Spearthrower Owl 🦉

@monlaferte did it!!! She matched the greatness of Norma with her new album, Mon Laferte Seis. It's very different from Norma, but just as spectacular. She's got endless talent and creativity. Mon is the greatest musical artist of our time. open.spotify.com/album/3EOGXDme…

@realsaadasad Isnt that because there must be a fire separated stairwell?

Most large apartment buildings are legally required to have two stairwells, e.g., two bulky cores on large lots. Scissor stairs fit into a single core, enabling more homes and more light on smaller lots. Single-stair reform only helps smaller buildings that need a single exit.

Washington unanimously legalized scissor stairs, a building code reform that frees up to 56% more living space per floor. Less wasted space means cheaper homes on smaller lots. Most US states banned this since the 1970s for no good reason.

@darwinbell @SirBylHolte Uh. Yes she was. She was 100% greek. Last of the Ptolomeys. Did you think she was Egyptian?

@SirBylHolte You must know that Cleopatra wasn’t white in real life…or are you really that stupid?

Here’s the thing: If Christopher Nolan loves race-swapping for “representation,” why didn’t he race-swap "Oppenheimer"? Cleopatra is black now. Anne Boleyn is black now. Queen Charlotte is black now. All real-life historical figures. So why didn’t he make Kitty Oppenheimer BLACK for that mixed-race-marriage flavor they love? Why not go all in? Colman Domingo as Harry Truman. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Albert Einstein. Kevin Hart as Richard Feynman. It would’ve “still been the same movie,” right? Yet for this one, Nolan’s cast stayed almost 100% white. Why? Because he knew the audience for that movie was mostly white intellectuals who actually know history. And that’s exactly the crowd that would’ve embraced a faithful version of Homer’s "Odyssey." Nolan told 60 Minutes that he always approaches each film as if it were his last. This time, I hope he's right.

@DrKarimWafa This is silly. Americans who live in the southern border typically know some spanish. Those that live elsewhere have no urgent reason to know anything but english, unlike residents of other countries adjacent to other language speakers.

One of the saddest scenes in the modern world is an immigrant apologizing for their accent to someone who speaks only one language.

@frankthefrstr @fleshsimulator @mozz_erz These claims have been repeatedly debunked. Police response was swift. There was no time for the types of atrocities claimed. Hostages upstairs were not abused. No pregnant women cut open have ever been identified. 1st responders described effect of the explosions, not torture.

@fleshsimulator @mozz_erz you…still haven’t presented a single shred of evidence for what you’re alleging ??

When you say "killed 129", it kind of undersells the fact that they cut the fetuses out of pregnant women, gouged out eyeballs, castrated men, and raped women with knives This info was kept out of the media, instead focusing on the bombings that occurred. It was also kept out of the media that the terrorists had arrived through the asylum system, which had such little oversight that it somehow didn't catch a cluster of known ISIS fighters entering the country

@jimstewartson 💯!! LLMs are no more AI than aagoogle search or even webcrawler before that. They're hyped up search engines with a "next word" predictor, itself based on the search through a database. They aren't close to getting beyond the Chinese Room problem.

It’s upsetting to watch so many people be led to believe a software feature created from human exhaust is an alien intelligence. It’s a psyop. LLMs are a clever way to compress and search large databases with patterns. They have now inhaled effectively all of human knowledge. From this point, there will be spikes of improvement in narrow areas, but the big models are already collapsing from inhaling their own exhaust. The core technology is at least 40 years old. Neural networks are nothing new. We’re just attaching obscene amounts of computing and data to them. The physical nature of an LLM is literally just a database of tokens (word parts) and weights (relationships) that can be queried. It is not magic. It can be made deterministic by setting the entropy aka temperature to zero. It is a clever way to store an immense amount of data and retrieve it through token predicting. “Agents” are just LLMs being queried in a loop. They take exponentially more energy and suffer the same problems as chatbots—hallucinations and sycophancy—but exponentially more complicated to solve. In reality, it’s all a category error. It’s a mirage created by the desire of a small group of elites to build a technological and financial moat around themselves. “AGI” is the McGuffin, the plot device, to serve as the messiah that will deliver people from the toils of everyday life. The broligarchs are trying to sell us our own replacements. According to them, we won’t have to drive, or work, or think anymore. The robots and AI will all do it for us. It’s the oldest con there is: magic beans. Your chatbot is not your Jesus or your girlfriend. Your Claude instance is not intelligent. It’s a search engine for human knowledge stolen from the internet and the destruction of physical books. So please understand. You are witnessing the biggest financial bubble in all of human history based on deceptive marketing, astroturfing, and cult dynamics. You are not witnessing the birth of a new intelligence. Unfortunately, that’s a battle we’re losing.

@JackCald @CreativeDeduct Critical Theory ,zand the Frsnkfurt School explicitly had an agenda and seeks to transform soxciety. It's whybit became so popular during the 60s. Also btw, Marcuse worked for the OSS...

@CreativeDeduct The opinion that there is some kind of “agenda” behind a sociocultural analysis is utterly nonsensical. Just rubbish against the Frankfurt School, but then again, part of the triumph of nonsense brought about by the very “culture industry” theorized by Adorno and Horkheimer. QED

By the 1930s many Western intellectuals reluctantly realised that classical Marxism had failed and the proletariat wasn’t revolting. But then a group of exiled German Marxists led by Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse decided to change the battlefield. Instead of economics, they targeted the “cultural superstructure”: family, religion, tradition, sexual norms and the very idea of objective truth. Their weapon was Critical Theory - a relentless campaign of negative criticism designed to portray every Western institution as inherently oppressive and capitalism as not just economically flawed, but psychologically and morally corrupt. Marcuse gave the strategy its most powerful tactical manual in his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance”: true liberation, he argued, required “liberating tolerance” - tolerance only for progressive ideas and outright intolerance for conservative or “regressive” ones. Free speech, in other words, was only legitimate when it served the revolution. The intellectual poison of the Frankfurt School was extraordinarily influential and as its graduates and intellectual heirs colonised universities, media, NGOs and corporate HR departments, Critical Theory evolved into today’s identity politics, DEI mandates and cancel culture - a cultural Marxism that attacks the individual in the name of group grievance. What began with a small circle of German émigrés in the 1930s now shapes the moral vocabulary of much of the Western elite. The result has been a softer, more pervasive authoritarianism: the dictatorship of the politically correct.

@politicalmath My suspicion is that it's not a translation at all, but a rewriting/reframing from others' translations. Sadly, not all that rare.

This paper by Professor Richard Whitaker goes through a lot of the complaints of Wilson's translation While most people will admit that Wilson brought a progressive perspective to the translation (and we can argue about if that is appropriate), she ALSO just mistranslated a lot of things.

I've been following the "Christopher Nolan used Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey" story but I felt like I just didn't have the grounding to judge if Wilson's translation was good or bad So I talked with a friend who speaks Ancient Greek to see what the scholarly world thought of it

@rebirthofthewo1 @NordicVikingur @ymangram @KwikWarren She was literally described as bright colored, white armed (used for nobles of pale skin due to not having to be outside working). Her name literally means "bright one" and the whole point if her myth (though she was likely a real person) is that she was astonishingly beautiful.

@NordicVikingur @ymangram @KwikWarren Fair doesn't always mean that it also means pleasing to the eye. Knowledge is Power

Did ppl bitch&moan about John Wayne playing Genghis Khan in “The Conqueror” or Elizabeth Taylor playing Cleopatra or Chuck Connors playing Geronimo or Jeffrey Hunter playing Jesus in “King of Kings?” Asking4friends confused about uproar over Lupita Nyong’o playing Helen of Troy.

@NordicVikingur @ymangram @KwikWarren Also, her name was originally closer to something like *Selena ("shining one"), further emphasizing her light features.

@ymangram @KwikWarren Its a story about greeks fighting greeks Helen was from Sparta , Spartans are greeks and greeks arrent Africas she is fictional but the settings is very much real. Also shes described with fair skin meaning light and blond hair.

@GabrielSinMas @bucknersrevenge @AR100876 @KwikWarren Because his father was the Roman soldier, Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera.

@bucknersrevenge @AR100876 @KwikWarren Jesus is white...

@Elle643612 @six_ace_deuce @AR100876 @KwikWarren Ancient Egypt included what is now Sudan. There is some evidence that the Hyksos (15th dynasty) were "black", which led to theories behind Black Athena. The latter has been widely misused by both sides in the current debate.

@six_ace_deuce @AR100876 @KwikWarren Egypt extends from the Mediterranean to the borders with Sudan. What color are the Sudanese? Some of the ancient Egypts were darker than others. Some were lighter than other. They portrayed themselves as Egypwho look like their current descendants. We still have diff. Shades

@KwikWarren You do know Cleopatra was last of the Ptolomy's, descended of one of Alexander's companions, and 100% Greek/European, right? And that everyone laughed at John Wayne as Ghengis and Chuck Connor as Geronimo, right? I dont know abt the last one.

@AttikaBeniko @_felipeeli_ @madamarchaeo Lol. He blocked me for pointing out that no one calls another country by the name that country calls itself but by the name one calls it in their own language. 🤣🤣🤣.

@AttikaBeniko @_felipeeli_ @madamarchaeo So what? Everyone always refers to other places in the language of the referrer, not the referrent. Otherwise, 90% of cultures and places historically would be literally translated into "Us" and "Our place".

Anybody who says that Iranians can’t be mad about the way King Xerxes was portrayed in 300 because it was based on a comic book… It really doesn’t matter that it was based on a comic book. The point is, most people will never take an interest in ancient Persia. When anybody mentions ancient Persia, this is the image that will come to mind. Iranians have the same right to be angry as Greeks are over Helen of Troy. More people watch movies than read history. It’s a sad fact. How we portray figures from history or specific cultural contexts, therefore, matters.

@ramzpaul It's not science fiction at all. It's space opera or space fantasy. Has nothing to so with science, a critical component of any science fiction by definition.

Star Wars was never meant to be sophisticated thought-provoking science fiction. Released in 1977, it paid homage to the 50s serial action shows that brought back nostalgia for the people of the time. It was basically meant as a kid's movie. The plot was shallow and the acting was poor. It was a cultural phenomenon in 1977 because the special effects were amazing for the time. The sound score was fantastic. And it was a welcome relief from the dark and angsty movies of the 1970s. Trying to milk the franchise for 50 years is a bit much.

@EndymionYT Unlike Helen of Troy, the physical appearance of Bond isn't a crucial part of the character. Benedict Wong would've been fine. But he, Idris Alba and Tom Hardy, coulda been great Bonds, but they've all aged out.

Here’s the thing tho would Benedict Wong be a good James Bond? No. But would it be cool to see other stories in a James Bond universe where Benedict Wong played a different 00 with his own backstory, codename & all that? Yes. The problem is they keep trying to replace James Bond, when they don’t have to. But they just don’t get it

@Kristinartz Eloise, Hermoine, Winnifried, Beulah, Clara, Edith, etc...

I'm looking for a ridiculously old girl's name. Think great grandmother type of name. Very old and

@Persiansasanian @HumbleSinner007 @Fahd1s0 @NiohBerg Alexander burned Persepolis to the ground in pure spite. The greatest of all ancient cities.

@HumbleSinner007 @Fahd1s0 @NiohBerg Ur daddy Alexander the Great idolized and cried at Cyrus the greats funeral. Greeks are the uncivilized donkeys that get fucked by Turks so now I see why you’re mad. You don’t even know if his name is really Fahd jackass

The Greeks now feel the same anger that Iranians have felt for 20 years.

@AttikaBeniko @_felipeeli_ @madamarchaeo It refers to the Parsi, one of several distinct Iranian language/ethnic groups. Your point being?

@_felipeeli_ @madamarchaeo 3. “Parthians were not an Persian empire, but rather an Iranian Empire.” Wait till I tell you what Persian means…

@waketheents @madamarchaeo No, they were Persians or Parsi. Iranian refers to the iranian branch of the indo-iranian language family. We dont call French ppl Francais, we call them French bc thats what the English word for ppl from France.

@madamarchaeo It’s also funny that you say “take an interest in ancient Persia” when they were always Iran. Persia was he Greek name