mrec

88 ms·

931.
by mrec 10y ago
The UK already has a bimetallic £2 coin. I don't see anything radically new here.
932.
by mrec 10y ago
I don't see the need for 3D at all. Civ is "naturally" a 2D game; the shift to 3D added nothing and IMO removed a lot. I racked up hundreds of hours in Civ 2; I'm not sure I bothered to finish more than one game in Civ 3
933.
by mrec 10y ago
It doesn't really avoid curves, though, even when carved into stone. Look at the inscription on Trajan's Column [1], f'rinstance; yes, it's got the classic U written as V, but the C, D, O, S etc are all as curvy as you c
934.
by mrec 10y ago
> I wonder about some of those "useless" Chinese cities, for example. Never attribute to forethought that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
935.
by mrec 10y ago
> Letting your code free won't take that away from you, at least not as long as you care. Good point, and maybe this genuinely wasn't true back then. It would have been much easier to pass someone else's code off as yo
936.
by mrec 10y ago
Very true, and I'm wondering now why this wasn't a Thing in the old days. The obvious answer is "no distribution mechanism for shipping libraries separately from the machine/OS/compiler/interpreter", but t
937.
by mrec 10y ago
OK, I'll bite: yes, "Mathematics can be true, beautiful, compelling, creative, unique, etc", but those qualities are generally only discernable by other mathematicians working at a roughly comparable level. Same for code; I&#
938.
by mrec 10y ago
No, it applies to all EU member states, although many of them (including France and Germany) routinely ignore it with no consequences.
939.
by mrec 10y ago
Is that still true? AIUI the Stability and Growth Pact [1] requires EU members to limit their deficits to 3% of GDP, and Scotland's deficit in 2016 was approaching 10% after North Sea oil revenues collapsed. Right now it's only fi
940.
by mrec 10y ago
I think we may be miscommunicating; a lot of these words mean different things to different people. Designing a good and minimal "interface" for a class or module, in the sense of how it exposes its functionality to the rest of th
941.
by mrec 10y ago
STTCPW has problems aside from its acronym; back when I was working in an XP-ish team we had any number of arguments which I eventually realized came from a fundamental ambiguity in this principle: does it mean 1. Make the simplest incremen
942.
by mrec 10y ago
> Everything will change so write (really build) code that tolerates change (IOC, interfaces, etc. Everything might change. Not everything will change. I think the problem I have with your principle is that many of the techniques t
943.
by mrec 10y ago
> Even if you build new units only for millionaires, that takes the millionaires out of competition for other high end markets, which then makes people who were previously marginal for those units get them, and takes them out of competi
944.
by mrec 10y ago
> Middle income people aren't seen as deserving to live downtown. I don't think we have to assume that. Might just be that rich people need poor people in close physical proximity (as nannies, cleaners, dog-walkers, gardeners
945.
by mrec 10y ago
We (UK) have had self-checkout tills for a few years too, but they still take cash as well as debit card. Maybe I'm just old, but I don't want payment to be too frictionless. Cash still strikes the right balance for me; convenie
946.
by mrec 10y ago
I don't use a credit card instead of a debit card, I use cash instead of a debit card. I mentioned the credit card just to emphasize that this isn't out of some weird card phobia.
947.
by mrec 10y ago
Well yes, but surely that's something that cash does even better, isn't it? I take a fixed amount of cash out once a week and that's everything I'm going to spend that week. Not only can you not spend money you don'
948.
by mrec 10y ago
> it is still much more of a hassle to manage than credit or debit cards are I don't really get this. I use credit cards (almost entirely online), but I've never used a debit card. Not out of any deep-seated aversion, I just
949.
by mrec 10y ago
I suspect WebAssembly is going to create a niche for very lightweight engines optimized for download footprint, too. And as you say, UE and Unity seem to be optimized for artist-driven projects rather than coder-driven projects. Which, real
950.
by mrec 10y ago
And a full-blown game engine is a very heavyweight solution for a lot of lightweight 3D problems, especially if you're looking at Web delivery. (One of the stated goals for this initiative is a next-gen WebGL.)
951.
by mrec 10y ago
> You could just take that money and give it to a million other causes more socially valuable than distributing BI to everyone. You're thinking of it as extra money. Try thinking of it instead as money that's already being pa
952.
by mrec 10y ago
It would arguably also encourage people to enter the work force, by removing the welfare traps that can, all too often, make people who switch from benefits to paid work worse off. There's also a distinction to be made between "
953.
by mrec 10y ago
> The heptapods have simultaneous consciousness and do not even understand the idea of free-will I'm not at all sure that humans even understand the idea of free will either; I've certainly never heard a definition of it that
954.
by mrec 10y ago
> On the one hand, democracy is touted as the perfect system in terms of fairness. I don't disagree with your broader point, but I've never ever seen anyone tout democracy as "the perfect system in terms of fairness".
955.
by mrec 10y ago
There was a distinctly unsettling paper[1] a couple of years ago which found evidence that ants could recognize themselves in a mirror, which is really not a result you'd expect from something (ab)used as a "sentience test&quo
956.
by mrec 10y ago
> Owning mortgaged property and watching it fall in value is terrifying. Building a vast amount of housing will do that. Exactly. And yet "why can't they build on brownfield?" is the immediate cry whenever anyone even star
957.
by mrec 10y ago
> Does this mean you think that supply is adequate and the only issue is that? If only I'd written a second sentence directly after the one you quoted which could have answered such questions... I want lots of housing built too, and
958.
by mrec 10y ago
> The money would come from "people's QE" Oh, yet more printy printy. Wonderful. > Would you prefer people didn't have homes? Just say it if that's what you want. No, I wouldn't prefer that. I'd quit
959.
by mrec 10y ago
> Corbyn's approach (let councils start building again) is a far more rational approach than this. Leaving aside the question of where the money and land comes from (both main parties have announced impressive housebuilding targets
960.
by mrec 10y ago
I tried that not long after reading Icehenge , but didn't really get on with it. Again, that was decades ago, so maybe I should give it another look. Gene Wolfe does tend to reward older readers; I'm pretty sure most of his Urth

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