This is my one of my favorites for exactly this reason. Agreed, other than the triumph of what little humanity Ted has at the end there’s not much in the story.

But despite being a famous asshole it always seemed Ellison loved this story, right down to actually re writing a happy end to the “I have no mouth…” adventure game in the early 90s.

Speculation on my part, but I always thought for a famous pessimist he thought his warning might make a difference, which is its own kind of hopeful.

Christofacism. Really you can look at the Westboro baptist church for how emphasis on their duty to a fallen society over gods love looks.

If it makes it into a congregation the reasonable people leave, and the rest radicalize further.

I think you’re in for a treat, but I am horribly biased by nostalgia and it’s impossible for me to be objective about that one. There is something deeply soothing to how what stands out changes even if the words don’t.

I remembered " to light a candle is to cast a shadow ".

But: “I had forgotten how much how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me”. Jumped out.

Even if you’re right, those organizations still have to be dragged kicking and screaming to do the right thing.

It’s not a quick solution, but the answer is more education about the space, so that there are more voices.

Hey I’m you at almost 40! I was always dev adjacent, but never learned to do much more than basic scripting for work.

I started with a couple books: Chassels intro to emacs lisp and Python the hard way.

Python was helpful for a couple things, but the ecosystem is kind of a disaster. I found just the general emacs config helps quite a bit get your feet wet with lisp likes.

Other people have mentioned Go is a great start point because its simplified, and I’ve definitely found it a lot more helpful than the java and C compliers I tried to learn on in my teens.

The only other thing I’d throw out is Lua, it’s super verbose in a way thats pretty easy to understand. it’s also relatively easy to find programs like wezterm that are configured through lua and offer instant reaponses when you change something and see changes.

Just like any new language it takes time, and some hard work to internalize what youre learning, but I don’t think there’s a too old.

You don’t have to be the best programmer ever to do useful things.

The classic is a wizard of earthsea/left hand of darkness and they are always worth repeating. If you do just two, those are them. It’s almost criminal how these are kinda slipping beneath view these days.

I got a steady diet of her short stories and children’s books growing up. I remember sur specifically, but generally they were less fantasy oriented from what I can remember. (Edit:huzzah autocorrect)

The adage if youre looking to split hairs and divide your Methodists is the united Methodists were always more free and the free Methodists more united.

Its a broad tent, most of which didn’t directly mean evangelical when I grew up, but there’s still free Methodists that don’t believe in dancing.

Openly serving gay and lesbian clergy was the hot gossip 20 years ago, it’s been a slow move but they got there.

I ended up on a first gen dell developer xps and didn’t win the Intel nic lottery. Dell’s Ubuntu repo bricked my laptop a dozen times til I moved to arch, which actually had the decency to include the broadcom driver.

The hardware is alright, but the total lack of effort in maintaining has been from the jump.

+1 here for the arch recommendation as an ex ms sys op. Browsing their repos was outstanding for retooling, most of the config problems you hit are a great way into the ecosystem.

It’s crazy how far this extends. I have fewer problems on my 5k atom series laptop GPU/CPU after fooling with a few of the settings than with an nvidia 2k card.

No issues with either full Intel or amd stacks a decade old.

Tldr and tealdeer in the arch repo are both helpful, but Ill do you one better since someone already beat me to it. I found fish shell’s tab completion with either tool to be immensely helpful if you’re not trying to stay stock standard. But if you’re working on a lot of remote machines you don’t own stick with bash/zsh.

There’s some easy to find fuzzy search and linting for for history plugins that mean if you found it once you can do it again in whichever shell.

Its mostly familiarity, but i don’t think I could function without fzf.

I’ve kind of come and gone full circle on this one. It fits in the same space as the terminal, way more useful when you know what you want.

Some config files are a lot easier to get the behavior I want, but editing a poorly formatted (or in some some cases pointlessly complicated) config is a quick nope out.

Too many options to learn a new language.

If you’re the type of person with an opinion on on how software should work, there are options to make it happen.

It’s been my first trip back in a decade, just looking through my options in the core repo these days has made me giddy. I worked for years as a Windows environment sys admin, half my tools went out the window for directly better options almost immediately.

Most of the open source software you’ll find had someone who thought there was a big enough issue to roll up their sleeves, so lots of the projects are answers to questions you haven’t thought of yet too. The entire orientation puts fixing things ahead of profiting off them.

Thank you for this, been hunting for a decent gesture typing option for awhile. Floris board had been decent, but the lack of actual suggestions was brutal to work around.

Don’t miss the collab with the octopus project if this is your vibe. Psychic swelling was how i hopped on this train.

I’m a bigger defender than most of Consider Phlebas than most, but it’s a product of age.

If you grew up with Star Trek and Neuromancer, the first book kind of splits those wickets on utopia/dystopia neatly in a way I don’t think holds up as well afterwards.

Player of games is a much neater intro, but the ambiguity of the first book felt intentional, and it’s always interesting to me to see peoples reactions to that called shot.

I must have read that description of ‘damage’ a dozen times.

I don’t have a study to cite on long term bias, but Scripps used to be newsy which used to be at least serviceable for what amounted to AP syndication.

I didn’t have a clue they were still around till just this instant, but at least the foundation is not something that sprung up yesterday as a Russian puppet.

Things like this make me wish the traditionally anti government party wasn’t a bunch of loonies, because they’d be the ones pushing this to public conscious in a way that might move the needle.

I don’t doubt the intentions of (some) progressive members of government, but they’re outgunned and have a long list of priorities. Getting legislation to reverse this isn’t coming from corporatists, the infinite retention is going to seem like a feature to business.

Using the stock market to measure a recession has to account for continually rising rates at which money is rented. If you can see pretty massive cases of consumer level inflation while businesses struggle, you already have a hole money is leaving.

Watching the evergrande saga unwind over the course of years should give an idea to the extent of run time it will take to see results, especially when it is in the interest of investors to prop up value.

If you have the patience letting the drip of communities surface through your instances ‘all’ feed has been a good way to take in the growth.

I have an account I don’t normally comment from I leave all the memes unblocked for killing time, otherwise it’s been a lot of negative filtering and following interesting comments.

If you’re self hosting that’s a different problem.