> And so it became institutionalized world wide. So they would send a bloke to Ballykissangel, pay him to sit there, listen to the villagers’ woes on Sundays, and spend the rest of the week in the pub providing cultural enrichment.
Oh, for sure, being a minister of any religion is a tough job that involves a lot more work than many people might assume. That's the role GP was clearly referring to, there, though.
More usefully, GPs point, or something adjacent to it, might be stated like this: in our modern age, certain roles that were previously fulfilled by religious groups are now either being commercialised, taken on by the government, or left to fall by the wayside. As we navigate modernity it's important to understand the larger context so we can make better decisions about how we handle the resulting changes in our social support structure, and what we might need to intentionally add back in.
But yeah, don't become a priest if you're looking for an easy job. I didn't mean to imply that.
They really have Monday morning and Monday afternoon mass? Friday afternoon? This seems like a lot more activity than the Catholic churches that I know.
Growing up, the Catholic church which my family attended, and to which our grade school was attached, held the following masses:
* Wednesday evening mass
* Thursday morning mass (this was attended by the school kids, as well as a collection of retirees)
* Saturday evening mass
* Sunday 7am mass
* Sunday 10am mass
There was also a weekly or maybe biweekly Confession.
That was serving quite a small congregation too, so I wouldn't be surprised to learn that bigger parishes have more frequent masses (although in my experience larger parishes often have more than one priest).
Also, the job of a Catholic priest is definitely not limited to performing Mass. They're essentially on call for Last Rites 24/7, but apart from that there's also just various parish events they'll be involved with.
So anyway, I don't want that job, I want the one where you give out vaguely mystical advice and listen to problems once a week, and then during the rest of the week you're like a cool side character at the local pub.
I spoke to a priest doing this when a family member passed. He'd perform the early Sunday service in town, then drive 1.5h to the next valley over and do a service there, then drive 45m to a third church before returning to the first for meetings and elderly care visits. Worse, each of these churches had different sermon schedules so he was preparing sermons customized to each on top of his other duties.
> They really have Monday morning and Monday afternoon mass? Friday afternoon? This seems like a lot more activity than the Catholic churches that I know.
Yes! For Catholics, there are daily Masses (and the Priest performs them, even if no one shows up!) in addition there is all of the other services they perform: Baptisms, Confessions, etc.
Then there is pastoral administration tasks, writing Homilies, etc.. then you have many important months where additional work is required..
You also have all other programs that Church organizes, including charity works, various community groups, etc..
I can't speak for Protestants however, since I'm a Catholic but if there are any hanging around here, they can clarify.
Protestant churches will vary, but I grew up in the American South, where religion is at least ostensibly important (and a major cultural fixture in the past, though less so today). Usually one or two morning services and some kind of Bible study in the evening on Sunday, and Wednesday nights usually had Bible studies and a sort of mini-service.
Other nights featured smaller study groups, athletic activities (a lot of casual adult sports like softball are organized by churches), or special events like musical performances, choir practice, etc. And then there's the daily pastoral care (officiating funerals, visiting the sick, etc.). But in the absence of Eucharist as a frequent component of worship, and where confession and last rites aren't even considered sacraments, there's little fundamentally different between a well-run Bible study and a full service except the scale. The actual things done aren't really different.
Note: Episcopal services would be much more familiar in structure to a Catholic mass, and I believe Lutherans are similar (but, y'know, not a ton of Lutherans in the South, so I can't speak with any authority on the matter).
Probably depends on the region. In my country, the church i attended to had three masses during the week and i think 6 (back to back all day) during Sundays. This was only one of three churches within a walking distance, and the (mid-small) city probably had around 10-15.
Which is expected, since every adult was expected to go to church every Sunday, and many people, especially elderly, went during the week. Also there were four or five priests, and only Sunday masses has more than one attending at once, so the load probably wasn't that large as I make it sound.
My trick with my previous dog was to just always have two toys for the fetch session. She'd usually drop the one she was holding when I wound up to throw the next one. Kinda like juggling.
Dude, this is so cool! I've had something like this floating around my cluttered headspace for ages, and it always sort of floats to the surface during the rare times when I do some light sysadmin work via Termux on my phone.
Another thing that jumps to mind is the minichord[1], a nominally open-source synth/instrument.
I just love seeing these little devices people can come up with given the proliferation of the necessary devboards and tools. Nice project.
* flipping through the pages I stopped with some interest on section for the "Optical Department" (page 84)
* I noticed the pince-nez glasses, and wondered "does pince-nez just mean 'pinch nose'?
* looked up pince-nez on Wikipedia[1], sure enough, pince-nez means "pinch nose".
* there is an interesting section in this article about early glasses [2]
* A citation in this section leads to "Renaissance vision from spectacles to telescopes," (p. 167) helpfully archived on the Internet Archive [3]
* paging through this book leads to a "fairly complete description of horn frame making in a Florentine carnival song of the early sixteenth century." [4] (p.171)
And finally, this "Florentine carnival song" has the following verse:
> Because they are made by
> necromantic artifice and the planets
> of Mercury, Jupiter and Mars,
> herbal juices and very secret,
> they make men wise
> when they use these spectacles.
I had no idea of the necromantic powers I was invoking by wearing glasses!
[2]:
> The earliest form of eyewear for which any archaeological record exists comes from the middle of the 15th century. It is a primitive pince-nez...
I wish I could find the original source on this, but I remember reading a tweet or blog that I thought had a really good metaphor for this kind of "male friend ribbing."
The metaphor went something like this: men making fun of each other are actuall y showing that they understand their friends deeply, because they know how to stab without hitting an organ.
That is - in order to make fun of someone without actually hurting them, you have to know which kinds of topics not to touch for any given friend. You skip the "your mom" joke for the friend with parent issues, and so on.
On the other hand, though, I have very often see my fellow enginerd types badly misread this dynamic. I've seen guys come onto an established team where some mutual teasing has evolved, then fall flat when they try to emulate that it - because they haven't yet earned the depth of relationship that makes it OK.
It kind of reminds me of another "nerd social fallacy" I've often observed, which I guess I'd name: "I can't be a bully." I think a lot of times people who've grown up dealing with bullying don't realize when they've become one. Sometimes the mutual teasing degrades into one guy just being a dick to the other.
That was my first thought too - but this is subtly different, and rewinds the context too. Actually highly useful, because I have often felt like a bad first pass at a solution poisoned my context with Claude.
I can't decide if I like this change or not, tbh. I almost always delete the comments Claude adds, to be sure - but at the same time they seem to provide a sort of utility for me as I read through the generated code. They also act, in a funny way, as a kind of checklist as I review changes - I want them all cleaned up (or maybe edited and left in place) before I PR.
I like to think of models leaving "useless comments" as a way to externalize their reasoning process - maybe they are useless at the end, but leaving them in on a feature branch seems to marginally improve future work (even across conversations). I currently leave them in and either manually clean them up myself before putting up a PR for my team to review or run a final step with some instructions like "review the diff, remove any useless comments". Funnily enough Claude seems pretty competent at identifying and cleaning up useless comments after the fact, which I feel like sort of proves my hypothesis.
I've considered just leaving the comments in, considering maybe they provide some value to future LLMs working in the codebase, but the extra human overhead in dealing with them doesn't seem worth it.
I've been wondering if the "you're absolutely right!" thing is also similar. Like maybe it helps align Claude with the user or something, less likely to stray off or outright refuse a task.
- like all documentation, they are prone to code rot (going out of date)
- ideally code should be obvious; if you need a comment to explain it, perhaps it's not as simple as it could be, or perhaps we're doing something hacky that we shouldn't
Comments are often the best tool for explaining why a bit of code is formulated how it is, or explaining why a more obvious alternate implementation is a dead end.
An example of this: assume you live in a world where the formula for the circumference of a circle has not been derived. You end up deriving the formula yourself and write a function which returns 2piradius. This is as simple as it gets, not hacky at all, and you would /definitely/ want to include a comment explaining how you arrived at your weird and arbitrary-looking "3.1415" constant.
I'm using a "memory" MCP server which basically just stores facts to a big json file and makes a search available. There's a directive in my system prompt that tells the LLM to store facts and search for them when it starts up.
It seems to work quite well and I'll often be pleasantly surprised when Claude retrieves some useful background I've stored, and seems to magically "know what I'm talking about".
Not perfect by any means and I think what you're describing is maybe a little more fundamental than bolting on a janky database to the model - but it does seem better than nothing.
Good lord, how do I get that job?