detritus

See, I'd class those as something like 'follies' or Whimsy, as they don't appear to be actual fortifications, rather forms of affectation.

That said, I'm not sure what definition or list this site uses - as others have already pointed out, there are loads of castle missing I can tell, just from a few that I've visited across Italy.

I'm well aware, but it could as-equally be because a lot of people default to 01/01 of their birth year when signing up to things online.

Sure.

How long's the longest voyage these days?

Mutinies aren't so common nowadays, but they were when ocean voyages were measured in months and years.

Yeah, this is the problem though - ironically highlighted by my still-maintained love and hope for Starship: Beyond Earth orbit, the energy requirement to move even small tens of tons of useful life-sustaining mass is incredibly expensive.

Like, to get a useful amount of people to Mars would be... the wealth of a first world nation for tens of years. Even using nuclear engines.

A generational megaship travelling at some small percentage of c to a nearby useful star (not even the nearest ones, which are all a bit shit)?

There's just nothing within our current projected reality that could even begin to accomodate that possibility.

Never mind the fact you'd need redunancy, and at least a few hundred years of testing to ensure that whatever mega project you could ultimately send wouldn't simply get vaporised halfway through, from realities unknown.

Maybe I'm over-thinking things. It seems like a lot of people's existences essentially revolve around a pocket-sized glowing rectangle.

Future AI and a database of all of humanity's experience before launch might be enough to keep the generational populace amused and distracted for the entiriety of their meagre, trapped existence... .

The difference there being that at the end of your day, having spent it masoning, you could leave the cathedral and go back to your family and have a walk in the fields and drink and be merry with people loved and new. The project wasn't the entiriety of your existence, it was merely the means to pay for it.

Unless we have generational ships the size of small countries, I'm not sure the human brain - unaided and non-forcedly evolved to do so - would be able to handle essential incarceration in a series of metal tubes for its own and its descendents existences.

I have no doubt that even the most republican of cultures launched from Earth would end up thoroughly monarchistic by the time the generation ships arrived at their destination. At best monarchistic - who knows what savage new forms of society could evolve in that sort of context?

Yeah, if your username is any indication of your age, you've possibly taken much the same trajectory of pessimism that I have. As a youth, I assumed we'd be hitting multiple Cs or bending space time when I was an adult; As an adult I thought we might get a percentage of C and conquer the solar system; Now I realise Just How Much Effort it would be to accomplish much of any value on our own Moon, never mind Mars.

I still hold on to the idea that very long term we might make strides in our own solar system, but it is a depressingly-longer timescale than I always used to believe.

Unless we have some magic-level shift in our understanding of physics, we're never getting anything beyond Von Neumann probes to other stars, and even then we're talking thousands of years.

Perhaps, but it is horrifically long in terms of human stuff.

Indeed, I'm fairly confident that I very specifically stated as much, as the fundamental underpinning of my comment.

You might be interested in https://www.reddit.com/ .

Out of interest, what value do you think that a comment like that has, in a forum such as this? You're not likely to be informing people with information they're not already abundantly aware of.

Whereas the person you're responding to is adding value, for me at least. I am in what might be an edge-case position where I need to run software specific to Windows and, much more importantly run hardware that uses drivers which seemingly don't work on Windows 11 (I only learnt recently, whilst planning to finally 'upgrade').

I couldn't even begin to do what I do, ably and competently at least, in a Linux environment.

And I've had at least one laptop for general use running some flavour of Linux for about 16 years now.

Oh! haha, sorry, it was late and I was a couple of drinks in when I first responded.

D'oh.

Rogen quote? I don't know what that is.

I think you're over-complicating this.

It's literally just Score Points.

That's all he cares about.

By his metrics? Probably.

It's a game to him.

He won.

Let's move on.

Yeah, I'm at once awed that something like that can be auto-generated (I presume?) and disappointed that it doesn't usefully or practically improve my understanding, beyond written synopses and human videos, at all.

Stuff like this reminds me that we still need a human in the loop to edit, to improve, to advance.

Auto-from-scratch just doesn't really achieve anything of actual value.

Yeah, I get that. But does it actually make them feel better?

What do they say about sugaring trauma?

heh, funny you say that - I just yesterday almost bit at some obvious Nego-Trolling on here and remembered "Just don't engage".

Some people, for some reason at certain points in their life, just want to shit on other people's stuff, any way that they can, for... reasons.

I mean, clearly it's not to make themselves feel better, because how on Earth could that work?

There's no value in engaging, in any way whatsover. Sadly there's very little that can be done to prevent that form of human behaviour, without otherwise souring the experience for the generality.

*shrug, whatchagonnado?

eh, unfortunately it's not today's work that's impacted (beyond wasting some time), but this weekend's, which I thought I had wonderfully set up, taking advantage of time whilst my family's away.

It's been a fun day for me today - my bank here in the UK suffered downtime which not only affected the app and online banking, but also online and possibly offline payments too.

I was glad when it finally came back on, after four hours off, so that I could order some material for a job... only to find that my supplier's site wasn't working. It's on shopify.

So too the two the other suppliers I use who offer the same thing I need, so I'm kinda stuffed as ordering from anytime now means I likely won't get my stuff in before the weekend, which is when I was planning on working with it.

Wonderful.

I find there's a certain flavour of Scot that's quite gesticulative - I know that I'm one. My partner's Italian and I guess my gesticulation's ramped up since we've been together because when I watched footage from an event recently, I was borderline horrified at how wild my expressions and gesticulations were, especially as the person I was talking to (well 'at', seemingly) is an impressively English sort. Made for quite the contrast in manner.

I looked like I was trying to sell Guybrush Threepwood a sinking ship... .

Yet the same skill that leads to perfect flatness then also leads to being able to make something look organic and natural, should they so wish.

It's about honing ability and competence.

Funny, I'm reading this as very dry, tongue-in-cheek humour.

Define 'logically organised' in the context of 'a creative' using a piece of software?

Back in the Mac vs. PC days, people would argue themselves blue in the face about which system was the 'more logical' with the non-answer essentially boiling down to the extent of one's experience and the preference of one's capacity to plumb the depths of the preferred OS.

Here, we're discussing a means for people who might otherwise not have any desire to use GIMP being able to use GIMP without having to throw said thousands of hours of experience. Whether they then want to transition to a GIMP-first comprehension of the software is another matter entirely.

This gets rid of the speedbump.

Unfortunately, it doesnt get rid of the singularly-offputting name, but that's a matter for another thread.

er.. no - I've been a daily user of Photoshop since '98 or so, but after getting annoyed with Adobe's subscription model a few years back I bought Affinity Photo and looked to move over entirely to that, yet I ended up back in Photoshop purely because of literal decades of muscle memory meant that every interaction that I had with Affinity's offering came with an undesirable cognitive speedbump.

I'm not a fan of Gimp (haven't given it a shot in over a decade, to be fair) but if it covers the basic capabilities of PS and provides for an almost straight swap for users looking to change, then it is literally the layout and shortcuts that will be the decider for them.

egh, as much as I enjoyed his Dogme 95 fayre when I was young and far more self-important, I find his later 'big cinema' output turgid twaddle.

Melancholia was just about bareable but from Mandalay onwards I could barely struggle through to the end of his flicks.

Nymphomaniac made me almost literally angry at its denouement. Just.. shit.

The origin of 'dark DNA' begins to make more sense through this sort of lens, except the system somehow maintained a level of compensation to fix all its flaws.

It's hard to believe, and I repeatedly said as much to people who thought as much prior to the vote who 'pfffd' me in response, and yet here we are.

The right to vote on fundamental societal issues should come with some sort of mental means testing. I'm only half-kidding. I think.

It is? Or is it just a pragmatic dislike?

Posts like this are why I read HN comments first.

Posts like this remind we how much better it is to be as part of a large trading bloc to be able to easily order/sample these sort of things, rather than it likely being a pain in the arse to get locally.