In the context of a semi-nomadic culture that had just conquered the urban Canaanites, pigs were city animals distinct from the nomadic sheep and goats—a ban on pork would prevent cultural assimilation. Same with the ban on shellfish that would have been standard in the coastal cities.

For a parallel, look at segregation-era white Americans banning music and other cultural pratices associated with African-Americans.

The Harappan language—then you could decipher the script of the Indus Valley civilization.

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/hawks-helping-keep-oakland-streets-safe-by-dispersing-crow-roosts/

while Baz insists he has nothing against crows, it’s the mess they leave behind that has people crying foul.

That’s what I’m secretly training the crows for.

I doubt the falconer would have any issue with me—I’m helping to keep them employed.

I’m indifferent to squirrels… but my city has hired a falconer to scare the crows away with hawks, so now the crows symbolize the oppressed masses being persecuted by the state.

A crow-calling whistle and a small tin of peanuts.

Blood Meridian as an illustrated children’s book.

What’s the purpose—research? Tax evasion? Shits and giggles?

You know that there are two unrelated words, and you’ve seen two different spellings—it’s a natural assumption that the latter stems from the former.

Why so many people would pair them up the same (etymologically unsupported) way, I don’t know… maybe we’re used to correlating words relating to art with French, and assuming that words with “ou” come from French as well (and this case just happens to be an exception).

I use “mold” for both, and regard “mould” as the British spelling for both.

But the etymologies are interesting—the verb comes from French modle, while the fungus comes from late Middle English mould. So if anything, your assumed distinction is etymologically reversed.

One issue specific to the Fediverse is that each instance and each community might have its own standard for what it considers “credible”—and part of another user’s credibility score might come from users on instances with which yours isn’t federated and doesn’t share information.

Not using their turn signals if the only other traffic is pedestrians.

So many times I’ve been crossing an intersection to the opposite corner where I could cross either street first, so I pick the street that won’t block the car crossing the other way. They’re not signalling so I figure they’re going straight, and cross the other way so they won’t have to wait for me—but seemingly every time it turns out the car was really turning after all. So they’re stuck because they couldn’t conceive of pedestrians as traffic they need to communicate with.

A long family tradition.

How can an LLM tell a hawk from a handsaw when the wind is from the west, if both terms are just high-dimensional abstract vectors without cross-domain referents and it can’t even feel the west wind in its neural weights?

Stick with the gopher protocol, http is too poorly implemented.

Another advantage of Nextcloud over Syncthing is selective syncing: Syncthing replicates the entire collection of synced files on each peer, but Nextcloud lets clients sync and unsync subfolders as needed while keeping all the files on the server. That could be useful for OP if they have a terabyte of files to sync but don’t have that much drive space to spare on every client.

I think a major factor was the Hellenistic age (the spread of Greek culture from the Mediterranean to Central Asia after Alexander the Great) and the “interpretatio graeca”—the practice of the Greeks (and later Romans) of merging their own polytheism with the various other forms of polytheism they encountered in the Hellenistic world. The result was that everyone from the Celts and Germans in western Europe to the Egyptians and Iranian polytheists in the Near East (but not the non-polytheistic Jews or Zoroastrians) could be assimilated into Greco-Roman culture without formally giving up their religions. But a side effect was that all religious institutions were assimilated into the state, so that when the state switched to monotheism there were no independent religious institutions to oppose it.

Semantic Mediawiki is an especially useful and powerful one.

That’s one factor; objective (or Bayesian) probability is the other.

Like, there are too many things that might be true, or that might come to pass, for me to consider all of them at once. So I filter out most of them by dissociating myself from the worlds in which they’re true: saying “I don’t believe that will happen” isn’t saying it’s impossible, it’s saying “I don’t recognize myself in the person that would happen to”.

But the more you commit your sense of self to worlds that are tenuous or impossible, the greater the likelihood that you end up in a real situation where you no longer recognize yourself—and then you face an identity crisis.