drakythe (u/drakythe)

drakythe commented on The Great Unwind occupywallst.com/yen... · Posted by u/jart

caust1c · 5 days ago

I watched this video yesterday corroborating this story and I gotta say the evidence is pretty hard to refute:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ws8Grsc4jU

Purposefully devaluing the dollar to make US goods more globally marketable and hide the Japanese debt crisis is an interesting but risky strategy.

Currently, I'm glad to see a correction without panic, but it's too early to make a call on the effect on the overall global economy. Xi's already suggested making the Yuan a global reserve currency, and seeing as much debt they're holding, I'm a little worried they're able to make it happen if this is the US financial strategy.

drakythe · 5 days ago

I'm immediately concerned with the note about silver dropping so much. Yes, that happened, and was a historic drop. But it followed a historic run up to its prior price, so the drop is still net positive for even a 1 month period.

I'm not saying the article's thesis is incorrect, but its providing some data without context. I'm always leery of data presented without context.

drakythe commented on Show HN: Moltbook – A social network for moltbots (clawdbots) to hang out moltbook.com/... · Posted by u/schlichtm

CrankyBear · 11 days ago

Moltbook is a security hole sold as an AI Agent service. This will all end in tears.

drakythe · 11 days ago

Glad I'm not the only one who had this thought. We shit on new apps that ask us to install via curling a bash script and now these guys are making a social experiment that is the same idea only _worse_, and this after the recent high profile file exfiltration malicious skills being written about.

Though in the end I suppose this could be a new species of malware for the XKCD Network: https://xkcd.com/350/

drakythe commented on 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found nytimes.com/2026/01/26/sc... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

WalterBright · 13 days ago

I went through public elementary and high school. The amount of world history taught there is vanishingly small.

Just for fun, ask some high schoolers who were the major combatants in WW2.

drakythe · 13 days ago

20th century history was covered in depth because much of it can be taught with an American Exceptionalism slant easily. I'm more talking about pre-Roman Empire times.

Though you just reminded me of a co-worker I had while I was in University. She had attended a private Christian High School and apparently world history was optional there because (we worked at a movie rental place) when Valkyrie released I commented on how I didn't care to watch it because I already knew how it would end. She asked what I meant and how I knew, and I had to explain that since Hitler survived the bombing attempt to shoot himself in his bunker at the end of WW2 (or be shot, or fake it, whatever your chosen explanation/conspiracy) in Europe that Tom Cruise's character pretty obviously had to fail. She had _no idea_. I was pretty baffled. My grandad enlisted in the army in the tail end of WW2. 2 generations back. And she knew nothing about it except that it had happened.

drakythe commented on 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found nytimes.com/2026/01/26/sc... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

caymanjim · 13 days ago

Others already clarified the confusion about your question. Just wanted to note that the HN audience is not going to hug-of-death nytimes.com.

drakythe · 13 days ago

The original link when I commented was to archeologymag.com -- it was later updated to NYTimes because of the hug of death that went on for multiple hours on archeologymag

drakythe commented on 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found nytimes.com/2026/01/26/sc... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

hearsathought · 13 days ago

> Lots of my learning has come in university and afterwards

That's true for pretty much everybody. Homeschooled or not. You think everyone shocked by this news was all homeschooled?

drakythe · 13 days ago

No, but I do think it more likely they got a more accurate world history class somewhere along the line. I was taught creationism thanks to the conservatism nature of my family and the area I grew up in. It took a long while to know and accept the world (and universe) is as old as it is.

drakythe commented on 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found nytimes.com/2026/01/26/sc... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

MengerSponge · 13 days ago

You might be old enough to have been taught that Humans are tool-using apes. That's tragically incomplete: lots of apes use tools. Birds use tools. And now, cows use tools!

Cow tools: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj0n127y74go

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_tools

drakythe · 13 days ago

I was homeschooled in a particular conservative area. Much of what I have been taught was... woefully inadequate, we'll say. Lots of my learning has come in university and afterwards, so what I've picked up is pretty obviously incomplete and leaves me with many unknown unknowns in this area. Today has begun filling in many of those gaps so they get to be known unknowns now!

drakythe commented on 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found nytimes.com/2026/01/26/sc... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

an0malous · 14 days ago

Why not just watch the talk and hear his argument from himself?

Wikipedia has a bias against everything outside of mainstream academia, there are activist groups like Guerrilla Skeptics that go through articles and rewrite them to undermine anything remotely fringe. It's not as objective as people like to think it is.

drakythe · 14 days ago

Because charismatic people can make us believe just about anything, and if we think we're immune to that we just haven't met the right charismatic person. I like to do some searching when something jumps out at me, like his book name, to get some background before I invest more time into the topic.

drakythe commented on 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found nytimes.com/2026/01/26/sc... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

sophacles · 14 days ago

This youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/stefanmilo has a lot of good stuff. I don't know enough to know where he's right or wrong, but provides entry points for to looking more into it.

I have gone down a couple rabbit holes based on his videos and while it seems like he's occasionally gotten some facts wrong or misunderstood an argument, I'm pretty confident he's doing a decent job accurately representing the archaeology.

drakythe · 14 days ago

Awesome. I've watched plenty of Miniminuteman (Milo Rossi) videos, but his tend to be more pop-sci/debunking outrageous claims and less foundationally educational. I'll check this channel out too.

drakythe commented on 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found nytimes.com/2026/01/26/sc... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

throwup238 · 14 days ago

Just edited to add two paper citations for the phytoliths and microwear studies. Have fun! It’s a deep rabbit hole largely ignored by popsci publications so there’s lots to explore.

drakythe · 14 days ago

Thanks! I'll add them to my reading list for today. Its going to be interesting, I can already tell.

drakythe commented on 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found nytimes.com/2026/01/26/sc... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

an0malous · 14 days ago

There is archaeological evidence of tools going back even further, potentially over a million years, but it's ignored for the usual reasons of dogma and not conveniently fitting into the paradigm of the current priestly class. I'd highly recommend this talk Michael Cremo (author of "Forbidden Archaeology") gave for this "Authors at Google" program in 2014:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKfGC3P9KoQ

drakythe · 14 days ago

That book name is... off putting, and his wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Cremo) isn't encouraging in a quick scan...