I agree. I think there is a third thing: processed foods are more likely to contain additives like colorants, emulsifiers, preservatives and stabilisers that humans have been eating for decades rather than centuries so we don’t have the same body of knowledge about them or their health-related impacts.
I wonder if there are lessons to be drawn from other marine mammals which can diver way deeper and longer than assisted humans, although they all also metabolise oxygen. How for example do cetaceans deal with the nitrogen in their bloodstream on returning to the surface?
I’m a veteran SF reader but I only read The Culture books for the first time recently, and I agree with you, albeit you have to acknowledge their massive influence on contemporary SF. The Three Body Problem, though, I struggled to finish the first book at all, because I found the prose excruciatingly bad (or more properly I guess, the translation).
I think this is a different phenomenon - I forget the name, but basically, your brain produces more of the behaviour that you rehearse with it. In my youth I played a lot of Tetris, to the point where I would ‘see’ (almost hallucinate, really) fitting shapes into the tops of hedgerows and skylines when I was outdoors.
In fact, I discovered Wilkie Collins through (and thoroughly enjoyed) Drood; but now I find my Dickens is lacking and I need to explore beyond A Christmas Carol. But reading Dan Simmons is a delight, whether it’s Hyperion, or his Stephen King-esque works, or my favourite, The Terror, which is something else again.
I’d been off Windows since the early XP days, first Mac then Gentoo then running a hackintosh for several years, and got fed up with the maintenance. Since in the end I was mostly using it for gaming I just thought, WTH, I’ll use Windows 10, how bad can it be!? I lasted a month and then in a figure of pique and frustration I downloaded and installed Linux Mint 20.3. What a breath of fresh air! And the silver lining is Steam Play which makes it as good a gaming machine as ever and far better than it was as a hackintosh
There’s probably no provider, paid or otherwise that you can be guaranteed to be safe with because they all rely on automated systems that can make mistakes. I would say you have more chance for active support if you go with a paid service like Proton though.
Apart from that, redundancy makes sense - don’t rely on a single email provider/service but have several independent email identities with your mail synced across them. This goes for associated data too - the worst part of having your account locked is losing access to your cloud-stored contacts, files, etc.
I loved this idea too, but I think we’ve come to realise it in a different way, more or less, purely by syncing everything to the cloud. I feel that the transition between my phone, iPad and PC is pretty seamless with continuity of all the data I care about, and different views and interaction models based on the capabilities of the devices.
Frankly, it’s a miracle how many of the original actors were able to reprise their roles given the unfortunate ratio of deaths in the cast after the show wrapped.
I hope it’s great, but I can’t help but worry that JMS has returned to plunder the bones of his one time success.
Java’s strength IMO is that the JVM is pretty reliable and performant even under heavy loads, and can be predictably tuned and optimised where that’s needed. That’s pretty compelling along with an OK language that works well at scale (lots of developers).
I posted this already on a similar thread. I’m very aware during deliberately not visiting Reddit these last two days, that I’m missing the ‘dopamine hits’ from the controversial posts and outrage bait more than the loss of information and discovery.
I’m sure I read something recently about there being a limited future for viewing the wreck of the Titanic before it degrades, and that’s under pretty deep water, over 2km down.
> The health care system is more capable than ever before
Not to take issue with your main point, but, I’d say that _medicine_ is more capable than ever before, but health care systems are struggling to deliver the benefits to growing populations, for lots of reasons like funding and budgets, education and misinformation, or ideology.
While I never used HyperCard, the ‘low floors and high ceilings’ makes me think of spreadsheets. Given that I code all day professionally, I have quite a high bar for using code to solve personal needs, but I love to use spreadsheets - there’s just enough automation to make powerful, useful mini-applications, quickly, without much complexity, and the presentation capabilities are very strong. While there is brittleness - I can share a budget sheet with my wife and it will be broken in minutes - it’s easy to fix and evolve, but most importantly, they are accessible and grokable for someone without much technical knowledge.
I guess spreadsheet apps are pretty self-contained so I’m not sure that composability is a strength.
I guess it depends on how you define competitors. I think they protected themselves from people playing against their strengths (ie photographic film), but failed to prepare against disruption from left field.
1. Make a deal with myself to do some of the boring task (say an hours worth) before switching to something rewarding
2. Procrastinate until the consequences of not finishing the boring work are technically or socially expensive then rush into it desperately
3. Do it as a sort of down time or palate-cleanser, or a break from more challenging or stressful work
If you can excuse the overt sexuality of his work, Piers Anthony depicted an interesting alien race of beings with a biological ball-bearing method of propulsion in one of the Cluster series books - I forget the title.
I’m surprised to hear this. I thought that Amazon had moved to offer all mp3 music as DRM-free. I’ve bought a lot of music from them and never been unable to download anything so far.
I know it’s way more than most people have, but $1.2M is not really FU money, at least in the US. It’s probably enough to take a gamble on, but it’s still not enough that you cannot be wiped out by bad luck or a significant health event while unemployed. And unless you are very young (and very lucky to have that much capital already) that $1.2M probably represents the gain from quite some years of work, and is critical as the basis for eventually gaining enough to actually be economically safe in retirement.
I tell new engineers that the only wasted questions are the ones they don’t ask. I always try to make it clear from the outset that not knowing something is not a defect...
VH1 was the first rock album I ever bought, back in 1979, and I’ve spend 41 years loving it. I know the band has had their ups and downs but I think that Eddie’s playing on their last album was just as fresh, vibrant and exciting as it ever was. Impossible to overstate the impact this man had on my life, as well as the entire music genre. RIP.