wyattpeak

So, a few things.

1) I ask you to refrain from personal attacks if you want me to continue to engage.

2) I feel no moral compunction to read a twenty page supporting document to make a one-line comment about not trusting people's claims uncritically.

3) Having now read that document, my opinion hasn't changed. One person tries a couple of times to address the bigger picture about what problematic books are in the curriculum. In both cases he is almost immediately shut down by the rest of the committee who want to discuss this particular book.

Well that's what they've claimed, but with the ongoing spate of race-relaced book-banning, it's a moderately hard claim to believe. How many other books in their library do you think contain the phrase "God damn"?

I think you're right, but in another sense I think the consumerist junk reading is just one segment of the population looking down their nose at another. I'm not sure that a game I quickly become bored with is substantially different from a weekend holiday. They're both things that occupied me for little time, but which I enjoyed for that little time and form positive, if rarely reviewed, memories. I don't go much for fashionable clothing, but I suspect the same is true there.

There are other arguments against disposable goods, but I don't know if they're strictly worse than the experiences that the maxim seeks to replace them with. It's a lot easier to replace a pound of cotton than it is to take a flight's worth of CO2 out of the air.

Edit: rephrased a line.

Ah, my mistake I'm sorry. Thank you for clarifying your thoughts.

It does, but the article is pretty cagey in its retraction (including following up with the comment "Though on the other hand, jamming is really bad for typing speed!").

The author seems to me to at least partly still believe its true, merely acknowledging that it's a difficult position to maintain.

Sure, I didn't suggest it was. I was only arguing against this:

> If you didn't start with that belief, what observation could you make to come to the conclusion that there is an afterlife?

Clearly, lots of observations lead people to the conclusion that there is an afterlife, independent of starting with that belief.

Irrespective of the reality of an afterlife, the very fact that the vast majority of cultures seemingly independently developed theories about it suggests that people do, in fact, come to the conclusion that there is an afterlife without starting with the belief.

People like to talk about religion as though it's all indoctrination, but the argument really doesn't hold up. Religions that focus on proselytism seem to spread faster, which is unremarkable, but religion definitely seems to form spontaneously.

It does in a funny way provide something of a metric for how willing the site is to be critical. Several video game reviewers I follow have stopped receiving product from some studios, which I think is a badge of honest review. Although it's not something you'd know easily so it doesn't help much in terms of finding good reviewers.

I don't think so. If the problem is people gaming the system, making it easier to game isn't going to improve the situation. It's not going to put good content creators on a level playing field with spammers, because good content creators simply don't care as much as spammers about search engine gaming.

Off the top of my head:

- What material are you making the rope out of? What data do we have of that material's behaviour under tension in a vacuum?

- How is the craft connected to the rope? Is it a fixed bond or is there freedom to move? What are the tradeoffs?

- What happens when one of the two ends is accelerated? How do you reestablish a stable rotation?

- How do you manoeuvre it? Can you?

- What happens in the event of a catastrophic failure of the rope? What safeguards need to be in place?

And this is all on top of the fact that we're discussing two things connected by a rope under conditions that rope has never been tested in, doing something that's never been done. Space exploration isn't in the habit of trusting that our untested models are reliable, especially where human life is involved.

It works in principle, but it's a very big engineering task, and an enormous expense to boot. To avoid noticeably different acceleration between head and foot,* it's going to have to be substantially larger than any spacecraft we've ever built, and the biggest spacecraft we've ever built cost over $100bn. It's also going to have to withstand stresses larger than anything we've done before.

There's no reason to doubt we could do it, but it's a very big step from where we are now.

* And if we don't do that, then we stray into the realm of untested biological issues. We have no idea if people can live safely and comfortably like that.

That's fine, I'm not looking to debate, I'm trying to help. You're here presumably looking for input on your new project, but you're not taking any of it, and getting very defensive whenever anyone offers anything other than praise.

I'm not making a comment out of pedantry, I'm telling you how I expect this is going to be seen by regular users. People on the whole are not interested in whether or not some particular security system is theoretically perfect, they're interested in whether or not it actually provides the security that they interpret it to promise. And they will interpret your claims as meaning that messages cannot come from anyone other than the signed user, which is going to be a problem the first time that assumption fails. And it will fail, because people aren't good at keeping secrets secret.

Sure, but you're ignoring flaws in the security to make a stronger marketing message for your site. Yes, there is nothing you can do about this, it's not under your purview. But nevertheless you can't make so strong a claim as to say that a message can't be faked without a broken verification function. It simply can't be faked in one particular way.

If Person B published a message under Person A's name, that is, to the non-crypto world, a faked post. They're not going to be impressed by your argument that actually it isn't faked, it's real, Person B just had access to Person A's computer.

No, they're absolutely right. You can steal a person's computer. You can get them drunk and ask them to hand over their keys. There are a dozen ways off the top of my head that you can have a message that's not written by the supposed poster without a broken cryptographic function.

As always, there's a relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/538/

I can see why that argument might work for a laissez-faire libertarian, but we have innumerable laws on what is contractable. That this should be singled out specifically as something which shouldn't have any such protections seems in my experience to be attributable to the fact that people don't consider games important.

Besides which, I challenge your claim that the buyer knew the terms perfectly well. The terms are often dozens of pages long and written in dense legalese, with clearly little belief or intention that the buyer will read them, and arguably specifically to dissuade the buyer from reading them.

> For games?

No, for money.

These actions are always dismissed on the basis that they're not selling something important. But setting aside the question of whether that's valid, they are selling in exchange for something important.

Of course it's an artificial limitation, the whole thing is an exercise in artificial limitation. Putting all pages in the same document is an artificial limitation.

They're artificial limitations exercised in pursuit of demonstrating that, with new CSS tools, something surprising can be done. Something which, as I stated in my original comment, could not be done twenty years ago: putting multiple pages in the same HTML file without Javascript.

I'm not moving the goalposts, my goalposts are exactly where they were in my first comment: The concept demonstrated in the article was not possible twenty years ago.

In fact I was very specific about what concepts were not possible twenty years ago: "What's being shown off here is not having a single page of a website in just HTML/CSS, but having all pages."

You're the one who proceeded to ignore that and make an unrelated claim about something different that was possible twenty years ago.

Not if you wanted multiple pages without Javascript it wasn't. Which is what's interesting about the site being described, although the article does a weak job explaining it.

This wasn't a foundational web standard. The :target pseudoclass was introduced in CSS3.

The article is not another pointless potshot at frameworks, it's showing a clever use of a new standard to allow multiple pages in the same HTML document without using Javascript.

This was absolutely not possible 20 years ago. The only pseudoclasses available at that point were the anchor pseudoclasses and :first-line/:first-letter.[1]

What's being shown off here is not having a single page of a website in just HTML/CSS, but having all pages.

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1/#pseudo-classes-and-pseudo-el...

I think this is substantially cleverer than merely "not using frameworks". Nobody's surprised you can do this without a framework, but I suspect a good number would be surprised you can do it without Javascript.

> the 5 tests is clearly a better outcome for society.

I don't think that's obviously true. Misread pregnancy tests are fantastically common, and someone mistakenly believing they don't have covid is going to be a significant negative for society.

Instructions simply don't work, a large number of people don't read instructions. Heck, I might not read the instructions for this if it looked understandable at first glance. Decades of pointless barely-understandable instructions on cheap devices have trained me not to bother.

Civilisation started heavily relying on coal a few hundred years ago. The Earth was well-dominated by humans by then. It very probably would have taken a lot longer to get to where we are now, but I don't think there was any danger of seventeenth century civilisation falling to dust because there was no coal to be found.

Unlike big-budget films, which are notoriously aimed only at nitpicking fans.

versioning != semantic versioning

Semantic versioning is an approach to versioning. It's an approach which, as GP stated, was designed specifically to help with dependency updating.

GP isn't proposing that languages shouldn't be versioned, they're saying that semantic versioning is the wrong approach to versioning for a language.

While I'm not particularly sold on the shadowy organisation argument, what the majority of Americans want should be fairly irrelevant to a matter of British law.

One would presume that Americans want possible crimes against them to be tried in their courts, but the purpose of an extradition hearing is to determine whether what the other country wants is acceptable.

I'm going to disagree with you there. I agree that their bottom line benefits from their being nice to me, but that's not the same as being motivated by profit. Similarly, I'm not looking to obsessively optimise for the best product.

I find your description distastefully cynical, but more importantly not particularly in line with my experience of how people behave.

That's fair, I should clarify: every public is motivated by profits.

I don't actually think it's survivorship bias, my local coffee shop is good to me for little other reason than the owner and I get on well, and they're not likely to go out of business any time soon. I just didn't specify my point well enough.

I find this attitude, as common as it is, a bit of a non-argument. Every company is motivated by profits, and yet I have vastly different opinions on the behaviours of different companies.

Even when you have one ultimate goal, there are a thousand different ways to go about it, including to behave in ways I find admirable in order to secure my business going forward. It's fairly irrelevant to me why you're behaving the way you are, so long as you are.