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Post by @selkies.bsky.social — Bluesky

Absolutely glorious ancient-Irish factoid from @selkies.bsky.social:

in college my History of Translation lecturer (Michael Cronin) told us that one of the first vernacular translations of The Iliad was into Irish, and the translator had to give the main characters dogs because in Gaelic society, a free man had a dog

And because of this social norm, the audience would immediately understand a man with no dog to be a slave/someone of extremely low status and would be like "what do you mean he's an army commander, where's his dog then"

Tags: gaelic irish ireland history dogs funny iliad translation culture

What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all

This is grim:

But the theory that someone used AI to develop an advantage in a prediction market is entirely plausible. The Numbers experience shows us that:

• We now live in a world where a movie statistics website is worth hacking because prediction markets empower anyone to turn almost any data into money.

• Hacking websites is now something anyone can do with a cheap AI subscription.

• The web, as we have it, is incredibly fragile in the face of large-scale swarms of agentic AI bots.

Tags: ai web hacking exploits the-numbers movies statistics bots prediction-markets