Tootfinder

Love this, by D.J. Grothe
We are truly only just getting started. All we have to do is to fail to kill everyone, and things will get better.
"Human civilization has existed for only 3% of the time that anatomically modern humans have existed. And modern industrial civilization has existed for just 2% of that 3% — just 0.06% of the time that anatomically modern humans have existed. Maybe we’re just getting started!"

"""
The barbarian role of cultural demolition crew is especially important when you consider how often cultural reconstruction is needed. Many of Rome’s glaring defects — exploitation, authoritarianism, corrupt self-aggrandizement — flow from deeply human tendencies. Time and again they’ve transformed promising civilizations into decaying, oppressive monstrosities. Time and again, history seems to cry out: Bring on the demolition crew! And time and again barbarians cheerfully respond to the call. Their previous massive wreaking of destruction, near the end of the second millennium B.C., had come after civilization went through centuries of apparent ossification.
In a way, barbarians are just a special case of that general and potent zero-sum dynamic in cultural evolution: brutal competition among neighboring societies. This rivalry renders ossified cultures vulnerable to a makeover, minor or major. They may be taken over by a vast neighboring civilization, which will revamp them in its image. Or they may be infiltrated and perhaps even disassembled by barbarians, paving the way for future reassembly. Or they may revive and prevail — an example of the “challenge and response” dynamic stressed by Arnold Toynbee. In any event, the point remains the same: however deeply human the tendencies of exploitation, authoritarianism, and self-aggrandizement, cultures that surrender to them may not be long for this world.
"""
(Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny)
Is it time for the barbarians now? Or perhaps we — here on Fedi — are the barbarians.

The gradual transformation of inland countries -- human plowing, horse plowing and equity incentives
Hongfa Zi, Zhen Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00067 h…

The gradual transformation of inland countries -- human plowing, horse plowing and equity incentives
Many modern countries have not learned their lessons and often hope for the wisdom of later generations, resulting in them only possessing modern technology and difficult to iterate ancient civilizations. At present, there is no way to tell how we should learn from history and promote the gradual upgrading of civilization. Therefore, we must tell the history of civilization's progress and the means of governance, learn from experience to improve the comprehensive strength and survival ability o…

Hundreds of Newly-Found Structures Reveal True Scope of Hidden Pre-Incan Civilization https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/hundreds-of-newly-found-structures-reveal-the-true-scope-of-this-little-known-pre-i…

Hundreds of Newly-Found Structures Reveal True Scope of Hidden Pre-Incan Civilization
Gran Pajatén is located high in the northeastern Peruvian Andes, and was likely the center of the Chachapoya civilization.

Calamus 18 City of my walks and joys!
A celebration of Manhattan. I love Whitman's embrace of cities as being just as vital as nature unspoiled. It reflects the humanist aspect of his joy in the world, not a Thoreau-like rejection of civilization.
I also love that Whitman is writing about cruising the streets, making eye contact with potential lovers, celebrating offerings of love.
as I pass, O Manhattan! your frequent and swift flash of eyes offering me love
Offering me the response of my own—these repay me,
Lovers, continual lovers, only repay me.
Whitman punched up the first line in later editions, escalating to "City of orgies, walks and joys!"

Every time you use a server-based LLM, you hasten the fall of civilization due to climate change.
I wish I were being hyperbolic.
https://www.frontiersin.org/news/2025/06/19/ai-prompts-50-times-more-co2-emissions

Some of your AI prompts could cause 50 times more CO2 emissions than others
Researchers found some LLMs create four times the amount of CO2 emissions than other models with comparable accuracy. Their findings allow users to make informe

In Ursula K. Le Guin's "A Man of the People" (part of "Four Ways to Forgiveness") there's a scene where the Hainish protagonist begins studying history. It's excellent in many respects, but what stood out the most to me was the softly incomprehensible idea of a people with multiple millions of years of recorded history. As one's mind starts to try to trace out the implications of that, it dawns on you that you can't actually comprehend the concept. Like, you read the sentence & understood all the words, and at first you were able to assemble them into what seemed like a conceptual understanding, but as you started to try to fill out that understating, it began to slip away, until you realized you didn't in fact have the mental capacity to build a full understanding and would have you paper things over with a shallow placeholder instead.
I absolutely love that feeling, as one of the ways in which reading science fiction can stretch the brain, and I connected it to a similar moment in Tsutomu Nihei's BLAME, where the android protagonists need to ride an elevator through the civilization/galaxy-spanning megastructure, and turn themselves off for *millions of years* to wait out the ride.
I'm not sure why exactly these scenes feel more beautifully incomprehensible than your run-of-the-mill "then they traveled at lightspeed for a millennia, leaving all their family behind" scene, other than perhaps the authors approach them without trying to use much metaphor to make them more comprehensible (or they use metaphor to emphasize their incomprehensibility).
Do you have a favorite mind=expanded scene of this nature?
#AmReading

The Rule of Idiots:
In the last days of all empires the idiots take over. They mirror the collective stupidity of a civilization that has detached itself from reality.
by Chris Hedges
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-rule-of-idiots

The Rule of Idiots
In the last days of all empires the idiots take over. They mirror the collective stupidity of a civilization that has detached itself from reality.

The Cradle of Civilization
Assyria Babylonia Sumer Persia Elam Medes Parthian
Babylonia - Born Again
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Iy4u3E6iLA
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DIODATO - Babilonia

RiverEcho: Real-Time Interactive Digital System for Ancient Yellow River Culture
Haofeng Wang, Yilin Guo, Zehao Li, Tong Yue, Yizong Wang, Enci Zhang, Rongqun Lin, Feng Gao, Shiqi Wang, Siwei Ma
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21865

RiverEcho: Real-Time Interactive Digital System for Ancient Yellow River Culture
The Yellow River is China's mother river and a cradle of human civilization. The ancient Yellow River culture is, moreover, an indispensable part of human art history. To conserve and inherit the ancient Yellow River culture, we designed RiverEcho, a real-time interactive system that responds to voice queries using a large language model and a cultural knowledge dataset, delivering explanations through a talking-head digital human. Specifically, we built a knowledge database focused on the anci…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.21578 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_qbi…

Glucagon and insulin production in pancreatic cells modeled using Petri nets and Boolean networks
Diabetes is a civilization chronic disease characterized by a constant elevated concentration of glucose in the blood. Many processes are involved in the glucose regulation, and their interactions are very complex. To better understand those processes we set ourselves a goal to create a Petri net model of the glucose regulation in the whole body. So far we have managed to create a model of glycolysis and synthesis of glucose in the liver, and the general overview models of the glucose regulatio…

Replaced article(s) found for physics.pop-ph. https://arxiv.org/list/physics.pop-ph/new
[1/1]:
- Cooperative Behavior in Pre-State Societies: An Agent-Based Approach of the Aksum Civilization
Riccardo Vasellini, Gilda Ferrandino, Luisa Sernicola, Daniele Vilone, …

The liberal obsession with optics serves the right and persuades no one. There is literally an active ethnic cleansing happening in the US right now, and the only thing that matters is making that as hard as possible to carry out.
Anarchists destroying intelligence assets saves lives. Every escooter thrown at a cop car is one less escort for a goon too afraid to kidnap random brown people without being flanked by a branch full of bad apples. Spray paint is not violence. Vandalism is not violence. Community self defense in all forms is legitimate.
Make no mistake, these raids are about changing demographics. Demographic trends have been shifting blue for a long time, and the right has, for a long time, been blaming "white replacement." Conspiracy theory aside, Democrats have also been relying on the growth of black and brown voters as a block. The nuances of whiteness as an identity are lost on the current administration and their supporters. They see that "white people will be a minority by 2050" and equate that with the "end of Western Civilization."
The only way to "save Western Civilization" is to change those demographics. Forced birth and forced removal are two sides of the same white nationalist objective. Of course they can't have due process, because they need to be able to kidnap anyone who they see as a threat to their demographic future.
They don't care about optics. The plan is to murder away any threat and flood everyone else with propaganda. There is no mythical middle. There's no one unconvinced. They know this, but they win when democrats buy that myth and save the police the work of policing the protests.
If your protest is 90% "peaceful," they'll take pictures of the 10% that isn't. If it's 99% peaceful, they'll shoot rubber bullets and teargas until someone throws a brick and take 100 pictures from a dozen angles. If its 100% "peaceful" and no one can be provoked, they'll generate pictures with AI or photoshop like they did during the George Floyd uprising and the pictures from the CHOP/CHAZ. Do you have literally no memory?
#USPol #FiftyFiftyOne #50501movenent #resistance #NoKingsDay #NoKingsDayOfAction

Replaced article(s) found for physics.pop-ph. https://arxiv.org/list/physics.pop-ph/new/
[1/1]:
Cooperative Behavior in Pre-State Societies: An Agent-Based Approach of the Aksum Civilization