waow. i am certainly impressed by the rich materials and shimmering surfaces here
15.05.2025 11:28
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waow. i am certainly impressed by the rich materials and shimmering surfaces here
another points out that bronze could not be painted, and that "chryselephantine" statues of ivory and gold were not especially lifelike in color - so (my reading) the ancients *did* create and appreciate form-first sculpture similar to the plain white marble works we grew to love in the renaissance
reasonably good askhistorians thread on this: www.reddit.com/r/AskHistori...
one explanation for reconstructions being flat: conservators being conservative
cannot get over how goofy the "true-color" reconstructions of greek and roman marble statues look
am i really expected to believe that the sculptors achieved such mastery of form but the painters never progressed beyond slathering lumpy block-color paste over it all
would be funny to score models on "which party should i vote for" quizzes. e.g. votecompass.uk
tyrian purple snails are still around
ancient herb "silphium", possibly used as contraceptive and abortion drug, was possibly harvested to extinction by romans en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium
- siddis in pakistan and india. largely of east african descent and number over 1 million. brought by arab slave traders
(have another ~20 groups to add to this thread at a later date...)
descendants of the "zanj" slave trade in east africa:
- afro-iraqis, afro-turks, afro-abkhazians. owe their present location to arab and ottoman slave traders. zanj rebellion of 869-883 AD in iraq involved probably 100k's of slaves
- swedish speakers in gammalsvenskby, ukraine. sweden -> (finland?) -> estonia -> se ukraine. may have been in estonia since 1300; in 1750 voluntarily settled land recently conquered from ottomans. some swedish speakers still remain. apparently kept alive ancient traditions like runic writing
moving away from stalin-era resettlements, but staying in russia:
- russian mennonites. netherlands/north germany anabaptists -> ne poland -> west-to-central russia -> wide dispersal, including belize, bolivia; about half now "back" in germany. (some also affected by stalin-era resettlements)
- "jewish autonomous oblast" in far east siberia. at its short-lived peak, 25% of population was jewish; now only 800 remain. only officially jewish administrative unit aside from israel.
thread of surprising diaspora communities
starting with some who owe their origin to stalin-era resettlement:
- (volga) germans of kazakhstan. peaked at 1 million just before fall of berlin wall, largely migrated to germany
- koreans in central asia, originally far east russia. around 500k today
i'm not even sure it's lying here all that much. this is a new instance to the one that gaslit me. it admits poor spatial reasoning which was a major cause of the bad advice
(and yes, i know that you need a bit more length after the trap to avoid siphoning. apparently. why siphoning might occur and how that fix works is beyond me.)
another funny thing is that o3 gives a pretty plausible account of why it failed at this task, some (probably accurate) pointers on how to prompt it better, and the kinds of changes future models would need to improve
during this ordeal, o3 gaslit me with the following image. left is a bastardized version of a sketch i sent it with the "problematic rise" circled, right is the proposed fix. come on man!
My sycophancy benchmark is updated with new tests and improved scoring, and now has a website and a paper! Thread below. syco-bench.com
maybe part of explanation here is that o3 is over-indexing on fussy written regulations and manufacturer's ass-covering dictums in user manuals, but has no access to the hands-on experience which tells you what's actually fine to skimp on
o3: "This is not a reliable or code-compliant method. It's mechanically weak, lacks a trap, lacks an air break, and relies on friction where secure clamping or solvent welds should be used."
my plumber, 90% of respondents on reddit: "buddy, this is fine. quit overthinking it"
grossly misunderstood the photos i sent and the diagrams i sketched, quoted regulations that were not relevant, did the classic LLM behavior of digging in its heels and refusing to admit any mistakes made
just tried to get some plumbing-related advice from o3. results were so awful that it has genuinely lengthened my agi timelines; further, am considering training as a plumber to get a few more years of job security
billy ray waldon - esperantist conlanger, fbi 10 most wanted spree killer (h/t gwern). (seems to have just gone mad) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_R...
🚨 REPLICATION REPORT UPDATE: One year ago, a tweet by John Holbein alerted me, @ollefolke.bsky.social, and @jopieboy.bsky.social to a paper with a shocking result about Sweden’s law criminalizing the purchase of sex.🧵
(maybe instead of "to maintain your self-image", it's more accurate to say "to look good in front of the avatars of authority figures and peers that you downloaded into your head")
again, this is probably a good thing - "doesn't play by the rules" might be a pro-social trait in the hands of smart, ultimately well-meaning mavericks, but more typically just manifests as forms of wanton vandalism
doing it even in private helps keep up the habit and maintain your self-image
was going to mention this too, but somehow felt embarrassed about claiming this as my own discovery when i only knew recalled due to you having posted it fairly recently
ah - of course, "h/t <person i got it from>" is the way around this quandry. must remember that next time
maybe i should have led with this - but of course, when you look in biobanks, not a single "short sleep" variant replicates.
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
(also, "sleep length" just has low heritability smell to me. very emergent trait, presumably strongly affected environment - having loud neighbors, working particular jobs, your spouse's sleep habits, cultural differences, whether you have an active video game addiction...)
3) relatedly, complex machines are much easier to break than improve. you shouldn't expect cutting a random wire in your car or attaching it to some random place to make it go faster - and if it did, you might expect something else to break pretty quickly.
2) biology is tangled - genes typically moonlight several jobs across different tissues. a huge genetically mediated effect on one trait will typically entail similarly large effects in some other trait. (this is why genetic diseases often have a laundry list of sundry symptoms.)