Well the evidence is circumstantial. A bunch of Canaanites celebrate a spring festival with unleavened bread. Later they adopt a different religion that has a spring festival and an Exodus story with a new god called YHWH is glommed onto El.
I think it depends how "natural" one thinks the reason for unleavened bread is to Exodus. There's obviously plenty of mythical aspects to the story but the oldest are more focused on the river (Song of the Sea) and the battle. Why not combine rebirth/reinvention stories -- one a feast and another the beginning of "freedom"
But it's fair to say that most of Passover as a story and holiday is unrelated.
"The Bible" is not a single coherent text, but rather a collection of hundreds or thousands of years of oral tradition that was created and passed on by various people at various times for various purposes, and then collected and edited again by different people for different purposes.
There are layers of edits that you can tease out with careful reading, and they can be supported by archeological evidence from sites all around the near east.
It is not remotely controversial that the Hebrews/Israelites/Canaanites/Judeans were originally polytheistic, with a pantheon built around Canaanite gods (El, Ashera, etc), just like all of their neighbors and then gradually became henotheistic (our god is the best god), and then finally monotheistic (there is only one god). Pure monotheism was a very late development, and a lot of the conflicts in the bible is straightforwardly interpreted as describing a conflict between Yahwist henotheism and traditional near-eastern polytheism. Even just reading the very first part of Genesis, there are two creation stories with very clear signs of a pantheon of gods.
There are also completely retellings of polytheistic myths in the Bible which are basically a find-replace of Ba'al, etc, with either "El" or "Yahweh" or both.
This is all absolutely correct. To amplify this point for people unfamiliar with it, the two creation stories are:
1. God separates the light from the darkness, the earth from the water, and creates all the plants and animals and peoples of the world.
2. The LORD God creates the garden of Eden, makes Adam from mud and Eve from his rib, plants a tree of knowledge and tree of life, etc.
Already there's a divergence: Adam is supposedly the first man in the second story, but in the first story, all the peoples of the world have already been created. But the more interesting divergence is in the name of the responsible God. This often flies over the head of readers in English, but notice that the first story isn't the "LORD God", just "God". This is because in Hebrew, the name of God in the first story is "Elohim", while in the second, it's "YHVH" -- a name too holy for Jews to pronounce, so they just say "Hashem" ("the name"), although if you're naughty you can say "Yahweh" or "Jehovah" or whatever. Why the difference?
A clue is that "Elohim" is a pluralised word in Hebrew. Once Judaism became fully monotheistic, this became interpreted as something like "The Wings of God" -- a sort of abstract all-encompassing Godly aura, rather than the pointed and personified manifestation of the divine, which is YHVH. But this is a bit of a tortured post-rationalisation, and isn't explicitly supported by the text. It's much more straightforward to read "Elohim" as simply "the gods", which is probably how it was read when the text was first assembled, with a henotheistic YHVH text being appended to an earlier polytheistic text.
Even the first commandment -- "I am YHVH, your God, and you shall have no other Gods before me" -- reads better as a henotheistic rather than a monotheistic text. It doesn't say there are no other gods. It pretty strongly implies the opposite. It just says that the other gods aren't for you.
It's also worth noting - the Bible isn't a single book, and it never was. It's 66 or 73 separate books (depending on the flavor of Christianity), bound together in a single binding. Much more of an anthology than a single book. The books were separated in time, authorship, culture, and even language. Never intended to be taken together as a single document.
Obviously not the intent of the original authors or the people who decided to compile these documents into an authoritative anthology.
Not convinced "all over the world" as a fair representation. Biblical literalists treat it as a single work, and they are mostly American or follow American leadership and tradition.
They also usually pick a particular version of "the Bible". Martin Luther's version, which was the Catholic version with some bits taken out. They also usually regard the Catholics who compiled that particular version as heretics. They also usually prefer a particular 17th century translation (so missing a lot of more recent scholarship and discoveries), and sometimes even a particular late 19th century (I think?) edition of that translation.
The preference for the KJV is quite amusing given it means social conservatives who presumably vote Republican are relying on the authority of a gay monarch.
See my later reply to the parent comment, but basically, first there's the creation of the whole world and all the peoples in it, then there's the creation of the Garden of Eden and Adam and Even and so forth. The first is ascribed to "God", or "Elohim" in Hebrew -- a plural word which has recently been awkwardly recontextualized through a monotheistic lens, but probably originally meant "the gods" -- while the second is ascribed to the "LORD God", or "YHVH" in Hebrew -- a definitely specific God.
Presumably "and god said let us make man in our image". Although the monotheists can claim it is the pluralis majestatis, that doesn't seem to be a feature elsewhere when god talks.
compare Genesis chapter 1 with Genesis chapter 2. they are 2 pretty different creation myths. chapter 1:27 and chapter 2:21 certainly read like 2 separate creation stories for humans that have been jammed together without really fitting
The problem with AI NPCs is actually not strictly a context problem and cannot be fixed with prompt engineering or RAG, because the LLM knows a _vast_ amount of stuff outside of the context you feed it.
No matter how you tell it how to roleplay or how many instructions you give it or don't give it, there is always the problem that you can ask it to write a front end app in JS for you and it will. Or ask it about the theory of relativity or anything else that the AI is capable of conversing about but the character would not be. It is trivially easy to jailbreak out of fictional personas.
Unlike current videogames, LLMs by default flips the relationship with the limits: the agent is completely open-ended by default, but the player has to play along to a certain extent.
This makes the experience a lot closer to a tabletop game, where you can say that your D&D character does anything you want, and it's a negotiation between the player, the dungeon master, the dice, and the rules as to whether you allow it to happen and what the result is.
An LLM by default tends to be the world's most permissive dungeon master, so the burden of keeping things consistent shifts to the player. Early AI Dungeon gameplay is a typical example. Feels kind of like forum roleplaying, if you're familiar with it--there's no technical limit to what you can write so social conventions (and the mods) are what's preventing you from god-modding.
This is very different from the "try to break everything" way a lot of video game players approach things.
We might be able to eventually build an LLM system where fantasy knights don't know javascript and you can't summon a dragon by typing "there's a dragon." But that's going to take a lot of hard technical work, because it's very unnatural for an LLM out of the box.
I think people forget that all AI inference is role playing to some extent. It pretends to be a chatbot, or a programmer, or whatever. There is no real difference between that and telling it to pretend to be a wizard.
I highly recommend having your prompt in Claude code or Roo or what have you include a “talk like an Arthurian wizard including in your code commits and PR‘s.” Line.
The reason that the explanations are all in Haskell is that Haskell is the only language that is reasonably popular that implements monad and calls it a monad, and 90% of the people looking up "What is a monad" are trying to learn Haskell.
Not necessarily. I have a small little POC agentic tool on my side which is fully sandboxed, an it's inherently "non prompt injectable" by the data that it processes since it only ever passes that data through generated code.
Disclaimer: it does not work well enough. But I think it shows great promise.
> "I don't know how we're deciding on some of these critical product features"
You shouldn't be using a single channel to make critical decisions and this stuff should be documented and people should have multiple ways to be part of the decision making process.
> For example, large language models and other AI systems also appear to display creativity, but they don’t harness locality and equivariance.
"Next token" prediction is (primary) local, in the sense that the early layers are largely concerned with grammatical coherence, not semantics, and if you shifted the text input context window by a few paragraphs, it would adjust the output accordingly.
It's not _mathematically_ the same, but i do think the mechanics are similar.
(This is commonly repeated, but there is very little evidence for this)
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