Halting State was great. It actually took me a couple of chapters to realize it was all 2nd person. That's the book that got me into Stross.

I really enjoyed the first three: they were pretty obviously just a bunch of short stories set in the same universe. The later books where he tried to write actual novels were not great though. He could do great short stories, but IMO wasn't much of a novelist.

I'm in the US, and I bike about 6 miles in to the office; with rush hour traffic, it'd probably take me about that long to drive in. Plus, I get some much needed exercise.

Text of an average book is 100,000 letters;

I'm not sure where you're getting that value. The low end of word count for a novel is 50,000. If we say the average word is only 5 characters, we're looking at a quarter million letters and another 50,000 spaces for a short novel (200-250 pages). Throw in some more for punctuation and formatting, of course. If you're a fan of big epic fantasy/sci-fi you're probably closer to a million words.

It's a reference to your username

Cory Doctorow coined it: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

That's a great point, thanks for adding it!

Thanks!

Because I'm not really that invested. The Steam launch will have the effect of making me check it out, so I guess that will at least work as intended.

I was really excited about this game when I first heard about it, right up until I learned it was Ubisoft. Their involvement makes me pretty dubious, so I'll wait and see how hard they crank the monetization handle, and also what the reviews look like.

I've frequently not been on boats!

"Do you think Death could possibly be a boat?"

I'm not sure what you mean; Google doesn't have anything to do with LocalSend, do they?

In a similar vein, "not the sharpest spoon in the drawer"

If you haven't, you might want to read Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin series, or at least to peruse this list from Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AubreyMaturinSeries/comments/4ak12q/which_its_a_prodigious_great_list_of_aubreys/

Yup, my Lemur has completely lost one hinge; I've actually got the case duct taped together at this point. Their customer support was really bad when i contacted them about it; they tried to get me to agree to charges before they even told me what they were charging me for: it took me days of escalation to get the answer that they were going to ship me a part but had no instructions or videos for installation and didn't recommend end users do it. I'm actually looking at Framework now instead; I'm pretty done with System 76 at this point.

Sure, but to me that means the latest information is that AI assistants help produce insecure code. If someone wants to perform a study with more recent models to show that's no longer the case, I'll revisit my opinion. Until then, I'm assuming that the study holds true. We can't do security based on "it's probably fine now."

Pedantics fighting pedantics LOL

I think you mean "pedants fighting pedants" :p

As a cybersecurity guy, it's things like this study, which said:

Overall, we find that participants who had access to an AI assistant based on OpenAI’s codex-davinci-002 model wrote significantly less secure code than those without access. Additionally, participants with access to an AI assistant were more likely to believe they wrote secure code than those without access to the AI assistant.

There are corners of the Internet still out there where you can find some really great people to hang out with; like 70% of my friend group is people who all meet through online games. We get together in person weekly or so now but still regularly play games together and hang out. I know it's no replacement for all you've lost, but maybe playing games with friends could be some comfort? Or some other hobby or interest group that can be engaged with online?