Also I can’t help but notice that he didn’t verify the correctness of the solution

Think I have mentioned the story I heard here once, about the guy who wrote a program to find some large prime which he ran on the mainframe over the weekend, using up all the calculation budget his uni department had. And then they confronted him with the end result, and the number the program produced ended in a 2. (He had forgotten to code the -1 step).

This reminded me of that story. (At least in this case it actually produced a viable result (if costly), just with a minor error).

Yeah I was also ver specifically thinking about Christian heresies, and not counting all the other religious wars/conflicts/murders going round.

Do always think it is funny that the whole magical staves thing which people think is some old norse early medieval thing comes from the 17th century and is a bit more christian (even if it is a strange offshoot, esp with iceland being mostly converted to Christianity in the 1000s). But that is unrelated to everything above, more that history is big and what we assume is often not correct and from the wrong periods. As I did here myself. Edit: wonder if there is an overlap between the staves and the sigils from The Lesser Key of Solomon, both of the sources for these things seems to be written in the same period (the lesser key is based on earlier works from what I could tell the sigils itself are always credited to the lesser key, so no idea if they predate that, I don't have much access to grimoires from the 1500s).

Seems my edit and your reply crossed each other. No I agree, I was wrong in all the ways, thanks for the correction and information.

Ah thanks, I didnt know. Edited a bit more in btw. Sorry about that. Scattered mind with a lot of L'esprit de l'escalier energy.

E: A quick Wikipedia check: To provide more of that energy, 1200 in France, yeah I totally stand corrected. My bad people, thanks.

Thanks, yeah, as I also said to Stross, I dont know that much about the period. Most of it comes from Crusader Kings ;) (Doesn't help that these games are sanitized in a large degree so genocides etc will not show up (which is the good decision btw, if they were not sanitized it would be worse, imagine hearts of iron for example), so it isn't a great way to learn about what you could learn more about the dark parts of our history), and the religion mechanics there are not that historically accurate, so I dont put not much stock in that apart form 'some people believed in a religion named like this once'.

Anyway thanks both for correcting me and giving me homework (ill read up on it, any more specifics about the Cathar stuff would be appreciated, as I wouldn't know where to start).

And I would say the latter stance on heresy only applies when your position is weak. When you are strong some random fools not believing correctly are not of a great importance, which is why I thought the church went more internally after heresies vs externally via crusades (in intend, not in practice I know what the first crusade did in the German region etc) later in history. Clamping down internally hard is more a sign of weakness in my mind, you need the hard power cause you lack the soft power (an example now and then not withstanding).

The crusades/Reconquusta were more an externally aimed thing at the Muslims right? (at least in intent from the organized church side, in practice not so much, so im not talking about those rampages). So yeah I was specifically talking about heresies, and im also very much not an expert in these things, so I dont know. I have not forgotten about the Cliffords/ /Alhambra things, as I dont know about it (I will look them up when im not phone posting). I was thinking more about stuff like protestantism, witch hunts and Jan Hus (the latter does count, as it is from the late medieval period iirc).

I just dont know very much about the period, but do knew some wiccan types who had wild ahistorical stories about the witch hunts.

E: yeah, I don't think we should put anti-semitism under anti-heresy stuff, it being its own religion and all that. But as Graydon mentioned, the Albigensian Crusade fully counts for all my weird hangups and so I was totally wrong.

I wouldn't say having the fab is worthless, but more that saying you have build one and it actually producing as specced, at scale, and not producing rubbish is hard. From what I got talking to somebody who knew a little bit more than me who had had contact with ASML these fabs take ages to construct properly and that is also quite hard. Question will ve how far they are on all this, a tech demo can be quite far off from that. They have been at it for a while now however.

Wonder if the fight between Nexperia (e: called it nxp here furst by accident apologies) and China also means they are further along on this path or not. Or if it is relevant at all.

the medieval Church’s stance on heresy

Im not an expert on this, but wasnt this period not that bad and it was more the early modern period where the trouble really started? (Esp the witch hunts, and also the organized church was actually not as bad re the witch hunts, the Spanish inquisition didn't consider confessions gotten via torture valid for example, and it was an early modern thing). The medieval period tends to get a bad rap.

E: I was wrong, see below.

The Soylent meal replacement thing apparently forgot some important micro nutrients.

Happy new year everybody. They want to ban fireworks here next year so people set fires to some parts of Dutch cities.

Unrelated to that, let 2026 be the year of the butlerian jihad.

Sunday rant post. I really dislike that so many people are now adopting 'electrons' when they mean power (it is good as a 'this person drinks the coolaid' shibboleth however).

And I was amused to hear people go 'AI (by which they meant the recent llm stuff) malware creating will be a risk in the future, look at the drug discovery that AI is already doing', wonder if drug discovery people have said 'look how great drug discovery will be in the future, look at all the malware development AI is already doing'.

The commit message claimed “60% cost savings.”

Arnie voice: "You know when I said I would save you money? I lied"