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Reposted by Nafnlaus 🇮🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇪

Tom @bambam.bsky.social · 2h

"If they tell you who they are, believe them"

Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 2h

POLITICO: “.. They referred to Black people as monkeys and ‘the watermelon people’ and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies .. and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.

@politico.com
www.politico.com/news/2025/10...

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Nafnlaus 🇮🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇪 @nafnlaus.bsky.social · 2h

Hmm, actually, I did a double check, and apparently their bronzeworking techniques were more advanced than I thought:

zoesaadia.com/metallurgy-i...

... including lost-wax casting and various forging and annealing techniques.

Metallurgy in pre-columbian Central Mexico - Pre-Columbian Americas

If dazzling jewelry was your weakness, then you might have found it hard to pass through a marketplace or workshop areas of Tenochtitlan or any other major Mesoamerican altepetl/city-state without spe...

zoesaadia.com

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Nafnlaus 🇮🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇪 @nafnlaus.bsky.social · 2h

(They also would have recovered from smallpox and gained some immunity).

They had all the ingredients for gunpowder readily available (but not the recipe). They could work bronze, but didn't have casting experience. I suspect they'd need foreign expertise to speed them along.

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Nafnlaus 🇮🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇪 @nafnlaus.bsky.social · 2h

... upheld, the Aztecs would have codified their experience on how to fight the Spanish, and it would have bought the Aztecs some decades, during which they may have - ala Japan - spent studying and trying to reproduce their weapons.

bsky.app/profile/nafn...

Nafnlaus 🇮🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇪 @nafnlaus.bsky.social · Mar 1

* Cortés's depleted force ditches their steel for light Aztec armour to travel faster
* Narváez refuses to believe Cortés could be near; doesn't fortify
* Cortés attacks at night, wins crushingly
* Tells Narváez's mercenaries, well, if you want gold, I know where you can get it.

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Nafnlaus 🇮🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇪 @nafnlaus.bsky.social · 2h

To me, one of the big what-ifs of history is, what if Velázquez hadn't sent Narváez to try to stop Cortés and accidentally ended up heavily reinforcing his army.

bsky.app/profile/nafn...

Cortés could have genuinely been defeated, the stereotype among the Spanish that the Aztecs were dangerous...

Nafnlaus 🇮🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇪 @nafnlaus.bsky.social · Mar 1

I'd say that Cortés - despite the multitudes of evil that he unleashed - would be up there.

* Launches illegal conquest mission
* Troops & supplies severely depleted
* Gov. Velázquez dispatches Narváez with overwhelming force to stop him
* Montezuma warns Cortés of Narváes, to get him to leave

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Nafnlaus 🇮🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇪 @nafnlaus.bsky.social · 2h

The Incas offered a relatively good bargain to conquered peoples - it was sort of a "monarchy at the top, communism at the bottom" structure with certain work obligations and welfare benefits. But they were still conquered people who overwhelmingly had had no interest in being conquered.

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Nafnlaus 🇮🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇪 @nafnlaus.bsky.social · 2h

That's the basic, ground-level premise of an empire. And it's a really brutal premise. You can add on top of that what happens afterwards - relative self rule vs. enslavement or murder, degree of resource extraction & general welfare, rates of warfare, etc. But all empires are fundamentally brutal.

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Nafnlaus 🇮🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇪 @nafnlaus.bsky.social · 2h

The entire concept of an empire is inherently a brutal affair. The Incans probably were on the better side, but not fundamentally different from "empires in general".

An empire fundamentally means - with force of arms - forcing people who don't want to be ruled by you to submit to you.

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Nafnlaus 🇮🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇪 @nafnlaus.bsky.social · 2h

It's also nonsense that Moctezuma II didn't realize how dangerous the Spanish were. It's true about Atahualpa, but Moctezuma was terrified of the Spanish. If anything, his main mistake was being *too* afraid to act.

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Nafnlaus 🇮🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇪 @nafnlaus.bsky.social · 2h

The sixth temple, specifically? There had been temples on the site for like a century and a half when the Spanish arrived.

Also, I understand there's some doubts about the actual numbers sacrificed at the consecration. But at the very least it was in the thousands.

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Nafnlaus 🇮🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇪 @nafnlaus.bsky.social · 3h

Gemini is kind of weird like that. Like, sometimes when writing Python, it will use C-style comments. Really simple mistake to make.

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Nafnlaus 🇮🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇪 @nafnlaus.bsky.social · 4h

The photo in question:

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Nafnlaus 🇮🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇪 @nafnlaus.bsky.social · 5h

IMHO, the measure of a robot isn't whether it can do parkour. It's whether it can do the dishes.

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Nafnlaus 🇮🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇪 @nafnlaus.bsky.social · 7h

Texas should cede 20% of its landmass to Mexico in the name of peace

-- Very Smart People

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Nafnlaus 🇮🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇪 @nafnlaus.bsky.social · 7h

(You can't cut straight across Iceland - or at least not "reasonably" - because the highlands is all really bad high clearance dirt roads, and is shut down for much of the year because so much snow accumulates up there)

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Nafnlaus 🇮🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇪 @nafnlaus.bsky.social · 7h

Yet it takes longer to drive around Iceland than across Texas. In Texas you can drive flat, straight, and at high speeds, without having to weave around mountains, fjords, over passes, etc. It takes 12-13h to drive across Texas in either direction, vs. 15h to drive around Iceland on the Ring Road.

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Nafnlaus 🇮🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇪 @nafnlaus.bsky.social · 8h

"very little fits inside registers" - Cerebras's inference engines take up an entire wafer :)

They don't give a lot of detail (that I've seen at least) exactly what sort of on-chip memory we're talking about (registers, L1 cache, L2 cache), but there's no question that it's blazing fast.

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Nafnlaus 🇮🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇪 @nafnlaus.bsky.social · 8h

I assume that this is something like what e.g. Cerebras is doing. Giant chips that can fit a large chunk of a model (or the entire model) on-chip.

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Nafnlaus 🇮🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇪 @nafnlaus.bsky.social · 8h

If we can do affordable floating *oceanic* solar, that's long-distance shipping electrified right there.

(There's also floating deepwater wind. In either case, you need charging ships that parallel passing ships to charge them, then return to the terminal to recharge)

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Nafnlaus 🇮🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇪 @nafnlaus.bsky.social · 19h

That's a brilliant observation about whether we can trust text that we read online lately! 🤯🌐🏅 Would you like to discuss more about this topic?

😏

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Nafnlaus 🇮🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇪 @nafnlaus.bsky.social · 21h

Jersey busy being Jersey.

Nafnlaus 🇮🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇪 @nafnlaus.bsky.social · 1d

Yep. Evasion takes fuel. Which is mass. Which could otherwise be used for a warhead.

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Nafnlaus 🇮🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇪 @nafnlaus.bsky.social · 1d

Burn off that energy, Gerbera.

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Nafnlaus 🇮🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇪 @nafnlaus.bsky.social · 2d

Going to need to update this XKCD for Laplace transforms.

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Nafnlaus 🇮🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇪 @nafnlaus.bsky.social · 2d

Why?

If it's the power notion, that's somewhat a myth. AI uses an order of magnitude less power than video gaming. AI datacentres are - like all large industries - a big impact at local levels, but not at global levels.

If it's "use of copyrighted material", Photoshopping is even worse.

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