nemo

I don't really relate to a lot of it, it's mostly a crude caricature of my experience, though it's still funny.

Right now Twitter is steadily shedding users and watching ad revenue steadily drop. Looks like it's in a slow death spiral to me.

The Romans mostly used oil lamps rather than candles, the use of candles as a popular light source developed among early medieval Christians who started to use them in their churches after the olive oil supplies dried up in the late/post Western Roman empire. These were too early to be tied to candle use (and strangely distributed geographically). Also the Romans had no kind of industrial standardization or production, every candle was hand made and unique, all the wax/tallow was valuable, so the later Romans who would have used candles would have used a candle holder designed to capture any lost fuel to reuse.

The big question there is why these metalworkers showed up in only one part of the empire, one of the less wealthy regions, and not one with some unique needs for bronze casting. Note that these are cast bronze, using the term "metalwork" conflates smiths who work with tin, gold, bronze, and iron, but those were different professions. This isn't a blacksmith showing off his ironworking skills, it's a person of a different profession casting fine bronze. Hard to say why you'd have mendicant bronze workers casting things, I don't know of any records of but it's a very limited area for so many finds, while this same work was needed all over the empire, why nothing in Spain, Italy, North Africa, or the eastern provinces where they'd need the same? Why just that one highly restricted range within Rome that coincides with Gallia and Britain?

Knitting hadn't been invented when these were around - we know the Romans made gloves, socks, and other garments with a great deal of supporting evidence, there's not a single example of a mitten, nor of any kind of knitting like this. The Romans wove cloth on a loom and stitched it together. There's no signs of wear on any examples of the dodecahedra, so it's not a hand tool that comes into contact with wool or metals which would leave at least micro-abrasions. Whatever these were they were not a hand tool. It snows in north Italy, why wouldn't they need gloves in some places where it snows outside of Gallia? The knitting tool is among the weakest hypotheses in terms of evidence.

If journalists were to refer to these as a knitting tool it would be because they were lazy and didn't do any research into that hypothesis. In general journalists writing on this tend to acknowledge scholarly opinion that their use is unknown and hypotheses about it are speculative. The lazy journalists are the ones who write about how some Youtuber decided it's a knitting tool or whatever and uncritically repeat this without researching scholarly consensus or what historians and archaeologists have to say about the tool.

>While some have members who aren't religious, the 12 steps are a religious doctrine.

I found groups that weren't religious, but if you go to an AA meeting you are participating in religious rites masquerading as addiction therapy. The placebo effect makes it work for some small number who keep going to meetings, and attributes magical healing powers to those groups and their rites, as cults do. The folks I met there were mostly really nice, and they were usually trying to downplay the fact that the 12 steps and all the structures around it are an embodiment of Protestantism.

Like Higher Powers, the Disease Model of AA is also religious doctrine, and particularly pernicious. The system (regardless of the group or their intents) pushes learned helplessness to keep people in the cult where they all see themselves as inherently deficient in a way that forms a group identity, attributing participation in the group and it's religious rites of confession (sponsor) and penance (the resentments business) to spiritual healing.

Personally I find it a repugnant organization that preys on the vulnerable to get them to join a cult rather than deal with their problems.

Anyway, I'm doing great thanks. I don't have a disease, and things are going well, I use some drugs in moderation when they're fun, and don't attribute liking the sensation with any kind of narrative about that being a spiritual disease. Liking drugs is just part of being a normal healthy human, moderation is the key.

All the best to you as well, good luck out there.

I've been to a number of AA meetings trying to find less religious groups. While some have members who aren't religious, the 12 steps are a religious doctrine. The entire method and approach are derived from the Oxford Group/Moral ReArmament, and the structure is a cultish church structure. I've yet to see an AA meetings without the 12 Steps, and those steps are religiously oriented - you are submitting to some form of god (a higher power may not be God, but it's a god), and repenting for your sins.

AA can work for some people but studies of AA's efficacy show it's effectively a placebo effect. I'd recommend against it, personally, since the organization itself is really odious and the suicide rate of AA members is far higher than people in any other treatment form, and there's been a lot of cases of sexual abuse covered up and other typical cult behaviors.

I'm suspicious of the use of "we" here since I don't feel like I'm a part of this discourse. Also:

>Now you are always late to things not because you are lovably forgetful

In the past from, say, 30-40 years ago, if you failed to arrive at appointments and meetings on time you probably weren't labeled "lovably forgetful," and you probably would face punishments for having certain personality traits. We're changing in how we understand those kinds of differences now, and it's not all for the better, but in general the discourse now is better than how things were in the past when neurodiverse folks tended to receive a lot of punishment, invective, bullying, and ostracism.

I've been autistic my whole life, but I'm from the older set where there was no understanding of such things, we used to get bullied a lot, sometimes quite violently, and social ostracism was typical then for folks on the spectrum. I'd be thoughtful about romanticizing the past or get taken in by the false feelings of nostalgia - it's wrong to imagine people used to deal with the neurodiverse in glowing light and thoughtful acceptance, no one ever said I was "lovably forgetful."

>The term 'painkiller' is reserved for strong pain relief

Maybe there's some very specific, limited medical context where this is the case but in common parlance it's not at all the case, search for "painkiller" in an online shop like Amazon and you'll find a whole lot of Paracetamol/Tylenol, and various NSAIDs (aspirin/ibuprofen) and manufacturers of those drugs actually use that specific term.

I wouldn't recommend ignoring any of the sources of pollution.

There are a lot of folks who vastly underestimate the carbon output of current AI training and work, and you're among them. The number of data centers being raised right now with increased power planning around data centers around the globe points to a reality of energy consumption that's probably an order of magnitude higher than you imagine. At a time when the costs of carbon poisoning the oceans is getting really ugly and driving extinctions, melting polar ice, and driving global warming, writing off a major new generator of atmospheric carbon is dangerously irresponsible.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energ...

Some plants actually have evolved to be pollinated by hummingbirds, they have long thin tube shaped flowers that a hummingbird beak can travel up. The Sword-billed hummingbird has an incredibly long beak due to mutual evolution with flowers that grew deep tubes.

Take a look at the Flowerpiercers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowerpiercer

They're true parasites, piercing the flower to drink nectar without any chance of pollination.

For that you want to use BirdNet:

https://birdnet.cornell.edu/api/

https://birdnet.cornell.edu/

Merlin is trained on the same source as BirdNet.

You can also use the iNaturalist API for visual ids, for what it's worth.

https://www.inaturalist.org

making excuses for the Wagner Militia really is not the takeaway you want from this one

The claims of the liberalisation of academia are part of a propaganda campaign from the people currently destroying academia - that narrative is totally disconnected from my experienced reality as someone who worked through an MA and a PhD. There's always been lefties in the Humanities, and there's been little change there over the last 50 years that I've seen. There used to be more Communists than there are now.

My wife's taking GLP-1s for health reasons. The author's ideas about the effects of these things are not evidence based. It isn't a magic drug that makes people ascetics. She eats less, but she still impulse buys clothes and things. The idea that the drug numbs feelings is not at all what I see, while some appetites are diminished, we still both do art, enjoy going out doing all the same stuff as before. She's lost weight, her vitals are looking better, and we eat out less, that's it.

The system has been steadily redesigned by authoritarians to remove accountability. I don't call my lawmakers since they all regard me as an enemy - calling any GOP lawmakers is pointless, they aren't accountable to their constituents, they do the party's business not the people's business. Protests are limited to "free speech zones" and almost entirely ignored by mass media, even mass protests are invisible to most. And elections are so heavily manipulated with intimidation at the polling places and large scale disenfranchisement that they don't reflect anything like any popular interest. It's bad, we're working on leaving the country.

Who are we going to believe, you or our lying eyes?

Sorry I'm busy, might have time to spend to look the podcast up in a day or two, but I don't think there's any actual value in that to anyone over an offhand comment so forgive me if I find other things to do instead.

I don't recall their name, they were a guest on the Root Causes podcast discussing PQ topics, though your summary varies from what I was trying to express. It's not that RSA will be classically broken, but that novel attacks to reduce factoring times of RSA key like batch attacks have a statistically significant chance of being discovered, that "further" was not meant to imply "completely broken classically," but "weakened further using classical approaches". Sounded plausible to me, though that's not a thing I'm any kind of domain expert in.

PKI Consortium: https://pkic.org/events/2025/pqc-conference-austin-us/

This smalls a lot like wishcasting masquerading as critique. I just attended a PQC conference, so I'm biased, but this paper's author makes a lot of very strong claims about the infeasibility of future attacks developing that most experts in the field would disagree with. There is a hope that this is all a fire drill and RSA/EC will survive the next decade unscathed, but there's also plenty of evidence to suggest that incremental improvements in PQ compute will eventually reach their goal. Rather than a big cannon, I see it looking more like AI/LLMs, lots and lots of small incremental improvements by researchers were needed to eventually yield some significant advancements. I pray Post Quantum computing stays in the realm of Cold Fusion, but I'm not about to believe it.

Cryptanalysis has already made a few strides on breaking RSA more quickly, and I've heard from noted cryptanalysts the claim there's a significant chance RSA will be further broken in the next decade regardless of PQ. It's a scary take to double down on RSA of all things.

This is an outcome of a very narcissistic approach to life which is completely disconnected to the lived reality of another that you are supposed to love. That approach to life will lead to very dissatisfying relationships, though it will also lead to a generally miserable and frustrating life, so I'd recommend working to grow out of it if you can figure out a way.

On a separate note, generalizing about half the human population isn't going to result in the reliable insights you imagine, you'll mostly find your own projections. If you don't like what you see, chances are it's a you problem.

No, I'm a vegetarian, actually. I haven't eaten meat intentionally for around 35 years now.

Looks like the mantis was partially paralyzed by a hornet sting to me. The article noted that insects engage in nociception with examples, that specific mantis wasn't in that case, but that's certainly not a thing you can generalize from a single Youtube video.

I'm a bird watcher, I go out a fair amount so I've seen a lot of predation, not just of insects but other birds and mammals. I still don't want to do needless harm to any animals, even insects. I'll still take out roaches, fire ants, flour moths, and other invasive/pest insects, but I actually feel some remorse when I kill the moths and others since I believe they do suffer by my hand even if I don't have another choice I'd make.

I have an iMac G4/800 that can run 9.2 as well as OS X. It's not as fast as the later G4s, but it's performant enough, the flat-panel is nice, and the all-in-one design makes thing really delightful to work with. Replacing the HDD with an SSD isn't fun since iMacs are unpleasant to work on, but is crucial. It's great for old games.

I'm 50-something, lots of the friends I've made in the last one to four years birdwatching are close now. I have old friends from 30 years ago but they're mostly a drain. I've formed new relationships with folks in my Tai Chi class as well. We're very close now, closer than I am with any of my old friends.

It might be that for some old friends add extra richness and depth to relationships, but that has not been my experience at all and I'm glad I've found local friends with common interests - I certainly prefer them to people I happened to go to school with. I know some folks from my job from long ago, and seeing old friends is nice, but still I mostly want to talk to the few that I still have some shared interest in common now.

If you want to debate something, don't pick another person's experience. There's no winning that.