Christy Walton has been outspoken and supportive of the movement, but I haven’t seen evidence that she’s bankrolling it. She for sure doesn’t speak for the company, which is more conservative.

Yeah, good point. I can’t think of anything I had as a kid that would be drastically improved with modern batteries, but for sure cordless power tools are a big change. I have a cordless electric chainsaw - that wouldn’t have been feasible in the 70s.

Are batteries that much different? I was born in the early 60s, and the batteries my toys used seemed like the same AAA, AA, C, and D batteries we use mostly today. I think the key difference is that a lot of things take a lot less energy than they used to.

Not only do I not miss it, I’m relieved that it’s not here.

Remember back in 2022 when Russia disconnected from the global Internet? Reddit was great that day. The amount of trolls and devisive posts plummeted and discussions were much more civil. That was when I first started thinking about looking for a different place to hang out (I had been a pretty prolific reddit commenter). Then the stuff in spring 2023 happened and I found my way here, leaving Reddit for good. No regrets for sure.

I noticed similarities with The Player of Games (you can see my comments on that one). It’s like none of the main characters have close relationships, even with people they love.

A number of people told my to just skip Phlebas, because it’s the weakest, but I decided to read it anyway. I didn’t hate it by any means, but I did have issues.

Awesome, thank you.

I started on the culture series at the suggestion of a number of people here, and some suggested I skip the first book as it’s the weakest, but I decided to read it anyway. I didn’t dislike it or the second, but it seems odd how insular the characters are. I’ll probably keep reading the series, I liked them will enough.

Let me know if you really like anything this list points you at. I appreciate your reply

Perfect! That’s exactly what I hoped for when posting this. I hope I help steer you to things you enjoy but might not otherwise have read.

Not sure why some people are disagreeing - it for sure fits the definition. I’m not exactly sad about it - Musk is helping to rip apart the country and I have a hard time blaming people who feel that helping to rip apart one of his companies is about all they can do - but committing arson to further an ideology is terrorism.

Probably so

They manipulated it and then tried to cover it up.

I’ve thought for many years that the first true cybernetics will be artificial eyes. If they can get self contained optic systems that fit into the eyeball space, it should be trivial to allow them to see a much wider spectrum, plus macro and telephoto. That would be cool. A computer interface for them would be awesome, but I’d have trust issues with that as well.

I remember our first personal computer had 40 columns on the screen, but we ended up getting an 80 column graphics card for it.

I taught myself basic, but the first language I took in college was fortran, and it was on cards. A bit of an aberration: they had moved on to somewhat more modern equipment, but the lab was being upgraded, so they reverted you the card system for a semester temporarily. It was out of date, but not wildly so at the time.

Well, it might or not be a line of code - depends a lot on the language. It’s 80 bytes, and a byte is one character. You could have continuation cards if your line was more than 80. That wasn’t ever needed for assembly language, rarely for Fortran, but very common for COBOL.

Seems about right. One card had 80 columns, a byte for each one, so 5,000,000 bytes divided by 80 would be 62,500 cards.

There’s a saying, something like “When you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” It’s the same with white folks who feel like it’s a big deal when there’s more than a token POC in something. It must be DEI, right?

I’m a straight, white, middle class male, but I’m fully aware that my life experience is much different from so many other peoples’. And I’ve never understood why some people feel like it takes away from them when someone else gets something, like the straight folks who feel like it takes away from straight marriage if gay folks can marry.

People are weird.

There’s for sure the “offness,” but there are also things like the lack of veins in the cat’s ear, which we’d see with the like coming through like that. But I agree, they’re getting very good.

This thread makes me so sad about the future. Here we have a bunch of folks who are absolutely convinced that a real image is AI generated, some even after being shown that it predates AI image generators. But we live in a time when there are a giant number of real images online, the only AI generated images are very recent, and most of those have things like extra fingers. What’s it going to be like in twenty years, when image generators are so much better and there are so many more generated images? Having a photo of something will prove nothing.

Oh, certainly. In case it’s helpful, here’s a post I made last spring with notes from a year of reading - it’s pretty much all SF and fantasy. Many of the books mentioned in this thread are there. I’ve been reading about the same amount since, and will probably do another post on the anniversary of that one.

I was surprised at how little I liked it given the hype.