Feels a little odd to painstakingly draw, with a pen, symbols that were intended to be created by pressing a stick into wet clay. Surely there's got to be a better way to hand-write cuneiform.
Why I'm Learning Sumerian
11–20 of 89 posts
Re: Why I'm Learning Sumerian
#12Re: Why I'm Learning Sumerian
#13They had the guts and willpower to learn Sumerian. Why, I wonder, had they to use an LLM to write the essay about it? It kind of invalidates the core messages.
Re: Why I'm Learning Sumerian
#14If you are interesting anything related to cuneiform writing or ancient Mesopotamian culture , Irving Finkel, a British Museum curator, is a treasure.
Here he is teaching how to write cuneiform: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVmsfL5LG90
Here is a hilarious talk he gave at Chicago's Oriental Institute on Noah's Ark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_fkpZSnz2I
Re: Why I'm Learning Sumerian
#15"That's when I learned the difference between burnout and disillusionment. Burnout drains your body; disillusionment erases your purpose. You can recover from exhaustion with rest, but you need something else entirely to recover from meaninglessness." This is an accurate pathology to burnout at least in my experience. I worked on many hard things in my life, from school to obsessing over hard problems on weekends but…
> Two weeks before launch, they pulled the plug
> It took 6 months of being stuck after reaching a local maxima in my career. I was working on menial, meaningless, tasks that I knew amounted to nothing while I was doing them. That caused my burnout.
This idea I think about a lot, and I believe another way to describe it is "alienation from labor," or, in the doing of labor, alienation from purpose or meaning. Marx wrote about alienation from labor:
> “If the product of labor is alien to me, if it confronts me as an alien power, to whom, then, does it belong? To a being other than myself.” (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844)
> "Labour power is...a commodity which its possessor, the wage-worker, sells to capital. Why does he sell it? In order to live...the worker, who for twelve hours weaves, spins, drills, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stones, carries loads, etc.--does he consider this twelve hoursí weaving, spinning, drilling, turning, building, shovelling, stone breaking as a manifestation of his life? On the contrary, life begins for him where this activity ceases, at table, in the public house, in bed. The twelve hoursí labour...has no meaning for him...but as earnings, which bring him to the table, to the public house, into bed...." (Wage Labour and Capital, 1847)
Imo though I agree with Graeber that we've gone beyond just alienation from the product of labor and into alienation from all purpose, in a world where a huge swath of labor and productive energy is put towards genuinely useless things.
> "...a bullshit job is a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case." Bullshit Jobs, a Theory
Re: Why I'm Learning Sumerian
#16They had the guts and willpower to learn Sumerian. Why, I wonder, had they to use an LLM to write the essay about it? It kind of invalidates the core messages.
I read the entire post, very well written, and didn't suffer from that impression that it was written by an LLM
Re: Why I'm Learning Sumerian
#17They had the guts and willpower to learn Sumerian. Why, I wonder, had they to use an LLM to write the essay about it? It kind of invalidates the core messages.
What makes you say that? Sad how easy it is for someone to dismiss writing these days as, "must be AI written!" (I'd wager the average LLM blog post takes more effort than your dismissive response, though I wish I didn't have to read either).
I'm not a fan of the author's writing, but you can look at their other articles and see the same (non-AI feeling) style of writing and general theme of content (airport-book style motivation).
Re: Why I'm Learning Sumerian
#18If you are interesting anything related to cuneiform writing or ancient Mesopotamian culture , Irving Finkel, a British Museum curator, is a treasure. Here he is teaching how to write cuneiform: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVmsfL5LG90 Here is a hilarious talk he gave at Chicago's Oriental Institute on Noah's Ark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_fkpZSnz2I
I was lucky enough to meet Irving Finkel a couple of times and he is as eccentric in person as he is in his brilliant lectures, talks, and videos. When I met him all the shelves, and even the floor, in his office was covered with different books, papers, and artifacts. He has amassed quite a collection of interesting things.
I met him through my work related to the Royal Game of Ur, which he also did a fantastic video on with Tom Scott: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WZskjLq040I
Re: Why I'm Learning Sumerian
#19[deleted]
Re: Why I'm Learning Sumerian
#20They had the guts and willpower to learn Sumerian. Why, I wonder, had they to use an LLM to write the essay about it? It kind of invalidates the core messages.
What makes you say that? Sad how easy it is for someone to dismiss writing these days as, "must be AI written!" (I'd wager the average LLM blog post takes more effort than your dismissive response, though I wish I didn't have to read either). I'm not a fan of the author's writing, but you can look at their other articles and see the same (non-AI feeling) style of writing and general theme of content (airport-book sty…
I usually don't care too much if a post was written using AI (this one was written at least partially using it, check it out using GPT zero), but in this case it irks me deeply, because the post is meant to summarize deep intellectual effort.