Sometimes the works we do have from the ancient world seem…. Better? Like meditations is still the only ‘self-help’ book I’ve ever read that has actually made me a better person. I find the stoic philosophy so powerful, and every incarnation of philosophers afterwards are generally… pessimistic or cold and calculating?
Probably a selection bias, most (all?) ancient works we have were copied by hand (expensive!) and widely circulated enough for us to still have them. So we still have Marcus Aurelius but not Caesars poetry.
This is definitely the case. Most ancient texts were not lost in the burning of Alexandria or whatever, but simply decayed. The texts have to be actively copied to be preserved, and there was not the money to do this continuously over 2000 years. So only documents that the rich of times considered most important to be preserved were copied.
On the other hand, we still only have four out of the eight books of Epictetus’ discourses. (He’s another stoic philosopher and his discourses had a similar impact on me as meditations had on you.) This seems to refute the strong version of your argument.
The science of archeology is a destructive one. Temples and tombs escavated in the late 1800’s could have largely benefitted from the rigour and advances made in modern archeology. How much information and narrative are lost to time due to their archeological mistakes?
The same applies here. Experimenting with chemistry at all runs the risk of destroying the information forever. During these tests, the artifact must be preserved. If you destroy the artifact but are able to read it, did you really come out ahead?
Yes, definitely you came out ahead in that case, but the problem is you’d likely have to destroy some amount of them without being able to read it before you got the method perfected.
Is it tho? A MetaMask wallet staking directly with the protocols/ yield aggregators is easier than creating a kraken account and doing KYC verification.
self custody vs. centralized exchange data would be relevant here. Instead of just saying “people don’t do it”. Because people do… and I would venture to say more people do it than keep their coins on a centralized exchange.
That may indeed be "easier", but self-custody requires a high level of confidence in your own ability to set things up properly and securely. And equally high confidence that your machine and wallet won't be compromised. I'd also say that getting to that point is difficult, unless someone is willing to play around with a test-net and not learning with their real balance.
There's definitely an appeal when it comes to having an exchange manage this all for you, even when they take a fee for doing so.
This may come off as… impractical… but I don’t understand why.
The best way to obtain coins without going through KYC is by using the protocols. The most cost effective is running a filecoin node but there are thousands of ways of getting coins by participating in the ecosystem.
Try some prompt engineering courses. It’ll change your perception. Some of my prompts are like 1200 words just to set context. But I use it for email, marketing outreach, blogs, you name it. It’s drastically increased my productivity as a solo consultant.
That wouldn't even remotely change my impression. I'm already aware, as I said, that ChatGPT is very good at continuing text.
Indeed, the scariest thing about ChatGPT as a technology is that the thing it is most useful for, the most obvious use case, is exactly what you are using it for: Increasing the amount of bullshit text in the world without even the gate of a human having to write it, which was already not much of a gate at all.
The problem is, that's by far the thing it is best at, and by far the most useful use for it. But that's a net loss for humanity overall. Hooray. Unfortunately, it is not something that be stopped; there's so many people rushing to take a dump in that Commons that it is unstoppable now. If indeed it hasn't already been happening for a while now (Dead Internet theory; if it isn't already true, it certainly will be).
I write around 100-200 emails a day, coordinate across various projects and write a lot of copywrite around the solutions and systems the company develops.
Explain to me how this is ‘bullshit text’. It sounds to me like you are just repeating other criticisms you’ve heard because you don’t like the tool. To me, it would be rude to respond to certain emails in a way that I can tell chatGPT. I can give chat GPT a very basic framework and it will respond in a way that is not overly laconic.
Writing certain copywrite towards a requirement or proposal is also not “bullshit”. Chat got is useful for sketching out a rough outline and it’s easier to go and edit it to your liking then writing it from scratch.
I reject your definition of emails, copywrite and proposals as bullshit. They are necessary, and if I can use chat gpt to help me save time by proofreading, generating outlines, managing tone and generally making my communication more streamlined and shorter, how could you call all of that “bullshit text”.
Well… the whole ‘ancient apocalypse theory’ might be discredited, but the sites they visit date back extremely far into our ancient history. It also shows that pockets of architectural knowledge rapidly advanced and then receded all across the known world. One thing is for sure, the human story is far from a ladder, with periods of around 1000 years of advancements and then everything collapses for a couple generations.
I think it goes back to the OP’s original point… there are some things we cannot ever know for sure but they are fun to learn and talk about.
You're making it sound like everything advanced and then receded at the same time across the world. This hasn't been the case since the end of the last glacial period. There have been recedings of local civilizations scattered throughout history, as well as some large scale regional disruptions (e.g. late bronze age collapse, decline of the roman empire), but nothing like periods where everything collapses globally.
> but nothing like periods where everything collapses globally.
What else but a population bottleneck could explain the lack of any genetic diversity to speak of in humans? No human alive today is more distantly related to you than 37th cousin. Any two random individuals are 99.9% identical. That's weird. For this to have occurred, something must have happened everywhere all at once.[1]
Yeah I don't disagree, which was why I caveated it by saying "since the end of the last glacial period".
Before that, all bets are off, and I personally do consider the Toba catastrophe a possible explanation for the ridiculously low level of genetic diversity in modern humans outside sub-Saharan Africa.
I like this idea. A long time ago, there was one amazingly attractive, irresistibly seductive, incredibly promiscuous and astoundingly prolific breeding individual and sexual athlete: the legendary Don Juan of the late Pleistocene.
Oh, you're right. My objection was based on my own misinterpretation of "pockets" as referring to time periods and/or specific architectural knowledge rather than to particular locations.
> It also shows that pockets of architectural knowledge rapidly advanced and then receded all across the known world.
That just means that this level of architectural capability is easily discovered from scratch when circumstances happen to be somewhat right, but then not enough of a gamechanger to endure when when they are not.
This is untrue. You aren’t thinking about the effects of sediment, usage, and erosion. When you build a dam and allow the riverbeds to dry, it changes the entire water table of the region.
They don't dry; they resume as normal once the dam is complete.
I don't understand that nobody can see this. The lake can't hold all the water to inifinity. Once it's full, the outflow becomes normal. Except now you can regulate it.
If you don’t have any intentions of defending your beliefs, why do you put them out there?
It’s like throwing a punch with no intention of getting in a fight. You’re just bound to get your ass kicked.
Not only is the UK not a republic but Republicanism isn’t about needing a grown up, it’s about time. Understanding the implications and reading through a 150 page proposal on the bill is not possible for the majority of the population.
