AbouBenAdhem

You’re assuming that time travel is equivalent to “rewinding” the intervening time span as if it had never occurred—in which case, yes, nondeterministic events are likely to happen differently.

But that’s not the case if time travel is a closed time-like loop (which is implicit in the “immutable-past” of OP’s second scenario). In that case everything happens only once, so it makes no difference whether or not the universe is strictly deterministic.

Rakesfall is quite a bit different from TSoBD—it’s a bunch of loosely-connected stories spanning from a mythic post-glacial past to the far-future end of humanity, where many of the narratives are metafictional stories embedded inside each other. So don’t go in expecting a linear narrative, or even a definite answer to what’s real and what isn’t.

• The first ten books of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga

• Vajra Chandrasekera’s Rakesfall (mix of SF and fantasy)

• N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season (re-read)

• Sue Burke’s Usurpation (end of the Semiosis trilogy)

• Ted Chiang’s Exhalation: Stories (short stories)

Thanks—I meant “formal” as in “formal grammar”, not that it wasn’t described in the published protocol. As in, there’s nothing in the protocol’s explicit form that distinguishes between this implied meaning and a real extra recipient—so it simplifies the parsing but adds an extra post-parsing step.

Why not a binary flag or something? Is it just to avoid making it a formal part of the protocol?

Does ActivityPub really send copies of all activities to www.w3.org?

I spent eight years as an undergrad in the 90s taking courses in everything, because I was addicted to interdisciplinary learning independent of any career goal. Then the dot-com boom convinced me that online learning could replace universities, so I picked a major that would benefit from having access to a university library (History), got a baccalaureate, and ended my formal education there.

It took a decade or so before the online availability of open-access papers caught up with my expectations, and I realize in retrospect that I underrated the value of postgraduate study—but given the expense and the necessity of specializing it would have entailed, I don’t regret not pursuing higher degrees.

I thought diarrhea was (at least sometimes) caused by too many of your gut bacteria getting killed by fever so they can’t digest solids enough to extract the water.

My city is full of shops and restaurants run by people who worked corporate jobs for decades while saving up to open their dream shop. The commercial landlords have realized this, and raised rents to the point where profitable businesses are a financial impossibility—they just aim to drain their tenants’ life savings as quickly as possible while they line up the next hopefuls. The city is full of amazing shops and restaurants, but they have a turnover time in months.

Goat herding, on the other hand, is much less susceptible to commercial rent inflation.

Doesn’t a song have words by definition?

If you’re looking for musical compositions, I’d say Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quintet or Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King.

I think related/similar languages can be picked up on the fly, but if (for example) you’re only familiar with object-oriented languages, you need a more comprehensive introduction to your first functional language.