That’s what I’m secretly training the crows for.

I doubt the falconer would have any issue with me—I’m helping to keep them employed.

I’m indifferent to squirrels… but my city has hired a falconer to scare the crows away with hawks, so now the crows symbolize the oppressed masses being persecuted by the state.

A crow-calling whistle and a small tin of peanuts.

Blood Meridian as an illustrated children’s book.

What’s the purpose—research? Tax evasion? Shits and giggles?

Not with a typewriter, though.

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

You know that there are two unrelated words, and you’ve seen two different spellings—it’s a natural assumption that the latter stems from the former.

Why so many people would pair them up the same (etymologically unsupported) way, I don’t know… maybe we’re used to correlating words relating to art with French, and assuming that words with “ou” come from French as well (and this case just happens to be an exception).

I use “mold” for both, and regard “mould” as the British spelling for both.

But the etymologies are interesting—the verb comes from French modle, while the fungus comes from late Middle English mould. So if anything, your assumed distinction is etymologically reversed.

One issue specific to the Fediverse is that each instance and each community might have its own standard for what it considers “credible”—and part of another user’s credibility score might come from users on instances with which yours isn’t federated and doesn’t share information.

TIL Habermas is still alive.

Not using their turn signals if the only other traffic is pedestrians.

So many times I’ve been crossing an intersection to the opposite corner where I could cross either street first, so I pick the street that won’t block the car crossing the other way. They’re not signalling so I figure they’re going straight, and cross the other way so they won’t have to wait for me—but seemingly every time it turns out the car was really turning after all. So they’re stuck because they couldn’t conceive of pedestrians as traffic they need to communicate with.

A long family tradition.

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?

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.

How can an LLM tell a hawk from a handsaw when the wind is from the west, if both terms are just high-dimensional abstract vectors without cross-domain referents and it can’t even feel the west wind in its neural weights?

Stick with the gopher protocol, http is too poorly implemented.

Another advantage of Nextcloud over Syncthing is selective syncing: Syncthing replicates the entire collection of synced files on each peer, but Nextcloud lets clients sync and unsync subfolders as needed while keeping all the files on the server. That could be useful for OP if they have a terabyte of files to sync but don’t have that much drive space to spare on every client.

I think a major factor was the Hellenistic age (the spread of Greek culture from the Mediterranean to Central Asia after Alexander the Great) and the “interpretatio graeca”—the practice of the Greeks (and later Romans) of merging their own polytheism with the various other forms of polytheism they encountered in the Hellenistic world. The result was that everyone from the Celts and Germans in western Europe to the Egyptians and Iranian polytheists in the Near East (but not the non-polytheistic Jews or Zoroastrians) could be assimilated into Greco-Roman culture without formally giving up their religions. But a side effect was that all religious institutions were assimilated into the state, so that when the state switched to monotheism there were no independent religious institutions to oppose it.