I put it in the “fun concepts boring characters” bucket with most Clarke.

I really liked the next Hugo winner. And 2020. And 2023. Honestly I think about half of the Hugo winners are amazing. 2007. 2002. 2000. Oh 1993. That’s a vintage. 1990. 87, 86, 85, 84 is ok. Oh. They get more consistent as they go back in time. Still pretty good.

Get a doula. They are like a birth helper. They have so much practice with birth stuff than you do.

Take off your ring during labor.

Same. I love that there are so many different kinds of pies. But I still want the pican pie from who’s recipe is on the karo syrup bottle.

I liked the article. It sung to my heart. I’ve been in this world for a while. Lived through the failure and hyperacalars just taking without giving back.

I don’t know what to think. But I’m not happy with where we are and it’s nice to hear someone else talking about it.

I’m on page 3 and already sold.

I loved Enix’s Ogre Battle and Square’s Final Fantasy 6 and 7. How could putting the companies together make a bad?!

I’m glad we have both the comic and the movie. I’m glad the movie led me to the comic. I love them both.

I told the car salesdude that I’d buy this car if he spent 15 minutes teaching me. Worked out pretty well!

That’s not what I was thinking but I like it! Http caching is pretty magic. Stateless nodes and easy scaling too.

For some kinds of problems you really can’t beat varnish and friends. It’s how we have Wikipedia, after all.

You have to learn this through suffering. Class would have to be project based.

It’d be fun to talk shop with the fast code in slow languages folks. I do that for a living. I remember three ways, but I’m sure there’s more:

• “Just use a better data structure”
• “My language is a DSL for a faster language” (Polars, Numpy, etc)
• “My compiler is surprisingly good if I’m careful” (Julia, JVM, etc)

As a work of conceptual art, it consists of a certificate of authenticity with detailed diagrams and instructions for its proper display.

I love it.

My first thought was that it’d be a great oracle for randomized testing.

And without Han and Chewy. Who are pure skill.

And, retconned, without the Rogue One and Andor people. I love you that even star wars came around to a revolution needing help from all kinds.

A large portion of the US stock market’s valuation is based on speculation that AI will be really useful and really cheap. It’s not useless. But is it as useful as folks think it will be? Are Oracle and OpenAI and fiends overvalued?

I do not want AI art. I do not want AI videos. I do not want AI narration. But I’m not everyone.

AI can help you program. Folks sell it like you can fire all your hackers.

We see AI as useful. Maybe even revolutionarily useful. The web is useful. Revolutionarily useful. But every .com company was super overvalued back in the day. Lots of folks lost their job and their pension and stuff.

I get US robber baron vibes too.

Fair warning for those who decide to read it, the book doesn’t treat women particularly well. And it’s the best propaganda I’ve read for capitalism. Read it with eyes open and it’s fun. Great villains. Fun world building. It ends well. And trains!

And it’s like a 1000 page long novel split into two books.

I’m not good at this but that’s never stopped me from making a fool of myself before.

Iterators are monads because they have a flatMap on them. It takes each element and spits out a new iterator which is merged in to the result.

Option is a monad too. Same reason. You can map the contents to another option. And you won’t get called if there’s nothing inside.

Promises are monads too. You can map the result to another promise. The wrinkle here is that you don’t get to know when the map happen. Or it might not get called at all if the promise errors out.

IO can be a monad because you can ask it for input and wait for the result. It’s just the same as a promise.

See how these different things share a common behavior? That’s monad. Or, maybe it’s monoid. Names are hard and I’m busy making a fool of myself.

Monads are nothing more than a useful abstraction. Haskell is famous for them because they couldn’t make Haskell do imperative stuff without them so they spread them all over the language.

We all use them every day in regular programming. We just don’t think of them as a class of thing.

In the Commonwealth Saga it’s trains! It’s portals with hugely demanding power consumption. They mostly have to stay fixed to one place and open. So they run choo choos. Their world is commerce and economics. And trains are a lovely symbol of that.

In The Final Architecture it’s jaunty. Unspace helps you go fast but you are always alone. Crewmates gone. When you come out they reappear. When you inside there is something coming to get you. Something that lives in unspace and doesn’t like that we use it for travel. The terror of its hunting you drives everyone to suicide. So instead they sleep. Magic “you sleep now” pods for everyone.

Except. You can only sleep if you are on a known route. Some rare people can feel out new routes. And they have to say awake. Most shows just follow normal routes. But the special ships with these other folks can go all over the place! At the cost of route terror.

The books are about coming together in the face of adversity cosmic horror. And unspace is a foil to that. You are alone. But we do what we can anyway. Your alone now, but not forever. Unless the monster gets you.

There I am. 149. Wild it’s still up there after the license stuff.