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"have" is doing most of the work here. Most EVs have a small 12v battery to power 12v components. But the driving the car to the store part is done with lithium.

This seems to be the model for “self” driving cars too. Good luck keeping attention during that ten thousandth time it navigates something tricky and suddenly needs immediate intervention.


Perhaps the burning of the library at Alexandria would qualify. How intentional that was is somewhat in question, but the world certainly turned its back on the only collection of written knowledge and let it turn to ash.


FWIW the burning of the library of Alexandria, and, indeed, its status as "the only collection of written knowledge" are myths.


Did it not burn? Was it not the most extensive library of human writing at that time? Please help us all understand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria


> Did it not burn?

Part of it did!

> Was it not the most extensive library of human writing at that time?

No.

More importantly, the original assertion:

> the world certainly turned its back on the only collection of written knowledge and let it turn to ash

is definitely not true.


From the article you link:

> Scholars have interpreted Cassius Dio's wording to indicate that the fire did not actually destroy the entire Library itself, but rather one or more Library warehouses near the docks.[87][81][8][89] Whatever damage Caesar's fire may have caused, evidently the Library was not completely destroyed.[87][81][8][89][3] The geographer Strabo (c. 63 BC – c. 24 AD) mentions visiting the Mouseion, the larger research institution to which the Library was attached, in around 20 BC, several decades after Caesar's fire, indicating that it either survived the fire or was rebuilt soon afterwards.[87][8] Nonetheless, Strabo's manner of talking about the Mouseion shows that it was nowhere near as prestigious as it had been a few centuries prior. It is unknown whether this was due to historical decline or catastrophic destruction.[8] Despite mentioning the Mouseion, Strabo does not mention the Library separately, perhaps indicating that it had been so drastically reduced in stature and significance that Strabo felt it did not warrant separate mention.[8] It is unclear what happened to the Mouseion after Strabo's mention of it.[60]

> Further evidence for the Library's survival after 48 BC comes from the fact that the most notable producer of composite commentaries during the late first century BC and early first century AD was a scholar who worked in Alexandria named Didymus Chalcenterus, whose epithet Χαλκέντερος (Chalkénteros) means "bronze guts".[90][87] Didymus is said to have produced somewhere between 3,500 and 4,000 books, making him the most prolific known writer in all of antiquity.[90][82] He was also given the nickname βιβλιολάθης (Biblioláthēs), meaning "book-forgetter" because it was said that even he could not remember all the books he had written.[90][91] Parts of some of Didymus' commentaries have been preserved in the forms of later extracts and these remains are modern scholars' most important sources of information about the critical works of the earlier scholars at the Library of Alexandria.[90] Lionel Casson states that Didymus' prodigious output "would have been impossible without at least a good part of the resources of the library at his disposal".[87]


  The Library, or part of its collection, was accidentally burned by Julius Caesar during his civil war in 48 BC, but it is unclear how much was actually destroyed


The 4th amendment protects people from unreasonable searches by the government. It does not require businesses to do anything special. There are plenty of great reasons to, and even other legal requirements to, protect and limit information gathered by businesses about individuals, but the 4th isn’t one of them.


It's commonly forgotten that the bill of rights simply restricts the government. For nearly 100 years it didn't even apply to state governments but just the federal government.


More context for those not familiar with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R...


I worked for one such employer long ago that would “accidentally” bounce paychecks.

This happened with such regularity that people would take their checks to said employer’s bank on payday and stand in line to cash them before heading to the office. You’d see a couple of coworkers in line to do this.

Maintaining a list like this is probably not super useful. Any company that does this kind of stuff as a routine will not continue the routine of employing people for long.


"Any company that does this kind of stuff as a routine will not continue the routine of employing people for long."

"On contracts" is explicitly mentioned. While bouncing your W-2 employees' paychecks is a big no-no, there are plenty of organizations that stiff contractors for decades.


> plenty of organizations that stiff contractors for decades

POTUS was famous for doing this - stiffing small contractors working on his real estate projects. This seemed like a pretty major character tell, but folks voted for him all the same.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/hundreds-claim-donald-t...


There first error was paying people. In a past life i worked in the entertainment industry. I was daily shocked by the number of non-employee "staff" positions that were unpaid. Students working a summer for "experience" came back a second summer as managers, then never left. A couple became supervisors of paid staff. Consumers would be shocked at how much profesional animation and cgi work is actually done by unpaid interns. Your favorite youtube channel? Dig into what an "association" with a local college actually means for thier bottom line.

I also met convicts doing "volunteer" work which did not pay but satisfied some aspect of thier parole. And with small businesses, there was of course the many children of business owners who were "helping out mom and dad", often as unpaid managers, in hopes of one day inheriting the business.


>will not continue the routine of employing people for long

The secret is to do this under different corporate names, not that they go out of business literally, but in America and probably elsewhere, they just rebrand and restablish elsewhere.


I used to work for a tiny company where probably just due to lack of cash (and/or failure to properly manage the payroll account) this was also an issue. We'd be given our paychecks in the morning and go to the bank at lunchtime to cash them!


A reverse centaur is just a person with a horse head right? I don’t get the analogy. I understand he’s talking about getting pushed around by an LLM, but would a normal centaur push an LLM around? It doesn’t even have any hands right? Seems like a reverse centaur is more capable of typing.


> A reverse centaur is just a person with a horse head right?

Well, no. A centaur is a normal person with stronger-than-human legs. That is, it's an augmented person who drives the powerful machinery underneath. Think of a person driving a car.

A reverse centaur is the opposite, namely, a machine making the choices and a frail human following them. In this context, a reverse centaur is an AI spitting thousands of LOC for a human to find the good ones.


> A centaur is a normal person with stronger-than-human legs.

Well also more numerous than human legs... And the whole two torsos thing

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Te...


Does this not work with HomePod? How is an AI voice assistant not compatible with the smart speaker?


That old hardware can't handle it. HomePod, the Apple TV, and the watch will all get updates in the next few months to streamline this.


Conservation easements are a thing. Many people support protecting natural spaces and the law is composed of such general understandings.


Yes, and they need to be flexible via public policy. If two generations from now some 10acre plot of land made into wildland is now surrounded by skyscrapers it probably makes a whole lot of sense for there to be a means for the local population to vote to remove that protection and turn it into affordable housing or whatnot.

It gets nuanced - but in general speaking terms this sort of thing should never be forever set in stone because someone alive 100 years ago decided as such via a private contract. Many other ways to go about setting aside areas for conservation.

Even conservation trusts make more sense to me. It’s still private, but they have an incentive to stay receptive to public comment and be a bit flexible. They might swap that 10 acres for another 100 acres somewhere else that creates a 1200 acre contiguous wilderness or what have you in order to stay relevant to contemporary needs while still staying true to the 250 year old mission.

I simply do not think you should be able to dictate (via private means) what happens to a property after you sell it. That’s for the next person who owns it to decide - in accordance with current local zoning and land use guidelines.


> Even conservation trusts make more sense to me.

That seems to be what was used here. Then the trust sold it for some cash.


  The U.S. Treasury publishes a daily total of the national debt, which as of May 2026 was $39 trillion.

  a little less than half of the total national debt is owed to the "Federal Reserve and intragovernmental holdings"

  In December 2020, foreigners held 33% ($7 trillion out of $21.6 trillion) of publicly held U.S. debt
[~] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_St...


39T is just the outstanding value of all the Treasury instruments (T-bills, etc). The entitlement programs (SSA and Medicare) have made commitments to certain levels of service and payments that are far in excess of the revenues they bring in, that's what is meant by "unfunded liabilities".


That's not debt, though. Congress can just declare SS/Medicare null and void, or change the amounts, etc. They can't do that with actual Treasury debt.

If you signed up for some expensive monthly subscription, you don't need to do the math about how much it would cost if you keep paying it every month until you die 60 years from now and then freak out about how big that number is. You can just...cancel the subscription.


How would turning bluetooth off convince anyone that there isn't a bomb on board? It seems like the bluetooth offering is the least of our worries in the insane case that this is how a threat was delivered.


The idea wasn't to convince anyone of anything, it was to reduce RF noise so the cops could find the offending device more quickly. Also if it were a real threat you would probably quickly identify someone who is unwilling to turn off their Bluetooth.


  a flight attendant told passengers over the PA system that they "must turn off Bluetooth immediately," or else the aircraft would have to turn around.


if it were a real threat you would probably quickly identify someone who is unwilling to turn off their Bluetooth.


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