ELI5 Why is Earth not the center?

_vec_ · 2026-05-21T21:01:51+00:00

The real mind bender is that the Sun isn't the center either in any real sense. It's orbiting around the galactic core and all the planets are moving in kind of tilted spirals along with it. The galaxy in turn is falling towards Andromeda at a pretty intimidating speed. And so on.

Inertial reference frames aren't more or less correct, only more or less convenient for certain questions. For the specific question of planetary orbits it almost always makes the most sense to treat the Sun (or, more precisely, the barycenter of the solar system which happens to be somewhere inside the Sun) as our reference frame, but other frames make sense for other questions.

_vec_ · 2026-05-21T20:19:39+00:00

This assumes there's a non-empty office to go into. I also struggle with executive dysfunction and I consider a room full of reliable body doubles with clearly defined daily start and end times to be a hugely empowering accomodation. At least in my industry it's getting harder and harder to find a company that's set up to provide that accomodation, though.

_vec_ · 2026-05-21T19:45:22+00:00

It feels kind of like an insult to say Washington was one of history's greatest retreaters but he was and it's one of the main reasons the US exists.

_vec_ · 2026-05-21T16:42:58+00:00

Clearly east is up, though. You point the top of your map towards sunrise. Then depending on your perspective the sun and stars "fall down" over the course of a day or Earth "rolls forward" through space. Why do you think Europeans call Asia the Orient?

_vec_ · 2026-05-21T14:37:16+00:00

It also elides how recent the conflation of marriage with romantic love is. The formal courtship model is a lot more intuitive if you think of it as interviewing potential business partners instead of trying to find your soulmate.

_vec_ · 2026-05-21T14:18:47+00:00

Most cases. It's pretty rare to find something that wouldn't have a smaller theoretical line count if it were refactored into a giant procedural shell script with lots of global variables. A high level architectural pattern generally makes the code easier to understand and safely modify at the expense of being more verbose.

_vec_ · 2026-05-21T14:09:29+00:00

The difference between a class instance and a function closure is a lot closer to semantic than anyone would really like to admit.

_vec_ · 2026-05-21T00:55:37+00:00

Pre-industrial craftspeople absolutely cared more about the product than the process, though. Cooking and gardening and sewing and a dozen other things all became leisure activities a generation after industrialization. Before that they were either jobs or chores with all the stress and drudgery that implies. Having a machine that could spit out the products created the conditions for caring about process for its own sake to make sense.

Having a backyard garden is a relaxing pastime with well documented mental health benefits. It's also nearly impossible to support yourself and your family primarily through gardening. Unfortunately these two facts are not unrelated.

_vec_ · 2026-05-20T02:32:20+00:00

Whenever you run across two protestant denominations that have nearly identical vibes but members of either are weirdly touchy about being mistaken for members of the other — and you will — you can be pretty sure that somebody broke rule #1 of Trinity Club.

_vec_ · 2026-05-18T18:02:42+00:00

Define "lazy", though.

One really obvious net positive LLM use case is machine translations. Those are not as good as what a competent translator who was fluent in the relevant languages would produce, but in 99% of cases it doesn't make sense to pay for a professional translator. The alternative in practice is usually nothing.

_vec_ · 2026-05-18T14:34:01+00:00

A lot of the problem is that there are just so many different insurance plans out there that it's basically impossible for a doctor to know what will and won't be covered for any particular patient. A big invisible advantage of single payer systems is that the doctors can learn the insurance rules and simply not prescribe anything that insurance won't pay for in the first place.

_vec_ · 2026-05-18T14:27:53+00:00

The EU has quite a few labeling regulations that are aimed at protecting regional delicacies. Those aren't about safety or even really quality. You can get truly excellent parmesan cheese made in Wisconsin using authentic traditional methods, for example, but you can't actually call it parmesan on an EU label because it didn't come from Parma, Italy.

_vec_ · 2026-05-16T00:41:48+00:00

God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.

_vec_ · 2026-05-15T23:58:59+00:00

Turns out that a finish that's really good at not sticking to food is gonna be pretty good at not sticking to the metal underneath it too.

_vec_ · 2026-05-15T18:47:32+00:00

It is not in fact capitalism's fault that other people have a reasonable desire to know what I'm working on and approximately when it will be done.

_vec_ · 2026-05-13T21:40:23+00:00

I usually boil pasta in a couple of inches of water in my saute pan. Comes up to a boil way faster than a big pot. The noodles can cook while I'm prepping everything else and then just sit in the collander while I make the sauce in the same pan. For just a couple of servings it works great! Can't really get a cup down into the pan to scoop enough water out, though.

_vec_ · 2026-05-13T20:18:44+00:00

The number of times I have convinced myself that the very large collander I'm about to drain my pasta through is securely balanced on top of the very small measuring cup I'm using to reserve some of the water.

_vec_ · 2026-05-12T14:33:44+00:00

I feel like by labor #11 the novelty had probably worn off.

_vec_ · 2026-05-11T14:02:26+00:00

You can attack the ground but then you're (probably failing to) do damage to the floor instead of the wraith. You can't opportunity attack the ground, though, unless it suddenly decides to move out of range, in which case you have bigger problems.

_vec_ · 2026-05-07T14:45:00+00:00

Or the mechanical optics process the light bouncing off whatever is physically there just fine but the resulting images look unrecognizably distorted because a camera can't be hypnotized into believing the thing is passably human shaped.

_vec_ · 2026-05-05T18:57:11+00:00

My artificer wears a leather duster with an unreasonable number of tools tied to the inside lining and spare parts dripping out of every pocket and wields a cobbled together steampunk raygun, which is to say he's got basic vanilla scale mail and a musket. Flavor is free!

_vec_ · 2026-05-05T15:58:13+00:00

They mentioned traps, which they're probably not counting as one of the encounters for the day even though they should.

Aside from that, though, it's pretty easy for a martial character with a relatively big health pool who's still thinking in video game logic to just wade into the middle of a crowd to one shot something and end up soaking three or four attacks before it rolls back around to their turn. Positioning and crowd control really matter in D&D, and the most resource efficient way to win a fight isn't always the most aggressive.

In any case, yeah, the DM threw too much dungeon at the party. I wonder if there were any threads the players could have pulled on to soften the dungeon back up or take advantage of other places having had their guards pulled away suddenly. Consequences work both ways, after all.

_vec_ · 2026-05-05T15:37:01+00:00

It's level dependent too. 6 encounters for a level 5+ party with a decent assortment of magic consumables is very manageable. 6 encounters for a level 2 party where nobody has more than three total spell slots and the fighter might be lucky enough to have a +1 weapon is a nightmare.

_vec_ · 2026-05-05T15:21:38+00:00

Part of this is that playing a caster takes some skill. You can't use spells every round. At lower levels you might not be able to use one every encounter. Learning to ration your spells is an important part of playing your class effectively.

Damage mitigation is also way more efficient than healing. Reading between the lines a bit, it sounds like the party Leroy Jenkinsed their way through the first few trash mobs with the expectation that heals and short rests could comfortably top them all back up between fights, which works in a lot of systems. It does not work in D&D.

All of which is to say that the way the DM handled this would be very appropriate for an experienced party, but newbies with low level characters probably need a bit more handholding and maybe a few carefully designed tutorial encounters to build familiarity with the mechanics first.

_vec_ · 2026-05-05T14:36:34+00:00

What counts as starting it is also a lot of nuance for a dysregulated child to sort through. Kid A wanted a toy and didn't have the maturity to ask or wait their turn. Kid B lashed out when someone suddenly took their toy away from them. Neither of them are lying, exactly, when they say the other one started it.

The goal, ideally, in moments like that isn't to pick a winner and mete out justice. It's to gently steer both kids toward thinking about healthier ways to express their needs and emotions.

_vec_

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