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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • As I was discussing this with my partner we summarised this as:

    Humans have always had the capacity for violence and murder; as populations grew, acts of violence could be larger, both in terms of number of combatants and also length of time of continuous fighting. This is a progression of:

    • Small bands of people skirmishing with neighbours to
    • Towns sending small raiding bands to
    • Cities fielding an army for a summer campaign to
    • Empires furnishing professional armies and sending them on multi-year campaigns, to
    • Nation states using advanced logistics to maintain millions of soldiers in the field for years at a time.

    Somewhere between city-states and full modern nation states, there have been full on campaigns of genocide. But genocide can be thought here definitionally as only possible with some significant number of people.

    Unfortunately there is a deep dark part of the human psyche that has always been with us.


  • I hear what you’re saying, but there’s a counterpoint to this.

    In prehistoric times, population densities were low. In mesolithic times (hunter gatherers) there were simply no concentration of people large enough to wipe out or to do the killing. Nothing could be called genocide at this time.

    In neolithic times (the first farmers) violence was definitely a part of life. Some early towns do show signs that they were destroyed. But again, population densities are low enough that the scale of violence would not be enough to call ‘genocide’. It’s a town burnt down with everyone murdered, not a ‘people’ - whatever that might mean at this time. This is not about egalitarianism - it’s population density.

    However as we move to the bronze age, there are definitely signs that large scale events occur that might fit into the modern concept of genocide but archeological evidence is severely lacking. The main line I would argue is that the male lines of the neolithic farmers in Europe are hammered and almost completely replaced with the Yamnaya Y chromosomes across a huge expanse - from the east european plains to the Iberian peninsula. Genetic continuity with the neolithic farmers is maintained though indicating that male newcomers were having children with local women, and very few male locals had children. During this event the culture changed hugely - burial patterns, material goods, etc.

    I don’t know if we can call this genocide - at least the full modern concept - because these changes took centuries to roll out across the expanse of Europe, but they speak to local conquests and, at the very least, the newcomers prevented local males from having their own families. At worst you can imagine a constant expansion of this new culture taking control of new areas, killing the men, taking local women as concubines and eradicating their gods, customs and ways of living. Quite a lot of genocidal checklist items ticked off there.

    By the mid to later bronze age, genicide is definitely a widespread thing, recorded in many texts.




  • This is exactly the answer.

    I’d just expand on one thing: many systems have multiple apps that need to run at the same time. Each app has its own dependencies, sometimes requiring a specific version of a library.

    In this situation, it’s very easy for one app to need v1 of MyCleverLibrary (and fails with v2) and another needs v2 (and fails with v1). And then at the next OS update, the distro updates to v2.5 and breaks everything.

    In this situation, before containers, you will be stuck, or have some difficult workrounds including different LD_LIBRARY_PATH settings that then break at the next update.

    Using containers, each app has its own libraries at the correct and tested versions. These subtle interdependencies are eliminated and packages ‘just work’.


  • modeler@lemmy.worldtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.worldHow to recognize words
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    7 months ago

    If you are anxious about the processing of words, most definitely this is possible, but I am 100% not saying that it is definitely the cause of your problems.

    You are right now highly self-conscious that you might have a crippling brain condition. Also, every time you say something or write something down, you are also monitoring yourself to check out whether it continues to be true or getting worse. In so doing, you might be suffering this effect due to the anxiety that this is causing - you mind is so much more focused on the fear than on the word, which confirms that the word is somehow different in your head now.








  • Maths and reality are different. Very different. Reality can be explored empirically while maths is logic not empirical. We can never say we are 100% sure about the rules/laws we have discovered about our reality, but we can say for sure that a maths theorem is true or false.

    Maths is a set of self-consistent tools that can be used to predict what happens in reality. The mathematical description of reality is an estimate, contains countless assumptions and inaccuracies about where things are and what properties they have. In fact in quantum physics, we literally can’t know momentum and location at the same time.

    Maths can describe (or I should say, approximate) realities that don’t exist.

    Because maths and reality are different domains, we can know different things about them using different approaches.