141–150 of 194 posts
McSweeney's uses AI to write now? I was extremely suspicious, and pasted the text into Pangram, said 100% AI generated (and yes, I trust Pangram as they have extremely low rates of false positives).
I think people fall into two distinct camps here: the wildly exploratory, who chase everything from lost civilizations to aliens, and the hyper-rationalists, who refuse to budge from safe, conventional explanations. When it comes to Giza, It may be disingenuous to write all the banter off as either conspiracy or bona fide science. While we understand the general progression of pyramid-building in Egypt, the sheer sca…
Related: Masonry Techniques of the Inca’s Master Builders https://www.earthasweknowit.com/pages/inca_construction This article was a fantastic read, and thoroughly debunks a lot of ancient alien style stuff.
You should post it to HN for greater visibility instead of being buried in the comments.
I think the more likely explanation is racism. If the pyramids were in Europe, nobody would challenge their human origin but pyramids are in Africa Surely aliens are involved.
The classic Mcsweeney's for the HN crowd is "E-mail Addresses That Would Be Really Annoying to Give Out Over the Phone" https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/e-mail-addresses-that-wo...
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This reminds me of Gall’s Law. You cannot create a complex system, you must create a simple system and improve it over time. The issue arises when you get so many iterations in, you’ve forgotten the process. Any catastrophic event can mean you won’t be able to create the silicon chip or airplanes and so much other technology. Maybe I’m wrong and people and books do exist that can explain the process and human might w…
A semiconductor company couldn't get their second plant to work until they tore it down and set it up again in an exact copy of the floor layout of the first plant. They don't know why.
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There's a ton of people that, for some reason, just can't grok that humans have been largely behaviorally and biologically identical for the past 200k years. The average ancient roman plebeian's life would not look dramatically different from ours today, minus technology of course. They worked a day job, ate at thermopoliums (basically fast food), lived in crowded apartment complexes with various forms of slum lords,…
A couple years ago I realized that I had somewhat subconsciously made the same assumption. The thing that snapped me out of it was my awe in watching Clickspring (YT) try to recreate the Antikythera Mechanism. That device's complexity and craftsmanship is proof to me that despite the lack of technology, there were some astonishingly smart and resourceful people living thousands of years ago.
The only thing really amazing about the pyramids is how many couple of ton blocks they carved out and transported. It's around 250 blocks a day for 25 years.
the wild thing about this is that _we have contemporaneous records of how they were built_. They know the names of architects and managers. There's no mystery to it at all.
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How many years did these production floor changes take to engineer?
Over a period from 1960 to 1969: > Landing humans on the Moon by the end of 1969 required the most sudden burst of technological creativity, and the largest commitment of resources ($25 billion; $187 billion in 2024 US dollars)[24] ever made by any nation in peacetime. At its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities.[25] A large chunk o…