They gave my younger sister a traditionally masculine name, so apparently they were already out of ideas on that score.

It looks like coins have been found on the sea routes that avoided the Parthian/Sassanian empires, but not on the overland routes. I’m guessing merchants exchanged their coins on the Roman/Persian frontier, east of which the Iranian coinage was the standard anyway; but in politically fractured places like southern India (south of the Kushans and Guptas), Roman coinage became the de facto currency of international trade.

So in other words, the distribution of coins outside the empire could reflect a regional demand for a standard international coinage, rather than Roman trade per se.

Wish I could see a map like this with the finds colored by mint date.

Yes—the Amber Road, the main trade route to the Baltic, did go through Central Europe.

And the reason trade went overland instead of by sea is because the Romans weren’t trading directly with the Baltic—they were paying soldiers stationed along the Danube and Rhine who then traded with neighboring peoples (and also directly subsidizing some frontier tribes), and the frontier peoples of Central Europe were then trading Roman gold for Baltic amber.

“Info tax”.

All of Haidt’s writings read to me like what I’d expect if you pulled a random person off the street and forced them at gunpoint to imitate an academic.

just think “medi(cal) eval(uation)”.

there is no “AI” in “IPA”

…because they’re still in the process of putting it there.

A neural network can learn to closely imitate someone making logical inferences, but that’s different from making logical inferences itself. It doesn’t have a sense of whether it’s correct or incorrect—just a sense of how similar it is to its training examples.

Sure—the point I was trying to make is that it still needs to be done piecemeal, while a blockchain can verify a collection of works as a collection (that is, it not only verifies that each work is unaltered, it verifies it in the context of other related works).

It’s a pity that blockchain technology is so intertwined with crypto—it would make a great anti-AI check. As in, a way for a decentralized community to maintain an expanding collection of information while efficiently verifying that no existing works have been altered.

Sure, you can sign individual documents—but then for each document you need a separate channel to verify the original signature.

“Up until the semi finals, it seemed like nothing would be able to stop Grok 4 on its way to winning the event,” Pedro Pinhata, a writer for Chess.com, said in its coverage. “Despite a few moments of weakness, X’s AI seemed to be by far the strongest chess player… But the illusion fell through on the last day of the tournament.” He said Grok’s “unrecognizable” and “blundering” play enabled o3 to claim a succession of “convincing wins”.

I think the main takeaway is that these models are fundamentally inconsistent, and you can never assume they’re going to be reliable based on past performance.

A majority stake in Twitter.

The typical pattern for leaders is to get “second opinions” from advisors who tell them whatever they want to hear, so… maybe asking the equivalent of a magic 8 ball is a marginal improvement?

It’s contextual: government can be used for right-wing or left-wing purposes, and people opposed to those uses can use libertarianism as a justification whether the actual policies they’re opposing are right- or left-wing. But that means people with right- or left-wing sympathies can selectively target policies they disagree with on purely sectarian grounds, while disingenuously claiming libertarianism as a motivation.

“Researchers in the field sometimes describe our goal as to pass the ‘Visual Turing Test,’” said Suyeon Choi […] “A visual Turing Test then means, ideally, one cannot distinguish between a physical, real thing as seen through the glasses and a digitally created image being projected on the display surface,” Choi said.

So they just came up with a needlessly opaque synonym of “verisimilitude”.

I donate to the Patreon account of a local independent journalist who covers the city council.

Doom Quixote.

As a 50-something, I can see the case for putting the “golden age” of the internet between the birth of Wikipedia in 2001 and Facebook in 2006.

If someone else posts a better comment that renders mine superfluous, I’ll often delete mine. But if someone else has already replied to mine, I’ll leave it for the sake of context but downvote it so the better one gets more visibility.