2,917 karma · joined August 8, 2013
I cannot think about dog cloning without remembering Fry's speech upon throwing the fossilized remains of his faithful Seymour into the lava beneath Planet Express, and it tears me up everytime.
Lock me in a dark closet under the stairs with just the glow from a couple LCDs and throw pizza and requirements documents through the slot, like you're feeding the Rancor. /s
The impact of the Mongol conquest almost cannot be overstated.
We are clearly not looking at the same subset of Instagram. I don't know anybody that actually uses it to post real content; it's just an endless feed of meme shitposting to laugh at.
Build a browser. Implement the standards fully. Make it scream. That's your job.
The Tang dynasty, like the Roman Empire, splintered in internal divisions and revolts, leaving behind a rump state that preserved elements of the previous structure, as well as a plethora of semi-"barbarian" successor states controlling portions of the former extents that had their own synergies of "Chinese" and non-Han properties, which one can squint at and see similar reflections of in the Germanic Roman successor states and the Eastern/Byzantine Empire. When Genghis rode into the gates of Zhongdu (Beijing), he had driven out the Jin, who were originally Jurchens from Manchuria, who had in turn displaced the Liao dynasty, who where originally Khitans from Mongolia, who had in their turn taken over when the Tang dynasty fell to pieces. Then his grandson completed the conquest and wiped out the Song dynasty that had remained in control of the southern portion of the old empire. Imagine Charlemagne being coronated Holy Roman Emperor in Rome, and then rather than his grandsons dividing his empire between them in civil war, one had proved powerful enough to maintain control, and then turned and captured Byzantium and the rest of the former Eastern Empire.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/support/home-charging-installation
Many over the years, and largely not. Unreal and Unity are probably the closest to successful to date, but they are full-blown game engines, at a higher level of abstraction, rather than just graphics APIs. OpenGl mostly failed as a multi-platform solution, because vendors provide varying levels of compatibility in their drivers, not to mention unholy extension soup, and you still have to deal with all the platform nastiness of everything else besides sending triangles to the GPU.
We have to at least try, and we have more than enough capability if we cared to try - we put men on the moon while fighting a major war and engaging in a nuclear arms race, with computers orders of magnitudes less powerful than a raspberry pi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Warm_Period
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period
I'm suspicious of anyone attempting to boil down the operations of such a dynamic, chaotic system as climate into simple cause and effect. There's so damn many things that feed back on each other, and that's just the tip of the iceberg that we think we understand. Much more research needs to be done.
I couldn't even read at five years old, I certainly wouldn't have been able to make heads or tails of computer programming.
This is a troubling thing to think about. What I can see happening is that increasingly, the utility of the labor of people in that subpar, but still adequate, IQ band is steadily decreasing as automation tears out the bottom of semi-skilled labor. You can take somebody with an 85 IQ and put them on an assembly line, and they'll make a good living in 1970, but you can't realistically send that person to a dev bootcamp and make them into a web developer in 2018. So what do they do? Low skilled service industry work sure isn't the answer. My suspicion would be that the trades are most likely to combine reasonable return and resistance to automation, along with a probable shortage once the boomers retire, but it's a thorny question.
I think it's become obvious that the "Everybody needs to go to college" narrative has been borderline disastrous, given the mountains of student loan debt and stunted development that my generation has experienced.