I trusted my government to protect my info, and now I have LifeLock for life because of several breaches on their part. If data is stored, it is virtually certain some portion of it will get leaked.

ANOTHER series I just remembered and highly recommend is the Unincorporated Man series. I think there are 4-5 books in the series. Pretty good IMHO. Similar to The Expanse, it’s the Inners vs the Belters, and explores personal liberty and person hood from the perspective of owning “shares” of yourself like a company.

The conflict is awesome, and two military strategy geniuses duke it out in a Legends of the Galactic Heroes sort of way–one has all the resources and latest tech, the other is scrappy and has to deal with extreme resources shortages. Awesome story.

Wholeheartedly agree. I’ve read the first and second, and liked the first the most. Still planning to read the third eventually.

I also should mention I “read” them on audible, and the narrator was good too.

The only other one I’ve attempted to read by Niel Stephenson has been Cryptonomicon. It seemed to get way, way into the weeds and is over a thousand pages. It was in my 20’s that I attempted it and I only made it half way through.

His work is top tier and highly regarded by many as thoroughly researched.

Going to have to check this one out!

Seveneves is incredible, with the caveat that the last chapter of the book was almost handwavey with regards to the author’s conclusion of where humanity ended up. 10/10 otherwise.

Children of Time series goes over this a little bit, especially in the first book. Colonists end up waking up early due to a malfunction and end up falling into a devolving tribalistic race to the bottom on their journey to the planet.

EDIT: As for “hard” scifi, while I wouldn’t say this series is at the same level as The Martian or maybe The Expanse, it is pretty good with trying to keep things real, especially with regards to the human threads of the story.

If System76 doesn’t get some movement on Cosmic soon I’m going to have to jump ship to KDE. This shit looks awesome.

Same. I’ve found Minneapolis to be fairly good too, but I only visit occasionally for work.

You say this pocket dimension connects to the internet, a la Matrix? I’d create a game with an in-game currency that looks the same as ours, and give it the same physical properties in-game as the real currency is for the region I’m in. I then would define that I am a billionaire with a bank account to match. I teleport in, withdraw my money in cash one suitcase at a time from the ATM that has an infinite cash supply, and then teleport out.

I read it when I was in my late teens or early twenties, so what little I remember reflects in my impression of the book at that time. Take my recommendation with a grain of salt!

The first book was awesome. I think the second book was ok, but disliked dead characters getting resurrected for apparently inane drama. The book I finally stopped at was whatever one it was that the main character turns into a telepathic immortal sand worm and was abjectly awful.

I think they’re making the right choice. Dune has some amazing world building, but the series got muddled down into whatever drug fueled fugue state and stopped being interesting.

Wait let me get this straight. The two countries she’s trying to pin on anti-genocide activists are two of the biggest contributors or genocide? Get fucked Pelosi.

Hey get out of here with all this rational common sense shit

/s

But is it Arch?

Atom was my go-to editor while in school–hard to believe it’s been long enough to be abandoned already. I’m going to have to check Pulsar out.

He will join us or die!

We got death star, we got death star! We got death star, we got death star! We got death star, we got death star!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ij4w7ChpuaM

Another interesting thing of note about Taiwan is that it claims the land of what is currently Mongolia iirc.

I’ve always found it interesting how intransigent some of the East Asian nations are. You have the Nk/Sk conflict that is only in an armistice, no official peace treaty, then you have PRC/Taiwan–also in armistice. Then, there are are hundreds of instances of inflexibility on China’s part with internal minorities or border conflicts with India or Vietnam. Add to the the SCS and the Nine Dash Line. Japan also exhibits some of this inflexibility leading up to and after WW2, and the forced pacifism afterward, which has caused some self-inflicted problems with an armistice with Russia over the Kuril Islands.

I’ve always wondered if the tendency is cultural or something else that was learned over the millennia.

It’s a disaster! Skywalker we’re after!

Plus they are working on COSMIC which looks SAF. That’s honestly the only thing that has kept me from distro hopping.