I think it is the novelty of the idea of what an LLM can do that is important. I suppose accuracy can be improved over time. Compared to using gmaps to search places, it seems to be a bit better.
I think with LLMs the tighter the constraints you give it and the bumpers the better it is. Something you could do with it is like a JackBox game that generates the content. However I think it is very dangerous to rely too heavily on it without writing something to kind of gate or filter the inputs.
I like this. But i also assume parts of the stack are going to be reused in newer models as well, so this is probably going to be a blocker for them accepting it.
I’ve had lifelong intermittent sleep paralysis and it’s one of the worst feelings. Happened to me yesterday during a nap actually! I went to get up, and only my right foot moved an inch (or so it felt). I had to count to 3 and muster all of my strength to try to move again, and it didn’t work until the 4th time, when my body finally giggled a little.. enough to wake up the rest of it and free me once and for all.
I would argue that "women and children first" has been practiced since the dawn of times in a smaller setting i.e. tribes of hunter gatherers
The motivation is to protect women and children from likely dangerous circumstance so that the tribe can be quickly repopulated.
The tribes that sent all the women and children off to war or adventure and had only a few women or girl survivors left would have to wait for decades to repopulate the tribe to previous numbers but the opposite could be achieved in years.
I can't find a link but this very scenario is playing out in Ukraine at the moment. There was a video released by the government outlining the policy perhaps to explain why men were barred from leaving the country.
You, and many, have argued the point about the tribes and whatnot, but I've found that this frequently seems to be just applying one's current day culture to a speculation of what things might have been like.
One counter point that immediately jumps to mind is the modern concept of "child" is likely far different than in the past, when manhood ceremonies might have occurred as early as 15 years old. We have plenty of young kings and military commanders just from the last thousand years, stretching back 10 or 20 thousand, who knows?
Since you mention tribes I assume you mean more the 5-20k years ago timeline, in which case I'd hesitate to plainly speculate that these societies all tucked their women away in caves like the Flintstones suggests, or that any one of these societies was much like another. It's a very, very long period of time after all.
David Graeber is a fun anthropologist to read if you want to challenge some of the "common sense" assumptions we often make about ancient societies. "Debt" and "The Dawn of Everything" in particular I recommend.
> You, and many, have argued the point about the tribes and whatnot, but I've found that this frequently seems to be just applying one's current day culture to a speculation of what things might have been like.
To be fair we can only speculate but I actually came to this conclusion thinking about the two scenarios mathematically. Women increase the rate at which a tribes population can grow so when women die in combat a tribes growth rate diminishes. When a competing tribe manages to capture a woman in combat the growth rate of her original tribe diminishes and the growth rate of her new tribe increases. So sure, bigger does not always mean better but in a small population faced with constant threats the bigger tribes had a statistical advantage.
> One counter point that immediately jumps to mind is the modern concept of "child" is likely far different than in the past, when manhood ceremonies might have occurred as early as 15 years old. We have plenty of young kings and military commanders just from the last thousand years, stretching back 10 or 20 thousand, who knows?
I don't understand why this is a counter point. The age of what is considered a child has changed over the years but generally and historically speaking it coincides with the age of puberty so if anything it proves my point instead of diminishing it.
No doubt there has been many brave female warriors. My position is that this has been the statistical exception not the norm and that over time the societies that failed to follow the idea of "save the women and children" have declined and been extinguished or absorbed by those that do.
> Since you mention tribes I assume you mean more the 5-20k years ago timeline, in which case I'd hesitate to plainly speculate that these societies all tucked their women away in caves like the Flintstones suggests, or that any one of these societies was much like another. It's a very, very long period of time after all.
Agreed. It is a very, very long period of time and what we are seeing is the results of experiments played out over that time. Notice the trend in the ratio of male to female combatants in modern and historical armies.
> David Graeber is a fun anthropologist to read if you want to challenge some of the "common sense" assumptions we often make about ancient societies. "Debt" and "The Dawn of Everything" in particular I recommend.
Thanks for the recommendations. Ill check them out.
> One counter point that immediately jumps to mind is the modern concept of "child" is likely far different than in the past, when manhood ceremonies might have occurred as early as 15 years old.
...You're arguing that the age of manhood has grown lower over time?
> 16th century BCE – Ahhotep I is credited with a stela at Karnak for "having pulled Egypt together, having cared for its army, having guarded it, having brought back those who fled, gathering up its deserters, having quieted the South, subduing those who defy her".
> 1479–1458 BCE – Reign of Hatshepsut. It is possible that she led military campaigns against Nubia and Canaan.
> 13th century BCE – Estimated time of the Trojan War. According to ancient sources, several women participate in battle
> 13th century BCE – Lady Fu Hao, consort of the Chinese emperor Wu Ding, led 3,000 troops into battle during the Shang dynasty.
> Mid-12th century BCE – Deborah believed to have been appointed judge and defeated the army of King Jabin of Canaan, according to the Book of Judges.
> 11th century BCE – 4th century CE [sic] – Approximate time for the burial of a Kangju woman in modern Kazakhstan who was buried with a sword and a dagger.
> Late 9th century–8th century BCE – Shammuramat (Semiramis) ruled the Neo-Assyrian Empire. She was the first woman to rule an empire without a man ruling with her.
You might notice that so far only one of these examples involves a woman fighting in war, and that example is taken from legendary "documentation" written 600+ years after the events.
To clarify, I was attempting to give a simple overview in counter to the idea that "all ancient peoples put women and children first because procreation etc." It's an assumption contradicted by what evidence we have.
You're right, much of what we have of ancient times is nothing more than legends, or the work of one or two historians. From 10k back we have basically nothing but archaeological evidence.
So first of all, there's not evidence to suggest this idea that women and children were universally tucked safely away from things like war. Second of all, we do have evidence of participation by women in war - the legends of the Amazonians didn't come from nowhere, and women did, apparently, fight in the Trojan war, and women did get buried with weapons, and there are tales of warrior women, etc.
As for children, my point was more like, "women and children first" in 2024 would result in some 15 year old boys on the life boat, whereas 20000 years ago a 15 year old boy could very well have a spear put in his hand before a battle.
> We have mass graves from prehistoric battles. A female skeleton in one of those would have been big news.
Doesn't seem to make the news, since in archaeological circles it's not really newsworthy. This really is just applying modern gender ideology to ancient peoples that had different ideas about gender roles.
Well I guess it does technically "make the news" since more niche news sites report on the findings. Maybe my own background makes me find it not really newsworthy.
You know, your comment is written to suggest that one of the links at the end provides an example of the phenomenon that I said "would have been big news", and yet none of them do so or even purport to do so.
Well now I'm just confused. Let me ask you this: to specifically which mass graves are you referring, from which time period?
The thread supposition is that the men tucked the women away and then went off to war. My counterpoint is that what evidence we have of the ancient world (more than 3k years ago and such since the people in the replies vaguely talk about tribes) doesn't really indicate that people "went off to war" like that, nor that what conflict did happen didn't have women in it.
There's also the issue that if we're talking mass graves > 5k years ago, so from sites from cultures about which we know very little, it's very difficult to accurately determine and individual's biological sex, and essentially impossible to determine their gender (knowing nothing about the genders of that society). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1155/2015/908535
If you're of the persuasion that modern gender enthusiasm is stupid or whatever, that's irrelevant, we're discussing ancient cultures, and other cultures clearly have had more than 2 genders before so we need to acknowledge the possibility https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/content/two-spirits_map-...
So: which grave sites did you mean? The oldest one we know of, Jebel Seheba, may have been from a protracted series of conflicts and is about half half male / female for the skeletons for which sex can be reasonably determined. The Talheim death pit had women in it. The crow creek massacre site had women in it.
If all your fighting age males died the women and children would just becomes slaves to whoever won. There are numerous examples of this being documented during Romes expansion into Western Europe.
A group of young men on the contrary can quite easily raid and kill the men in neighboring villages and take as many women as they can keep as slaves. Again, documented in Romes founding.
People seriously underestimate how bloody and amoral history is and that women were as complicit in all of the barbarity as the men.
Could you clarify what you said about women's complicity at the end? Every other part of your comment seemed to attribute very little agency to women (they are essentially prizes for whoever wins a fight, with seemingly no other choice).
Once you understand that you will understand that the gender of the losers didn't matter one bit once the fighting was done, they were killed, enslaved, conquered, raped or whatever else the victors felt like at the time.
This isn't about men and women, this is about winners and losers.
Or to quote Rosa Luxembourg about the same phenomenon a couple of millennia later:
>Most of those bourgeois women who act like lionesses in the struggle against “male prerogatives” would trot like docile lambs in the camp of conservative and clerical reaction if they had suffrage. Indeed, they would certainly be a good deal more reactionary than the male part of their class. Aside from the few who have jobs or professions, the women of the bourgeoisie do not take part in social production. They are nothing but co-consumers of the surplus value their men extort from the proletariat. They are parasites of the parasites of the social body. And consumers are usually even more rabid and cruel in defending their “right” to a parasite’s life than the direct agents of class rule and exploitation.
One of the many writings she was raped with a saber for, but for some reason isn't popular today.
That was a joke in Plutarch. Women were absolutely despised in Ancient Athens. If you want to get a sense of Athenian attitudes towards women you should read Pericles' Funeral Oration.
I have little clue about ancient athens. Your statement however does mean contradict the poster. You can despise a party/group, while that group holds power over you. In fact that is a very common way why such a relationship occurs.
There is truth in comedy. And the real joke is that it continues about his infant son controls his wife & therefore his infant controls all of Greece via his wife.
And not sure how Thucydides' Pericles telling the future widows of Athens to basically have a 'stiff upper lip' is evidence of them being "absolutely despised". If anything I'd take it as evidence they had status and influence because otherwise the first man of Athens wouldn't be addressing them.
And also from Plutarch, women are the ones who stop Rome from being destroyed w/ Coriolanus.
I think complicit is a poor choice of words in this case. I think compliant is better.
The behavior of the captured woman would be:
- do everything possible to ensure her young previous children are not killed, but accompany her in captivity;
- don't try to escape, which would probably be impossible anyway;
- don't fight or assassinate her new captor 'husband', it would mean certain death;
- try to make the enslaved relationship work as well as possible; please the new master;
- seek to have successful children in the new context;
- marry-up in the new society, if at all possible, such as on death of the first 'husband'.
Many women would have already had arranged marriages out from their home village, to a new husband in another location, even within the same tribe or society. They may never have seen their original family again.
They would be dominated by their new mother-in-law, and treated like a slave in the new extended household. Being captured and enslaved again was probably not so different - unless it was by different and abhorrent barbarians.
For example, China had arranged out-marriage of daughters, and many of their lives were totally miserable (e.g. foot-binding so they couldn't run away). But being captured by the Mongols was probably extremely unpleasant (I mean, they never washed :)
They are complicit though because in this case whatever value they hold (labor, baby factory, social connection) goes away when they refuse to do those things or get killed while refusing.
In your analogy imagine being held at gunpoint knowing that if you give up your riches you will ultimately survive but the behavior that caused you to give up your riches will be incentivized and perpetuated due to your compliance. Now contrast that with the situation where you refuse to hand over your riches and the would be robber walks away or kills you only to have the riches disappear the instant you do.
Granted it is not an easy situation for an individual to make but choosing to be complicit and acting accordingly is still an exercise of an individuals agency.
> survive but the behavior that caused you to give up your riches will be incentivized and perpetuated due to your compliance
I'm really confused by this, it feels like a modern framing is being applied to a really long period of time a very very long time ago.
Why would a band of pillagers stop pillaging because the women in one village slit their throats rather than be taken captive? If anything, it seems more likely that a band would settle down and take over existing defenses and start a new life if there were people there to start new lives with, even as slaves.
Anyway it seems a little silly to suggest ancient peoples would be concerned with, or should be concerned with, the greater incentive structure of pillaging. Either way, pillagers gonna pillage.
> Anyway it seems a little silly to suggest ancient peoples would be concerned with, or should be concerned with, the greater incentive structure of pillaging. Either way, pillagers gonna pillage.
I am not asserting this. It's simply a matter of did the women help or hinder the violence? I argue that by virtue of being taken captive with hopes of integrating into the new tribe in some shape or form they helped perpetuated the violence.
> I argue that by virtue of being taken captive with hopes of integrating into the new tribe in some shape or form they helped perpetuated the violence.
If you share this opinion with some women you know irl, I would be really interested to hear how they respond.
I get you’re trying to make some argument about the roles we take, ultimately, because of our personal decisions in life situations, but complying with a robbers demands does not make me complicit in the crime. Those are two different concepts.
>Associated with or participating in a questionable act or a crime; having complicity.
>Associated with or participating in an activity, especially one of a questionable nature.
I find it sickening that someone would even try to describe a woman having to give up her agency due to not having the physical power to fight off a man as “complicit”.
> I find it sickening that someone would even try to describe a woman having to give up her agency due to not having the physical power to fight off a man as “complicit”.
It's a dark way of thinking about it but I guess it's why 'just following orders' is generally not considered a valid legal or moral excuse even in situations when insubordination likely results in death or imprisonment.
I am not talking about decision in a legal context.
I am talking about cause and effect.
My point is that actions (or lack of action) determine the outcome. The emotions that the actor feels towards the available actions does not determine the outcome of whatever action they choose. Just the actions count.
Some situations like a single instance of SA cannot be reasonably predicted and attempts at fight, flight or freeze will end up with SA occurring regardless.
So in these situations the person who is being assaulted is not complicit because no action whatsoever could have prevented the SA from happening.
Let's do a simple calculation that seeks to explain why Arabian men might have up to 4 wives.
Assume: in ancient Arabia, life was very harsh; tribes survived by raiding each other; 100% of adult men would go on a raid; women do not fight; fighting was brutal and merciless; casualties were high; no male prisoners were taken; wounded were killed; then ...
The first raid is inconclusive and 20% of men die on both sides. Now there are 100:80 women to men.
The second raid is also inconclusive, with the same casualties. The ratio is now 100:64.
The third raid is a rout, a total victory. The victors again lose 20%, but all the losing tribe's men are killed, and all their women are taken.
The victors now have more territory, more camels, more date palms and more wells.
The female to male ratio is 100+100:51
Of course, you can reduce the casualty rate and increase the number of raids, but something like that could be quite close to historical reality.
I think they would never be trusted. Clan loyalty was paramount. A man would never think of surrender or betrayal, and even if he did, he would not be trusted, because the victorious men could never imagine such a thing (like Japanese in WWII).
Secondly, there was literally no work for men to do, except fight. Another man is another mouth to feed and water. In the small scattered settled urban locations, in the few major oases, there was work (farming, building, digging irrigation channels, etc), but they had E. African slaves to do this, because they could be trusted (no hope of escape; all were castrated).
Thanks for the link. I came up with this theory after researching why men seem to have been the primary hunters in hunter gatherer tribes.
Totally unscientific but I think that heterosexual men and women shape the behaviors of each other for better or worse. Similar stuff is observed in animals. Spiders are particularly interesting.
"Women and children first" only means something in mass transportation or dense urban evacuation in a society with a concept of queueing.
More generally, there are ancient virtues of preserving the precious, vulnerable and honored, but the situations where the men would have to uselessly line up in the back would not exist. They would be fighting, attacking back, carrying weaker people, creating diversions, etc.
I think you're close to the mark but not quite on it.
Women and children first is an artifact of modernity. It is a required value in a location where you can A) have a disaster and B) have people (men) who don't have strong bonds.
If we were all from the same family, or village, then yes your "preserving" line of thought works. But mix in a group of males who dont have women or children with them, they can push to the front as it were. Even if they don't have the numbers to be successful they are a "threat to order" that might not exist. One where men who could be helping are now fighting/keeping order.
Yes this. Even though it has been practiced for years prior at some point it was probably just instinctual and driven by emotion instead of logical thought.
The phrase and it's propagation is an artifact or modernity.
I'm upvoting you to counter the downvotes because that is the brutal reality of war, particularly if the top brass (on both sides) don't actually have anything to lose.
Instead add hashtags to the end of the URL and bookmark them like normal. This way you can search them based on context without having to faff about with files and folders.
Of just email the links to an email address and add the hashtags in the body of the message.
>Too many pages are either ephemeral or generated by an SPA making this idea less than ideal.
I've noticed this. The worst part is if you are looking for some specific piece of information similar to other links that are still valid it's hard to tell if you have the correct information at hand or not.
Chrome can take a full page snapshot of a webpage but the image is not high res.
I asked it:
"Show me all the train yards in New York."
It only identified seven of them when there are many more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_City_Subway_y...
Then when I tried to copy and past my prompt from the history it did not display the full prompt and had no option to copy it to the clipboard.
reply