Amezarak

What gives you that impression?

It takes very little time to prepare and cook most simple meals - if you want to dress it and garnish it and execute a 1000 step recipe, that is of course on you. For example, you can have a steak and potato (loaded with cheese and sour cream) as good as anything you get in a restaurant in under ten minutes. It is rarely faster to go out to eat. That is of course taking as a given that people really are working more hours, which I am very skeptical of and which BLS data does not support.

I am sympathetic to people's arguments about cost and free time generally, but I think "cooking your own food" is mostly a victim of the increasingly sky-high value people place on convenience vs doing almost anything for themselves that constitutes "work" in their minds. It is definitely not true that money is the issue, as other commenters already mentioned.

It is the third largest coal producer, behind India and China.

You misunderstand. I don't posit that the educated classes are actually much or often any better off. All you have to do to convince them of something that is true is imply it's low class and boorish to think otherwise, and provide a sophisticated intellectual justification. Less educated people are often harder to fool because many of them have a reflexive distrust of sophisticated intellectual justifications and authority. What I said was that an educated and informed person would be capable of disproving false claims, much more so than they were 100+ years ago.

The difference here is that you believe the educated and intelligent (no doubt as determined by your preferences) should make decisions on others' behalf about what resources should be available to them. That is not what democratic societies are about; of course we've long been on the path for an authoritarian managerial state broadly throughout the West, and for better or worse that's ultimately what you're arguing for.

> But at the same time demanding the public to support more of what benefits you. Why?

Freely available, unrestricted AI net benefits everyone, though there will undoubtedly be social disruption and adjustments, as there is with all new technology. Restricted AI, tightly regulated and controlled, with the best stuff gatekept, benefits a very small class of people.

This is even more obvious when you consider the obvious outcomes here: it's trivial for someone with local models to download satellite imagery and modify it however they want, then use it to create and post misinformation. So you're not stopping everyone. You don't have any hope or possibility of doing so. You just want to gatekeep it away from regular people, who might have all kinds of legitimate uses for it, including things neither of us have ever thought of.

> Frankly, this seems so callous and myopic I think you would last nowhere near as long in a true post-factual-reality pandemonium as you think you would, either.

The world got along quite fine in this pandemonium prior to the 20th century.

> The button makes it socially acceptable to generate misinformation. That's it.

No, it does not. It makes it socially acceptable to use AI for fun. Yes, moralizing scolds hate that idea and want to talk about how bad actors can and will use it for misinformation purposes as well. Even some of the examples in the thread starter are clearly just from people having fun. In general the whole "safety" and "policy" thing is stupid - consider the "Eiffel Tower" example. I guess that's "unsafe", even if I just generated it to laugh at, or to use in my forthcoming webnovel about kaiju. No, we can't allow Google Maps to let me generate that image because what if I was a Russian bot using it to generate misinformation to convince gullible people who believe random social media accounts that the Eiffel Tower collapsed? It is very obvious where this line of thought leads.

No, not a return to books and newspapers, but a return to where there was a huge array of distributed and untrustworthy information sources, with the central authorities often having only a weak influence on them. The world was rife with gossip, rumors, and misinformation that spread mainly through word-of-mouth and papers and pamphlets of various kinds many of which had very little regard for the truth. As was complained of very often and sometimes led to quite amazing consequences.

Of course, in this environment, most people recognized that everything should be taken with a grain of salt, because they knew quite well that people could just make things up and there was no easy way to disprove it. That would be the environment we'd be returning to, to some degree - we'd actually still be better off, in that an educated and informed person would usually still be quite capable of determining if it was true or not in many instances, thanks to the good part of the Internet.

I am sympathetic to arguments that quantity has a quality all of its own - for example, I think this has deeply impacted privacy. It may have been legal to discreetly follow someone and note their movements for most of history, but because it wasn't scalable, there was no major privacy threat for doing so. Now it can be done at scale and very cheaply. "Quantity" has qualitatively transformed privacy in practical, real terms.

But nearly all the AI panic seems to be oriented around very different core principle - rather than "technological changes are making us less free in practice" it is "technological changes threaten public harmony." This is the core concern in all authoritarian empires. The idea is that people simply shouldn't be allowed to generate images or texts The Experts have decided they shouldn't be allowed to, because (in this case) it might make journalists' jobs harder, or it might trick too many people, or its offensive, or it offends some really vague notion of "safety" (or can be construed as such by people writing breathless articles for engagement dollars that will be bad PR for the AI company involved.) Yes, doubtless many people will be deceived by AI imagery. Many people already are. This number will certainly be higher than the number of people deceived by altered photographs, which are less in number and require more work to create. But this does not represent a earth-shattering disaster that must be dealt with by banning (somewhat dumb and silly) product ideas like "generate an AI photo based on this satellite imagery" buttons on Google Maps. It can be dealt with by cultural understandings of any imagery shifting, and a general return to older (not unprecedented) information environments. I think in the West, the rise of broadcast and state media really broke people's mental models of information - it really inculcated the idea that people cannot be trusted even in a democratic society to evaluate things on their own: someone must be doing it for them, top-down. The way things worked in the pre-broadcast environment is maybe inconceivable to them now. (And to some extent, there was always a "parallel" information environment that was in the background, but not highly visible to the people in charge, full of conspiratorial nonsense - but they could ignore that because they didn't see it.)

The ultimate endpoint of AI Safetyism is local models are illegal or highly regulated, computing devices are locked down, and only a small list of government-approved AI vendors with tight restrictions are allowed to Do AI. This is totally unnecessary, but it certainly has massive financial benefits for those who thing they can get on the list.

They were not likely written very early in almost all of those cases (your own link dates every single one to well after the canonical gospels), and almost none of them have meaningful narrative differences (once again, as opposed to theological differences.)

> Even the official gospels don't all match on all the details despite retelling the same story (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source) since they are all included that would indicate a few hundred years later nobody really knew which story was true or not.

The canonical gospels were all likely written within decades, not "hundreds of years"; and while you can argue canonization did not officially happen until much later, de facto canonization occurred very, very early. The others floated around, yes, but they were never mainstream in any sense.

Not only that the identification with that figure as the Jesus is highly contested.

Yes, Joseph Smith played a similar role to Romulus in the founding of Rome: the leader and lawgiver. It's the Joseph Smith of Rome you are wishing away, not Moroni. It also seems highly unlikely that Smith simply "made up" everything as some cynical ploy for power, as you describe the motivation of the ancient Romans and Jews. It seems much more likely he was a true-believing wacko.

> Likely a man named Jesus existed because we have non-biblical documents from the time period (Josephus and the Sanhedrin) recording that he existed. F

You continually imagine historical sources that do not exist. Josephus is real, of course (although the extent to which the alleged reference to Jesus is an interpolation is debated; I personally side with no), but there are no "Sanhedrin" documents about Jesus. You should probably ask yourself why you keep committing gross errors of historical fact (like your argument that there were plenty of records contemporary with the traditional date for the founding of Rome) while making this argument.

There were meaningful competing theologies, there were not meaningfully different competing narratives of the historical events.

I don't see anything particularly counterfactual or unlikely about a group of Egyptian or Caananite-descended Egyptians leaving Egypt and returning to Caanaan, where they fused with an existing population. Can you explain this?

The conversion of the Romans to Christianity happened because of real events, even if elements of the stories became mythologized. Or are you saying there was never any man named Jesus who was crucified? I guess you may as well argue that - both him and Paul could have been invented.

> It's how Muslims were able to rewrite Christianity into their own religion.

I think Mohammed was almost certain real, although I guess according to your standards of corroborating evidence, maybe he wasn't. The core of his story is not "rewriting Christianity", it's that he claimed to receive direct revelation and he used incorporated what he knew of what he believed to be true history.

> It's how Mormons did the same.

I think Joseph Smith is rather too well attested to claim he did not exist.

The idea that some random historian or politician simply convinced everyone his fiction story was true and central to their identity - and it worked time after time AND everyone else bought into it - is clearly absurd. Just pointless cynicism with no basis in actual human psychology.

These are almost always absurdly simplistic, when they're not simply projections of how modern peoples think and what motivates them. It's really not useful to speculate about motives because you feel events resemble patterns of myth.

> Further, the fact that his story is a mishmash of common tropes and that his very name is a derivative of Rome is a pretty strong indicator that he was simply a product of myth making.

You could make precisely the same argument about Alexander founding Alexandria.

> There are written records from surrounding nations and people from 750BCE.

Very, very few, precious few. There are zero comprehensive timelines or histories of notable events of cities in the region at that time. Indeed this is transparently not true, because obviously if there were written records contradicting the early history of Rome we have, then we would be talking about those. Indeed most of what we do have we cannot understand, because it's in Etruscan, which we have a very limited understanding of...because a very limited amount of text survived. [Ed - in fact from a brief survey, and given what we can read of Etruscan, it appears there are no surviving Etruscan references to Rome at all. Maybe Rome didn't exist!]

> There's evidence that the first founders of Rome showed up around 1600BCE.

Cities were seldom founded in desert wastes. They were almost always founded on prior settlements where people were already living. There were settlements in the general area of Rome for many, many thousands of years, not just going back to 1600 BC.

> The fact that the first records of Romulus trace the lineage of the rule of the city directly back to him is a very good indicator that the author was myth making.

So who was the first king of Rome?

> That's why, for example, we are so certain Ramesses II existed.

Egypt famously has some of the best records and archeological evidence in the ancient world. (And there are nevertheless huge gaps and mysteries in ancient Egyptian history!) The amount of records and archeological evidence for this time period in southern Europe is comparatively scanty.

> And very influential leaders tend to leave pretty extensive records.

I see no reason to believe Romulus and Remus would have been "very influential" outside of central Italy, and even then, the phrase is probably a stretch.

> The historian placed the foundation WAY later than it actually was and wrote a fantasy story about Romulus where the only thing that could possibly be true is his name

And somehow magically convinced everyone else all the history they knew was wrong. And convinced all the people in the cities around them. Interesting hypothesis. It seems like a much more parsimonious explanation to say that there really was a Romulus that ruled Rome and founded or refounded the city, and that's why all the Romans thought there was. It also conveniently explains why there is an ancient temple under the Forum with an empty sarcophagus dated to the 500s BC that appears to be dedicated to Romulus.

https://apnews.com/general-news-8996e6a7d9983ce25290408d2146...

This is a totally unfruitful line of inquiry, unless you are an academic historian doomed to publish-or-perish; in that case, it's perfectly understandable that you have to make these arguments as part of your career.

Better questions, when it comes to ancient history are:

1. Is there any negative evidence? 2. Is there any reason to expect more evidence than what we have? 3. Did ancient historians with better sources believe it? 4. Is there anything inherently unlikely about the idea?

In this case there isn't any negative evidence, there's no reason to expect more evidence than what we have, ancient historians believed various versions of the same basic story, and there's absolutely nothing crazy about it - someone had to found the polity, and to declare them fictional results in there still existing a first king of Rome, just a guy with a different name for whom there is no evidence at all. You can certainly apply (4) to specific details of the different stories - for example, it seems much more likely Romulus was murdered by Senators than raptured by Jupiter, though perhaps something altogether different happened. There's even very weak archeological evidence - a chamber was found in an area where Romulus' (empty) tomb was supposed to be, although archeologists are debating over whether it really is that.

Either way, there's a large gulf between "Romulus and Remus weren't real" and "Romulus and Remus weren't exposed as infants." You obviously don't believe Cyrus is fictional.

Large numbers of people report their ancestry simply as "American."

I would actually argue this is the origin of a lot of political divisiveness in the US. It also sort of boils down to the "America as an immigrant/proposition nation" vs "America as a settler nation" debate. The former seems to be ascendant in the past few decades but it's definitely not consensus.

"African Americans" certainly also separately underwent ethnogenesis, although the preferred nomenclature there has changed, and there wasn't really any disruption there. But I think it's certainly fair to count them as a distinctly and uniquely US ethnicity.

> Iran changed the game with their missile and drone defense ability forever I think.

Not an invitation for discussion on the vagaries on the larger strategy and outcomes of the Iranian war: specifically a comment that this statement is clearly wrong; Iranian missile attacks performed worse than historically would have been expected due to US anti-missile defense tech and drone attacks performed markedly worse than "experts" have been anticipating for years. The "conventional Internet wisdom" was totally wrong and appears to perhaps be immune to actual events, since we continue to see comments like "drone and missile attacks changed the game".

You can argue about the larger strategy all you want but technical reality we saw is that the US military outperformed expectations when it came to missile and drone attacks: far from "changing the game", they showed that long-range attacks are less effective than at any time since the early development of missile technology. The fact the Iranians were unable to do anything about ships a few dozen miles off their coast is absolutely bananas and perhaps historically unprecedented for a military of that size and capability.

You and the other commenters keep focusing on overall strategy about eg the strait but the argument was about drones and missile attacks changing the game. Rather than changing the game, they were shown to be less effective than in past conflicts. The real video game thinking here is the bizarre idea that the US and was totally invincible and untouchable until this showed otherwise. They took shockingly few losses.

2. The USN fired thousands of missiles at the Iranians so obviously they were highly motivated to retaliate. They tried and failed to do anything about it. Thus the idea that Iranian missile and drone tech changed the game would seem to be falsified, which is what this discussion is about. If anything it would appear that defense tech has changed things in the opposite way, considering its track record in prior conflicts.

Accurate long-range attacks are not new. If anything they are less effective than at any other time in modern history.