Superman’s Metropolis (?) is based on Cleveland (and the last movie was filmed there)

N.K. Jemisin (mentioning her again here) did it really well in Fifth Season. Implied-to-be-future-Earth that is tectonically unstable, and constantly suffering from eruptions, earthquakes, and acid rain.

We got so far into “hardware is cheap” / “developers are expensive” / abstraction positive feedback loop, we are using a Raspberry Pi to blink a LED, but on a global scale.

Speaking of Alastair Reynolds, concept of Pattern Jugglers - benign algae-like pools that oscillate in strange image-like patterns and can physically connect, read, and modify human brains. A person entering the Pattern Juggler could experience someone else’s life, temporarily gain skills or knowledge, or… die.

In Ursula LeGuin’s Left Hand Of Darkness, I love the idea of society without war. There is still violence and murder, but fighting on someone else’s behalf must be viewed as incredibly absurd and unacceptable.

Department Of Truth comics are based around the idea “what if what we believe becomes true?”. So cryptids, UFOs, and conspiracies exist because enough people believe in them.

The depth and mechanics of Orogenes in N.K. Jemisin’s Fifth Season / Broken Earth. It’s not just “I cast frost”, it’s heat and energy manipulation, with sense, direction, and geometry.

A Translator appears in Ancillary Sword, and it’s pretty much “try to simulate a human” silly stuff for comic relief.

I used porkbun, and never had to upload an ID (but I am in USA). IIRC still need to provide an address, but they mask WHOIS.

Hobbies, sharing things that we both would find interesting, movies / tv shows / video games, happenings in life.

As usual, there is a sci-fi story for this: The Unincorporated Man.

Every individual is incorporated at birth, and spends many years trying to attain control over his or her own life by getting a majority of his or her own shares, a task made difficult given the long life spans now possible.

Haven’t read it yet though.

Read this in Subliminal by Leonard Mlodinow: human brains are biased towards optimism, but also, to value own decisions above others’. Baggage from thousands of years ago, but it’s there.

Article uses the “akshually humans are just complex learning machines” pro-AI argument:

The competence a human needs to oversee an AI system is not a fixed asset. It is built and kept alive through practice – the same practice the AI system is now doing instead of the human.

Keep scrolling.

HERE WeGo (aka HERE Maps) is not FOSS, but has traffic, satellite view, offline mode, etc. Some POI might be outdated (due to it being not Google)

IIRC history of the current Russian flag is that it was a naval flag derived from the Dutch by… Rearranging the stripes. Yeah, so original.

Also, many people confuse the color stripe order anyway. The cynical way to remember it is “blood under water”.

I suppose I should not ask your opinion on color choices for Bangladesh.

You guys, the truth is way more depressing. They are not even smart enough to be as evil as you’re giving them credit for.

from Don’t Look Up.

Good engineers will produce more good code, because they ask the right questions, know what good looks like and check the output.

Best code is the code that is never written in the first place. But that concept is difficult to explain and measure for management purposes. Just because “AI” can automate well-structured, tested boilerplate for “good” developers does not mean all that boilerplate should be there.

Bear in Ukrainian is “vedmid”, and in Russian it is “medved”.

What I don’t understand is that the most desirable areas (home price, population growth) in the US are also very prone to natural disasters: floods in Carolinas, fires in S California, hurricanes in Florida, extreme heat in Texas and the southwest. Meanwhile, Great Lakes / rust belt area does not get many disasters, still has seasons, has access to fresh water, and yet, cities/areas populations are slowly decreasing or staying flat.

Instead of headlights 2 feet off the ground, now we have overpowered searchlights (brighter = safer, amirite?) mounted 4 feet high, guaranteed to blind pedestrians and any shorter vehicle’s driver.

Not just mechanical stress, but sugars and carbohydrates in those foods feed the bacteria in the mouth, whose byproducts damage the enamel. Few people are blessed with teeth that withstand it, or mouth flora that is non-damaging, but there is no natural selection for that… Because we have dentistry, thankfully.

They will laugh and then keelhaul you.

Was waiting for my car, guy walks in and says to the manager “Hey, can you fix my girlfriend’s car? It’s, like, all fucked up” without elaborating further. As any public-facing job, they have some tolerance for bullshit and will probably ignore it.

IMO the “visual concept” is a weak argument - those are very abstract shapes.

each character conveys a word or concept rather than a single letter that has no inherent definition.

And each character consists of strokes, or even unjoined glyphs, making them more eqivalent to a word rather than a letter.

they even have words that are “swapable”

In languages that I know, order of compound words mostly matters but order of words in a sentence can change a lot. In Ukrainian and Russian, it could be used for emphasis without tone, e.g. “она пошла домой” (she went home, neutral), “домой она пошла” (she went home), “пошла она домой” (she walked home). But in English, at least in conversational, non-contorted way, word order has to be preserved.

alphabets (as those are based on sound)

Well, yes, but, actually, no. Alphabets co-evolved with pronunciation. While Ukrainian and Belarusian (AFAIK) are very close phonetically to written text, Russian has a lot of a-o sound swaps, and English, in addition to a = æ and the th sound is… Well, you just have to know how to pronounce every word because they could derive or be borrowed from Spanish or French or any other latin-script language, but for some reason they keep the original spelling.