lennivelkant @ lennivelkant @discuss.tchncs.de

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Science communicators that make complex things accessible for the general public are a critical component to building and maintaining public support for scientific institutions. If we want science to serve public interests rather than corporate ones, we need to establish public funding for it, which requires a public understanding of what they are doing and why it's valuable.

A blog I very much like and keep recommending talks about both the importance of this and the differing viewpoints within academic culture (specifically about history, but many of the concepts apply to sciences in general). It also has cat pictures.

This isn't the first time I've heard about toxic culture in universities (Section "The Advisor"). Again, the entry is about graduate programs in the humanities, but it's not just a humanities-specific issue.

I personally didn't know about HowStuffWorks (I was under the misconception that it was just a YouTube format, which I generally don't watch a whole lot), but checking it out now, I definitely missed out, and I think it fits the criteria of the field-to-public communication.

To drive such a valuable contributor to such despair they no longer want to live at all is a disservice to the public, a threat to what good their institution can do (which, for all its toxicity, probably also provided valuable research) and most of all a crime against that person. I hope they're held accountable, but I also hope that public scrutiny can bring about improvements in academic culture so that his death might still do some good in the end.

There is some merit to that, but not quite in the way you may believe. Their "boot camp" (that didn't actually teach much in the way of combat, just enforced the Spartiates' social hierarchy) did involve the senior children abusing the younger ones (including sexually), creating a shared suffering and an incentive to become the fucker rather than the fucked.

You're more likely to fight harder alongside the people that made it through the same awful shit as you did.

If you'd like more info, there's a historian's blog I very much recommend who wrote a series on Sparta.

There probably has to be some level of cohesion (keeping it together in combat - when you're under fire, you don't want your mates to wet their pants and run away), but I would assume that's established through drill and general camaraderie, not through romantic or sexual entanglement.

Entomolinguist

It mises the "good enough" human approximations of the "true names" when the latter is impossible for humans to pronounce: it doesn't have to be the exact correct pronunciation. If the Ants can't make the -lk- or -nt- sounds of my screen name and chant "Lennivekat", It's close enough that I get they mean me. I might try to teach them the correct pronunciation, then probably give up and ask what they actually want.

There should be a Lemmy feature (perhaps just a client implementation detail?) for LaTeX conversion

It would certainly be an atrocity, if that's what you're getting at. There is no less value to Palestinian or Native American lives than to European ones. Genocide, however, is the systematic persecution with the intent to eliminate a certain ethnic group.

The difficulty in your example arises with defining that "genus" in the modern sense of genocide, since "Parisian" is a very diverse mix of people. What makes them "Parisian"?

If their common association is, say, having their primary residence in Paris, or having been in Paris during a certain point or stretch in time, I suppose we could coin the term "urbicide", but I don't know if there's a historical precedent for the systematic persecution of a specific city by whatever definition.

There is the historic phenomenon of soldiers wantonly slaughtering a chunk of the populace of a captured city, but if you wanted to actually use the administrative and productive value of that city you'd want to keep the killing in check. On the other hand, raiding other tribes or villages and killing inhabitants with the purpose of driving them away from your lands also involved the murder of civilians, but the intent was foremost to secure resources and prosperous land for your own people.

Failing any other classification, it would still be a massacre. We don't need to slap particularly loaded labels onto everything bad to make it bad. Doing so dilutes the meaning of those terms, watering down both their political weight and their usefulness in classifying events.

I don't think they did. A minority voted for this, but I don't think they actually grasped or knew the extent of what they were voting for.

Partial genocides are still genocides.

I'd assume intention makes the difference here: Anakin was lashing out in anger at the ones immediately within reach, like a one-man pogrom, but I don't know that he commanded an attempt to exterminate their entire kind.

Given how thoroughly the Tusken Raiders are narratively linked to American Indians it's also pretty fucking weird that you'd insist on this point. How many tribes do you get to wipe out before it's a genocide iyo?

I honestly wasn't aware of that narrative link, which may be an artifact of my European cultural perception.

In any case, it wouldn't change my stance: Massacring one tribe would be a massacre. Done out of racial hatred, it would be a hate crime. The criterion for genocide would be the scale and scope: Is your violence aimed only at a specific tribe?

Attempting to push a particular group from prosperous land has been a motivator for warfare since forever. That's not what makes a Genocide in my opinion. A genocide is a systematic attempt to eradicate an entire people, not just displace them.

That doesn't mean massacres or wars of displacement aren't atrocities either, just that we don't need to slap the label "genocide" on everything, thereby devaluing its gravity when applied to things where it actually fits (like the war of extermination on the Palestinian people).

Now, if I missed something and Anakin went on to chase down the rest of the Tusken people, that would be genocide too.

Now I want to learn more.

That is just about the greatest compliment you could give me, and I'm delighted that my own fascination has lit some in you too.

One blog I can't recommend enough is A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, a Roman and Military historian's look at pop culture depictions of history like the Siege of Gondor or the general stereotype of Romans, interspersed with general info about the social patterns around making bread, a discussion on the nature and severity of the collapse of western Rome, an argument on "Why We Need the Humanities" and even some thoughts on spaceship gun placement and a followup on starship design extrapolated from the factors that informed those decisions historically (like firing arcs or protection of vital components).

I'll give you a single, half-hearted warning that you may end up sinking hours and hours into binging this, but I honestly think that it's a good way to spend those hours.

Actually, it's not entirely disconnected.

Concrete was mostly used in large building projects. These were expensive and thus usually sponsored by those wealthy enough to invest in such projects, particularly if they were vanity projects. In Rome, that would be the Emperors. Outside, it would typically take multiple sponsors.

The decline in economic stability around the Third Century, the reduction in profitable conquest due to military power being invested in civil wars of succession and the increasingly expensive bribes for the Praetorian Guard all contributed to Emperors having less money to spend on such projects, with predictable results: Less projects were built.

This is vaguely recited from an AskHistorians post, all errors are on me.

That is a very good point. The people should be controlling the government, after all.

Much of Roman technology was lost because the collapse of state capacity and according administrative capacity rendered the balance of agrarian to non-agrarian workers unsustainable.

A high equilibrium, where the products of population centers supports and enhances the productivity of the agrarian surroundings while administrative pressure (like taxes) encourage the trade between the two: If the farmers need to pay taxes in coin, they need to sell surplus to merchants who ship it to cities to sell it. Conversely, the craftsmen producing iron plows, pottery and so on need coin too, so they sell tools, which the farmers buy to improve their yield. The state also buys services (like construction) and the elite buys luxuries, further creating jobs and fostering more technological development.

(Obviously, the elite skim a lot off the value produced by others - just because they did some good for others with it doesn't mean they didn't primarily do a lot of good for themselves.)

But when internal strife, plague, worsening climate, desperate invaders and identity politics all start breaking that machine, it's hard to keep it from falling apart. And once the rural argarian production can no longer sustain the cities, the skills and crafts of the urbanites get lost.

Maybe someone should pair the watchdogs with guard dogs to do the biting when the former bark

Anakin murdered one village, he didn't prosecute a war of extinction against an entire people.

That, or they opted to use buzzwords to secure funding from investors more willing to buy into the hype than actually interested about the research.

Or it's just a joke, playing off of that trope or scientific headlines to make a caricature of Musk.

AGI and ASI are what I am referring to. Of course we don't actually have that right now, I never claimed we did.

I was talking about the currently available technology though, its inefficiency, and the danger of tech illiteracy leading to overreliance on tools that aren't quite so "smart" yet to warrant that reliance.

I agree with your sentiment that it may well some day reach that point. If it does and the energy consumption is no longer an active concern, I do see how it could justifiably be deployed at scale.

But we also agree that "we don't actually have that right now", and with what we do have, I don't think it's reasonable. I'm happy to debate that point civilly, if you're interested in that.

It is hilarious and insulting you trying to "erm actually" me when I literally work in this field doing research on uses of current gen ML/AI models.

And how would I know that? Everyone on the Internet is an expert, how would I come to assume you're actually one? Given the misunderstanding outlined above, I assumed you were conflating the (topical) current models with the (hypothetical) future ones.

Go fuck yourself

There is no need for such hostility. I meant no insult, I just misunderstood what you were talking about and sought to correct a common misconception. Seeing how the Internet is already full of vitriol, I think we'd all do each other a favour if we tried applying Hanlon's Razor more often and look for explanations of human error instead of concluding malice.

I hope you have a wonderful week, and good luck with your ongoing research!

Are you permanently drawing data at full available bandwidth?

Data consumption isn't a constant stream limited only by your speed, it's a question of demand. Maybe compare it to getting groceries: Getting them by car may be quicker than on foot, but that doesn't mean you'll need more of them.

AI strong enough would be smarter than a human

General AI might be, but the type of "AI" we have right now isn't general, isn't smarter, it's just a really expensive imitation engine that people keep mistaking for actual intelligence.

And the energy consumption and heat production are really not what our global situation needs right now.

My personal suggestion? Stop using Twatter.

Whether you move on to some other microblogging platform (like Bluesky or Mastodon) or just drop it entirely is a different question and depends on what content you care about. When you do check it, what do you check it for? Would you really miss that?

If it's specific accounts or personalities you care about, you could check if they have opened alternative accounts on those other platforms and let that inform your decision. If it's topics, I don't know enough about Bluesky's userbase to recommend it, but I know Mastodon's @FediFollows@social.growyourown.services has a bunch of topic-oriented curated lists.