Pascal programmers are confused.

The 13th month should be called eleven, because it’d come after December (10), our 12th month.

It’s len(str) in Python. Not str.length.

Is it wrong that I’m stuck trying to figure out what language this is?

Trying to figure out what string.length and print(var) exist in a single language… Not Java, not C# (I’m pretty sure its .Length, not length), certainly not C, C++ or Python, Pascal, Schme or Haskell or Javascript or PHP.

The Chu Ko Nu was more of a party-trick than a real weapon though. The amount of power behind each bolt was miniscule.

The actual “rapid-fire warbow” the Chinese used was the lol rocket-launcher. (Or really, Koreans did it first, strapping Chinese rockets to a bunch of arrows and lighting all of them at the same time, causing devastating effects on the battlefield). See Hwacha: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwacha

Zhuge Liang’s biggest battlefield contribution in practice was probably the popularization of the “Ox Cart”, aka the Wheelbarrow. The Shu’s army could march further since they had such contraptions powering their logistics. Kinda funny to think that things like Wheelbarrows were still the stuff of sci-fi in the year 200 AD, but that’s where technology was in practice.

EDIT: The fact that Zhuge Liang’s lanterns (aka: hot air balloons) got practical usage back then is incredible though.

Honestly, if it doesn’t end with people getting impaled on spikes in front of his castle, I have a tough time believing it was Vlad, lol. Pretty much everything ended with “And then they were impaled to serve as a warning to everyone else” like every damn time.

Alibaba in some ways.

My understanding of Alibaba (and the 1001 Arabian Nights) is that they’re closer to Arabic “Duck Tales”. Fantastical stories more designed to woo children with crazy powers and nearly illogical plot structures. However, 1001 Arabian Nights became absurdly popular in Europe, far more popular than well-respected Arabic Heroes. (Much like how Duck Tales is a children’s story in American culture, but way more popular in Europe for some reason). Or for the American equivalent: us importing young-adult shows from Japan (lots of anime) and the American adults consuming it.

For someone “like King Arthur”, an adventuring Hero that’s well respected in the culture that they’re from (ex: English respect King Arthur and see him as high-culture), Arabic Heroes are closer to Sinbad the Sailor instead, rather than Alibaba, Aladdin, or Scheherazade.

Unfortunately, if an Arabic tale came to Europe in the 1500s to 1800s, it would be called “Arabic Nights”, because the original 1001 Arabian Nights was just so popular, every translator in Europe would basically add it as one of Scheherazade’s sub-stories. So its difficult from a Western / English-speaking lens to see what is, or isn’t, respected high-culture stories.

I’m looking through Wikipedia and have come across Antarah ibn Shaddad, a Guardian of the Nativity (Yes, “that” Nativity, Jesus’s birthplace). Such a hero sounds far more similar to King Arthur as a heroic figure to look up towards. (A lot of 1001 Arabian Nights are filled with rather disgusting and backstabby characters and aren’t really “Heroes”).

Its hard to overstate how “legendary” the names are of Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

The Sun family who controls Wu (one of the Three Kingdoms), is the same Sun family who wrote Sun Tzu’s Art of War.

There is this legend / history from Romania called Vlad Dracula. He was a Voivod (would be roughly a Count in Western nobility, but with more military powers) who brutally murdered the rich and corrupt Boyars and gave order and safety to the poor.

If you ignored the hundreds of impaled men, women and children in front of his Castles… Legend says he kept gold at the center of his towns to prove that all thieves were dead. If anyone openly stole the gold at the center of town, they’d be impaled.

Perhaps Vlad Dracula was too brutal by Western European standards. But IMO, there seems to be overarching tales of someone who stood up to the corrupt Nobility and actually enacted a sense of justice between both Robin Hood and Vlad.

Obviously, it’s 100% myth by the time people are telling stories of the Count Dracula who drinks your blood. But as a nobleman of the years 1400s or so, his true story is so difficult to separate out from the myths and legends. Whoever was for real, he was clearly brutal to have caused so many myths to be written about him.

Going further East, there are the many Tales of Baba Yaga. A powerful and brutal witch of Siberia. There’s all kinds of stories of Baba Yaga, but she usually has Twins or Triplets form, a Dancing Hut and powerful and brutal (but ironically fair) Magicks.

I wouldn’t say that Baba Yaga is like King Arthur… But Baba Yaga very similar to the evil and brutal Morgana of Arthurian lore. But Baba Yaga has no peer or equal. There is no King Arthur or other set of knights to save society from Baba Yaga wrath.

Even further East are the Fables from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms of China.

The TL;DR is that China had a massive civil war at the fall of the Han Empire in the year 200AD or so. This Civil War lasted three generations.

As the Han Emperor was stolen by the evil Dung Zhou, the 12-way Coalition army tried to save the emperor. It was too late however, China fell into a war and the 12 warlords soon entered a period of free-for-all, vying to control all of China.

The armies kill and or subsume each other until the rise of Shu, Wu and Wei. The ‘winners’ of that period of chaos. And then the real crazy shit starts happening.

They utilized Magicks to create battlefield conditions: unlikely wind that spread fires through enemy camps. They find legendary weapons. Single men fight against armies of a thousand or more.

This crazy Wizard/Inventor named Zhuge Liang invented hot air balloons and used them as communication between troop formations. No wait, this one is actually true and not a legend.

Lots of Chinese Magic and History here as the three-way free for all causes a natural set of alliance (Shu and Wu were weak early on) but then later when Shu grew more powerful, Wu and Wei staged a careful betrayal killing the God of War: Guan Yu (one of the main generals of the Shu. This is “That long-beard Guy riding the Red Horse” you keep seeing in every Chinese Restaraunt)

Romance of the Three Kingdoms is somewhere between King Arthur and the Bible in terms of importance to Chinese Culture. Even modern Chinese understand that whoever wrote the book was a Liu Bei fanboy (aka: obviously biased / favors Shu in every situation). But the book is incredibly influential to Chinese Philosophy. Many sayings and parables about the importance of scholarship and science (Zhuge Liang and Sima Yis inventions to change the course of battle), the importance of order and fairness (even the brutal warlord Cao Cao of Wei was well known and well-regarded as a fair king). The importance of recruitment efforts, and other such parables / philosophy regarding how societies can gain advantage over each other. Not just battle, but through economic power, legends, and more.

76F to 78F in the summer.

68F in the winter.

My Dad does 85F summer and 65F winter though. I though I was being luxurious with my settings lol.

I do run a dehumidifier in the summer and a humidifier in the winter though. Humidity control is almost more important IMO for comfort.

Honestly, Docker is solving the problems in a lot of practice.

Its kinda stupid that so many dependencies need to be kept track of that its easier to spin up a (vm-like) environment to run Linux binaries more properly. But… it does work. With a bit more spit-shine / polish, Docker is probably the way to move forward on this issue.

But Docker is just not there yet. Because Linux is Open Source, there’s no license-penalties to just carrying an entire Linux-distro with your binaries all over the place. And who cares if a binary is like 4GB? Does it work? Yes. Does it work across many versions of Linux? Yes (for… the right versions of Linux with the right compilation versions of Docker, but yes!! It works).

Get those Dockers a bit more long-term stability and compatibility, and I think we’re going somewhere with that. Hard Drives these days are $150 for 12TB and SSDs are $80 for 2TB, we can afford to store those fat binaries, as inefficient as it all feels.

I did have a throw-away line with MUSL problems, but honestly, we’ve already to incredibly fat dockers laying around everywhere. Why are the OSS guys trying to save like 100MB here and there when no one actually cares? Just run glibc, stop adding incompatibilities for honestly, tiny amounts of space savings.

Because it isn’t inferior.

Ubuntu barely can run programs from 5 years ago, backwards compatibility is terrible. Red Hat was doing good but it just shit the bed. To have any degree of consistenty, you need to wrap all apps inside of a Docker and carry with you all the dependencies (but this leads you to obscure musl bugs in practice, because musl has different bugs than glibc).

For better or worse, Windows programs with dependency on kernel32.dll (at the C++ level) have remained consistently deployed since the early 1990s and rarely break. C# programs have had good measures of stability. DirectX9, DirectX10, DirectX11, and DirectX12 all had major changes to how the hardware works and yet all the hardware automatically functions on Windows. You can play Starcraft from 1998 without any problems despite it being a DirectX6 game.

Switch back over to Ubuntu land, and Wayland is… maybe working? Eventually? Good luck reaching back to programs using X.org dependencies or systemd.

Windows is definitely a better experience than Ubuntu. I think Red Hat has the right idea but IBM is seemingly killing all good will built up to Red Hat and CentOS. SUSE linux is probably our best bet moving forward as a platform that cares about binary stability.

Windows networking stack is also far superior for organizations. SAMBA on Linux works best if you have… a Windows Server instance holding the group-policies and ACLs on a centralized server. Yes, $1000 software works better than $0 software. Windows Server is expensive but its what organizations need to handle ~50 to ~1000 computers inside of a typical office building.

Good luck deploying basic security measures in an IT department with Linux. The only hope, in my experience, is to buy Windows Server, and then run SAMBA (and deal with SAMBA bugs as appropriate). I’m not sure if I ever got a Linux-as-Windows-server ever working well. Its not like Linux development community understands what an ACL is in practice.