Bruce Bethke, the guy who actually invented cyberpunk and wrote the story Cyberpunk, wrote a book Head Crash. In which the VR hotsuit includes a "ProctoProd®" for bass. Bruce's predictions have turned out more accurate than anyone else's.
mdhughes
joined 2 years ago
I posted on fedi
This corporate takeover shit is why you can't trust penguins.
and immediately got reply-guyed from someone defending federation with Threads.
Some of Rudy's books are free, and they will blow your minds. Software, etc. and Postsingular as "what technology can do to us", and White Light as "how does infinity work in a story context"; he also has a couple non-fiction books on infinity.
- Greg Egan
- Rudy Rucker
- Vernor Vinge
Hard, computational SF aren't given nearly the respect they should, and these apply math, comp sci, and physics in a way nobody else does. If there's any civilization in the future, they'll be seen as visionary.
Runners-up are Robert L. Forward, Alastair Reynolds, but Forward has very little computation, and Reynolds doesn't show his math too often.
You can get the same basic CS education and write your own OS, it was in my 4th year CS classes, we mostly just implemented Minix 1.0 but you could get as weird as you want.
Then you have to make enough libraries to start porting things to it, or write everything from scratch.
One of my favorite hacks like this is SectorLisp, which fits a Lisp (sort of) in a boot sector.
There's other, more verbose, regular expression languages, for instance SRFI-115 for Scheme. But the hard part isn't the syntax, but actually thinking about patterns, so it won't help you any.
Just get the O'Reilly bat book and learn. So what if it overwrites 10% of your brain and you can't remember your mother's face, you'll have a useful skill.
I grew up during the Cold War, I had zero expectation that I'd live to adulthood, and I'm still unconvinced the world after 2000 exists. The way to cope is nihilism and/or activism.
Nuclear war, global warming makes the Earth uninhabitable, new plagues wipe out everyone, AI poisons us or creates nanotech grey goo, fascists take over and gas everyone who isn't them, a dinosaur-killer meteor hits the Earth again, eventually the Sun expands and fries the planet. You personally are going to die, probably long before any of those.
So you can either say "fuck it" and do your usual stuff anyway, or get involved in trying to stop or delay one of the disasters. Have fun with it.
Or as Morty says: "Everybody's going to die. Come watch TV."
Safari's fast, less crashy, highest privacy protections, and uses less memory per tab; I often have hundreds of tabs so that's important. It also has the best inspector, much better than Firebug. Add in StopTheMadness and an adblocker (currently using Ghostery), and it's pretty great.
Degoogled Chromium is useful for sites that don't work in Safari, or as a sandbox I don't mind crashing in development.
I've given up on Firefox, it's too fat and bloated.
Cops (ACAB) are not a good example for moral treatment of others.
- APOD - start my day with some perspective
- techmeme - aggregates tech news
- memeorandum - aggregates political news
- HuffingtonPost - nice mix of serious & trashy pop culture junk
- Politico - slightly right, but very serious analysis
- Mother Jones - very left, but well-written
- Then a few thousand RSS feeds, which I read in Feedbin.
- Fediverse, Lemmy, etc.
I play a lot of MineTest, using the Asuna "game" (big modpack) and a huge custom set of mods, and have a game that's like MineCraft but utterly different. Others play the MineClone2 game, and it's fine, like MC 1.12 + some stuff. Repixture is an adorable mini-minecraft-like. There's a lot of people who use it more as creative, and many servers with various games.
It's definitely a little harder to set up the specific thing you want, but it's incredible how much variety there is.
I recognized the twist at a certain conversation early in the movie. It's not really hidden, or at least not well.