anvandare

And if it could think, it would probably be very proud of the quarter (hour) figures that it could present. The Number has gone up, time for a reward.

Comment · 1 year ago

I don't know. Let's start by cutting up any "social"* company/platform with more than 10 million users and work our way down from there.

Who knows, it might even have the side-effect of forcing them to use open protocols so that people can connect to people who are on other platforms. Maybe they'll even have to make money by delivering service to their users instead of users to their advertisers.

* antisocial, they are antisocial.

Comment · 1 year ago

The gender of a noun is just a noun class. But because Germanic languages lie more toward the analytic end of the morphological typology continuum (whereas Romance languages lie more toward the synthetical end) the information is latent - or rather, the task of conveying that information is left to other words (the articles).

Just imagine if someone studied Portuguese but learned vocabulary like this, never bothering with the ending vowel:

  'gat-'

  'cas-'

  'bolach-'

To make a weird tech analogy: Romance nouns are like laptops, with a touchpad built in. Germanic nouns are like desktops, you have to remember to carry a mouse* along.

* Die Maus

Comment · 1 year ago

Pregnancy is, it seems, just another (evolutionary) war.

https://aeon.co/essays/why-pregnancy-is-a-biological-war-bet...

Red in tooth and claw at every layer, from the smallest cell to the entire biosphere.

Comment · 1 year ago

"The limits of my keyboard mean the limits of my programming language."

If only they had had ⊥ and ⊤ somewhere on their keys to work with Booleans directly while designing the languages. In another branch of history, perchance.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)#/me...

Comment · 1 year ago

I take it this means it has moved to the obituaries?

Comment · 2 years ago

Well, if she weighs the same as a duck...

It seems to be a variation of §1 - because witchcraft is a serious crime and the god of rivers (Idlurugu) would obviously drown anyone who was a witch.[1]

§1: accuse someone of murder -> (can't prove your case) -> your own life is forfeit

§2: accuse someone of witchcraft -> (can't prove your case) AND (they prove they are not punished/drowned by the river god) -> your own life is forfeit

Trial by ordeal was an ancient thing, even back then.[2] It is the sort of thing you see where there was no real distinction between legal and theological, between law and rite. Indeed, Töyräänvuori concludes:

>Arbitration via suprarational trial seems to be required in cases where it is the word of one person against another, and no forensic evidence can settle the manner. Anthropologically, the ordeal is supposed to reveal whether the witness or accused is lying through the threat of supernatural punishment, functioning as a primitive lie-detector test. Its use in European witch trials likely also follows from this function, as accusations of witchcraft were often spread through social contagion. An important facet of the trials is that they seem to have been meant to acquit the accused innocent of the crime in most of the cases it was used.[2]

It's interesting that unproven (false) accusations and perjury are at the very top of the legal code, with severe punishments attached. Which are exactly the sort of abuses you'd see pop up when a legal code is in place.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idlurugu#Idlurugu_as_a_legal_p...

[2] http://saa.uaic.ro/wp-content/uploads/6.-Joanna-T%C3%96YR%C3...

Comment · 2 years ago

I think you're thinking of the Lightspeed Leapfrog trope[1].

(In a more general sense, it's the inverse of the first-mover advantage: the law of the handicap of a head start[32])

Or: the early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LightspeedLeapfr...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_handicap_of_a_head_...

Comment · 2 years ago

As the laws of physics do not seem to stop at the borders of a skull, there is no sovereignty of the Self. But no one minds a thought thinking itself its own thinker, as there is no one at all. Just a thought.