Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?

Now that's one tricky rabbit hole. If you are planning on buying a camera, the deliberation seems to be a part of the shopping process. Post buying though, the differences seem either very important, or don't matter at all. Depends on how serious you want to get with the cameras.

It was what resulted in Gnosticism, not the other way around.

You had this first century response to Epicureanism's naturalism as a foundation. In that paradigm, the Platonist demiurge recreating the physical world before it was an agent of salvation, liberating the copies from the certainty of death from the Epicurean original.

What happens is that Epicureanism falls from popularity over the second century, so in parallel to the increased resurgence of Platonism, Plato's forms becomes the foundation instead. For Plato, there was a perfect world of the blueprints of everything, the corrupted physical versions of those forms, and then the worst of all was the images of the physical. So the Thomasine salvation by being in the images of physical originals is through that lens corruptive.

So as the foundation shifted from the Epicurean original world of evolution (Lucretius straight up described survival of the fittest in book 5) to Plato's perfect forms, a demiurge creating a copy of what predated it shifted from being a good thing to trapping people in a corrupted copy.

For the first 50 years of the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas, it was mistakenly thought to be Gnostic. This changed at the turn of the 21st century with the efforts of Michael Allen Williams and Karen King, and it's now labeled as "proto-Gnostic." It's absent a lot of the features typically associated with 'Gnosticism' though that term in general should be retired as it's turned out that there isn't any single set of beliefs to be considered 'Gnostic' in the first place (this was the chief realization of scholars over the past twenty years).

The wonderful world of research paper identifiers.

DOI (Digital Object Identifiers) are used by many modern research papers as sort of a UUID for papers, run by doi.org.

But they're discipline-specific. So they're used widely by certain disciplines. But others use different databases.

So for biology-related papers, NIH's PubMed ID. Or for Astronomers, Bibcode.

All are "global" identifiers and each has some kind of consortium that's trying to make theirs the One ID. DOI seems to be the closest.

USB is a frighteningly deep rabbit hole. I thought it was going to be easy when I first dipped my toes into the USB stack but boy was I in for a shock.

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