I dream of a pure information protocol. Kinda like RSS, but… More.

• allow any piece of information (news article, DM, sensor reading,…) to be wrapped in a standard format
• subscribe to any number of source directly or indirectly (e.g. through a self-hosted relay server)
• allow networks to define default data sources (e.g. get sensor data from machines as soon as you are connected to corporate networks
• make the data declare what UI elements are required,
• but allow clients to display them however the fuck they want
• allow user to assign priorities statically or programmatically to any source, and to filter, sort, categorize based on it

Essentially: I want “the feed” from universes like The Expanse

Even worse worse, he named prior projects after Culture ship names. Whose author despised him.

It probably contained Linux

If I had to guess? Ubuntu Studio 14.04

That’s still eugenics, just as side effect

Interesting. I always loved how they fit the musical entries into the story in a way that it makes sense that everyone is singing all of the sudden, lol

Iain M. Banks’ Culture.

I’m deathly afraid of the day some big studio manages to buy the rights and produce a Hollywood version of the Culture. Mostly because it is very easy to flip through the Wikipedia entries and then take the superficial aesthetic of the Culture and misunderstand or ignore the rest.

For an example on how easy it is to do this: I remember vividly when the German translations of the later books came out, and they all had some variation of

The Culture is the galaxy-spanning empire of mankind. Unbeknownst to its citizens however, their supposedly benevolent machine gods are about to dispense with the needs for humans at all"

in the blurb. Someone scanned the wiki page until they read something about “superhuman AI” or the like, then went “ah, got it, I’ve seen Terminator”.

In a similar vein, I cannot imagine that Hollywood would portray the Culture as an unquestionably good Utopia. They’d not be able to resist to paint the luxury gay space communists as “…with a dark secret / actually dystopian /…” tones.

It has to have the same energy though. Dong have to be the same characters, doesn’t have to feature Brakebills for Fillory, but needs the same “we’re broken and magic doesn’t make it better, but hey, here’s a canonical musical” feeling

Computer Science (at a rather “prestigious” university for CS, for that matter, at least as far as that’s a thing here). Not in the US though, and none of the three universities I’ve studied at had mandatory attendance, for anything (exception: seminars, where attending talks by your fellow students was mandatory). As a result, I’ve never seen any prof take attendance.

A lot of comments on this post say that attendance was called esp. for freshmen classes, but frankly, I don’t see how that would even have been possible here, with sometimes 500+ students in a lecture hall.

In regards to assignments, at least in my experience, studying the lecture material and consulting it while solving the exercises was usually the fastest way to understand them and get them done.

Hi, I have been to lectures fewer than 10 times throughout my entire master’s. No AI, no textbooks, just lecture slides and doing the (ungraded) weekly assignments.

It probably wasn’t a smart idea (incl. for my social life), but it also wasn’t hard to do.

YES!

The books are also good, but very different. The show creators made an excellent adaptation of the world and its energy and feeling, but changed characters and plot to something more suitable for a show. Both are great though.

No, mate. I don’t need a guide, or a tour. Just a single clarifying sentence.

“My product does x”. Right now, x could be:

• help you scam people
• provide a meditation partner
• help you learn how to code in Cobol
• give travel tips
• …

What does your product DO? And dong you dare answer “it helps you make money”, that does not explain anything.

I have clicked every link on that site and I still have exactly zero clue wtf this is.

Ah, my bad then! I didn’t see a repo linked in the post or on the site. That’s great, then!

Cool idea. But since it doesn’t seem to be open source and self-hostable, I won’t trust it.

FWIW, I have no issues sending mails/having them be received from my self-hosted to Google mail

On many trackers, you get “paid” for time seeded. Usually in the forms of bonus points or the like. You can then exchange these for improving your ratio (or a freeleech token, or an invite,…).

It’s a system that also rewards keeping media available even if you are not uploading to anyone.

Also, keep in mind that often, a large part of the available content is freeleech (meaning leeching it doesn’t affect your ratio), but seeding those torrents usually still does improve your ratio.

Pimsleur. It’s very different than Duolingo, in that it is almost entirely audio-based. However, at least in my experience, it actually gets you to the point of speaking and understanding a language much more rapidly than Duolingo. Way, way less gamified though. It expects you to put in half an hour a day where you just concentrate on the lesson.

Isn’t that what Sichuan peppers do?

Sorry, I should have mentioned: liking bare-metal does not mean disliking abstraction.

I would absolutely go insane if I had to go back to installing and managing each and every services in their preferred way/config file/config language, and to diy backup solutions, and so on.

I’m currently managing all of that through a single nix config, which doesn’t only take care of 90% of the overhead, it also contains all config in a single, self-documenting, language.

YES, WATCH STEINS;GATE!

Not Steins;Gate Zero though, that’s a sequel.

The most common criticism is that the first handful of episodes are slow, but I hard disagree. Every moment is either re-contextualized later on, or is important character work.