It’s not really that straightforward though, is it? Firstly is it a mean or a median average? What counts as an empire? When do we date the rise and fall of specific empires? These are not questions with straightforwards answers. Would Hitler’s Germany count as an empire? How many Roman empires were there?

I nearly dismissed your review until you qualified your assessment of onion rings. I have transposed the order on those first two myself

Onion rings top, then tots, then everything else

Literate programming as an ideal works at very very high level and very very low level. Plumbing code often doesn’t benefit from comments at all, and is the usually the most subject to refactoring. Code by amateurs/neophytes is often not gonna be written in such a way that a clear description of the intention or mechanics is achievable by the coder. Unobtainable standard, smh. I like comments with a ‘why’ at the top and a ‘what’ at the bottom (of the stack. I’m talking about abstraction layers. Why am I doing this piece of logic in the code you can clearly understand at the top, what the fuck am I doing these weird shenanigans with a fucking red-black tree of all things in this low level generic function)

Sometimes you just need to document the business reason behind what you’re doing, regardless of how clear the code might be 😆

Good story. I’ve bookmarked that one.

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Gotta get Jill of the Jungle on that bad boy

Are you not entertained?

For a month or two I still kept the app on my phone. As a memento.

Reddit’s official UX experiences suck balls

That’s bollocks, their first album was 2000

Edit: just checked, actually their first album was 1999. Although what they have to do with 50 shades of grey…

There’s a difference between an advance that repudiates prior understanding and one that doesn’t. You can, in maths - and I assume this is the point - know that you are right, in a way that you can’t with a more… epistemological science. Of course it’s more complex than that, and a lot of maths is pretty sciency, like deriving approximate solutions for PDEs is more experimental than you might imagine, but even though we might make improvements there, we’ll never go ‘oh actually those error bounds are wrong’. They might be non optimal but they’ll never be wrong

I always maintain that Aristotle’s notions of how to test theories of ‘natural philosophy’ are a reasonable starting point for ‘science’

I don’t think you’re expected to see the moral choices made by characters in the culture as ones you yourself should pick given current reality. It’s set against a rather different set of background conditions.

Haven’t read any of those in an age. I liked it! Sentient wasps was fun, but a billion-year-old malevolent pseudo-virus that rapidly turned you into a military agent of an ancient and hugely destructive race was… less so.

Some of them, sometimes. But some are adulated and free and contribute vast swathes to our culture and understanding.

Yes, I think this a more compelling take

It’s not the same joke because, it’s a more honest attempt to imagine a plausible scenario in which unconscious prejudice may manifest. Apache attack helicopter is obviously absurd. AI sentience is just very unlikely something that is not currently a prejudice we find ourselves exposed to and may speculate we’d end up being adverse to

Yeah, jeez, that sort of mechanophic language should be illegal

I like that song. Perhaps a perfect encapsulation of some specific part of the 60s mythos. I can only speculate.