Interesting approach—to detect fake news by simulating humans’ reaction to it rather than judging the content itself.

As many others are pointing out, cultural hegemony plays a major role—but I think there’s another factor at play as well:

Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology have been dead and fossilized for a thousand years and more, and in the meantime a long tradition grew up of mining them for allegory, with their prior religious significance stripped away. Most other world mythologies, on the other hand, still form part of active belief systems, or recently died out under colonial occupation and so carry postcolonial political overtones. So borrowing from them could be more problematical, whereas classical mythology has basically been left up for grabs by its former adherents.

The classical Romanization was more accurate in its time—the issue is that the common pronunciation of classical Latin changed after the classical era (for instance, the “c” became soft in many contexts, instead of always being pronounced as “k” as it was in classical Latin).

If you use the original classical pronunciation for Latin, you’ll also pronounce the classical romanized Greek names correctly—and if you spell them the classical way you’ll recognize them more easily in Latin sources. The modernized romanization is most useful if you’re only interested in Greece and not in the classical world as an integrated whole.

Utnapishtim.

Not with a typewriter, though.

Yeah, that’s why we need at least… two of them.

I know—I’m just saying that any other theoretical solution would always be worse than cloning, because you’d lose genetic information.

Edit: See Isodisomy for details.

The obvious solution would be to just clone the parent.

Any hypothetical attempt to simulate recombination would produce a genetic clone at best—but more likely (even if you overcame the practical issues), you’d end up replacing some of the unique material on one half of each chromosome with a copy of the genes on the other half (with a corresponding increase in the risk of genetic defects).

The sort of case I was thinking of is if different parties present different versions of an image or video and you want to establish which version is altered and which is original.

Maybe each camera could have a unique private key that it could use to watermark keyframes with a hash of the frames themselves.

TIL Habermas is still alive.

Many authors stipulate that their books must be sold on Amazon without DRM, so their readers can back up and use their books outside Amazon’s ecosystem. Does preventing users from accessing their files violate any conditions that were implied when people bought and sold books with that feature?

I haven’t yet expressed an opinion on capitalism, except to say that the features you’ve mentioned have little to do with it.

But to answer your original question: capitalism stricto sensu is when the profits and decision-making power in a firm are vested in those who put up the original financial capital. It incentivizes financial risk-taking, which (depending on economic conditions) can be useful or destructive. But the only merits it rewards are the possession of pre-existing wealth, the willingness to take risks with it, and luck. Nepotism and cronyism serve its ends by providing a source of wealth for new capitalists, and an outlet for successful capitalists to convert their gains into social rewards.

There is one thing I would find genuinely useful that seems within its current capabilities. I’d like to be able to give an AI a summary of my current knowledge on a subject, along with a batch of papers or articles, and have it give me one or more of the following:

• A summary of the papers omitting the stuff I already know

• A summary of any prerequisite background info I don’t already know, but isn’t in the papers

• A summary of all the points on which the papers are in agreement

• A summary of any points where the papers are in contention.

The better product; the greater amount of production; the higher efficiency

Every economic system claims to be able to deliver those goals.

But what you’re describing is more a general free-market economy than capitalism proper. The former determines how companies interact with consumers and each other; the later determines how power and profits are distributed within a company.

Reality itself: “Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” —Niels Bohr

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Submarine_films

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Submarines_in_fiction

Pomegranate molasses.

“I do feel like it added a level of distance to it that wasn’t a bad thing,” he told Ars Technica. “Maybe a bit like a personal assistant who stays professional and has your back even in the most awful situations, but yeah, more than anything it felt unreal and dystopian.”

If the single word “dystopian” is how the editors decided to summarize that description, I’m not sure they’re doing any better than the AI.