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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   1594 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 28, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Some opinions issued by the US Supreme Court have been fairly long. But have you ever devoted any thought to the International Court of Justice?

The ICJ's opinion on the legality of the secession of Kosovo from Serbia (penned by President Judge Owada of Japan, for a majority of nine against a minority of five) is 54 pages—far from outrageous. (Compare the US Supreme Court's recent 42-page majority opinion regarding Trump's presidential immunity.) But there also are nine other opinions from individual judges. Of those, the longest (a concurrence from Judge Cançado Trindade of Brazil) is 95 pages by itself, and the other eight (three concurrences and five dissents) take up 78 pages in total. And you can add to that both a 31-page summary of all the opinions and an eight-page press release super-summarizing the majority opinion. That's a total of 266 A4 pages—easily enough to make a book! (The aforementioned US Supreme Court stuff has only 64 pages of separate opinions and 8 pages of summary, for a total of 114 letter-size pages. Note also that the US Supreme Court uses significantly larger margins than the ICJ does.)

Programmers love semantic versioning.

Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:

  1. MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes

  2. MINOR version when you add functionality in a backward compatible manner

  3. PATCH version when you make backward compatible bug fixes

Additional labels for pre-release and build metadata are available as extensions to the MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH format.

Can this be applied to fiction writing?

Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:

  1. MAJOR version when you make a retcon

  2. MINOR version when you add information in a backward compatible manner (e. g., a new chapter)

  3. PATCH version when you make backward compatible fixes (e. g., to English or continuity errors)

Additional labels for pre-release (e. g., Patreon-exclusive vs. public) and build (e. g., HTML/EPUB vs. Word/PDF, or fanfiction.net vs. archiveofourown.org) metadata are available as extensions to the MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH format.

Programmers love semantic versioning.

also popular

Semver is one of a couple programming concepts that are widely applicable. Mostly my field is full of cutesy bullshit that prevents the art from being taken seriously (PHP? Gulp/Grunt/JavaScript in general?) but yeah, it's awesome.

Europeans sometimes note the American (or perhaps Anglo) ability to get to the fucking point in an efficient manner. With law, the example I usually heard cited was constitutions, but I heard similar comparisons of academic papers, though I think in that case Europeans learned to boil things down a bit.

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