Herodotus was an early kind of historian, in the context in which he was relating his histories he was as much an entertainer as much as a historian so he repeated every fun and weird story he heard. He did qualify the dog-headed men specifically as a thing he had heard in a ironic Greek tone, he was relating an entertaining tale, not trying to persuade you that dog-headed men really exist.
A human body with a canine head. My guy Herodotus wasn’t telling tall tales at all, he was merely giving accounts of some of the very first furry conventions. These “dog-headed” men were wearing fursuits!
What Plato described was an invention he created for a philosophical parable, it wasn't intended as history and treating it as such would be akin treating Batman comics as history. The imagined and fictional island was also beyond the Pillars of Heracles which means it was in the Atlantic, not in the Mediterranean.
Not everyone is well informed about the realities of climate change, but many are and it's a concern I hear from normal people from the US, Europe, and Asia that I've met. Some bury their heads in the sand, and if you do you'll ignore others who haven't, but it's a very legitimate concern for people with a basic awareness of reality. Things have gotten far worse in my lifetime, probably older people are more concerned since we can see the changes more clearly, but not all young people are deluded or ignorant about the reality of climate change.
Really, I encourage you to log off and go outside a while, take a look a what the local flora and fauna are about and learn about that, maybe use online tools or communities to learn, but remember to log off and go outside and experience the natural world where you can.
I play tennis regularly, and I roller skate (inline) regularly. I find that these things provide me a great amount of balance (mentally) as a reminder that 99% of the world is physical / analogue, and that the electronic / digital part is, well, small and unimportant (no matter what is said by those with an axe to grind about the importance of their specific digital service).
I don't read books as regularly as I should, but I always enjoy when I do. I donate plasma once a month and the 'enforced idle time' is perfect for catching up on an hour of reading.
(I'm not very good at either tennis or skating, especially since I've been doing both for 10-odd years, but I enjoy them, they keep me fit, and I'm slowly improving or at least arresting the natural decline that comes with age, and planning on not giving either of them up until I'm literally physically unable to keep doing them)
There are a few places that don't use the Gregorian Calendar like Iran, Nepal, Ethiopia, and some others, so in those places no one would consider the year 2026 (though if familiar with a Gregorian Calendar they'd agree on the year). Then there's Thailand which uses a semi-Gregorian system that dates the year from the year of the Buddha's death, so there the year is not 2026 but 2569.
"the abandonment of representation everywhere in the world"
Worth checking out Socialist Realism, both the thing that motivated the CIA to fund and promote non-representative art and help develop it into a fad, and also a large corpus of representative art that existed when you imagine it did not (there's many others besides, non-representative art has always been a small niche relative to all art produced which is primarily abstract or representative once you start to look outside galleries and museums).
Jayme's theory depends on trade emerging post-Bronze Age collapse of a sort that requires a new kind of theory of mind and processing in a low trust environment driven by international trade. The Ea-Nasir letter was written c. 1750 BC shows that the same issues were already around ~ 800 years earlier and there's lots of international trade going on even in the 3,000s BC. The content of the Ea-Nasir letter and the personal reflections and issues presented there really destroy the central thesis of the book. It's also got a few other serious historic flaws (false claims about the existent of omens ignoring previous examples thousands of years earlier) that make it the kind of book that's interesting but without question also completely wrong in its central thesis.
>A lot of people use Claude as a friend/therapist/romantic partner
People developing a para-social (pseudo-social?) relationship with a corporate robot have far bigger problems than the word-chooser in their robot "friend".
I have, and I still do this occasionally. I don’t believe the plant on my desk (I don’t have a rubber duck) is intelligent. I don’t need it to be intelligent, either.
I also do it with a LLM every now and then and, while it’s feedback is more useful than a toy’s, it does not need to be intelligent either.
Even intelligent people have demonstrated they are not immune to the damaging effects of AI sycophancy. The most recent example that comes to mind is Hank Green.
Gardening and horticulture are ancient human activities that are incredibly old, the act of tending to and cultivating one's garden is a really delightful way to center the mind and get into a place where one is more grounded, connected to nature, and about as disconnected from capitalist interests a thing as you'll find. It's humanizing.
Just because the suits took a metaphor from gardening doesn't mean you have to think like the suits, maybe you want to liberate yourself from the kind of dehumanizing thinking where capitalism rather than nature is the central frame of reference.
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