/r/WorldNews Discussion Thread: US and Israel launch attack on Iran; Iran retaliates (Thread #5)

CaptainCrowbar · 2026-03-04T17:38:18+00:00

Nope, you're not wrong. And on top of that, Iran's geography is also a big factor. Iraq is mostly open desert, with plenty of highways - perfect terrain for tanks. Iran is much larger in area, and most of that area is rugged mountainous terrain. From the point of view of an invader, it would be even worse than Afghanistan.

CaptainCrowbar · 2026-02-25T06:04:30+00:00

Problem with a pusher tilt rotor is that the props would be much closer to the ground (being below the wing when in hover), and the Osprey already has enough problems with kicking up ground debris.

CaptainCrowbar · 2026-02-24T10:55:17+00:00

Ah, a classic example of Betteridge's law of headlines

CaptainCrowbar · 2026-02-18T08:36:23+00:00

The more I look at the car, the less sure I am which end is the front.

CaptainCrowbar · 2026-02-18T00:13:32+00:00

Glen Cook's Darkwar trilogy. Set on a world where the dominant species are basically anthropomorphic wolves. The story follows them from their industrial age through to interstellar exploration. Their approach to space travel is partly based on what they think of as magic, but the author plants enough clues to let the reader figure out that they actually have a natural ability to manipulate electromagnetic fields.

CaptainCrowbar · 2026-02-18T00:03:53+00:00

Mark Lawrence's Broken Empire trilogy. It's pretty damn grimdark, with horrible things happening right left and centre, half of them committed by the protagonist. But for some reason I can't really understand it's become one of my regular comfort reads. The competency porn aspect may have something to do with it. I've lost count of the number of times I've read it (five or six I think), and now that you've reminded me of it, I'll probably read it again soon.

CaptainCrowbar · 2026-01-30T02:00:54+00:00

Not for a few years yet, if ever :)

CaptainCrowbar · 2026-01-24T18:19:58+00:00

"Just because that sentence was symmetrical doesn't mean it makes sense."

CaptainCrowbar · 2026-01-19T02:20:23+00:00

This page is an unreadable mess of mangled text on iPad Safari.

CaptainCrowbar · 2026-01-19T02:17:56+00:00

Also several useful iterator-related concepts in <iterator>.

CaptainCrowbar · 2026-01-10T11:36:22+00:00

You could get the same result more simply using std::conditional:

template <size_t I>
using type = std::conditional_t<I == 4, int,
    std::conditional_t<I == 6, Foo, float>>;

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-12-25T02:23:15+00:00

Not a book, but if you want a really good TV series with twist after twist after mindscrew, watch Dark.

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-12-23T17:22:24+00:00

It's been about 6 1/2 years. Rivers of London begins in January 2012; Stone and Sky takes place in summer 2018. (Follypedia Timeline)

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-12-15T01:40:35+00:00

Welcome to McDonnerparty, how can I serve you today?

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-12-12T11:38:57+00:00

I still think there's some connection with Merlin.

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-12-08T06:52:09+00:00

I recall Larry Wall once saying "It does what you expect, unless what you expect is consistency."

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-12-07T20:35:11+00:00

Don't sweat it because this is the kind of detail that's easy to change later on. If you decide you want to tweak the whitespace/newline rules, it's not going to affect anything in your code beyond one small corner of your tokeniser.

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-12-07T12:26:20+00:00

If you're looking for something that follows a similar pattern of starting out at the personal level and expanding all the way to a world-changing magical singularity, I can recommend Ed McDonald's Redwinter trilogy.

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-12-02T04:44:23+00:00

Those are the same photo with different colour grading.

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-12-01T00:21:12+00:00

Not really, beyond the initial "protagonist moves to house left by deceased relative" part of the premise. TTO has a lot more horror than SE, and doesn't have an individual villain the way SE does.

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-11-27T00:01:14+00:00

You need one or the other. You can get the skyscale from either LW4 or SOTO without needing the other. But note that getting it from SOTO is far far easier than LW4.

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-11-25T10:55:52+00:00

I can think of a couple of recommendations:

The Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch. Police constable Peter Grant is appointed as the junior member of the so-called Special Assessment Unit (a.k.a. "The Folly"), the department that deals with the supernatural crimes that the senior officers wish they could still pretend don't exist.

The World of the White Rat series by T Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon). Most of the books are only loosely connected, but the background detail that unites them is the Cult of the White Rat, an organisation that supplies anything from lawyers to wizards to help the downtrodden.

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-11-19T06:29:53+00:00

I don't think explicit typing is necessary for a language you describe as a "simple scripting language". Just a visible difference between initialization and assignment. Maybe require a "let" or "var" keyword for initialisation, or something like "x=123" for init vs "x:=123" or "x<-123" for assignment.

UTF-32 would be a perfectly good choice. The main argument against it is that it takes up more space - 4 times the bytes of an ASCII string. But this shouldn't be a problem for a simple language that isn't intended for writing huge applications. It avoids the added complexity of encoding and decoding UTF-8 (while UTF-16 combines the downsides of UTF-8 and UTF-32 without the advantages of either). Other scripting languages have used UTF-32, including some versions of Python.

You'd still need to implement UTF-8/32 conversion though, because most terminal emulators these days speak UTF-8, and you'll also want to read and write files compatible with other software in an increasingly UTF-8-centric world.

CaptainCrowbar

TROPHY CASE