Because they might be in a hurry to reach that mountain pass before the snow comes. Or to meet other goals set by the general and if already stocked up on supplies, it would be quite a burden to also carry an extra elephant (which was likely also carrying things before it died).
Quite unlikely. For an army on the move, especially one that had to cover such a long distance, a considerable portion of the troops was assigned to procure provisions anyway.
Well, the term lacks clarity and a shift of meaning.
If you define "vibe-coders" as people who just write prompts and don't look at code - no, they ain't coders now.
But if you mean people who do LLM-assistet coding, but still read code (like all of those who are upset by this change) - then sure, they always have been coders.
No, those paid games where NPCs starts to point to clues if the player takes too long to solve a riddle or where you can skip the hard parts if you fail to often.
Even if they communicate visibly it doesn't always work. I don't use slack / pagerduty (not even sure what that is) and I'm not going to install or set up an account on some random proprietary service just to meet the demands of one email recipient. It might be fine in certain contexts (e.g. team members or friends/family who all use the same communication apps) but it breaks down when you're communicating with arbitrary members of the public.
Those are work tools. If you work for a company that uses them, you ought to have them installed on your work machine. This is not unreasonable.
If your friends are using random apps, screw them. They'll find a way to get a hold of you if they care enough. Or you'll eventually figure out what the majority are using and cave.
> If you work for a company that uses them, you ought to have them installed on your work machine. This is not unreasonable.
I covered that with "It might be fine in certain contexts (e.g. team members..." and "it breaks down when you're communicating with arbitrary members of the public". A lot of the comments in this thread seem to be assuming that the only communications that ever take place are intra-company. For many people that isn't true at all. For me the vast majority of work-related communications are to clients and third parties. I can't just say "screw them" or "they'll find a way to get hold of me if they care enough" or tell them to use slack to inform me that they've emailed me. I have to live in the real world.
Exactly. But it also works the other way. If you expect people to read your emails within 24 hours, make it very clear that that's a business need. Otherwise some of them will not.
"that we keep encountering phenomena in reality and then realize that an existing but previously purely academic branch of math is useful for modeling it."
Would you have some examples?
(Only example that I know that might fit are quaternions, who were apparently not so useful when they were found/invented but nowdays are very useful for many 3D application/computergraphics)
Group theory entering quantum physics is a particularly funny example, because some established physicists at the time really hated the purely academic nature of group theory that made it difficult to learn.[1]
If you include practical applications inside computers and not just the physical reality, then Galois theory is the most often cited example. Galois himself was long dead when people figured out that his mathematical framework was useful for cryptography.
To me the difference is, there seems to have been way more freedom of thought in the pre christian societies. Polytheism is (usually) more open to new ideas than religios dogma of one god. This is for me what dark times means, and the age of enlightenment when it was possible again to dare to think in new directions and not be afraid of the inquisition anymore.
How to do real research, when you have to align every insight with some old book or face the stake? Only very restricted, in secrecy and not in open exchange.
So also in non christian societies people were killed for having the wrong ideas, but comparing greece or early rome with the christian empires, it seems obvious to me why progress was slowed down for so long.
Consider why the Roman public, commoners in particular but not exclusively, were so ready to abandon the religious beliefs of their forefathers and throw it all away, even defacing the old temples, to adopt some jewish desert hippie's promise of simple salvation. Perhaps you'd like to think this conversion of Rome was all by the sword, but in reality the early christian converts chose despite very credible threats of state violence, and the state itself only converted when the critical mass of common christians could no longer be denied or ignored.
Rome's culture and traditional was fundamentally broken; it no longer served the needs of the Roman people, and if Christianity hadn't popped up, it would have been some other system of reform instead. The status quo was unstable, rapidly deteriorating. You may idealize the religious tolerance of their polytheism, but what that matter if it isn't actually serving the spiritual needs of the people?
" You may idealize the religious tolerance of their polytheism, but what that matter if it isn't actually serving the spiritual needs of the people?"
Rome in the end was a decadent, but brutal empire full of slaves. And to a slave christian salvation sounds great.
But before there was a empire with emperors taking up the idea of becoming gods themself, there was a republic. And also after it became an empire, they did not have a institution like the inquisition shaping thought and banning heresy baked into their system.
This is the fundamental difference that I see.
In medieval times being expelled from the church was pretty much a death sentence. In roman and greek times for most of its existence not really.
The demise of the Roman Republic was an inevitability. It could have been Sulla rather than Caesar, and if not Caesar it could have been another, but one way or the other the situation was fundamentally unstable and the public was deeply discontent. Would be reformers like the Gracchi were finding enormous popular traction only to get assassinated.
Also, the Roman Republic were prolific slavers too. I say this because you speak of the Empire and slavery but then go into a "But the Republic.." This isn't Star Wars, you can't divide it into good guys and bad guys, the Republic and Empire were both imperial sons of bitches who conquered territory and took civilians as slaves. The demand for reform that would eventually motivate mass conversions to Christianity was already well established before Caesar was even born.
"Also, the Roman Republic were prolific slavers too. I say this because you speak of the Empire and slavery but then go into a "But the Republic..""
My point here was about freedom of thought. And that seems to have been way more valued in the republic, than in the empire. (In general, good and bad are relative terms to me)
"The demand for reform that would eventually motivate mass conversions to Christianity was already well established before Caesar was even born."
And maybe so. But christianity in general was not really about freeing slaves, either.
I’m not sure there necessarily was that much progress before that, though? With some exceptions ancient societies were highly stagnant especially technologically in contrast to high-late medieval Europe.
Also plague, climate change and demographic collapse kind of directly kickstarted the dark ages.
> Polytheism is (usually) more open to new ideas than religios dogma of one god.
This is a modern view with hindsight bias. In the ancient world, the existence of many gods did not imply peaceful co-existance, but very heated rivalry and politics.
Ironically pagan authors of late antiquity were the "conservatives" in our modern sense. Pagan literally means "farmer" - it might have similar implications to how we would call someone a "redneck" today. At the time, they were opposed to foreign gods and new influences on their traditional and respectable Pantheon.
If anything Rome was a little too open to foreign dieties. Titus performed the right of Evocatio at the siege of Jerusalem, a custom where the god(s) of their foes were enticed to abandon their current patrons in return for a home and worship on Rome.
Eh, even those polytheistic societies had their own inquisitions. Socrates was executed for defying the gods, and lots of Christians and Jews were persecuted because they refused to accept that the emperor was a god.
It seems you draw everything every frame onto the canvas? The result is quite GPU heavy, for your next game I would recommend looking into a graphic libary like pixijs, to make use of the webgl/webgpu .. then it would run smooth even on old mobile phones.
Hence eco-systems, yes. But that's probably a harder problem than radiation shielding + hibernation. You'd still need the radiation shielding but it would be far, far more of it (because non-local).
These are interesting problems to think about, right now they are solidly SF but dragons are and always will be fantasy because physics says they can't exist in the way they are described. But you can't 100% rule out that one day descendants of humanity will visit the stars in person, assuming we don't blow ourselves up first.
That's one of the main reasons I dislike Musk so much: he takes people motivated by positive dreams (a clean planet, off-world travel and living) and then subverts their energy for grift. But 'DOGE' has shown the world who he really is, the mask is off now and anybody still empowering that asshole is co-responsible.
> physics says they can't exist in the way they are described
If we assume advanced genetic as well as bio engineering that admits the possibility of self reproducing cybernetic organisms that closely match many or all of the key characteristics. I'm not sure it's actually a cyborg if the lineage is fully independent without involving any technology external to the species but I use the term there because that's the easiest way to communicate the idea.
No, then it still wouldn't work. Not until you use that other thing to get you to a planet where gravity is low enough that a dragon would be able to take off. The whole power-to-weight and wing-surface-area-to-weight ratio simply does not work. It (barely) works for bats though some of them can be of impressive size. The idea that something the size of a dragon can fly with that size wings on Terra is something that I do not believe is supported (hah!) by physics.
I think you're making an awful lot of assumptions there and have failed to provide even ballpark specifications for the thing you're supposedly refuting. Weight seems to be a secondary characteristic related only to size. There are also plenty of examples of "small" dragons in fantasy literature.
We've already got examples of dinosaurs that come fairly close to qualifying so I'm sure something vaguely in the ballpark is within the realm of possibility. Exactly how close to the mark though I have no idea.
For example, what would you make of something visually resembling a massive western dragon but with a largely hollow body? I don't think that would disqualify it in most people's eyes. Pushing the concept a bit farther could yield something vaguely like a living cross between a hot air balloon and a deep-sea anglerfish with a weaponized tail.
Vaguely related to that hypothetical, we've got examples in the fossil record of 2 foot wide dragonflies estimated to have weighed in at under 150 grams. There's a pretty large solution space to explore here.
Sorry, not going there. The physics of the impossible are not for me to take apart but for you to show. I've postulated ways in which you could get to other solar systems, I don't see anything here that would lead to a dragon as it is commonly described in fiction. Fire spewing, heavier than air, intelligent and willing to let themselves be mounted and directed by humans, that's the bar.
Archaeopteryx would have you for lunch long before you realized that it doesn't spit fire.
Well you've decided that it's impossible but you certainly haven't convinced me of that fact (neither am I certain that it is possible though).
I'm not even clear what the criteria are. We've got examples in fiction that run the gamut. Even limited to fairly traditional post-Tolkien western high fantasy examples of creatures with a long neck, two wings, a distinct abdomen, and a tail we've still got concrete examples ranging in size from a small lap dog up to larger than a McMansion. Plenty of reasonably canonical examples don't spit fire (although being able to certainly furthers the general vibe). And weight? As I said earlier, that's (imo) solidly in the domain of secondary characteristics.
Semantic arguments aren't any fun (and are largely pointless). Is Pluto a planet or not? Unless it's a technical discussion where the distinction matters for some reason, who cares? What matters is if Pluto fits the pattern that you (ie the people conversing) care about.
Hence my posing the example of a particularly buoyant variety of dragon. I think most people would consider it to fit the pattern well enough but I'm sure there would be at least some disagreement.
Also as long as we're talking about wild far future sci-fi possibilities such as visiting other stars in person then you can't rule out dragons in the form of a wildly advanced, needlessly decadent military technology show piece. Something like a nuclear powered bio engineered cyborg for use as some sort of fighter jet. (Apologies if I just inadvertently ripped off some anime I've never heard of.)
"But detective stories don't work if your world isn't grounded in something real."
No, it just has to be grounded in something consistent and if the book starts by explaining the mechanics of the world(or is in a world with known mechanics), a detective story very well can work.
It can’t be too different from what people are familiar with. So it has to be consistent with itself and with reality.”It’s like our reality except …” but the except part (faster than light travel, mind reading, time travel, dragons, magic, etc) can’t get arbitrarily complex or unreasonable or the reader will be lost or confused.
"can’t get arbitrarily complex or unreasonable or the reader will be lost or confused."
Indeed, but that is always the challenge of a writer. But if you introduce magic in your story, and you do it in a way to show the limitations and what is roughly possible, then you can give hints later, if there was a murder with the help of a magic trick. But I actually think I only ever read one detective fantasy story
It mostly works, but in one instance there was a surprise fantasy ability, that I could have not guessed before. But the actual murderer in the end, there were enough hints that gave them away despite magic, as the skills were explained and then you could combine.
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