beloch

"Our incentive structures reward conformity over bold inquiry."

This is pretty rich coming from an administration that has cracked down on education institutions for lacking loyalty to Trump, installed student monitoring programs and snitch lines, and waged lawfare on any institutions that didn't immediately conform.

Academic freedom works because it's very hard, if not impossible, to predict what curiosity driven research that everybody currently thinks is a waste of time will lay the foundations for new fields and future industries. If U.S. research is refocused on private enterprise chasing the latest trends and commercializable things at the expense of institutions that perform fundamental research, the U.S. will forever be behind the tech curve. New fields will always emerge someplace else.

Unreliability is a cost. While the U.S. was the default, cheap and reliable option, it was virtually impossible to uproot settled patterns of behaviour. You just couldn't do the volume necessary to become competitive. That's changed. Also, transport is far cheaper than it was when the old patterns were established. If China can become the manufacturing hub for the world, Canada can increase its reliance on the EU at the expense of the U.S.. So too can the EU increase its reliance on Canada.

I'm not speaking of some hypothetical future either. It's already happening. Watch the video.

It's important for Americans to realize that Carney is probably the most Euro-focused PM Canada has had in living memory. He was the governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020. His relationships and predilections all run more cross-Atlantic than North-South. Trump is why Carney was elected. Trump is why Carney has a strong mandate and overwhelming public support to shift Canada closer to Europe and away from the U.S.. The changes that are happening now are huge and painful for Canadians, but polls show they're begging for even more, and faster. Canadians want this shift because they see no other choice.

These new tariff's explicitly violate CUSMA/USMCA, which Trump personally signed. That treaty does include a clause for pulling out, but that isn't being properly exercised here. Failing to use the proper termination clause for the trade deal just makes the U.S. look even more unreliable and incapable of meeting it's signed commitments.

It's now clear that trade deals with the U.S. will not be honoured, so why should Canada continue granting the U.S. concession after concession? The Carney government needs to go silent and let Trump hang himself in the midterms.

As for myself, I'll never drink Kentucky bourbon again so long as I live, whether that corn swill is on Canadian shelves or not.

Full tit-for-tat retaliation for tariffs? That'd harm our own economy as much as the U.S.'s. We want fewer tariff's. Not more.

Trump is most likely just trying to distract people from his Iran debacle, the cover-up of his involvement in the Epstein scandal, or whatever it is he's trying to do with the midterm elections. He's unlikely to follow through. It's better to wait and see what he actually does before taking any action.

Maybe if Trump weren't tariffing our lumber so much more of those trees would be providing cheap homes for Americans instead of burning! We're sorry America, but you're getting out trees one way or another. We're a little fuzzy when it comes to consent. But, hey, we know you understand.

There needs to be a carrot or stick to discourage this kind of practice. Perhaps when companies sue users for piracy, the valuation of what was "stolen" should be dependent on the nature of that company's sales practices. e.g. A company that merely "rents" media in a deceptive way would only be eligible to claim small fractions of a penny on the dollar were stolen when prosecuting a pirate. This way companies would be encouraged to respect user ownership rights if they want their own rights to be respected.

Some music is a lot like abandoned video games. It can sometimes be tricky to figure out who owns the rights and, even having done that, more difficult still to track them down and get their permission. Also, it's not a given that the answer will be, "Yes.". If you ask an obscure artist to fill out forms and jump through hoops for 6 cents in streaming royalties, they may tell you to piss off.

There are likely many albums that would have met oblivion were it not for piracy.

Just to leapfrog off of the calculator notion...

There's a difference between capability and mastery. If you have a calculator, you are capable of doing basic arithmetic (probably). If you can do fairly complex arithmetic in your head, that's mastery. If all you need is capability, it's fair to say that acquiring mastery might be wasted effort. However, if you want to go on to do advanced math, physics, etc., then mastery of basic arithmetic, calculus, algebra, etc. are necessary stepping stones. If you have to go back to calculators, math programs, textbooks, etc. every time for basic things while trying to formulate and manipulate equations, you're going to have a very hard time getting along.

Sure, rely on AI for things that you merely need as capabilities, but recognize that doing so prevents you from developing mastery required to progress to other things. If you don't want to progress to those things, then it's fine. If you do, then you should rethink your approach.

Archaeology is an unusual discipline in that it incorporates so many others as tools. Chemistry, physics, geology, CPSC, you name it. It's difficult enough to figure out what people were doing based on ruins and trash pits. It's harder still when there are so many disciplines involved that, each, introduce their own uncertainties.

That being said, "We asked an AI..." is a special kind of uncertainty that goes above and beyond anything else Archaeologists do.

--------

"No written rules for this game survived antiquity. To reconstruct how the game may have been played, researchers turned to the Ludii General Game System — a comprehensive digital platform developed at Maastricht University that can model and simulate thousands of historic board games. The results were published in the journal Antiquity (Volume 100, Issue 409, 2025).

Using Alpha-Beta search agents — the same class of algorithm that powered early chess computers — the team ran 1,000 simulated rounds for each candidate ruleset, allowing one second of processing time per move. The AI tracked which lines on the board were used most frequently during play, generating detailed edge-usage statistics.

These statistics were then compared to the physical wear patterns on Object 04433. To account for human cognitive biases — such as right-handed players preferring to play on the right side of the board — the researchers applied symmetry transformations to the simulation results, maximising consistency between AI-generated play and the actual marks left by ancient players.

Nine game configurations matched the wear criteria. All of them were blocking games, and the most frequently matching format was a four-versus-two game in which pieces start on the board. This site faithfully reproduces one of these AI-validated configurations."

--------

It's interesting that they considered use-wear on found pieces as input for their AI. Still, this study made a lot of assumptions. I wouldn't be surprised if a different team could use the same methods and come up with a completely different result.

"Avoid even audiobooks. Big corporations want to grab your attention by trying to market audiobooks as books for busy people, but don’t fall for the trap. A book is just boring black text on a white page because that’s how it’s meant to be consumed, and it requires your entire attention. Listening to audio while cooking or cleaning or whatever you do is not the same thing; you are not 100% concentrated on the content. "

----

I disagree with the author of this post. Audiobooks are fantastic in certain settings. e.g. Driving, or any form of transit if you're prone to motion sickness. Yes, listening is different from reading, but you're still getting information into your brain. There are definitely books that don't work as audiobooks (e.g. Anything with equations), but there are also books that are, perhaps, best consumed as audiobooks. Homer was passed down orally for generations before being written down. Anyone who poopoo's an audiobook of Homer deserves to be ridiculed.

For those who grew up post-iPhone: wearable computing was a huge, dorky trend in the 90's and early 2000's. Well, not exactly huge, but hugely dorky. Some people came to class/work/etc. absolutely strapped with a plethora of PDA's, camera's, etc.. It was actually pretty amusing and a lot of people had a great deal of fun embracing the dork energy. Then smart-phones came along, did everything a fairly ambitious wearable computing rig could, and fit in your pocket to boot.

There's a critical difference between this early embrace of what cell-phones would soon do and the wearable glasses being produced by Google and Meta: consent.

If a 90's dork had a camera in a quick-draw harness, you'd know they were taking pictures because they had to point the camera and press a button. You didn't have to worry that some of the most amoral and ruthlessly invasive companies on the planet were getting a live-feed from that camera, nor did you have to worry about what they were going to use it for. You didn't have to simply trust that they haven't disabled the recording light, nor did you have to deal with that light coming on suddenly without your permission. Back in the 90's, you could also safely assume that you just weren't interesting enough to spy on. Thanks to AI, every conversation will soon be (or already is) worth spying on, even just for the relatively minor application of ad tailoring.

Meta glasses are not just a new, dorky fad that people will find amusing and soon learn to ignore. They're going to piss reasonable people off.

One of Cline's main points about the bronze age collapse is that it wasn't any single thing. It was a systems collapse. The societies of the time were likely resilient enough to deal with "just a drought", "just a war", "just a big earthquake", or just some "international trade hiccups". What happened during the collapse was all of these things at once. It was the combination that proved so difficult to handle.

To be fair to Devereaux, this is just one blog post vs multiple books by Cline, who is one of the preeminent specialists on the topic. You're going to get a lot more detail with Cline.

Cline's followup to 1117, "After 1177 B.C.", goes into the resilience of societies and how they made it through the collapse and recovered (or didn't). If you enjoyed 1117, it's worth checking out.

You might be able to mount an image of the original CD and let it detect that, depending on how schmancy their copy protection scheme is. To be fair though, I used nocd mods back when some of these games were released just so I wouldn't have to keep swapping CD's.

"But most people use Steam anyway, I hear you say. That's true, but you can still own your games on Steam. Very easily, in fact! Steam doesn't apply a hard DRM for games on their platform, you can bypass it and play your games offline without the launcher if you know what you're doing."

--------------

When it comes to PC games, the real peace of mind comes from cracks and piracy.

Sure, a single player game that requires an online service to start up could become unplayable if the company running that online service decides to end it without providing a patch. If that happens, somebody will crack it so the game can be run. Sure, a game could be yanked from Steam without notice, but you can always pirate it. Sure, Steam could go under, but the internet is my backup drive. I know what I've paid for.

I don't have actual legal ownership of the titles I buy, but I also have recourse if I feel I've been ripped off. That recourse may be abused by some, but game companies have no moral right to oppose it until they start respecting the rights of their paying customers. Taking away something that was paid for is theft. Ownership rights for downloaded titles is a critical stepping stone if game companies are serious about reducing piracy.

Saying, "Oh, you just have to baby it and it'll probably be fine!" is probably not the best way to counter claims that EV batteries are unreliable.

Also, consumers currently are the ones taking on liability in adopting new technologies. That's one reason why EV adoption has been a gradual thing. Offer certainty to consumers and they'll look at what they have to gain instead of focusing on what they might lose.

If batteries are actually lasting, then it's easy to counter the propaganda. Manufacturers simply need to make sure batteries are replaceable and offer guarantees that they'll be replaced on the manufacturer's dime if they degrade.

Might be. Might not be. To put it another way, would you want this waste water diluted and dumped in a lake you swim in or a river you fish in without proper study and regulation?

This is one of the data centres that went to the extra expense of building a closed loop cooling system that would, supposedly, not waste water on a continuous basis. Apparently, even these are not so clean to set up. Governments are going to need to start paying more attention to the commissioning process apparently.

--------

"Meta said that it's supporting its general contractor, Fortis, which stopped discharging and began hauling wastewater offsite"

--------

Governments should also watch where this wastewater is being hauled to, and likely just dumped.

1. Imagine a video game like Red Dead Redemption where each NPC is voiced by AI and can respond to you in a convincingly human fashion. Their responses and even the plot of the whole game can change based on your interactions with NPC's.

2. Imagine a world in which humans can still write books and interactive experiences and find audiences sufficient to earn a living at it.

I really want these two things to be compatible, but I'm not convinced they are. #1 is a gamer's dream, but it's a nightmare for our humanity if it comes at the cost of #2. That's why I'm highly ambivalent about this contest and its results.

The U.S. health system is incentivized in a way that's simply not sane.

With socialized medicine, the state has some very constructive incentives. People who get sick and stay sick don't produce as much taxable income, so keeping citizens healthy is good. It costs more to remedy conditions after they develop than it does to prevent them, so preventative care is offered and even pushed. The government is on the hook for unemployed and retired people, so it makes sense for healthcare to take a long-term approach.

In the U.S. system, insurance companies want to collect money and then not be responsible for you once you become too expensive. If you get sick and can't work, lose your company plan, or can no longer afford your personal plan, that's great! You're no longer their problem. Preventative care? Sounds like a short-term expense for no long-term payoff. So old that you're virtually guaranteed to need care? Good luck getting insured without paying a fortune out of pocket! The affordable care act was pretty insane in that it left insurance companies in the loop and simply shovelled money into a broken machine. It was better than nothing, but its design made it clear that U.S. insurance companies had accomplished complete regulatory capture.

The 1% in the U.S. might get better care than they would in a country with socialized medicine (depending on the country), but the average white collar worker does not, and there's also less security. If you lose your job because of AI or because some exec made bad decisions for your company and then get a serious condition at just the wrong moment, you're F'd. How can typical Americans have peace of mind?

There appears to be some controversy over whether DOGE's cuts directly caused this specific outbreak[1].

---

"Though it appeared DOGE did cancel funding to the FAO, which works to monitor and control outbreaks of screwworm, in 2025, it was not possible based on the available evidence to conclude that the canceled grant directly caused the outbreak in the U.S. or to determine how it might have affected the FAO's work to contain the parasite in Central America."

---

My interpretation would be that, as the parent article says, there were circumstances that have been leading to this outbreak for years. It may have happened even if Trump were never elected. However, one thing this article makes very clear is that screwworm control measures need to be in place across international borders. It takes efforts in Mexico and further South to stop screwworms before they reach the U.S.. Funding screwworm control in Mesoamerica is actually in the U.S.'s self-interest.

While this particular outbreak may have occurred anyways, cutting funding to screwworm control in Mexico and further South as a part of cutting foreign aid likely exacerbated the problem and will prolong the outbreak. The U.S., purely out of self-interest, should have been boosting funding to screwworm control South of their own borders in 2025, not slashing it.

--------------

[1]https://www.snopes.com/news/2026/06/12/doge-cuts-screwworm/

While some forums had up-votes long before reddit came along, it was reddit that used them to rank and promote posts/comments. This provided some benefit, but also opened up a huge vulnerability. It became easier to find high quality posts some of the time, but it also drowned everything in a sea of karma-farmer spam.

Reddit also never found a good solution for moderation. Like the BBS's and message boards of yore, reddit mods are unpaid (by Reddit at least), anonymous, and unaccountable. Some are good. Most aren't. Modding is not a pleasant job, so it's worth asking why somebody would do it for free. The actions of some reddit mods can only be interpreted as psyops for authoritarian regimes.

Ranking and moderation remain tough problems. Algorithms can be gamed. AI, to date, has lacked the judgment to do either well. Humans can't be trusted not to behave like tyrants or push an agenda, either theirs or that of someone paying them. Not without costly incentives, like pay, and standards that are actually enforced by other humans, all of which is expensive.

An oldschool forum without up/down-votes might actually be less susceptible to karma-farming. No karma = no karma-farming. However, you're right that giving up everything that came with karma systems is tough to do.

"This year, the economist decided that both the midterm and the final exams for his course would be of the take-home, closed-book type (there is a certain tradition of this at Ivy League schools). “It’s a very nice kind of exam, because as you’re giving students practically unlimited time to complete it, it lets you make it harder than normal, to see how far they can go.”

...

"But it also hurts him that the one time in 34 years that he decided to offer a take-home exam, for highly justified reasons, the response was wide-scale fraud."

-----------------

Not to in any way defend or condone academic misconduct, the fact that this was his teaching-career-first take-home exam is probably relevant. Take home exams can be fiendish. I remember having one in grad school where we were given a very insufficient 36 hours to complete it, and many people just didn't sleep. That was from a prof who knew what he was doing. This guy may have accidentally made his exam absolutely sadistic.

Couple this with the fact that students often have other exams they need to be studying for in the same time window. The pressure can be immense. The temptation to use AI to help is going to be hard for many to resist unless the penalties are severe and strictly enforced.

AI cheating is probably going to be a problem going forward in all situations, but open-book, take-home tests are going to bring it out more strongly than other test formats.

- Go stand in the Hagia Sophia and tell me the Romans did little to improve architecture and engineering.

- I won't defend the Roman record on slavery, but I will point out that the Greeks (particularly the Spartans) were slave societies too.

- The Greeks were significantly more xenophobic and sexist than the Romans. If you washed up on the shores of ancient Greece, you could never have become a citizen. The Romans were far more tolerant and inclusive.

- Putting spaces between words was a medieval innovation. The Greeks wrote in much the same way as the Romans, and that was thanks to the Phoenicians!

- Romans revered Greek culture because their city started in a period when Greek colonies were spreading Greek influence throughout the Mediterranean and, specifically, in Italy itself. Greece was to Rome as Rome was to medieval Europeans: A colonizer.

----------

No ancient society smells of roses if you look close enough. However, it's also rare to find ancient societies that expanded and persisted for centuries without being innovative and progressive. The Romans were both awful and great, much like the Greeks, Akkadians, Babylonians, Sumerians, etc. before them.

AI companies are in a bit of a double bind here.

Countries such as Canada are in the process of implementing regulations to prevent repeats of the Tumbler Ridge incident. A disturbed person was basically attaboy'd by AI into a mass shooting. The discussions this person had with OpenAI's AI triggered some alarm bells at OpenAI, but they did nothing about them. If future shooters were to simply use AI chatbots under assumed names, there wouldn't be much AI companies could do about it, except maybe change their bots to stop offering mindless affirmation. At the same time, there is a move by multiple governments around the world to ban children from using AI. You can't meet that legal requirement without age verification.

On the other hand, even Americans don't trust their own corporations with their personal data. People outside of the U.S. are even less trusting thanks to the completely amoral nature of the present U.S. administration and their steadfast opposition to any kind of sensible regulation.

The chickens are coming home to roost.

Unlike most other nuclear reactors, Candu reactors don't require enriched uranium. Ottawa says Western allies are turning away from Russia, one of the world's key suppliers of enriched uranium.

Even if Canada winds up relying more on CANDU reactors than SMR's, there is a case to be made for enriching domestically. There are a lot of potential customers looking for a reliable, ethical supplier. Canada has the raw minerals, political stability, and a long record of refusing to weaponize despite having the capability.

"South Koreans are hoping to change that with a $60 billion submarine deal Hanwha Ocean is trying to sign with Canada; it would be the largest military procurement deal in Ottawa’s history. But the peninsula faces a formidable opponent in Germany’s ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems, which has a long track record of producing submarines for NATO countries. Canada is expected to announce the winning company later in June — which means the South Korean government and Hanwha still have a little time to lobby Ottawa — but the odds look increasingly slim, according to Kim, the president of SMI."

--------------

What's interesting about the German/Korean bids to build subs for Canada is that both countries are offering package deals that include building other military vehicles and parts in Canada. This isn't just going to be a one-time purchase of military goods. The deal, whichever country gets it, will, ideally, kick-start long-term cooperation. The Canadian government seems to want what they used to have with the U.S., only with more reliable partners that won't regularly threaten their sovereignty.

This isn't so much a rise of SK's weapons business as it is the rise of a new, integrated military supply chain centred around NATO and close allies, but with a deliberate move away from U.S. suppliers.

Fining parents because of the bad actions of a foreign tech company would generally fit the definition of "political suicide" for any government dumb enough to do it.

1. A tech solution like this is unlikely to work since kids will be highly motivated to circumvent it and will likely be more tech savvy than their parents.

2. Leaving whether or not to allow social media use up to parental discretion creates a situation where some kids get permission to use social media and the rest use it anyways because of peer pressure.

3. If tackling the problem from the side of children and parents doesn't work, you can try to address it by acting on the social media companies themselves. Unfortunately, these companies will resist any effort to make their products less addictive. Social media companies are mostly American and lobby (bribe) the U.S. government into taking punitive action against anyone who tries to tax or regulate them in a way that actually impacts their bottom line. Since you can't tax/regulate them without facing reprisals, one alternative is to ban them as ineffectually as possible. e.g. Australian kids are still using social media, so the social media companies don't really care. They may actually benefit from the cool/rebel factor their services have been granted.