Yes because what we have always known about sarcasm and what this thread is a perfect example of is how you can define something as sarcastic/not sarcastic just by how it subjectively "comes across".
Yes, you can guess. But assessment depends strongly on context. And Pow's Law still applies. People can write messages that seem sincere, and then later claim sarcasm. As in "I was only joking". Or people can write sincerely,
but come across as sarcastic, or vice versa, and yet be ambiguous enough that readers can't tell. That's where the /s flag help. Done intentionally, such ambiguous messages can probe the reader's state of mind. Or set traps.
I don't believe search is mature. We haven't seen a lot of innovations in web search for a while and what we know as web search is probably the best Google can do. It's probably not the best possible web search though. Just the best from Google.
The reason nobody is there to challenge Google is because noone has come up with a way to fund a web search engine other than through ads. Challenging Google probably also means challenging the whole ad industry. It's a rough climb.
That map is just awsome in so many ways. Where is Denmark and Sweden though? Romans just didn't think there was anything up there? Nothing? Way too cold up there for people to live?
> They didn't really get past the Germanic tribes and stopped expansion
They were unable to find a new natural border that was as easily defendable as the Rhine-Danube combination.
> Presumably also because there wasn't much there at the time that would've allowed them to collect taxes.
The Romans liked to portray Germania as poor and inhospitable. Part of the reason for that could be cognitive dissonance for never having conquered it.
Or because it really was poor and inhospitable. Until the middle ages, when new agricultural tools were invented, Germanic territories projected very little power, and relied on periodic aggression to survive in typical nomadic way. This changed when they could actually grow stuff in more reliable ways, producing surpluses to trade and establishing stable kingdoms.
In other words: Germanic tribes were using the defensive strategy of not preparing wheat fields for invaders to harvest during campaigning season. Kind of equivalent to cyberdefense by pen and paper.
Half of Cesar's Gallic War seems to be more than half about grain logistics (huge efforts to start the campaigns jus a few weeks earlier) and ripeness of the local crops. And that is even while he was likely trying to downplay all the robbery.
Romans didn't just pillage, they also planted stuff like chestnut trees as they moved up and down Europe, so that they could use them in following years. Regardless, I find it difficult to believe that already-struggling tribes would further starve themselves just in case this or that opponent tried to invade. It's much more likely that they simply weren't able to grow much more in what was a hard soil, without the stronger plows that would be used later on to break such soil more effectively; especially when a lot of these people were still basically nomadic.
Production beyond the Rhine simply was not great even in times of peace, before the middle ages. Rome ended up controlling most of the German territory through client states anyway, even sending troops for punitive raids and propping up this or that friendly ruler, so they knew the economic potential of those lands pretty well; they just renounced full invasion because it was not worth the risk. At a time when they were already hitting what we could call scaling limits in their ability to mobilise troops over long distances, there was little appetite for going further North, where clearly there were no riches waiting for them. A similar assessment was done for Scotland, and rightly so.
> Regardless, I find it difficult to believe that already-struggling tribes would further starve themselves just in case this or that opponent tried to invade.
Allow me to apologize for my lack of precision, I never intend to imply that they deliberately avoided "invader-friendly" crops. Wheat just had not spread that far, due to climate (not yet sufficiently adapted by breeding?) and/or cultural reasons: nomadism (well, more effect than cause I guess) and the fact that large scale forest clearances are the type of project that can only happen in presence of big organizations that are stable enough to enable such long term investments. Many German settlements still carry the name of the medieval nobleman who commissioned the original clearance (names ending in -rode, -roda, -reuth and probably some more regional variations), which implies that before the clearance, there was only wilderness.
Not to mention the fact that by the third century, if a general controlled enough troops, they would (and did) overthrow the Emperor, so the Emperor tended to run around with one large army putting out fires, which was inefficient.
And many of those soldiers where mercenaries from the outside, who, by serving the empire, where put in the position to loot the empire's superior agriculture.
This went on for many generations, it's not a "last days before the ostrogoths" exception. Competing "emperor startups" in an empire representing pretty much the entire known civilized world, surrounded by mostly harmless outlaw wilderness. It must have felt as natural and "could the world even be not like this?" to the people populating that world as nation states, competing militarily, economically and in the Olympics seem natural to us.
Well, the reason that Germania (and Britain north of Hadrian's Wall, the available sources are better for Britain) was never conquered was that they were so inhospitable. When your army has to support itself off plunder there needs to be plunder to begin with. It just couldn't be done in such thinly populated areas.
Having knowledge about legacy (Microsoft) tech is not bad if you're good. Many companies I know run their business on VB.Net/WebForms/Knockout/ELK/MSSQL. We do at my current gig. You have to be its mother to love that stack.
I've been putting food on the table as a .net specialist for fifteen years. My impression is that .Net 4 is a band-aid of Windows-dependent implementations and that .Net Core is some solid tech, using industry's best practises for streams, collections, GC and so on. How do you think they made it portable?
I started to get pissed off at MS at around the time MVC 3 came out. That was not the direction I would have taken. Oh the bloat. Asp.Net Core Mvc is a dream. You start out with nothing, basically. Invent your own conventions.
I'm happy to not touch .Net 4 again. Love Core.
Edit: as parent said though: Microsoft, your tooling has gone from best-of-breed to just-another-messed-up-ide. Please remove everything you copied from Resharper from Visual Studio. It just doesn't work. Try renaming a file. I have never had anything but near-fatal studio errors such as "the refactoring of the file name just didn't work, man, crashing soon...". I want my Resharper back. Can you disable your stuff? I mean, all of it? And please don't ask me to develop server applications on a javascript client such as VS Code. Nut gunna do it.
Hi, let me tell you a thing about building in-process document databases, competing with the works from FB, Google and MS: the codebase of a document database is very small. The size of your team does not matter as much as the ideas they follow. Resin has been based solely on my ideas up to just recently when now PR's are starting to show up. Check it out.
Hi, this is an early demo of searchpanels.com. You know those instant answers Google sometimes give you for certain types of queries? Those, but community-driven and with an attractive gamification model for businesses. Does this idea sound good or just plain?
