No, the main character isn't confused at all in his last message, he's very confident in saying that the station "is coeval with the cosmos, and constitutes the cosmos." That's why the "estimated diameter: 15k ly" feel like a writer's oversight. Unless it's intentional, but then I'd like to understand why.
The report writer also failed to realize they'd looped back to their starting location until much after they had done so. They're clearly unreliable, an inconsistency like that doesn't need to be explained by anything other than that the author is losing their grip on reality. The other explanation is that their instruments are indicating a diameter of 15,000 light years and that that is all they are recording (as they were recording in previous reports, the numbers came from instruments), and the report writer has failed to recognize the inconsistency between their belief and the facts available to them.
> Unrestricted immigration destroys democratic high trust societies.
I’m currently living through a democratic high trust society that’s destroying itself with immigrants being 0% to blame. I’d swap the Christian nationalists for immigrants in a heartbeat, no matter where they’re from.
> back then, it sucked so hard that web designers with a decade of experience would crank out articles about trying to achieve "the Holy Grail of web design," which was three columns, a header, and a footer, with stuff in the middle bit and links in the left bit and maybe some other links in the right bit, that didn't fuck up in some hilarious or obscure way. Shit that was trivial and intuitive with tables, but absolutely fucking impossible with CSS.
This fact (which is 100% true) makes me so angry about CSS. They had a really good idea—separate structure from content. But they didn't design CSS about what people Actually Wanted To Do, so for what, a decade plus? CSS was this steaming pile of hacks and hoops and bullshit. Designers wanted 3-column layouts. They wanted pinstriping. They wanted drop shadows. They wanted to center things vertically. And rather than make those dead simple, they made them all pains in the ass. Why spend all that time designing and developing and proselyting a technology, without ever thinking about what sort of thing people will want to do with it?
They did, in fact, design CSS to implement this kind of design easily. You were able to implement that in a simple way without any weird hacks using only the functionality in CSS 2.0, published in 1998.
Unfortunately, the simple way was to use display: table-cell, and Microsoft didn’t implement that part of the standard until Internet Explorer 8, released in 2009. And since old browser versions stuck around longer back in those days, it was several years after that before web developers could count on it.
If it weren’t for Microsoft abandoning Internet Explorer development for five entire years once they got a browser monopoly, you could’ve been doing this in a much simpler way more than a decade sooner.
You’re blaming the W3C for not putting an easy way to do it into the standard but they did put it into the standard. It’s just what they put into the standard didn’t matter – Internet Explorer had >90% market share so Microsoft didn’t care about the standards and paralysed the industry for over a decade.
A truly vast amount of the weird hacks we had to do back then was simply papering over the shortcomings of Internet Explorer.
I have heard that web design is supposed to be tractable again, but I could not stand CSS with all its spooky-action-at-a-distance unpredictability, and did not have the years of patience it would have taken to get through the growing pains, so I haven't had anything to do with web work in over twenty years now. Oh, well! It was fun in the late '90s, at least.
> and one of the key features highlighted by Steve Jobs was voicemail
Visual voicemail was, and is still a fantastic feature, and phones without it existed for an embarrassingly long time afterwards. I don't remember the last year I had to dial a special number and type in my password, in order to get my voicemail read off to me one at a time in order, but... it was not a small number year.
No, they published their rules ahead of time. When you do that you can’t just go and make up new rules on the spot. That’s a central tenet of “the rule of law” that the rules are written down so we can interpret them.
Ive also purchased and commissioned a few pieces of art. And I find that with actual artists, they ARE very approachable and dont have the Art Critic vibe of 'better than you'.
Its primarily the art literature and critics whom portray this haughty and 'holier than thou' types of one way conversations.
My SO works for a art museum, and they constantly fight with those types as well. When their museum hosts art painting days for artists (primarily plen air or open air painting), the artists use appropriate jargon for painting, but the critics show up and its basically a word-soup for their own vernacular.
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