Not everyone is well informed about the realities of climate change, but many are and it's a concern I hear from normal people from the US, Europe, and Asia that I've met. Some bury their heads in the sand, and if you do you'll ignore others who haven't, but it's a very legitimate concern for people with a basic awareness of reality. Things have gotten far worse in my lifetime, probably older people are more concerned since we can see the changes more clearly, but not all young people are deluded or ignorant about the reality of climate change.
Really, I encourage you to log off and go outside a while, take a look a what the local flora and fauna are about and learn about that, maybe use online tools or communities to learn, but remember to log off and go outside and experience the natural world where you can.
There are a few places that don't use the Gregorian Calendar like Iran, Nepal, Ethiopia, and some others, so in those places no one would consider the year 2026 (though if familiar with a Gregorian Calendar they'd agree on the year). Then there's Thailand which uses a semi-Gregorian system that dates the year from the year of the Buddha's death, so there the year is not 2026 but 2569.
"the abandonment of representation everywhere in the world"
Worth checking out Socialist Realism, both the thing that motivated the CIA to fund and promote non-representative art and help develop it into a fad, and also a large corpus of representative art that existed when you imagine it did not (there's many others besides, non-representative art has always been a small niche relative to all art produced which is primarily abstract or representative once you start to look outside galleries and museums).
Jayme's theory depends on trade emerging post-Bronze Age collapse of a sort that requires a new kind of theory of mind and processing in a low trust environment driven by international trade. The Ea-Nasir letter was written c. 1750 BC shows that the same issues were already around ~ 800 years earlier and there's lots of international trade going on even in the 3,000s BC. The content of the Ea-Nasir letter and the personal reflections and issues presented there really destroy the central thesis of the book. It's also got a few other serious historic flaws (false claims about the existent of omens ignoring previous examples thousands of years earlier) that make it the kind of book that's interesting but without question also completely wrong in its central thesis.
>A lot of people use Claude as a friend/therapist/romantic partner
People developing a para-social (pseudo-social?) relationship with a corporate robot have far bigger problems than the word-chooser in their robot "friend".
Gardening and horticulture are ancient human activities that are incredibly old, the act of tending to and cultivating one's garden is a really delightful way to center the mind and get into a place where one is more grounded, connected to nature, and about as disconnected from capitalist interests a thing as you'll find. It's humanizing.
Just because the suits took a metaphor from gardening doesn't mean you have to think like the suits, maybe you want to liberate yourself from the kind of dehumanizing thinking where capitalism rather than nature is the central frame of reference.
please, I encourage you to feel free to share your amazing and brilliant insights with strangers on public transit in the Bronx, see how it goes, they'll surely admire your brilliance and very serious thoughts - you're so smart!
I knew I wanted to be a birder since I was a kid, but wasn't sure how to make that happen, now I can bird by ear and pick up a lot of species, have 700 wild bird species on the life list with photos, and hit the trails every weekend to look for birds, I run feeders, and track local wildlife with iNaturalist/eBird. I do think as some folks age they recognize that they want to be more connected with nature and work on that in their ways, my family was mostly the same. Nature's more real than what you see on the glowing rectangles.
You literally posted that some people are effectively born slaves, that's beneath contempt and if you said it to my face I would certainly have been far, far less kind. Also you definitely need to spend a while researching what comprises being an adult.
In traditional publishing publishers view the cover as a marketing tool - Arthur C Clark had negligible influence over what appeared on the covers of his books in his career when 2001 was released. That's not self-expression by any definition. You could hire a human to do art for you if you like, that's also not self-expression, nor is using an AI to do art for you. There's no meaningful self-expression in the act of having other people make things for you, they're doing the expression, you're enjoying (or not enjoying) the result.
Using AI to generate content isn't expressing yourself. It's expressing non-human AI content that's actually not a part of your self - AI content is the opposite of self-expression, it's other-expression. That's why people dislike seeing it peddled as self-expression.
Yes, every translation is an interpretation, none can capture what the original Homeric Greek means in English, all make some kinds of compromises. It is work noting that it is absolutely the case that some of what's Emily Wilson's translation is literally invented to fit a vibe - see "complicated man" which is not only not what the Greek says, but also violates the spirit of what the Greek says.
"man of many turns" is at least a better translation than "complicated man" which feels to me like a bit of a travesty to translate polytropos into. Polytropos literally has the roots of "many" and "turn" in it, "complicated" is not there. Lattimore was a literalist and his translation's weird for that but more fair to the Greek than what I've seen of Wilson's translation. Wilson takes the Fagles approach, but modernizes it.
For the record I can still recite the first book of Homer in Greek so I have opinions.
Yeah, I studied Koine, Attic, and Homeric Greek over eight years in school, Modern Greek's the Greek of the Eastern Romans who spoke an evolving Koine (this language they actually called Rhomaic) while their intellectuals turned to Atticizing. When Greek became a nation state Atticizing was idealized (called Katharevousa) so Attic and Koine are more intelligible (I can't speak much modern Greek and have no listening comp, but can read menus and signs and monuments in Greece), but Homeric Greek is a distinct dialect with its own weird vocabulary, weird particles, lots of complicated inflections later Greek lost like the dual forms, and so on. More like Middle English, familiar but very weird. I did a seminar where we read Homer's Odyssey in Greek, any English translations will inevitably be an interpretation reflecting the thoughts and values of the translator. Lattimore's good in some areas, terrible in others, Emily Wilson's great in some areas, terrible in others. I never read Fagles but assume it's the same.
Logistics companies are using hybrid QC now from D-Wave Systems. Quantum computing is currently in use in the real world. There's already physics simulations running on QC hardware beyond the capacities of classical computing, QuEra's Gemini is already doing materials science work now. It's very expensive, giant logistics companies and other industries with lots of capital and the need to do the special kinds of simulations these things are good at will be renting time on these things from specialized vendors who can run this kind of intensive hardware, something like time sharing on a supercomputer. Quantum-as-a-Service (QaaS) via platforms like Amazon Braket, Azure Quantum, or IBM Quantum Platform is already a thing. Big Pharma will be renting this stuff, Google currently plans to have QC for Pharma applications running c. 2028-2030. Lots of folks dealing with materials sciences and so on will be on projects where this will be affordable since not everything needs a massive CRQC to be useful.
Every time I see someone pearl-clutching about speaking honestly about fascists, my mental picture is unsympathetic as well. "Fascist" may be inflammatory but it's certainly not inaccurate. Fascists are a real part of the world, trying to language police them away doesn't work.
Whatever that performance was, it certainly was not a debunking. The guy made a Nazi salute at CPAC, I saw it, there wasn't any ambiguity or question of intent. To me and everyone I know it was an obvious overt Nazi salute made in a context where it was clear that's what he was doing, esp. to me and my Jewish family members. The fact that the ADL stooped to what they did doesn't change reality, it just shows what a bunch of ghouls the ADL have become. Other Jewish orgs have been clear that this was a Nazi salute.
I've taken up gardening, I hike more, I go birdwatching every weekend, I practice pen and pencil drawing and sketching on paper, and I read more paper books these days since there's not much that's very compelling about the current web for me - at this point I'd rather be weeding than surfing the current web, it's great.
You might want to search for "alexander the great" again, and also, maybe use "Alexander IV" or "Alexander of Macedon". I'm an amateur Classicist I look up ancient figures all that time, obscure and well known to check wikipedia on things, and I've never seen it prioritize that film above the figure, though perhaps it did when that movie was recent. Pity about Thor and the MCU, though.
Having worked a large bureaucracy, when we'd sometimes get into some catch 22, I used to quote the line "I am only taking it to keep you from thinking you have omitted anything" sometimes to a friend who also knew the short story, and we'd laugh.
I live in Austin, we used to have huge butterfly migrations long ago, they were amazing to see, big swarms of Queen butterflies as well as Monarchs and other species. Last year's was heartbreaking to see, handfuls where there once were swarms, though I think that was driven by the drought. I have a pollinator garden and have been tracking butterflies in iNaturalist for a decade, last few years the numbers have been showing real decline. I think it's mostly habitat loss for my area.
Fairly sure it's just a coincidence, Sasanian refers to the dynasty started by Sasan, an ancient Persian king. Sassenach seems to have its roots in "Saxon".