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> Plus there's zero direct evidence for their colours

This is no longer true! Starting with Sinosauropteryx in 2010, paleontologists have identified what they believe to be fossilized melanin-containing organelles. These organelles, called melanosomes, have different shapes depending on which color they produce, and those shapes are preserved well enough to be visible under an electron microscope.


Amazing, thanks for pointing it out. In the meantime, there's been some rejigging of the classification so it's this related genus where they've found the melanosomes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huadanosaurus


Isn't a rather good deal of color from feathers a result of "structural color", rather than pigmentation? I'd be curious if fossilized feathers could ever, in theory, preserve enough microscopic detail to guess at that.


There are plenty of tools for organizing activities. Meetup’s real value, which no one has replaced yet for various reasons, is in getting new people to join.


One more to add from the early days: widespread use of  , the character entity for a non-breaking space.

They were used to move text to the right to the left within a container. Or (IIRC) in table cells to make them behave, similar to 1x1 spacer gifs. Some pages had hundreds of nsps. Just kind of a general way to add margin or padding.


Crazy idea: a red team for hire that tries to scam your relatives (but doesn’t actually go through with it). Seems like the most effective way to teach people what to look out for.


It's worth noting that betaveros won several previous Advents of Code without using Noulith. You can't attribute too much of this year's success to the language. Still, it's pretty cool, and I've really enjoyed reading his solutions. Noulith feels like walking through a syntactic candy store and eating whatever you want.


More exactly winning 2019, 2020, 2021, and runner up 2018, which seems to be the first year participating.

By the looks of it right now, Betaveros will win 2022 too. One could say that Betaveros dominates AoC.


Including winning 2021 and 2020! I'd guess that exclusively using a new programming language that you recently invented is actually an impediment to speed, though apparently not a significant enough one.


Having the syntactic sugar might make up a little bit for the overhead of using a recently invented language though.


the language seems designed for advent of code speed, so it might be a win


I agree. One additional detail to notice is the use of horizontal space. There are several different widths being used, depending on the type of content. (I'm on desktop.) I like the varying "full-width" image sizes, as well as the footnotes on the side. But most exciting to me is how the content gets wider for side-by-side image and text components, such as the early MS-DOS CLI screenshot. This component uses the extra horizontal space that it needs to, while maintaining flow with the rest of the writing above and below it. It's elegant and I believe it's an innovation. After experiencing this post, the typical blog or article layout crammed into a fixed-size column seems straitjacketed. It's inspiring.


This isn't true, and also makes no sense. (How would he have paid taxes? What money would the police have seized?) Speaking from first-hand experience, there's a significant community of collectors who like and will buy Shvembldr's work.


The money from the purchases after the value is inflated.


Two things that might help. First is acknowledging that the benefit of a joke isn't just the humor, it's making yourself look funny. If you notice and factor out the part of you that wants to seem funny, fewer jokes will cross the threshold of being worth saying. (Maybe 10% fewer. :) The second is the understanding that jokes disrupt a conversation. A conversation is a collective effort that creates a certain mood, and unless entertainment is the main goal of the conversation, then jokes have a cost. They hinder people from what they're trying to do.


Instead of /list, I remember the bots advertising with ASCII decorations like this:

_,-^-,_,-^-,_,-^ Enter 33 for /\/\ /\/\ ^-,_,-^-,_,-^-,_,-^-,_

(You'd type "33" in the chat to get a Mass Mail in your inbox.)


Fixed formatting

  _,-*^*-,_,-*^*-,_,-*^ Enter 33 for /\/\ /\/\ ^*-,_,-*^*-,_,-*^*-,_,-*^*-,_


The MMers allowed you to specify chat commands, but the default was usually /list or /listme


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