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I'm sick of Big Recipe vilifying the tried and true, much simpler Ingredient Diet which our ancestors did quite well with for trillions of years, thank you very much. If I was meant to mix together ground wheat, processed sugar cane, and avian embryonic fluid into the modern culinary monstrosity we cutely call a "cookie" (the better for Big Recipe to market their industrial Frankensnacks to children), then they would grow on trees.

I've just personally never understood how the work of ancient people's was somehow insufficient to the tasks that evidence presents us. You must at least be willing to consider that some at least were a bit tougher than us today, a bit more resourceful. Human beings can achieve amazing things when they really start being resourceful. A thousand ton block can be lifted easily by the djinni of a river.

That's a fascinating angle. Personally I find it very questionable that the dynastic kingdoms built the pyramids given everything we know about the engineering involved. But the idea that something was already there, something sacred or significant, and later civilisations built on top of or around it is genuinely compelling. Many ancient cultures did exactly that. Built where power or meaning already existed. It would explain a lot about why the Giza plateau was chosen in the first place.

🚨 A paper from a researcher at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona is going viral across Spain right now. His claim: the Giza pyramids are 12,000 years old, built by a civilisation that predates ancient Egypt 🔹Water erosion on the Sphinx 🔹Later pyramids get worse, not better 🔹No royal mummies ever found inside 🔹Precision impossible with copper tools 🔹Astronomical alignments too advanced The mainstream is pushing back. But this story has been covered by 20 Minutos, La Razón, AS, Mundo Deportivo, El Tiempo, and more in just 3 days. The fact that this keeps resurfacing, in papers, in headlines, in public conversation, tells you something. The current answers aren't satisfying people anymore. When the whole world keeps asking the same question, maybe it's time to stop condemning us for asking it?

@demishassabis @elonmusk How? Without those three I mean

@elonmusk Actually it can all be thought of as information.

Matter, Energy & Intelligence

@Grimezsz I'm sorry I got you addicted to cheese crack

@parmita Whatever. I wrote you a twelve page letter you didn't respond

i would ban ghosting if I were the queen of California you would be banished to the other states if you ghosted people. once you cleared the backlog you’d be let back in

Okay, Mandarin not as hard as I thought. But how anyone learns good Cantonese from English ever

We can have a bold new future, and a great old tradition. In fact, it is mandatory. It is now.

Outsourcing has been evolving for thousands of years in Herbert's universe. He really does seem to tend to that, and even the consequences of hyper outsourcing, and in fact that's part of the premise of why the Dune universe is so epic, it shows how this hyper outsourcing is both essential, but also a constraint, and the play between the abundance and constraints leads to a humanity at the edge of speciation

The fremen don't have ships or manifacturing. It isn't credible to me for them to be able to do a Jihad. And even if they do, how can one planet have enough soldiers to kill 100bns. I just doesn't feel at all real to me. It feels like Herberts justification for his tough moral problem (cos I suggest that Herbert cares a lot about how a world feels but less that it actually makes sense. he's great at dust and language and culture, shit at economics)

Dune: I find, "do the most evil thing ever in order to save everyone" to be a pretty contrived narrative. If that was the universe I was in, I think I'd be surprised.

Golden Ages, etc, are described as both mass movements and individual efforts. The "side effect" of such immense shifts of focus and energy are a destructive aggression. But from this destruction humanity learns "let us pave the streets with gold as we walk" and that time tills all soils

@NathanpmYoung Jihad is the only option for the Fremen, in exactly the same way that (Tolstoy claims) war with Russia was the only option for the French. In-universe, we're simply told that Paul uses his prescience to try to avoid it, but only finds ways to alter the form of the inevitability.

@parmita I am going to extrospect all the way into your intro-extro maybe interspective mind flung from here like some wild blooming arrow it's crazy this is a shittoast, I tip my glass to you m'lady

this was absolutely unhinged to say and I was going through a lot of turbulence thank you airplanes for flying me around the world and taking me to America you changed my life and I told tens of thousands of people I hate u what I really hate is space shuttles

But of course they're not just poor souls below, but you know what I mean

The heroic meets the philosophical at a very interesting point, not before the hero's arc has been waltzed through, but after: One is, as it were, upon a mountain, and what does one see then? All the poor souls below? Well, perhaps, but also this: the scores of peaks, distant mountain tops beyond, that could only be barely glimpsed before! The adventure--whether inward, outward, or allward--has really just begun!

@notathrv @tszzl @elonmusk If messianic is simply "far-sighted," then yes, and let there be many messiahs now, and many to come

@tszzl @elonmusk if Mars ends up being mostly robots, does that defeat the whole purpose of making humanity multi-planetary?

the romantic human aspect of space colonization-placing our flags on other worlds-is redundant with robots and Von Neumann replicators unfortunately. the mars colony will be robots. ppl can join, but as consumers of an experience rather than critical parts of novel adventures

@peterrhague @tszzl @MorlockP But once you have them, you've always had them, and everything was leading up to that

@tszzl @MorlockP We don’t have Von Neumann replicators though

I feel like you have the best grasp on what's coming, roon, out of all of Your Respective Them, or at least you articulate it best. The human future has always meant both rising to the heighest heights and sinking to the lowest depths. We will participate in the Von Neumann Experience. In fact it well be sold back to us exactly as the glitter packaged simula of A Critical Part of a Novel Adventure, yet oddly by mere human standards it might actually be ACPOANA. Like, machine abundance might actually award we masses with "spaceship discovery experience" it's just that by then, a million "spaceship discovery experiences" will have happened in the bat of an eye by countless probes traveling a good fraction of c.

@SandyofCthulhu I think he intended him as a contrast between the mythical-cyclical spacetime and the legendary-historical-linear. Also he is a merry fellow.

Tom Bombadil stops the story cold. We are in an exciting cross-country trip as the hobbits pick their way through a creepy haunted forest to avoid the sinister Black Riders. A terrifying black huorn ensnares them. Poof! Here comes Tom deus-ex-machina Bombadil to save the hobbits from a threat which Tolkien seems to have created to give him an excuse to insert Bombadil. Then, just as the story starts to move again, Tom shows up a SECOND time as a deus-ex-machina to rescue the hobbits from the barrow wight. Ugh. Again stopping the story cold. What is Bombadil's function? He doesn't represent the Old Good Ways which the fellowship must save. Bombadil isn't threatened - he's a cheesy distraction. I'm not saying it's impossible to convince me that Bombadil is a Good Thing, but such a convincing would be an uphill battle, and I view Tom as one of Tolkien's missteps. I am happy Jackson left him out of the film, because it would have stopped the movie's flow too.

@nofreewill42 @Megalithic12000 Horses achieved. Then bronze

@Megalithic12000 superintelligence achieved or sth ?

Every ancient culture that built with megalithic stone stopped doing it at roughly the same time. Why is that?

@Megalithic12000 We see megalithic traditions lasting a bit longer in Greece and the Aegean, quite possibly due to less impact from steppe expansion. Egypt was effectively megalithic right until the Bronze Age collapse

I'm not sure, but two other things happened around then: the Bronze Age began in Europe, and the domestication and use of horses. The Yamnaya weren't anywhere near chariot warfare yet, but the added advantages of using horses at all helped them displace earlier megalithic cultures, and perhaps extended trade networks, the sum of which meant mobility and bronze ruled once things became more centralized again. It's also possible the Yamnaya spread some diseases which they were better adapted to resist than the megalithic cultures they displaced.