In fact, it seems to be just “hierarchy”. Oh wait “hierarchy with a computer”. With “hierarchy” being an Ancient Greek word thousands of years old.

Noted.

And yes, we did something similar in uni in Pascal in the 1990s.

And yes, I did Shit a fair amount of GPT to get that summary.

But yeah, that company attempting to patent tree views is insane. Especially when they only shipped the feature in beta on 2023 and then pulled the feature.

1. Antiquity and the Middle Ages – Early Outlines

• Aristotle (4th c. BCE): Aristotle’s logical works (the Categories, Topics, Posterior Analytics) introduced hierarchical classification of concepts (e.g., genus species subspecies). These were not indented trees in the modern typographic sense, but were often rendered in later commentaries as branching diagrams or stepwise lists.
• Porphyry’s Isagoge (3rd c. CE): Introduced the “Tree of Porphyry” (Arbor Porphyriana), a famous diagram of how genera divide into species. Medieval manuscripts frequently depicted it as a literal tree or as a branching hierarchy. This is probably the earliest “tree hierarchy” diagram in Western tradition.

2. Medieval and Scholastic Outlines (12th–15th centuries)

• Scholastic manuscripts used outline formats with nested structures, marked by letters (A, B, C), numerals (I, II, III), or alternating systems (I.1.a).
• Example: Peter Lombard’s Sentences (12th c.) and Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica (13th c.) are organized into major parts, questions, articles, objections replies. Manuscripts often show them as indented or cascading lists, essentially early outline trees.

3. Early Printed Encyclopedias and Tables of Contents

• 16th century encyclopedias and legal codices began using tables of contents that were hierarchical, with indentation or stepped numerals.
• Example: Conrad Gesner’s Bibliotheca Universalis (1545) and Historia Animalium (1551–58) used hierarchical subject divisions, sometimes visually tabulated.
• Legal codes (e.g., Corpus Juris Civilis, rediscovered 11th c. and printed 16th c.) were also structured hierarchically with books titles chapters sections.

4. Early Modern Systems

• Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (1605): explicitly presented a tree of knowledge divided into disciplines and subdisciplines, often printed with indentation.
• Diderot & d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751): had a famous “tree of knowledge” diagram based on Bacon, with branches into philosophy, theology, sciences, arts.

5. Library Classification Systems

• Dewey Decimal Classification (1876): Explicitly hierarchical in decimal notation. Not typically indented in early catalogs, but by design it’s a tree structure (e.g., 500 510 516).
• Library of Congress Classification (1897 onward): Used an alphanumeric hierarchy with indentation in catalogs.

TL;DR – Earliest Examples

• Tree of Porphyry (3rd c. CE): first explicit hierarchical tree diagram.
• Scholastic outlines (12th–13th c.): earliest indented/nested list format in manuscripts.
• Early printed encyclopedias & legal codes (16th c.): hierarchical tables of contents.
• Dewey Decimal System (1876): modern numeric hierarchy for catalogs.

I cannot think of a better application for Betteridge’s Law of Headlines.

Fluffernitter is unwilling or unable to understand and differentiate various concepts such as revenue, profit, cashflow, creditor liabilities, parts, labour, and opportunity cost. In his business, which is probably a lemonade stand on his parent’s lawn, a factory shutdown doesn’t cost anything and doesn’t affect revenue, P&L or balance sheet, because “cars that were never made haven’t cost anything”.

He is unwilling or unable to understand and differentiate various concepts such as revenue, profit, cashflow, creditor liabilities, parts, labour, and opportunity cost.

In his business, which is probably a lemonade stand on his parent’s lawn, a factory shutdown doesn’t cost anything and doesn’t affect revenue, P&L or balance sheet, because “cars that were never made haven’t cost anything”.

The article provides an adequate summary of the situation.

For instance, it opens with the line: “Jaguar Land Rover has halted production for nearly a month following a major cyberattack, costing an estimated 30,000 vehicles and billions in lost revenue.” It then goes on to outline the impact on suppliers.

The shutdown resulted in billions in lost revenue. Your claim that “cars that were never made haven’t cost anything” is incorrect. When production is disrupted, revenue declines significantly more than expenses, whether through reduced sales, missed opportunities, or lost market share. The result is a direct reduction in profits.

The better analogy is one of a cow that is unable to be milked due to equipment failure or staffing shortage. The milk is wasted and revenue decreases more than expenses. This is a net cost to the business.

Surely even you would understand that when a grocery store is closed for an extended period, some milk and bread on the shelves and in fridges becomes spoilt and no longer sellable, some wages to workers that were going to stock the shelves or sell the milk is lost, contractual obligations to suppliers for unwanted milk and bread deliveries must be paid, etc? And that’s just a small grocery store. Not a high tech factory with industrial robots, complex production processes and deep supply chains.

From a user perspective? Not much. From a business perspective? Just ask Stackoverflow’s accountants.

Ah yes. But can you steal all of Slashdot? And Wikipedia. And Reddit. And Twitter. And

The actual BBC article is better: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews%2Fartic... The Slashdot summary linked to a BBC blog item rather than an article.

I think the joke is that if it exactly one light millisecond away, it is likely due to extraterrestrial intelligence with knowledge of human conventions.

Agreed. In fact it is even worse than that. The figure 186,000 miles does not have three significant figures, because it is itself converted from 300,000 km.

What’s AT&T? I bought iPhone 1 (just called iPhone) for £269 on O2 in 2007.

Possibly true for minimum device thickness, but not true for device volume.

Volume is additive: Apple likely considers the volume of the USB C port worthwhile, whereas the volume of the physical SIM not justified.