Revelation Space series does not have FTL, but in its place, an engine that can produce 1G indefinitely (not manufactured anymore, powered by handwavium, it seems… but the secret is revealed in one of the short stories). There is further shenanigans with physics, but never FTL.
It definitely adds more nuance to the world, because now you can’t have interstellar empires if you cannot communicate over large distances.
It really depends on the business.
I worked for two smaller businesses (team of ≤ 10 software developers). One was mismanaged, ran by very unpleasant people, and abusive towards employees, resulting in a huge turnover and a “dead sea effect”. The other company got government grants because the owner’s relative was a politician, and had ridiculous surveillance software on developers’ machines.
Ironically, the most “human” and enjoyable work I did was working on internal legacy software and code rewrites for a huge corporation before and during their move towards agile and modern “conveyorized” approach to software.
When I ran prosody a few years ago, I did so without docker.
I did try snikket in docker though, and it looks like it is still actively maintained.
IIRC the Windows version of Midori was the only browser that was light enough to watch Netflix on my ~2005 laptop.
Reminds me of a “minimalist text editor” that my coworker showed me circa 2015. It was an Electron app that consumed more RAM to display a empty file than Firefox with 5 active tabs.
From some philosophical standpoints (determinism, for example), a person is their mind, a brain; so reproducing or simulating the brain to a very high degree would result in reproducing that person. Whether that is true or not is philosophical, and is similar to the Star Trek teleporter discussion.
In Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space universe, the classification is pretty sensible: there are three levels of simulation.
Alpha level is a nanotech scan-copy of a real brain which kills the subject, but the resulting persona is considered intelligent, a human, with rights and all. IIRC there were only 60 people who did that.
Beta level is a model built upon all available information about the person, all audio, video, text, etc. This is pretty much what we might now call a trained AI, but it is not considered intelligent.
And gamma level is a fully artificial persona, usually used for chatbots and what we would use LLMs for now.
YSK that OverDrive (developer of Libby) is a private for-profit company that makes obscene amounts of money. Pretty much a prime example of private-public “partnership” taking taxpayer money.
I am not too familiar with animism either, but as far as I understand from the book, it’s the belief-idea-philosophy that humans are a part of nature, including both living and non-living things. (Contrary to modern idea of separating the “human” and “natural” worlds). In addition to awareness and careful choices, it believes in reciprocity, giving back what was taken from the ecosystem. Similar to what was/is practiced by many native communities.
(Please correct me if I am wrong)
Not just about climate, but Less Is More by Jason Hinckel. It is anticapitalist and pro-animist (!), and I found the historical parts interesting, particularly the philosophical angle of how separating the human from the rest of nature happened (and how it played into abuse of both nature and humans)
Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid by Thor Hanson is about climate change, how animals adapt to it, how forests can migrate, and local climate anomalies.
I miss blinkenlights on smartphones. They went out of style circa 2015, and now all you get is the screen turning on momentarily, or some variant of a dim always-on view that wastes battery.
A lot of them are getting blocked too, presumably by datacenter IPs. I suppose it’s possible to run it off a residential IP.
The article matches my experiences.
I knew a guy, not MAGA, but a self-identified libertarian, with very bigoted and bad takes (racism, misogyny, general lack of empathy). His responses for being called out or criticized were:
Eventually, I also figured out that the only way to win is not to play the game. Shame, we were good friends back in the day.
IMO tech terms evolve a bit faster and are more accepted with their new spelling and meaning. Older words are less prone to such adjustments, but “alot” puzzles me as well.
Here are a few more to add to the confusion:
FYI Annihilation novel has the same premise and setup as the movie, but is quite different plot-wise. It’s more emotional, introspective, and has very vivid imagery. Much different from what I usually read, but I loved it.
Mailbox Standard compared to ProtonMail Plus:
Ukrainian “не лізь поперед батька в пекло” (“don’t rush to hell before your father”) - a mix of “don’t be foolish / try to prove yourself / hurt yourself doing so” and also “let experienced people do their job / lead”.
Also Ukrainian “або пан або пропав” (“Either [you become] a lord, or you disappear”), an important risky choice, or sometimes used as YOLO of yesteryear.
AFAIK as close as you can get is PinePhone or Librem5. But both have pretty poor battery life, an IPS display (technically could be OLED at the expense of even more battery consumption), and pretty jank camera (drivers for good cameras are proprietary, and a lot of modern smartphones rely on postprocessing for quality too).
Don’t get me wrong, PinePhone made fantastic progress in 6 years, but your experience may vary (some people use it as a daily smartphone, some as a dumb phone, others are just turned off immediately)
Samsung Galaxy S5 checks all of these. I prefer it with Lineage 14 (Android 7), but ran it with Android 8, and it can support up to Android 10 or 11 IIRC, although later versions are somewhat slow.
Samsung Galaxy J7 (2015) might also fit the criteria, even though it’s not a “flagship”.
If you’re looking for alternate OS list for smartphones and tablets, I compiled a list.
I thought SAP was shit until I worked with Microsoft Dynamics NAV, an ERP from alternate 1990s hell dimension. It has a built-in IDE that uses its own language called C/AL (syntactically similar to Pascal). The only source control is developers’ ability to lock files they are working on. And the code editor is worse than notepad. Seriously, it does not allow to select or paste multiple lines, and in general, acts as if each line is it’s own textbox. Forget about syntax highlighting or anything else other than black text on white background.
And, AFAIK, if your company needs to customize it, you are required to hire a “Microsoft-certified” NAV developer.
Xed editor comes close in terms of handling files-as-files, but I found it more cumbersome and buggy than Markor.