I'm reading Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones' Babylon - The Biography of a Metropolis which just recently came out, and that's how I ended up hearing about Yale's culinary adventures.
The book, btw, is kind of breezy in style and 'he of many LLs in his name' (Lālu-mullālu in Akkadian as suggested by my friendly AI) uses a lot of contemporary pop (nerdy) references to carry the narrative, yet very engaging and am learning a lot about this fabled city (and civilization).
That’s not how things work. There is one set of rules for us and another set of rules for the oligarchy and their corporate vehicles. It’s just like the Taliban legal code (see above) where the closer you are to the top the more lenient and ‘understanding’ the system.
Edit: worth a pull quote
Article 9 explicitly divides Afghan society into hierarchical categories based on social status, including religious scholars (ulema), elites such as tribal leaders and merchants (ashraf), the middle class, and the so-called lower class, assigning different forms and levels of punishment accordingly. This structure grants partial or full impunity to privileged groups while subjecting marginalized individuals to harsher penalties.
I was looking at the picture in Reuters of Putin meeting Jared Kushner and my thoughts were that our government is no longer a government of the people for the people but oligarchs for their creepy spawn. Also this Red-Blue nonsense is wearing thin. It's really a spectrum of corruption at this point.
Cradle of civilization is not an odd culture. Babylon, meaning Gate of God, is one of the more profoundly influential urban civilizational clusters in human history.
To an archeologist, 'civilization' refers to builders of walled cities inhabited by non-farmers with complex social sructure, division of labor, and usually some form of taxation. Highly moral hunter gatherers living in mud huts are not a 'civilization' in this context. Now you know.
That's interesting, because I don't really think of a "culture" as smaller than a "civilization". I think of a culture being a necessary thread that runs through a civilization and without which there are no civilizations.
Traveling overland across Africa will swiftly disabuse you of the notion that hunter/gatherer lifestyles make up any "large portion" of the continent's population. It would hardly even be feasible in the face of massive deforestation and population boom.
Africa comprises an entire continent. There are not large portions of it (or "large swaths") where people still live as hunter-gatherers living in mud huts, for any reasonable definition of "large portion."
… Eh? Even by the most generous possible definitions (including people who are primarily hunter gatherer but interact with the local economy to some extent), there are only on the order of tens of thousands of hunter gatherers today, worldwide.
As for mud huts, still commonly used in some places; there’s nothing particularly wrong with mud/earth construction if it works in your local climate.
Uh, what? I'm not sure where you are pulling that accusation from. I said very succinctly that I was not talking about what was the majority in Africa. I think you are confused.
What exactly is the problem? I understand a browser is a complex program but is the claim it is impossible to build a browser without continual dependence on advertising toxic dollars?
A browser in the class of Firefox or Chrome is for all intents and purposes a full OS constantly exposed to the world.
I understand open source OS development to be sustainable thanks to the the effort put into the server farms. That doesn't work for client side software, with the additional hurdle of needing to be better than the ad funded browser.
Maybe companies should see browsers more as a the Linux kernel, a precompetitive commodity layer on top of which we deliver/extract value to/from users.
And Firefox is not riddled with ads. The websites it loads are. If you run a program that shows ads on your Linux distro, the Linux kernel won't block them, will it?
Does your hypothetical kernel make it easy or difficult for you to install add-ons that block ads? Does the organization that build it have a conflict of interest regarding advertisting/surveillance interests such as Google/Meta/...?
Not sure what your point is. My comparison was not made to be stretched infinitely. Next question may be "does your kernel render web pages?", but I don't see where it is going.
But to give an answer: if you wanted to bake an ad-blocker in the Linux kernel that would prevent programs from showing ads in a transparent way (the ads just don't show and the programs still work and look fine), I think it would not be trivial at all.
But I don't see the point of going down that discussion.
Look, Windows (apparently) displays ads to some users. So even for OSes, if they can get away with it, they will shove ads in our face.
Linux is a highly complex piece of software. It is OSS. And it does not shove ads in face of its users. So my point is if there is a will there is a way.
The question is then why aren't we all getting behind a solid OSS browser? Specially now with AI coding assist, this should be even more feasable.
We're this conversation so Firefox is not up to task. And Chromium is connected in some way with the poster child for ad tech and surveillance capitalism.
So the point stands: OSS community has shown itself capable of tackling some of the hairiest technical challenges (Linux) and we should not let the notion that 'browsers can only be developed by corporations' stop us from creating OSS alternatives to the current offerings.
> OSS community has shown itself capable of tackling some of the hairiest technical challenges (Linux)
Has it though, say in the last decade? My first intuition would be that Linux was in a very different situation when it started. And it's not like there are 10 similar open source kernels that were created in the last decades and that got usable enough to be replacements for Linux...
Perhaps not riddled but Mozilla has added ads to Firefox itself and considering their acquisitions and behavior in general you can expect them to add more.
Hey, thanks for this recommendation! Just watched it and enjoyed it. Very interesting and unexpectedly spiritual. (This must be the one and only Herzog film I've managned to watch to the end.)
He started by saying he initially couldn't even achieve phantasia (at school) but now can and that validates his experience which is he has made strides on mental imagery department.
Why is the notion that some cognitive ability needs to be developed to acheive full potential controversial for you?
It's not, but you then must admit that there's a variety of experience that you may not experience, and that some people don't need to learn, or vice versa, cannot learn.
Fair enough but we're not discussing all under the heaven here.
The phenomena we are discussing is, to date, mostly defined and categorized based on subjective (self) reports. Given that, until we actually do experiments where we analyze brain patterns over a period of time and clinically prove that it is not true that a developmental methodology can alter brain patterns of subjects when attempting internal image formation, we can not summarily dismiss subjective reports that claim a degree of improvement.
Parent poster was rejecting the idea that subjective reports claiming impossibility were possible, I'm not going to extend them the benefit of the doubt in the opposite direction. "That's not a real thing" puts the onus on the demonstrator, you can't disprove subjective experience using subjective experience.
I believe in a plurality of human experiences, they do not, because they experienced one thing different. It's a specious argument, just like all the people rejecting the idea that other people can have a different subjective experience (based solely on their own personal experience) in this thread.
You are ignoring his "conceptually" bit and that is a reference to R.E.P.Loop which is what interpreters do: they read, they evaluate, they output, and loop.
Conceptually is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, then. The evaluation step of many (I won't say most) mainstream (not academic, and not toys people create in class) lisps will do a compilation step. It is not being interpreted any more than gcc interprets your C code. Describing it as interpretation is often wrong, and leads people to the extremely common (even here on HN) mistaken belief that Lisps are strictly interpreted and never compiled.
No reason to leave a mistake (if it was one) or a confusing statement (if it was meant in your, hah, interpretation) unaddressed.
Between 1958 and 1960, it took them a good part of two years to get a compiler going. Little did they know that this costly delay would still have people saying that Lisp is fundamentally interpreted in 2026.
Delaying the publication of key papers in major journals until 1960, and loudly mentioning Lisp compilation as the first application of Lisp, didn't help; too late!
This is just the Wikipedia page for "interpreters" so perhaps this is fake news but
> The first interpreted high-level language was Lisp. Lisp was first implemented by Steve Russell on an IBM 704 computer. Russell had read John McCarthy's paper, "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I", and realized (to McCarthy's surprise) that the Lisp eval function could be implemented in machine code.[3] The result was a working Lisp interpreter which could be used to run Lisp programs, or more properly, "evaluate Lisp expressions".
I.e. his realization that the Lisp eval function would behave as an interpreter came at the same time as his realization that the Lisp specification of the eval function can be translated to machine language. Though he did that by hand, within a short time, they had code doing that.
> Describing it as interpretation is often wrong, and leads people to the extremely common (even here on HN) mistaken belief that Lisps are strictly interpreted and never compiled.
Well, I literally said in my post that basically all Lisp was compiled. And I was replying to a guy saying that I thought all lisp is compiled. So hopefully I'm not contributing to that misconception.
Disagree. Concepually is lifting according to its weight class here. It is entirely irrelevant whether all or most implementations compile. The germinal fact is that a "naive" interpreter implementation of LISP does not in anyway alter the semantics of the language or the code being executed.
> No reason to leave a mistake (if it was one) or a confusing statement (if it was meant in your, hah, interpretation) unaddressed.
Look buddy, I'm not here for snarking others. I am here to learn and exchange ideas.
The book, btw, is kind of breezy in style and 'he of many LLs in his name' (Lālu-mullālu in Akkadian as suggested by my friendly AI) uses a lot of contemporary pop (nerdy) references to carry the narrative, yet very engaging and am learning a lot about this fabled city (and civilization).
It sets certain records straight ...
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