Some of my early renderings Renderman (high school), Povray (college), and Art ( https://www.abemegahed.com/software/ - at the very end) were trying to visualize the scale of Rama and Ringworld.
One of the things that I recall from that (and written about elsewhere... though I don't recall where) is that the shadows of the shadow squares, when viewed from the surface all subtend the same angle on the Arc of Heaven.
I kind of agree with you on that... and I kind of understand why.
The first book was an exploration of humanity in the stars. While there was contact, it had more the traditional science fiction footing that we're familiar with.
The second book was getting into the exploration of the mind and other minds. While the first book touched on the mind - with spiders being more relatable to how we think... the 2nd book presented us with something more alien in how the octopus thinks... and something even more alien.
The third book was downright confusing until the end and was more of a philosophy book about the mind. Can one mind be in two bodies? What entails thought? What is identity? ... and for that matter, what is reality?
The 2nd and 3rd books are good (and interesting) science fiction, but they go much deeper into exploring philosophy than many other science fiction books and use the scaffold of the universe to explore the mind rather than technological advancement. The upgrade of technology and how that changes things isn't the focus of the story - as one would expect in more traditional science fiction, but rather an exploration of a new mind. That change in the expectation from the first to the second (and third) book has some wish for more of that first book with the challenges of humans (as we can understand them).
Book 1 is a first contact story with survival. Book 2 is a psychological mystery about alien cognition (and a bit of horror to it too - "we're going on an adventure" gives me shivers). Book 3 is much more of a puzzle around unreliable narration and reality.
For me, I enjoyed the first book. I was confused by the 2nd book because of the change in the "it's not about the technology and survival anymore...". The 3rd book confused me on the first pass through it. The second time going through it and understanding where things were leading and being able to pick out the changes made more sense... even though I was expecting a book about the mind rather than science (the first pass through I thought it was more about the crow's minds).
Rule Morocco 2026 only - Feb 15 3:00 -1:00 -
Rule Morocco 2026 only - Mar 22 2:00 0 -
Rule Morocco 2027 only - Feb 7 3:00 -1:00 -
Rule Morocco 2027 only - Mar 14 2:00 0 -
Rule Morocco 2028 only - Jan 23 3:00 -1:00 -
Rule Morocco 2028 only - Mar 5 2:00 0 -
Rule Morocco 2029 only - Jan 14 3:00 -1:00 -
Rule Morocco 2029 only - Feb 18 2:00 0 -
Didn't know that it was moveable! It's actually a great example of why storing future datetimes in UTC is wrong. Future dates should always be stored in local time with appropriate zone information and then converted close to the "decision time". Otherwise, it may represent the wrong local time by the time the dated information is supposed to take effect!
Who maintains what time it was in Yugoslavia in 1970? Or Serbia? What country maintains the time information for the island of Taiwan? Or Hong Kong while under British rule or while under Japanese rule?
It might be possible to use that for the information of now - to answer the question of "what is local time for me based on UTC?" or "what is local time for someone else now?" ... but what about the information of yesterday? When it was 12:01 PM in Chicago in 1948, what time was it in Hong Kong?
That would provide the machine readable version... but not the human documentation of time. You wouldn't be able to debug the Moroccan Ramadan rule (which is provided as some elisp code) and its predictions for future changes.
Having it be managed by governments would mean that the whim of a politician could break things by changing the established name... say from "US/Pacific" to "USA/Pacific" or deciding by fiat to change the timezone for a political enclave within another one that doesn't have a TLD. ( https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/main/northamerica#L821 )
This also describes the compromises in the design of the system to accurately record the time.
# From Paul Eggert (2026-03-07):
# The law says that 21 hours after the usual 2026-03-08 02:00 switch from
# PST to PDT, the next day inaugurates the new standard time Pacific Time,
# i.e., just one clock change but two name changes separated by 21 hours.
# PT, the obvious abbreviation for Pacific Time, is one letter too short
# to conform to TZDB’s (and POSIX’s) [-+[:alnum:]]{3,6} requirements.
# I asked the BC government for advice, with no response. For now, do this:
# 1. As a temporary hack, pretend that the BC law takes effect
# not on 2026-03-09 at 00:00, but on 2026-11-01 at 02:00.
# This pretense works around a limitation in CLDR v48.1 (2026-01-08),
# which would otherwise say the interval uses “Pacific Standard Time”.
# (Below, this temporary hack is marked “Temporary hack; see above.”)
# Strictly speaking this hack is incorrect since the interval uses
# standard time, but it does have the right UT offset and it
# works around the CLDR limitation. We should be able to remove
# the temporary hack after CLDR is fixed.
And a single database maintained by a volunteer and accountable to no one is the best way to achieve this?
> say from "US/Pacific" to "USA/Pacific"
Did the US assign itself the .us TLD? These things are already defined. A more realistic example would be the US changing the name of the "Pacific" timezone to the "Western" timezone. All users of that timezone have to incorporate that change anyways and most would probably want to.
> change the timezone for a political enclave within another one that doesn't have a TLD.
You could actually grant the entire Navajo Nation the .nsn.us.timezone subdomain. I'm sure they find it absolutely insulting to be instructed to use "America/Denver." Why is that better? We could directly grant them their own authority.
There's also a handful of countries the tzdb didn't bother with and instruct to use their neighboring countries definition. In some instances this arrangement can be rather insulting to the political history of the two countries. Why is this better?
> the compromises in the design
What compromise? Here Eggert is ostensibly trying to get a sovereign government to participate in the "TZDB's requirements" and since he can't has to invent a hack to make things appear to work. Which is completely backwards and highlights precisely why I think this whole centralized database concept for this problem is flawed.
There's a good lesson here for any who wants to be a founder and start their own company - the maintainers of the timezone DB are accountable to their users, just as any founder is accountable to their customers.
If the timezone DB maintainers start messing around with the way it works, they will quickly find that people start alternatives, which would be worse for everyone. Governments would choose to own them, and the bad things other posters have talked about would happen. Particularly bad governments would pass laws that mandate the IT systems in that country would have to use their timezone data. That would be yet another way a country can exert control. The only reason they don't do it now is because it's incredibly hard work and obviously no value when there's a gold standard available for free.
If you're choosing to start a business you should remember that this is true of your customers - if you start messing with things for the fun of it rather than because it provides obvious value, those customers will go somewhere else.
> Here Eggert is ostensibly trying to get a sovereign government to participate in the "TZDB's requirements" and since he can't has to invent a hack to make things appear to work. Which is completely backwards and highlights precisely why I think this whole centralized database concept for this problem is flawed.
Eggert is petitioning the government for a redress of greivances on behalf of more or less the entire computing industry (or whatever portion follows POSIX): to whit, the world has come to agreement that timezone abbreviations must match [-+[:alnum:]]{3,6} and PT does not match that.
Now, BC government could ask every vendor of software that displays a time zone abbreviation to use PT, and then they could individually come back and say, no it needs three letters. And then they could threaten to not buy products that won't say PT and not allow imports of said products... But then the vendors would probably ask if they have control over imports or if that's a federal responsibility (I don't know) and that they're not doing a one off to fix something for BC. But if that's how it's going to be, probably maybe come back with POs in 5 years when POSIX standards have filtered down to allow two character abbreviations. Seems easier to get told it's a problem in one place and hopefully figure out what the answer is once.
No, it hasn't. I commonly use PT myself which doesn't fit that format. It's the timezone that the west coast of America uses which makes it very convenient if you live there instead of having to remember if the day your meeting on is with or without daylight savings. The three timezones we use here are:
PT: The time of the day that all of our clocks are going to be set to.
PST: The time when daylight savings is not active.
It's very common for conferences and the like to use shorthand like PT or ET. The reality is that once you start specifying standard time or daylight savings time, the people writing the announcement regularly mess up. I don't remember what the house style was at my prior company but I regularly saw people putting EST or EDT at times of the year when it wasn't correct.
This sounds like a classic case of engineers trying to overspecify and demand that things fit their nice little database, reality and life isn’t like that.
“PT” is more correct than many other things you could list, because people always forget which is DST and which is Standard.
It’d probably be cleaner to say that Pacific is on Mountain Time half the year.
Funnily enough, I just got a bunch of one hour computer schedule changes for a European event in late March. I assume this is related to Daylight Savings vs. Standard Time. I'm sure I'll work it out once I'm over there.
Totally. You have the local time at the time of the event, you have current US time, and you have current European time. Yes, computers can handle a lot of this but a lot of people are working off the local times for the event--and I've had a ton of schedule corrections that I've had to confirm.
> Zero interest-rate policy (ZIRP) is a macroeconomic concept describing conditions with a very low nominal interest rate, such as those in contemporary Japan and in the United States from December 2008 through December 2015 and again from March 2020 until March 2022 amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
I know a lot of developers who have learned their skillset by rote from the early 2010s and have not progressed in competency (they still write code with the same issues as they did a decade ago) or technology (haven't been able to pick up technologies that they lacked when they started).
That puts them in a precarious place since the organization that downsizes would be looking at them first ... and that they haven't been able to attain any mastery of the newer technologies that are coming into play in the system.
For many of them, they're finding themselves leaning on AI to make up for the lack of learning new things (and without learning those new things). They're also realizing that any candidate who is more skilled than they are would be a stronger candidate (and that their job is increasingly becoming entering prompts into an LLM that is easily replaced).
Why they got to that spot and stopped? That's an open question. Some might have gotten comfortable at that spot. Others forcefully reject the idea that continuous learning outside of the 9-5 is needed (spend 40 hours a year learning a new technology). Others may lack the problem solving capabilities to go beyond that spot. I know I've seen all three of those. There are probably other reasons too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...
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