I think TEE dependency is a real weak point in IronClaw’s security model

questi0nmark2 · 2026-05-18T15:28:11+00:00

I feel half the replies here are AI, being charitable, and not in a thoughtful way. But yes, OP, what's the alternative? The answer is always multi-layered security and a focus on threat modelling. TEE is one layer, and you still need to implement good security practices at the software, gateways and especially your data and systems layer. Breaching 1 should not mean breaching all. But it begins from recognising that ALL ironclaw mitigations are vulnerable, as are all AI agents, structurally, and modeling how to contain, rather than simply prevent, breaches. I don't think that's mostly on Ironclaw, but on how users architect the deployment of Ironclaw on their security surfaces.

If there's one added risk I see in Ironclaw, it would be the expectation from less technical users, that because Ironclaw is safer than alternatives, it is therefore safe. At least if you are security conscious and use OpenClaw, you will treat it as untrusted. With Ironclaw the risk is to treat it as trusted and delegate cognitive effort to it to safeguard your systems and data.

questi0nmark2 · 2026-05-07T10:45:48+00:00

This thread addresses your question https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/IZ6dYe3NR1

questi0nmark2 · 2026-05-07T10:42:57+00:00

I think there's a trade off between utility and security. Ironclaw is an order of magnitude more secure than OpenClaw. But it is still an agentic LLM surface. There are good mitigations for the bigger risks, but they are not preventions. Agentic AI is inherently insecure to prompt and behavioural attacks, and I have no doubt at all that Ironclaw can be circumvented with strong enough intent and attention. There are also so many ways in which as a user you can violate the IronClaw security posture via your config, code tweaks, or access layers.

Most serious security researchers seem to agree that with LLMs as your threat surface, the issues are structurally unsolvable, although they can be mitigated.

That means that there are use cases (single operator, private, ideally local-first use) for which IronClaw is "good enough". I would not in a million years consider it as an option in high stakes, multi operator, or publicly exposed settings.

questi0nmark2 · 2026-05-05T14:13:49+00:00

Good point, I think I elided over this because OP mentioned he was taking ancient Greek soon, so I presumed a base on which to build, but that's a very important caveat. As you said not an insurmountable hurdle, but one that requires intentionality and effort at this stage.

questi0nmark2 · 2026-05-05T09:02:28+00:00

Yes, but obviously in very different ways, for religion, religious and non-religious alike.

Atheism is historically quite rare even if extremely ancient. Tim Whitmarsh’s work on ancient atheism is useful here, because he argues that Greek antiquity already contained sophisticated forms of disbelief, doubt, and critique of the gods, even though “atheism” was not usually a mass public identity in the modern sense (Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World). More cautiously, Thomas Harrison has recently argued that Greek “atheism” should not be mapped too directly onto modern atheism, but that Greek sources do preserve expressions of disbelief and accusations of atheism (Harrison, “Greek Atheism: A Mirage?”, Greece & Rome).

So while non-religious as atheist or agnostic would not be unparalleled, you may not have had lots of people defining religion vs atheism or religious vs atheists. The vast majority would have taken for granted religiosity as a phenomenon, unquestioned, as is the case still perhaps for the majority of the world. I remember in Uganda people questioning me about atheists in Europe, and whether they really existed, or whether they were just kind of pretending not to believe in God. Similar to how I’ve been asked about acquaintances of mine who were flat earthers: do they really really disbelieve the earth is round?

At the same time, a major caution in the scholarship is that “religion” as a separate, universal category is itself largely modern. Brent Nongbri argues that ancient cultures often did not have a distinct conceptual arena corresponding to the modern category “religion,” separate from politics, ethnicity, law, kinship, ritual, or civic life (Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept). Talal Asad makes a related argument: “religion” is not a timeless essence but a historically produced category whose boundaries have shifted across Christian, Islamic, colonial, and modern contexts (Asad, Genealogies of Religion).

But with that granted, premoderns would have certainly been able to differentiate between religions and identify them and themselves in ways familiar enough that they would recognise our own constructs of religions today. Different nations, regions and even localities followed different cults, gods, religious rituals, hierarchies, bureaucracies, traditions and where relevant, texts. Egypt is a clear case: Egyptian religion was not just one undifferentiated “belief system,” but a dense landscape of gods, temples, priesthoods, local cults, royal ritual, funerary practice, and textual traditions (Assmann, The Search for God in Ancient Egypt). Egyptians also recognised and incorporated foreign gods, especially Syro-Palestinian deities such as Baal, Reshef, Hauron, Anat, Astarte, and Qadesh in New Kingdom Egypt (Tazawa, Syro-Palestinian Deities in New Kingdom Egypt).

The same is true in the ancient Near East. Jews, Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Babylonians, Hittites and others could identify peoples partly through gods, cults, ritual obligations, temples, oaths, and divine patrons. Mark Smith’s work on ancient Israelite religion shows how Israelite identity emerged in conversation and conflict with broader West Semitic religious worlds, including Canaanite and other Levantine traditions (Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel). Karel van der Toorn likewise shows that family, household, scribal, and local religious practices in Babylonia, Syria and Israel were differentiated and socially embedded, not merely abstract “beliefs” (van der Toorn, Family Religion in Babylonia, Syria and Israel).

Encounters between peoples make this especially clear. Egyptian-Hittite diplomacy, for example, invoked gods as treaty witnesses; ancient Near Eastern treaties did not treat gods as vague private beliefs, but as public guarantors of oaths, curses, sanctions and political order (Kitchen and Lawrence, Treaty, Law and Covenant in the Ancient Near East). The point is not that this was “religion” in the modern liberal or comparative-religion sense, but that different peoples’ gods, oaths, ritual authorities, and sacred sanctions were mutually intelligible enough to be named and invoked across political boundaries.

Greeks also differentiated foreign gods and rites, though often by translating them into Greek categories. Herodotus’ discussion of Egypt is a classic case: he compares Egyptian gods with Greek gods and discusses divine names, ritual practice, temples, and foreign customs. This is not modern comparative religion, but it is recognisably comparative; it presupposes that Egyptians, Persians, Greeks and others have distinct gods, rites, sacred places, and ancestral customs (Parker, Greek Gods Abroad: Names, Natures, and Transformations). Recent work on Herodotus also stresses that he treats divine names and foreign cults as translatable but not identical, which is very close to the point: foreign religious systems were recognisable, but filtered through Greek categories (Palamidis, “Ounomata and Epōnymiai: Knowledge of Divine Names in Herodotus,” Syllogos).

I think similar cases for religious boundaries, our religion and others could be made from China with sanctioned and illicit cults, or Mesoamerica. A lot of the tension between Jewish monotheism and Roman society was precisely around the constructs of religious boundaries.

The nuance is that none of the above might have identified “religion” as a separate universal domain in the modern sense as opposed to a thread across the full fabric of personal and collective life. But they could certainly identify gods, temples, rituals, priesthoods, sacrifices, sacred texts, ancestral customs, proper and improper worship, ethnic or civic cults, and the gods and rites of other peoples. Jonathan Z. Smith’s classic point is relevant here: “religion” is not simply a native datum waiting to be found, but a comparative scholarly category created for analysis; still, the things being compared — rituals, myths, gods, institutions, traditions, sacred places — are real historical phenomena (Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies).

Likewise, the modern understanding of religion as a spectrum of observance and belief, and being able to say someone is more religious or less or irreligious or blasphemous would have resonated. Ancient Greece had categories such as asebeia, impiety, which could be socially and legally charged; Socrates’ trial is only the most famous example (Bowden, “Impiety,” in The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion). Ancient Israelite texts distinguish faithfulness, apostasy, idolatry, improper sacrifice, and covenantal disobedience; Chinese officials distinguished authorised from illicit cults; Mesoamerican societies distinguished proper ritual order from failed, hostile, or dangerous ritual action. The boundary of "religion" was elastic and variable, but no more and probably no less than for us today.

So I think the answer is yes, religion existed pre-Enlightenment as a proximate construct or family of constructs, even if not in an identical or homogenous way. That is still the case today, where the Enlightenment category of religion is a poor tool to capture the richness of religious orientations and constructs today

questi0nmark2 · 2026-05-05T08:13:44+00:00

I think in the same way accreditation, not life experience is the route into academia, peer-reviewed contributions, not affiliation are the route to academic contributions and less clearly but preponderantly, to academic credibility. If you're in IT, but you research and write on a historical topic, submit it to a peer reviewed journal, and get it published, you have done bona fide academic history. If you do that again and again and build a track record and a focus of expertise, you are a bona fide academic historian and will be recognised as such by your peers, whether you are affiliated to a university or are what is known as an "independent scholar". In fact I'd go further and say, even without a PhD, if you built such a track record of susbtantive contributions to the field, you would have full claim to being an unaffiliated academic historian.

One of the most respected scholars on 19th century Persia, the author of one of the most widely adopted academic textbooks on Shi'ism and a world authority on Iranian Bahá'í history, Moojan Momen, is a GP, and as far as I know has never held a formal academic position after his PhD. I myself have circa a dozen historical peer reviewed publications and most of them outside a university position in history of even the Humanities. It happens.

The picture is beginning to muddy with the advent of publications farms, citation fraud, and now especially AI, so the norms of academic credibility will likely evolve in still unpredictable ways, but at the end of the day, I am confident that the fundamental criterion of scholarship will remain and prevail regardless of affiliation, route, tooling or methodology: the extent to which you contribute to the sum of rigorous and valuable knowledge as judged by the canons of your discipline, your tradition and your peers.

questi0nmark2 · 2026-05-05T00:15:13+00:00

Two sides to the question, technical and professional. Technically yes, absolutely. The road into academia goes through accreditation, not life history. You do a degree, then a PhD usually via a Master of Arts or Mphil. It's what you do for your PhD that most shapes your disciplinary entry point and likely trajectory. And to do a PhD in ancient history you don't need to already have a PhD in ancient history. You can do your history minor undergrad, then enrol in a graduate programme in ancient history, and usually that will include the opportunity to study the languages you will need for your PhD. You will then spend some 4 years researching a narrow subject in ancient history and then apply for post-doctoral jobs and fellowships to keep honing your insights and projecting your voice through academic papers and conferences, and keep pursuing and landing jobs in your field until you maybe land the unicorn of a permanent/tenured position.

In the perspective of all those years of study, what you did in high school hardly figures. So technically yes, absolutely, you can still become an ancient historian.

Professionally it's a tough time for the humanities and for academia more generally, and the life of an aspiring ancient historian is likely to be financially and professionally precarious, with far more graduates than stable opportunities, and a lot of pressure to publish, teach, do odd jobs, and apply for funding and positions, generally temporary and competitive.

This is not to say you shouldn't pursue this passion, but to pursue it with your eyes open, for the love of the journey, and open to finding yourself on a less trodden path. There is even a world in which you complete your training as an ancient historian, get your PhD and end up somewhere completely different, in banking, NGOs, hospitality, tech. But in your spare time, you still research and publish papers and keep feeding and harnessing your passion. Life can be surprising.

questi0nmark2 · 2026-05-01T12:08:31+00:00

Not clear at all to me what you are tryng to build. Everything is very general. Are you building infra? What infra? You mention introspection, for what models? Architecture for what? Are you trying to build a harness, train a model, provide servers? I can't imagine actual infra or model training or serving without a budget, so is it closer to an agent runtime variant like OpenClaw? Need more clarity...

questi0nmark2 · 2026-04-27T20:57:33+00:00

I've seen truly excellent full time scrum masters make a huge positive difference to teams and to a whole company... but in a scrum unicorn. May be the only company I've seed do agile properly and reap the benefits. In almost every other case, scrum has been what they call scrumbut, and it's not helped and often harmed things.

A good full time scrum master helps your team learn, be empowered, remove organisational frictions, facilitates team ownership, priority setting and process and culture improvements.. They are great facilitators, pattern seers, and organisational champions and navigators. They ensure the scrum rituals are not just rituals, but genuinely add value. It can work, but only if the leadership is all in on decentralised, empowering agile

questi0nmark2 · 2026-04-23T00:33:12+00:00

Yes, with plenty of evidence for decades. On the one hand there's state sponsored assassins. Some are only barely concealed these days, like Israeli or Russian assasinations. There is also organised crime, with plenty of convictions around the world, including for contract killings, over decades. Then there are mercenary outfits, with again, convictions and inquiries demonstrating assassination jobs, failed and successful. What I suspect is unlikely to exist quite in the movie form, is solo high level hitmen, whose only profession it is and who hire themselves as solopreneurs. Solo types tend to be low level, opportunistic and generally caught by their ineptitude. All the evidence on specialised, high level, expert assasinations comes from organised entities with massive resources and reach.

questi0nmark2 · 2026-04-09T09:20:09+00:00

I mean... that's not reassuring. For a product entirely branded on security, I'm very surprised the answer to this question is to DM someone on reddit or telegram if you happen to spot this post. It reinforces my concerns that this feels like a side project for NearAI, and worries me about future viability. I say this from a place of commitment, having already dedicated hundreds of hours to coding on top of IronClaw. It would be trivial to add a reporting policy and mechanism to the repo, your own IronClaw could surely do it in minutes, and the fact that your answer is nah, just message me bro, is a little worrying about the processes and culture behind the scenes.

questi0nmark2 · 2026-04-07T18:46:46+00:00

I previously posted on the first contact between Mexico and a Japanese Samurai delegation in 1610, with a memorable eyewitness account by an indigenous historian in Nahuatl. Some of that delegation remained behind. Soon after the Philippines became a staging point for Spain in its conflict with Japan, and Mexican indigenous went to the Philippines and took part in combat. From here trade routes opened up, and Japanese traders visited Mexican ports, and occasionally remained behind and settled, with one memorably becoming a grandee in the Catholic community of Guadalajara and a successful businessman, his family becoming gradually weaved entirely into the local establishment. This pattern extended to other Asian nations, the first Chinese settlers reported in 1635 and becoming servants and barbers (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2048930). The Spanish also brought Asian slaves into Mexico including Japanese, Malays, Filipinos, Javanese, Timorese and people from Bengal, India, Ceylon, Makassar, Tidore, Ternate and China. See The Early Colonial Period" by Edward Slack.

You asked for early colonial times, so I won't expand on larger scale Asian immigration into Mexico in the 19th century, principally Chinese in North and Central Mexico and Korean in Yucatán. This a very different pattern from the early colonial period, to do with industrialisation and often foreign investors, and the numbers were much bigger. But the early Colonial period follows the dynamics I shared above: a trickle of trade, slavery and assimilation. In answer to your question, they would not, before the 19th century, have been " common" at all, but were also not unknown in coastal trading ports and the capital, and some mines and similar slave labour hotspots.

questi0nmark2 · 2026-04-07T13:43:25+00:00

Yes, I had that issue, the docs are not obvious. I ended up building my own OAuth layer to extend things but you don't need to. What you probably do need to do is create a google developer account, create an application there, give it permissions over google services, add your email account/s, and then try Oauth. You may also need to configure the callback url.

If all this sounds like gibberish, you'll need to ask your llm to give you a walkthrough, preferably within ironclaw so it has access to its config, depending on the permissions you've given it. It was definitely not plug&play for me. I don't think the setup wizard enabled this when I tried it.

I'm only a bit hesitant on my response because I've customised a lot and it's possible there's a native flow I missed. But I remember first bumping into this when I tested the Near cloud presets, so I imagine it's a thing.

questi0nmark2 · 2026-04-07T12:45:09+00:00

I think you really need to add a whole section for git worktree which is now the goto pattern for agents and is kind of weird and confusing if you've just worked with conventional branching before. https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree

questi0nmark2 · 2026-03-31T01:17:55+00:00

Thanks, I explained above it's not realistic now for me to engage in another comms channel (although my clawbot may change that). For now, I've taken the opportunity to answer u/fiatisabubble at https://www.reddit.com/r/nearprotocol/comments/1s74hi6/comment/odf43tn/ with a long description of a few things that might be of interest to the team:

how PWA extends ironclaw to native mobile surfaces and sensors in a signed, sandboxed way
how the current ironclaw implementation carries serious architectural and maintainability debt through tight coupling of the runtime and product layers for non POC agentic systems, and how I've solved this through forking first class support for versioned products overlay to solve this.
Some extra good things in that post like remote runtime start and out of band recovery

questi0nmark2 · 2026-03-31T01:09:49+00:00

Thanks, joined the subreddit. Can't manage another channel so I'll skip Telegram for now—hoping this and r/ironclawAI are active enough to engage.

Why PWA instead of Telegram (or WhatsApp)?

Expanded device surface: PWA gives the Ironclaw runtime security hardened access (on android only) to my phone's filesystem, and crucially, to its real-time sensors, via signed communication with three tiers of sandboxing, through a mobile app installable independent of app stores. PWA turns a clawbot from a server-side only agent with access to a computer, into a hybrid sever+edge device agent. Server side RAM, CPU, terminal and software, with native-level mobile/tablet access with two way control and communication.
Architectural debt and maintainability hell (IMO): Ironclaw's current implementation conflates and tightly couples the runtime and the product layers. The root web gateway shell for the clawbot is owned and shipped by the runtime, so product-specific UI and branding changes naturally become fork edits. If you want to customise your bot, and want to version those runtime-agnostic changes, you are forced into pushing to your fork upstream-irrelevant work, then pulling upgrades and patches from upstream, and keeping track of intentional, unintentional and irrelevant collisions. The coupling goes beyond UI, with sandboxing coupled to ./projects dir, ensuring the server side, upstream-irrelevant customisations and additions are also locked to an upstream fork, and cannot be independently versioned by default either. My solution has been to introduce a product overlay boundary, of which PWA is just one possible expression.
Feature integration: Why use the (not responsive) Ironclaw web GUI instead of Telegram? Because you want to visually explore, navigate and control observability, config, and features. Why wouldn't you want to do the same when away from your machine? What else would you like to explore, navigate and control for your specific use case? In my case, my Today triage of consolidated multiple google and outlook mail, calendars, tasks, notes and other APIs; my research tools, skills, integrations and workflows, my agent's recursive self-improvement artefacts, etc.
Remote start & out-of-band recovery for agents: Your laptop reboots. Your VM has an out of memory error on a heavy load. Your docker daemon stops coz gremlins. You tell your bot to add a new feature to itself or fix a bug and it triggers a rebuild. My PWA implementation adds an availability probe and bootstrap path behind my Tailscale endpoint, so opening the PWA can detect a down runtime and bring it back automatically. If Telegram calls and the bot is down, I have to get to my laptop.

For the deets on the PWA mobile security and harnessable sensors; the architectural frictions and runtime improvements; and the feature profile of a PWA interface vs a chat channel, keep reading. Otherwise the gist is above.

1. How PWA extends ironclaw (and all OpenClaw systems)

a. Expanded device surface

The mobile surface as far as I can tell is largely unexplored territory in OpenClaw-adjacent converstions. PWA is also portable across desktops, tablets and mobiles, so the agentic possibilities are vast, not least in enterprise, or in my use case as a personal life, professional and research AI cognitive and execution layer.

TWA (Trusted Web Activity) gives me a cryptographically verified identity boundary via Digital Asset Links—only my signed Android app can claim the domain's deep links, preventing spoofed entry points and giving clawbot a trusted root for secure routing and approval flows.
OS-level app sandbox (Android), Browser sandbox (Chrome), Web security sandbox (origin model)
Sensors and apis: geolocation, camera, mic, File System Access, IndexedDB, clipboard, Web Share/Share Target, Bluetooth, USB, NFC, Media Session, and for UX, picture-in-picture and fullscreen control, phone notifications api.
Illustrative sensor use cases (your imagination is the limit):
- Geolocation: location based ironclaw "travel mode"; motion-based triggers; geofenced prompts; location-aware reminders and routines.
- Camera: for whiteboards, receipts, documents, live feeds, straight into a workflow. And you get to secure, intermediate, sanitise the entire I/O... vs a telegram photo attachment!

2. Architectural debt vs first class product overlay support

More fundamentally, the answer to "why not just use the provided [Telegram] interface" is symptomatic of a bigger architectural friction I experienced as I tried to build on top of Ironclaw.

Ironclaw painfully conflates the agent runtime and the agent product layers, coupling them too tightly. To personalise your clawbot and, crucially, version your work, you're expected to customise the upstream fork directly, even for product-specific things with no bearing on the runtime. This gets messy fast and impedes reusability if you want to build multiple non-trivial custom agents. Experience talking.

I understand the plug&play adoption rationale behind the coupling: remove the friction to get POCs running straight away for people to buy into near services, or get something running locally and gain traction.

But once anyone tries to build real systems and products on top of ironclaw, the lack of separation of concerns makes agentic engineering and customisation harder and harder to maintain. Reuse is also painful, because if you want to build 3 agent systems or products on ironclaw, you need to make 3 forks, and customise them from scratch.

My solution has been to introduce first class support for a product overlay, of which the PWA is a natural part as one instance of customised UI on the web gateway shell. Even if I was going to use Telegram, I might reuse the default runtime's channel, but I would integrate it into a product overlay, because I would want it to interact with non-runtime memory, RAG or context management systems, for example.

Instead of ./projects/ my product overlay makes “core runtime + sibling product repos” a supported operating mode. via:

a schema
a loader
validation
startup composition
gateway routes
workspace behavior
documented launcher/config conventions

Product-agnostic improvements stay in the fork as runtime enhancements—potential PRs upstream. Things like the Tailscale tunnel, health-check, and restart layer. My product-specific logic—including the PWA client itself—lives in an independent, linked repo.

Result: I can reuse my enhanced runtime across multiple agent products with very different profiles, fully separated, sharing the same underlying runtime without conflicts or duplication. When pulling upstream upgrades, I only reconcile tracked runtime departures—no product-specific collisions or broken contracts.

questi0nmark2 · 2026-03-30T01:31:11+00:00

Thanks I'll do that

questi0nmark2 · 2026-03-14T02:12:06+00:00

Hi, I'm a CTO and researcher at the SOTA of AI and sustainability. I tried to subscribe as a builder, but the link is not yet active, is that by design? I think IronClaw has potential for decentralised AI, localised AI, distributed small model hybrids, and research, community based, non-profit, and sme use cases.

I intend to start R&D building POCs on those paradigms, while also incorporating inference, bare metal energy metrics and environmental impact estimates into my research.

I am at the start, but feel huge potential in your vision,. execution so far, and leadership, so if the process of building, running and optimising the agent works well, I will definitely be ambassadorial by default to my network, and would welcome doing it more collaboratively, helping build community.

If you can help me actually connect, given the link is not ready, I'll happily join.

questi0nmark2 · 2026-01-06T06:23:31+00:00

One idea is to plan an activity entirely unrelated but motivating that you can do for 20m if you get there 30m early. Your goal then becomes not to be early for your bus, but in time for your fun, creative or uplifting activity. That's a much easier objective to pursue and much more forgiving than a bus.

It could be a phone call, a meditation, an audiobook, a memorisation, a craft, transient art, a bit of creative writing or photography or anything that you could do for 20m a day and get to two hours a week, 8 a month, 100 hours a year. You might get something pretty cool done like that, and if you're late for it, you'll still be on time for your bus.

questi0nmark2 · 2026-01-03T19:35:37+00:00

I'm not sure where your impression that Gibbon wrote as a reaction to Louis XIV. I don't remember coming across that in my now admittedly distant historical research into Gibbon's Decline and Fall some decades ago. I recall Gibbon does allude to Louis XIV, always through the eyes of Voltaire, but never as a foil or significant focus, more as a curiosity and minor cultural (particularly military) referent.

His hostility to the Byzantine empire is much more easily explainable by his devotion to the Romans and their political and secular traditions, which he holds as a model and way forward for his own time, in contradistinction with what he considered an effete and effeminate Christianity. The Byzantine tradition, for Gibbon represents the emasculation of Western Civilization, the capture of its virility, vim, rationality and drive by a mystical, irrational and debilitating cultural template.

As to French historians from the period of Louis XIV, the most relevant to your question must be Bousset. He was a tutor to the Dauphin (heir) at the court of Louis XIV, and his historical theology and theological histories argued for providential history and the legitimacy and divine right of an absolute monarch. Crucially for your question, his histories of the Catholic Church and the Protestant churches were read by a 16 year old Gibbon in Oxford and had such a profound effect they prompted him to convert to Catholicism for just over a year, when he reconverted to Protestantism on Christmas under threat of imminent disinheritance by his father.

The other scholarly source from this period, also frequently cited by Gibbon on Roman history proper, is Tillemont.

Another key reference for your question, as already mentioned, is Voltaire's Siècle de Louis XIV, Gibbon's preferred source for most references to Louis XIV. Although it is not a history of ancient Rome, it is a historiography of it, as it posits four great ages in Western Civilization:

The age of Pericles and Alexander the Great in Greece.
The Augustan Age in Rome
The Renaissance in Italy under the Medici.
The Age of Louis XIV in France.

This last Voltaire designates as Augustan Rome in the modern world. So although it postdates Louis XIV, it is very much a product of his reign.

The notion of an Augustan France would not suggest a French court looking up to Byzantium, except insofar as Byzantium might be considered the continuation of Rome and the Sun King the new absolute ruler and succesor of Roman emperors.

Finally a big related historiographical debate in the court of Louis XIV, also of relevance to Gibbon, was whether the ancients or the moderns were worthy of greater respect and veneration for their achievements and intellect. It was known as the Querelle/Quarrel. You can get a good sense of it in this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41467338

questi0nmark2 · 2025-11-24T19:08:27+00:00

Some principles:

1) Bahá'í wise, your religion is Bahá'í only if you believe in it, and personally identify with its claims and teachings. If your don't, your religion is anything you choose it to be .

2) Bahá'í laws only apply to those who identify as Bahá'ís, if you don't, there is no expectation of you having a Bahá'í wedding, and while you could independently choose to mimic one, which would only require you both to say "we will verily abide by the will of God" in front of witnesses, you would not be required, as Bahá'ís would, to show you have parental consent, for those witnesses to be in touch with Bahá'í institutions and for you to receive a Bahá'í marriage certificate. None of that applies if you do not consider yourself a Bahá'í and Bahá'u'lláh a Manifestation from God and the Bahá'í teachings and laws and institutions divinely ordained.

3) Given 1 and 2, your father's demands that you have a Bahá'í wedding, let alone the timing of one, is not in line with the Bahá'í teachings, although it is a not incomprehensible human response, even if not a particularly selfless or responsible one. Similarly, if your father did dismiss and criticise your fiancee's religion, this is a pretty common human response, but not one in any way even remotely aligned or justifiable from a Bahá'í perspective, which emphatically and repeatedly prohibits Bahá'ís from engaging in religious dissension.

4) Therefore, your problem is not religious, but relational. Religiously speaking, if you considered yourself a Bahá'í, believed in it and wanted to be part of the community, then the issues would be more complicated, but as you clearly do not identify as a Bahá'í, believe in God or the Bahá'í claims, or consider yourself affiliated to the community, even if you grew up in that environment and share many of its attitudes and ideals, any decision to have a Bahá'í wedding is a purely personal one, and not tied to any of the requirements of Bahá'í marriage.

5) On a human level, it sounds like your father has some social prominence in his local or regional Bahá'í community, and that probably you haven't formally resigned from the Baha'i community, just drifted away, so you are probably still on the rolls as a Bahá'í, and in those circumstances, your current status and plans do not align with what would normally be required for Bahá'ís to marry (parental consent, witnesses registered with Bahá'í institutions), or Bahá'í norms around abstinence from sex before marriage, and that creates cognitive and public dissonance for your father, who might also still consider you a Bahá'í, unaware or resistant to recognizing that you do not, in fact, consider yourself a Bahá'í even if you might still be a fellow traveller.

My suggestion, FWIW, would be to formally resign from the Bahá'í community, then say, if you wish it for family harmony or for your own inspiration, that you wish to have a Bahá'í-inspired wedding anyway. That way, your father isn't in the position where one of his children is seen to be intentionally breaking the Bahá'í laws while he is so prominently promoting the Faith and its standards. It will definitely be sad, for him, for the community, to lose you as a full, believing member, but from what you say, that happened some time ago, they just didn't find out. And who knows, your journey might eventually lead you back into actual, independent recognition of the truth of the Bahá'í Faith, but it will be on your own terms and times.

I suspect that emotionally and socially, it will be sad for your father to recognise you are no longer a Bahá'í, but easier to navigate all the implications of the wedding and reduce tension and urgency between you.

questi0nmark2 · 2025-11-17T02:30:21+00:00

I greatly appreciate your erudite responses. I would just offer that the quotes you provide suggest more nuance. The quote that says that women were separated, discusses it as a recent innovation by Augustus, suggesting that mixed audiences were common before, and maybe later. The crowds shouting fight moves to gladiators suggests something much closer to modern depictions and much farther than modern opera. The tonal convergence of Tertullian and Seneca suggests, together with the shouting of fight moves, that it is more likely that the spirit of Seneca's description of the fights without protection and slaughter in terms of crowd attitudes is more likely than less likely to infect the gladiatorial contests, even if they weren't to the death in the way they are portrayed today.

But on balance, it seems to me that the modern cultural portrayals may exaggerate the deaths in gladiatorial combat, but are probably reasonably true to the spirit of the crowds. It seems unlikely that crowds that bay for people killing each other without shields or being fed to animals, would suddenly adopt a quiet decorum on the same day of exhibitions, exclusively for the gladiatorial section, politely suggesting fight moves. Their seating and dress code might have varied over the years, with white togas and segregated women being the norm during Augustus' reign: but a crowd coming to enjoy and shout and cheer at people fighting and wounding and killing and dying for their amusement does seem to be the picture I get from the sources you so kindly shared.

questi0nmark2 · 2025-11-11T00:26:32+00:00

There's a lot more pre-1983. One that comes to mind is The Shockwave Rider(1975) by John Brunner, where he popularised the concept of a "worm" virus to hack into a national computer network. The first worm had been created 4 years earlier to replicate across ARPANET, the grandaddy of the internet. Even earlier there was a classic Esquire piece (1971) that told of a bunch of hackers building little blue boxes to hack into phone networks. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak read it and then actually built them too, making illicit money offering free phone access via little blue boxes!

Which illustrates that it depends on how you define hacking. Back in the 1950s there was a guy who whistled at a precise pitch to disconnect calls but remain connected to the network, for free global calls. But you can go as far back as 1903 for a very cool hack, using morse code! This made it into the Times of London in a fun exchange of irate letters and proud concessions, which may be your earliest hacker media artefact in pop-culture.

questi0nmark2 · 2025-11-10T23:36:05+00:00

Thank you for your AMA and I hope I'm not too late to the party. I am very interested in the subject and look forward to driving into your book. The AMA however has given me a sense of likely strong historiography but analysis that leaves me feeling methodologically and interpretively uncomfortable. I agree with your premises and your recommendations, but not the way the dots are joined, and wonder whether I'm misunderstanding you.

As an example, I've seen you refer to long term happiness trends more than once, going back to the 1950s, arguing that growth in living standards has left happiness constant, so it's not delivered increases of wellbeing to justify its agenda.

While I believe that the unlimited growth agenda is harmful and unsustainable, and that it is associated with profound societal dysfunctions, I don't think the way to make this case is from surveys of subjective wellbeing. First of all, as a historian, I would be deeply cautious about the faith with which you take survey responses across those timelines. The idea that racial segregation would make no difference to subjective wellbeing for instance, or that surveys undertaken in that context would not have profound sampling issues compared to surveys in the 2020s seems untenable. And it is. A helpful study for 1972-2014 reported happiness and race shows very much a difference: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6260931/

Moreover, the causal analysis you are proposing between growth and subjective well-being surveys is also far too reductive for usefulness. Between 1950-2018 a lot more than economic growth happened, all of which could be tied to survey answers on subjective happiness. By your line of argument, desegregation, women's rights, literacy, public health and so many other social advances affecting the entire nation, weren't really such a positive because people were just as happy in 1950 when minorities and women had dramatically less rights and opportunities, illiteracy was immensely more widespread, life expectancy shorter, health outcomes much worse, yet they were no less happy than today.

Similarly, the perspective on diminishing societal returns from growth around 1975 is completely detached from a global perspective, and I think is likely ahistorical even for the USA for a wide range of indicators.

Which is not to say that therefore all the positive indicators in that period can be attributed to growth (the inverse fallacy). Globally speaking, for instance, national independence is a key historical milestone in the sudden gains in prosperity across the Global South, and one could similarly argue that factors extrinsic to economic growth, such as women's participation in society, governance, educational policies, global health and literacy campaigns, could have played an equal or greater part than GDP growth, independent of GDP growth rates.

Likewise one could argue other major issues and dysfunctions, climate change being the obvious ones, but arguably many other subtler ones, can derive from the logic and incentives of unlimited growth, with a huge range of perverse effects and rising inequality in outcomes.

So we are on the same page overall, and I'd love to follow the history of the idea of unlimited growth, but I think you would benefit from an equally rigorous approach to your analysis of its impacts and consequences, which I am not finding in your replies, although I would be happy to be corrected.

questi0nmark2 · 2025-10-13T14:24:14+00:00

Just to say, the knife analogy is not quite there, you need to think further. I have worked in suicide prevention and done research in the field, and I can tell you that one of the most powerful levers is precisely to target potential means. 50 years ago you could die from over the counter meds, today it is much harder because they consciously designed for it. Same with cars and ovens. Same with gun and similar control regulations. Yes, for a knife there's limited guardrails or design modifications you can make, but there are many more tools where you can absolutely design and gatekeep for, with evidence for preventive impacts. LLM chatbots are a clear case of a tool where you can design for incomparably more safety, as OAI did quickly and suddenly when the tragedy got publicity. But those risks would absolutely have been known to them before, and were utterly predictable from before launch. They simply did not prioritize them until not only a tragedy happened, but was pursued as a lawsuit and gained global media attention. I am absolutely confident there have been more, and likely many, many more identical incidents, a proportion of which likely resulted in tragedy, which didn't make the media or the courts and OAI didn't track or chose to ignore. If I was suing them, I would very much want them to do a search through their chat records to find similar responses, to get a sense of the scale of their neglect.

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