> states ruled from Prague, inhabited largely by Czech speakers, extending to virtually the same territory.
More like two polities which share a capital city, but barely have either a language or a geography in common. The idea that Bohemia is essentially Czechia has no more reliable historical basis than belief that it belongs to Greater Germany, or to Czechoslovakia.
This isn't true. The majority of countries are much younger than this. The thousand year old ones are the exceptions.
Many countries have an 'origin story' which implies that they are the same thing as random countries or regions which had similar names/languages/locations but in the vast majority cases these are something between a loose approximation and a myth.
I think the above commenter's point is that "countries" doesn't just mean the formal nation state, but the cultural group. The nation of China was created on 1949. China is much older than 75 years. Likewise, Germanic tribes existed as far back as the Ancient World.
But the only real connection between 'Germanic tribes' and the modern state of Germany is that people from the latter believe the former to be their forefathers. They are not genetically closer to them than other Europeans, nor do they speak the same language or call themselves the same word or have the same lifestyle or inhabit the same places.
During the Yugoslav period, there was a minority group of Bulgarian migrants in one region of Yugoslavia. Like most linguistic groups they adopted the national language and believed themselves to be Yugoslav. However their group was sometimes referred to as 'Macedonian' because the corner of Yugoslavia near Bulgaria is also near Macedonia in Greece. They now have their own country (and language - whose only differences from Serbo-Croat are those which were intentionally introduced), and many believe themselves to be the descendants and cultural and spiritual heirs of Alexander the Great (even though Alexander reigned over and left an influence over a region bigger than Europe).
All countries have things like this in their history. It's just that generally they are a few hundred years further away.
No, there are continuities in language. It's changed over time, but it's still descended from those older cultures. French has it's roots in Frankish people that settled there in the migration period, with Latin and other influence. It's not just people arbitrarily claiming lineage. There are also specifics in culture and tradition, e.g. Christmas trees date back to pagan Germanic festivals.
Incorrect, English does indeed have German influence but it also has more Celtic influence. One is closer to Old German than the other: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_High_German
Germanic tribes in the ancient world did not speak Old High German. The status of Old High German as the origin language of modern German is part of the construction of German history in exactly the manner I have described.
There is very little Celtic in Old English. It's very close to a synthesis of Anglish and French. There's much more Danish in English than there is Celtic.
> Germanic tribes in the ancient world did not speak Old High German.
As per the link, it was spoken around 500 AD. Which is at the tail end of the Ancient World but it's still far older than Germany as a country.
> The status of Old High German as the origin language of modern German is part of the construction of German history in exactly the manner I have described
Are you just rejecting the entire field of linguistics? Languages absolutely do have descendants, and while there is admixture and external influences there is broad continuity between old German and contemporary German.
I don't think you've established any factual challenge to either of my statements:
> But the only real connection between 'Germanic tribes' and the modern state of Germany is that people from the latter believe the former to be their forefathers. They are not genetically closer to them than other Europeans, nor do they speak the same language or call themselves the same word or have the same lifestyle or inhabit the same places.
> Modern German is no closer to the language of a randomly chosen 'Germanic Tribe' than English, Prussian, Danish, Yiddish, Swedish, Czech, etc
The fact that there is some connection between modern German and Old High German and some connection between Old High German and the languages of the Germanic tribes does not contradict either.
You stated that old Germany wasn't spoken in the ancient world, when the link I posted explicitly said it was. You also wrote that "the only real connection between 'Germanic tribes' and the modern state of Germany is that people from the latter believe the former to be their forefathers", which is also not true. The languages are indeed linguistically descended from old Germany.
English is also less closely related to old German on account of the Norman french influence.
The Czech language is Slavic [1], it's substantially different than German. It's more similar to Polish or Russian.
Swedish and Danish are both North Germanic [2] rather than West Germanic [3] languages. Related to, but distinct from the West Germanic that would evolve into contemporary German.
Yes, there is a lot factually wrong with your posts.
>During the Yugoslav period, there was a minority group of Bulgarian migrants in one region of Yugoslavia. Like most linguistic groups they adopted the national language and believed themselves to be Yugoslav. However their group was sometimes referred to as 'Macedonian' because the corner of Yugoslavia near Bulgaria is also near Macedonia in Greece.
Wow, this is... biased. Sincerely, a Macedonian.
People living in Macedonia (or, to avoid confusion, sigh... North Macedonia), have at one point (and even today, by some), yes, been called Bulgarians, but we've also been called Serbs and Greeks (in northern Greece, since Greece claims that everyone in Greece is Greek, lol). So, you claiming that we have only been Bulgarians, who, judging by the tone of your comment, got brainwashed into thinking we're Yugoslavs and after that Macedonians is absurd, to say the least.
Serbs tried to make us Serbs before Bulgarians tried to make us Bulgarian, and they too failed. You can't make up an entire nation in a top-down manner, the people living in those lands first have to show signs that they consider themselves as a separate nation from the rest in any given region, which the Macedonians have, time and again.
Now, to be fair to Serbs, there's a lot of Serbian cultural influence here, and a lot of people here do understand Serbian more than Bulgarian (even though Bulgarian and Macedonian are, on paper, more similar than Serbian and Macedonian), but still, they failed in trying to convince us to be Serbian rather than what we are now, a separate nation, Macedonian.
Also, the modern idea of a separate, sovereign Macedonian state for the Macedonian nation has existed since at least 1880*
> (and language - whose only differences from Serbo-Croat are those which were intentionally introduced)
1. And this is how I know you're not a Bulgarian because a true Bulgarian nationalist would claim that Macedonian is not its own language, but that it's only a dialect of Bulgarian.
2. There are a lot of differences on paper from Serbo-Croatian. It's closer to Bulgarian. Still, you don't create a language in a top-down manner. Read "Za makedonckite raboti" by Krste Petkov Misirkov.
> and many believe themselves to be the descendants and cultural and spiritual heirs of Alexander the Great (even though Alexander reigned over and left an influence over a region bigger than Europe).
Not sure how true this is. There are some definitely, but I feel they're more of a very loud minority, or at least not the majority by a long shot. Anybody who is seriously claiming they're direct descendants of some guy who lived over 2 thousand years ago, and completely forgetting about everyone that has walked and mixed in that region between then and now (think of all the Greeks, Romans, Slavs, Jews, Ottomans, and everybody else I'm not mentioning) is to have his mental faculties questioned. This goes not only for my fellow denizens, but for anybody claiming such a historical connection to a long-lost civilization, and especially so for those who are geographically not related (I could name names, but that would further diverge this conversation.) But at the same time to claim that people living in present-day Macedonia (the entire region, not just the state) have no connection whatsoever, is, as well, stupid.
I read the whole thing. It's literally a showcase of all the mental tics and obfuscations involved in the construction of artificial national histories as I described in my earlier comment.
Accusations of bias, the suggestion that 'only nationality X would question this aspect of our proud Y history', turning minor linguistic coincidences into meaningful history, the admission that 'everyone is from all over the place, but nonetheless we are all definitely from Z because [no evidence]'.
Self-definition based on 'we are W because we're not U and definitely not V.' The denial that it's possible to force the construction of a cultural, linguistic or ethnic group, despite numerous examples of exactly this happening. Appeal to biased histories written by true believers. Appeal to linguistic treatises only available in the language in question. Appeal to the time-honored authority of ... the 1880s, a (not very distant) era when every single group of people in Europe was trying to become a nation.
Alexander the Great did not live in Skopje. He did not speak Macedonian, 'a language closer to Bulgarian than to Serbian'. There are at least 20 countries in Africa, Asia and Europe which have closer cultural, political or ethnic connections with Alexander the Great than Macedonia does.
> It's literally a showcase of all the mental tics and obfuscations involved in the construction of artificial national histories as I described in my earlier comment.
I agree, all nations are artificial creations. I'd recommend Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson. And never did I claim that a unified Macedonian nation has existed for longer than 144 years (since 1880), so not sure what the "artificial national histories" part is alluding to(?)
>Self-definition based on 'we are W because we're not U and definitely not V.'
What's wrong with this? Americans are American because they defied the British Empire. What are you going to claim next - that Americans don't exist? If so, good luck!
And isn't that how all nations are? The French are French because they're neither German, nor English, nor Spanish, nor Italian. Nations are essentially just in-group vs out-group behaviors and dynamics manifested in relatively large landscapes.
Serbs are Serbs because they're not Croats or Bulgarians or Macedonians or Albanians. Macedonians are Macedonians because they're not Serbs or Greeks or Bulgarians or Albanians.
All nations (groups) have traits that are different enough from another nation (group), which is why they become a group (nation) in the first place.
>The denial that it's possible to force the construction of a cultural, linguistic or ethnic group, despite numerous examples of exactly this happening.
I suppose I worded that part terribly, so it's my fault. I tried to say that all (yes, all) top-down nation-building projects don't work. I know you're going to provide examples of something like the middle eastern arab states, but that would be a terrible example, as no one, and I mean no one, from, say, as an example, from Saudi Arabia views himself as Saudi Arabian first, instead they view themselves as Arabs; same goes for people from other projects like Qatar, QAE, Bahrain and the other "nation"-states in that region. The people living in those "nation"-states didn't organically decide to create their state based on their nation, instead their "nation"-state borders were created by some interventionists in a faraway land, unsuccessfully because nobody there thinks that his "nation"-state is much different from his neighboring "nation"-state.
Macedonia, conversely, is not a top-down nation created by bureaucrats - people here, like people all over the world who belong to bottom-up nations, came to their own conclusion that they're different from those around them, hence they became a separate group (nation). And yes, if we got back far enough, at one point people here did consider them Bulgarians, and at another time Serbs, and at a third time, much further back, Greeks (I am not arguing against this fact, if you think I am then we are arguing bout different topics), but if we go back far enough, most people in Europe alone came from one group, which does not invalidate their national affiliations today.
>Appeal to biased histories written by true believers.
Where did I mention this? True believers?
>Appeal to linguistic treatises only available in the language in question.
And btw, it's available in Bulgarian too, it was published in Sofia in 1903 after all; and most copies were confiscated or destroyed by the Bulgarian police, wonder why that happened?
I also wonder why Bulgaria occupied Macedonia in WWII - it wouldn't make sense to occupy one's own people, no? Unless... :)
>Appeal to the time-honored authority of ... the 1880s, a (not very distant) era when every single group of people in Europe was trying to become a nation.
And when did I say that the Macedonian nation has existed since time immemorial? Starting to look like you didn't read my comment. And what's wrong with the 1880s specifically? Would it have been better if it happened in the 1980s? What about the 1780s? Does America not exist because the revolution happened to be in 1776 - a random year as any?
>Alexander the Great did not live in Skopje.
Never said he did. He probably never stepped foot in what was Skopje at the time. Still, Macedonia is not Skopje, contrary to what most foreigners think (along with our politicians, unfortunately.)
>He did not speak Macedonian
Of course not, and I never said he did. The modern Macedonian language is a Slavic language, it would be absurd if he spoke a Slavic language some ~1000 years before the Slavs came to the Balkan with their language.
There is a chance that he spoke some version of Aincent Macedonian, likely a dialect of Greek, which is very likely not related to the modern Slavic language which bears the same name, along with Greek, the prestige language of the time.
> 'a language closer to Bulgarian than to Serbian'.
Yes, what's wrong with that? It's in the South Slavic branch of languages, in the eastern group with Bulgarian and Old Church Slavonic. All languages in the South Slavic group form a dialectic continuum, meaning that we can all more or less understand each other (except, I would add, Slovene). Does that mean that no nation whatsoever exists in the Balkan? Or that we are all just one nation, even though we don't think we are, which is what nations are based around in the first place - thinking we belong to one group and not the other?
>There are at least 20 countries in Africa, Asia and Europe which have closer cultural, political or ethnic connections with Alexander the Great than Macedonia does.
And when did I say otherwise?
Seems to me that more than half the time here you're just arguing with yourself. And a couple of lines of yours read like they've been copy-pasted from some ready-made document full of zingers
> Frustrating enough since it feels like in JavaScript, you never have control over what’s going on.
> In C, you can go ahead and misconfigure a makefile to output debug files, a segfault, or a bad reference, but at the end of the day, it’s your fault.
> The same goes for any serious language ecosystem out there.
> But JavaScript is quite the opposite: it works like magic (and not as a compliment!) even though you know it’s pure software!
I think we can recognize from these comments what is happening here. If you think that the tools you are working with are magic (whether because of bias, unfamiliarity or whatever), it will be much harder to pin down problems. If you understand that you're dealing with very complex, but deterministic systems, you will be able to work systematically, observe things carefully and carry out experiments to check your hypotheses, and you have a chance of actually discovering what's going on.
While I agree with everything you have said, and it's been my motto since I read, "I'm sure you're joking, Mr. Feynman." The point of the post was to point out (maybe I did it wrongly) that those things you have described are pretty impossible given the ecosystem we have nowadays in Javascript (as a whole!). Of course, you can try to theorize and try to get a hypothesis on things and then try to prove those, but it's just too hard to keep track of everything.
Another random story from this week: we have been using `nanoid` to generate IDs internally for an internal tool. Apparently, they did a breaking change release, and now you cannot use it anymore on commonJS env. See my point? where's the hypothesis we can make? It's hours and hours spent tinkering with code and other people's dependencies, and if, as you said, put a theory that theory won't match if you think how real systems work (the networking section on the blog post)
SQLite is not 'a little iffy'. It's a) one of the most resilient pieces of software ever made and b) one of the most widely adopted pieces of software ever made.
One data point that really highlights this is that it is used in the flight software in Airbus planes. This alone is a very strong indicator that it is extremely robust, and also that it will be around for a very long time. There's a whole list of additional industry use-cases [1] that support this claim even more.
You put postage on the letter, and the post office stamps the postage (to invalidate the postage). The stamp contains a date. You can't stamp something after having mailed it, that happens as part of the mail submission.
OK, I suppose this could be arranged. The seal has to be over the whole of the "back side" of the envelope, where the flap is. Then put the address and the postage over that, and the post office stamps it.
What confused me was how you would achieve post office stamping over a seal that's on the wrong side of the envelope, where the flap is.
Not quite sure what your comment means exactly or how it implies what I said is incorrect.
At any rate, test_asyncio contains a lot of tests that involve threads and specifically thread safety between coroutines and those tests fail. As far as async I/O and threads being distinct, I mean sure that is true of a lot of features but people mix features together and mixing asyncio with threads will not work with this particular release.
We only have Otto Frank's word for it that this is what she would have wanted. And he is known not to have had respect for her legacy in every way, for example editing the diary to remove criticism of himself.
Also, 'wanting to be a writer' does not necessarily mean that you would have wanted to have a specifically private piece of writing published.
Even if he's a liar and she didn't even want to be a writer, at least he left a plausible reason why it might be what she would want. In the absence of her actual wishes, that's the best we can do and, given the impact that the journal has had on the world, I find it hard to believe that anyone would not want that work published.
This, on the other hand, is someone going against explicitly stated wishes. It's not a very comparable situation.
Should we act this way with regards to all future events? Should I for example vote for leaders whom I believe will make decisions which make things better during my lifetime only to get much worse in the far future after I'll probably have died? If I have a disabled family member who will likely outlive me, should I ignore the fact that they will continue to require care after my death, when planning my financial affairs?
Those are actions you can take with expected outcomes, not impossible desires. The equivalent in this case would be destroying your work when you're alive, or asking your executor to destroy it with the understanding that your desires may be disregarded.
You might think that making sure your children will be cared for after you are dead is an impossible desire. You might think that leaving a will specifying your intentions for unpublished work is an action with an expected outcome. The line between actions with expected outcomes and impossible desires seems hard to establish.
Making sure your children will be cared for after you are dead is also impossible, but at least there are well-established legal processes to make an attempt. I think it's actually pretty easy to establish that line.
Disability and the need for care by others are not always the same thing. Please don't imply in your writing that everyone "disabled" needs care and financial support by family members, that is pretty much generalised patronisation. I have a disability, but nobody needs to take care of me, and I have my own (sufficient) income.
More like two polities which share a capital city, but barely have either a language or a geography in common. The idea that Bohemia is essentially Czechia has no more reliable historical basis than belief that it belongs to Greater Germany, or to Czechoslovakia.