I think the difference in time is too big. Also, in the talk page’s archive it is stated that the wikipedia was updated because of this meme, and not the other way around. This is from the talk page:

Looking through the archived history of the talk page, I can confirm that the claim on the wiki page is derived from the viral post, and not the other way around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gulf_of_Mexico/Archive_3#Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl

How did I miss that?!

My timeline is incorrect then. Since the post from sassymetischick.bsky predates the wiki edit, it is more likely that the wiki edit was made in response to this meme, and not the other way around. This pretty invalidates what I said above…

I still can’t find any evidence of this being an actual trend, but I no longer have a good guess about the origin.

I have banned multiple of those accounts for DM spam. Banned a new one just now.

I’m not sure this is a bot. I suspect it might be a real person who doesn’t realize how they’re coming across. Initially, I thought it might be a strategy to get attention, but if that were the case, I’d be surprised by their persistence with a strategy that isn’t very effective.

I suppose it is kind of effective if we are making posts about them… Hmm…

I prefer not making too many assumptions other than to assume no malice. But of course the DM spam will not be tolerated.

Cuando quieras! 😁

Yes, but that version is in German. That website also has one in English: https://annas-archive.org/slow_download/24154814bfe1e676d79509c3db1f74a4/0/0

Let’s see…

Woah, interesting. The author is José López Portillo. I thought he shared the name with a former Mexican president, but, nope, the author is a former Mexican president.

The title of the English version is a bit different, but the text appears to be the same. It is a novel, and I can find no mention of the gulf of Mexico or of Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl in this book. To me it looks like a mistake in the citation.

The claim appears to come from this text (citation 1): https://www.scribd.com/document/703207646/Dioses-prehispanicos-de-Mexico-mitos-y-deidades-del-panteon-Fernandez-Adela-1992-Mexico-D-F-Panorama-Editorial-9789683803061-cbee5

Unfortunately, that book does not contain references nor is it stated where this claim comes from.

EDIT: As indepndnt mentioned in a comment below, the OP was posted on February 14, which pre-dates the wikipedia edits. So, my conclusions below about the timeline are not valid.

Hah, sure, let’s investigate 🕵️‍♂️

The term ‘Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl’ was added as a potential Aztec name to the English wikipedia page on February 15, 2025, by user ‘Mxn’.

The description of the edit is the following:

Frum says the Aztecs had no specific name for the gulf, which is plausible in a practical sense, but Fernández gives a specific religious name and is more of a reliable source on this topic

If we investigate a bit further, we can see that the term Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl is described to be a name for the ‘Gulf of Mexico’ in the spanish Wikipedia: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl

This page was updated to include the description of Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl as the ‘Gulf of Mexico’ in September 16, 2018. I don’t have access to the citation so I don’t know if the citation specifies if this term is still known/used.

If you check the history you will find that the same ‘Mxn’ fixed a typo in this page on February 15, 2025.

So, from this sequence of events it is highly likely that the term ‘Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl’ was included into the Gulf of Mexico wiki page as a result of the user Mxn performing an active search for Aztec names for the Gulf of Mexico, and finding this connection between the term an the gulf by searching on Wikipedia. This information did not come from recent news about the term being used by natives.

I can find no evidence of native people referring to the gulf of Mexico as ‘Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl’ more frequently or at all. I can find no mention of this becoming viral in Mexico.

I find it highly unlikely that:

• User Mxn added an obscure Aztec term to the Wiki page two weeks ago

AND

• This same obscure Aztec term coincidentally began being used by Mexican natives, and this trend became popular enough to be noticed by foreign media but not by Mexican media

More likely…

• Mxn actively looked for a term and updated the English wiki
• Someone read the English wiki, thought this would be a nice story, made the meme

And this concludes my little investigation 🧐

Always exciting to learn about new perspectives on consciousness!

I have searched for the “Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC)” theory and I do not personally find it very compelling. I appreciate that the hard problem of consciousness is very difficult to address using the scientific method, but I suspect that consciousness arises from a form of processing that requires computations of the kind performed by animal brains. I don’t think that the kind of biophysics that allows cells to sense and respond to the environment are enough to create a conscious experience.

About the: “third state”. Cells are alive, independently of the multi-cellular organism that they come from. I don’t agree that changing the way that the cells are organized constitutes some “third state”.

Despite my disagreements, it is still nice to read and think about. Thanks for sharing.

These are being developed by a Dutch company: https://www.oneplanetresearch.com/innovation/ingestibles-for-gut-health/

• In the general case, I think that we would not be able to tell. Unless the programmers explicitly program into the simulation the tools for us to interact with the external world, we would not be able to collect evidence of something external to the simulation. We are limited.

• I am agnostic to whether we live in a simulation or not, but I don’t think that this hypothesis brings a lot in terms of answering existential questions. We could live in a simulation inside of a simulation inside of a simulation inside of a simulation… meaning that there is an infinite depth of simulations when we choose to consider this possibility. In my view, being the first rung of existence or being a million simulations deep is the same. Discovering that we are in a simulation just shifts the existential question one universe higher.

• I have been reading some texts about theories of how the brain thinks (predictive coding), and it seems like what we experience as “consciousness” might be the result of our brain simulating what our next sensory experience will be. So, in that sense, we are all experiencing our brain’s predictive simulation.

Only those who complete life without believing in a God pass into the next stage of the simulation.

I have used XMPP for some time now and I tried Matrix for a bit, but have stuck with XMPP until now.

I found it practically very easy to set up a prosody XMPP server in a raspberry pi. In XMPP you have the core standard that is kept quite minimal and then you can extended your implementation using XMPP extension protocols (XEPs) in a highly modular fashion. This approach of building on top of a light core using well-documented extensions I like very much.

With Matrix, JSON is used instead of XML. I think that JSON is a nice format when trying to look under the hood at how the message data is structured. XML is a bit of a pain to look at in my opinion. And I think JSON might be more efficient in how it moves the data around. So, that is a big positive for me. But I Matrix appears to be more focused on being feature rich than on having a flexible modular structure. While it does have extensions, successful extensions do have a chance of being eventually integrated into the core protocol. This makes the core feel bloated to me, because I have very minimal requirements.

In terms of security, in XMPP you start with the core and then you select the type of encryption that you like (OpenPGP, OMEMO, etc). OMEMO encryption has plausible deniability built into its design, and for me, plausible deniability is a property that I consider important for messaging. The modular approach to XMPP also means that these are choices that one gets to make in an active manner, and the protocols are open protocols that come from outside of XMPP. With Matrix you get their encryption protocol as part of the core - it is a protocol that they designed and that you need to accept to use their tool with encryption. It is probably a good protocol, but I don’t think it has plausible deniability built in, and that’s a choice you did not get to make.

As for moderation, I don’t know. Do they mean moderation tools, or the actual absence of moderators and unmoderated communities? Because the latter is more a property of the people using the tool that the tool itself. You can have your own private communities.

If someone asks me, I could recommend Matrix but would rather recommend XMPP, depending on what they are looking for specifically.

Snowden’s Permanent Record book was a strong motivator for me.

Ah, bidding technology has advanced since I sniped Tony Hawk Pro-Skater for the Nintendo 64 on ebay. Why start bidding over a week early, though?

I find it strange that they are out-bidding each other like this when there are over 8 days left. I am not too experienced with bidding, but I thought that the normal strategy was to maybe place a placeholder bid if there is no activity, but more generally one waits until the last second to set a reasonably high bid. Going on a 1v1 with fast out-bidding over a week early seems bad for everyone except the seller. Perhaps someone can explain.

Someone needs to explain to Musk how to debug with the JSON so that the ipv6 GUI does not overflow into the git API front-end

Teach me a new tongue twister

I’m not sure about the laser from the article, but I know that the Extreme Light Infrastructure project has a few pretty strong laser.

The L4 Aton in Romania produces a single, 1.5 kJ, 150 fs pulse every minute - so peak power is 10 PW (1500 / 150E-15), but 1.5 kJ over a full minute is only 25 watts.

ELI also has the 2 PW High Field (HF) Laser laser, in Szeged, Hungary. This one gets the 2 PW with a 10 Hz rep rate, 17 fs pulses.

No, not at all! As you grow older, it may not be as automatic as when you are in school. Many of the people that you interact with might be focused on their own stuff (work, partner, family, hobbies, finance) and not too motivated to expand or even have a “social life” in whatever free time they have (if they even do). But this is not everyone. There is still a lot of people at every age that do want a social life, you just need to put in a bit of effort to connect with them.

And, a tip, do not consider failed attempts at socializing as a “failure” on your side. Perceived rejection often boils down to people being very attached to their free time, and socializing not being on their list of priorities. If you keep this in mind then you do not need to feel discomfort from rejection, and you can be active in your search for like-minded people without worry.

Even though:

These data are associative and do not establish a causal role for such particles affecting health

I still don’t feel so nonchalant about the idea of microplastics lodging on my brain. While the effect on human brains is very difficult to directly measure, we do have a lot of data on mice that suggest that having plastic in the brain is bad for the brain.

When quickly looking into EU food regulations it seems like microplastic content is not regulated in food, and the logic appears to be along the lines that not enough data is available to assess the actual risk. This makes some sense in that measurement, control, and enforcing limits is likely to be difficult, expensive, and might create some economic challenges, and so regulators might not want to go this route unless proven absolutely necessary.

At the same time, data does exist showing that the plastic levels are increasing in our brains, and we have very good reasons to believe that this is not a good thing. It is not that we are completely in the dark - I am sure some smart people would be able to come up with reasonable limits and methods of control by now.

My not-very-informed suspicion is that there is pressure from wealthy and powerful lobbyists that would significantly suffer from microplastics regulations, because ‘plastic in the brain’ has seemed like an obvious thing to address for some years now.

I have never been educated about how to avoid ingesting / breathing microplastics. Do any of you know some habits or diets that reduce or increase exposure to microplastics?