I’m not super involved, but I believe it’s possible to engage with Wikipedia ethically and well as a PR firm or the like. But being honest is part one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PR_Professionals_%26_Editing

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

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.

I love that proco being a pig is treated as mildly weird. His relationship with the fascist government is more important to the plot than that he is a pig. No one else is an animal. It’s just a thing that happened to him. You can tell it’s a big deal to him, but no one else really cares. You could remove him being a pig and the story still works fine. It just makes the regret and inadequatecy more obvious.

I think I like Howel’s Moving Castle more. But it’s close. That one gave me a whole author.

Second generetions software engineer. 19 years. It’s been good. I’d recommend folks try writing software one time somehow and if they like the puzzle solving bits look into it more. The market is really saturated for new grads now so it has to be something you love.

I’m a software engineer because I’m bad at everything else. Barely made it through college physics class and highschool chemistry. Wanted to do English but can’t write. Didn’t want to follow in my mom’s footsteps but I just can’t so anything else well. Came around in college after a pretty bad first semester.

I was kind of a slacker in school. I did ok, but the pressure I see on kids these days would have killed me.

I made it through a computer science degree because it was fun for me. So much puzzle solving. Even the theoretical stuff was fun. I had a professor who everyone thought was really easy. Folks were getting like 98/100 in the whole class. I think, though, he just tought well. We got it. He made it easy.

These days I work on data things. Nothing fancy. All open though so googling my name will find it. It’s honest work. I got here accidentally. I was taking random tasks and worked on search once time. Was kind of fun. When that job went belly up I spent a while working for something cool. I found a job I was unqualified for but sort of bluffed my way into. Learned a lot.

While I was there I built a search thing that, terrifyingly, is built right into Firefox. Go to the location bar, type @w, hit tab, and type a word. That was me for a while. I’m proud of it. It’s no google, but it’s honest.

Been working in search and data stuff ever since. I don’t deserve it. It’s been good. But I got lucky.

I used gerrit and zuul a while back at a place that really didn’t want to use GitHub. It worked pretty well but it took a lot of care and maintenance to keep it all ticking along for a bunch of us.

It has a few features I loved that GitHub took years to catch up to. Not sure there’s a moral to this story.

I think all those are a little true. But I’m mostly guessing. I’m happy to change my mind if anyone knows better.

Either way, these folks are my hero.

Amazon is certainly interesting for open source. They’ve caused me and my friends a fair bit of trouble but they have made some real contributions. I feel like they only do it when they have to though. They are quite happy to take others work and give nothing back.

They just feel very disingenuous. Opportunistic. A bit sleezy. But some of my favorite open source hackers work there and do good work. It’s hard.

I read Snowcrash when I was twelve and super wanted to live in that world. Then I read it again when I had twelve year old kids. Boy did it hit different.