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Their tiny size notwithstanding, their awesome potential illuminates the profound ambiguity of the work’s title, which can be taken to refer either to the spaceship’s proud name or to the swarms of alien automata that threaten it.

Err, no. The language of the original - Polish - doesn't have such ambiguity. "Niezwyciężony" is in masculine singular form. Plural would be "Niezwyciężeni" for masculine plural and "Niezwyciężone" for non-masculine plural (includes neuter).

"Roguelike" is nowadays commonly defined by having a meta progression system (unlocks). Scroll through reviews of a game like Noita or DCSS (Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup) and you will see some people complaining the game doesn't have (enough) permanent unlocks.

There's a mini discussion on HN about them here, when I last mentioned them. Crucially, they know alternative names such as "Flow Fields".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22848106

You've found a secret area!!

The best, most addictive spiritual successor I've found to date is Eador:Genesis. Although it has a bunch of other inspirations such as Master of Magic.

https://eador-masters-of-the-broken-world.fandom.com/wiki/Ea...

It mostly has very bad AI for which it compensates with insane material advantages, but tactical layer is stellar and strategic layer has some VERY interesting ideas as well. Your actions have far reaching consequences, such as you choose only 3 tier II units from about ten or so, and they have very different niches and work to a varying degree with each of the 4 basic classes.

If you have one group of coders writing new functionality, and another doing maintenance work on the application, you have diverging interests. The "new functionality" people have an incentive to rush stuff, because bugfixes won't be their responsibility anyway. The most cynical way to do this is writing a lot of new functionality, put it on CV, and leave for another company.

Poland's last foreign ministers (Waszczykowski and Rau) have been inane. Nature doesn't like vacuum. Poland more or less left the stage, and Lithuania is trying to fill the niche.

This is especially surprising because the common idea is that civilization arrived later into northern, colder Europe. Bushcraft like on the wonderful Primitive Technology youtube channel is harder when you don't have a year-round growing period. You need not just warmer clothes, but ways to stockpile and preserve food. Traditional Polish cuisine has many ways - preserves in glass jars, salt, pickling... Actually the cuisine is the aspect that positively surprises visitors the most. So many peoples and empires were present in the region, so many culinary influences. It's only lacking in saltwater fish because historically there was limited sea access.

Maybe the climate was different?

What you call "low-quality conversation", smalltalk, is particularly disliked by people with Aspergers.

I think the best part is not the recipe itself, but the error handling of the article. It goes into detail into what conditions are optimal, what kind of tools to use, how various mistakes look like (with photos!).

I'm patiently waiting for the desktop metaphor to die. I'm a very happy user of i3 (tiling) window manager and it's beautiful how efficiently it uses space. Meanwhile in the "desktop metaphor" world, interface designers have settled on fullscreen applications (skype, even music players) and tabs. Because no one wants to bother moving application windows around with mouse.

i3 is explicitly for power users, but someone will eventually take the idea of tiling window managers and make something with a low learning curve. And that will be the end of desktop icons and movable windows.

What you just did sounds like an interesting "Show HN" project. Automate the thing, so that a HN bot posts a comment with previous talk about the topic.

There's a song about this:

"Dare to be Stupid" - Weird Al Yankowich https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMhwddNQSWQ

Asking questions is really putting print statements(or functions) in ordinary, physical world. It's debugging yourself or your surroundings.

Asking questions is crucial when you're doing sports and trying to improve your personal best - for example pull ups or squats. Eventually a joint or tissue starts to hurt and you need to figure out why or you get an injury. Am I doing it too often? No warmup? Bad diet? Sleep? Does your joint rotate too much and in which axis?

And you will absolutely not get far in a puzzle game like Baba Is You if you're not good at asking questions. When I got stuck in that game, it was almost always due to a wrong assumption I made early on and failed to recognize. Solving the game is similar to tree traversal. If one approach doesn't work, and you don't have another idea, you need to re-examine your assumptions.

Likely because Muslims are very prickly.

Isn't it true for all programs? Not just _unix_ programs?

Firefox is portable and it's a large program, but a LOT of effort went into that.

And here Ratramus, a 9th century monk researches the matter:

"Do the Dog-Headed Men Have Souls?" I also learned a human head is round.

Chemical weapons are used for assassination, but not for large scale warfare. More like terror weapons on civilians (Syria?) and guerilla fighters with limited resources and few alliances.

I think the parent might be suggesting that sleeping on a wet bed might trigger peeing reflex.

It appears you've read the article to the very end - I'm glad you've enjoyed it.

High ceilings - absolutely. Warm air goes up, can it get simpler than that? Primary/Elementary school physics.

If you watch some videos on lost African civilizations and traditional architecture, it's full of them (and curtains rather than doors). Some examples are Basil Davidson's "Africa" serries (on youtube, if you don't mind low quality) and I think Stefan Milo on his channel, the video about coral cities ("Swahili Culture").

Interesting experience with Katrina. You could call it having a house that "fails gracefully" and doesn't rely completely on any one system.

There are downsides to modern, well-isolated houses. When air is the primary medium of heating your house, opening a window means almost literally letting money out. Aside from crap like emissions from furniture (I believe they're called VOC - not a native speaker), dust, bacteria and fungal spores pile up. People develop allergy and respiration-related diseases more easily.

If you're interested in low tech, passive and energy efficient technologies, I recommend the

LOW TECH MAGAZINE

For example, Revenge of the Circulating Fan: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2014/09/circulating-fans-air...

Frequently discussing topics like thermal comfort, energy needed to heat up a person, sustainability, solar-powered websites, mist showers, wind power, compressed air power, medieval methods of heating and what we can learn from them...

Bret Devereaux is of the opinion that chemical weapons are not in use anymore simply because they're ineffective next to simple explosives.

https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...

Maybe the simplest way to save the environment is to invent more deadly, cost effective weapons that don't harm the land as a side effect?

Tolkien fought in the trenches of WW1 and it left a mark on him. Mordor and the way orcs treat land are especially influenced by his experience. People started to call this type of landscape "moonscape".

https://acoup.blog/2019/10/18/collections-the-battlefield-af...

According to one book I read...

Cheyennes divide birds into 3 groups: plain, great and sacred. They count magpie in the sacred ones :-). There's a magpie on my fence as I'm typing this.

They like magpies because they're smart, talkative, they announce guests, they live close to humans.

Australian "magpie" is not even a corvid.

You don't appreciate zero until you try to invent a positional number system. In the past, when they used positional system they would often just leave a blank spot in the place of zero. This inevitably leads to errors. Is that two numbers or one number with zero between? How do you distinguish between 1 and 10?

Source:

A popular science book

"The history of numbers or the history of a great discovery" (Georges Ifrah)

Contains some fun chapters like "How to count if you can't count". For example if natives in a stereotypical jungle want to count numbers to a holiday. They memorize a sequence of items, for example body parts: little finger of one hand, palm, wrist, forearm, arm, shoulder, neck.... then they measure once and conclude one needs to wait as many days as there are from the little finger on left hand to, say, navel.

I clicked on the link for fun youtube and streamable videos. There were none.

I'm sure (animal intelligence) researchers would be getting more grants if they put more effort into capturing some of these feats on video.

I think TikTok will figure a way to cram advertising into 60 seconds.

No, I'm considering it. I need to travel more and compare before I make up my mind. It's unsurprising many people migrate because they're fed up with their country. Financial incentives is just another side of it, because it's demoralizing to work long and hard hours and be paid little. However, plenty of Poles migrate that can reconcile their desire for high wages with uncritical admiration for their country.

The country has taken an authoritarian turn. The aspects that annoy me personally is lack of critical thinking, lack of insight when it comes to history (it's a second state religion in practice which is two too many), low trust, bigotry, corruption, double standards, shallow XIX century understanding of patriotism. There's focus on "moral victories", heroic sacrifices and losing battles. Contempt is something very common in society - it's like everyone needs someone they can despise. Constructive criticism is very unwelcome and met with denial. Compromise is often called "rotten compromise".

Some education systems put an emphasis on critical thinking, some on absorbing tons of information.

Polish education is notable for memorization. One area where it doesn't seem to hurt is medicine. It appears Polish doctors and nurses are very much appreciated when they migrate. Perhaps critical thinking is not a useful skill in medical practice?

Once upon a time I was reading an article about Polish migrants in Norway. The Norwegians observe that Poles are reluctant to send kids to Norwegian schools for a few reasons: a) the language is very different, b) Poles fear children will become rebellious, because the schools emphasize critical thinking* c) Poles fear children will become... idiots. Because they won't know too many facts. It appears despite constant complaining about pointless facts and useless information, Poles take some sick pride in the suffering. Some kind of Stockholm Syndrome.

* this reminds me of a rumor circulating about personnel of mental hospitals. Patients are often sedated not because it's good for the patients, but because it's convenient for the personnel.

TabFS lets you mount Firefox tabs as a filesystem. You can then use regular scripting to operate on them.

Let me guess, because they had LOTS of sheep, which they had because they had LOTS of grass, which they had because they had LOTS of rain. And they were known for mass producing wool and exporting it to Europe.

Ok, now I've skimmed the article. The elderly and toothless. That must be why medlars were so popular. Once the fruit is bletted, it gains the consistency of a baked apple.

I have a good example of irony.

The right wing / conservative people in my country frequently call their political opponents "lemmings", to imply they're deluded, misinformed and mindlessly rushing towards their deaths.

The mass suicide of lemmings is a myth. The most notable perpetuator is Disney, which in a 1958 documentary movie "White Wilderness" staged a "suicide" scene, complete with pushing lemmings off a cliff. There were more cases of involving Disney.

So whenever right winged/conservative describe people with opposing views as "lemmings", they accuse them of being misinformed yet are proving themselves to be misinformed.

To top it off, the "documentary" movie won an Academy Award, which is also itself ironic, because misinformation has been rewarded as educational.