Given need, access to anything that might serve as string, pieces of wood, and too much time to think about the problem, most singular humans will come up with that within the year, if not within days.
That thing has probably been independently invented a hundred thousand times over. Trying to figure out who did it first is silly.
Also that is not a "sophisticated" tool at all. It's literally one step above hitting rocks together. Sharp rocks happens to be the only tool you need to make a basic bow drill.
I think it is several steps up and beyond from hitting rocks together.
You need to create string. You need to cut the wood for the bow. The bow and the string need to be the right sizes too. You need something that is sharp enough to work as the drill bit but also small AND approximately round enough to work in the bow. That also needs to be made of a material that is harder than the one you are drilling - here in this story there was some sort metallurgy involved to create the alloy, so that likely involves working with ores etc (mining, identifying, processing etc etc).
There are a lot of steps. You can't just find a random "vine" to wrap snuggly and securely around a random thing you find to use as a drill bit that is like 1cm in diameter - you'll need something of consistent size and highly flexible for the string, similar for the drill bit needs to be the right size and so on.
The next step up from banging rocks together is probably using sharp stone chips as scrapers or crude knives. Even napped stone axes are quite difficult to create and require skill, even if the raw components are literally laying around.
I suspect the average person would struggle to make fire, let alone hand tools.
That region typically used flax for string. That's another thing that can be done with virtually no tools.
Even if you skip the retting and merely hand-strip the fibers you still get something usable enough for some use.
These people didn't sit inside looking at screens all day. If your region had a plant that can be trivially turned into usable string you'd know - especially since they had contact/trade with neighboring Asia and there's evidence of flax processing in Georgia another 30k years earlier.
> I suspect the average person would struggle to make fire, let alone hand tools.
It took us maybe a few days of experimenting to finally figure out as boys. We used some modern string, random sticks, and an assortment of materials to try to start a fire with. It's harder than it seems, but not much so if you're determined. If some bored 8 year olds can do it, then so can anyone of any era.
I don't think the linage of anyone for whom that was truly so unattainable would have survived to this day.
Replying to myself because I looked into this a bit. Looks like date palm fiber might have been more common for rope (likely much easier to make if you needed a lot).
For this use-case probably nowhere near as good though.
I've made bowdrills for fire starting with hand twisted hickory cordage. Soaking the bark makes it easy to separate the inner bark, which you then tear into long strips and twist into rope with a "reverse wrap"--basically twist until it curls back on itself then give the "bundle" a half twist back to lock it in. I'm sure many species of tree would work similarly.
That is to say there's nothing special about rope, you can make it with nothing but your bare hands.
Alloying copper with silver and lead is sophisticated. How could they have got to this without structured research, experimentation, controlled manufacturing. It’s a lot closer to our drill bits now than a sharpened bone.
It is likely that only silver was the intended alloying element.
Except for native silver, which is very rare and usually mixed with gold, most silver is extracted from sulfides where it is mixed with lead (because silver ions and lead ions have the same size), so simple smelting will produce a mixture of silver and lead.
There are techniques of purifying the silver from the lead (i.e. "cupellation"), which were well known in later antiquity, but, at the time of early tools like this, probably the purification was not yet efficient.
The knowledge of the fact that pure metals are soft but mixing them makes hard metals is extremely ancient. Before learning this, metals could be used only for jewelry (except for very rare natural alloys, like the meteorites made of Fe-Ni-Co-Ge, which were the source of the oldest iron-based tools found in Egypt and elsewhere, thousands of years before the discovery of how to extract iron from its minerals).
Before discovering tin and the bronze made from copper and tin, which happened relatively recently, around the time when written history also began, for many thousands of years various weaker copper alloys were used, but which nonetheless were much harder than pure copper.
The metallurgy of 3 metals, lead, copper and gold, is very old, around ten thousand years or more. So more time has passed from the time when the techniques of smelting metals and making objects of them were first discovered until the discovery of other metals, e.g. silver and tin, and the diversification of metal-working techniques, than since that moment until the present.
There was a lot of time for refining the techniques used by smiths.
Do a web search for "Wootz steel", "Damascus blades" and "Iron pillars India". The ancient world certainly had expertise in advanced metallurgy. Wootz steel was actually nanotech.
But that doesn't mean the average person will produce all that stuff from a standing start within 12 months just because they would like to drill a hole.
It took many years, but modern scientists have finally reverse engineered Wootz steel to understand its incredible secrets, and identified that Wootz steel was the result of extraordinary metallurgical processes with scientific acumen and excellence based on multiple millenia of research, experimentation and practice in ancient India.
"Modern analysis of surviving Wootz ingots has revealed the critical presence of these impurities. Silicon, for instance, is thought to have aided in the complete removal of sulfur during the smelting process, a common contaminant that can lead to brittle steel. Phosphorus, on the other hand, while often considered detrimental in steelmaking, appears to have been essential in the formation of specific microstructures within the Wootz. The exact ratios and interactions of these elements were likely a result of empirical knowledge, painstakingly acquired through trial and error over centuries."
https://www.realloreandorder.com/the-ancient-nanotechnology-...
Carbon nanotechnology in an 17th century Damascus sword
Discover the secret behind the legendary Damascus blades and how carbon nanotubes shaped sword-making techniques of ancient blacksmiths:
https://www.discovermagazine.com/carbon-nanotechnology-in-an...
Or it was just the vanadium and molybdenum traces in the ores combined with the high carbon content that created a proto carbide steel. The moment those ores ran out they couldn't create it any more.
Crucible steel making was certainly an Indian invention.
And if anyone thinks that Indian metallurgical prowess was a fluke or a temporary affair, they need to research better.
They also need to understand how and why India was an industrial and economic powerhouse of the world via scientific and mathematical advancements for many millenia.
Historians believe India was the most important manufacturer in the world prior till medieval era, responsible for about 25-30% of the planet’s
entire industrial output.
Ancient India was a pioneer and expert in advanced metallurgy, there's so much evidence spanning several millenia.
And the reason that India stopped being a world superpower in metallurgy and science is not because it ran out of some ore, it is because the Islamic and Christian invaders destroyed the Indian industries, killed or maimed (cut off limbs) of the experts & artisans, banned the local scientific education, and took credit for Indian innovations in mathematics, science, etc.
i.e., India was deliberately and forcibly deindustrialised and its economy crippled, by barbaric invaders.
While India produced about 25 percent of world industrial output in 1750, this figure fell to only 2 percent by 1900.
> iPhones have become the default smartphone, and is a status symbol compared to Android.
It does not function as a status symbol in the west. It's not a big deal to get one if you really want to and live in a developed country. People in asian countries making 1/8th of their american counterparts can afford iPhones. Someone making minimum wage in Germany can buy one using about 3-4 months worth of saved disposable income. In the states they'll throw one after you on credit without looking at you twice. It's only a status symbol if you want to set yourself apart from someone living in Zimbabwe... oh wait they also have lots of iPhone users. From who exactly? Afghanis?
Honestly if the bar for status symbol's is that low, you should sooner consider excercise and good dietary habits. These days in many western counties that will do many orders of magnitude more for how people perceive you and your dating life. Certainly more than what flavour of annoying chiming piece of shit you bought.
What says a lot is that you had to dredge up some up to 7 years old posts on reddit, on which replies still overwhelmingly call the idea silly. This smells like an attempt to manufacture consent, but it'd be pretty low effort for even that.
As a rule, if something sounds stupid to you, it will probably be just as silly to most people you should give a damn about. Certainly don't let some posts that look like the lowest-effort FUD imaginable tell you what other people think.
> I may have something to teach you about indicators, averages, and population samples/biases.
You didn't sample. You filtered. You used a search engine to zero in on a couple dozen in a population of 350 million, then suggest to me that the mere fact that there's at least some means it's an opinion held by enough people to matter, when in fact it's probably not - even going by the references you selected yourself.
That you throw around some statistics lingo after all that is hysterically funny to me.
Scientific rigor never was the bar to convincing me, but since you brought it up yourself, be my guest.
> People exist that judge and exclude based on if you have have an Android.
We're not debating whether such people exist, we're interested in what the experience of someone using an Android phone is likely to be. Remember that an original claim was "Which means if your an Android user in a relatively average social group: [the following will happen]"
This conversation is very much about average/majority opinion and has been from the beginning. I might let you weaken that to "an android user is likely to have at least occasional bad experiences in some social groups" - if you're willing to at least provide evidence to support that much.
After all, what could be your purpose in bringing something up that has no relevance to almost anyone? You'd just be wasting both of our time.
That is assuming the user doesn’t first have to offer incense and whisper a fervent prayer to the Omniscient Deity of USB Devices to seize control of the mouse and click the link in divine intervention.
However for most of us that is uncessary and clicking a link to a video requires no effort at all.
I don't watch video complaints. I don't watch most YT videos except at 2x because by time the person who made the video got started saying what they're trying to say, I could have finished a text article version of the same thing.
Most people speak way too slowly for me to be interested in what they're saying, especially when they could have written an article that is more information dense and it typically shorter in any case.
Videos have value for enhancing reports, but are mostly useless as reports themselves.
So yeah, it's too damned much to ask to watch a video.
It isn't necessarily. A _bad_ video can often be worse than a bad description, because I can read a bad description and reformulate and clarify. This is compounded when the video skips the prerequisite steps that a description often needs to add.
Video-first is generally as ridiculous as SEO-driven recipes where I can't start cooking what I want to cook because I have to go through someone's nonna's best friend's sister's cooking life story.
It's great that this video gets to the point in the first 33 seconds, but make me want to watch your video.
This post made me not care.
I get video bug reports all the time at work -- but it's accompanied with a description of what the problem is that makes it worth my time to watch the video. (Sometimes, with a well-written description, I don't need the video but watch it to make sure my understanding matches.)
It’s like when you don’t like someone’s friends but you’re not actually going to say that out loud. Instead you say “I'm just too tired to go out” — it’s a “diplomatic out.” Yes it’s a lie at face value but you leave people with their dignity while simultaneously signal your intent. Your friend, who presumably has social skills, picks up the subtext and you successfully communicate two layers of meaning with one sentence.
You're absolutely right, this is basic courtesy, and the sort of polite awareness that everyone should have when dealing in public. If you can't understand why you would often softpedal criticisms in public (while forthrightly addressing them privately!), you're hurting youself.
No, what you call "basic human social skills" is literally opposite of it. Having good social skills also involves saying "this person/institution is lying". Or even "this person/institution is harming people".
Having social skills means also being able to distinguish between innocent nicer phrase, outright enabling and being coconspirator.
I’m sure this is also cultural, but that approach is terrible. Your friend can’t automatically guess you’re lying, not for the first few times, anyway. Of course they’ll believe you if you say you’re too tired to go out. Then they inadvertently catch you or you reject them so many times they start to believe you don’t want to go out with them, not the other friend. All the while they became closer with the other person, who actually did hang out with them.
Stop lying. You’re hurting the friendship. If you care about the person, eventually you’ll have to be an adult and explain why you’re not comfortable with the third person.
You don’t get it. We are all extremely good friends and there is no friendship being hurt.
Talking in private is different where we are bluntly truthful.
This is how we talk in public.
It’s like doing steganography[1] on language. I can pass a secret message to my friend plainly in front of someone else using subtext.
And it’s not even contrived most of the time. Sometimes someone inadvertently leaks out subtext by their posture or tone and an observant person can read that the person is uncomfortable or comfortable.
So what you’re describing is a situation where the three of you are together and you want to cut the evening short for yourself because you don’t like one of the people? If that’s the case, I don’t think that was at all clear in your original post. Judging from the downvotes and the other responses, I think everyone assumed a situation like your friend calling you up and saying “hey, want to hang out with me and <person you dislike>?”.
And press releases are the same way. There is a literal message but often times there is subtext. They can’t say the subtext literally because it is inherently hurtful and burns a bridge (just like me saying “this guy sucks let’s leave”) so you read between the lines.
Outright lying in press releases is different. That’s a company saying “AI caused our company to fail” but actually you invested in the wrong product and don’t want to admit it.
It may even be that they have no alternative but to lie in their press release. Like say hypothetically they went to Flock and said “I know we have a contract saying we’re gonna do this partnership but given the optics and the amount of heat we’re getting we have to cancel”.
Flock may well have agreed on a break to the contract but stipulated that Flock had to agree to the wording of the press statement and Amazon was not going to disparage Flock yadda yadda.
Saying good things can get you sued. The truth doesn't need to be disparaging. If you are uncomfortable about the privacy implications of some action, just say that. You don't have to use words like "evil" or "villian" to express that you are not comfortable with a particular path.
> In China cameras use your gait to automatically ticket you for J-walking and automatically deduct funds from your bank account. I’ve read that before at least.
China is a huge place with a population larger than the entire western world combined, so I don't doubt something like that could be happening somewhere. Maybe it was a tech demo?
However in general that is not a thing. If you pick any of China's megacities and walk down a street it will take you all of 5 seconds to realize how absolutely not a thing that is. Jaywalking is rampant, so obviously there's efforts to crack down on it, but I've yet to see anyone be shy about it around cameras*.
* And cameras really are everywhere. Though I suspect a lot are closer to a decorative prop for deterrence than a surveillance tool.
> If this behavior is acceptable then it should be legal so we can avoid everyone the hassle in the first place.
Codifying what is morally acceptable into definitive rules has been something humanity has struggled with for likely much longer than written memory. Also while you're out there "fixing bugs" - millions of them and one-by-one - people are affected by them.
> I bet AI would be great at finding and fixing these bugs.
Ae we really going to outsource morality to an unfeeling machine that is trained to behave like an exclusive club of people want it to?
If that was one's goal, that's one way to stealthily nudge and undermine a democracy I suppose.
> On-device processing: Video selfies for facial age estimation never leave a user’s device.
If true, there's little problem with just this from a privacy perspective, but that also makes it useless. Someone is going to make a browser extension to bypass/feed it a fake webcam feed.
> Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly— in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.
However if they ask me to submit my ID to any third party, I'd sooner ditch discord. My default assumption is that this will get leaked, tying everyone's discord account to their real identity publicly. Discord seems to have halfway decent opsec, but I don't trust their "vendor partners" at all. I'll try submitting a fake ID, but if I get banned for it, then so be it.
This would, most likely, go hand in hand with “Discord is no longer allowed on rooted devices” and “Discord desktop is disallowed from client-side effort”, given the necessity of attestation to make it viable on mobile and the near-total absence of third parties taking advantage of the necessary protections on desktop.
I doubt it'd work here though. You know you can just print out a fake ID and show it to the camera. I doubt the app will be able to tell. Attestation doesn't really change this.
If it truly never leaves your device, you'd also be able to use the same fake ID for your entire friend group.
The cynical and best-case take is they don't actually care, and it's just a gesture to show to authorities to prevent further regulation. In which case they wouldn't try especially hard, which is a good thing.
The authorities would need to provide the framework for more intensive regulation, which would end up being expensive and also duplicating the work of the post office’s ID verification service, at which point you’re verging on “federal identity verification service”. Which, yes, really ought to exist — we defer that to banks and cell companies today?! — but I somehow doubt it likely to occur under the current structure.
Perfect enforcement is not required for authoritarians. All they need is to have a threat of punishment, and a questionable process of uploading your ID is more than sufficient for that purpose. Most people will comply in advance.
More groups than authoritarians support online age checks of various sorts, and any for-profit enterprise would far rather externalize the heavy lifting of profitless identity verification to a government agency or contract. Coincidentally, I noticed Discord doesn’t seem to accept ID.me; how curious! If anyone has a larger database of verified ages with online proofs, I’m not sure who it would be.
Yes, this shitty world where we can't control our devices we need to have (as they need to work against us) seems to be inevitable.
But I'm actually happy that these "protections" don't yet exist on desktop (albeit DRM already does).
If something really needs to work against my interest (for greater good), be it a smartcard, not my smartphone and definitely not my PC.
I can highly recommend developing a habit of selecting words you don't understand, opening the context menu, and hitting search. Takes somewhere between 2 and 10 seconds to look up acronyms this way.
That thing has probably been independently invented a hundred thousand times over. Trying to figure out who did it first is silly.
Also that is not a "sophisticated" tool at all. It's literally one step above hitting rocks together. Sharp rocks happens to be the only tool you need to make a basic bow drill.
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