Instead of trying to detect and block it, just disincentivize it.

Most AI spam on social media tries to exploit various systems intended to predict “good” content on the basis of a user’s past content by tracking reputation/karma/etc. Bots build up karma by posting a massive amount of innocuous (but usually insipid) content, then leverage that karma to increase the visibility of malicious content. Both halves of this process result in worse content than if the karma system didn’t exist in the first place.

Avoiding nuclear war long enough to destroy the world with our normal economic activity.

Is your Kindle e-ink?

The general issue with e-ink-based readers and scrolling is that e-ink is designed to be mostly static, with sporadic (preferably partial-page) refreshes; but scrolling needs to have a very high refresh rate that updates the whole page simultaneously if it’s going to be usable.

So instead of a simulation, maybe we’re living inside of some other type of thing we’re hard-wired to be unable to even think of—and maybe “simulation” is the idea we’re hard-wired to replace it with.

Seems like they could have avoided this by having the Sandy Hook families join the bid with an arbitrarily high dollar amount—which they’d immediately get back as creditors.

Obligatory Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

All information was passed down orally by people specially-trained to serve as “oral repositories”—in various cultures they were called bards, makars, aoidos, and various other terms. Important information was often set in verse to aid memorization.

There was a transitional period when writing and printing were used, and an even briefer period when these were supplemented by encyclopedias on CD-ROM before the birth of Wikipedia.

There are lots of kinds of “leftisms” with lots of different attitudes toward landlords—but to take Georgism as a concrete example that exclusively focuses on land ownership:

Georgists would say that the portion of the rent equal to the market rent of the unimproved lot—including the value generated by the presence of the surrounding community and infrastructure—should go back to the community rather than the landlord, but the portion of the rent contributed solely by the presence of buildings and other improvements should go to the owner of the improvements.

My uncle fell for this scam and bought some “prime agricultural land” in the middle of a flood plain—he had to come up with this whole technique he calls “geometry” just to find it again each spring.

If it’s a public forum and a topic of general interest, I bear in mind that every commenter likely represents a number of lurkers and later readers with a similar point of view—and those others deserve a decent response, even if the commenter currently expressing their viewpoint doesn’t.

In the British Empire, ancient Egyptian cat mummies were sold as fertilizer.

I met some gibbons once—they were suspiciously lacking in social skills.

Iain M. Banks’s Culture series—the prototypical example of “fully-automated luxury gay space communism”.

So if I have a net loss for the year, I’ll get paid to commit crimes?

To paraphrase Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: the better you know a property, the more ignorant you must be of its conjugate property.

I heard he was wearing a white and gold blue and black coat.

In addition to looking for the killer, police are still searching for a motive as to why someone would kill Thompson.

This is definitely where they need to focus their resources first.

Thanks—I made the mistake of going directly to the journal’s site and searching there.

Some impressions after quickly reading the paper:

• They start with the assumption that iron-age warriors took stimulants before battle (based on a comparison to other selected cultures, rather than any direct evidence) and look for any possible relevant artifacts, rather than starting with the artifacts and trying to deduce their use from the context of the finds

• They present no corroborating evidence like chemical residues or association with containers that might have held stimulants. They do mention a type of wooden box found in other graves, but no suggestion that the occurrences are correlated; they also mention metal containers found in female graves—but since the spoonlike artifacts are only found with male burials, there’s clearly a negative correlation.

• If stimulant use were as widespread as the prevalence of the artifacts suggests, you’d expect some mention by contemporary Romans or Greeks (especially given the famous description of cannabis use among the Scythians by Herodotus, and the fondness of later historians for imitating him), or some survival into medieval practice or folklore

• They mention a number of psychoactive plants based on their potential availability, not evidence of actual use—and not all of them are stimulants, or appropriate for inhalation.

• There’s no suggestion that the spoons were a standard size, as would be expected if they were intended for measuring drug doses.

In short, the paper seems a lot more speculative than the Newsweek article implies.

So they say this study is in Praehistorische Zeitschrift, but they don’t link to it, or give the issue, or the date, or the title of the paper, or the names of the authors? And they don’t ask any other historians or archeologists for an opinion?

Getting the street wrong is how we know it was him.