throwaway676712

And it gets some weird amount of focus seemingly purely due to modern sensibilities in an anti racism drive and to create a sense of belonging.

What does it say about people who relentlessly push back on it? It's not like people are arguing Rome had the same make up as the US. The thesis is fairly weak ("a small trickle of black people shows up because Rome was diverse and a unified empire that favors large scale population movements") and yet a large contingent of people seem intent on saying "no, not even that". I didn't mention anything about anti-racism drive, that's odd of you to bring it up.

They didn't just go back, didn't get selected out so that they didn't routinely show up in genepool research. They just aren't there in the demographic data.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnfBYO53jhg

(Africans in Anglo-Saxon England)

Equating North Africans who genetically, culturally more interlinked with other Mediterranean people with Sub-Saharan Africans is not exactly right. After all before the Indo-European invasion Europe was almost exclusively settled by middle eastern immigrants (and largely remained so in Southern Europe genetically).

No, I mean that North African client kingdoms and tribes, or the Roman themselves, would routinely trade in slaves and hire mercenaries or bring in merchants through the trans-Saharan trade routes.

It’s not a stretch to imagine a lot of things but there is no evidence that was true to any significant degree (besides the demand for slaves in Roman Egypt was likely substantial enough to absorb most of the demand)

There literally is, as pointed out at the top of my comment. You can look it up.

The blog's name is "a collection of unmitigated pedantry" and the host is known for playing scores of video games including AOE2 itself. The explicitly avowed purpose of the blog is to talk about pop culture products as a gentle way to introduce the general public to deeper historical knowledge and concepts.

I think you may have missed the point.

There are reports of black legionaries in Romain Britain as late as the reign of Septimus Severus (himself not very white if you look at portraits).

Black people in the Roman empire isn't that far fetched when you consider Rome had a huge presence in Africa and the Trans-Saharan slave trade was thriving at the time. Rome also had contacts with Merowe (Kush) through Egypt and other client kingdoms in North Africa. It's not a stretch to imagine a small but steady stream of black slaves (possibly manumitted later), mercenaries and merchants trickling into the empire and spreading throughout, especially when one considers that the military was one of the very few social advancement possibilities if you weren't already from an aristocratic or at least land-owning family (Rome would give veterans a money payout equal to all of their 20+ years' service arrears plus a bonus and Roman citizenship at the end of service, allowing one to retire in relative comfort).

So they wouldn't be as frequent as in the US, but they definitely wouldn't be an oddity either.

This meme must die, how did Kimi 3 even distill Fable or GPT 5.6 within weeks of their being available?

Also, how a model identifies itself isn't very telling, many models when asked in Chinese will identify as DeepSeek

Premodern states would do this all the time. A ruler would find themselves strapped on cash, debase the (metal content based) currency, people slowly find out, raise their prices, rinse and repeat. Gresham's law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law) states that when 'pure' and 'impure' coins are both in circulation, the impure currency takes over.

It's just Moravec's paradox all over again

It's more like WP:BASICMATH. It's like someone showing a huge number isn't prime (proverbially hard to factor, trivial to check) and HN/WP users requesting a reputable source citation for the factor multiplication when anyone can input it in a calculator.

Counterexamples are literally the only way to show a "for all" statement is false. (Non-constructive proofs by contradiction work by showing a counterexample must exist.)

Also, 'brute-force' style attacks where one simply feeds the input into the computer and it yields a solution are nothing new and certainly predate LLMs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%27s_sum_of_powers_conjec...

Hell, one could even go further into the past and refer to the thankless work of pre-computer era mathematicians who sweated over manual calculations in order to disprove various prime related conjectures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_conjectures

You seem to have an objection to non-intutionist mathematics in general, a position that was once held by many an illustrious mathematician but is relatively fringe in the contemporary academic community. Mathematical facts don't have to be intellectually satisfying or make sense to you, the human, rather it is up to you to wrap your mind around discovered mathematical facts.

Just a couple days ago I argued with an HN poster who quipped that biology is stamp collecting. A non-negligible number of "mathy" engineer types (not actual mathematicians, those usually understand the complexity of biology and even gladly contribute to the field) seem to think all biologists are quirky eccentrics dedicating 30 years to a single protein or a species of ants in the Kalahari desert. (Not that these don't exist or aren't worthy of respect, but they don't score high in the sophomoric 'hardness scale' of fields that these mathy types still subscribe to)

Meh, you can ask another LLM like GPT5.5 to unwind it into accessible language and it works it out fine. Seems more like a case of token greed from Anthropic

"Co-author" lol we both know what that means. Still, if that's true that makes it even sadder. Hope you mature and broaden your horizons at some point instead of engaging in undergrad-style petty field rivalries

So you think biology is just proteomics and use meme expressions like 'meat bag', got it. Not updating my prior on you being unserious

The commenter was talking about biology and you are talking about physics. Just because your view of one field stagnates doesn't mean the rest of science doesn't, and your quip about stamp collecting (referring to that sneering quote) means you are thinking in memes and are not a serious interlocutor

No

A large contingent of the top AI people is French, the Mistral founders worked at Meta and Google before coming back to France. The real issue is capital, French salaries are shit

Europeans are risk averse and don't have access to that many deep pocketed risk-taking VCs. On top of that the US is poaching all the talent since most EU firms won't or can't match the salaries offered in the US to AI researchers.

This may change in the future as AI gets more commoditized and the current US admin keeps shooting itself in the foot but they are still very far ahead right now

The key part is like other species and human societies do not tolerate impulsive violence in adults. All societies have rules, customs and/or arbitrage methods to regulate violence and the vast majority of people definitionally abide by them (otherwise there wouldn't be much of a society to begin with). And the vast majority of violence dealt among humans is not impulsive but deliberate (war, feuds, etc.). This is not incompatible with many people having a capacity for violence, only it's usually channeled through these deliberate methods and the extra impulsive outbursts tend to be punished.

Moving goalposts. Android is Linux (the GNU part of GNU/Linux is trivial to add), people use Linux knowingly or not, and Linux is on the most devices on Earth regardless of whether their users know it or not.

IQ is not a unit, it's a z-score. Z-scores can only be compared within the same cohort against which they are computed and given the same test. Given that the cohorts and tests keep evolving over time, it makes no sense to track IQ across large time periods.

European elites as in a couple media figures and fellow extremely online people that professional internet opinion havers like him have convinced themselves control the world narrative. In reality AC is very common in Europe except in old buildings or poorer households, same as everywhere else.

This is the same level of analysis as Europeans on 4chan saying >be Amerifat >get shot, you're supposed to grow out of meme thinking upon becoming a mature adult

It's just a meme but too-online professional opinion-havers memed themselves into taking it seriously. Many such cases unfortunately

It's a touchy subject because scientists are afraid of looking like cranks. Just like cognition in other nonhuman species was historically dismissed because no one wants to be seen as someone who think plants talk to each other

A necessary condition for the emergence of civilization (in its broadest sense, as in the collectively organized reshaping of one's living environment for one's purposes) is a basic level of trust and cooperation.

Humans are not naturally prone to bouts of violence like other species and human societies do not tolerate impulsive violence in adults. Instead, the vast majority of human-on-human violence is deliberate: people plan, carefully and rationally, the killing of their fellow human beings in order to achieve their goals. This is known as 'war'. This is very rare among species, and more violent species cannot form complex societies at scale, despite being also quite smart in some cases (chimps, octopuses).

We even unconsciously internalized this idea to some degree, since most people are comfortable with the idea of militaries existing and being necessary but also agree that solitary murderous psychopaths should be put in prison.

Is this 2006? Linux is present on literal billions of android phones, servers, supercomputers and other embedded devices. It's the most ubiquitous OS on the planet and it's not even close, even Microsoft contributes to it.

The only niche where it doesn't utterly dwarf the competition is personal computers and it looks like we're all getting priced out of that anyway

So, literally the ending of Her (2014)?