Smalltalk would probably make more sense than C++.

Thanks!

I have always loved the OED. As a kid I used to sit in the library and just read it. It was always a dream of mine to buy my own copy and just have it the way people used to have encyclopedias.

That was amazing! I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve seen this.

“Every customer should be greeted when they walk into the store.”

The singular “they” is traditional in English - it is very much proper English and has been around (iirc) since the 17th century. It’s only a big deal now because conservatives want to make gender a factor in elections.

It is a joke.

This is the rpg where you join the “not a fraternity” in college and then go on to become a political or business leader of the United States, right?

“No stupid questions” is intended to be a topic, not a challenge.

Yup! I really love the whole story there. It was sort of like the space race but with tall masted ships and pirates and such.

I mean, you also had the slave trade, but if you blithely ignore the discomforting parts of history, reading about it can be fun.

There were so many problems with monitoring time. Even today I always dread it a bit. While we’ve tried to at least move the issues from the mechanistic to the philosophical, we still run into things like the Y2K and the 2038 problems. Hell, I remember running into an issue with calculating leap years and such as an undergrad.

I like to think that, if nothing else, it gives me a greater appreciation for Discworld.

So I got scooped on the whole candle thing, which I really wanted to go with. Instead, I’m going to pivot and say that accurate timekeeping - day or night - was actually driven by the needs of navigation. 

You could get a pretty good idea of when it was based on the position of the sun and stars, as long as you knew where you were. The opposite is also true - you could figure out where you were, as long as you knew what time it was (and had the appropriate charts/data). The problem was that, while sailing around the world, ships often didn’t know either one.

For rough purposes, people used things like candles. In some cases, monks would recite specific prayers at a given cadence to keep track of time overnight and so know when to wake the others. These methods, as well as later inventions like the pendulum clock that used a known time component to drive watch mechanisms, were all but useless for navigation due to inaccuracies. They were good enough in the 1200s to let the monks know when to pray, though.

I could see you going to get your PhD in, say, three years post-MD, you could get your law degree JD in three years - total is six. Then you get a Master’s in data science and then an MBA, and I think that puts you ten years of education beyond - well beyond - that of an MD.

The MD still might make more though.

Oh, I know. It’s not necessarily a crime, although I wouldn’t recommend it without reading what actions specifically would trigger those laws. It’s the wording of the laws that I’d want to be comfortable with.

But morally speaking it’s not even a grey area. It’s absolutely worse than just not tipping at all. If I were a restaurateur I’d ban this person on the first offense, no questions asked.

I’m not positive about that. Possessing obviously fake money is not a crime, but passing it off as if it were real money in a transaction itself may constitute a crime. Back before sensors became more sophisticated, I had a friend who used photocopied bills (which were obviously fake) in subway token machines, and he got into some trouble for it.

It looks like a Bike Party kind of bike. Bike parties are events where the city’s bike community can come together. At least out here, they publish the path for that night’s ride, and then the bicyclists will basically take the lane with a kind of parade of weird bikes lit up with LED lights, playing music, and socializing. In several cities around me, it’s a year round monthly event, and homeowners along the route will frequently come out to see the bikes and wave to the riders. This is where you’ll see people pulling out their pennyfarthings and other weird bikes. I could definitely see this used for that kind of thing.

There’s a square wheel bike that I think is similar in terms of the use cases.

I think there’s a handful of problems with the idea. For starters (I’m just going with the first returned result because the actual numbers don’t matter as much as the magnitudes), there’s around 64 zetabytes comprising the internet as of 2020, 64 trillion GB. That’s going to be one hell of a zip file. In fact, pretty much the only thing capable of storing that much information is, well, the Internet itself.

Second is the rate of information being produced. These estimates vary wildly, but the rate of growth is increasing exponentially. We will soon be writing more data per day to the internet than is currently there from the very beginning until now.

So maybe we don’t need every product page from every store website around the world. Maybe we don’t need the tens of millions of pages of corporate training manuals. Maybe we need curation rather than SELECT * FROM INTERNET.

That’s what things like Gutenberg and the Internet Archive do. They’re very limited in what they catch, of course. It’s also sort of what Wikipedia does, although curation here includes summarization. It’s also a feature of historical archives from existing media - like New York Times records that go back a century (or wherever they’re at now), or back issues of Nature and Science going back to when they started publication. Those are obviously doable - people are doing them - but each alone is a microscopic piece of the puzzle.

So, given that those exist, alongside the rest of the internet, what value are we creating? Storing something digitally doesn’t give it permanence, and I have an 8” floppy disk for a cash register POS created by an unknown OS to prove it.

Someday (hopefully soon) PDFs will go away and nothing will read them. Hell, the concept of “file” could go away in 50 years. There are written texts from thousands of years ago that we cannot read, and others we’ve deciphered only very recently and imperfectly. All of that archived stuff will have to be ported over, and again that’s going to mean yet more curation. At the rate information is growing you’re going to make Sisyphus look like he’s on a vacation in Tahiti.

Does that mean it’s all one big library of Alexandria? Not necessarily.

Rather than thinking of all those data as a library, think of them as an ecosystem of knowledge. Once Amazon goes out of business, no one’s going to care about that one page of theirs with the nose hair trimmer. We will still have a copy of the NYT when we landed on the moon, or when Nazi Germany was defeated. We’ll also have other information about space programs and 20th century history. We probably won’t have my mom’s recipes or all those pictures I’ve taken of my pets over the years, and my MySpace page is thankfully gone forever. I even deleted all of my Reddit content before moving on.

Maybe my scientific publications will end up archived someplace, but there we get into the tree falling in the forest problem. If no one reads them from now to the end of time, are they really there? Maybe physically, but they’ve sort of passed out of the ecosystem of human knowledge and are now part of the fossil record, if anything.

We’ve also researched how to communicate over millennia. There’s the (kind of silly but a little cool) Long Now project. We’ve also tried to invent symbology that will allow us to put warning signs outside hazardous/nuclear waste storage facilities that will continue to communicate “Danger - Do Not Enter” for tens of thousands of years.

In short, I think that the problem you’re trying to solve is impermanence or entropy, which both Buddhists and physicists will tell you aren’t things we’re going to solve.

Look at it like this:

You’re in a position of privilege where your sexuality and gender identity are part of what constitutes “normal” for most people. All sexualities and genders are normal, of course, as far as I’m concerned. I’m going to guess by the nature of your post that you’re a cis-gender heterosexual male. You have a bit higher percentage of society that’s going to think of your positions as “normal” than, say, that of a gay man or a trans woman.

It’s like when a white person stands up against racism, or men march for women’s rights. When we tolerate intolerance, we allow it to spread. This is a good use of privilege. It’s expected that a gay person will be against homophobia and that a black person will be against racism. Being a “normal” person and being against those things is, by itself, calling out homophobia and racism. The community can use all the allies it can get.

I would point out one thing though. It sounds like you’re made uncomfortable being associated with the ideas behind the slurs. It’s fine to want to be seen as holding your identity, but it could also be because you harbor some negative stereotypes as well, perhaps unconsciously. I wouldn’t be insulted if someone thought I was black, or Mexican, or a trans man. If it’s an honest mistake on their part I might correct them (because it could lead to an awkward situation), but if someone were to call me an inapplicable slur, it would be just funny, not insulting. I might be offended that they thought it was okay to use such a word as an insult, but not that they thought they could insult me with it.