There are 50,000 and 60,000 acre tracts owned by separate logging companies near me, and that’s a small part of one county in northern California.

Point being that 10,000 acres isn’t actually as much land as it sounds like, when it comes to forest land.

I took a bit of dramatic liberty in connecting that to their present-day efforts, but I could definitely see it being a part of company lore encouraging unconventional marketing strategies.

I had interpreted a "census block" to be an arbitrary unit, but it seems to have originally designated actual city blocks. In 1990 they decided to divide the whole country into blocks. [1]

"An automated computer process looks for all visible and nonvisible features in our geographic database (MAF/TIGER) that should be a block boundary and creates a block each time those features create a polygon." [2]

Kind of an interesting extension of the "block" concept. It would seem that population density should be more of a factor. Automatically generating 5 million unpopulated census divisions seems a bit like something out of a Terry Gilliam movie.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Census_block

[2] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2011/...

1) I don’t think the analogy of ambling around our backyards holds for space travel. Space is vast and largely empty, it would be astronomically unlikely for anyone to casually wander over to earth from another star or galaxy.

2) We only treat ants that way because we already know about them. People have noticed them and studied them at great length. A person who doesn’t know that other animals exist on earth would probably be incredibly fascinated by them and likely try to communicate with them.

The main challenges I see are:

1) With any given simulation, it’s going to take a long time before something really noteworthy emerges, and until then how do you know you’re on the right track?

2) What is the fitness function? This has always stumped me. How do you create artificial resources and competition and life and death to drive evolution?

Or maybe it was and they tweaked it well enough to work. It's been a while, my memory could be off. I don't know if it would have been prohibitive on the GameCube to have audio of every line (there were a lot), but I wouldn't put it past them to have done so.

Now that I think about it, I feel like this is what CSS Zen Garden was all about. You have to embrace the fact that you’re gonna sit there tweaking margins and experimenting with various incantations.

You want to build applications? Use whatever freakin tool or platform your users will adopt. Don't be constrained by pointless prescriptivism.

A central service where you can easily manage many subscriptions, with integrations into other websites. There are a lot things I would pay for if I didn't have to go through the process of creating and managing yet another account. If it was just a one-click add/remove.

News websites come to mind. I would also use a "buy access to this article for 50 cents" feature. It just has to be frictionless.

The major players might not want to give up the money from people buying subscriptions and not using them much or forgetting to cancel them, but that seems like a lunch ready to be eaten.

That's a fair point, and later last night I regretted having used some unhelpful rhetoric. I often struggle to resist that temptation. In my defense though I was only going toe to toe with someone who had already demonstrated a willingness to dispense with courtesy in the name of pure inquiry.

Can you explain, then, why 1) your original post was devoid of any such language, and 2) you dismissed my suggestion, which added some, as being likely to cynically have the opposite effect of what was intended?

I get what you're saying. People often do couch cynicism and trolling in pleasantries. Which makes it difficult to appear genuine when asking a tough question like that. But that means you have to try extra hard if you want results, not give up entirely and go full autism on someone that clearly isn't going to respond well to that.

I highly doubt it would have performed worse than your strategy, which at best resulted in a derail about tone, and at worst scared off the person you were asking and others who may have otherwise taken time to give the deep and thoughtful answer you were looking for.

It seems clear that you find niceties and pleasantries to be not genuine or unnecessary, and I can sympathize, but they go a long way in terms of making people feel comfortable and opening up to you.

While I agree with your overall point, this is not true. AIs often fail in very inhuman ways. Their "thought process" and learning capabilities resemble ours only superficially.

That said, humans also make a ton of lethal mistakes on the road and I do think we're getting close to a point where it might even out on balance. But people are more forgiving of relatable human failure modes than bizarre machine ones.

A better way to ask might have been: "I'm curious, and I don't mean to be rude, but what caused you to post this comment here instead of searching for the answer?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRpUr5iQPIY

A programmer getting started contributing to a large existing codebase may feel more like a proofreader or editor at first. But creating an application from scratch definitely seems very similar to writing a novel.

"Court approves Apple's hiring of startup's engineers after failed acquihire" is the most neutral phrasing I can come up with. "Startup CEO tries to sell engineers to Apple" would be a bit flippant and biased the other way, but seems to capture the most intriguing bit.