im still losing it over the "how did high schoolers write 600 word essays before chatgpt" post. 600 words. that is nothing. that is so few words what do you mean you can't write 600 words. 600 words. this post right here is 45 words.

we (collectively) have done so many disservices to the younger generations, and this is one of them.

as a seventh grader, I could write a page and a half essay in longhand, in a single 55-minute class session, and have time to revise and rewrite the whole thing before the end of the exam.

my seventh grade English teacher was really scary

Dude, the enemy is not "the group of people who can afford a nice house and car and take vacations and eat well and have enough saved for retirement."

The enemy is the group of people who make it IMPOSSIBLE for EVERYONE to have a nice house and car and take vacations and eat well and save enough for retirement.

In the US, "poor people" USED to be the people who had not-so-nice houses and cars, or who had to rent instead of own. And it's not the dentist down the street who changed that; among others, it's the ultra-rich CEOs and shareholders who refuse to pay a living wage so they can live off your labor, and the exploitative corporations that buy up as much housing as they possibly can and charge exorbitant rent so you'll never be able to own your own home. It's the bosses who decide that "excess" food must be destroyed if it cannot be sold at a price that enriches shareholders. And it's the politicians who encourage and enable all of that.

Your average upper middle class family has enough money to have nice things, put their kids through school, and not have to think critically about every purchase they make.

Your average billionaire has enough money to convert it to gold and build an island in the ocean out of nothing but gold. And probably to also build a mansion on it and buy a helicopter to commute with.

Those... Aren't the same thing.

What's the first question that really pops into peoples' minds about Ea-Nasir? I'm trying to write this history down, but I'm struggling.

After looking through the evidence, both, but moreso the second.

Ea-Nasir's tablet is dated to 1750 BC, which is coincidentally aligns to the death of Hammurabi. For context, he lived at the end of the Isin-Larsa Period, a time in Babylonia's history where it was a collection of warring city-states. Ur and Larsa were the most powerful of these, since they were farthest south and controlled most of the trade coming up the Persian Gulf. (Isin, near where Hammurabi was from, was in the North and had lost power about 200 years before.)

Right after Hammurabi's death, all the city-states he'd conquered, including Larsa and Ur, decided that they didn't give two squats what the people in the North thought, and started a rebellion.

The tablets in Ea-Nasir's house have been translated. It's very difficult to find them, but the book is called Foreign Trade in the Old Babylonian Period, Leemans 1960, and he makes a series of interpretations that still align with our understanding of the culture today:

Where is Dilmun? Good question! Archaeologists spent the next 40 years figuring it out! At this point, they're fairly certain it's in present-day Qatar. The city was used as a midpoint port to bring in copper from Magan and Meluhha (current-day UAE/Oman and India respectively.)

The reason we know this, is because Oman is an old, old copper-producing region. It's an ophiolite (rock from the seafloor that's been uplifted to the surface) that contained a spreading center (think Mid-Atlantic ridge) which forms deposits of copper and other metals as sulfides from the black smoker vents (copper-iron sulfur, lead sulfur, zinc sulfur, etc.)

To produce copper, you have to remove the iron and the sulfur. To remove the iron, you add "flux", which essentially bonds iron to silica, because it likes silica more than copper does. And to remove the sulfur, you add oxygen, which burns off the sulfur as gaseous SO2.

The copper is heavier than the iron and silica, and sinks to the bottom of the furnace. The iron and silica, slag, flow out the side. The resulting ingot looks like the bowl below. And a lot of times, holes remained from gas getting trapped at the bottom.

They measured copper by weight though, so this wasn't too much of a problem. However, if there weren't enough flux, or the fire wasn't hot enough, iron would also get trapped in the copper ingot, making "black copper"; if a merchant wanted the 97% pure copper that could be made using this process, a lot of iron would definitely be considered 'bad copper'.

Switching back to the culture!

Around 1800 BC, the same time as this was going on, the culture of Oman underwent a noticeable decline. Many of their coastal mines stopped producing copper and people moved inland. They also stopped making bronze with tin. This is notable, because tin was scarce in the Bronze Age and insinuates they might've been left out of the trade route. At the very least, they had stopped being Mesopotamia's primary supplier and started doing their best to keep up with the times.

(At this point, I'll point a finger to Cyprus, which was firing up its smelters at the same time. Cyprus is very interesting, but it pertains less to Ea-Nasir, so I'll just wave enthusiastically at their oxhide ingot copper and tin trade domination.)

So we can't know if Ea-Nasir wasn't a chronic scammer, but I think all the evidence outlines a different story.

Ur, a powerful city-state rebelling against a conqueror within Ea-Nasir's lifetime. Ea-Nasir, selling large amounts of copper to the government, and smaller sales to private merchants who complained about being given scraps; a man who was still traveling to trade copper in a state that had lost their monopoly on the copper trade and was possibly producing some less-than-ideal quality.

He mostly sounds like a person with strong ties to his city and culture. Maybe not the best copper merchant, but certainly a passionate one.

References below the cut:

people are really fucking clueless about generative ai huh? you should absolutely not be using it for any sort of fact checking no matter how convenient. it does not operate in a way that guarantees factual information. its goal is not to deliver you the truth but deliver something coherent based on a given data set which may or may not include factual information. both the idolization of ai and fearmongering of it seem lost on what it is actually capable of doing

Remember what generative "AI" does, kids: it GENERATES. That means it generates answers to questions based on whatever garbage has been fed into it. Not "goes and looks up the answer." Not "already studied and knows everything." It's just reaching into its sack of word salad and dumping a pile on your desk. Sure, maybe the words fit together to form sentences, but that doesn't make it correct.

a generative AI search result vs the exact article it is citing. the website it scrambled that information from also just happens to include info on winged roaches. gisborne cockroaches are completely wingless. even if it's pulling info straight from one reliable source, there is every chance it'll mash up that info into something false.

If you need a visual, here’s how poorly AI performed when asked to create citations for news articles. And that’s just for citations, imagine what it’s doing when you ask it more complex questions and tasks.

On the cornsnakes subredit someone there used generative AI to "answer" someone's question about what the raised black lump on their corn snake could be. Another person called them out and AI-user responded with "I can do what I want, and what's the harm anyways?"

I stepped in and explicitly detailed everything that the list got wrong, which was about 95% of it, to show why is was harmful. After an hour they deleted their comment plus they deleted most of their comment history.

AI is a lie generator. Don't use it.

Holy **** oh right okay. So I was about to make a post about how using speech to text has already been a game changer for me but as you can see by the line of asterix at the start of this post the bloody thing auto censors swear words. (Yet bloody got through, ig Because it is a description and also British slang.). Hint: the word I was trying to say there starts with F and ends with K.

Oh and guess what else you can't say you can't say? **** [Nipples]. had to type that myself. penis is ok but **** [clitoris] isn't, and all my attempts to say "clit" were Misunderstood, which may just be my speech but at this point I am not willing to give the benefit of the doubt. Vagina is OK too but every time I say it there is a moment when an * shows up on screen first before the full word does. this doesn't happen when I say the word penis.

It is completely heinous. Anybody who needs speech to text is immediately forced to comply with the rules set out by people in a position of power and then enforced by a machine — a machine that is a very powerful accessibility tool. Imagine trying to dictate a letter to a doctor or fill in an E consult with speech to text, only to have words of your anatomy censored as if they are taboo. there is already far too much stigma around genital physical health — and note that I could say genital but can't say **** [clitoris] — for it to be okay for these words to be censored.

And even if somebody just wants to swear In a message to their friends or write smut/**** [pornography], they should be able to. There is no justification for this feature. No reason for it to be default.

I'm trying to find a way around this. There is a settings icon on the little speech to text bar that comes up, but this only gives me options For the speech typing launcher, auto punctuation, and to set the default microphone. it's making me extremely angry

[ID: REDDIT POST:

Title: "Speech to text alternative for Windows that DOES NOT censor curse words?"

Flair: "General Question"

Post main text:

"I hate how Windows speech To text censors my words, things like offensive words and curse words. I'm an adult and if I want to say those words, I should be able to say them and not have to deal with a bunch of asterisks. Speech to text alternatives?

answer: I was using a different, simpler windows voice to text functionality. Windows has a more extensive voice control functionality that actually allows you to navigate windows with voice as well but you can use it for diction only like i do:

You can turn off the profanity filter.

Use profanity filtering

If voice access captures a profane word, it is masked in the speech feedback. If a profanity is detected while you're dictating text, the masked version is typed out. By default, this option is turned on. You can turn the profanity filtering off or on from the voice access bar.

THANK YOU!! I was searching desperately for alternatives and/or workaround s but kept getting Microsoft forum results of people with the same complaints + Microsoft employees staunchly defending the filter and saying there is no other option. Really should have gone to Reddit first...

you know who you are

i expect to see every girlie saying oh the sleepy meepy by tomorrow at naptime is that clear

oh the sleepy meepy. everybody wants to be me enemeepy

they should hold 4 versions of every olympic event in this order to witness the full breadth of human capabilities:

#5th version olympians who do a completely different sport#i wanna see the weightlifters do table tennis. chuck a bunch of archers in the pool & see what happens. give the gymnasts gun

Bear in mind that this is a technique that anyone can use on anyone about anything.

For example, you probably want to be suspicious when megacorporations start rebranding themselves as "diverse" and "sustainable".

"Vegan leather" replacing "pleather" as the most frequent term for the material, as the greater populace began thinking that anything vegan is good and anything plastic is bad, is another good example if you want something specific.

the unholy trinity of piss-poor caretakers, tag yourself:

Taken together this is approximately 99.9% of the kids in my teen therapy program.

Finding out that Frances Dana Barker Gage, a white woman, rewrote Sojourner Truth’s famous speech to be more stereotypically “Southern slave” (complete with slurs and misspellings like dat, dere, dey) when Sojourner Truth was actually from New York and spoke only Dutch until she was almost ten and wouldn’t have actually sounded that way linguistically and decidedly did not use the phrase “Ain’t I A Woman?” at all is…whew. And on top of everything, she embellished details about Sojourner Truth’s life (like the number of children she had/how many of them were sold into slavery), wrote that ST said that she could take beatings like a man, and the reception of the speech in the room (she claims ST was called a n*gg*r, earlier accounts say the room was welcoming).

Lmaooo peak white feminist antics.

You can read the most accurate transcript here, alongside the racist edited one.

I was already disgusted just reading about this but looking at the side-by-side comparison of the real speech and the rewrite really brought it home.

See the two versions of her first line below:

Yeah I remember a few years ago when I found this out through Feminista Jones and was mad but not that surprised because white woman so….

This sent me down a bit of a research rabbit hole and I found a cool thing where afro Dutch women read Sojourner’s speech aloud in their contemporary Dutch dialects in hope of offering a more truthful rendition of her authentic Dutch voice.

So. Storytime for guerilla gardeners and solarpunk enthusiasts. This story comes to me 3rd hand but I believe the basic shape of it is true, even if details may be off.

So there’s this guy who lives in my parents’ town. Wanted to have a pocket farm but lives on an urban lot in a small city instead because y’know jobs and stuff. He could definitely get a few raised beds in the backyard but nothing all that impressive and the front yard is on a very busy road with the expectation that it’ll look reasonably traditional (plus planting food by busy roads isn’t always a good idea).

However

After he’s lived there for a while, he realizes his neighbors are all older people who maybe have more challenges taking care of their yards than they used to. So he goes to his next door neighbor and offers a deal: I’ll mow and maintain your front yard for free if you let me knock down the fences between our backyards and plant them both with food. And you’ll get a cut of the produce.

Presumably the neighbor already knew and trusted this guy because he said yes. So he starts mowing and maintaining his and his neighbor’s front yards and planting food in their now-shared backyards. After a season or two this goes well enough that the next neighbor down the street asks if he can be in on this too.

So now there’s 3 front yards to mow and three backyards full of produce. And it keeps going from there. Dude gets a rider lawnmower and does everyone’s front yards, and meanwhile he’s maintaining an entire block’s worth of produce in the back. His yields got so high that he was able to start offering boxes of produce outside of the block’s residents too. This is how I heard of him: my parents’ next door neighbors were picking up a regular box of produce from him.

I love a couple of things about this story:

These exact circumstances might not be replicable everywhere, but I love thinking about how these principles could be applied.

Hey Science side of tumblr folks, if you were working on an NIH grant that was canceled, ProPublica is looking to hear from you to amplify your story and put it in the perspective of the ongoing assault on our commitment to care for each other.

Multiple relatives of mine donated their bodies to science. That donation was in each case an awe inspiring act of kindness and love, an effort to help create a world in which the thing that was at the time actively killing them would not do so to others if they could help it.

Huge swaths of disease research is based on similarly beautiful commitments to humanity, and the NIH represents our societal commitment to make those sacrifices matter.

So I am taking these bastards pulverizing it extremely personally and am incandescent about it. I am personally committed to making everyone involved in this suffer as much as I personally can. Which is to say I would appreciate if you took the time to help ProPublica shine a light on this atrocity if you have a story to tell them.

ProPublica is reputable af and extremely hardcore in their investigations. They've also got a pretty good track record of embarrassing politicians enough to get good shit done.

I support them financially because we NEED them, and I encourage anyone who fits the profile to get in touch with them.

Also Caleb giving the name Caleb Widogast when everyone is giving fake names is so funny in hindsight

Dreamwidth and Reblogging

I keep forgetting about it because I don't actually use it, but there is actually a third party script that will allow you to "reblog" stuff on Dreamwidth! I'll have to do some digging to find it (unless someone who knows where it is can link it in the notes perhaps?), but it does exist.

Another thing a lot of people do for signal boosting and sharing stuff is provide easy code you can copy and paste to your own account. They'll usually have all of the HTML ready to go and look neat for you, and it may even include a neat graphic! I'm not sure about rich text options (again, not something I use), but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people start offering a basic copy-paste-able "Share this paragraph" thing to get the news out.

Here it is! By astolat, melannen and lj_writes. https://astolat.dreamwidth.org/309702.html

Bless you for digging that up for me ♥ I'm probably still not going to use it myself, but darned if it won't be useful to a heckuva lot of people who are considering moving over there!

(And honestly, I am not at all surprised by who was involved in the making of it 😂)

Bumping this up on my blog! It's gotten a bit buried under other posts, and "Can I reblog on Dreamwidth?" is one of the more frequent questions I get.

since the URL above isn't linkified, here's a link. Reblogging on dreamwidth.

More Democrats need to be like Sen Brian Schatz [D-HI]. Stand up. Have courage.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal [D-CT] steps up.