Hahaha, yeah I only buy books that I know I will be rereading down the line, because otherwise the foundations of my house would crumble under the weight.
My library allows requesting new books 3 months before they come out, so I usually try and be the guy requesting it and getting the first hold on it that way…
If you want to read something slightly closer to “normal” SF by him, The Embassy is good. Although my absolute favorite is still The City and The City, which is all about social mores and to a degree, castes.
I think iMessage and whatever Google had at the time were “good enough” here that WhatsApp never caught on? Like most people already had unlimited texting by the time it hit the scene, so It just felt like a scam back in the day and I remember it wanted my phone number to complete a sign-up and I was damned if I was going to give it to them.
Opening weekend for Dune 2 but the 10:45 am showing in a Sunday. Only like 6 people in the theater. Alas, one was coughing up a lung mid-movie but even he was far enough away I didn’t feel like I was getting COVID cooties.
Dune 1 I “streamed” via NZB (since they released it to streaming simultaneously) and then went and bought a ticket at the theater and threw it away without ever going in just to vote with my wallet for Dune 2 to happen.
No offense but I have a 100” projector screen, a decent amp, surround and a subwoofer. Versus going to see Dune 2 in the theater recently (admittedly on a much bigger screen) with some guy in the back possibly coughing up an internal organ or just plain expiring mid-movie as the soundtrack to a lot of it.
If you’re into Insta, be sure and check out PixelFed.
Came here to say basically the same thing. GOP now stands for Groupies of Putin.
They’re great! Especially Sundiver and The Uplift War. EDIT: should have added they are somewhat stand-alone, although you do manage to learn a little bit more about the overall arc of the plot from each book if you move through them in order.
Sort of? Almost? It provides a lot of motivation for one of the main characters IIRC. Honestly might be just as well off watching the NF show haha.
So the first 100+ pages was an excruciating slog but after that he finally gets to the real story. Which was cool and fascinating but he completely effed it up in book 2 and I didn’t even make it 100 pages into book 3 before seeing it was more bogusness. Still, I would kinda recommend Book 1 if you can make it through the freaking Chinese revolution part at the start.
Yeah, but that’s unavoidable. Whereas, Tesla and Waymo, etc getting to use our roads for self-driving testing is just our government not doing their job to protect the roads adequately, IMHO. This is veering way off topic, but I just recently watched a video that had stats on Teslas and the fact they’re like 8.2x more likely to be in a crash than a standard level 2 car driving system.
Honestly, a search engine companion is probably its least offensive case, you’re correct. Mostly, it makes me so mad because they are polluting our entire collected knowledge base, because there is no way to watermark anything as AI-generated (especially when it’s text, not images) which means that every search you make from here on out returns worse results. It’s like being forced to share the road with self-driving Teslas because the self-driving car companies (especially Tesla) have made us all involuntarily part of their beta test.
The “screw everyone else trying to use the same public resource” mentality is out of control.
There is no such thing as a good AI engine… all I really want from any AI engine is the ability to watermark everything it outputs as generated by an AI so it can later be filtered out when it’s discovered to be inaccurate or just simply plagiaristic.
I would fucking rather pay not to have AI in my browser, FFS…
I’m pretty much against it because I feel like it’s an opportunity to have to explain which BSG is actually the good one of them all to everyone you ever talk to about it. (Also, way way too soon for another reboot!)
Doesn’t contain The Arrival either. Or Moon, or Alien or Twelve Monkeys… Basically there are a lot of more deserving candidates then Gravity, Ad Astra and Sunshine.
Gravity is not bad IMHO, but it lost its hard sci fi cred ::: spoiler with the Sixth Sense shenanigans ::: .
Doesn’t contain Moon, 12 Monkeys, The Arrival, Alien, District 9… there are quite a few movies I would out ahead of Ad Astra and Sunshine at the very least. And possibly Gravity and Solaris too. Also, listing 2001 in 15th place???
I had to do some googling, but it looks like it was the Apple Network Server that I’m thinking of.
But was it an escaped boomslang snake?