Email or username:

Password:

Forgot your password?
Fabio's posts Post Back to profile
Top-level
Kye Fox

@blacklight Medieval times gave us all kinds of cool inventions like the printing press and eyeglasses.

It's easy to look back at stuff like that and miss what's made possible when engineers are able to spend their energy on the useful part instead of on optimizing. I'm happy to let Firefox and Chrome use a half gig at rest for what I can do with them.

FWIW, VSCode is only at ~200MB right now with tens of documents open. It's a good trade for me.

30 Jul 2023 at 14:28 | Wall-to-wall | Open on tech.lgbt
3 comments
Fabio Manganiello

@Kye the printing press came around the 16th century (Gutenberg) and eyeglasses came around the 17th (Huygens and other Dutch inventors).

I've used that example because the Middle Ages (especially the early period) were indeed a period when engineering skills from the Greek and Roman period were lost. It took us more than a millennium before we figured out (with Brunelleschi) how to build a large dome like the one used in the Pantheon, and the same goes for the art of Roman concrete production.

30 Jul 2023 at 16:09 | Open on social.platypush.tech
Panda | 판다

@blacklight @Kye The Jikji was printed in 1377 and there may well have been books printed even earlier that haven’t survived so although Gutenberg developed the printing press in the West (in 1455), it came around earlier in Korea.

30 Jul 2023 at 21:14 | Open on assemblag.es
dagnymol

@blacklight @Kye Early eyeglasses existed in the thirteenth century and the modern printing press in the early fifteenth (Gutenberg died in 1468)

Additionally, the idea of a "dark ages" is extremely Western-centric idea, particularly ignoring the contributions of the Islamic golden age (8th to 13th centuries) which brought us the astrolabe, windmills, solid soap, manufactured glass, kerosene lamps, water clocks, pinhole cameras, various gears and valves, the entire basis of algebra, and much of the basis for modern chemistry.

@blacklight @Kye Early eyeglasses existed in the thirteenth century and the modern printing press in the early fifteenth (Gutenberg died in 1468)

Additionally, the idea of a "dark ages" is extremely Western-centric idea, particularly ignoring the contributions of the Islamic golden age (8th to 13th centuries) which brought us the astrolabe, windmills, solid soap, manufactured glass, kerosene lamps, water clocks, pinhole cameras, various gears and valves, the entire basis of algebra, and much of the...

2 Aug 2023 at 12:05 | Open on pony.social
Go Up