At least once in your life, visit the Sagrada Família. As you approach, don't look up to it. It's tempting, but wait. Keep walking until you're right in front of it. Then look up. You'll be staring at the most stunning building ever made by human hands: the scale, the intricacy, the stonework.
Go inside. It’s worth it. The light is beautiful, and the architecture rewards unhurried attention. Take your time to wander, don't rush.
One hundred and fifty years in the making, and still unfinished. The two completed façades serve as the "secondary" entrances; the main entrance is yet to be built. Completing the project will require demolishing four city blocks, a plan that is controversial and complicated because people live there. Many of those residents bought at lower prices with a clause acknowledging this; when the Sagrada Família is finished, they will have to leave.
When I found out I am going blind, I traveled around Europe solo for a summer and I found myself at La Sagrada Familia...once inside I almost cried because the light was so beautiful. And finding a special spot to just sit and enjoy an espresso on a sunny day with it in the background is blissful. I'm not religious at all, but many of the nicest buildings throughout my travels were places of worship.
I think it might be because places of worship have a function that is nowhere else to be found: a place for introspection.
Where a city is usually all entertainment and shops, a place for true rest and just enjoying the places is far rarer. Although some cities are wising up and creating more of those places in city planning.
Same here. On the other hand I think it is just how some people are. I do not appreciate art, and can live happily without music. Art in general, never gives me any profound experiences. Books on the other hand, now we're talking! Political performance art, also entertaining.
Idk if you ever shared this view with art people. It must have been hard because there is a sort of obligatory necessity that people MUST like art embedded into their worldview.
But also, there is a basic universality of art, and I wonder where it comes from, and what would make some people into it, and others, like you, not into it.
For some, it’s the sheer grandeur and architectural splendor. Strasbourg, Chartres, Cologne or Rouen Cathedrals, with their scale and delicate designs, often stand out.
For others, it’s the spiritual resonance of a place. The Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela has stirred something deeper within, but maybe that was just me. I experienced the same with Lourdes and Le Puy-en-Velay in France because they carried something that felt "sacred" and transformative, not only from the buildings but the actual place.
Then there are those who value historical or religious authority. Cathedrals like St. Peter’s in Rome or the Papal Palace in Avignon have that kind of symbolic weight, and I assume some would favor them over the more "profane" work of Gaudi.
As I wrote in another comment, I think the Sagrada Familia is a worthy successor for the grand gothic cathedrals you mentioned, because Gaudí made the most out of late 19th century technology, same as the medieval builders made the most out of the technology available at their time. I mean, just look at those branching columns: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia#/media/Da... But, to each his own.
I would like to add two (former) churches to your list: the Hagia Sophia (it's really humbling to think that it was already standing for 900+ years when the Turks conquered Constantinople 500+ years ago) and the Pantheon in Rome, which despite being several centuries older, had the largest dome in the world for more than 1000 years.
St Peter's Basilica is probably the most mind-blowing for me, even just because of the scale. The intricate facade of the Duomo in Milano, the green and while marble exteriors of the Duomo in Firenze, the (neoclassical?) architecture of St Paul's, the unusualness of St Francis of Assisi, Notre Dame (haven't gone back after the fire yet), the bright golden interiors of pretty much any Orthodox church,... Hagia Sophia if I may stretch the definitions a bit :)
I am not remotely religious, but I cried when I saw the inside. It is awe-inspiring in every sense of the word. It wasn't so much the objective quality I think, more that I was _surprised_ by how beautiful it was. The outside is, like others have said, somewhat kitschy, a little dated, more like an theme-park stoner version of a church. It just didn't connect with me, but the purity of the beauty inside just completely shook me to my core. Pictures do not capture it at all.
Yeah, this is really a building that you have to experience yourself, words and pictures don't do it justice. Gaudí is a worthy successor to the unknown masters who built the great gothic cathedrals: like them, he used the technology of his time to maximum effect. If you see all those towers from the outside and then go in, you're bound to wonder how the church can be so spacious on the inside. But somehow, it works...
First, small detail: "família" is not Spanish but rather Catalan. In Spanish it's "familia".
As for Sagrada Familia / Familia Sagrada: putting the adjective before the noun is sometimes done in Spanish to reinforce the importance of the adjective. "La blanca nieve" places focus on the color of the snow while "la nieve blanca" focuses on the snow itself.
> One hundred and fifty years in the making, and still unfinished.
The explanation behind this is usually the Spanish civil war, and then it's how the construction is funded by donations. The latter brings in a cynical twist, because the argument to keep the money flowing in ends the moment the cathedral is deemed finished. So you have a perverse incentive to stall the construction because once it's done then the whole economy around it will end as well.
Taking so long to finish it is not the badge of honor that's depicted. The project is just as complex as when it was when Gaudi died.
> There’s no “done, so we don’t need money any more”
Supposedly this happened to Paris' Notre Dame for many years until Victor Hugo published The Hunchback of Notre-Dame which re-ignited it in the general public's imagination.
A 6 re-org does not mean a '51% attack' was successful. In that case, we'd see unbounded-depth re-orgs/no blocks mined by any other mining pool (assuming the adversary censors other mining pools, as this one does).
It does mean an adversary with a high amount of hash got lucky. I noted there's a discrepancy between their claimed network hashrate and pools' claimed network hash rate.
They may not be including their own hash rate in the network's, in which case they'd need to exceed it. Having 51% would only be 34% of total.
They're an unreliable narrator and I wouldn't trust any data from them. There's insufficient evidence to claim they have 51% of the network's hash power.
I am not that well versed in crypto. I understand the concept of a blockchain and what an n block reorg is, but what is the downside of a reorg? Like who can profit financially and why?
I'm a little rusty with the terminology, but in a blockchain, the canonical current block is the one that has the greatest amount of proof of work (I think they call this the heaviest chain). Typically, each new block is the descendant of the most recent block. But it is possible to create a heavier chain from an earlier block. This invalidates any transactions on what was previously known to be the heaviest chain, and is called a reorg.
The farther back, the less likely a reorg is, so to have a reorg that invalidates is blocks is extremely unusual.
If one entity has a majority of the hash power, they gain the ability to try to force reorgs with a likelihood that increases with their advantage in hash power.
I typed all this before realizing I could have recommend you ask an LLM, and it probably would have given you a better answer.
No, it's not 6 blocks longer. It just needs to be 1 longer (i.e. 7 blocks since the last common block), which guarantees a higher cumulative difficulty and thus all honest miners will switch to the new branch, obsoleting 6 blocks on the old branch.
It would be impossible to enforce, and a place that HN that has leaders who evangelize AI as a cure-all would never do it, but "I asked AI and here's what it said" comments should be against the rules.
Most such comments are actually informative, and the honesty about asking an AI is an important detail. This particular one was heavily downvoted, as it should have been, because it was wrong. It was still a human writing, trying to be helpful.
You shouldn't downvote entries that are wrong, you should present evidence against them. People shouldn't feel penalized for being wrong, just not rewarded for it.
However, you should downvote for doing things that hurt the community -- and "I asked ChatGPT" hurts the community almost as much as "I googled this for you" does.
Downvoted for disagreement and for mentioning voting, but I'm telling you why because you think I ought to say something if I disagree, which I'm able to do in this case.
It's fine to downvote things that you believe are wrong or simply disagree with, and I have read mods on HN say that downvoting for disagreement is okay. Asking or insisting for more from an HN user is presumptuous, and discussion of voting is largely considered off-topic and therefore not really what the guidelines suggests we should do.
> Downvoting for disagreement has always been fine on HN. People sometimes assume otherwise because they're implicitly porting the rules from a larger site, but that's a mistake.
> HN has never allowed bots or generated comments. If we have to, we'll add that explicitly to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, but I'd say it already follows from the rules that are in there. We don't want canned responses from humans either!
These are quotes from dang, not my own. I'm just a HN user, which is why I found the quotes to help everyone make up their own mind what the guidelines say.
I would tend to agree that it usually does benefit the discussion to say why one disagrees instead of a simple drive-by downvote, but when folks have already agreed to disagree or are in the process of reaching such agreement, more rabble-rousing inclined folks tend to jump into the fraying thread to sow discord, so I understand why it’s not in the guidelines that we must specify why we downvote or flag instead of just doing so.
The whole comment is worth a read, so here’s just a taste:
> Our goal is to optimize HN for intellectual curiosity, which requires a higher signal/noise ratio. Downvotes dampen low-value comments. I know downvotes do bad things too, but that's the good thing they do, and it's big. Taking that away and/or increasing the noise with a flood of people disagreeing about their disagreements would not be an optimization.
"They" refers to Qubic (by Sergey Ivancheglo), a blockchain network that uses a "Useful Proof-of-Work" system, so it is not built for traditional cryptocurrency mining that solves arbitrary puzzles. Instead, it uses the collective processing power of its miners to train an AI. Qubic's AI-training work is performed by CPUs, same as used by RandomX (Monero's mining algo).
Qubic was able to orchestrate its network of miners to temporarily halt their AI-related tasks and redirect their collective CPU power to mine on the Monero network instead.
Also, Qubic has implemented an economic strategy that involves selling the Monero it mines for a stablecoin like USDT and then using those funds to benefit its own ecosystem and attract more miners, and renting hardware to gain more hash power. The proceeds from the sale of XMR are used to buy Qubic's native token (QUBIC) from exchanges. These purchased tokens are then "burned" or permanently removed from circulation.
I've looked into the "source code", and it doesn't. There is no such thing as useful PoW. Qubic isn't actually a decentralized cryptocurrency. It's closed source, runs as a EFI executable, and is only accessible from their discord channel.
The attack is no different than paying miners to join a malicious pool. It works as long as money flows in.
There is such a thing as useful proof of work. Qubic may not be doing it but it does exist. The linked papers [1][2] are examples of way to do it. They aren't 100% "useful" but rather achieve partial efficiency by essentially forcing miners down random paths in a manner that limits the ability to complete work ahead of time or otherwise "cheat".
I mean that's just proof of work. PoUW is just an attempt at converting some of that work into something worthwhile and not pointless hash grinding.
There's a lot of re-inventing the wheel in the cryptocurrency space but on the formal academics side of the space people are very cognizant of what they are working on and their work is focusing on improving very specific properties of consensus algorithms.
Not really-- or, rather, the security provided by proof of work is only proportional to the part of the cost above the fair value of the useful work.
One of the main idea behind POW security is that you spend energy and the thing you get for it is income in the blockchain. And so if you mine unfaithfully your work will end up on a chain of debased value or won't end up in the eventual consensus chain at all.. so your effort is burnt out.
Now imagine a POW that costs $5 in energy and does $5 in "useful work" --- well in that system you can now attack for 'free'. Or say it costs $6 in energy to mine plus due $5 in "useful work". There your security is related to the $1, the $5 is mostly coming along for a ride.
There are other problems with "useful" proof of work: e.g. A POW function should ideally be approximation free and optimization free... if an attacker invents a better version they gain an advantage. So e.g. if the miner detects that this particular work instance is 'hard' they can just discard it and try another. This makes it really hard to do much of anything 'useful' except the most contrived kinds of 'useful' without creating vulnerabilities.
But difficulties aside, the fact that outside benefits don't contribute to security (or at least don't contribute much) makes the whole idea space kind of unexciting.
> Not really-- or, rather, the security provided by proof of work is only proportional to the part of the cost above the fair value of the useful work.
This is only partially true for a number of reasons.
> Now imagine a POW that costs $5 in energy and does $5 in "useful work" --- well in that system you can now attack for 'free'. Or say it costs $6 in energy to mine plus due $5 in "useful work". There your security is related to the $1, the $5 is mostly coming along for a ride.
This is one aspect however you make assumptions about the rewards that are not necessarily true. If rewards only payout on a cycle or if the rewards have a locking/"vesting" schedule before they become accessible. There's a lot of ways to make attacks more expensive/nonviable but without the "useful work" aspect, they've not provided meaningful benefits to the protocol and therefore haven't been integrated.
> There are other problems with "useful" proof of work: e.g. A POW function should ideally be approximation free and optimization free... if an attacker invents a better version they gain an advantage. So e.g. if the miner detects that this particular work instance is 'hard' they can just discard it and try another. This makes it really hard to do much of anything 'useful' except the most contrived kinds of 'useful' without creating vulnerabilities.
Now with this you'd see that the research papers explicitly were tackling this problem. The one is implementing an SMT solver/optimizer for large, expensive problems. It uses random walks (forcing the miner to bias their choices in specific random ways) based on a VRF or their results are invalid. The efficiency is only 50% of course however that doesn't mean the price is 50%, just that the energy efficiency is 50%. The market on problems to be solved of course will still be priced on supply/demand (give or take parameters) and if there is insufficient utilization, mining falls back to a traditional PoW algorithm.
So in a sense what PoUW is attempting to do is to supplement the valuation of the underlying tokens via production/cash inflow rather than purely relying on demand for tokens to pay the transaction fees.
Also I do want to point out that those papers aren't just making claims, they include a lot of verification and proofs to demonstrate the functionality of the systems in question.
> But difficulties aside, the fact that outside benefits don't contribute to security (or at least don't contribute much) makes the whole idea space kind of unexciting.
The interest is in being able to produce a digital resource (that can be used for consensus) from a physically hard task while actually producing something of value as a side effect.
Gold and other metals were valuable as currency because they were difficult to mine however their value increased because practical uses for the metals increased demand beyond the synthetic demand as a currency. That increased incentives for mining which led to more mining. Eventually it reached equilibrium.
Also notably outside of a given PoUW algorithm's viability as a PoW, it's still important research because every PoUW algorithm that is game theoretically sound is viable as a decentralised market for computation/work where cheating is effectively non-viable.
I will have to read these papers then. My intuition is that it's impossible to usefully use PoW to train neural networks because you have to rely on user-submitted training data in order to work which allows you to cheat by pre-determining the solution to your own work.
It's not a terrible idea, but I've yet to see it be inplemented. Gridcoin is one typical example where it's just PoS with "useful PoW" tacked on for token distribution, and doesn't actually use PoW for security.
Basically, Chainalisys was able to gather more offchain metadata (IP in this case by setting ip-logging nodes) that then helped them narrow down some heuristics to try to guess some things on the blockchain. From the leaked video, they can't trace nothing and they say "Monero is awesome". Cool.
And the US Dollar in cash is the easiest way for drug dealers to get payment for the drugs they are pushing on the street. Yet, the answer to that is not to demand that society goes cash-less. Money will always be used by people you disagree with. And you should not try to use the money itself as a way of limiting what people do. For if you do, one day it could be you that finds himself unable to spend his money the way he wants to because someone else, more powerful than you, disagrees with how you spend that money.
Using money that is yours should never be illegal. Prosecute the bad people for the bad thing they did in the first place to get the money / the bad thing that someone paid them money for.
It's much easier to follow someone using a public ledger than having to beg/subpoena banks for records with the broken/outdated AML/KYC/KYB system, with bank secrecy in many places, with banks participating in illicit activities too sometimes, etc.
> Theoretically it's possible that people use it for legal means, in practice 99% of people do not.
This is a completely made up statistic and it is showing your bias and/or ignorance about the topic. The lower estimates from industry sources like Chainalysis (0.15-0.62%) contrast sharply with higher academic estimates (23-46%) because the latter tend to include illicit activities that happen off chain but get "washed" on-chain which explains their own huge range of estimation... it is hard to quantify but nobody serious ever came close to 99%.
Something for which there are estimates close to 90% is the volume of transactions happening on centralized exchanges, and since these are required pretty much everywhere to follow AML procedures, just like traditional banks (sometimes even more intrusive than banks), it means it is just as easy, if not easier, to prosecute criminals who would use these... with the added bonus of having a public ledger with records of their activity on-chain.
> cash is the easiest way for drug dealers to get payment for the drugs they are pushing on the street. Yet, the answer to that is not to demand that society goes cash-less.
That is exactly what many are proposing, or at least a core argument of many anti-cash proponents.
Crypto is not money. Money is coupled to a value; crypto is as much a currency as paintings are: completely arbitrary.
Effectively, human work. Money is an abstraction over the relative value we assign physical goods; instead of bartering, we collectively agree on using money as an intermediate form. The financial system, then, is a lot more abstraction over the value of producers of things—and thereby human work.
Of course it's way more complex than that, but that's the basic difference between real-world money and crypto currencies.
I'm not a crypto bro by any means, but I think crypto satisfies those criteria.
If you want to know the actual answer however. The answer is debt. Or more specifically assets and liabilities on various bank ledgers. Those banks organically set the value to monetary systems. This system would fall apart without a forced taxation system for a given currency.
The actual value is debt and taxation. I'm not complaining, who am I to criticize? But that is the answer.
One could conceive of such a crypto ledger system, and that would be a CBDC.
Doesn't that come down to the same thing effectively? Debt and taxation are details of a system of trusted authorities built around the economic system of human work.
And if we consider a CBDC to still count as cryptocurrency, in my opinion we've just shifted the goal posts from a decentralised, anonymous, revolutionary, grass-roots form of digital currency to the technical underpinnings of the digitisation process of the global banking system.
The current centralization is what keeps it "stable". This stability makes the currency lose it's value in a very gradual way. Only housing, property, education, and healthcare are gaining value at a outlier rate.
Decentralization will incentivize hoarding. Why spend crypto when it might go to the moon tomorrow. Maybe that is a feature, maybe not.
Wrong. For all intent and purposes, you could switch any cryptocurrency with whatever FIAT in your sentence and it still applies. I don't hunt money and wear it as a necklace (lion teeth). I don't mine it out of a gold mine. It is given to me in exchange for work.
Given.
Exchange.
If you and I agree that we only accept little tin circles; What's the difference? When you say money, what are you referring to? Just the US bank note? Some brass coins? Any FIAT?
Today's FIAT have nothing to do with what currency, basically just a fancy IOU note, used to be.
Currency WAS representative of human work. Directly. The oldest known form are lion teeth. You had to WORK to get them. It was direct proof of work. And it was important to keep that link so no arbitrary value is taken or added to it.
The next major leap of currency was IOU notes. Notes that banks respected between each other. One bank gives you some paper that says "trust me, bro, I'm worth 2 lion teeth". You go to another bank and can exchange that paper back to 2 lion teeth.
At one point in time, the US bamboozled the entire world and declared the US dollar as some form of new gold bar (what it was previously tied to, gold; proof of work). Tying all of FIAT to it. A value that can more easily be arbitrarily changed. And, since then, propaganda reigns supreme and people like you are born. Praising a nonsensical paper as some kind immovable artefact of mankind.
Language evolved.
Law evolved.
Currency didn't evolve.
And, for some reason, you are fighting its evolution.
This is simply not correct. A fiat currency is ultimately bound to the performance of the global economy, so it sure ties into gold mines or the lion teeth gathered by hunters, I've you're so inclined to keep it savage.
The dollar is fundamentally a promise of the US government that they owe you a given amount of money. As long as the US government exists, a dollar is going to have a worth. You may debate the virtue of the US government all you want, but at the same time, there's nobody to give you any such guarantee for a Bitcoin, or an NFT. The moment the market settles for a new plaything, these binary numbers you praise will be entirely worthless. So when I say money, I'm referring to the trustworthiness of its issuer.
The only thing Crypto has brought us is a gambling system rich people use to get richer, and poor people use to loose money; lots of brainlessly burned electricity; a neat way to collect ransomware payouts; and a bunch of Ponzi schemes.
People like you like to feel smarter than anybody else, and I know you'll stay committed to cryptocurrency regardless of any reason. So I will drop out of this discussion here, as it's fruitless.
Government backing, our shared delusion, unicorn dust, take your pick: whatever it is, it's something stable enough that it doesn't experience quintuple digit deflation in a decade.
And you're comparing annualised inflation to the deflation over a decade, which is equally embarrassing. Regardless, all other things being equal anyone who has their own financial interests at heart would rather hold a currency that experienced 20,000% deflation since its creation than one that lost 99% of its value to inflation since its creation. Because the best predictor of future performance is past performance.
Did you just try to browbeat me for not breaking down the deflation over a time period... then compare 10 years of BTC movement to some arbitrary period of USD movement?
Then top it off by claiming someone would want a currency that deflates 20,000%?
no, no, I love 10% inflation, it's really good for employers, they can charge customers more because of "inflation", and they don't have to pay me any more, because their costs have gone up so much because of... "inflation".
You're being downvoted but as someone running an AI generation site, I can't even imagine the kind of bottom of the barrel filth you'd attract not even having the tiny deterrent of KYC.
You wouldn't end up being "just another generation site with crypto", you'd become a magnet for everyone who's generating things they're scared of having their legal identity tied to.
I had to stop supporting logged out users because 99% of the CSAM generated on the site came from people trying to skirt the basic login requirements.
Sorry but your privacy doesn't trump my not wanting to run a child porn site, and the overwhelming majority of the public manages to live through having to login in and pay for things with traceable money.
And before the conversation goes there: is it a perfect filter? No. But a 99% reduction (realistically near 100% reduction) in unwanted behavior is what I'd call very effective.
The moment you say "Please stop with FUD" I instantly assume that the reason you're actually worried about FUD is because it's directly linked to the value of your tokens.
genai.orchid.com (Note: I am not just affiliated with this company, but am "in charge of technology" for it... however, I haven't actually used this demo we are building, except to understand how to better generalize it into our overall platform; I thereby cannot vouch for the "quality", though I will happily vouch for it not stealing your money or anything.)
this is awesome. I hope some video editor comes up that can compete with Premiere. Then with pikimov and photopea, I could totally ditch Adobe for one. Have you considered open sourcing the app to benefit from contributors and build a community?
Good, it's great to have alternativew in this space. My gf uses Drip [1] and it's a very good app for this, it allows to also track mood, sexual activity, aches, etc...
There is a bit of a controversy around this. And I don't say you are wrong. It's just that I personally consider that Castilian should not be used and does no longer exist. Here's why I think it like so:
Castilian originated as one of several Romance dialects in the Iberian Peninsula. It developed in the Kingdom of Castile during the Middle Ages, distinct from other regional languages like Catalan or Galician. With the unification of Spain, Castilian gained prominence, eventually evolving into modern Spanish. This was not merely a linguistic shift but also a result of political and cultural dynamics. The language we now call Spanish has absorbed influences from Arabic, indigenous languages of the Americas, and others, diverging significantly from its medieval Castilian origins. For this, Castilian has now disappeared, you just need to read how Castilian was written to see it has nothing to do with modern Spanish.
Today, Spanish is spoken by over 500 million people worldwide. In contrast, the Castilian region of Spain has a much smaller population (~3M). Referring to the language as Spanish acknowledges its extensive global presence and its modern version. Just as we refer to the language originating in Tuscany as Italian, not Tuscanian, calling the language from Castile 'Spanish' aligns with common linguistic naming conventions. Languages often take their names from the nations or cultural entities they are associated with, not their specific regions of origin.
Modern linguistic institutions, like the Real Academia Española, regard 'Castilian' and 'Spanish' as synonyms but recommend 'Spanish' for its inclusive and global character.
This is a nice and thoughtful post and I agree mostly. I'd like to add that my use of the word "Castilian" reflects my experience of usage of the term here in Barcelona (when speaking "Spanish", Catalan, and English). It's not a hard rule of course, but people are especially likely to refer to Castille over Hispania when distinguishing from other languages spoken historically within the country.
The term also usefully refers to the prestige dialect of Spanish, as might be spoken in Madrid. This is useful to distinguish from e.g. the "al-andalus" (Andalusian) spoken in the south which is more treated as a dialect than a separate language (though the distinction is of course fuzzy).
(On the other hand Barcelona in particular has a significant population of sudamericanos who will usually say "español", certainly that term is well used and understood.)
> Castilian (castellano), that is, Spanish, is the native language of the Castilians. Its origin is traditionally ascribed to an area south of the Cordillera Cantábrica, including the upper Ebro valley, in northern Spain, around the 8th and 9th centuries; however the first written standard was developed in the 13th century in the southern city of Toledo. It is descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire, with Arabic influences, and perhaps Basque as well. During the Reconquista in the Middle Ages, it was brought to the south of Spain where it replaced the languages that were spoken in the former Moorish controlled zones, such as the local form of related Latin dialects now referred to as Mozarabic, and the Arabic that had been introduced by the Muslims. In this process Castilian absorbed many traits from these languages, some of which continue to be used today. Outside of Spain and a few Latin American countries, Castilian is now usually referred to as Spanish.
> In Spain and in some other parts of the Spanish-speaking world, Spanish is called not only español but also castellano (Castilian), the language from the Kingdom of Castile, contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician, Basque, Asturian, Catalan, Aragonese and Occitan.
> The Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term castellano to define the official language of the whole of Spain, in contrast to las demás lenguas españolas (lit. "the other Spanish languages").
It's the same language. I'm a Spaniard, so I know it well. Name it the way you'd like, it can be called Spanish, Español or Castellano everywhere from Mexico to Patagonia, and from The Canaries up to the Pyrenees.
"name it the way you'd like, it can be called Spanish" is a very different proposition to "[you should say] Spanish, Castilian does not exist [and you are wrong to use that name]", which was the angle of the poster who kicked all this off.
> from Mexico to Patagonia, and from The Canaries up to the Pyrenees.
Sounds a bit imperialistic?
Notwithstanding the tens of millions of native speakers of autochtone non-spanish languages in these territories: Mapuche (260K), Quechua (7.2M), Aymara (1.7M), Guaraní (6.1M), Wayuu (400K), Mayan (6M), Miskito (150K), Garifuna (120K), Nahuatl (1.7M), Mixtec (530K), Catalan (4.1M), Basque (750K), Galician (2.4M). Spanish is quickly eroding all of these, but they still exist! (And this only counts native speakers. The number of people who are fluent in Guarani or Catalan is certainly more than the double of that.)
> Not imperialistic. Would you say the same of the English language too?
Yes, of course? When I think of imperialism the first thing that comes to my mind is precisely "the bri'ish empi'ah and its commonwealth"! If English is currently the world's default language is just because of the triumph of English/American imperialism.
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Go inside. It’s worth it. The light is beautiful, and the architecture rewards unhurried attention. Take your time to wander, don't rush.
One hundred and fifty years in the making, and still unfinished. The two completed façades serve as the "secondary" entrances; the main entrance is yet to be built. Completing the project will require demolishing four city blocks, a plan that is controversial and complicated because people live there. Many of those residents bought at lower prices with a clause acknowledging this; when the Sagrada Família is finished, they will have to leave.