Apiary
Fabian GiesenFUN FACT: the "nano" prefix ultimately descends from Ancient Greek "nanos", which means "dwarf".
Consequently, translating "nanotechnology" as "dwarven machinery" is arguably defensible.
As an aside, we use impossibly bright, impossibly blue light to inscribe tiny runes on sand, producing constructs that obey our commands (well, sometimes...) and communicate with us through literal liquid crystals.
This is not a fantasy setting. I'm just describing the real world
(well I'm leaving out 1000s of in-between steps, but still)
ARGVMI~1.PIF
Giacomo Tesio@[email protected]
Programmers change how the world behave through arcane words.
This is literally why I learned Pascal when I was 13: to become a powerful wizard.
Couldn't figure the horrible molochs I was going to face, trying to protect my family and friends not from evil wizards like me, but from evil almighty guilds like #BigTech that most people trust!
@[email protected]
Programmers change how the world behave through arcane words.
This is literally why I learned Pascal when I was 13: to become a powerful wizard.
Couldn't figure the horrible molochs I was going to face, trying to protect my family and friends not from evil wizards like me, but from evil almighty guilds like #BigTech that most people trust!
@[email protected]
das-g
Marc@argv_minus_one @rygorous it's a shame computer people aren't called electromancers 😢
Wolf480pl
Fiona Ebner@rygorous
> There's magic everywhere
> Just be aware
- From the Blind Guardian song "Straight Through the Mirror"
> There's magic everywhere
> Just be aware
- From the Blind Guardian song "Straight Through the Mirror"
Gwen the Loitering Fox 
@rygorous you forgot the fact that the commands must be issued in arcane languages that no one speaks out loud but several practitioners understand, and whatever those commands say will be executed exactly as said. That's why sometimes it doesn't do what we want, because it always does what we asked it to
ein kleines z
Orangenoel@kleines_z @gwenthefops @rygorous
Well, that's not casting a spell, that's summoning a demon...
Claudius
Martin Vermeer FCD@rygorous And we ride flying machines over the ocean while doing it. And this
https://fediscience.org/@martinvermeer/111782633809967989
It's a magical world...
Frost, wolf of winter 🐺🎄
@rygorous The programming them is rune magic, too! Except the stuff it's written on doesn't even physically exist.
HighlandLawyer
Moritz Negwer@rygorous and when we power them with fossil fuels, we use the heat of a long-bygone sunshine, captured in decaying jungles whose rotting remains were trapped in caverns under the ground for untold eons, then dug up and burnt to make artificial lightning... More than a bit of necromancy in fossil fuel, if you ask me
HolgerPieta@rygorous Any technology discernible from magic is not sufficiently advanced.
Aras Pranckevičius@rygorous good timing on my timeline, so @MikkoMononen made dwarven vector graphics.
@aras @MikkoMononen yeah that was the inspiration :)
dragonfrog
xenia 
Loïc Denuzière@rygorous And this is how I realize that nano has the same root as nain... (dwarf in french)
@tarmil Latin imported it as nanus, and from there on into the Romance languages, I expect
LR
Luigi 
Heals 
@rygorous so we’re all developing to a steampunk age… kinda?
Count me in!
/cc @jakehamilton
Erebus@rygorous Funfact if you add an "e" at the beginning of "nano", you have "enano*", which is the spanish word for "dwarf"
*probably but not enterily sure to have the same root.
Edit: I just look the word in the dictionary and it is indeed the same root, so apparently there is no joke xD. (From the latin "nanus", and "nanus" from the greek "nanos")
Ronflaix
Fissile
Renato Ramonda@rygorous you just described Italian.
Nano: same word.
Bill, organizer of stuff@rygorous And, as foretold, "The dwarves delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dum-GPT... shadow and flame."
Arthfach 🐻
Gen Denelith
Daniel Johnson@rygorous Interesting! The Spanish word for dwarf is “enano.” I never thought of the Greek connection, since so few words of Greek origin made it into Spanish without a Latin intermediary.
@ossobuffo there is a latin intermediary, sort of, but it's just an actual Greek loan word in Latin (nanus)
@rygorous @ossobuffo chances are that @yvanspijk has a cool infographic on how this word root moved around all across the Indo-European language family
Yoïn van Spijk@yvanspijk @rygorous @ossobuffo Looking forward to the eventual nano/nanus/(e)Nan(e/o) vs dwerg/zwerg/dwarf ... graphic :)
Martin Owens 
"…the dwarfs found out how to turn lead into gold by doing it the hard way. The difference between that and the easy way is that the hard way works."
- The Truth, Terry Pratchett
This is all I hear when we see crystals being used by engineers in modern technology vs. being used in healing woo.
Andrew (Television Executive)@rygorous sounds like someone has been doing some uncleftish beholding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding
Jose Luis Peruyero@rygorous
And you still see that in modern spanish, where "dwarf" is "enano".
And you still see that in modern spanish, where "dwarf" is "enano".
Pēteris Krišjānis@rygorous I will borrow this for dad joke round. Also, this tracks 😅
Zeborah@rygorous And "technology" is from tekhne meaning craft/skill/art, so you could say "dwarven craft(s)".
D. G. Marshall
It's Anthony!@rygorous Yagrum Bagarn sends his regards
Xenotime, Librarian of Æther 
@rygorous ok but a fab space in one of those exploded out caves like the Stockholm metro would go unbelievably hard
Benny Powers 🇮🇱🦁@rygorous dwarven make-doery
@rygorous So I did a little digging on where the metric prefixes came from.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix
kilo = 1000, from Greek χίλιοι; milli = 1/1000, from Latin mille. Each word means one thousand in its respective language.
mega = million, from Greek μέγας, "great"; micro = 1/million, from Greek μικρός, "small."
giga = billion, from Greek γίγας, "giant"; nano = 1/billion, from Greek νᾶνος, "dwarf."
tera = trillion, from Greek τέρας, "monster"; pico = 1/trillion, source unknown.
peta = quadrillion, from the Greek letter "eta" (which in the old Greek system of numeric notation had the value 5) with a p prefix for uniqueness; femto = 1/quadrillion, source unknown.
exa = quintillion, from the Greek ἕξ meaning six; atto = 1/quintillion, source unknown. (In ancient Greek, six was denoted by the letter ϝ digamma, which represented the "w" sound in some dialects. In Byzantine times its position in both the alphabet and in the numeric system was replaced by the letter stigma, which morphed into a sigma-tau ligature. The Latin alphabet borrowed the old digamma's shape and its position in the alphabet for the letter F. See the Wikipedia articles on these below.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digamma
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigma_(ligature)
The other greater-than-1 prefixes are taken from the names of Greek letters from the numeric system, with a one-letter prefix so that their abbreviation is unique. The less-than-1 prefixes are derived from the corresponding greater-than-1, but with a different word ending. The former have an uppercase abbreviation, the latter have a lowercase one.
Sorry, this is one of my autism special interests, so of course I needed to infodump!
Therefore, a trillionaire is a monster.