sxan

Yah, it does. I've come across it before, but it rode in on a wave of alternative search engines and got lost in the shuffle.

Thanks.

Oh! In so glad I got to be the one to introduce you to Banks!!

A couple of caveats:

1. There's no starting point, and few overlapping characters. Start anywhere.
2. Some people think some books are better than others (and some people have strong opinions about a couple of the books). There are a couple books in particular that are commonly considered the best, and the worst. Read at least two before giving up, just in case the first isn't your cup of tea.
3. Iain is dead; he passed away a few years ago at a relatively young age. He only wrote a dozen or so Culture novels, and there won't be any more (from him).
4. I went from liking him to him being one of my favorite authors over a period of a decade.

The novels really are all over the place. By the time I'd reached the end of his bibliography, I fell into a depression that there wouldn't be any more. While other authors were his peers and friends, and some are put in the same general "feel" category, he really was quite unique and I haven't yet found an author who could fill his shoes.

If you have time and interest, I'd suggest looking online at some fan sites suggesting entry points (and points to avoid starting with). All his books are good, but I do think a couple read better if you're generally familiar with his writing than as first reads.

I envy you; you're in for a treat. Banks was one of the greats.

Works for me.

This is a great question, in that it made me wonder why the Fediverse hasn't come up with a distributed search engine yet. I can see the general shape of a system, and it'd require some novel solutions to keep it scalable while still allowing reasonably complex queries. The biggest problems with search engines is that they're all scanning the entire internet and generating a huge percent of all internet traffic; they're all creating their own indexes, which is computationally expensive; their indexes are huge, which is space-expensive; and quality query results require a fair amount of computing resources.

A distributed search engine, with something like a DHT for the index, with partitioning and replication, and a moderation system to control bad actors and trojan nodes. DDG and SearX are sort of front ends for a system like this, except that they just hand off the queries to one (or two) of the big monolithic engines.

I assume replicators have some non-trivial energy debt, too. If my memory were better, I might even remember an episode where replicators couldn't be used because they were on backup power. Like, compared to warp, it's nothing, but if the warp core or main dilithium generators are offline, replicators don't work.

I know we're in tenforward, but another good post-scarcity-except-when-not is Iain Banks' Culture. Intelligences still trade, but it's more information/skillset/favors based.

I do not know, but for a video of this length it could just be cutting Long seconds of inaction between segments.

There was about 50s of action, between the first fire and the last explosion. There were about 5 cuts in this period. If there were even only 5 seconds of nothing happening between each cut, eliminating them would have reduced the video length (of that segment, which was about half the entire video length) by 30%.

I was watching the smoke dispersion, and it does seem like time was cut out - 2 seconds? 5? 10? I don't know, but it seems to me like it was mainly to cut out periods of inaction during which people might have gotten bored and clicked away.

There's also a fair amount of dramatization, with digital flair added; I blame all this on the audience being brought up on action movies with nonstop explosions. Sucks for analysts, but this is propaganda[1] media.

1. I'm using "propaganda" per the definition: Information that is spread for the purpose of promoting some cause. It's information wrapped in motivational entertainment-oriented editing targeted at a particular audience.

(Comment originally got attached to the wrong parent, so I moved it.)

Yup.

However, let me suggest a radical idea:

Any service that has infrastructure requirements like this, such that there's a mandatory "base fee" under the usage fee, should be nationalized, and the base fee paid be taxes. Every, and any, service. Water. Sewage. Electricity. Internet. Roads. Any basic need provided, that requires infrastructure that would incur a monthly maintenance fee. De-privatize it.

This would be my litmus law for nationalizing services.

This title is click bait, and wrong. Ranked Choice Voting is used, and has been in use, across the country for years - including in city councils.

In particular, city councils in St Paul and Minneapolis used Ranked Choice for elections in 2023.

Are the reporters just bad at their jobs, or is it just click bait hinging on the specifics of the "version" of Ranked Choice Voting? What's so different about their "version" of RCV that makes it so deserving of the alarmist title?

The article is paywalled.

No, but they have been trying to ban it.

In my case, it was just too many technology changes from what I was used to, and simply wasn't familiar enough with. It doesn't help that every distro seems to do everything slightly differently, rather than just agreeing on a standard. The egotistical NIH may be the most frustrating thing about distro builders.

EFI and dracut are both novel to me; efi I'm starting to become more comfortable with, but dracut is new and I'm not entirely sure how it works and where it puts all of its config stuff. It's still better than systemd-boot, which was mostly a catastrophe for me; it worked fine until you wanted to draw outside of the lines a little and then you discover a mountain of spaghetti. I probably should have just stayed with grub, but I wanted snapshot booting, and grub is beginning to struggle with some of these new modalities.

Anyway, I don't want to have to rely on a custom specialized distro, and I figured out my problem in a couple of days; I only have to screw it up two or three more times and then I'll be comfortable with it :-)

Rivians seem to be (a) popular, and (b) getting much better reviews than the Cybertruck. So if you're truck hunting, that's a good option.

Didn't the industry recently standardize on the Tesla connector, though? Wouldn't that mean you could charge at any Tesla station?

• https://www.plugshare.com/
• https://www.electrifyamerica.com/
• https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electricity-locations#/find/nearest

These aren't Tesla specific.