@jonny This query made me think of the soundex key. It only applies to individual words in English, but you can calculate their key which enables you to find words with close pronunciation. However, it is absolutely not collision-resistant.

archives.gov/research/census/s…

PHP even has had a native function for this since 2000: php.net/manual/en/function.sou…

@clacke @tfb French AZERTY keyboards have dedicated keys for é, è, à, ù and ç. US International keyboard requires combination presses, like ` and then a for à, ‘ then e for é, etc…

This makes it easy to write accented capital letters by combining with a capital letters, while French keyboard dedicated keys don’t have capital versions like you said. For example Shift + é gives 2.

@clacke @mdhughes It could be exponential if it's planning is centralized. The problem with space is that there's a lot of nothing. On Earth we enjoy a balmy 30% of stuff compared to 70% of "nothing", but in space the ratio becomes absolutely ridiculous, even before accounting for livability.

So you'd first need to bring life support systems to the remote planet, and then somehow all the infrastructure for space travel if you'd want to jump to the next planet without fully developing the first one?

It sounds unlikely to me.

@clacke I’m sorry you had to find out the hard way, although this kind of “feel old yet?” social media posts has never been relatable to me. I’m not sure why I am among apparently few people with a minimally distorted age appraisal ability when it comes to people, music and movies?

It’s like for most people, things don’t age until they are actively reminded about how old they are, and so have a puzzlingly hard time conceiving past things aging gradually.

Is this supposed to be a marginally hard/rare skill?