and here my Protestant bias is showing, I think the Bible warns against the idea of the church being a single earthly institution that gets to set a 100% all-encompassing "party line" for its members: Jesus criticized the Pharisees for making their own arbitrary traditions (Matthew 15:1–7 [7]) and the apostle Paul repeatedly urges Christians to be tolerant of some amount of doctrinal or behavioral differences (e.g. Romans 14 [8]). Now, it is also true that the Bible draws red lines, e.g. the Jesus-denying antichrists as previously mentioned, or those who preach a different gospel (Galatians 1:6–9 [9]). So there certainly are times when I think Christians should take a stand and say that some things are just plain wrong and dangerous—Jesus was not a moral or religious relativist, and the Bible is clear on many things. But, the idea that the institutional Church is this domineering thing, with inherent authority on all aspects of faith and morals, is very much not a universal Christian belief. (And, historically, a tremendous amount of evil has been done in the name of such a belief.)
Now, I readily admit that this doesn't quite defeat what you said, since you very well might define "the Church's line" to even include core theology like "Jesus is God". But to be honest, in general I think it's difficult to defend against accusations of the form "the Bible only says that you're for or against God for rhetorical reasons, to make it easier to convince people to agree with it". I certainly understand the argument, and I myself would apply it (or at least something vaguely like it) to other religions (e.g. how Jehovah's Witnesses shun those who leave). Still, I think the argument has the problem that it's unfalsifiable, at least when considered in a vacuum: If the Bible is false, then perhaps it makes sense that it would present itself as the exclusive way to God, but isn't that also the case if the Bible is true? Like, if Jesus really is "the way, the truth, and the life" and "no one comes to the Father except through" him (John 14:6), I'd certainly hope the Bible would go out of its way to tell everyone for their sake.
[2] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=james%204%3A4&v...; N.B. "friend of the world", AFAICT, isn't used in the sense of being friendly with most everyone (which is a good thing and indeed repeatedly commanded in the New Testament), but rather in a deeper sense of e.g. going along with the morality of one's environment rather than the law of God.
[5] I'm not sure what the current secular scholarly consensus is on the biblical canon. However, many Christian (specifically, Protestant) scholars would argue that the canon was organically decided, rather than being imposed by some top-down institution (even the Catholic church didn't "infallibly" declare its version of the canon until the 1500s, as a response to the Reformation). I recently read Canon Revisited by Michael Kruger and it seemed pretty convincing to me, but I'm also just some random guy on the internet, so what do I know :-P
I don’t have anything more to add to this discussion but I can’t stress enough how much I appreciate you taking the time to share this. I enjoyed reading your perspective and I’ve got a few notes here I want to go study a bit. You took a fairly thin thought I had and gave it depth, which I can consider more fully.
Thanks so much for the kind words; it was my genuine pleasure, and I'm deeply grateful myself that you actually took the time to read it :-) Happy hunting with whatever you decide to investigate more deeply, and God bless.
Somehow this comment was flagged to death, I really don’t get it. Anyway, I clicked “vouch” and now it’s back.
I can’t imagine humans would flag this comment and not your others (like i could vaguely imagine some militant atheist going crazy, but why only flag the “thanks my pleasure” comment then?), so it’s gotta be some weird HN algorithm. Weird shit!
If the highest good is a belief in Christ, as is Christian doctrine, then an anti-Christ that is good in every other way is still evil by Christian doctrine.
Thanks for highlighting this - I won't be able to unsee how well this does in "x person is bad" clickbait headlines vs "Christ V2: A Revised Edition" which seems to be more accurate and honest. I admit I've fallen for this for trop for ages ...
FWIW I think the parent comment is incorrect (unless I misunderstood it, of course); I responded in more detail here [0] but the tl;dr is that the Bible does describe the (big-a or little-a) "antichrist" as more-or-less entirely opposed to Christ. (Not to mention that Jesus himself warned about copycat "Christs", in Matthew 24:23–27, and calls them "false" and says that they "deceive".)
Thanks, I see. I thought this was more settled and the authoritative tone of the parent comment was enough for me buy it. (One would hope a youth in Catholic education wouldn't have me so clueless and looking stupid in public, but here we are!) Clearly I need to learn more about this
This is very interesting. One other thing I think gets glossed over a lot is that there is "the" Antichrist as you explained, but there are also MANY other Antichrists. The latter are constantly trying to attack the Christian faith by saying they _are_ Christians but behaving very un-Christlike _on purpose_. I think we see a LOT of this happening now.
The Christian conservative movement seems to really have that sort of an outlook. I mean, last year there were some that called out a priest for "the sin of empathy" when she was preaching about taking care of the less fortunate and not laying immigrants to the wayside. Because as we all know, one of the things that Big J disliked was checks notes empathy!
And it's not exclusive to the US. For example here in Finland, this sort of Christian conservatism has a lot of support alongside our far-right government. The Bible being used as a justification for intolerance and hate, which does seem rather ironic considering what Big J was all about.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is a lot of the theological beliefs about the Antichrist/antichrists evolved much later in time as interpretation of biblical scripture, and are not something that is explicitly stated by biblical authors (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/References_to_the_Antichrist_i... for a quick summary).
I was raised in an evangelical religious environment with strong premillennial dispensationalist beliefs. It wasn’t until I later took theology classes at university that I discovered those beliefs I was taught as a child aren’t universal among christians, or even strongly supported by biblical scholars.
Also there is no singular antichrist. Samson was an antichrist. We are antichrists when we oppose his will. Thiel is the worst kind of dispensationalist.
When studying the psychology of criminals in prisons for extreme violent crimes what really surprised me was that, from the beginning until the end, most of them had an internal justification sort-of belief system about why they were actually the good guys and their violent and often brutal repeated acts were just to punish those they saw as the actual bad guys even indirectly (like sexually assaulting a person was just to punish all those "bad" people that never let them live peacefully their sexuality)
Certain serial killers maybe? I get that people are fascinated by them, but to me such people are oddly boring. Their crimes are horrific, but the justifications (if not outright delusional) seem to be just "I can do whatever I want if I find a way to get away with it".
Most other people we might consider 'evil' have more moralistic justifications - such as religious fanaticism, or nationalism, or revenge against some perceived enemy. Not that this makes them right in absolute terms, but presumably they do not consider themselves evil.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "aware". Does awareness imply that someone simply knows that what they did was immoral, or does it also imply remorse? Psychopaths know that their actions are immoral but are incapable of feeling remorse.
He accumulates vast amounts of money and AFAIK isn't very into charity or helping the poor, which directly contradicts Christian teaching. By the most direct interpretation of the Christian gospels he should be giving most of it away, but even a more moderate interpretation says he should be doing a whole lot more philanthropy.
He openly supports and funds elitist ideologies like neoreaction that propose that all human life is not of equal moral value and that some are "just better" than others and more or less that might makes right, which is very contrary to Christian teaching.
Those are two that come to mind instantly. There's many more.
He's pretty clearly a political reactionary who believes in religion as a tool to organize a society. That's a secular belief. Belief in religion as a political tool does not require belief in God. (And on the flip side it's entirely possible to believe in God but not to like or trust religion, which is a secular human institution.)
Not sure where your getting that Christians can't be wealthy or accumulate wealth. Theres nothing is Christen teachings that says you must give away your wealth. Historically and currently there are many Christians that have vast amounts of wealth.
I'm not sure about the elitist funding or the human grading. Please give a source on this along with the exact biblical text that contradicts his actions.
>> No seriously, where's the leeway in interpretation? I truly don't see it.
The point is I can grab any verse and sell it for whatever my narrative is. The fact is the OP wants it interpreted the way they read it. I don't see any connection forcing someone to dispose of wealth to be part of a religion.
Extreme wealth has nothing to do beliefs or your religion. What the theme here is that to be a devote X you need to follow every rule and belief to claim yourself an X. Thats nonsense and anyone who did would carry the label of religious fanatic. 99 percent of all religious people do not follow or believe 100 percent of whatever their following.
So your point is that scripture is irrelevant, but you are asking for scripture to defend a statement. Also, there have been at least 4 other verses mentioned in this thread.
Really, what has happened here is that you have failed to give an alternative interpretation. Your entire argument stands on your ability to do so.
I already went over the relevance to extreme wealth in another comment, I encourage you to address it there.
I agree that "you must give away all your wealth" is not a command binding on all Christians (based on other passages in the New Testament), but generosity is commanded pretty often IIRC: Matt. 6:19–21 and 6:24, 1 Tim. 6:17–19, James 2:15–16, etc.
Also when your not polorized it affords you to be a critical thinker. E.g. Understanding why people say what they say instead of just hearing what they say.
One of the key teachings of Catholicism is the spiritual leadership of the Pope and his infallibility when he speaks ex cathedra.
Thiel's views go directly counter to what the Pope wrote in Magnifica Humanitas.
He cannot be properly or deeply Catholic. He can only be a hypocrite that likes the aesthetics of Catholicism, or in slightly more theological terms, a heretic.
My understanding is that he was raised evangelical. I don't think he's converted to Catholicism, but he is a fan of some Catholic authors on eschatology. I find a lot of his rhetoric around the end times distinctly more evangelical: ultimate fight against good and evil and all that jazz.
At the risk of getting too theological, the Catholic view would push back on the idea of the end times as being a battle. The Catholic faith views Christ as already the victor of history, and the end times as a trial to be borne, not a battle to be won. Whatever I've read from him or seen reported about his thoughts, it basically boils down to building one Antichrist to fight another Antichrist.
> My understanding is that he was raised evangelical.
Was that before or after he spent part of his childhood in a Namibian settlement called Swakopmund that venerated Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party?
> Before settling in Foster City, California, in 1977, the Thiel family lived in South Africa and South West Africa (modern-day Namibia) in the time of apartheid. Peter changed elementary schools seven times. He attended a German-language school in Swakopmund for two years that required students to wear uniforms and employed corporal punishment, such as striking students' hands with a ruler.
> Swakopmund was known for its continued glorification of Nazism after World War II, including the celebration of Hitler's birthday and "Heil Hitler" Nazi salutes given by residents.[12][13] In 1976, The New York Times quoted a German working in a Swakopmund hotel who described the city as "more German than Germany".[13] As of the 1980s, Nazi paraphernalia was available to buy in shops.
It is not mutually exclusive. Klerofashism was and still is a thing. Current pope is NOT nazi, very much not. But, parts of church are and historically were
He definitely isn't a Catholic. "Thiel is a self-described Christian and a promoter of René Girard's Christian anthropology." says Wikipedia. He grew up in a fundamentalist evangelical household. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Religious_views
>Thiele claims that this strand of thinking, which attacks Christians for not doing enough for victims or the poor, is a continuation of communism and the social gospel, which also inherit some Christian characteristics while being anti-Christian at the same time.
Ha, he is the living embodiment of supply side Jesus.
Well, some of that actually is common among the Protestants in Western Europe. The belief is that God will punish you for doing bad (quite common in many religions), and therefore that your are faithful if you're doing well. These were not the persecuted minorities that fled to the USA, but dressing greed as piety did cross the pond.
He says he is a Protestant, and he probably identifies as one. He may believe he believes in Jesus Christ, but does he actually believe, or is he just fooling himself? Can you even know if you genuinely believe in something, because you are always the easiest person you can fool?
There are many doctrinal differences between different branches of Protestantism. Lutheranism teaches that while good works do not imply faith, faith does imply good works. The absence of good works can therefore seen as evidence for the absence of faith, from that perspective.
personally i think its pretty cool to see that some books from thousands of years ago are applicable to a world the authors could never have imagined. it sure is a lot cooler than detonating earth to make peter thiel and other evil men of his ilk very briefly happy. from my angle, the absurdity is watching evolved monkeys toil to cease gigacenturies of evolution by permanently ruining their home.
AI has always seemed like a convenient panacea for the excesses of accelerationism. An overloaded term in the equation that should balance everything, but only if the right conditions are met. That framing discrepancy alone should indicate that AI is being marketed as something that it will clearly never be.
I doubt someone like Thiel would be deluded enough to think of AI as anything other than an economic accelerator and wealth amplifier.
> Like it is honestly hard for me to put into words how absurdly on-the-nose it is
These guys are also often longevity enthusiasts as well. It's not uncommon to see the belief that AI is going to deliver us from disease, and even mortality itself.
> energy into giving birth to a Superintelligence, and that Superintelligence will fix everything
Beware of any and all plans with a huge (magic happens here) step.
Overthrow the capitalist class, declare a Communist state, and (magic happens here) and then workers' paradise!
Pour loads of investment money in this company, they put everything into marketing and scaling, and (magic happens here) and they are profitable!
Tear down the system and overthrow the government and (magic happens here) and everything will be better!
Elevate a strong leader, give them all the resources they need, put all our support behind them, and (magic happens here) and America is great again!
Etc.
Magic does not happen. Problems are solved by solving them.
I'm not a believer in the doom scenarios, but lets say we do build a superintelligence. Who says it fixes all our problems? To get that to happen we'd have to work with it, align it, and apply it properly, and that's fixing all our problems with a new tool. It is not "magic" and would require a lot of effort and work.
Ultimately the attraction of these kinds of ideas is they let us off from thinking and working. Magic means someone or something does it for us. Unfortunately I don't think the universe lets you do that. Thinking and working is mandatory. New tools, even superintelligent AI tools, just changes the nature of the thinking and working and might allow more to be accomplished more easily or quickly.
We went from having a panic over binary blobs after the xz crisis to everyone installing giant binary blobs on their computers and giving them access to their filesystems and online accounts.
Off topic and a little whimsical, but LLM incantations is a really fun idea.
In a world where one hyper intelligent AI controls everything, hackers work tirelessly in secret off-grid, doing extreme math by hand, finding the right series of tokens that magically coerce the AI into carrying out certain actions. Spell books are copied out by hand and distributed in dark alleyways. Itinerant wizards travel the land on horse drawn carriages, travelling from town to town, casting spells on people's devices to bend the AI to their will.
I'll eat my hat if we still talk about Clair Obscur in the next decade, like we might still be talking about Dark Souls (2011), for example, to this day.
It is a good game in an era where big name studios only care to invest in live-service games, and even indies are starting to rehash the same tropes over and over. It is not a ground-breaking cornerstone of the arts, just an isle of respite among the greed; any food tastes good when you're starving.
Clair Obscur was a far, far more memorable game for me and it's not even close. One actually has a story and characters to care about. The other is a masochism simulation.
Clair Obscur has great art (including music) but isn't a greater game underneath it. It's good but not exceptional. I can see the appeal for final fantasy fans, but I was underwhelmed.
Someone else mentions Blue Prince here. I think that's a much better game relatively speaking, even if not having Clair Obscur's exceptional art.
Which is too bad, because Blue Prince is the better game. :)
I'm playing through Clair Obscur now. It's above average for aaa stuff. But there are way too many cut scenes, and dodge/parry mechanics continue to be tedious. And the story is fine, but isn't really grabbing me. Sigh.
Blue Prince, on the other hand, is quite probably the best puzzle game I have ever played. My partner and I worked on it for months, and have a 50+ page Google doc of notes.
I am "only" a dozen+ hours into Clair Obscur, and I am similarly not understanding the hype. Combat is too gimmicky and annoying. The story is tonally all over the place. It starts out very dark, and then the characters seemingly have no problems going on stupid side quests because they want to see some cute elves or something. Are you saving the world or not?
The joke side quests work in your standard RPG because they take themselves less seriously. Your character is wielding an eight foot sword, the mage companion is a talking cat, and your boots are haunted by a long-dead Egyptian prince. Sure, go nuts if you want to play the mini-game at the circus belly-dancing competition to win the golden hat.
Clair Obscur starts in such a bleak, breathing world that the characters not treating the situation deadly serious breaks my connection to the world, so I start to focus more on the mechanical annoyances.
> worked on it for months, and have a 50+ page Google doc of notes.
That sounds more like a part time job than a game. I'm curious if you play it for the mental challenge? I feel challenged enough at $dayjob that all I want from games is mindless relaxation.
That's the beauty of Blue Prince. The core game doesn't require all of that. You can get to a satisfying ending with moderate puzzle solving. But after finishing the game, there are still hundreds of hours worth of optional puzzles left.
Yeah blue prince is three games (I've played two of them and won't play the third).
First, it's a really compelling roguelite puzzler where you explore and understand the house and it's mechanics. The puzzles are mostly small and straightforward (but not easy!). You can probably win this without taking notes. I found this part compelling and delightful.
Then it's something else where you learn about the world. The puzzles are more complicated and need notebooks and notes to keep the loose threads tracked. This part for me became a slog by the end and I finished mostly to say that I had.
To be sure, it was a couple few hours here and there, not at the scale of a job.
Blue Prince is an example of what fills are calling 'notebook games' -- instead of giving you lots of qol stuff, you just use a notebook to keep notes. The act of writing and arranging your notes is actually quite immersive. It's also fun!
Blue Prince has layers of puzzles and story... It's pretty reasonable to play to the credits, and not get into the depths of the post credits game; it's a very reasonable cutoff point for non-sickos.
I liked Clair Obscur a lot, but I doubt very much if I will ever replay it. The necessity of being able to dodge to survive encounters really killed the fun of the gameplay for me.
Tokens aren't free so there's already some level of buy-in on the part of the human sending out the agent. The amount of unserious requests will be limited by the cost of the tokens to run the agents.
On the other hand op said they'd been wanting to do this for years but never had the time / ability. This is work that would otherwise not be happening.
The fact that tokens aren't free will limit the number of unserious requests. Email is free, and so there's a lot of spam emails sitting in my inbox, but tokens aren't.
On the other hand, op said he had wanted to do this for years but never had the time / ability. We can probably assume any increase in unserious requests will come with an increase in serious requests from people paying for the tokens to get the quotes.
> The fact that tokens aren't free will limit the number of unserious requests. Email is free, and so there's a lot of spam emails sitting in my inbox, but tokens aren't.
Back when email was new, using it required paying an hourly fee to a proprietary online service. Then, with economies of scale and protocol standardization, it got to the point where the resources needed for email were so minimal that unlimited usage could be baked into flat-rate service offerings, and anyone who cared to could run their own SMTP/POP/IMAP servers on commodity hardware.
Using cloud-hosted LLMs is currently still in the "$5/hour CompuServe account" territory, but imagine what things might look like in five years.
> The fact that tokens aren't free will limit the number of unserious requests.
LLM costs are already pretty cheap (regardless of whether someone believes they'll continue falling).
For a recent example, see a relatively powerful LLM like DeepSeek Flash, where you can get a million tokens for $0.20. And if someone is OK with their task being batched (instead of executing it right now), that can lower prices too.
If you like the vibes but not the humor you might like The Dig. It's more serious, and has Orson Scott Card and Stephen Spielberg credited as writers. I last played as a kid it in the 90's, but still I have very vivid memories of it.
It's not that I dislike the humor, I just don't think it's as hilarious as it's often made out to be. Insult sword fighting, for example, is at best a sensible chuckle and gets pretty long in the tooth after the first two attempts or so.
A minimal camera bump means they've advanced the technology to make it small, but no camera bump makes it look like they're using a cheaper camera?