It’s a nice change of pace to see how they interact when they’re not busy parenting Calvin

Awesome, I’ve been waiting for this!

On a related note, I think libraries do need a bit of a facelift, and not just be “the place where books live”. It’s important to keep that function, but also expand to “a place where learning happens”. I know lots of libraries are doing this sort of thing, but your average person is probably still stuck in the “place where books live” mindset, as you allude. I’m talking stuff like 3D printers, makerspaces, diybio, classes about detecting internet bullshit, etc.

Threads like this, with highly upvoted comments like

americans are more propagandized than they think citizens of the DPRK are

They also use sarcasm try to push the narrative that North Korea is actually just fine, OK?

Guys you don’t understand; the West has spoken; we MUST hate North Korea, our governments have already decreed it so.

Many of them are also seemingly physically incapable of communicating without hexbear’s custom reaction images, which is a weird behavior common to many cults. Makes it harder to communicate with the outgroup.

I think LW is defederated from them (or vice versa) so you can’t post over there, but for further examples, try making an account over there and saying that maybe, just maybe, Putin did a bad thing by invading Ukraine, and they’re defending an imperialist.

I’d be careful of pushing the narrative about computers not being a good choice for regular users. I’m going to channel a bit of Stallman and say that that’s how we end up without The Right To Read

For your bullet points:

• Yeah, GNOME can be flakey with extensions. Almost no regular users will install extensions though. Windows also has tons of bugs and issues that users just ignore because it’s the “default”
• Regular users won’t care about desktop scaling. I’ve seen people using the blurriest, weirdest aspect ratios on Windows because they liked it that way
• Bluetooth sucks on all hardware and with all software, to various degrees.
• Syncing files is trivial with Syncthing
• MacOS keeps breaking my coworker’s setups with every update.

GPU issues can be hard, but that’s not really Linux’s fault. There’s a reason this image exists of Linus giving nvidia the middle finger:

That being said, it’s getting better. As of this year, nvidia has started putting some real effort into making things work with wayland.

EDIT: I’ve found nirvana with NixOS, speaking of GPU drivers. I just add a few lines to /etc/nixos/configuration.nix and it goes off and ensures that the nvidia drivers are present. I also run lots of CUDA stuff on top of that and it all works about as seamlessly as possible.

https://hexbear.net/

From here:

On occasion, a writer will coin a fine neologism that spreads quickly but then changes meaning. “Factoid” was a term created by Norman Mailer in 1973 for a piece of information that becomes accepted as a fact even though it’s not actually true, or an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print. Mailer wrote in Marilyn, “Factoids…that is, facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority.” Of late, factoid has come to mean a small or trivial fact that makes it a contronym (also called a Janus word) in that it means both one thing and its opposite, such as “cleve” (to cling or to split), “sanction” (to permit or to punish) or “citation” (commendation or a summons to appear in court). So factoid has become a victim of novelist C.S. Lewis’s term “verbicide,” the willful distortion or deprecation of a word’s original meaning.

I think !shortstories@literature.cafe would be a good place for it. The community sidebar says your own stories are welcome. You might want to add that you’re specifically looking for feedback

Sorry, I should clarify I mean first chronologically, not in importance. As in, “here were the warning signs”. Also I’ll concede that this won’t be first chronologically either, it’ll be Guido stepping down as BDFL, and then the Tim Peters thing, then things like this.

To be fair, the comment had been moderated for like 4 days, and was only restored recently after people noticed. Hopefully somebody realized that it wasn’t a good look.

He’s not being run out of the project… yet. This is not a good direction, though. This comes across as the first link that’ll show up in a github gist of “What happened to Python?” in a few years. Hopefully not and it’s all just an automod mixup, but after the Tim Peters btfo, I know what I’d put my money on.

IMO it’s the weakest of the series. The next two books, The Player of Games or Use of Weapons are much better, at least to me. Use of Weapons is great, but has a somewhat challenging narrative structure of two intermixed timelines, so if that’s not your thing The Player of Games would probably be a good one to try.

Nice! It’s been a while since I’ve read any of his stuff. I should be done with my current book soon, what are a few of your favorites from him?

I’m pretty meh on the arguments there. It would be different, but we’d adapt. And we’d fix a lot bunch of problems.

The difference is that you’re not changing how time is kept. Countries can change their timezone offsets right now to screwy things like +12:45 and it changes how time is recorded and stored. If we switch to UTC, a country can just declare their official hours are shifting and nobody has to fundamentally change how clocks work.

IMO people would figure it out and life would go on. Yes, lots of people would have the calendar date advance in the middle of the day but that’s fine, we’d get used to it. People wouldn’t work 9-5 jobs, but we’d come up with different terminology.

I don’t really see the argument about people waking up at different times. Yeah, some people would wake up at 02:00 and some at 16:00, but when someone says they wake up at 02:00, there’s 0 confusion about when that is. You’d have to know when someone is awake to do an international call, but you have to do that anyways.

Have you read the other Culture books, or is this your first one? I just found out now that there’s !theculture@lemm.ee that could use some posts if you have anything you want to share about it. If you haven’t read it yet (or if anybody else is curious for a quick taste of the series), here’s the author writing a few notes on it:

http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

I thought this was also a good read, though it does have a few spoilers across the first few books:

https://www.sciphijournal.org/index.php/2017/11/12/why-the-culture-wins-an-appreciation-of-iain-m-banks/

At this point if I feel like getting fancy with Pandas, I’d reach for Polars first. My experience with it so far has been great

Listening to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy audiobook. I read it once ages ago, and am enjoying getting to all the good parts I only vaguely remember. It holds up pretty well, there’s a reason people are still quoting it. I use the term “excitingly chunky” to describe the “developer chic” style of buildings that are getting slung up around me.

The biggest issue so far is that Trillian is the most fleshed-out woman in the series, and she’s basically a cardboard cutout that has “girlfriend” hastily written on it. It might get better later on (I’m almost done with the 3rd book), but I don’t recall it happening. I know it’s not really the point of the series, but as someone that doesn’t tend to notice this sort of thing, it was very noticeable.

Oh also, it was kind of strange how little he mentioned AI. I like how he wrote that the AI wasn’t trusted to be a Swordholder because it was “too logical”. Completely missed the boat on ChatGPT. “Write a play in which Harry Potter pressed the button to destroy humanity, and then act it out” or something like that would be all it takes.

It was also strange that hundreds of years in the future, humans are still doing hard manual labor. Where are the robots?