Tim McCormack

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• Commented on Made of lies (and more lies)
  Oooh! I really appreciate the idea of using the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect as a probe....
• Commented on Pushing it back
  Some materials are extraordinarily durable and recognizable. If ancient dinosaurs had an industrial civilization, they almost certainly would have had glass, and that stuff doesn't break down chemically, only mechanically. I also dispute that our civil engineering projects would be...
• Commented on Summer webcomics
  The Secret Knots. It would be a disservice to both creators to say it's like if Borges had a webcomic, but the comparison has certainly been made. Mostly disconnected pieces, though a few short arcs. Forward. Serial comic about the...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  I assume Hell would publish altered versions of these open source libraries with logic bugs that will cause the caster's soul to be dragged to Hell. As a result, magicians would be more cautious about supply chain attacks than programmers...
• Commented on WTF
  I... can't even tell what it is? Their FAQ page is a good deal less than helpful....
• Commented on Because I am bored ...
  The only non-awful cryptocurrency I've seen so far is Filecoin, which uses "proof of space-time", really proof of file storage. Not just using up storage space arbitrarily, but storing files for other people. The files get stored in some kind...
• Commented on Dead plots
  ("Funnel-vision" was a typo, but it actually does seem apropos.)...
• Commented on Dead plots
  I'm on board with "cops are bad frequently enough that they can't be portrayed as unexamined good or even neutral", but... I don't know, man, you're really stretching it with "anyone who doesn't problematize cops is a racist". I think...
• Commented on Yet another novel I will no longer write
  Fantastic premise, condolences about the timing. "Eyes peeled" == recording/streaming video? (By the way, some of the Javascript for this page is being loaded over http rather than https, not sure if that matters to you...)...
• Commented on Random excuses
  The new LJ ToS rather worryingly bans scripting. I don't know if that means that they'll be blocking Dreamwidth's importer, but if anyone is waffling I'd advise doing the import now, just in case. I also hacked together a burn-your-journal...
• Commented on Children and War Toys and Violent Video Games and Action Stories
  If our kiddo wants to make "guns" out of sticks, that's fine. I'm not going to have her playing with orange-cap guns, though -- I want to very much keep a divide between play and reality, since that's my main...
• Commented on Towards a taxonomy of cliches in Space Opera
  You've covered the "exobiology is just like Earth biology, only simpler" and "aliens are basically people" cliches pretty well, but there's also the opposite: Assumptions that aliens are totally alien, and that exobiology is totally incompatible. For instance, if there's...
• Commented on A small research question
  Related to the Braconidae are the Ichneumonidae, which apparently were a component in Darwin losing his faith in intelligent design: But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence...