It is more or less round. While modern milled coining created nice neatly rounded coins, throughout the history of hammered coins they were very rarely anything like a perfectly rounded coin. They were creating these things in a mass production environment where they made tens of thousands (or more the Romans), quality control was focused on weight over all else. For silver coins and gold some issuers did often try to hold to higher aesthetic standards, there's some Roman/Sassanian/etc coins that are fairly nicely rounded (though often still a bit ragged on the edges from being hammered) but for bronzes they did rarely focused on this (the Ptolemaics did, some others did, most didn't care).
You can tell them the truth, you could do public reach out, you could do a whole lot of things. Secret back-room deals deliberately hidden from the public who will (justifiably) assume maliciousness just creates even worse PR, less trust, and opens up avenues of corruption and abuse.
Between iNaturalist and Wikipedia, for me iNaturalist is the more significant of the two. I use iNat every day, have many tens of thousands of observations, and using it I've learned to identify thousands of birds, plants, bugs, fungi, and other things out there. Now I can name trees, plants, birds, et al, but more than that I understand better how they fit together into ecosystems. Also I've learned a lot of taxonomy which actually helps inform my view of the world a lot. In the process I've connected a lot more to nature, and thanks to iNat (and eBird) I now spent a lot more time doing meaningful things exploring wild spaces and spend less time scrolling on web pages. Wikipedia's invaluable as well, and completely indispensable, but between the two it's been less significant for me actually directly learning about the natural world I live in.
So the kids died as a result of the action taken (withdrawing meds from impoverished children), but the person who took the meds away from the sick kids who then died as a result is innocent? I feel like you might want to look at that word "sophistry" long and hard, and do a bit of soul searching.
While the quantification isn't inherently reliable, the reality of many dead at the hands at Elon Mush is a simple fact that's not up for dispute. The only question is how many he's killed so far. He cut off life saving meds to sick kids and food aid to the areas with food shortages, the deaths are known and reliably reported.
He co-founded a payments company - he certainly wasn't an engineer. He was fired and given a golden parachute from Paypal for his incompetent insistence that they stop all software development at PayPal for a year so that they could move off Linux and move to fully hosting on Windows NT servers (!). He was a manager and money guy from the start, he never was a software engineer or any kind of engineer.
Out of curiosity, what about calling someone a racist, a fascist, a Nazi, a bigot, etc.? Are those all fine too and better to just put out there so no one is, I guess, disempowered? Should we let everyone throw around racist and hateful slurs casually, and also label people using them with the traditional labels for those who engage in that kind of behavior?
>it's not that hard to learn to just read Attic and Homeric Greek
I studied Attic, Koine, and Homeric, as well as a few other dialects for 10 years through college until I left my PhD program in Classics. Learning Greek was _very_ hard and even after that time I still had many gaps.
I did some tests with heavily math oriented programming using ChatGPT and Gemini to rubber-duck (not agentic), going over C performance tuning, checking C code for possible optimizations, going over math oriented code and number theory, and working on optimizing threading, memory throughput, etc. to make the thing go faster, then benchmarking runs of the updated code. Gemini was by far better than ChatGPT in this domain. I was able to test changes by benchmarking. For my use case it was night and day, Gemini's advice generally quite strong and was useful to significantly improve benchmarked performance, ChatGPT was far less useful for this use case. What will work for you will depend on your use case, how well your prompting is tuned to the system you're using, and who knows what other factors, but I have a lot of benchmarks that are clear evidence of the opposite of your experience.
>In the jungle you have to be a bad guy to fight the other bad guys.
One of my favorite places to go in the world is jungles. I've never really encountered bad guys there, and I've never fought anyone I've met in a jungle. I think you might want to work on a better metaphor, and also question your assumptions about any of this since on this I can't agree literally or metaphorically.
The claims about extreme complexity of the Late Roman/Byzantine state came into the popular imagination by Enlightenment and other Western thinkers who were deeply biased against the late Romans due to a long history of cultural conflict. The OP is completely correct here, the reddit comment is an extremely incomplete story. It notes that the Roman state was more complex than other Medieval states (correct), but to say that it was "too" complex is a culturally based judgment, not a fact. The origin of the negative cultural judgment about that complexity waen't coming from the Romans, they were coming from the Franks, Venetians, and later Western Europeans who in large part were repeating the old prejudices going back to the schism, but also justifying their own conquest and abuses of of the Roman people.
Your article mischaracterizes the facts in a way that I sincerely believe could only have been a result of a dishonest party. You might claim that it's the VDARE fraudsters who lied and the publication didn't apply any diligence into actually reading the charges filed or investigating, and simply credulously repeated a story that was contradicted by the facts at the time of their writing. However you want to frame it, there's a kernel of deceit.
That's an interesting thing, but all the same, Plato's myths aren't history in any sense, and mistaking them for that is not an error of degree but of type.
Plato was neither a historian nor an archeologist, he had no way to know anything about the remote past. He made up and repeated myths, which you can impute whatever meanings you like onto, but you should try not to mistake them for a history even if they accidentally fit cherry-picked examples.
The ants who fell in died after a while, but the story is really about how they survived to form a colony close to a million through survival by cannibalism.
If you've learned even a little about the history of Rome then you'll quickly bump into SPQR, Mary Beard's recent popular, and very good book on the Romans it titled "SPQR", in the city of Rome you'll see SPQR used all over, in films when Romans are depicted, SPQR is always there. While not everyone will have a background where it's familiar, it's also not at all obscure. If you're not familiar with the Romans you won't know, but lots of people like to learn about the ancient past since it's really interesting to some types.
Time travel was the most important invention of the 1800s too, but that goes to show how bad resolving the temporal paradox issue is, now that entire history is gone.
Orwell was an anti-Communist, though especially anti Stalinist. He fell into the POUM, he didn't choose them, "I knew that I was serving in something called the POUM. (I had only joined the POUM militia rather than any other because I happened to arrive in Barcelona with ILP papers), but I did not realize that there were serious differences between the political parties."
He actually said "As far as my purely personal preferences went I would have liked to join the Anarchists." After the Stalinists illegalized the POUM, killed and tortured Orwell's friends and tried to kill him, forcing him flee Spain, his view on Communism grew ever more dim, and after that he grew more strongly anti-Communist than his earlier anti-Fascism.