I am only partially qualified in that I am not a professional archeologist, but I have done post-doctoral archeological studies and have read enough archeological studies to understand the larger academic context.
It is not possible to present all the data informing a judgment in such a short work. Even in a book, it would not be possible. Thus it is common in archeology for papers to be written as part of an ongoing conversation / debate with the community - which would be defined as the small handful of other archeologists doing serious research on the same specific subject matter.
Part of that context here is that these tombs are well-established to be the royal tombs of Alexander's family, spanning a few generations including his father and his son. This is one of the most heavily studied sites in Greece for obvious reasons, and that is not something anybody is trying to prove.
In that context, his arguments are trying to identify any body as one among millions, but as one among a small handful of under ten possibilities.
At the same time, the fact that he is not a native English speaker and general archeological style come into play. For example:
"the painter must have watched a Persian gazelle in Persia, since he painted it so naturalistically (contra Brecoulaki Citation2006). So the painter of Tomb II has to be Philoxenus of Eretria" sounds like a massive leap, and it is. He continues:
"... Tomb I (Tomb of Persephone) must have been painted hastily by Nicomachus of Thebes (Andronikos Citation1984; Borza Citation1987; Brecoulaki et al. Citation2023, 100), who was a very fast painter (Saatsoglou-Paliadeli Citation2011, 286) and was famous for painting the Rape of Persephone (Pliny, N. H. 35.108–109), perhaps that of Tomb I."
Another huge leap, both 'presented as conclusions'. However he then continues to indicate these are just hypotheses: "These hypotheses are consistent with the dates of the tombs..."
So his English language use of presenting things factually does not indicate certainty in the way the words would be used in everyday speech. He seems to perhaps misunderstand the force of the terms, but also appears to be working within the context of the conversation with other archeologists I mentioned to start: They all know every affirmation is as "probably", rarely anything more. So it is relatively common shorthand of the craft in that sense.
I believe you are overthinking his responses to other authors, although I understand the culture shock. It is an ongoing conversation and archeologists tend to be blunt in their assessments. Add Greek bluntness on top of this, and it does not seem to matter to the material.
As to your last question, is this legitimate research? The answer overall appears to be yes, although I could see several points (such as the identification of artists I quoted above, and various items I noticed), which I would never have put into ink the way he did. Still, most of his arguments are compelling. It is a shame that the aggressiveness of a few affirmations detract from the overall value of his work. Archeology is not code nor is it physics. It does not pursue universal truths that are more easy to verify through repeated experiments, but unique historical ones which necessarily attempt to interweave physical details and ancient historical records. Each field has its own level of certainty, and the fact that we cannot establish these details with the same certainty as we can establish the chemical formula for water does not make them useless, or pure inventions. Far from it.
> You also get that intangible "separation" of your work life from your home life that your commute used to give you--hard to explain. A brief walk outside to and from the office allows me to reset into work-mode or home-mode.
A lifehack that I learned here on HN when I was working from home was to actually leave the door, then walk right back in and work. If I needed to do any housework, I would again leave through the door, and return "home".
This reduced all temptations to mix work and home life. It also made it clear to the other people in the house that daddy is now serious, and that even just a simple "hi, how are you" would require me to get up, leave, and return to answer. And then leave and return to go back to work. The social friction was important.
I'm obviously not going to comment on anything internal, and I'm obviously speaking for myself and not the company, but it's worth bearing in mind that this migration was not from "on-prem" in the traditional sense. LinkedIn has its own internal cloud, complete with all the abstractions you'd expect from a public cloud provider, except developed contemporaneously with all the rest of the "clouds" everyone is familiar with. It was designed for, and is tightly coupled to, LinkedIn's particular view on how to build a flexible infrastructure (for an extreme example, using Rest.Li[1], which includes client-side load balancing).
There was no attempt to "lift-and-shift" anything. There are technologies that overlap and technologies that conflict and technologies that compliment one another. As with any huge layered stack, you have to figure out which from the "LinkedIn" column marry well with those in the "Azure" column.
I personally appreciate LI management's ability to be clear-eyed about whether the ROI was there.
A few years ago, my wife and I decided to adopt a rescue cat from battersea.org.uk. However, it was a frustrating experience as the staff didn't always update the website regularly, and we'd find that any suitable cats would be snapped up before we'd even seen them.
I spotted that the website served its data to the frontend via an unsecured internal JSON API, so I built an Elixir app that would poll the API endpoint and upsert the cat data into the database. Any new records would get posted to a twitter account (a free way to get notifications on my phone).
It worked beautifully, and when a black cat called "Fluff" popped up, we both knew he was the right one, and we were able to phone them and arrange a meeting before anyone else. Fast forward five years, and he's sitting next to me on the sofa right now, purring away.
Every once in a while, I looked for an alternative to Google. I have given them all a go, but none of them stayed as my default for more than a few days. Until Kagi.
I absolutely did not think I would pay for a search engine. Especially as I've recently been on a quest to cut every unnecessary subscription. YouTube Premium is gone (thanks to 83/% family plan price hike). Half of my dozen or so domains are gone... you get the idea. Who would pay for search, right!? I signed up for the free trial, fully expecting to walk away.
But have you noticed how the quality of Google has steadily deteriorated over the last decade or so? How it now just surfaces ad filled garbage, listicles, and regurgitated content, ad nauseam?
I'm sure it's not just me who prefers what Google used to show around 2011.
Kagi is like the Google of 2011. Except, better. You can combine a bunch of domains you think are related and create a "lens" to just search them. It comes with a bunch of pre-built lenses, so you can search for academic results, or forum posts or pdfs. You can tell Kagi if a website is good or not, and it will then tailor your results according to your preferences.
It kind of feels like what Google could have been, if the brilliant minds employed there weren't just tasked with chasing billions more in ad revenue every quarter.
Honestly, its results are better than Google's. Forget the lack of ads and them not tracking you and not selling your data (from which Google Search apparently makes on average $300 USD every year from every user). Just purely based on the search results, Kagi is better.
I've recently converted my plan to a "Duo" plan, and the SO, who doesn't over care about privacy and ads and stuff, also likes it. #win
As a Chinese user who regularly breaches the GFW, QUIC is a god send. Tunneling traffic over a QUIC instead of TLS to breach the GFW has much lower latency and higher throughput (if you change the congestion control). In addition, for those foreign websites not blocked by GFW, the latency difference between QUIC and TCP based protocol is also visible to the naked eye, as the RTT from China to the rest of the world is often high.
As others have pointed out, cryptographic authentication is very hard to bootstrap if you simply loose your device.
Just last month my missus cracked the glass of her iPhone. Apple repaired it under AppleCare, which is great… except… that they didn’t tell her that the “glass repair” entails them replacing the guts of the phone and wiping it in the process.
Apple iPhone backups don’t contain cryptographic secrets like eSIMs!
She got stuck in a loop where she couldn’t activate her eSIM because that needed her email, but her email needed MS Authenticator, which she couldn’t activate without an SMS.
She had to drive to the Telco with a pile of photo ID to reissue her eSIM. Her bank account got locked in the process despite the password being correct because of some sort of phone hardware lock.
This took days to fix and multiple in-person visits to various organisations. If this had happened while overseas on holiday, she would have been screwed.
Times have changed.
Your entire digital identity is now a smart card in your phones
That Smart Card is either a SIM card or an onboard TPM chip, but in any event if you lose it, you may as well be dead as far as anyone else is concerned.
Passkeys make this much worse. At least if you still have a physical SIM you can transfer it from any phone to any other phone.
Passkeys are not cross-vendor transferable!
Run away screaming. Don’t believe the hype. Wait until the vendors get their act together and come up with a solution for transfer and recovery.
I have no solution for the web turning to complete shit but I do have a solution for the "laptop on fire" / fans going crazy and my solution even helps the planet a tiny little bit.
I do simply throttle my entire CPU when I'm on a virtual dekstop / workspace where there's a "surf the Web" browser opened (as opposed to, say, a workspace where I have a browser I use to test stuff in dev).
It's all automated from my window manager: everytime I switch workspace the maximum CPU speed allowed is modified. I go to workspace 3, where my editor/IDE is, the CPU governor is set to "ondemand" (i.e. the CPU can boost to 5.5 Ghz if it wants to). I go to other workspaces: the CPU governor is set to "powersave".
It's brutally efficient. No more noisy fans because this and that websites are busy executing oh-so-important JavaScript code to track me.
I don't bother modifying the max TDP of the GPU when I switch workspaces but I could (the reason I don't bother is that I'm using fanless GPUs in my two main machines).
It just works.
In the past I used to put CPU and RAM quota on processes/group running browsers but I find it much easier to just modify the CPU's power settings upon switching workspaces.
It's trivial to do and there's really not much websites can do about it. They can basically suck it.
1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
Thank you. Online discussion would be much more productive if everyone clearly laid out the principles on which their viewpoint was based.
Fundamentally, there are only a few ways honest people can disagree: Different principles, different information, different interpretation, or just plain misunderstanding. (Meta-meta: This is the principle that I believe and based this comment on.)
Much of what makes online (and offline) arguments so unproductive is confusion over where exactly people are disagreeing in the first place. There's no point in discussing whether someone did the right or wrong thing if you don't even agree on the principles by which that rightness or wrongness will be judged.
If I disagree with one of your principles, we need the discussion to be at that level, or more likely, we simply must agree to disagree. If I think there's another principle you aren't considering, we can debate its relevance. If you're missing key information, I can provide it. If you're misinterpreting something, I can offer my alternate interpretation and justification for why I think it's better. In any case, if I disagree, it's clear how to proceed because your line of reasoning is clear. We can engage in a productive discussion without talking past each other.
As it stands, I agree with you 100%, but more importantly, you have raised the bar for discussion on this contentious issue. Thank you again.
I am only partially qualified in that I am not a professional archeologist, but I have done post-doctoral archeological studies and have read enough archeological studies to understand the larger academic context.
It is not possible to present all the data informing a judgment in such a short work. Even in a book, it would not be possible. Thus it is common in archeology for papers to be written as part of an ongoing conversation / debate with the community - which would be defined as the small handful of other archeologists doing serious research on the same specific subject matter.
Part of that context here is that these tombs are well-established to be the royal tombs of Alexander's family, spanning a few generations including his father and his son. This is one of the most heavily studied sites in Greece for obvious reasons, and that is not something anybody is trying to prove.
In that context, his arguments are trying to identify any body as one among millions, but as one among a small handful of under ten possibilities.
At the same time, the fact that he is not a native English speaker and general archeological style come into play. For example:
"the painter must have watched a Persian gazelle in Persia, since he painted it so naturalistically (contra Brecoulaki Citation2006). So the painter of Tomb II has to be Philoxenus of Eretria" sounds like a massive leap, and it is. He continues:
"... Tomb I (Tomb of Persephone) must have been painted hastily by Nicomachus of Thebes (Andronikos Citation1984; Borza Citation1987; Brecoulaki et al. Citation2023, 100), who was a very fast painter (Saatsoglou-Paliadeli Citation2011, 286) and was famous for painting the Rape of Persephone (Pliny, N. H. 35.108–109), perhaps that of Tomb I."
Another huge leap, both 'presented as conclusions'. However he then continues to indicate these are just hypotheses: "These hypotheses are consistent with the dates of the tombs..."
So his English language use of presenting things factually does not indicate certainty in the way the words would be used in everyday speech. He seems to perhaps misunderstand the force of the terms, but also appears to be working within the context of the conversation with other archeologists I mentioned to start: They all know every affirmation is as "probably", rarely anything more. So it is relatively common shorthand of the craft in that sense.
I believe you are overthinking his responses to other authors, although I understand the culture shock. It is an ongoing conversation and archeologists tend to be blunt in their assessments. Add Greek bluntness on top of this, and it does not seem to matter to the material.
As to your last question, is this legitimate research? The answer overall appears to be yes, although I could see several points (such as the identification of artists I quoted above, and various items I noticed), which I would never have put into ink the way he did. Still, most of his arguments are compelling. It is a shame that the aggressiveness of a few affirmations detract from the overall value of his work. Archeology is not code nor is it physics. It does not pursue universal truths that are more easy to verify through repeated experiments, but unique historical ones which necessarily attempt to interweave physical details and ancient historical records. Each field has its own level of certainty, and the fact that we cannot establish these details with the same certainty as we can establish the chemical formula for water does not make them useless, or pure inventions. Far from it.