gattr

I love both The Laundry Files and Merchant Princes/Empire Games, and wouldn't mind seeing a high-budget TV adaptation of them.

mild spoiler

At some point there's a bloody Project Orion-type spaceship taking off the Earth's surface.

More specifically, in Permutation City mind uploading is in its infancy, while in Diaspora it's a run-of-the-mill tech.

I'll add Schild's Ladder to the recommendations.

I'm waiting for a "monitor-replacement glasses" - show me a device which simulates an equivalent of my current 24"/4K/60 Hz monitor (same amount of pixels, same angular size in my FOV). Since I can touch type, I don't need AR/motion sensing, just the display.

> The concrete prediction is that the internet will become filled with AI written crap, and that anyone wanting to use it will have to filter out an enormous amount of AI nonsense, before they reach any useful information.

The same point is made in Fall; or, Dodge in Hell.

It's more stable (and structurally leaner, I think) to instead have the engines at the front in tractor configuration, as in the interstellar ships in Avatar movies.

And Unreal Commander (freeware), also compatible with TC plugins. I'm usually on Fedora, I use Krusader there.

On a related note: Cold War-era Polish military maps of the British Isles, in case of a Warsaw Pact invasion thereof:

https://earthlymission.com/map-of-britain-teach-invading-pol...

> This Cold War era map was created to teach Polish troops how to pronounce English place names in the event of an invasion against Britain (click to enlarge). Towns and cities in Essex and Kent are spelled out phonetically – resulting in interesting transformations such as Southend-On-Sea into Saufend-On-Sji.

I read about them elsewhere; one of the details I remembered is how at some point they started noticing fast-moving "stars" in the night sky and the father realized they must be man-made artificial objects (satellites).

Another fun fact: there are more trees on Earth (3×10¹²) [1] than stars in the Milky Way (1-4×10¹¹).

[1] "Mapping tree density at a global scale" https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14967

Or we could mark the Earth-facing side of the Moon somehow; that would endure over geological time scales. Maybe not via massive excavations with nuclear charges (sounds like vandalism to me), but, say, hundreds of kilometers long figures/patterns made with aluminium foil sheets hung on poles, or just spread on the regolith (so - easily removable).

Hopefully, in a few decades: got cancer? Go for a biopsy, wait a week for a personalized vaccine. Even if some cells survive, mutate and start growing again, just repeat the procedure. Cancer becomes a somewhat annoying chronic illness.

He could have been using small earplugs - I hope!

As a side note, Terminator: Future Shock ([1]) had 3D enemies in '95 - but still 2D-sprite explosions and weapons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminator:_Future_Shock

Here's an interesting view I've encountered somewhere: yes, complex (not to mention intelligent) life might be very rare, but simple life might be extremely common (either easily arising from primordial soups, and/or trivially spread by panspermia). Imagine - millions of Earth-like planets in the Milky Way alone, all covered (or: infested) by unicellular goo.

(Before eventual colonization, this would warrant a really thorough "gamma soak" as in Alastair Reynolds' "Revelation space" SF series.)

But as soon as you can run an open-source model privately on your workstation, laptop, eventually a phone - common man's position might get somewhat improved.

Let's not forget about San Escobar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Escobar

Unofficial map:

https://joemonster.org/p/1595265/size/oryg/san_escobar_map_J...

I love the idea of LLMs being super-efficient language tutors. And you have a good point; coming soon: "We've been getting a lot of these tourists here lately, they're eerily fluent, but all seem to have the same minor speech impediment" (read: messed-up weights in a commonly used speech model).

When I got older, I realized the sneakiness here (shortening and quoting from memory):

> Trurl realized that a poet's mind is shaped by the civilization that produced him, and that civilization - by the one before it, and so on. So in order to create an artificial poet, he'd have to simulate the whole history of the Universe. Which he did, but then from the results chose only the important bits as inputs for the learning process, otherwise it would take too long...

I hope we'll get a screen adaptation of HL/HL:OpFor/HL2, at least as good as HBO's "The Last Of Us" (I loved it, and haven't even played that game).

Thanks, good to know! Looks like I'll switch to dump1090_rs.

Just a few weeks ago I got interested in this as well ("where does FR24 get its data from?"). I ended up buying a cheap RTL-SDR dongle (R820T2) and a small outdoor antenna. I run the free dump1090 tool (I'm on Fedora) to decode ADS-B messages, then my own simple "radar-like" visualization program ([1]) connects to dump1090's network socket to receive decoded data (SBS1 textual format). Even with the antenna just sitting in my room (on a photo tripod), I typically receive data from 10-20 aircraft, up to 190 km away. I drove to a hilltop this weekend (some 600 m higher) and immediately got >100 aircraft, up to 500 km.

[1] https://github.com/GreatAttractor/plane-tracker

Just a side note: for torque it's very emphatically "times", not "divided by": lb⋅ft (or N⋅m).

I agree. We'll have life-like androids for all kinds of entertainment (not AGI-controlled, just some fancy future-generation LLM) sooner than direct neural interfaces for full-immersion VR or stuff like that.

Good point! I guess a properly shielded drone would work. This way you could wear the defenders down, just send in a swarm after swarm.

Tangentially related: in Joe Haldeman's SF novel "The Forever War", at some point "stasis field generators" are added to the arsenal. They limit the maximum speed (of matter and photons) inside a small volume of space to less than 20 m/s (not counting the insides of specially shielded space suits). If you want to root out enemy troops holed up inside the field, you need to get in with bows, arrows, javelins and swords.

The hand-to-hand combat at the China-India LAC ([1]) features prominently in one of the plotlines of Neal Stephenson's "Termination Shock".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_Actual_Control

Similarly in Polish ("judasz"). The more formal term is "wizjer", though that can also refer to "helmet visor" or "camera viewfinder".

In this vein, I can recommend the "Axis of Time" novels ([1]).

The novels deal with the radical alteration of the history of World War II and the socio-historical changes that result when a technologically advanced naval task force from the year 2021 is accidentally transported back through time to 1942.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_of_Time

But the SW sliders are much more convenient; say, at work the desirable blue light level varies quite a lot (e.g., a sunny afternoon with blinds half-closed vs. a rainy morning), and a smooth adjustment is very nice to have.

I've been using dark themes whenever possible for a few years now, but recently realized much of unpleasantness of light mode comes for me from it being too blue w.r.t. the ambient lighting conditions. Playing with the slider in "Night Color" under KDE or "Night light" under Windows does the trick.