GamingChairModel

Most of the time it doesn't escalate into a contentious debate, sure. Lots of discussions where the things I read change my view on things, and I'm sure my own comments change others' view on things too.

But by the time it starts to take on the style of an actual debate, there's less room to convince someone who feels strongly enough to engage in the debate. Still, it's worth doing sometimes because in these public forums, the debate might be read by thousands of lurkers, some of whom didn't feel strongly enough to have a view, but walk away convinced that one of the two sides is more correct.

I know I've been convinced of a side while watching two others debate.

The "ninjas stole my dog/wife/kids, need money for karate lessons" joke itself predates smartphones. I used to see this sign from panhandlers all throughout the 2000's.

But I've never been genuinely tempted by tens of millions of dollars before. I can't imagine it would just be "one big moment", more like slowly boiling a frog.

I think a substantial majority of people wouldn't be tempted to do world-changing bad things for direct personal gain of even billions of dollars. But the corruption is, as you note, gradual.

And the mechanism isn't direct personal gain, but gain for an institution they control: a church, a corporation, a newspaper, a university, a nonprofit. A promise of a reliable stream of income, political influence, or other goodwill for the organization is often irresistible because the person in charge doesn't feel selfish or corrupt when accepting those benefits on behalf of an altruistic mission rather than for their own personal gain, so their conscience doesn't kick in quite as sharply.

Yeah, yeah, the stubborn handles that just won't go away, I've heard it before.

That's a very, very common project management analogy.

I was born on January 1, 1970, at exactly midnight in London. My OS will confirm this.

What if Claude was one of us?

Yes, but I bring it up for the specific example of using our own eyes to achieve this effect, rather than relying on a camera. We don't have a choice to change the focal length of our own eyes, or even crop the image, but the effect is still there.

Focal length equivalent assumes a 35mm sensor or film format. 50mm on 35mm is basically the human range of view (although human eyes are interesting in that our resolution is so much sharper in the middle of the sensor than on the edges, and there's significant variation between individuals.

But the important part is that it isn't actually focal length that makes the effect. It's distance from the camera. If you do a dolly zoom with a fixed focal length lens, where you still push or pull the camera towards or away from a subject, you can still see this effect on the nose and the ears.

A flat, two dimensional representation of a three dimensional object will always have distortion. The effect we see here is about distortion that changes with camera distance, and the change itself is what makes things feel strange.

Technically focal length doesn't matter directly, only indirectly, because the phenomenon is almost entirely defined by the distance from the camera and the subject. If you have a 50mm lens and take the photo as far away as the 200mm lens, the person will look roughly the same when cropped down to the same apparent size (minus the loss of resolution from cropping and a smaller effective sensor size).

If you slap on a 200mm lens on a camera within 2 meters of your subject, though, you might not be able to focus, and if you can you wouldn't be able to fit their entire face in frame.

But that also means our eyes, with our fixed focal lengths, can experience the same thing, by just moving closer or further away from a subject. Our visual cortex automatically adjusts a lot of things, but get up close and see someone's ears or hair shrink in relative terms compared to their nose, or get far away and see their nose get back to a normal ratio to their eyes or ears.

Side note, this is a big reason why I don't care for selfies. I don't like the distortion.

The day is the number I want to know most of the time. Day, month, year, in order of which number you most likely need to know first.

No, getting the year wrong by 1 is much more significant than getting the day wrong by 1. If you're arguing that it won't happen because people will infer from context the correct year, then you're actually assuming that the person already does know the year first. The only reason why people don't state the year is because it is already known by the listener. But just because it's unstated doesn't mean that it isn't critically important.

If you're measuring duration, for example, you will put the largest unit first. The longest serving prime minister of the UK served for 20 years and 315 days. Magellan's expedition around the lasted 2 years, 11 months, and 16 days, if you count from Sanlúcar de Barrameda. The course record for the Iditarod race is 7 days, 14 hours, 8 minutes, and 57 seconds.

And some languages are more irregular than others about numbers. In English, we say "sixteen" where the ones digit is said before the tens digit. French has some base 20 naming conventions that screw up the order, too.

But when we write numbers, we go left to right, largest to smallest. That's why describing time should follow the same convention, and why ISO 8601 exists.

You're using the word "significant" in a colloquial/informal way, but in terms of the strict mathematical definition, most significant digits to least significant is about the size of the unit. If you were to create a dial system, the most significant digits move the slowest and the least significant digits move the fastest.

Or, if you are rounding a measurement to the N most significant figures, you are by definition keeping the largest units and rounding off the rest.

So ISO 8601 properly orders it left to right, largest to smallest, without exceptions. It can be truncated for lower precision, like how 2026-09-14T20:15:35 takes place in a particular year (2026), or a particular calendar month (2026-09) or a particular day (2026-09-14).

It's the best format and everyone should use it.