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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • If something is possible, and this simply indeed is, someone is going to develop it regardless of how we feel about it, so it’s important for non-malicious actors to make people aware of the potential negative impacts so we can start to develop ways to handle them before actively malicious actors start deploying it.

    Critical businesses and governments need to know that identity verification via video and voice is much less trustworthy than it used to be, and so if you’re currently doing that, you need to mitigate these risks. There are tools, namely public-private key cryptography, that can be used to verify identity in a much tighter way, and we’re probably going to need to start implementing them in more places.





  • I did my first cruise this year, and honestly had an absolute blast. However, the extremely important factor here is that it was a gay cruise (from the company Atlantis), and so it was absolutely nothing like the standard experience. For one week in the Caribbean, it was basically just a giant non-stop party. No kids, no entitled retirees, just you and 5000 other gay men trying to enjoy as much debauchery as can be fit into a week.

    There were some port stops as well which were nice, but the main draw was very much the parties that would go on all night and through the morning. The music and production was incredible, and most of the other entertainment options were also swapped out for more gay-oriented options, so instead of bingo or whatever it is the boomers do, it was drag queens doing Britney Spears singalongs and things like that. And because everyone is gay, there’s already a shared common experience and identity so people tend to be very friendly and welcoming.

    Also, if you’re single or otherwise available, the amount of sex you could have is genuinely ridiculous, though I was there with my boyfriend so we mostly just enjoyed the parties and made some great new friends. I had such a fun time, contrary to my expectations, that we’ve actually signed up to do another one in Europe later this summer, and that winter Caribbean cruise will probably become an annual thing for us.



  • Just for the sake of completeness, the actual history here is that Ancient Greek has the latter Phi Φ which, during the classical Greek era of around the 5th century BC, was pronounced as a particularly strong /p/ sound that produced a noticeable puff of air, as opposed to the letter Pi π which was a weaker /p/ sound. It’s the exact same story with Greek Theta θ vs Greek Tau Τ and Greek Chi Χ vs Greek Kappa Κ. This distinction is called ‘aspiration’.

    The Romans obviously had quite a lot of contact with the Greeks and took a lot of Greek words into Latin. However, the issues is that Latin did not have these aspirated sounds natively, and so they didn’t have an simple way to transliterate those letters into the Latin alphabet. The clever solution they came up with was to add an <h> after the aspirated sounds to represent that characteristic puff of air. So, they could easily transcribe the distinction between πι and φι as “pi” and “phi”. Thus begins a long tradition of transcribing these Greek letters as ‘Ph’, ‘Th’ and ‘Ch’.

    The awkward issue is that languages tend to change over time, and by the 4th century AD or so, the pronunciation of all the aspirated consonants had dramatically shifted, with Phi Φ becoming /f/, Theta θ becoming the English <th> sound, and Chi Χ becoming something like the <ch> of German or Scottish “Loch”. This was generally noticed by the rest of Europe, and other European languages tended to adopt these new pronunciations to the extent that their languages allowed, though some languages also changed the spelling (see French ‘phonétique’ vs Spanish ‘fonético’). Plenty of languages kept the original Latin transcription spellings though, and thus we have the kinda goofy situation of ‘ph’ being a regular spelling of the /f/ sound in English.

    So, tl;dr: Ph was just a clever transcription of a unique Greek sound that basically was a P plus an H. Then the Greeks started pronouncing it as an F, and so did everyone else, but we kept the original spelling.


  • Who is ‘they’?

    You’re acting like there exists some single high council of concerned people who have unilaterally decided to pin all childhood woes on the phones, when this is a single article primarily about a particular group of UK parents who’ve focused on this issue and who presumably were never in contact with this American psychologist.

    How do you know that these parents haven’t also considered helicopter parenting and free play? Do you know them?











  • Okay, so who are the people responsible? A handful of leaders? Most of the original Zionists have been dead for a long time. Is it literally every single Israeli? What exactly does this freedom and justice look like? I don’t think locking up Netanyahu and Ben Gvir would exactly satisfy the Palestinian cause, so ultimately, you have the situation of millions of Israelis, most of which were born there, who do not want to leave and will only do so by force.

    So, what do you want? The forced removal of all Israelis? That’s not an inconsistent position given your general perspective, but if that’s the case, come out and actually say it.

    You’ve said a lot of nice abstract things about wanting freedom and justice, and very little actual concrete info about the situation on the ground.


  • Jews conquered large parts of Palestine (not all of it AFAIK)

    This isn’t really true to the historical record, not that it’s significantly relevant to the modern conflict. Contrary to the Biblical Exodus account, from what the archeological and linguistic record seems to show, a unique Jewish culture seems to organically emerge from a particular group of Canaanites who were not otherwise previously distinct from any of their neighbors. There certainly was no mass migration and conquest from Egypt. Over time, the Jews/Israelites developed a distinct cultural identity, possibly with some amount of external influence, and later developed individual minor kingdoms before being subjugated by the Egyptian New Kingdom, the Assyrians (thus the Lost Tribes of Israel), the Babylonians (thus the first Exile and the destruction of the first Temple), the Persians (who returned the previously exiled Jews), Alexander the Great, and lastly the Romans, who destroyed the Second Temple and began the Diaspora.

    Again though, none of this should really be seen as being particularly relevant to the modern issue any more than Roman territorial claims are to the modern borders of Italy.