The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.

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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • But there’s enough of a problem you can see even if you just start at Julius, which is what I was concentrating on in my previous comment. The parallels to Trump are terrifyingly on the nose.

    True that.

    Weirdly enough (or perhaps not surprisingly) I see the same here with Bolsonaro supporters; there’s a disproportionally high amount of them among classicists, even if humanities as a whole leans heavily to the left.


  • The alt right obsesses over the Roman empire, but ignores the republic, as if Julius Caesar and Octavius were the origin of everything. As such I’m not surprised that they don’t learn about what caused the fall of the republic. (A century or so of oppressed masses and greedy elites did it.)

    And, even when it comes to the empire, they’re busier cherry-picking examples that show that the grass was greener, the men were manlier, the women were chaster, and dogs barked quieter.


  • At least when it comes to languages, the eurocentrism and subjectivity are being addressed for at least a century. Sapir for example proposed that the “classical languages” weren’t just two but five - Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit. And the definition became roughly “varieties with a heavy and outlasting impact outside their native communities”. (Personally I’d also add Sumerian, Quechua and Nahuatl to that list. But that’s just me.)

    Additionally plenty linguists see the idea of “classic” not as specific languages, but as a potential stage of a language, assigned retroactively to the period when its prestige and cultural production were specially strong. For example, Classical Ge’ez is defined as the one from centuries XIII~XIV.




  • The backlash to this is going to be fun.

    In some cases it’s already happening - since the bubble forces AI-invested corporations to shove it down everywhere. Cue to Microsoft Recall, and the outrage against it.

    It has virtually no non-fraud real world applications that don’t reflect the underlying uselessness of the activity it can do.

    It is not completely useless but it’s oversold as fuck. Like selling you a bicycle with the claim that you can go to the Moon with it, plus a “trust me = be gullible, eventually bikes will reach Mars!” A bike is still useful, even if they’re building a scam around it.

    Here’s three practical examples:

    1. I use ChatGPT as a translation aid. Mostly to list potential translations for a specific word, or as conjugation/declension table. Also as a second layer of spell-proofing. I can’t use it to translate full texts without it shitting its own virtual pants - it inserts extraneous info, repeats sentences, removes key details from the text, butcher the tone, etc.
    2. I was looking for papers concerning a very specific topic, and got a huge pile (~150) of them. Too much text to read on my own. So I used the titles to pre-select a few of them into a “must check” pile, then asked Gemini to provide me three paragraphs summaries for the rest. A few of them were useful; without Gemini I’d probably have missed them.
    3. [Note: reported use.] I’ve seen programmers claiming that they do something similar to #1, with code instead. Basically asking Copilot how a function works, or to write extremely simple code (if you ask it to generate complex code it starts lying/assuming/making up non-existent libraries).

    None of those activities is underlyingly useless; but they have some common grounds - they don’t require you to trust the output of the bot at all. It’s either things that you wouldn’t use otherwise (#2) or things that you can reliably say “yup, that’s bullshit” (#1, #3).



  • It’s interesting how interconnected those points are.

    Generative A"I" drives GPU prices up. NVidia now cares more about it than about graphics. AMD feels no pressure to improve GPUs.

    Stagnant hardware means that game studios, who used to rely on “our game currently runs like shit but future hardware will handle it” and similar assumptions get wrecked. And gen A"I" hits them directly due to FOMO + corporates buying trends without understanding how the underlying tech works, so wasting talent by firing people under the hopes that A"I" can replace it.

    Large game companies are also suffering due to their investment on the mobile market. A good example of is Ishihara; sure, Nintendo simply ignored his views on phones replacing consoles, but how many game company CEOs thought the same and rolled with it?

    I’m predicting that everything will go down once it becomes common knowledge that LLMs and diffusion models are 20% actual usage, 80% bubble.




  • You know, the ban here was enlightening for me, about certain people from my social circles. Four examples:

    1. Resumed Twitter shitposting in Bluesky. Different URL. No mention of Twitter.
    2. Cheering Twitter being gone, as they were only using it due to their contacts, but felt like shit for doing it. Criticising how Moraes did it, but not the goal itself.
    3. LARPs as against fascism but screeches nonstop in Bluesky about Twitter being gone, as they think that the world revolves around their own convenience.
    4. Left microblogging altogether.

    But I digress (as this has barely anything to do with the OP). Those people like Musk are bound to “creatively reinterpret” the words: in one situation orange is yellow, in another it’s red, both, neither. Sometimes it isn’t “ackshyually” related to red or yellow, it’s “inverted blue”. And suckers fall for it. That’s what Musk is doing with fascism.



  • The text says “several”, but it mentions only four components (gdebi, apturl, aptdaemon and mintcommon-aptdaemon) merged into two (captain, aptkit). It doesn’t look like much, and typically the Mint project is responsible to not claim to maintain more than it can maintain¹.

    In special, I remember gdebi being broken for quite a while², so this hints that Mint’s goal is to get properly maintained replacements.

    1. As shown by Cinnamon. I personally don’t like it, but it is well maintained, even being a huge project.
    2. If I recall correctly, the issue was with the associated gdebi-gtk frontend; you’d open a package with it, then click “install”, then the program exits because it’s looking for sudo instead of pkexec. I’m almost certain that it was fixed by now, but it does show general lack of maintainance.






  • Because that “multiple” doesn’t refer to multiple hardening (σκλήρωσῐς/sklḗrōsis) events, but rather to hardening as something uncountable happening in multiple spots.

    It’s roughly “multiple hardening”, note how the lack of a plural doesn’t feel off in this one either.

    For reference, in languages showing adjective-noun agreement, the adjective gets the singular (e.g. Portuguese “esclerose múltipla” - the plural would be “escleroses múltiplas”).