axby

To give a bit of credit to the book (hints of a spoiler ahead), the aliens were different from humans in a few ways, so it made a little more sense than what someone might think from your description.

But yes, "contrived" is a great term for a lot of it. I loved the descriptions of how humans would react to aliens and in the future, the build up was amazing (or maybe I hyped it up in my head), but I felt like some of the physics got a little unbelievable, and I did not find the ending satisfying.

Overall I'd recommend it though. I had meant to read it for years, then accidentally read the 2nd book (Dark Forest) and got hooked because of the first few pages, which explains the "differences" that I'm referring to above.

As an extra question: when do we start getting data? Specifically, how long until we can start finding out if planets around other stars have oxygen, or even industrial pollutants like CFCs (my understanding is that if we see CFCs, it's almost certainly due to complex life and couldn't be a natural phenomenon. Oxygen is unfortunately more ambiguous, apparently).

Ever since I heard about JWST (I feel like it's been 8 years ago now), I was looking forward for an answer to this question. All the delays have been so painful...

Splitting out my other thoughts into a new comment:

I also have an awful short term memory, but can usually remember concepts from many years ago in great detail. Also text based content is way easier for me to remember than hearing it-- if someone tells me their name multiple times then I'll have trouble remembering it. But if I see someone's picture and their name written down, usually it sticks with me. Words are even worse, especially if I don't know what they mean. (I hate acronyms if I don't know what they stand for) If someone tries to give me a list of numbers or dates out loud, it barely makes any sense to me, I simply can't keep that all in my head at once, I need to process one at a time. But if I can see them written down, usually having to make a diagram of some sort, it's easy and I'll remember it for a while.

Overall I wonder if I would have led a very different life if I lived in an age before common literacy, or perhaps even without ubiquitous computers. I've been successful in my career with software, but if my job required me to keep track of a bunch of things without having the chance to write them down, I think I'd be screwed. Hell, I have to really focus when counting scoops of coffee or something simple like that. Going through a large list of data is difficult unless I can annotate it. I could see myself making stupid mistakes a lot if I had to do a job with real time consequences. But luckily for software (and school assignments, way back) I've been successful when I've had time to write stuff down and think it through, and edit my work/answer.

Sorry this kind of got off topic, but I can definitely relate to getting stressed about meeting someone in a restaurant. And as far as I know, I don't have aphantasia at all, at least based on everyone's descriptions of it.

Interesting. I find that I can relatively easily picture an imaginary beach, and recall mental images from my past of being on a beach. I tried imagining a few different fruits like another commenter mentioned, and I don't have any trouble with it. I can imagine a detailed banana with some brown specs, not just a cartoon yellow shape.

But what you said about meeting a person you haven't seen often resonates with me. For people I know well, I can conjure up a number of detailed images of them from my past and I feel like it refreshes my memory. But I feel like every now and then, for someone I haven't seen much (or recently), I'll just "forget" what someone looks like completely and only have vague ideas like hair colour, age, height. Once I see them though, I usually have a "speak of recognition" as you mentioned.

I am especially curious about how anyone is able to give a decent description of a criminal or something like that (since it seems like people often do). I feel like I might struggle to recognize someone after they interviewed me for an hour, at least days later.

Python lets you throw together a GUI pretty easily. I used it to build some simple wxWidgets applications when I was learning how to program.

Then trying to build a wxWidgets application in C++ isn't that much of a leap from that. Building it on linux is super easy. OP is right in that it is not obvious how to even start building on windows, at least if you want to know every command being run and do it all from the command line, instead of using the microsoft IDE. After downloading a ton of tools and looking through the IDE, it starts to feel like something is wrong if you just want to build "hello world" and were able to do it easily on linux.

I found that using CMake with C++ was a pretty okay process on windows, despite not having much experience with windows. I have to run cmake and then msbuild and I don't really know the details, but I got a simple GUI application running with wxWidgets on windows, and I don't need to use the Microsoft IDE. I'm happy to share more details if anyone is interested.

It was a nightmare to figure out how to do it, though.

Specifically, he doesn't have any incentive to hype up Bitcoin to get you to buy it, at least as far as I know.

I really liked this video by 3Blue1Brown explaining how blockchain works: https://youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4

Things that I didn't realize until I watched the video:

* "Mining" bitcoin means processing transactions for other people. Miners do time consuming operations to process transactions.

I had never heard of 3Blue1Brown before someone showed me that video, but he has a bunch of other good math videos. I liked the one about pi showing up in weird places.

I have heard that the latest chromebooks make it easier to switch into linux mode. I bought one a few years ago and had to go through some hacks to run linux, and every time I power it on, it would tell me to press space bar to "fix" everything and wipe the harddrive.

Was the tablet not a good fit for real time handwriting? Is it a bit slower than pen and paper?

I found it was relatively easy to type and tex everything that was written on the board. But I think my comprehension probably suffered a bit, though maybe that would have happened from using a pen and paper too.

Cool, did it have a physical keyboard? And if so, what was it like when using it like a laptop? That's my main aversion to a tablet, I would prefer a laptop so I could precisely angle a screen and the screen wouldn't be so heavy.

Also the price since I would almost exclusively use it for traveling.

And despite my love of netbooks from that era, part of what had me switch to Vim/LaTeX was my cheap ~$100 netbook not being very quick with large documents in an editor like LibreOffice.

Also a random thought: the netbook had also come with "windows 7 starter edition", which didn't let you change the wallpaper, much to my frustration. They went so far as (I believe) hashing the image, so if you edited it at all then it would show a black screen. [1]

I think that was what got me into Linux, despite years of losing access to wifi every time I updated and lost the Broadcom wifi drivers. My current laptop doesn't even have an ethernet port, I wonder how people get into Linux now.

[1]: The argument of "this laptop is resource constrained so it needs a simpler version of windows" seems weak when they go to such great lengths to enforce it. Maybe it was more about selling it for cheap and expecting some people to upgrade? Imagine paying $60 for windows for a <$150 netbook. (Maybe it was actually $200, I forget)

I did this back in 2011, though I used OpenOffice (and now I believe it's LibreOffice) at first, its equation editor syntax was a lot like LaTeX. I didn't realize MS Word had a text input option for its equation editor.

Eventually I decided to switch to Vim and LaTeX though (I was pretty new to both). The OP's setup looks much fancier than what I did, I just used pdflatex and mupdf. Diagrams I would draw by hand on paper.

I am grateful to have my notes in a nice clean searchable pdf now 10 years later, but unfortunately my career in software has yet to have me actually do differential equations again.

I have to ask because I miss it so dearly: is there any modern alternative to a 10" netbook like what I had back then? Besides the GPD win that was posted a few days ago. And I don't like the idea of a super expensive tablet with its heavy screen.

What do students take notes on now?

Has anyone tried typing on an 8" keyboard like this? I had a 10.1" netbook back in 2010 and loved typing on it.

Otherwise, is there any modern equivalent to a 10" netbook that isn't a super expensive tablet? Ideally something I could install Linux on and use for light programming and SSHing.

I'm also interested in foldable keyboards that I could use with my phone over Bluetooth or USB C.

But the initial investment required to watch a new video seems much higher: it feels like you'd have to watch it for a minute or so to really tell if it's any good and interesting to you, but I can make the same decision for text articles typically in much less than that. (And as a bonus, I don't have to sit through ads or hear "hey everyone", "don't forget to like and subscribe", "thanks to so and so for sponsoring this video".

But I agree with your comment, while also agreeing with part of the spirit of the parent comment. Of course videos can be high quality, and making a high quality video probably takes much more effort than making the same thing into an article.

TL;DR: my best guess (based on not much reading about this) is that perhaps they pitch NFTs as an inter-company form of people paying twitch to send messages to everyone watching the stream?

Specifically, beyond all the delusion of the metaverse as discussed in the article... are these people seriously pitching that average (or even top 1%) people will create content, and people will pay not to view the content, but just to be listed in the blockchain database that says that they own that content?

That sounded crazy to me before I wrote it, but I just realized: apparently Twitch (the video game streaming site) makes quite a bit of money from people paying just to send a message to all the other people watching the same stream. I don't understand this and haven't been able to get into Twitch, but maybe that's what they mean.

Still though, it seems dishonest to call that buying an "NFT". At that point you're bidding on being seen by all the other people watching the stream, not just to be listed as the "owner" of some digital content.

Then again, devil's advocate, people used to say that the internet had no applications for regular people. All it would take for NFTs to become important is for everyone to agree that they are important, and for some reason choose to read the stuff written by whoever buys the NFTs.

That seems crazy to me now, but I suppose it's not too far off from paying to send messages in a twitch stream. Maybe if all the companies agree to integrate viewing the NFT purchases with viewing the stream, then it would work? People also voluntarily read comments, so maybe NFTs would simply be the way of having an HN/reddit style comment tree on twitch streams, substituting karma for cryptocurrencies.

This gives me very unsettling vibes, but maybe the world would be a better place if you needed to pay 10 cents to make a comment, and if the content producer received that money for creating popular and engaging content. (Ugh, new dystopian idea: someone being able to make a living by posting articles that start flame wars)

I hope so, and perhaps to some extent quality content always will be rewarded in some circles of the internet. But I worry about the vast majority just falling prey to whatever is most convenient. Maybe it will always be possible to have "traditional" websites, but if only something like 0.1% of the population visits them, and the rest just mindlessly scroll through their Facebook feed or whatever the "metaverse" is supposed to be, then that seems like a problem.

I have never tried to make money producing content on the internet. But I have found a few good content producers who make podcasts and post them to YouTube. I wish that they would also post transcripts and have an RSS feed, but they don't really have any incentive to do that. And I can't blame them: I don't think I would really pay any extra for it. And unless there are better content producers who show up and do those things, I'll probably still keep watching the same podcasts on YouTube.

So I am concerned that all the best content producers just doing whatever will make them money, and:

* ultimately they will probably produce content and host it with a big company.

* And that big company will probably do whatever it can to maximize profits

* (and presumably content providers will typically favour the company that pays them the best).

* And I worry that video content can make way, way more money than text, at least for certain content types.

Certainly I'm probably overstating the issues, but I think there's some truth to this. Look at what happens when you look up cooking recipes on the internet: you almost always get a big article and a bunch of garbage that no one wants. I think I read somewhere that they do that because a recipe can't be copyrighted without an article. If that's true, why isn't there a nice clean recipe site that doesn't have all the garbage in it? Perhaps even with a nifty database where I can filter based on ingredients and stuff that I have? I think the answer is that (#1) I don't look for new recipes that often, and (#2) I am willing to tolerate skimming through some garbage on the rare occasions that I do.

To clarify my comment: obviously text will never be "obsolete". But I worry that some day when you search for something like "how do you reverse a linked list", the most popular results will no longer be well thought out articles, perhaps with good use of pictures, and maybe animations when necessary. Perhaps in the future the most popular results could be a video, perhaps also well done, but advertised with clickbait and constant "like and subscribe" and "sponsored by <some product>".

Can someone explain why NFTs have anything to do with the metaverse? I heard about browsers easily supporting cryptocurrencies as an important step to it, that kind of makes sense. But do any average people buy NFTs for any reason besides being tricked into it as an (extremely dubious would be putting it politely) "investment"?

While ultimately text content will always have a place, I do worry that video content could become way more popular, and text content much less so: simply because advertisers have a big incentive to push video content (bigger ads, more front and centre), and content producers are usually going to cater to the advertisers (unless people start paying for content more often).

I don't see the appeal of TikTok (though I haven't tried it), I much prefer skimming text than skimming through videos (let alone with sound). But it is incredibly popular, and a ton of people find video content addictive. To my surprise it isn't just popular among youth, but I have older smart senior software engineer friends (who didn't grow up surrounded by optimally addictive apps) who say it's amazing, at least once you let the algorithm converge.

So we shouldn't just assume that text will always prevail. Look at other seemingly amazing technologies/mediums that largely died or were at least hidden from the mainstream due to business reasons. These may be weak examples (I just woke up) but hopefully the gist of it is clear:

* RSS?

* I remember hearing that the alternatives to VHS and maybe blu-ray were technically superior but lost due to business reasons.

* Maybe Windows too, beat out technically superior alternatives because of business reasons

* Google+ apparently had a number of innovative features (like "circles"), but I barely know anyone who used it over facebook back in the day)

Now of course text content couldn't just "die", but perhaps the main companies hosting content could give strong incentives to produce video content instead of text, and control what the vast majority of people see. From what I understand: content producing companies (like CollegeHumor) that were super popular before Facebook were basically screwed when Facebook was the main way that people discovered content. Even though it was still possible to visit their website, the majority (or at least many) people would just watch whatever videos showed up on their facebook feed, so CollegeHumor took a huge hit. (I think that was what I read a while ago, anyway. I forget a lot of details so please correct me or add more information)

That scares the hell out of me: if a few tech companies ultimately control what the majority of people see, the content producers are basically chosen by the tech companies' algorithms. And the algorithms are ultimately going to optimize for profit, and not "quality content" or even "content that isn't harmful". (And more relevant to the comment I'm responding to: favouring ad heavy video over text). Potential up side: maybe it will be easier to filter out crap content if it all goes to video.

Link to Reddit RSS wiki for more information: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/rss

Their wiki uses the slash: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/rss

Personally I feel like the precedence is more obvious with the slash, so it's clearer to figure out how more obscure combinations work, like:

    https://reddit.com/r/news+worldnews/.rss

Do you have to add ".rss" to both subreddit names? (I assume not) Is it more likely that their parser could break some day with or without the slash? RSS is fringe enough, so removing the slash is probably even more fringe.

That being said, I also hate needlessly ugly URLs. If someone leaves in the tracking garbage then I hate it (like this):

    ?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

I had no idea this existed. It looks like it's "reutersagency.com", which may be different from reuters.com?

These are the results that I get in my RSS reader, they seem very different from https://www.reuters.com:

    newsboat 2.10.2 - Articles in feed 'Reuters News Agency' (10 unread, 10 total) - https://www.reutersagency.com/feed/?taxonomy=best-regions&post_type=best
    1 N  2021-10-20 06:44   1.2K  Reuters exclusively reports Renault sees bigger production hit from chip shortage; market reacts                                            2 N  2021-10-18 06:52   1.3K  Reuters exclusively reports India presses Qatar for delayed LNG as power crisis mounts
    3 N  2021-10-18 06:50   1.4K  Reuters reports Fortescue’s Forrest says Australia must commit to carbon cuts to keep green energy advantage
    4 N  2021-10-18 05:15   1.3K  Reuters reveals U.S. to lift restrictions Nov 8 for vaccinated foreign travelers; market reacts
    5 N  2021-10-18 04:00   2.5K  Reuters impact: U.S. lawmakers say Amazon may have lied to Congress, Senator Warren urges breakup, India retailers want probe after Reute   6 N  2021-10-15 06:56   1.4K  Reuters reveals how the illicit copper trade is sapping South Africa
    7 N  2021-10-15 06:46   1.4K  Reuters exclusively reports Italy considering extending bank merger incentives to mid-2022
    8 N  2021-10-15 06:43   1.9K  Reuters first to report Evergrande’s $1.7 bln Hong Kong HQ sale flops; CEO in Hong Kong for restructuring, asset sale talks
    9 N  2021-10-14 11:44   1.9K  Reuters ahead with key Turkish Central Bank news; market reacts
    10 N  2021-10-14 08:38   1.5K  Reuters ahead with news of German economic growth downgrade

I have seen this, and just now realized that my client supported both RSS/Atom feeds and I didn't realize there was a difference.

I like https://newsboat.org, though it is command line and since I started using an android RSS reader, I've stopped using newsboat as much.

I also like Feeder for Android, free, no ads, scrapes full articles in a wonderful way: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsense...

I used Flym for a while and went to download the source one day, in fear of it suddenly disappearing, and apparently updates are blocked by Google, and the dev gave up? I'm very curious to know more about it: https://github.com/FredJul/Flym

Since then I've used Feeder, it's similar (also free, no ads, can scrape full articles) but is missing a few things that I liked about Flym. It was easy to export my list of feeds (OMPL file, I think) and import into Feeder: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsense...

It is sad, but some good news for anyone considering trying RSS:

* all reddit subreddits can be turned into an rss feed by adding ".rss" after the URL, e.g. https://reddit.com/r/news/.rss

* YouTube still supports RSS, but it is well hidden and I am worried that it will be silently removed at some point.

* HN supports RSS!

* many major news sites still offer RSS, though it's often hard to find the feed. Reuters shut it down about 1.5 years ago

"Newsboat", a command line RSS reader, definitely has keyword searches and a ton of other functionality for complex filtering and grouping: https://newsboat.org/

I haven't found a good Android based RSS reader that does that, though I haven't really looked.

I would agree until I found:

* newsboat (command line) for desktop: https://newsboat.org/

* Feeder on android (which also scrapes the full article content in most cases): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsense...

Both are definitely not bloated, though I don't know if there is any decent notification functionality in newsboat. It is open source though, so maybe it's not that hard to add. You can configure it to auto refresh so I've just kept it open when I've been following the news obsessively.

I am a big fan of RSS but I strongly agree with both of your points. I have only used it for checking out new things. Though having the option to fetch the full feed without visiting the website would be a great feature. I use an android app that seems to do that by scraping the site, I love it.

That being said, for some reason that escapes me, some news sites don't make it easy to see a list of articles at all (looking at you, https://cbc.ca/news). And when writing this comment, I see that if you scroll down far enough you can see more articles in this really annoying tile format (the app is better but I hate downloading a ~300 MB app when a <10 MB RSS reader is all I really want).

TL;DR: somehow it isn't just RSS but even somewhat publicly funded news sources seem to prey with the "get you stuck in an endless cycle of scrolling while you're trying to find the content you want" trap.