One of Kemp’s central arguments—that some early societies were relatively democratic, and that hierarchical rule is not humanity’s default setting—closely echoes the theory advanced by David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. That book, published in 2021, generated heated debate about the origins of inequality and the reliability of the archaeological record, and it was ultimately admired more for the force of its argument than for its account of the earliest societies.

Is that really the consensus opinion on Dawn of Everything?

Even regular laws should have a trial period, and only get confirmed after demonstrating that they have the intended effect.

Saag paneer.

How will we pay each other for our thoughts?

I ate the last one yesterday.

Did you really expect me to resist?

Global Thermonuclear War.

We queried the TriNetX Global Research Network for adults ≥ 18 years with an insomnia diagnosis (ICD-10 F51.0). The exposed cohort required ≥ 1 melatonin prescription and ≥ 365 exposure-days; controls had no melatonin exposure.

I interpret that to mean that both the study and control cohorts had insomnia diagnoses, but the cohorts weren’t randomized and no other variables were controlled for.

Reflective inner surface that can double as a solar cooker.

Even if your claim were correct… with every infection the pathogen potentially gets better at infecting humans, and you’re giving it another opportunity to improve and spread to others.

Entire species have been wiped out because natural immunity doesn’t always outpace pathogens’ ability to adapt—letting nature take its course has no predictable winner.

Those who benefit from the way the police currently operate are incentivized to preserve the status quo—mental illness and all.

Syncthing uses a centralized discovery server to connect device IDs to IP addresses (although you can change this to point to your own discovery server, too).

I don’t know if Funkwhale has a similar option.

Cucumbers or radishes?

Reminds me of the Berkeley balcony collapse during a student party ten years ago.

Entire story content:

Sen. Mitch McConnell, 83, fell to the ground in a Capitol hallway Thursday afternoon as he made his way to Senate votes. This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

New update:

McConnell, who announced in February that he would not seek reelection, fell to the floor while two volunteers from the environmental advocacy group Sunrise Movement approached the senator and asked him a question about Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions. He did not respond to the question. The senator seemed unsteady, but got up and kept walking with the help of his detail. He then waved to the two individuals who were questioning him.

Attack by environmental terrorists confirmed.

The way Linux treats many things as part of the file system (devices, sockets, etc.) that Windows doesn’t.

Bureaucracy.

First they came for the woodwinds, and I said nothing because I play in strings.

Edit: It’s a silly joke, but I do think instruments in an orchestra is a good metaphor for the importance of diversity to society.

I think humans are natural storytellers who rely on the construction of narratives for most of our basic thought processes. But the natural world is inimical to narrative, so we employ narrative worlds whose functioning is adapted to the requirements of storytelling. (Even “naturalistic” storytelling relies on subtle tweaks to the laws of causality and probability, if nothing else.)

So I believe that we can’t make sense of the world without relying at least implicitly on the supernatural, but I don’t believe that it corresponds to anything external to our own cognition.

But the “laws of nature” are just provisional rules we’ve deduced through observation. When we see things that violate the rules as we’ve deduced them (and we often have), we figure out new rules—we don’t just assume there are things to which the rules don’t apply.

To distract us from the other bots.