Discarding scientific evidence usually looks differently than "we discussed that we didn’t liked it". Is is usually not looking at all, never starting a discussion, or even lacking an intellectual framework to comprehend the phenomenon.
That short story makes me think of the kea (Alpine parrot) of New Zealand.
They're ridiculously smart and dexterous.
When I was a ranger I'd tell tourists to think of them as "monkeys who can fly... ...you're laughing, but I'm serious".
Their upper and lower beaks can move independently like a human's thumb and forefinger, unlike nearly all other birds, and they can also use their beaks like scissors, or to undo screws - that last one is very true, I'm not making it up, their upper beak makes for an effective flathead.
They share knowledge like corvids do, once one kea learns that the self closing door on your shop closes slowly enough, after a human enters, to give them time to get in, steal a chocolate bar and get out, there'll be five more trying it tomorrow.
They can undo zips on your backpack and then undo the latches on your lunchbox to steal your sandwiches, or they'll untie your bootlaces (yep they can undo knots) and remove them from your boots, or remove your tent pegs, or maybe cut your guylines, all of this just for fun.
There was a gang that would deploy one of their number at a viewing platform to act very engagingly and oh so photogenic to distract the tourists while its mates quietly stole interesting things from the hand bags, backpacks,and, if you left the door open, cars(!) of the tourists who were focused on the photogenic decoy putting on a show.
They had a bit of a penchant for passports during my time. Most of which were last seen being dropped into a deep and dangerous mountain ravine by a parrot that then let out a mocking laugh.
There used to be a gang of juvenile males that would deflate tyres at the local public toilets to prove they were tough - because the noise depressing a tyre valve made was scary, so the longer you pressed it, the tighter tougher you were, while your mates egged you on.
They also have distinct and recognisable facial expressions they use to indicate their emotions.
They've been taught to speak in the past - but the fact that they can survive, and indeed, they thrive, in the harshest environment in New Zealand is far more indicative of their intelligence than any Polly Wanna A Cracker would ever be.
> the fact that they can survive, and indeed, they thrive, in the harshest environment in New Zealand is far more indicative of their intelligence than any Polly Wanna A Cracker would ever be.
Filesystem is a tree - a particular, constrained graph. Advanced topics usually require a lot of interconnections.
Maybe it is why mind maps never spoke to me. I felt that a tree structure (or even - planar graphs) were not enough to cover any sufficiently complex topic.
On Linux at least, hard links can't be made to directories, except for the magic . and .. links. So this only allows for a DAG.
Symbolic links can form a graph, and you can process them as needed using readlink etc. to traverse the graph, but they'll still be considered broken if they form a cycle.
Historically, it made deletion rather difficult with some problematic edge-cases. You could unlink a directory and create an orphan cycle that would never be deleted. Combine that with race conditions on a multi-user systems, plus the indeterminate cost of cycle-detection, and it turns out to be a rather complex problem to solve properly, and banning hard-links is a very simple way to keep the problem tractable, and result in fast, robust and reliable filesystem operations.
True, I missed that. I suppose with symlinks you have the reverse problem: you can point to deleted filenames and then have broken links. The cycle detection is still an issue though--it has indeterminate complexity and the graph can be modified as you are traversing it!
This is true, but just about everyone has a symlink cycle on their system at `/proc/self/root`, and for the most part nobody notices. Having a max recursion depth is usually more useful than actively trying to detect cycles.
The wall of slop after the single human paragraph, you mean? Text generator output isn't data.. it's at best unreliable, and at worst entirely fabricated.
Not many keystrokes to get a readable text. Yes, it has issues. But at its core, it is a plaintext with extra stuff, and no temptation to turn it into a webapp. (See my footnotes on HTML vs MD for saving text in https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2025/02/markdown-saves/).
Yes, there is a problem with "many ways to do the same thing". The solution is ease - use a linter or autoformatter. No more bikeshedding.
> Simplicity through Consistency: If you know how to do one thing in Typst, you should be able to transfer that knowledge to other things. If there are multiple ways to do the same thing, one of them should be at a different level of abstraction than the other. E.g. it's okay that = Introduction and #heading[Introduction] do the same thing because the former is just syntax sugar for the latter.
See "The great silence" by Ted Chiang, http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/supercommunity/article_1087.p... for this "not looking at".
For this "beyond comprehension", think about Solaris Ocean, a mind (or non-mind?) we cannot relate to anything else. Or WAU from SOMA.
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