npcompl33t

The soil samples were taken above / below / in between layers that are clearly artificial.

The controversial 24-14,000BC dates are from soil in Unit 3.

Directly above this layer, is a layer of soil that is much younger -- yielding radiocarbon dates of 8000-6000BC

On top of this layer of soil fill, are stacked/cut pieces of columnar basalt, aligned parallel to the ground which does not occur naturally and indicates it is an artificial construction. Dates from soil in this layer yield 6,000-5,000BC

So the age of the soil in this case does indicate ages in which portions of the structure was assembled. You can argue that the soil is "old", but given the time gap, and the fact that it is completely covered by younger soil yielding dates from 8,000BC-7000BC, it seems hard to argue that it was not constructed sometime before at least 8000BCE.

I would advise reading the study as it provides much more information, including stratigraphic profiles of 4 different layers, maps/images of the trenches, borehole data, and various remote sensing surveys.

Unit 1 (surface): 2,000-1000BC Unit 2 : 6,000-5000 BC Unit 3: 24,000-14,000BC Unit 4: NO data

Unit 2 is clearly artificial and represents a construction layer. It has pieces of cut columnar basalt aligned parallel to the ground -- which does not occur naturally, so it is undisputedly artificial.

The soil filled on top of Unit 2 contains homogenous radiocarbon dates and no weathering indicating it was placed all at the same time.

They unit 3 layer contains weathered rounded boulders stacked on top of each other -- this type of weathering normally occurs in a stream an their presence on top of a hill does seem to indicate they were placed there. They also seem to be placed into structures forming a wall. While it is less obviously artificial than unit 2 -- they still provide some compelling evidence that it is indeed artificial.

They claim unit 4 is a natural andesite lava flow that has been "sculpted", but I don't see any evidence to back up that particular claim in the paper, unless i missed it.

TLDR: they did exactly what you mentioned -- took samples from above / below / inside various construction layers, and the dates match the stratigraphic context.... It wasn't just 'scooped up in the vicinity of the pyramid.

I agree given the nature of their claims, it would be ideal if they included another dating method like OSL to go along with the radiocarbon dates, but the radiocarbon dates themselves are not as half-hazard as you make them out to be.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/arp.1912

Created using midjourney, with the following prompt:

instagram fit pic, full body, showing outfit on lone figure, facing camera, jacket pants boots hood harness, realistic proportions, r/techwearclothing, wiwt, bioindumentary, phlegethon, documenta, yoji shinkawa, akira, Masamune Shirow --testp --creative

I'm really impressed with how well it was able to place PG on the political spectrum and capture his world view.

They are curated. Probably around 5% of the generated content was usable. As someone who has been responsible for coming up with content for twitter accounts I can say even with having to curate the results it was still orders of magnitude faster than having to write original content. It took around 4 hours to generate about 3 months of Twitter content.

Wouldn't doubt it, but I didn't use his essays for training, just his tweets.

It doesn't even take one death from a volcano, apparently: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hawaii-volcano/hawaii-rep...

Hey! Great Question. There are actually two steps:

1) The list of powernodes is derived from running a modified version of Eigentrust on the network, and selecting the top n nodes. This is run at the publisher/domain level.

2) After identifying the powernodes, they are used to rank news at the article level, based on how many powernodes are linking to a source.

Therefore the powernodes are selected based on the entire graph, and can change over time. Testing our ideas on the current media landscape seems to show the algorithm does a good job of identifying local maxima.

For example: Our current list of around 60 powernodes was generated from a graph of around 3.5 million articles from the last 3 years. It includes sites bitcoin.com and coindesk, two sites that are relatively new compared to several of the larger incumbents.

From the left, it includes sites like salon, vox, and msnbc.

From the right it includes sites like breitbart, the daily caller, and the washington examiner.

All trustless cryptography based systems have a threshold of malicious participants they can tolerate before failing. Bitcoin, for example, has a well known threshold of 51%. The media, however, is diverse enough that the idea they would all somehow collude with one another to game the system seems unlikely.

Thats an excellent question, and one that we don't take lightly. We have undertaken quite a bit of research to validate this idea by looking at the current link economy between media organizations and running our proposed algorithm on the resulting network, minus the negative link portion.

Our algorithm works by first identifying a set of powernodes (right now, about 1% of the total nodes). Each of these powernodes is then given the ability to "vote" on whether content is trustworthy or not.

Using the MIT Media labs tags I can then quantify what % of the total trust is held by the liberals and the conservatives. Currently, there amount of trust between both sides is roughly equal, though on the liberal side most of the trust tends to be in the "left-center", while on the conservative side it is mostly held by more extremist outlets such as fox news, breitbart, and the daily caller.

Interestingly, the most trusted content is often linked to by both parties, and through the classifications its very easy to identify which articles are partisan/are only being linked to by one side.

The conservative outlets don't appear to often support each other through collectively linking to bad content. Totaling up all of the conservative votes - the number one trusted source is unsurprisingly fox news, but the number 2 and number 3 sources are the Washington Post and the Times.

https://imgur.com/O05eHfX (Most trusted overall)

https://imgur.com/FCoJrWd (Most trusted conservative)

https://imgur.com/SotcwD0 (Most trusted center)

https://imgur.com/kg9dmou (Most trusted liberal)

Its interesting that even with several hyperpartisan conservative outlets given a "seat" at the voting table, these sources still bubble to the top. Compare this to the results from Facebook's recent attempt to start ranking publisher trust, using users' ratings: https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/993502674233577479

The financial incentives for running a node take the form of a "publishing fee" - similar to the transaction fees for other cryptocurrencies - that block creators will receive.