I walk by it every week and I still stop every single time. I was born and live in the neighbourhood and I've seen it progress. It's really inspiring to see man can conceive such beauty and wonder. I agree with other comments mentioning we software developers can/should especially appreciate it for the humongous endeavour, work in progress and feat of engineering it means. I also like to think Gaudi and Barcelona have impacted the way I see and appreciate design, and how I lamely try to embed it into my work!
It’s broadly agreed that he’s referring to Sagrada, yes - the omitted sentence in my quote is “it has four crenelated spires the exact shape of hock bottles.”
I built up a bit of a stash before they discontinued them for good. Hopefully the (sealed and unused) batteries don't degrade too much while in storage so I can have enough spares to last me until software support is discontinued. It's like the modern equivalent of a wine reserve.
I think to anyone who has used it, it is plain testament that social networks do not scale. This is a social limitation, not a technical one. What killed the Internet is the centralization of platforms compounded by the commercial interest to "engage" on behalf of both corporations and users. IRC worked because it was decentralized and had no commercial interest, nor did it cater to narcissistic tendencies. No interest to comment for points, and decentralized enforcement where you'd fuck around and simply get banned from the(that) server.
I once read an article about forum quality as a function of the number of users. I can't seem to find it anymore, sadly.
The core idea is there's an optimal number of people. Not enough people and the community dies: not enough activity and ideas to sustain it. Too many and it also dies: it becomes impossible to form social relationships, cooperation dies down, everything becomes meaningless because you don't know anyone, the probability of ever interacting with any given person ever again trends toward zero.
I had a _really_ in-depth conversation with a friend with multiple interesting lines of thought going at once that only worked because the chat we were using had a per-message reply feature. The conversation would not have been as meaningful to me otherwise. I'm not sure IRC could have supported a chat like that...
(admittedly I haven't tried anything other than a few basic IRC chats, never really getting deep into IRCv3 or new features and stuff)
In IRC you'd just paste the relevant message or part of a message you're replying to after a greater than sign and then post your thought in the following message. Works totally fine. I have used IRC, XMPP, and Matrix to chat with some of the same close friends, I don't find actual replies to be necessary, and I think they kinda disrupt the flow when used too much.
I can appreciate that per message replies are handy in modern messages. But if you were having _such_ an in-depth conversation at the peak of IRC, you may have moved to email to make it async and allow for more fully thought-out replies.
Email is still a great way to communicate with people today.
I'm seeing it too. I think it's not about rewards, but punishments. A lot of people have (or perceive that they have) a lot less to lose in this economy.
Well, there are no consequences are there? Or at least no precident of consequences of such behaviour. My hope is that folks like this always lose out in the long run but I'm not so sure anymore...
The highest jobs require these days a proven track-record of corruption. You can‘t blame young startups wanting to take the first step on that ladder. At the end of the day we are living in a merdeitocracy.
Visited Barcelona in 2015, at that time anti-tourist graffities were abundant at Gothic Quarter and generally visible everywhere in the city.
I saw some anti-tourist gaffities at Ghent as well, for example.
However, amount of them in Barcelona left me thinking.
Those are there because of overtourism, and the locals have a point. Europe is big enough, but if you have any sense you'll ignore Venice, Barcelona, Bruges, Amsterdam, Ghent, and even parts of Paris and Rome, and go to somewhere where tourists aren't mostly seen as a nuisance crowding out the local residents.
That's a whole other topic. There's a relevant part of Barcelona's society who reject tourists in general (not Americans specifically) because of the impact tourism has had in the city. Note that many still haven't recovered of the impact of 2008 GFC, 2010-2012 slump, with incomes still under pre-2008, and who are now having serious trouble to even afford a roof. So even though there might be some minor hostility towards tourism, it has nothing to do with americans. It's a problem in every major european city I believe.
That was the spirit of the question, failing is good because it means we are trying :) Failure is part of the process to success (whatever success means to you)
