I don't understand why everyone here isn't already talking about how James Mickens spent his sabbatical recording a metal album where all the band members are himself.
@rooster I think the next book that I was that blown away by was Scott Westerfeld's The Risen Empire. A buddy handed it to me on the ship after someone left it in the lounge and was like, "You need to read this." He was absolutely right. https://scottwesterfeld.com/books/succession-series/
"The market will efficiently allocate resources where they're most needed!"
Meanwhile, the market: we're putting this "AI" thing that doesn't seem to work and everyone hates into everything you use including your mouse. We're sure this will make us rich somehow. Do you like this? [Yes / Ask me again later]
A single-board command-line computer using the esp32. Look at it! It's cute. Can't buy it yet the creator is starting some kind of online commune for single-board computer freaks. I bet some of you are around here, go say hi at his forum it only has like two posts and its making me sad.
I have started a series on my blog where I go over my efforts to rebuild my homelab on a different stack! If you want to read it early, subscribe to me on Patreon:
Just learned that you can split a document into multiple source files, so now my resume has a Makefile and is easily rearranged. And because I'm a software nerd first, I've got Document Viewer open and ran git ls-files | entr make to auto-rebuild any time a tracked part of the document is saved. Who needs WYSIWYG?
Finally listening to Deb Chachra's How Infrastructure Works and it is just wonderful. I wanted to squee when she described Boston's Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge as a "charismatic megastructure". It's just a great book.
Recommended to me (not personally) by @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/
I'm sure this is true for many people, but I'm having the opposite experience, tbh. Coding (mostly) for myself, and taking a lot of care to make it long term maintainable, has been incredibly restorative for me. Keeping a code base tidy is so much more relaxing than constant tip toeing around a bunch of hazardous piles of legacy junk that you're not allowed to fix.
@jenniferplusplus I'm more like that too. I also really like the idea of solving problems for reasons other than profit motive.
I don't want to sell my code. I just want to make it and give it freely to anyone it might help.
@skry alright, I apologize to my elementary school teachers for what I thought were insulting lessons on parsing the text and structure of stories. There are people who just do not get them. The evil, unaccountable mega corporations of cyberpunk and other dystopian science fiction were supposed to be obviously bad. Do not create the Torment Nexus includes political systems not just devices!
@tef oh, oh yeah. Rust’s whole ouvre is not that at all. I mean there are cases where some refactors are easy and really safe because of the ownership model and borrow-checker, but exploratory programming is not - broadly-speaking - what I would associate with Rust.
@chx neither I nor the author of this critique say that there is no value or appeal to the book. It captures well the feelings of childhood victimhood and powerlessness. There’s a cathartic element to seeing surrogates for one’s tormentors or oppressors laid low by a victim figure. The issue is that the use of overwhelming and lethal force is presented as somehow literally perfectly moral and blameless based on Ender’s status as a victim of abuse and his intention to prevent abuse. @pluralistic