silasmariner

Nobody had anything better to do back then

Yeah you get a lot of these 'moral purity absolutists' with all the nuance of an edgy teen. Some of them, or course, are edgy teens, but 100 years is a super odd choice even so. You'd think by the time they were 13 they'd have heard of at least one war that came pretty close to defense against a malign hegemonic power with ambitions of global domination....

It largely won't happen. We're near a ceiling on what predictive models can do, and it's still painfully obvious when something's bot-generated. Porn is one where I can actually see that changing because people have never minded absolutely trash porn, but the arts as they currently exist are not gonna vanish

Not gonna double my response - OP deserved it more - I will say another 'fair enough', give you an upvote, and leave it at that

Good response, happy with that. Sorry about the implications, I think I just found it a fusty conservative choice. Had it been Infinite Jest and Chaucer I probably wouldn't have bothered responding. Sometimes the idea of 'classics' can seem... narrow and dull. Just wanted to mitigate the notion it was all brown bread (not that I don't love your suggestions tho')

Why start there with British and US authors? Why not 100 years of solitude, Disgrace, and dream of red mansions?

Mark Knopfler had a good song about that - Boom Like That

For a month or two I still kept the app on my phone. As a memento.

Reddit's official UX experiences suck balls

That's bollocks, their first album was 2000

Edit: just checked, actually their first album was 1999. Although what they have to do with 50 shades of grey...

There's a difference between an advance that repudiates prior understanding and one that doesn't. You can, in maths - and I assume this is the point - know that you are right, in a way that you can't with a more... epistemological science. Of course it's more complex than that, and a lot of maths is pretty sciency, like deriving approximate solutions for PDEs is more experimental than you might imagine, but even though we might make improvements there, we'll never go 'oh actually those error bounds are wrong'. They might be non optimal but they'll never be wrong

I always maintain that Aristotle's notions of how to test theories of 'natural philosophy' are a reasonable starting point for 'science'

I don't think you're expected to see the moral choices made by characters in the culture as ones you yourself should pick given current reality. It's set against a rather different set of background conditions.