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linehedonist

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I think this is unnecessarily pessimistic. I think there's actually a surprisingly large number of people who are interested in and have the discipline to study something on their own, and there's value in pursuing a whole course of study from beginning to end. Doing things piecemeal and incrementally has value too (especially in software development), but can obscure the whole shape of a discipline.

Attention-grabbing headline, but the article itself answers the question: very important.

"Hastings was one of those battles which changed the course of history, most directly for England but also, as events turned out, for Britain and for France... In terms of its consequences, Hastings must be the most important battle ever to have been fought in England... the consequences of its outcome changed the course of English history definitively."

But as the article says, this battle really was tremendously important. The utter catastrophe led to the quick and permanent entrenchment of the Normans in Britain, with huge and long-reaching consequences reaching to the present: first and foremost, that the English language was profoundly altered at every level by influence from French.

sure, though New York has gotten a real honest-to-goodness winter this year. There's been a foot on the snow on the ground continuously for the last month, and it's been cold enough that the pipes in one of my bathrooms froze. I think it's easier from the West Coast to bemoan the end of East Coast winters than to live through one :)

I’ve used Macs nearly exclusively for 13 years and have not gotten used to the window tabbing. I just fundamentally don’t think windows of the same application should be grouped together.

Certainly the world’s climate is worse. Wealth inequality is worse. I try hard not to be nostalgic, and even so I have to admit lots of things are not as good as they were in the 60s.

It’s not even like the physical infrastructure is all that much better. I live in a house built in the 50s, and clearly the people living in it then led a pretty similar life to mine. It just cost me a lot more money.

Rhodian sea law, from 900 BCE, states that if a salvor rescues property from the perilous seas, they are entitled to a share of the saved property.

Unlikely, given that the Greek alphabet didn’t exist in 900 BCE.