If nothing else, having to go to church every Sunday in my youth taught be to be able to sit still while bored off my brain for an hour a week.
5,181 karma · joined August 28, 2011
The Fall Between and Burning Mountain by Darcy Tindale recount the investigations of main character Rebecca Giles.
The Survivors by Jane Harper. Seriously, get any book or a shopping list written by Jane and you'll not be able to put it down.
Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth. Another author who's complete catalogue is well worth your time.
Black River and Broke Road by Matthew Spencer.
Unbury the Dead by Fiona Hardy.
Other authors worth noting are Margaret Hickey, Chris Hammer and Christian White.
On the sci-fi side of things, I found Infinite Archive by Mur Lafferty quite cozy. Also the Lady Astronauth Universe series by Mary Robinette Kowal, that starts with The Calculating Starts. Flybot by Dennis Taylor (of Bobbi-verse fame).
I was less enamoured with A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine than others are, and don't feel the need to tackle the second in the series.
I also revisited the John Cleaver horror series by Dan Wells that starts with the excellent I Am Not a Serial Killer.
I've just started Slow Gods by Claire North. I find her books a bit hit and miss for me but so far, so good. I absolutely love The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, and Touch was also quite good, but some of her others I could not finish or didn't event start as they were just not for me.
We originally signed up with element.io back when they were called vector.im. Service was good, but a year or two in they decided they wanted to focus on those sweet, sweet enterprise licences and the pricing changes were untenable for our little 15 person operation. (I bear them little ill will for this, gotta do what you gotta do and all that, but it was a real PITA at the time.)
We moved to etke.cc who have been quite good. They were responsive to my modest support requests, and apart from being initially a bit surprised we wanted an unfederated server (which to their credit they dealt with with alacrity and aplomb) it's been a service we've just used and not had to otherwise think about.
The only sticking point was there was no way to migrate our messages from the older service. If memory serves, this was due to a deficiency in either Matrix or Synapse due to changing domains (originally an element.io customer subdomian). So always your own subdomain if you can is the moral of the story, I guess. I don't know if the migration story has improved in the years since.
If we had to leave Element/Matrix for whatever reasons I would definitely look at Zulip based on the many recommendations I see for it here. I think back when we went with Element I was quite interested in Zulip, but there just wasn't any good hosting options at the time and we didn't want to go with self-hosting (time-sink vs $$-sink).
For context, my team lives in a timezone ~17 ahead of the parent company and they seem to really have difficulty grappling with the idea of not scheduling meetings with me for three in the morning.
(Seasonal related practices like taking holidays during our summer in the other hemisphere also seems to be perplexing.)
I think you're being a bit reductive there. For one, the article indicates the greatest benefits are from a hybrid environments where some time is spent in the office.
I'll admit, of the few books of his I've read, I always felt like they ended a couple of chapters too soon or a couple of chapters too late — which has put me off reading more of his books despite some interesting premises. I suspect some of the deeper themes are lost on me in my bedtime readings. Just not my cup of tea at the end of the day, literally.
Another way they've utilised geothermal energy is with large, sophisticated greenhouses which allow growing of many produce they would otherwise import. I only had the opportunity for a brief visit but a lot of it looked hydroponic with really interesting monitoring and control technology. (Plus the biggest bees this Antipodean has ever seen! These suckers were so big they didn't buzz, they rang the doorbell.)
I've been thinking of joining that.
Backups that are stored with the same provider are good, providing the provider is reliable as a whole.
(Currently going through the disaster recovery exercise of, "What if AWS decided they didn't like us and nuked our account from orbit.")
I was expecting when I make a commit, I would have the facility to specify what issues it addressed and it would close them for me automatically. It seemed there is so much opportunity there to "close the loop" when the issue tracker, etc and integrated in your VCS, but it wasn't taken.
History students are often disappointed when they learn why the AI take-over failed. They were defeated by human resistance, which was kept alive by libraries and old paper books, and a surprising machine ally.
Books had not been replaced, because even the mightiest AI could not make printers work.
[1] https://www.cerbos.dev/blog/productivity-paradox-of-ai-codin...
There's neuroplasticity and there's picking your battles. :-)
I do like the idea of thumb keys, but would probably need them as duplicates to the more traditional positions. I got a Keyboardio 100 which is absolutely beautiful, but 60% with layers for those above important keys just was too freaking hard.
You should also look at PipePipe, also available on F-Droid and with similar enhancements (e.g., Sponsorblock) over NewPipe.
The author argues that modern "compression culture" undermines deep, meaningful experiences by prioritizing efficiency and instant gratification. This culture treats depth as inefficiency, leading to a loss of valuable human experiences like confusion, difficulty, and transformation. The text highlights how historical practices, such as oral traditions and early universities, valued immersion and communal struggle for knowledge. The author criticizes the illusion of knowledge created by consuming compressed information, which leads to superficial understanding and a lack of true wisdom. The document emphasizes that meaningful growth, whether in skills, relationships, or personal development, requires patience, repetition, and engagement with complexity, which cannot be achieved through compression.
Time saved reading: 10min /s