But when you succeed in the game, then what? Yes, the real world is full of endless trials and never a payout. But the entire point is that there is no point. The fun is in the journey. The real treasure is the friends you make along the way, to quote the meme.
It's kind of like how the north star for a programmer is to automate themselves out of the job. A good manager will bring the best out of their reports, which leads to making good decisions and executing on them.
It's not the kidnappers trying to contact the family in this case. It's the clinic administrator who doesn't know why their doctor hasn't shown up for a week
On the one hand, I agree with you. On the other hand, the false positives (and the fallout from it) might outweigh the negatives: imagine a volunteer doctor who disappears in West Africa due to being kidnapped/robbed etc and someone local tries to contact the family back home, but all the messages end up getting blocked.
I always thought fusion was easier than fission, since all* you really need is water and electricity — the problem being that it's currently impossible to get more energy than what you put in
* I am eliding over the fact that building a Farnsworth fusor is still a challenge, but less of a challenge than sourcing, purifying, and enriching uranium certainly.
The Amish view of technology is a bit more nuanced than "modern technology bad". Generally, technology needs to have a legitimate purpose for the community in order to be adopted. So a grid connection would be bad as it's a connection to the outside world, and electricity on tap would encourage vices like television. But battery power, or solar power, where the purpose is simply to power your tools to make your work more efficient is acceptable. Were people to start hooking up smartphones to the solar panels and posting videos on TikTok, the opinion about the technology might change.
As someone who uses curl and postman regularly, both tools have their places: I've found curl most useful for quick ad-hoc requests, or if I need to figure out why my service is no longer working. Postman I've found most useful to create a library of requests that are available on-hand: If I need to call services but I don't want to have to remember what the exact URL is or what the exact payload is.
Yep, any kid who obsesses about the periodic table of elements can figure out how to collect radioactive isotopes and attempt to build a simple nuclear reactor. Most don't, because they know better.
Presumably you would have built up a pension in your previous country, which you can draw from. That would satisfy the requirement for an independent source of income. When Britain was in the EU it was (and still is) common for pensioners to live in Spain.
This. In poorer parts of the world, you might have an extra mouth to feed for the first 15-20 years, but once your child finishes school and finds work they're contributing to your well-being and to helping feed the younger children. You also need not worry too much about your retirement, because you know your family will support you, and you'll play a role raising your grandchildren and great grandchildren.
I do wonder if the window for observing it empirically has passed. Pretty much everywhere in the world has access to artificial light — even if it is in a cheap, low-tech form like a hand-cranked LED torch. And those people who remain uncontacted have made it clear that they do not wish to be contacted.
That's the slippery slope people who want to take away rights exploit. Sure, you can believe women shouldn't vote. You can even go around telling people you believe women shouldn't vote. But just because you can say something, doesn't mean you should. If you say you don't believe freedom and democracy are incompatible, I am absolutely going to judge you for it because it's a stupid belief for which there is no evidence. There are several free democratic nations, a much larger number of unfree democratic nations, but there are no free undemocratic nations. And it doesn't take a degree in sociology to figure out why that is the case.
If we're at the point where power producers are saving up excess sunny-day energy to sell at other times, then we've solved renewable energy's infamous base-load problem.
You'd be surprised! Solar panels provide shade for local wildlife and improve crop/grazing yields due to the cover moderating the hot sun and providing spots for dew to form. As much as I love nuclear, we really should have started deploying it 10 years ago to make a difference. Solar is cheaper now and easier to deploy.
That doesn't really apply since Ireland has different visa requirements to the UK. As a South African national I can enter Ireland without a visa, whereas I do need one to enter the UK.
For my work I often run a lot of queries with a similar structure, but not repetitive enough that I can just have one query. What I normally do is paste the query template in a Python REPL and write some code to generate all my queries, which I then output to a file that I can call before ending work and leave running through the night. This would allow me to do the same thing, but in a more reproducible way that I can, for instance, share with my teammates.
When I think of 'Western culture', I think of the culture that developed in Protestant Europe and English-speaking America from the early modern period onwards, and aspects of which are diffusing through the rest of the world. I agree that it's a bit too broad of a characterisation to really be of use, but it is a thing.
You don't need language to do maths — the Greeks went pretty far with geometry alone. While language makes it easier to understand things, it's not strictly necessary: you can learn a lot from mimicry, for instance.
Yes, but the Chalcedonian schism and the East-West schism were between churches who viewed themselves ostensibly as equals, or at least on a relatively equal footing — bishops leading one church against bishops leading another. The Protestant Reformation was more like a revolution: people fed up with the Church for whatever reason rebelling against it. There were antecedents, like the Lollards who had many of the same complaints the Protestants had, but their movements never stuck or spread in the same way that Protestantism did. That, I believe, can be attributed to the printing press
Mac's command-line tools are the BSD versions. I always get confused about the command-line arguments for `date` because they differ so much betwen platforms.