> This is kind of stuff is absolutely as old as time,

I've only very recently become interested in ancient history, so I'm still very ignorant about this.

Are there any particular examples of this tactic you'd suggest studying?

It's Art of War.

"18. All warfare is based on deception. "

AoW is one of the most important historical treatises, it's not just 'something that was written in history', maybe the oldest true 'textbooks' of objective knowledge, and also realpolitik. Also there's hints of metaphysics in there, in a way. It absolutely stands up today.

The very first work of the Western Cannon: Trojan Horse.

Information / espionage and deception has made most of history; Hannibal, Caesar, Alexander etc.

A fun exercise would be to look at battles of history from the lens of information warfare and deception, and contemplate the outcome without it.

Canon, not cannon. Then again, since this is about war, maybe it should be cannon. Lol.

Not the military stuff but Arab tribal society, read "The First Muslim" by Lesley Hazleton, about Arab society around the year 600. It's an absolute eye-opener.

Thanks for the tip about that book!

I'm case it's helpful to anyone, here's one review of it: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2vxts5/comme...

Seems like a tough area of history to be certain about.

> Prompt processing on Macs is VERY slow...

That sounds like a contradiction.

/J

Just mentioning this in case it's helpful:

If you know ahead of time which programs / processes are at risk of unacceptably high memory usage, check out "ulimit".

I think I've heard late-career engineers from the past century say similar things, although I can't remember exactly quotes.

I wonder if every generation of engineers ends up with such hand-wringing about the next.

I'm also genuinely curious what fraction of the time they were right to worry.

I had a similar issue yesterday with classical Greek. Some website used a typeface that renders one of the diacritics in a totally unfamiliar way.

I had to copy and paste the text into another doc and change the typeface to understand.

I suppose that you refer to the circumflex accent, because that can differ wildly between Greek typefaces.

Some render it similarly to a French circumflex accent, others render it like a tilde.

I think it was either the "smooth" or "acute" symbol, but it was originally rendered as (approximately) a vertical line.

That really interesting.

To be fair, modern "English" is a nebulous smorgasbord of words from a lot of different languages. I'm sure we could afford to drop a lot of the words from clusters of synonyms.

> we could afford to drop a lot of the words from clusters of synonyms

Not really, because every synonym imparts a slightly different meaning, usually perceptable only to native speakers. That's why they persist, because they are useful even if not strictly necessary.

I recall a team working on machine translation starting by translating English into a simpler form before translating that into the target languages. This was a couple of decades ago. Perhaps not a new idea even then.

You can take those 'useless', redundant synonyms from my cold, dead brain cells!

Vim!

(Mostly joking.)

Exactly. The true answer is ed

In the US, the equation isn't quite so simple. Being unemployed can mean poor or no health insurance, which is also a health risk.

The economy is not in good shape right now.

So you’re saying OP’s choice is between dying for their job, or potentially dying without one?

In that case the focus should be on the immediate emergency (of being ill because of work) than the potential risk (of getting ill while jobless)

Wow! I wonder what the physiology of that was.

Ooh, next do "MBAs" ;)