caesar novus

I'm interested in material artifacts aspect of Roman history, and am less interested (skeptical in fact) about the going narratives. Think how wrong the media gets a story if you happen to have local knowledge of it. But there are hard to overlook vignettes evoked by ruins that just beg for some contextual story, like the alienation of Tiberius or the refinement of the Quintilii brothers based on their respective villas. Same could be said for their meditative portrait sculpture...

Irresistible Cuban vibe x 4

Is anyone bothered by the possibility that ebay items could be stolen? I've noticed a trend where some Amazon "free shipping" items have become quite pricey yet are increasingly cheap from ebay. Local stores may not have those items any more; what are the ethics of ordering from cheapest source? On one hand, an "American Greed" documentary covered the FBI shutting down shoplifting rings that used ebay, and somebody supposedly keeps surveilling ebay for suspicious patterns. In some sympathetic cases things come from overstock and wanting to sell from an indirect source in order to not violate a list price agreement. On the other hand more modest shoplifting has become decriminalized, and sellers I deal with have suspiciously small quantities available altho may have started with many more. I normally wouldn't deal with suspicious sources like ebay, but Amazon has gotten not only pricey and slow (non prime), but their takeover of delivery service is bad here with them dumping packages in insecure piles in public. On ebay if I order from a highly rated vendor I get faster, cheaper service with secure delivery. If these are greedy criminals some sure can be generous, like the one who let me have $100 shoes for free after some tiny dispute.

Cover of "I Feel Love" with humans playing rather than original robo synth, and serviceable vocals:

short intense nuggets from Cuba and India:

I would like to see a similar analysis of the populating of the americas. In some cases the reverence of "first nations" is misplaced because they are hardly first, but a ruthless later wave that crushed the earlier.

I Like It Like That · Pete Rodríguez Miriam Makeba - Pata Pata

Here is a really clear and thorough article downplaying lead risks of ancient time https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2019/08/30/why-lead-poisoning-probably-did-not-cause-the-downfall-of-the-roman-empire/

Giovanni Hidalgo & Friends performing Buena Vista Social Club's "El Carretero" live

Famous researcher of ancient dna and author David Reich had a couple hour youtube here that generated 3000 (mostly supportive) comments. I didn't realize they are so active with prehistoric and ancient dna, but apparently they are reluctant to publish due to narrative-busting results. Lots of findings about the plague and hordes from the east and how new narratives need to be developed:

Zeugma Mosaic Museum Virtual Tour

A prominent more nerdy western counterpart AI was just made free, offering an optional reason mode 03mini: https://chatgpt.com/ I tried rerunning some of these questions, and it did toy around with explanations and a few answers, but always it choked with "There was an error generating a response". Might work better for those in a different time zone; it's supposed to have similar quality.

I was more interested in how it reasoned to form haikus rather than which people chosen. And interested in Adrian's rich details for them. I just reran the search with explanations turned on, and yes it was based on a literal acceptance of 10 web pages. I think I could tell it to be skeptical and not rely on compilation lists, but might then need to get behind book paywalls. Supposedly it sneaked past entire NYT archive paywall, and that influence may be why it once made a woke attack against an innocent question of mine. I used to be skeptical against this mindless pattern-matching neural network approach, but found they can discover the rules of logic without being taught. That's why I use the R1 version of deepseek, which stands for reasoning. As for learning facts, deepseek is famous in only spending a few million in training vs a hundred+ million for competitors, yet getting similar results. Assimilating facts is costly but straightforward. Complex reasoning is badly done by humans, and seems ripe for automation. If you can prove reasoning capability thru explanations, then you might justify more investment for loading in facts. P.S. A crippled (lite) version of Chinese deepseek can be downloaded to run on laptops, but there is a U.S. law proposing 20 years of prison for that (for espionage). I showed how to run the powerful web version in a topic something like 5 worst Roman emperors. Excerpt of (a shallow) deepseek explanation:

I just noticed the eminent Adrian Goldsworthy covers a similar list of top generals: