I’m currently reading Babel by RF Kuang, which definitely can’t be described as woman-centric (indeed, a major criticism is that its female characters are relatively shallow and few and far between). Good book though.
If you want an old classic to try, give Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees a go. Very unique and fairly influential cult classic from 1926.
“Species concepts are human classification systems, and everybody can disagree and everyone can be right,” she says. “You can use the phylogenetic [evolutionary relationships] species concept to determine what you’re going to call a species, which is what you are implying… We are using the morphological species concept and saying, if they look like this animal, then they are the animal.”
“If they look like this animal then they are the animal” really doesn’t sound like a particularly useful (or scientifically rigorous) position.
Not least because there are lots of animals that look alike but aren’t the same species.
In my limited experience experience, Gemini responds better with flat, emotionless prompts without any courteous language. Using polite phrasing seems more likely to prompt “I can’t answer that sorry” responses, even to questions that it absolutely can answer (and will to a more terse prompt).
So I think my point is “it depends”. LLMs aren’t intelligent, they just produce strings based on their training data. What works better and what doesn’t will be entirely dependent on the specific model.
Orwell’s Animal Farm would seem like a good way to go. Not having any Orwell in a dystopian literature class would seem like a miss, and Animal Farm’s heavy parable style sets it apart from the others in the list.
Off beat suggestion: The Lorax by Dr Seuss. It might be interesting to study dystopia aimed at younger children as part of a full exploration of the genre.
Possibly somewhat on-the-nose, but It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis is fairly timely.
Back with the classics, perhaps The Trial by Franz Kafka. Very effective and highly distilled form of dystopian text, boiled right down to its elements.
Shout out to The Last Man by Mary Shelley, which is a contender for the first true dystopian novel (certainly one of the first worth remembering).
I know a Candida!
It’s actually surprisingly a relatively common uncommon name. Crops up a lot in certain Catholic communities as it’s Latin for “white”.
You don’t know that. The people of Kepler-452b might well be suffering under a truly awful automobile industry.
Fair point.
Redirect it to Blue Sky instead.
I’m not sure I really understand the point of this. Even if you hate Mozilla, the Gecko engine is excellent and it would make far more sense to fork it than to start a new one from scratch.
Building and maintaining a browser engine is hard. FOSS means that everyone is of course free to pursue the projects that interest them, but this doesn’t seem like a great use of effort to me.
Two very different recommendations.
First is the Southern Reach novels by Jeff VanderMeer (the first one being Annihilation). Unsettling, surreal Lovecraftian sci-fi. Gorgeously written, beautiful prose, and very memorable.
Second is the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (starting with Red Mars). Hard sci-fi on an almost unprecedented scale: a comprehensive and incredibly detailed narrative of the colonisation of Mars, which covers almost every possible aspect of the story in glorious, engaging detail. You get everything from the love triangles and personal rivalries of the colonists, to politics and religion, to macro-economics, to superstructure engineering, to long deep chapters covering hydrology, micro-biology, the finer points of lichens and mosses, to architecture, art… Honestly, it’s breathtaking in just how thoroughly it covers its subject whilst still being a poignant, engaging, story. Not to everyone’s tastes, but it could certainly make an impact.
Technically not really e-waste, as it’s just the same cycling computer you were buying anyway, and presumably would have a similar lifespan.
The waste part is the non-electronic bits, i.e. when the computer needs replacing you need to bin off the attached bits of aluminium and rubber that make up the rest of the handlebars.
Seems like a bit of a waste to launch an intercontinental missile at a country next door, on the same continent. Isn’t Russia supposed to have plenty of short and mid range ballistic missiles? I guess they must be running low.
I was under the impression that ICBMs weren’t all that great for conventional warheads. Their payload capacity isn’t enormous and their accuracy tends to be relatively low- which matters not a jot if you’re firing nukes (which do a lot of bang per kilo, and where a few hundred metres either way isn’t likely to be critical), but not so great for dropping normal munitions.
and/or EU
I can’t see the EU revoking access to Galileo just because Trump says so.
A plastic nob is cheaper than a touchscreen, yes. But if you’ve already got a touchscreen as part of the design anyway (for things like satnav or car maintenance data), it’s cheaper to not include any other buttons or inputs and to bundle them all up into one interface.
I looked at Dino and another one mentioned here and they look dated. Windows 95 feel with better anti-aliasing, rounder corners, but same colors? Gtk 2 or something?
Looks like a standard GTK4 app to me. Whether or not that is to someone’s tastes is obviously subjective, but it uses the same design language as every other GTK app under the sun.
GTK apps always look out of place on Windows though. Looks far more sensible in its native environment (i.e. *nix running GNOME).
Having data means nothing if you can’t monetize it.
As you say, AI can already access it all completely for free with nothing more complicated than a web crawler. Long term, charging AI firms for access is not a viable strategy unless the law changes.
And they’ve been trying for years to monetize visitors through advertising and other schemes, and so far come up consistently short.
What a bizarre coincidence; that’s exactly what I came on to post!
Finished Red Mars a few weeks ago, started Green Mars a couple of days ago. I’d never read any Kim Stanley Robinson before, and I’m enjoying it so far.
Any other recommendations from your award-winners reading list?
To be fair, there are (or were) lots of distros downstream of RHEL marketing themselves as drop-in replacements, not just Oracle. And this move isn’t likely to stop Oracle (and the rest), only make the transition experience less smooth for clients (ultimately all the downstream distros can just rebase off of CentOS Stream instead; they lose “bug for bug” compatibility, but will still largely be drop-in replacements).
I also find it hard to muster any sympathy for IBM of all people, even when their opponent is Oracle (who are the lowest of the low).
We can’t immediately convert all cars to EV, we don’t have the grid capacity or enough charging stations, yet.
Well sure, but there’s no suggestion of converting “all cars” to EVs “immediately”. Even if ICE cars were banned for new sales tomorrow, it’d still take a decade and more for the existing rolling stock to gradually be replaced by new vehicles.
A 10 year period for utility companies to gradually upgrade their infrastructure doesn’t sound desperately unrealistic.
They started selling them in the UK this year, and I’ve already started to see them on the road. They claim to be on track for around 30,000 sales per year in the country, which would put them at about half of the number of Teslas sold (about 60,000).
Why are people buying them? Well, the same reason people buy any car. They’re sold with a relatively high trim for a relatively affordable price, and they’re reviewing well with the auto press. It’s not like there’s any magic to it. China’s a cheap manufacturing country, and they’re undoubtedly willing to throw profit margins to the wolves to boost market share.
Good advice in general; even contractual fuckery aside, you can’t guarantee a company will even still exist this time next year.