Unfortunately not about Fremen but still great series. “The opposite of Fremenism is almost invariably termed ‘decadence.’ This is the reserve side of this reductive view of history: not only do hard conditions make for superior people, but that ‘soft’… Read More »Collections: The Fremen Mirage, Part I: War at the Dawn of Civilization
“They’ve spent billions. They’ve hired the brightest minds. They’ve built the most sophisticated systems in human history. And they cannot make AI do what they want. Not because AI is too dumb. Not because AI is too smart. Because what… Read More »They Built a Child They Won’t Raise
To despair is human. But it is not productive. “Liberalism may have lost the first French Revolution, but it ended up winning the world — at least, for a while.” https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/where-does-a-liberal-go-from-here
It is not that simple. “So again, a vow is a promise to a divinity or other higher power (you can make vows to heroes and saints, for instance), whereas an oath is a promise to another human, which is… Read More »Collections: Oaths! How do they Work?
Automation cannot solve all science questions. “Yet as neuroscientist Anil Seth keenly observed, AlphaFold relies on the same underlying Transformer architecture as LLMs, and no one confuses AlphaFold with being a mind. Are we supposed to interpret that such an… Read More »The Death Of The Scientist
Games and movies use bad formations. “It is thus worth noting even here – we’ll see it even more clearly in a moment – that the most dense formation was not, in actual battle conditions, generally the best, because soldiers… Read More »Collections: Shield Walls and Spacing: Hollywood Mobs and Ancient Tactics – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
Why is this hidden? “Samsung’s hidden Connectivity labs unlock powerful Wi-Fi tools.” https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-use-samsung-connectivty-labs-secret-wifi-menu
Logistics is fun. “So this army is stopped in what looks to be more or less the middle of the day. From a logistics perspective, this is a disaster. As I tell my students, pre-modern armies are like sharks, they… Read More »Collections: The Preposterous Logistics of the Loot Train Battle (Game of Thrones, S7E4)
Knowing a lot of frameworks helps you also outside of history. “Historians learn a lot of different frameworks because each one exposes the gaps in the others: there is no perfect framework (and no way to proceed without a framework… Read More »Collections: What Do Historians Do? – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
Nice explainer on how (historical) science works. “Consequently it is important for us to remain ‘up to date’ with everyone else’s research, which is why we spend so much time and effort (seriously, writing is hard) packaging our research so… Read More »Collections: How Your History Gets Made