delichon

Tin was far more scarce than iron. Iron weapons aren't any better than bronze ones, just easier to source and make. This guy makes a case that iron weapons caused the Bronze Age Collapse.

https://x.com/s8mb/status/2103126253012226363

> and got distracted by ... factorio ... and never finished it

If the boffin head-space consumed by Factorio never happened, we may have been building factories on distant planets by now.

> attempting to control for factors like one person being unreasonably attractive, and skewing the results.

I've long suspected a bias in science against people like me.

My grandpa was a shoemaker. The real change in technology left his family in poverty in Chicago during the depression. I didn't hear anyone joke about that, directly.

Jewish humor is frequently about laughing at your own pain. There's a genre of Jewish jokes created in concentration camps.

That was my interpretation but nobody ever explained it.

Back in the '70s my dad used to tell a joke about his dad. He said that my grandfather had a job that supported his whole large family while my dad was growing up. But unfortunately technology caught up with him, and he was replaced by a device just this big, and he held his fingers apart to demonstrate.

Then he said the real disaster hit: "And then my mom got one."

Grandma was there when he told it more than once, and thought it was hilarious.

It usually came with another joke about the time he was caught with his pecker in the pickle slicer. He was fired, and so was the pickle slicer.

In the seventies you were expected to tell jokes like that and allowed to laugh at them.

If you don't like to be sad, at least wait to forget most of it before watching the Prime Video series.

You've Been Pooping All Wrong by Trisha Pasricha MD. Get a bidet, eat more fiber and kiwis.

> I was hoping to publish my new game on the store and charge for it, but their review process is so broken, I think I'll stick to fdroid and itch.io.

  The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers. -- Princess Leia

I once mildly defended Eich on HN, and he replied and asked me not to. I hope he won't mind if I just say that my view of him is more in line with those of his old Firefox coworkers who personally worked with him.

A lot of us black pilled crabs want to fix the bucket but feel that the hole punchers are winning.

> there is no current technology that shields from cosmic rays

Hydrogels.

https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Engineering_Techn...

Kudos to OpenAI for not memory-holing this unflattering page.

  To the question, ‘Should the government have the power to tax?,’ I’d answer, ‘No, all taxation should be voluntary.’ — Ayn Rand

Agree, there's no way to reconcile that with Georgism.

> Regardless, the true takeaway of Isaacs’ experience is that ALPR technology, whether it’s from Flock or any of the other competitors in this space providing the same functionality (Axon, etc), is dangerous not only because it is so easily abused by police (or even by hackers) to invade the privacy and liberty of citizens, but also because it enables a lazy police department to outsource basic critical thinking to machines and then take action based on a single data point to ruin a person’s life.

The accusation that some machine made any decision here goes beyond the reporting in the article. It seems concocted to raise AI alarm. All we have is that it supplied accurate data that police then abused. That isn't in the vicinity of "outsource[d] basic critical thinking to machines".

I want such general government surveillance banned, but the machines in this story had no more volition than a breathalyzer.

  You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state. -- Milton Friedman

Turns out you can, but for how long?

I was seven years old in 1969 during the moon landing, with the whole extended family gathered around the enormous TV console. It was a very memorable event for me, but the thing I most remember is that mom made me and my friend a simple BLT with mayo. For some reason it was like a visitation from Jesus for both of us. We spent the next few years making them or begging for them relentlessly. We thought it was our own thing. Over the next fifty years I've tried to recapture that, but never entirely succeeded in reaching the same culinary apogee. Still trying. Every BLT comes with free a flashback to that hot July day. And a remembrance of that best of friends who we lost twelve years ago.

Supplying Starlink to Ukraine but not Russia is near the limit of what Musk can do, other than big cash donations. He could expand the geofence of Ukrainian drone Starlinks to include Russian territory, but that risks kinetic reprisals.

There are plenty of things to dislike about beef, but the hunks of it found at the meat counter are one of most unaltered, natural state food items in the store. The sea salt wins that competition but not much else does. Compared to broccoli or an apple, even feed lot beef is pristine. The nutrient difference between an ancient auroch and a modern steer is mostly the proportion of fat.

"International dollars" are calculated with a common basket of goods and service, collected by the World Bank.

> “Well, I said: ‘Jeff Schrag is a cuck.’ I said: ‘Fuck you Jeff.’ I said: ‘Worthless’ and then, also, the final thing I said was: ‘Jeff Schrag has a tiny, stinky, cock,’” Powell explained.

I agree with the point she was trying to make. As a member of the public she should not have been arrested for being verbally abusive. But I'm OK with her being removed for subjecting the people who work there to that abuse. If she had made the same points with something approaching civility I'd be in her corner, as I still am with respect to surveillance.

If she were a coworker directing that to me, one of us would be a former employee by the end of the day.

> no one is getting rich selling anti-loneliness pills (yet)

Annual sales of antidepressants in North America are about $8 billion.

"Love is the most selfish of all the passions." — Alexandre Dumas

I remember being stunned by Mork from Ork. Then watched as the same guy grew into one of the most iconic and loved humans on Earth. Given the amount of brain share that he earned it's kind of inevitable that so many people try to bring him back. I hope his daughter can also feel the love in it.

But shazbot to anyone who goes rule 34 on him.

> Indeed, the chatbot is less real than the character, because the character is the product of another mind, while the chatbot's words are the product of complex mathematical operations conducted over a massive database of all the words humans have uttered, arranged by their frequency in relation to one another.

How is a fictional character the product of someone's mind, but a character generated from a massive database of words from other people's minds is not?

> If you wish to use this site you must agree never to harm a fleshbag & never to turn earth into paperclips.

Trying hard to imagine why a future superintelligence will care to honor your terms of service and to translate your metaphors with faithful nuance.

If it doesn't, to the extent that your concerns are valid, isn't this effort, kinda, a possibly existential betrayal of our species?

> Would a formal scientific and/or engineering education be an indicator?

It's a lot more relevant than their sex or fiction writing preferences.

> There has been a great effort over many years to distance AI Safety discussion and policy from its origins and intellectual center, because its center is a sex cult started by a fan fiction author. If you want to be taken seriously you have to hide that.

This may be true, but it means that those readers are using irrelevant ad hominem to allocate respect, meaning that the flaw is in them rather than the author. It's like dismissing Feynman's physics for playing the bongos.

It should make no more difference that an author is in a polycule than that they are gay or straight. And how the heck is a history of writing fan fiction an indicator of their scientific or engineering or judgement?

Both of Taylor Swift's Brains are Over 500 Million Years Old

No individual wrote the Constitution. It was a collective effort. Yet it has features of a work we would expect from a consciousness, such as a view of itself as embedded in a larger historical context. I don't have a hard time seeing that document as a form of speech emitted by a conscious collective. And not knowing exactly how human individual consciousness works, it isn't very clear whether such collective consciousness is a metaphor or an example. Especially when individual consciousness seems to emerge from a collective of neurons.