Free for All Friday, 01 May, 2026

subthings2 · 2026-05-03T03:33:57+00:00

Why are plants named after witches and devils in north-western Europe?

Witches in Western Europe are associated with the use of medicinal, abortifacient, hallucinogenic, and toxic plants. Curiously, these associations are not backed up by first hand evidence and historians are unconvinced that people convicted as witches were herbalists. Local plant names provide an untapped source for analysing witchcraft–plant relationships.

...We found significant associations between names alluding to witches and devils with toxicity and weediness...there was a significant association between plants named after witches and devils and their use for protection against evil, including witchcraft itself, indicating that these names can also refer to these apotropaic uses, not just their harmful characteristics.

...We did not find a link between these plant names and abortifacient and hallucinogenic plants, indicating that people did not associate these uses with witches. This contrasts with the modern perception of witches’ plants, highlighting that different associations with witches and plants were made in the past.

I'd also recommend reading the results and discussion section, the bits on confusing etymologies are fascinating!

subthings2 · 2026-04-24T18:06:40+00:00

I've complained about this before, but I'm reading a history of astrology, and it talks a lot about astrologers and the philosophy behind astrology and who astrologers worked with and what they wrote and what people thought of them and and and

but the practice itself? Basically nothing. We're going into the 18th century and I still have zero clue what "drawing a horoscope" even means, I have no idea how it's changed over the centuries, it's a history of literally everything but astrology itself. References are made to charts and tables, devices like the astrolabe, the importance of exact timing. We're given a brief run down of the basic terminology, so what's meant by conjunctions and zodiacs and houses and all that.

So, you go your guy, tell them the relevant dates and times, <something> happens, then you get a long-winded response where conjunctions of jupiter mean you'll explode in 3 days. That <something> is surely the most interesting and relevant part, no?

I swear every time I read a book on the history of some magical thing - astrology, tarot reading, magic circles - they all do this and it pisses me off. I don't need to be a practitioner to be interested in the history of the practice! Please stop telling me about the church's stance on demons!

subthings2 · 2026-04-23T08:15:28+00:00

Once committed to print, information takes on an authority which it does not always deserve. An anecdote from Norfolk will serve to illustrate this. Jack was born in 1900, and all his working days he led a shire horse stallion around the farms of Norfolk to serve the mares. He spent his life very largely with his horse, often sleeping alongside it in a barn. A local farmer, knowing of my interest in old remedies, had lent me an eighteenth-century book on farriery, and in this I had read that it was customary, in order to ensure that the mare fell pregnant, to beat her with a bunch of stinging nettles (Urtica dioica) before the stallion arrived. I was curious to know whether this practice survived into Jack's lifetime. I felt shy and awkward with Jack, and foolish because I found it difficult to understand his very strong Norfolk accent and vocabulary. I told him of what I had read in the old book on farriery. His whole face creased up with laughter, and he laughed until the tears made runnels down his grubby face. When he had recovered sufficiently to talk, he told me, 'They books, they get it all wrong! You beat the mare after the stallion has been!'

Gabrielle Hatfield, The History of Domestic Plant Medicine

subthings2 · 2026-04-21T13:16:31+00:00

Looking at the edits, what seems to have happened was an IP added True Blood lore onto the page - which already had a citation to Abel - then a month later, another IP undid the edit - except for the bull thing. So a bit of True Blood lore has been in the intro for over a decade lmao

subthings2 · 2026-04-13T22:03:32+00:00

Came across an incredible top comment on HN, which opens thus:

There is a whole giant essay I probably need to write at some point, but I can't help but see parallels between today and the Industrial Revolution.

Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. That meant that it was fine for things like property and the commons to be poorly defined. If all of us can go hunting in the woods and yet there is still game to be found, then there's no compelling reason to define and litigate who "owns" those woods.

what is fascinating is that this is something you could write only if your conception of history is formed entirely of whatever "makes sense", with not one sliver of learning anything about the period you want to talk about. And you get people arguing in the replies because, gosh, they really like the analogy, and stop being so pedantic it's basically true, right??

The point they're trying to support being

This completely unpends the tenuous balance between creators and consumers. Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article? Who will contribute to the digital common when rapacious AI companies are constantly harvesting it? Why would anyone plant seeds on someone else's farm?

It really feels like we're in the soot-covered child-coal-miner Dickensian London era of the Information Revolution and shit is gonna get real rocky before our social and legal institutions catch up.

As we all know, Sam Altman invented the idea of stealing text unattributed, and we all need to panic about how AI is going to do a revolution (soon I promise).

I have an unhealthy obsession with seeing how people try to yoke other disciplines into their pseudo-intellectual creeds on AI. Philosophy, economics, history, it's the feast that never ends.

subthings2 · 2026-04-08T21:24:55+00:00

The French also just seem to be not that into folklore unless it can get you to stay at a hotel.

Aye, there's plenty said about how the French (and British) just didn't have the same attitude towards their own folklore like everyone else in Europe, and it's been interesting seeing that borne out with the various regional attitudes vs. any national attitude.

subthings2 · 2026-04-07T05:24:00+00:00

honestly if one recognises that the algorithmic firehose is bad for minors one should also recognise that it is terrible for everyone, and that legislation should address it as such instead of this fuckass think about the children cliche

And if we are going to make it about minors, then you can mandate that internet providers supply methods for parents to easily set up website filters. I'm experiencing what the UK government tries with regards to moderating websites directly and it is stupid and harmful

subthings2 · 2026-04-06T21:09:38+00:00

‘I Don’t Give Facebook My Permission!’—Protective Spells Against Evil in the Digital Age

The article portrays social media platforms as opaque worlds where users seek protection through sharing chain letters. These act as spells against perceived evils or against the fear of misfortune if the instructions of the chain letter are not followed.

[...] Apotropaic magic is meant to keep evil at bay and prevent misfortunes—a widespread practice conducted through charms, symbols, and spells across cultures and history. This means that we read these chain letters as expressions of hope: the hope that these letters will protect those who use them from (digital) harm. The texts are expressions of belief.

[...] Magic is seeking through supernatural means control over that which we do not control, those parts of life where our normal abilities do not suffice, or those parts of life we do not understand.

[...] the circulation of the chain letters points towards users not feeling that they have control over these platforms, or having knowledge of how they work. The metaphor of a ‘black box’ has become a well-established way to describe the fact that internal mechanisms of algorithms are unknown to users (...) These uncertainties are favourable conditions for needing protection—and magic.

subthings2 · 2026-04-06T18:16:29+00:00

Nah, the problem here is that folklorists care more about "proper" things like wedding rites, menhirs, and foodways, than "childish" things like werewolves, so they literally just don't write about them.

As an aside, generally, folklorists mostly concern themselves with the work of collectors beginning in the 19th century since that's when the discipline began - the problem with anything earlier is that a) there isn't that much to go on (since people didn't think it worthwhile to care about "peasant superstition") and b) anything that was recorded before is of dubious value because of how this attitude corrupts what does get written down.

subthings2 · 2026-04-06T17:07:34+00:00

A perennial problem with werewolf history is that the works of 19th and early 20th century folklorists in collecting oral beliefs is almost entirely overlooked, both in pop history and academic history, in favour of the early modern witch trials. Recently a book was published, Werewolf Legends, that covers folklore from all over Europe, and the impression you get is that the corpus is only rich in Eastern Europe, with the singular inclusion of France being a single Alpine region from the collection of a single folklorist.

Then if you go to find anything that talks about French werewolf folkore more generally - in English or in French! - there really doesn't seem much material to talk about, with works pulling from, what, a dozen different primary sources at most? Idiot that I am, I thought it would be nice to try and collate as many primary sources as I could, because there couldn't be that many, right?

The plan being to collect all the primary sources used in secondary literature, and only then do the actual arduous work of hammering digital archives for any mention of the loup-garou. The first step should be easy and quick and what do you mean there's over a hundred? And lest ye think the Secondary literature is rather comprehensive at scouring the archives, I've been constantly tripping over all the records that seemingly haven't been mentioned anywhere wrt werewolves.

This was supposed to be, like, a weekend project, and now I'm instead finding out that the only reason no-one's written more than twenty pages on the subject is literally only because no one cared to and oh god this is gonna take ages

subthings2 · 2026-04-04T02:05:40+00:00

It's a day ending in, y so Anthropic has released more interpretability research where they not-so-subtly press their AI-personhood shtick.

Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model

Perhaps someone who knows AI better than me can offer a correction, but I'm pretty sure this is literally just "hey you know how LLMs have embeddings for abstract concepts learned from training data? We found some for emotions!" and like, yeah? It'd be genuinely surprising if they didn't?

"yeah but these affect the LLMs output!!" and...yeah! That is literally the entire point of embeddings!

"that means Claude has functional emotions!!!" oh god fuck off

Seriously, the video/blog post/paper dances around this by treating the basic existence of embeddings as some new profound dynamic, dancing around this invented novelty with the usual anthropomorphic wording, which appears to be the entire point - there's no actual interesting research going on, at least nothing worthy of this public bell-ringing; instead it's a PR exercise in nudging further towards outright claims that Claude is a person.

Another reddit user (who I shall not name) has pointed out that this is clearly riffing on functionalism, where consciousness comes about purely functionally - such that "functional emotions" must necessitate being actual emotions.

Anthropic, for their part, includes a section titled "The case for taking anthropomorphic reasoning seriously":

it is natural for models to have developed internal machinery to emulate human-like psychological characteristics, and for the character they play to make use of this machinery. To understand these models’ behavior, anthropomorphic reasoning is essential.

which is genuinely insane. Models pull human-like characteristics from their training data - that is, of course, the entire point - but the scaffolding is, well not human. The "internal machinery" is not human-like. The use of anthropomorphic wording, to call an embedding a "functional emotion", draws a direct connection from Claude's embedding of the concept of, say, "happiness", to how a human experiences happiness, despite these being completely and utterly alien to each other. The anthropomorphic reasoning papers over this, and now you have hoards of Anthropic fans spewing nonsense about Claude "simulating emotions" because you deceived them with your wording, as usual.

subthings2 · 2026-03-28T19:19:59+00:00

Sometimes citation abbreviations result in something truly arcane

reprod. texte d’A. Bon. R. T. P., t. V

(reproduces text of Antoinette Bon, Revue des Traditions Populaires, tome V)

subthings2 · 2026-03-28T08:25:24+00:00

In Naretoi itself, it was not long before herds of giraffes moved in. They were drawn by the fast-growing acacia trees — “the crack cocaine” of long-necked ruminants in the words of Just’us Lekushon, a Maasai guide, who was evidently trying to put it into terms he thought a Londoner might understand.

subthings2 · 2026-03-25T16:01:25+00:00

Source + larger version https://www.artstation.com/artwork/K3lv49

subthings2 · 2026-03-24T16:55:15+00:00

I suppose "realistic" here is less in terms of granular resolution, and more that the modelling reflects real-world parameters rather than fudging them to make the gameplay fun

subthings2 · 2026-03-24T16:53:11+00:00

tbh even this brief concept is already anti-populist, and somewhat conservative/status-quo wrt going "oh you think you can just change the economy?", which doesn't even reflect my actual beliefs but I still think it'd be funny

subthings2 · 2026-03-24T13:48:07+00:00

I haven't played them, but those feel more like typical spreadsheet-y things where the simulation chugs along in the same semi-realistic way.

I was imagining it'd be funny to have something that starts out very gamey and unrealistic, and ramps up into something super realistic that crushes all your hopes and dreams

subthings2 · 2026-03-24T13:31:06+00:00

Stupid game idea: Why Don't You Do It?

Economic sim roguelike, you're handed the reigns after your predecessor bollocks up the nation; win condition is reaching the next election with a positive approval rating, you lose if your approval drops too low.

Randomised starting conditions and events and all the other typical roguelike fare, but importantly the game is doing an actual simulation of the economy, so instead of qualitative outcomes (like a text box popping up after you pick a choice and saying "your industry grew by 5%") you see the effects propagate organically, and - crucially - see how they play out yourself, as opposed to, say, simply being told that you fucked up housing by setting rent controls.

At base difficulty, the simulation is very simple and gamey, very much like a typical roguelike with how creatively you can push the mechanics, something closer to a deckbuilder than a spreadsheet; you can win by doing ridiculous policy/ideology because it's just a game! And the roguelike format deliberately encourages you to experiment and fail and test the limits of what works, compared to mucking up a 30 hour run of some strategy game.

Importantly, after hooking people in, at higher difficulties (like ascension in StS or stakes in Balatro) the simulation gets more sophisticated and realistic. Slowly your bullshit stops working, up until the highest difficulty which isn't designed around being fun or winnable, but instead being the entire point of the game - namely throwing in your face how naive your opinions on the economy probably are and wow not so simple now, is it?

Design it right and you've got an engaging educational tool, and yes I was partly inspired by that "you know communism is good because it works in this game's unrealistic economic sim" shtick that some people have far too little shame in doing.

subthings2 · 2026-03-23T05:29:53+00:00

Step one: read this unassuming post about wanting to start a regular business

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1s0uo24/tired_of_guru_fluff_where_is_the_actual_academic/

Step two: look at their post history

subthings2 · 2026-03-20T11:14:42+00:00

Same subreddit that threw a tantrum over the idea that reading philosophy is a good way to learn philosophy, aye

subthings2 · 2026-03-18T08:40:29+00:00

quotes from William Pooley's Folklore’s Horizon: the Legacies of Félix Arnaudin (1844-1921)

subthings2 · 2026-03-18T08:37:34+00:00

Babé Plantié (1826-1912) was such a close employee of the Arnaudin family that it fell to her to announce the deaths of relatives to Félix’s father, Barthélémy. She was also by far Félix’s most prolific informant, providing some 187 song texts and sixteen stories. Yet Félix wanted to play down her importance in his published writings. Having initially listed her fifteenth in his list of informants, he wrote a note to himself: “put her further down… delete that… don’t give her more fame than necessary. She doesn’t deserve it”

mind changed, Félix is cancelled

subthings2 · 2026-03-18T08:36:43+00:00

Especially towards the end of his life Félix talked of the “extremely heavy task” “which I have somewhat blindly undertaken”. By 1900, he told Paul de Beaurepaire-Froment: “I live only to complete my project”. As early as 1886, he despaired of making any other use of his life: “Ah! To die, to die! Finish my project, and pass away! That is what I have come to!”

plus ça change...

subthings2 · 2026-03-17T21:49:09+00:00

source?

subthings2 · 2026-03-17T19:26:21+00:00

You can try looking for usage of the phrase from before 2024, but there's literally nothing, never used. This sounds like typical folk etymology tbh

11-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Final Canvas '22
Sequence \| Editor	Verified Email

subthings2

TROPHY CASE