Zompist Bboard Again

Cool stuff, travis. How does doing all this in a Forth-style environment differ from, say, a more tradtional C-style one, besides the obvious? Is it easier or harder? Etc.

Here's an exwercise for anyone who thinks Biden and Trump are for all practical purposes indistinguishable: Make a list of: - 10 important things which would be more or less the same regardless of which one becomes President - 10 important things which would be substantially different depending on w...

I wonder - how would the world look like if humans could only see in black and white? Would the development of civilization be hindered in any way? I can't see how it would be, sorry. I see what you did there :-) Interesting question, though. I suspect humans would have become more sensitive to oth...

I also remember reading somewhere (though not where) that the Elves, Dwarves and Halflings were added in a late stage of the design in order to market the game to Tolkien fans. And Tolkien's estate didn't like them being called "hobbits", and forced a name change. In my personal opinion, ...

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Wed Apr 24, 2024 12:57 pmI even seem to remember reading somewhere that D&D was initially marketed as a "wargame" and only latter called a "role-playing game".

This is quite true: it started out as a table-top wargame, and the role-playing bits were shoehorned in later.

I have been sent from the future to explain to you how to travel back in time, but you don't have the technlology yet.

Tangentially related to this, long ago, I saw a forum or comment section post by someone who claimed to be a former libertarian. That person claimed that, back in their libertarian days, when they were visiting libertarian forums, in the internal libertarian flamewars, they could always tell the pe...

Travis B. wrote: ↑Mon Apr 08, 2024 3:49 pm

alice wrote: ↑Mon Apr 08, 2024 3:19 pm We get a double eclipse over here: the moon eclipses the sun, and the clouds eclipse them both.

Do they have a sun where you live?

Two, in fact; one always capitalised (it thinks it's a newspaper) and one sometimes capitalized (it gives us warmth and other things).

malloc wrote: ↑Mon Apr 08, 2024 8:58 pm For some reason, I cannot get into irc.sorcery.net. It keeps saying "Unknown host. Maybe you misspelled it?" even though it's the same host I've always used.

Maybe the site is down?

We get a double eclipse over here: the moon eclipses the sun, and the clouds eclipse them both.

To confuse things further, I've seen initial /z/ and /v/ in Dutch transcribed with the under-ring diacritic for devoicing, which clearly indicates something different from /s/ amd /f/, but I've never understood what. From hearing sung Afrikaans, orthographic initial <s>, corresponding to orthograph...

To confuse things further, I've seen initial /z/ and /v/ in Dutch transcribed with the under-ring diacritic for devoicing, which clearly indicates something different from /s/ amd /f/, but I've never understood what.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Sat Mar 30, 2024 3:33 pmAlso, rickets were very common.

Actually, "rickets" is singular; I can't imagine what a single "ricket" would be.

TIL that an exclamation point in front of conditions on a sound change means it occurs unless the condition is present. Despite being midway through my thirties and part of the conlanging community for about twenty years. At least it's nice to know I still have things to learn even in the basics of...

It seems I’ve gotten some sort of respiratory infection. On the one hand, this sort of thing really sucks, especially if you’re immune-suppressed. On the other, the past few years I’ve gotten an infection like this, it was like it sort of pre-immunized me to whatever was going around when I did wan...

malloc wrote: ↑Tue Mar 26, 2024 10:41 pmYou can forget about people abandoning tradition and learning true facts through Marxist literature once that happens.

Be careful not to oversell your point; I doubt there are many "true facts" which are only found in Marxism.

malloc wrote: ↑Sun Mar 24, 2024 12:00 pmArtificial intelligence with the ability to read and decode ancient languages clearly differs fundamentally from photography.

I think this is ennobling what the "Artificial intelligence" actually did just a little bit.

This is what I always hated about programming in Java -- conventional Java design standards greatly encourage boilerplate coding, to the point that you need to use a Java IDE* which automates much of the writing of boilerplate for you, as it otherwise becomes simply unmanageable. * And the only IDE...

rotting bones wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2024 6:58 amAll non-sentient machines are tools.

Well, someone has to say it: so are many sentient non-machines.

AIs are now being used to plan, script, and run entire events. Be afraid! Be very afraid!