Ancient peoples were fully as intelligent as us.

Maybe even smarter as there was no lead poisoning their brains!

It's a good guess the people who made these artifacts (the bronze ones particularly) suffered from lead poisoning: lead was a primary alloying metal for bronze. You can even look up elemental analysis for BMAC bronze artifacts specifically: "...contain appreciable amounts of arsenic (up to 3%) and lead (up to 4%), as did bronzes of the preceding chronological horizons"[0].

The early smelting techniques simply released everything into the open atmosphere, as fine particulate fumes. Environmental samples going back 5,200 years show regional-scale lead pollution[1] from Bronze Age metals smelting.

[0] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/earth-science/articles/... (under "3.1.3 Bronzes of the Late Bronze Age II")

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01921-7

("The smelting- and cupellation-related release of Pb into the environment is predominantly via the fine-particle fraction and, as such subject to large-scale atmospheric transport, resulting in a supra-regional to hemisphere-wide distribution9,10,11,20,21,22,23")

Regarding sanitation, there is evidence that they understood the corruption of the flesh and many Bronze Age cultures had topical treatments that were quite effective antiseptics. So, while not understanding what bacteria are, they still knew the effect.

How about: ancient people had brains that were physically similar to anyone modern, and sometimes they came up with one or two good ideas, but they were generally poorly informed and full of misconceptions by modern standards.

How can you possibly call yourself an intelligent person if you cannot speak Cantonese?

(I don't like tonal languages because they interfere with tone of voice, and Cantonese has extra tones.)

Being able to read Chinese could be advantageous, and then I'd be less of an idiot, it's true.

It's somewhat different from "smart", isn't it? Since it includes everyone.

Yes, they are loot box whores but so is everyone else.

Steam is a community, social media, and a store. The community is what they built and that community is extremely loyal. That community is also what developers are paying for.

In Gaben, we trust. I have 20 years of experience saying Gabe won't fuck me over to increase EBIDA by .5%. Are they perfect? No, but they are lightyears better than most of their competitors except GOG in terms of putting consumers first.

They had to be sued to get them to offer refunds

They had to be sued to get them to remove forced arbitration clause

I keep giving Valve my money because they keep giving me good value for that money and a trustworthy environment to spend that money in. I have no loyalty. I also buy games from Humble Bundle and GOG.

I'm not excited about the prospect of losing my 4000 games but the literal only options available for consumers right now are "Pay money and get a game that we can take away at any time, fuck you over, do all sorts of bad things, and we demonstrably hate you", or "Pay money to get a game and a refund period and a bunch of features and maybe when Gabe dies we will do that other thing"

There is no alternative. GOG is run by the same people who released CyberPunk2077 as a bug ridden mess to please upper management, so they even have evidence of already straddling that line right now.

1.0 was 5/10 (quit after a few days) 1.5 was 7/10 (finished) Phantom Liberty was a 9/10 (finished)

It took 2 full years of additional development for 2077 to be in the amazing state it is in now.

It's a terrible incentive for the industry and why I still refuse to buy No Man's Sky.

It's essentially the concept of early access but lying about not being early access.

GOG is also amazing.

On another note, heard on Bloomberg today that they've been working on GTA 6 for 10 years at this point. Considering the size of their development teams it's possible that more manhours may have gone into this single title than all video games that were made until the PS1 era combined.

It’s incredible to think about what else has happened during these past 10 years of development. Or think about other decade long stretches and what was accomplished.

Not cutting short what the undertaking of this is, just that the scale of this project spanning a decade is fascinating.

Ironically this tendency to form an opinion without investing time might also be a form of brain rot.

Unfortunate to see the same happen here but that's life I guess. The fact that the news for nerds group is so desperate to find community that they glom onto every IRC and website they can is a bit sad but I guess it's the nature of online cultures. But oh yeah enshittificiation and the year of the Linux desktop is tomorrow and Meta is going down down down or something right?

On the other hand it's funny how folks who like that culture keep putting it on a pedestal. Why? It contains little predictive power. It teaches little. It's just about opining. Is it that fulfilling to find online bytes that share your opinions? I guess I use my real life friends and family for that.

It's social media in a nutshell. We're more interested in finding people like us than confronting reality. When that happens at scale, you lose mass consensus. HN is but one piece of that.

The reality is there arent many people like us outside of work. I would love to be able to talk about this kind of stuff irl but in all my years none of my irl friends, acquaintences, etc, are more than remotely interested in the kinds of topics that come up here. There is a distinct difference between echo chambers where the opinions are common (politics), and thread discussions like on HN where real life versions are fleetingly rare. I dont think its entirely fair to conflate the two. eg:

> Is it that fulfilling to find online bytes that share your opinions?

I discuss on HN as much to find and genuinely debate alternative opinions, and IME thats a pretty common pattern. i have learned so much reading other comments, formulating thoughtful responses to others, and have others break down / extend / critique my own shared opinions. Its what makes HN enjoyable and also the primary way its different than other social media sites.

206 points and 129 points on a 47 word blog post where most of the thread is about what people think about the title.

Are you sure it's actually different from other social media sites or do you just find it more relevant to you than the others?

> I guess I use my real life friends and family for that.

In my region, I never had real-life friends I could shoot the shit about FOSS geekdom with. And nearly all of my friends forged in youth through shared interest in intellectual topics, drifted away from that as they married and had children and had to spend all their waking hours on family or working to support family.

Where I live has a traditional cafe culture, so there is a third place for men to go to daily and interact, but the topics that can be talked about there are very limited indeed, so obviously nerds “glom onto” internet communities.

I think this was, roughly, peak Slashdot (tho I'll admit I was probably too young to be a good judge of it at this point.) From 2004 the meme discussions started overriding a lot of the regular discussion, and by 2007 ish the site was constantly getting derailed into EEE threads the way HN is constantly getting derailed into enshittification threads.

> Where I live has a traditional cafe culture, so there is a third place for men to go to daily and interact, but the topics that can be talked about there are very limited indeed, so obviously nerds “glom onto” internet communities.

My point of contention is that, this form of FOSS geekdom culture has many, many venues. Do you want to hop onto IRC? HN? Reddit? Discord? It may not be mainstream but it occupies the internet in a deep, fundamental way. On the other hand actual hard-nosed technical or business content is a lot, lot rarer. The loss of a site that discusses tech to become Yet Another FOSS Geek Social Site is to me a much sadder thing; there's a lot fewer of the former and a lot more of the latter. But, as you say, I've noticed a lot of the users are really desperate for a social venue to talk about tech nerd culture and so that's what crowds out all the other discussion.

And yet in hindsight, this seems to have been a pretty accurate way of looking at developments.

Anyway, there’s a difference between chit-chat that is just inane posting of the same old memes, and long-form-text chit-chat where people occasionally learn something new. IRC is no substitute, as long-form text isn’t part of the culture and some channels discourage social activity entirely. Reddit is enshittified and, because the standard input device is a phone screen, so hostile to long-form text that posting just a couple of solid paragraphs marks you out as a weirdo who will get downvoted.

You like business news, but IMO that’s the worst part of HN. For a site based on “anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity”, most people who are working hard to develop a startup simply don’t have the leisure time for a wide range of interests. That’s why posts on the humanities here often draw some less-than-informed responses, even though many nerds would see them as important a part of the life of the mind as hacking computers.

I'd be much happier with an HN that actually talks about tech and nothing else. It's unclear to me why the 3000th thread about social media being evil needs 1000 posts of armchair opinion or how every thread about Meta devolves into declarations about how the company will implode (why? Because God will smite it for its sins? Lol.) Or whether or not AI will doom is all. The gravity of activity on this site is tech culture. It's not really tech. Obviously a certain person really enjoys this culture. But I'm not more intelligent, aware, or even better informed because of it. My take is the folks that enjoy this culture don't care much in the same way nobody cares about these things at a sports bar or cafe.

My guess is the reason I joined HN (this is my 2nd account, my first was in 2007) and why someone joins the site now is very different. Back then I was interested to see the developments on web tech. We watched Javascript build and mature into today's browser language. We watched the rise of dynamic languages, a rebound to static languages, and now interesting developments like Rust and Zig. TCP got improvements, now we have things like WebRTC, QUIC, Homa, and gRPC. But I suspect today people join here because they want to talk about whether AI will steal their jobs and are only tangentially interested in how LLMs and transformers actually work.

Why would you think this place is not absolutely full of shills?

the Internet is so dead, I'm sure I'm arguing with a bot. I need to go outside..

HN's interface, and showing just a username in a tiny font, honestly gives me less of that tiring feeling of people around me hustling a personal brand, than even the fediverse which is supposedly "healthy social media".

HN is full of bullshit, shills, charlatans, and extremely bad moderation/rules. Yet it, like Linkedin, dramatically increases your earning potential if you post here.

By all means, study the detrimental effects of social media and AI on our brains but don't correlate it with people creating art just because.

The first type of brainrot is what happens when you let other things think for you and your thoughts and opinions become not your own. AI is anti-thinking because you can let the machine think for you. Social media is anti-thinking because you can let other peoples' opinions think for you.

On the other hand, memes actually communicate ideas. For example, The Simpsons Ralph meme "I'm in danger" and the dog on fire "This is fine" memes both represent understanding being in a dangerous situation while doing nothing about it. Star Trek was actually way ahead of its time with the episode "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" which was about a culture that used memes as communication.

So what do you get when you combine brainrot ("anti-thinking") with memes? You get brainrot memes, which is the second type of brainrot. For example, 6-7. 6-7 doesn't communicate ideas. It doesn't mean anything. Instead, it communicates the opposite of an idea. So when someone says "6-7", they are embracing using language in an anti-thinking way. In this way, brainrot memes can be thought of more as an anti-meme. It's as contagious as an idea, but since it doesn't contain any information, it acts more like a virus. So brainrot memes are essentially mind-viruses that embrace the lack of thinking that comes with brainrot.

Using language in an anti-thinking way seems like a somewhat interestingly thought through mission though. If that's even the case.

The fact that you try to think about it that much though is arguably what makes it almost funny.

Art doesn't have to make you think or convey any ideas. L'art pour l'art. It doesn't matter if it's on TikTok or wherever.

Anyone from far away lands, kings, priests, CEOs, rando on HN reaching into your mind... all engaged in information shaping to encourage allegiance. It makes instinctual sense for NY Times editors to get others to risk their health through limited coverage. Biology is self selecting and instinctual to the core; it does not run in high minded philosophy, just physics. The only way to confirm our efforts now matter is stay alive longer to verify. Something entropy does not afford our individual biology.

I have taken to ignoring those not on the cutting edge of health science and essential technology for food safety and production. Everyone else is gaming clicks.

Ultimately companies like Jane Street have no moral rudder and it is a waste of talent for smart young people to work for them, but we are so far beyond such considerations at this point that it sounds naive to even suggest that maybe talented people should work on things that make society better for everyone and care about the moral implications of their work. Instead everyone is looking for a way to contribute to the coming dystopia in whatever way they can because that's where the money is.

You may not like it but we function in a capitalist society and as such the efficiency of markets is part of that. To have that happen usually requires the market as a whole participating and that includes firms like Jane Street. In the India case I don’t know if what they were doing was illegal or not, India is complicated and the laws there in my opinion are influenced not as much by standards but how well you scratch the itch of others. It is clear the option markets in India was/is highly inefficient in that Jane Street was able to pull the rug over and over. I would be curious who the counter parties were and if this is more about pride of Indian financial institutions not being competent instead of this being illegal. Thinking more about Hindenburg and how India reacted. In the US it feels like a gray area because at the end of the day the options market was clearly clueless on how they should be pricing the options.

Speaking from a US perspective people get thorny on these topics but I think it’s great that folks are always pushing the boundaries. This type of law is tested and we figure out what is ok and what is not. It’s often not cut and dry. Maybe Jane Street was entirely in the wrong in India and they will pay a price. Maybe not. Hopefully their markets learn and benefit from it.

I don’t believe any of us are in a position to say how folks should be spending their time. If we went down that road we could probably argue it back to nobody should be working and should simply be farming for our own food.

Money is debt, you can’t make it without someone else owing it. Taking billions in profits from India’s stock market is pretty straightforward, millions of Indians lost their savings.

Edit: I don’t think my point was clear. If you are going to allow retail in the options market, you should also be ok with sophisticated actors participating in it.

We obviously can't tell people how to spend their time, but we can point out that there might be moral reasons to avoid working in industries and for companies with particularly strong negative impacts on society.

> If we went down that road we could probably argue it back to nobody should be working and should simply be farming for our own food.

This is a classic false dichotomy. There are an infinite number of middle grounds between farming for our own food and an ultracapitalist dystopia in which morality is replaced by profit.

You’re right that there are middle grounds between subsistence farming and some caricature of ultracapitalism, but deciding where to draw that line in practice is messy. Pretending it’s obvious which industries are “moral” and which aren’t usually says more about someone’s priors than it does about some universal ethical framework.

At the end of the day, efficient allocation of capital, imperfect as it is, is what makes the system work. It drives productivity gains, lowers costs, and ultimately raises living standards across the board.

One big problem is that such claims are often cover for what amounts to theft. PE companies loading acquisitions with debt, for example, or "enshittification" - both tactics which are optimized to transfer wealth to investors, not improve the overall allocation of capital.

The idea that all these shenanigans are "efficient allocation of capital" is just propaganda, left over from decades ago before the system became what it is today.

This is where you need government intervention and controls, but unfortunately the US government is structurally and systemically unable to provide that. Regulatory capture, legalized corruption ("campaign finance", "lobbying"), money as speech, corporations as people - none of this is morally sound, and the justification that it's all in service of "productivity gains, lower costs" etc. is hollow.

> but deciding where to draw that line in practice is messy.

Of course - that's the nature of morality, it's inherently political. There would be no morality without other people. But that doesn't mean we should throw up our hands and give up on it.

But the idea that smart people should "push the boundaries" to find out "what is ok and what is not" is either naive or borderline sociopathic IMNSHO.

Before throwing around labels like “naive” or “sociopath,” it’s worth recognizing that a capitalist system relies on efficient markets, and efficient markets depend on laws being tested and clarified through the courts. That process benefits everyone.

I’m not making an ethical defense of any specific behavior. I’m saying that just because someone benefits from mispricing in a market doesn’t automatically make it unethical. The courts help define those boundaries. If you reject that premise and prefer a system without capitalism, then we’re simply talking past each other.

And for what it’s worth, tossing out loaded terms like “naive” or “sociopath” isn’t exactly an argument, it’s just lazy rhetoric. It’s ok for us to disagree but why use such a lazy argument?

I do however believe that gaming the system for personal profit is unethical. The intention of the law might have been to build a playground for people to enrich themselves, but from a Christian standpoint, I don 't think this always works out well for society. I'm not a Christian, but I do like some of its values.

I was a bit disappointed about the suggestion that capitalism requires certain things that make Jane Street a necessity. This is not a fact, nor does the current process benefit everyone equally. Rejecting that notion, and possibly reading a bit too much into that, is what caused me to use said terms.

I do agree that we are probably talking past each other though :)

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