Why is Discovery just Doctor Who level of "chosen one" plotlines that make no sense?
troyunrau
joined 1 year ago
Looks fine. And it's better than lighting up their phone a dozen times with even shorter notifications
Right! And that's not even one percent of lightspeed.
It's probable there are better ways at finding things, but sometimes these commands are sort of muscle memory and I don't even think to explore what else is out there once I have something that works for me ;)
It's hard to teach an old dog like myself new tricks. I still think git was a mistake and long for centralized revision control systems... Because that's what I grew up with ;)
Not to be argumentative, and I generally see your point :)
I do occasionally write software that will have zero users -- not even myself. Because it's fun to play with the code. "I wonder if I can prototype a openscad type thingy using Python set syntax..." Or whatever. It's the equivalent of sitting in front of a piano and creating song fragments to pass the time.
Naturally the benefit here is that you're developing skills, passing time in an entertaining fashion, and working the ole grey matter.
When I was in undergrad, living in dorm... We used to throw forks at the bulletin board for fun, trying to make them stick. I recommend this as the ultimate fate for your unruly fork.
Trivia. Aluminum was once the most expensive, and thus prestigious metals on the planet. The king of France would dine with aluminum cutlery as a show of opulence.
I have a compulsion... At every restaurant I go to, I inspect their fork. Specifically, I check to see if the tines are aligned. If they aren't, the first thing I do is start bending them so that they are aligned. I do it subconsciously if I'm by myself. But in polite company, often I cover my compulsion by making some sort of joke about being a food blogger or similar.
Until traffic becomes unmanageable, we shouldn't fracture communities too much. In fact, we should do the opposite, to drive discoverability and discussion. If the community grows to a hundred posts per day, and there are non-stop pseudoscience articles posted, then adapt.
I've worked on open source software projects, some of them pretty major. And we had a sort of similar debate. In a non-capitalist software product, the users are not strictly required -- particularly if they aren't paying, you don't really need them. Except that open source has this user->contributor treadmill that requires that some users become contributors in order for a project to grow. So you want to be as pro-user as possible, hoping and dreaming you'll get patches out of the blue some day, or similar.
But what happens when your users become hostile or entitled. What if they do the equivalent of calling tech support and demanding satisfaction. The customer is always right, right? How much time and effort can you devote to them without detracted from what you were doing (coding). Eventually as a product grows, the number of hostile users grows. What do you do to manage this at scale?
Suddenly you're facing the same problem Home Depot faces in your article, except your capital is not measured in dollars but time, motivation, mood... And you start putting up barriers in a similar fashion.
Aside from the fact that anything with mass cannot travel at the speed of light... Lots of fun things happen as you approach the speed of light. There's an excellent mostly-hard sci fi novel called Tau Zero that explores this concept in depth and, despite being older, is worth the read.
(1) Time dilation (the universe and you have different clocks).
(2) blueshifting of objects in front of you. At 0.95c, basically all visible starlight in front of you has been blueshifted into ionizing radiation. Fun fun.
(3) shape distortion. You become more needle-shaped -- getting very long and skinny, as observed by the rest of the universe.
(4) you become a nuke. At .99c if you run into anything, your kinetic energy related explosion would be roughly 6x the Tsar Bomba (largest nuke ever detonated) for each kg of mass. Or, put another way, each kg of your mass would impact with the energy of 3kg of antimatter contacting 3kg of matter. Boom.
Sci fi always overlooks the last one. Near light speed combat is basically firing buckets of sand at planets and blowing them up.
Federated networks route around the damage. You're seeing that in action here.