Currently reading 1491, and I saw this. Mind-blowing to me that archeologists thought that Ancient Americans were so primitive, and that it had to be such a battle to demonstrate that no these were complex peoples just like everywhere else.
One of my favorite facts is that 3/5 of the worlds produce was domesticated in Meso-America. Wild. These civs were pros at developing foods.
Mesoamerica had both wheels and bronze. They just weren't as widely used because the technologies weren't nearly as useful in the Mesoamerican social context.
Human sacrifice occurred and had important religious connotations (in terms of very literally keeping the universe alive), but it's wildly over-stated as an everyday fact of life by chroniclers.
The current theory on why they didn't use the wheel much is that they had no animals to pull a cart. Llamas aren't suited to it and never spread out from the Andes in any case.
My only problem with that theory is that wheelbarrows are damn useful things.
They had animals to pull carts: Dogs and humans. Plains groups had large breeds for travois pulling before horses were introduced. Dogs weren't used for physical labor in Mesoamerica, but they had large breeds like the loberro that were large and strong enough. Andean cultures had their own large breeds I'm less familiar with.
The plains example is particularly illustrative here though, because horses and knowledge of wheeled transports were introduced at roughly the same time, yet only horses were immediately adopted by nomadic plains groups and used to pull larger versions of the travois they had been pulling with dogs for centuries. The wheel just wasn't that useful because there was no road infrastructure to make it viable.
And so it was with virtually all of the Americas. Eurasian style road construction largely did not exist. The few places it did exist were enormously mountainous regions where a long distance journey was not reasonable by wheeled vehicle, and in those areas wheels remained relatively impractical for transportation purposes until the industrial invention of motors. Just to give some historical examples, the conditions in northern mexico were so rough that the most common kind of wagon often needed new axles daily. Spanish colonial authorities could afford nicer wagons and built them with all sorts of durability improvements like iron-banded wheels maintained on the journey by specialist carpenters, yet still regularly lost significant percentages of caravans to the conditions even on well-maintained trails like the camino real. Is it any wonder that people largely preferred to use mules or horses?
As an aside, wheelbarrows are much less useful without shovels. The primary digging implement in the Americas was a digging stick, the most basic versions of which are exactly what they sound like. Mesoamericans would occasionally have small wood or metal paddles at the end of theirs for various reasons. Descendants survive in modern tools like the coa used by jimadors to trim agave for tequila. For a large earthmoving project laborers would have used their digging sticks to loosen soil and hands or various small implements to scoop it into baskets or hides for transport by hand.
> No wheel, no bronze/iron and lots of child sacrifice…
Regarding child sacrifice, we are not faring much better today:
"UNICEF’s Executive Director Catherine Russell told ambassadors that an average of 28 children are killed in Gaza every day – “the equivalent of an entire classroom.” - https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/07/1165415
AddBlock is still available. I was wondering if there is some issue with the extension itself that it got flagged? Maybe an update to the codebase would make the extension installe-able again?
Wasn't Adblock Plus the plugin to be shunned because they allowed certain ads as long as the advertisers paid them money? I remember a scandal like that a few years ago, but I might be mistaken since there are many similarly named plugins.
uBlock Origin didn't have this problem, which is why it got recommended so much.
A roller coaster could actually be a good way to move things around. With lower gravity than earth, and initial thrust could take a payload a predetermined distance effectively.
Bring a friend, talk, enjoy the views, bring headphones/speaker to listen to music/podcast/audiobook. The US is full of awesome trails and parks. The great thing about a hike is you can go for as long as you want or you can set a goal of reaching certain distances or destinations. Being outside is a great way to take a breath, get some fresh air & sunshine, and even meet other people on the trail (if they're willing to talk - I find people are super friendly on trails 90% of the time). After enough small hikes you'll probably want to take longer hikes, spend the night on the trail, and see grand views. This is motivation to plan a fun trip somewhere - most everyone wants to take a cool trip in nature!
Any outdoor activity really is great. Sports or even more leisurely activities such as kite flying, carving, gardening, all present great options.
If stuck indoors, invite people over and cook for them. Tell them you'll provide the food if they provide the company. Cooking is great because it involves creativity, planning, activity, and a tangible final result that can be eaten.
Reading is lovely - become okay with being by yourself, or start a book club where you either meet to discuss or read aloud to one another/listen to an audiobook. Do a puzzle, coloring pages, or something else with your hands while listening to an audiobook.
I had a similar thought, although I do think the article is somewhat useful - I haven't come across many other people supporting the view that efficient and practical startups are a better investment and create higher quality and more useful tech than unicorns.
I do strongly wish the article had more data. Note that the article is labeled as an 'Idea' on the website. See https://restofworld.org/series/ideas/ . I don't think that label should prevent data from being included, though.
Besides Notepad++ making a statement (which I think does matter), their code change will be relatively ineffective, as DuckDuckGo gets lots of results from bing anyways.
I see this really as more of a social statement and less as a technical solution.
The lack of search engine competition - viable alternatives - remains a rather massive problem in tech. Notepad++ doesn't have much in the way of options, unfortunately.
By that logic we should just throw in the towel and use Google/whatever the biggest player is. I refuse to play by those rules, even if my resistance is ultimately futile.
So by that logic you should use Google (wrong, but let's play along). And by Notepad's logic you should use Google (because it's Bing and Google, that's it). Good job?
DDG is (largely) a pass-through proxy for search from Bing (both Web and image) and for Russian-language media, Yandex. It maintains a number of specific search bots that mostly provide its intsant-answers content.
(This is based on interpretation of very unclearly worded statements and comments from DDG over the years.)
DDG may not censor results itself, but it inherits the censorship policies of its search providers.
(Disclaimer: I've used DDG as my primary Web search for nearly a decade, and Images since DDG image search came online. I'm strongly critical of DDG's relationship to the Tank Man image censorship issue.)
You make a good point in the difference in active choice but to say duckduckgo doesn't censor results is inaccurate is it does even if by proxy of where it sources those results from. I do feel this is a no-win situation for DDG and I don't think anyone should hold this situation against them as they seem to be caught up in it against their will.
I think that is what they were intimating in that last sentence. That the Notepad++ devs are implicitly supporting MS (and so Bing) by writing a Windows application.
Notepad++ has been a Windows application long before Bing was even a twinkle in its creator's eye.
Cancelling your technical platform over decisions that its vendor made decades after you originally picked it (and discarding N*17 man-years of your own hard work) smells of a logical fallacy, though I can't pinpoint which one.
You can't pinpoint which one because it's not a logical fallacy. Which makes it extra funny you're reaching for one, just because you find what I have to say uncomfortable. I'm afraid you'd have to satisfy yourself with emotional downvoting and no explanation why you feel this way.
Notepad++ was a Windows app before Bing existed, and Bing was a search engine in Notepad++ before they filtered Tank Man.
The question is are you doing symbolic knee-jerk gestures, but stopping right before it matters, or are you that clueless not to realize everything you do is Microsoft related, before you try and pretend you're going against Microsoft.
You see, everyone wears FUCK THE SYSTEM t-shirt, but then they play along with the system. Communicating one thing and doing another is quite pathetic IMHO, and counter-productive. It shows the cognitive dissonance behind our "pop-morals" if I can call them so, the things we get "outraged" on social media, and the lives we actually have.
I think an intelligent, thinking individual works on those discrepancies in their mind until they arrive at a cohesive (albeit not as simple) worldview where their actions and words match.
But for the rest, there's always the FUCK THE SYSTEM t-shirts, and the SAVE THE NATURE stickers for your gas SUV bumper.
That's what Notepad++ is. Pretending to go against Microsoft by deleting Microsoft's search engine on Microsoft's GIT hosting of their app written for a Microsoft OS.
My worldview is that we have two search engines worth a damn in this world, Google and Bing, and everything else uses their results more or less (yes, including Duck Duck Go). And Google has done a lot more shit than Microsoft to merit a ban if any one should be banned. Yet no one is comfortable banning Google because they dominate. Bing is easier to ban, because they don't matter much. so everyone is directing their cheap outrage in their direction.
Although the Tank Man decision is likely the actions of one person in a tens of thousands of people department, and rejecting their work wholesale due to one transgression like this is ridiculous. Also everyone knows about Tank Man. Even the dogs in China do. So what is this, if not the armchair symbolic issue of the day, where you get to feel you're making a difference by hopping on the right symbolic bandwagon? It's the online version of a bumper sticker.
One of my favorite facts is that 3/5 of the worlds produce was domesticated in Meso-America. Wild. These civs were pros at developing foods.