PhasmaFelis

A few kilobytes of text is not a resource that needed saving.

Mostly that's because devs want to drive people to the app, where they can track you a lot better, so they make their mobile sites shitty on purpose. Plenty of mobile apps are just webapps anyway under the hood. There's absolutely no reason for a mobile site to be massively worse than the app unless the devs want it that way.

Absolutely agree that it was politics, not science, but it wasn't really anti-science either. In a nutshell, his theory was fine on its own; he was punished for insulting the Pope.

It wasn't his theory, it was that he presented it in the form of a dialogue with a character who was an obvious stand-in for the Pope, and then made that character sound like a complete idiot.

The heresy charges were an excuse to punish him for being disrespectful. He'd gotten approval from the Pope to publish; he would have been fine if he'd just been polite.

Obviously that's still petty and unjustified, but science denial wasn't the real reason for it.

This reminds me, some years ago as Google was expanding its translation service, someone tried translating text into and out of an obscure African language (don't recall which) and it always came out as weird Biblical-sounding semi-gibberish.

My revelation was that machine translation needs a corpus of bilingual documents to learn from, and if the language is sufficiently obscure, there may not be any bilingual documents except for the Bible, which missionaries have translated into just about every language on Earth.

Human bodies are scarce because you can't pay most people to live there. They're not mutually exclusive.

When a generally smart person makes a humiliating million-dollar mistake, then you can trust that person, more than any of their coworkers, to never make that specific mistake again. That's the "expensive education" here.

But they didn't have to, and a bit of thoughtful consideration would have (and presumably did) make that clear.

This is less of a "caught driving drunk" situation and more a "caught driving with one taillight out" situation. You want to make sure it doesn't happen again, but there was no real danger from this single instance.

Since this wooden rod travels several miles in a 6 second time frame - traveling more than 500M/s on average - don't we have to assume it accumulates?

The basic assumption here is that the rules as written beat physics and common sense. When you play that game, you have to do it rigorously. You can't say that rules trump physics one moment, and physics trump rules the next.

There's also the rule of cool. If it makes the story better/ more enjoyable: have at it.

That does rule out the Peasant Railgun more thoroughly than any rules argument.

Finding fun and unexpected rules interactions is certainly D&D. Finding obviously broken and unintended interactions that make no sense in-universe, purely as intellectual sport, is also D&D.

Seriously expecting the DM to behave like a buggy video game and give you ultimate power because you found an exploitable glitch in the game mechanics is...well, that has also always happened in D&D, but it's hardly praiseworthy or in the spirit of things.

Wasn't it also something to do with supplying government contracts, which require all behavior to be documented?

Some "significant effects" are a lot bigger and more broadly negative than others. You know this.

Whatever your feelings on the current US administration, no reasonable person could deny that it's having significant effects worldwide.

I want to know why the organ features an image of a man in the instant that his hat falls off his head.

Yearly flu vaccines have been a thing for decades.

If that's what OP thinks, I'm not sure they actually know what a vaccine is.

I'm excited to hear why you put "vaccine" in scare quotes.

If you do something with your car that ends up with it skidding on its side, that's a crash by any possible definition.

Is a landing barge not "purposefully engineered to be flat"?

I believe it was what we call a joke.

I am obsessively pedantic about grammar and spelling, in code and in English. I have a firm personal preference about how to spell "cancelled"--I like two Ls.

The only reason I'd ever consider telling someone that "canceled" is wrong is if the other spelling was firmly established in the actual codebase. Not in comments. And absolutely not with the ridiculous claim that the language you're coding in has opinions about how to spell your comments.

Why do tech workers get so wrapped around the axle of layoffs when most people are in a chronic state of tech job hopping?

Most of us job-hop because we have to, not because we want to.

There's a class of people in the tech industry who like to write blogs about how fun and fulfilling it is to constantly change jobs and roles. Those people are highly visible but not representative. Most humans find constant change and uncertainty stressful, not exhilarating.

I can't get past the second paragraph, where he introduces "Chiang's Law." I click through for the definition:

This law can be stated compactly as: science fiction is about strange rules, while fantasy is about special people.

Anyone who believes that has not read much of either. And the writer admits this immediately:

Whether the story is about spaceships or dragons is irrelevant.

I have a hard time listening to someone who use established terminology to refer to some completely orthogonal concept, in a context guaranteed to cause confusion, for no reason except to snipe at a genre they don't like, for reasons they know are neither fundamental to nor unique to that genre.

No one said they were.

Reminds me of a few years ago, when a bunch of people were breathlessly claiming that blockchain was the future of videogames, because it would let you transfer items from one game to another. Take your favorite Skyrim sword and use it in Minecraft, or whatever.

So I'd point out that that had been technically possible for decades, no blockchain necessary, and the reason it hadn't happened was that no developer actually wants it. And then they'd get super mad and call me names.

I'm afraid the AI bros are going to do more real-world damage than the crypto bros did, though.

There are games like Deep Rock Galactic that have really good support multiplayer for multiplayer mods; it tells you what you're getting into in the server browser, and IIRC even separates them into tiers (simple HUD mods you can use in any game without effecting anyone, big changes have to be run on a server that everyone agrees to).

But yeah, they're few and far between.

And more people should consider backing off from political-media consumption as it is clearly toxic to the soul.

Destroying the government services that allow disabled people to get healthcare and other basic needs is toxic to my literal, physical body.

You're talking like this is all a genteel philosophical disagreement. People are going to die.

I would dearly love to return to even the 2021 era of the internet in general. 1999 would be ideal, actually. But I'd settle for most anything up to 2012 or so.

Wow, that's obnoxious. You may be able to call down and ask for a folding table of some kind. But yeah, you shouldn't have to.

Blaming all your problems on old people isn't any more attractive than blaming them on Jews/women/queers/etc.

You're reading this on a device made in an underpaid Asian sweatshop, wearing clothes that are the same. Old people with pension funds are no more or less complicit in the brutality of the system than you are. Try blaming the people who are causing this situation on purpose, not the millions who are just trying to navigate it as best they can.

I used to fly with a 13" MacBook and a frankly excessive amount of random stuff in my backpack, and it still fit under the seat without too much trouble.

If you're trying to keep your daily carry bag super slim on principle, I guess it mgith be harder.