PKD is special somehow. He’s the one author where, I think, the movies are better than the books pretty consistently. Maybe it’s luck or my flawed opinion.

I’ve not read them all but that sort of feels like how the culture novels are.

I love the idea Kylo Ren. Unhinged man child who worships Vader for all the wrong reasons. His soldiers are afraid of him and work around him and pity him. I love having such a broken villain.

I loved when Rey’s parents were nobodies.

I loved that Luke was a scared and broken. Should have felt crippling pity for that guard he force choked in a Jabba’s palace. Still. I loved it.

And while I’m at it. Frozen. I wanted so desperately for Hans to be entirely sympathetic and just not in love will Anna. Movie is mostly the same until Anna gets back and needs the kiss to fix her and he tries and… Nothing. Then. I dunno. Finish the movie some other way.

I worked for them ten years ago. I was excited to do something important for once. And it was better than competing with Amazon for book sales. I was really helping.

I eventually left because I didn’t think we were being a great steward of donor money. And I didnt have the best relationship with my boss. Nice guy, but we didn’t clock.

Back then they spent like half their money on donations and programs trying to get more editors. That included supporting projects in smaller languages and diversity on current projects. Mostly good stuff as far as I could tell.

Where they invested their money for tech was where I disagreed. But even so, I’ve donated since then. They are supporting important work. Everyone makes mistakes.

Ultimately, I dunno.

It’s one of magi!

I certainly get lag in my pixels but no disconnects.

I think blind itself drives some interesting bias. The public posts are pretty incel. You need a critical mass of folks at your company to have a company private board so it attracts folks from bigger companies. It doesn’t seem to represent average folks well. Unless I have no idea what average is.

I’m not sure what to do with that instinct. The overall results say a thing I wanted to hear. It all feels weird.

Catch 22 is just about the funniest thing I’ve ever read. I don’t think you’ll finish it in a day, but it’s amazing.

Never Let Me Go is the most “not for me” book I’ve ever read. I can see why people love it. And I respect what it’s doing. I just don’t want to play a long.

Project Hail Mary used to come up on r/books from time to time and was polarizing. Lots of folks loved it. Lots thought it wasn’t good.

If you loved the Martian I think you’ll like PHM. I did.

My guess is the big video ram is high resolution textures, complex geometry, and a long draw distance. I honestly don’t know much about video games though.

The smaller install is totally the map streaming stuff. I’m unsure quite why it has to be so big, but again, I don’t know video games. I do recall you having to tell it where you want to start from and it’ll download some stuff there.

I recommend it. Try to go in blind.

“I once ran the Indy 500. I must confess I’m impressed how I did it I wonder how close that I came.”

I don’t know but the suggest makes me so happy.

I like this explanation. I don’t think we can do a lot better than this one at this point.

I think a fun next step is “forget what’s real, I want to write a story with humans interacting with aliens that’s consistent with what we see now.” What do you have to invent to make it work? Nothing really works for me. But stuff like the dark forest is good. I can suspend disbelief enough to enjoy it.

I bought some $50 open back headphones a while back and they a just worlds better than anything I’d had before. Is there a step up from there that’d similarly rock my world?

My mic is pretty similar. $100 got me an SM58 and it’s wonderful. You have to basically eat it and I can peak it if I’m loud. But it sounds so much nicer than most things. I know there’s a few steps up from there. But I don’t sing so think I’m fine.

Try your local library.

I think it was the EPA’s National Compute Center. I’m guessing based on location though.

When I was in highschool we toured the local EPA office. They had the most data I’ve ever seen accessible in person. Im going to guess how much.

It was a dome with a robot arm that spun around and grabbed tapes. It was 2000 so I’m guessing 100gb per tape. But my memory on the shape of the tapes isn’t good.

Looks like tapes were four inches tall. Let’s found up to six inches for housing and easier math. The dome was taller than me. Let’s go with 14 shelves.

Let’s guess a six foot shelf diameter. So, like 20 feet circumference. Tapes were maybe .8 inches a pop. With space between for robot fingers and stuff, let’s guess 240 tapes per shelf.

That comes out to about 300 terabytes. Oh. That isn’t that much these days. I mean, it’s a lot. But these days you could easily get that in spinning disks. No robot arm seek time. But with modern hardware it’d be 60 petabytes.

I’m not sure how you’d transfer it these days. A truck, presumably. But you’d probably want to transfer a copy rather than disassemble it. That sounds slow too.

Not looking at the man page, but I expect you can limit it if you want and the parser for the parameter knows about these names. If it were me it’d be one parser for byte size values and it’d work for chunk size and limit and sync interval and whatever else dd does.

Also probably limited by the size of the number tracking. I think dd reports the number of bytes copied at the end even in unlimited mode.