BitSound

Sorry, I should clarify I mean first chronologically, not in importance. As in, "here were the warning signs". Also I'll concede that this won't be first chronologically either, it'll be Guido stepping down as BDFL, and then the Tim Peters thing, then things like this.

To be fair, the comment had been moderated for like 4 days, and was only restored recently after people noticed. Hopefully somebody realized that it wasn't a good look.

He's not being run out of the project... yet. This is not a good direction, though. This comes across as the first link that'll show up in a github gist of "What happened to Python?" in a few years. Hopefully not and it's all just an automod mixup, but after the Tim Peters btfo, I know what I'd put my money on.

Thanks, yeah. There weren't any immediately nearby, but I'll try searching farther out.

Makes sense. I thought it was odd, because all of the clones I've seen use different names that clearly differentiate them, like Shattered Pixel Dungeon. I would say using the exact same title is confusing and maybe a little unethical, but if Watabou doesn't care, then there's probably not much that can/should be done.

IMO it's the weakest of the series. The next two books, The Player of Games or Use of Weapons are much better, at least to me. Use of Weapons is great, but has a somewhat challenging narrative structure of two intermixed timelines, so if that's not your thing The Player of Games would probably be a good one to try.

Nice! It's been a while since I've read any of his stuff. I should be done with my current book soon, what are a few of your favorites from him?

I'm pretty meh on the arguments there. It would be different, but we'd adapt. And we'd fix a lot bunch of problems.

The difference is that you're not changing how time is kept. Countries can change their timezone offsets right now to screwy things like +12:45 and it changes how time is recorded and stored. If we switch to UTC, a country can just declare their official hours are shifting and nobody has to fundamentally change how clocks work.

IMO people would figure it out and life would go on. Yes, lots of people would have the calendar date advance in the middle of the day but that's fine, we'd get used to it. People wouldn't work 9-5 jobs, but we'd come up with different terminology.

I don't really see the argument about people waking up at different times. Yeah, some people would wake up at 02:00 and some at 16:00, but when someone says they wake up at 02:00, there's 0 confusion about when that is. You'd have to know when someone is awake to do an international call, but you have to do that anyways.

Have you read the other Culture books, or is this your first one? I just found out now that there's !theculture@lemm.ee that could use some posts if you have anything you want to share about it. If you haven't read it yet (or if anybody else is curious for a quick taste of the series), here's the author writing a few notes on it:

http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

I thought this was also a good read, though it does have a few spoilers across the first few books:

https://www.sciphijournal.org/index.php/2017/11/12/why-the-culture-wins-an-appreciation-of-iain-m-banks/

At this point if I feel like getting fancy with Pandas, I'd reach for Polars first. My experience with it so far has been great