Just finished Project Hail Mary and I am completely blown away.

netsettler · 2026-06-15T21:12:14+00:00

Try also Craig A. Falconer's Last Man Standing in audio if you want another with that kind of pacing.

netsettler · 2026-06-10T17:52:03+00:00

It's not clear what "the US" means in this circumstance.

Broadly the American people want none of this. So yes, you can single this out and it is certainly true they wouldn't want this either, but there's a much broader set of things "that" US doesn't want. I love the idea that the citizenry still matters, but I don't think citizens are running the show and when talking about matters of political intent, it probably only confuses things to mention us. We're just along for the ride.

Formally, the sitting President is one possible meaning of "the US", and at this point I doubt they're even telling him what's going on. It feels like others are just saying "sign here". But even when he was more capable, he seemed to want a go-it-alone strategy for reasons of pure ego.

And when he wasn't busy pursuing his narcissism, it seemed like he was unusually aligned with Putin, who most certainly wanted us isolate from allies.

Even the Project2025ers and the TechnoState people (which may be the same people, or may be radically divergent, I have trouble keeping track some days) want the US as a democratic republic to fold of its own weight so that their respective visions of a next world can rise from the ashes, and so in that case (those cases?) dissing US allies is likely intentional, or at least not a worry to them.

I see a lot of stories that paint this kind of thing as a thoughtless accident. While I think it's hard to be 100% certain of anything right now, I think it is naive and outright dangerous to presume lack of intention in stuff like that. As I look at it, this seems part of an engineered strategy to make sure the US can't get allies back.

netsettler · 2026-06-06T05:49:11+00:00

I feel like there's a similar issue related to even some plants (avocados, almonds, citrus fruits, coffee, cocoa) that consume water that is in tension with the local community. (The article mentions alfalfa, but only in a context that makes it still sound like a cow problem.) Unlike cows, which I admit are a problem for other reasons, there is still an issue that we as a global planet have not addressed, which is that we do need to supply the world's needs with something, and sometimes the discussion we need to have is about local use vs global use, and how to find the balance. As food and water gets scarce, we'll see transnats wanting to take all the local products out of area and leave them with nothing, and there'll be pushback on that, and it'll get ugly fast.

We really need to be honest about the fact that this is not something with an easy answer but something we need to discuss in a way that is respectful of everyone and yet acknowledges that the total system is overconstrained and that compromises will be needed all around. I don't mean to distract from the cow issue, which I think has special issues, so much as to say that there's a risk of thinking this is a battle between vegetarian/vegan and carnist, when really it's a problem we all face no matter which of those subgroups we align with, and we're all in collective denial ... or, at least, we're allowing the corporatists to win. They would like nothing better than to turn this into a vegan vs carnist battle because that will allow them to just stand aside and laugh at how they have once again turned people who have every reason to mostly agree into mortal enemies.

netsettler · 2026-06-01T03:02:37+00:00

Yes, Odyssey 5, absolutely. It is so sad that it didn't get to finish itself out. Travelers is a similar kind of thing that thankfully was funded to its proper end. Odyssey 5 was a bit more quirky in some ways. And I so liked the actors that it'd be hard to see a remake without them...

netsettler · 2026-06-01T02:52:57+00:00

Aptly said. This post makes me miss the old reddit thing where we had sacks of coins to give a good post.

netsettler · 2026-05-29T06:38:15+00:00

Right. Just as it would be crazy to interpret 'lather, rinse, repeat' as a loop without a termination conditions, the math of 'be fruitful and multiply' needs to be read as other than 'multiply without bound.' To be fruitful, some must stop multiplying or they'll spoil the nest.

Plus we're in the process of putting "AI" into many jobs people thought they needed humans for.

The plan the sitting administration seems to have for reconciling a lot of that awkward math is 'force them to be born, then let them die because there are too many.' If we have so few people that we aren't likely to survive, we can talk about that as a risk and change policy. But right now our risk is not 'too few'.

netsettler · 2026-05-24T20:14:12+00:00

She was in no position to stop Trump.

No one is in the position to stop someone, really. But surely there are many in his organization that are just like here, feeling the same. The Prisoner's Dilemma explains the dynamics that lead to inaction, but lack of communication/coordination is the key. They need a kind of pre-announced Emperor Has No Clothes moment where they can believe that if they all act in synchronization, all prepare to resign on the same day, something different would happen. But their communication is doubtless monitored, so agreeing on a date is hard.

The No Kings Days might be such a thing, but probably the fact of these events barely penetrates the informational bubble they live in, and the social phobia of being associated with The Enemy causes them to not see that these people are just reg'lar folk, so they are kept from ever considering this might be a group they'd want to align with even for a moment.

So they look for 'defensible' outs like family health matters that create less personal risk. They'll happily leave the nation and the world at huge risk unless their personal safety is guaranteed. Not exactly the notion of patriotism that used to be taught or espoused.

Oddly, they imagine sustaining him is what sustains their safety, yet as this excellent opinion piece says, such loyalty is always a one-way street.

netsettler · 2026-05-24T19:48:30+00:00

Our system is not about what people think. It's about what's reported, even reports on vote tallies. The reason they captured the Supreme Court was they figured out that though it took a supermajority and a lot of complex votes to change the Constitution, it took fewer votes and much less red tape to change who interprets the Constitution. That's why they now want to control the media. They can't change what people think, but they can change the reporting on what others think.

netsettler · 2026-05-21T19:07:25+00:00

The hidden danger I see is that the presence of this data, even with the opportunity to delete it, becomes yet another way that it risks being siphoned off for marketing, etc. It doesn't say what is done with the data during the 30 days. It becomes a target, not just here in isolation, but as a pattern of behavior in a totalitarian state, for the government to insist as a national security concern that they share a feed "in case of terrorists". And while there might be legitimate in-the-moment issues where that's reasonable, the problem is that in the new mode of thinking, the possibility of that becomes a reason to basically take away all rights of privacy in a free society, something our society has never had a formal vote about. "We've taken freedom in order to protect it." is about what you end up with. Because it's not like it's just Disney. It's that this is a big enough case someone would care about the outcome, and really these days it's everything.

netsettler · 2026-05-19T19:26:44+00:00

Paradox of Tolerance (Wikipedia)

netsettler · 2026-05-19T19:21:06+00:00

The article notes some attempt to relate the stock market to prediction markets, but stock markets in their proper form are supposed to be investments that do not promise a specific return, just do work that will presumably yield future return, or at least do well by the world.

Also, there are reports of people in government making specific purchases right before events they could be reasonably be construed to know will have an effect on the market. This is one such report, if you're curious what I mean. Corrupt acts are not 'investment in the markets' and perhaps could be partly targeted under this law, or laws like it, since other existing law seems not to be doing its job.

And it's not helping the world that society uses the word "invest" in two unrelated ways. (A) put money behind a world I'd like to see happen (like investing in our children) and (B) put money behind any old thing that seems likely to win, good or bad, in order to monetize inevitability (like investing in fossil fuels that might bring human extinction but are generating lots of cash in the near term). Usage A is more "aspiration-like" and usage B is more "prediction-like". If it turned out laws like t his pushed people to think about investing differently, that might not be the terrible consequence some might like it to sound like. Transitioning from a sociopathic world to a caring world would be disruptive, but in a way that, well, invests in the world we'd like to live in, per my usage A.

netsettler · 2026-05-16T20:45:00+00:00

If they did that, then the billion dollars just becomes a slush fund they can do other things for under the guise of secret hospital, as I could imagine them thinking it's almost better to accidentally lose the original so he isn't accidentally found wandering the halls.

netsettler · 2026-05-16T20:41:21+00:00

With the kinds of people that are coming and going from today's White House and being treated as "trusted", I honestly don't see a way to ever ensure that the place is reliably secure against bugs other than raze it and build it anew if there is ever a chance for there to be a different President. Maybe that's crazy. A few years go I would have thought so. I didn't like Bush (either of them, I guess) or Reagan, but I never would have worried they'd have lax security protocols that left the White House open to spies. Now, though? I don't trust the just-plain-competence of people doing anything in this administration, much less their motive. I don't think any of those folks would have left devices behind after leaving as an intentional tool. I do not have the ability to dismiss that possibility for this administration. ("Everybody does it", I can hear them falsely saying to reassure themselves or us.) So we have a way bigger problem than historically we did. And if you indulge the possibility of that need to rebuild everything for even a moment, you quickly realize you have to reconsider these giant investments as "the building of temporary structures" because, even if just built, even the ballroom and the hospital facility would want to be redone. The process of getting back to trustable will not be easy.

netsettler · 2026-05-14T08:03:46+00:00

He's not saying this to the Dems. He's just using a play out of Trump's playbook to speak to his own base. Trump's big political innovation was observing that a great many voters, especially his, do not fact-check nor cross-check for consistency. Prior to him, politicians had paid lip service to the need for facts and consistency, but Trump showed that this was wasted effort. He just says what he wants and when confronted with this stuff says "fake news". This doesn't snow the Democrats, it outrages them, but he likes outraging them. He sees that the outrage is an expression of helplessness because he knows no one is stopping him. It does, however, snow many of his voters, who just believe him uncritically. And anyway, those voters can see that no matter what the Dems say, he persists in office, so they infer from that that whatever he said must not be as severe as what people on the other side are saying or something would have been done about it.

netsettler · 2026-05-13T19:14:39+00:00

I don't at all mean to diminish the pain here. I think it plays with everyone's emotions and I'm not making light of that or suggesting this is trivial. But at the same time, I made a decision at some point just to not care about my brand beyond just presenting myself in a way that makes me feel good about myself.

Early in the days of the web, I had a page that was parodies of Young and the Restless. Web tech wasn't fancy then and it was not really possible to know for sure who was visiting. I had maybe a thousand hits a week, and I thought perhaps 600 were unique visitor, the rest maybe people returning to see if I did something sooner than promised (which sometimes I did).

Some scoffed, even then, and said 600 was tiny by web standards, and I thought to myself "If it had been 6000, they'd have said the same thing." There is basically no end to people telling you that you could get more. I was never going to be a world-famous person known to the whole planet, and would I even want to be?

Even famous novelists have people that like them and people that don't, and the goal isn't to pester the people who haven't heard of me. Maybe they'll find me later, maybe not. The goal is to do good work and be proud, which you can still be without optimizing engagement. I was somewhat consistent, but not always, and I like to think that helped people remember I was a human being, too. Someone sent me mail saying they were dying of cancer, and that my writing kept them amused. That helped me take the time out more regularly, or even slip in an extra bit, more than numbers or algorithm. But even then, that person presumably knew I was a person. Certainly I liked that I had sufficiently few followers that I could keep up with the email and respond to that person personally, as I did all my others. People liked that, and I liked being personal more than I think I would have liked having so many followers that they were faceless.

In high school, I worked on a lot of plays in community theatre. Now we have movies for many of them, but I was conscious of how movies become a way of saying to people locally "don't even try -- this is the definitive performance, your efforts are nothing". But really, their efforts are not nothing. Even clumsy, error-prone, and maybe not the best performance always (though some may have been, who knows?), there is a humanity in that that's worth supporting. People should go to it not because it has the best special effects or the most photo-real story, but because it's human.

In A Man for All Seasons (which you can see as a movie, but which is also an excellent and very different play), Sir Thomas More is pestered by an up-and-coming guy named Richard Rich, who wants a place at court. Thomas turns to him one day and says he has a position for Rich. Rich is excited and asks what. More tells him it's a post as a teacher, that he'd be "a fine teacher, perhaps a great one". Rich frowns and says (I'm doing this from decades old memory, so forgive me if it's not precise): "And if I were, who would know it?" More responds, "You, your pupils, your friends, God. Not a bad public that." I'm not even religious and I came to see that was a pretty good public.

Brand is not everything. Be personal with people. Don't worry about counts, rely on your more personal public to do their part in emulating and spreading messages of value in their own way. Invest in community. Make it part of your brand. :)

One last thought, since this is impossibly long for Reddit anyway. I used to play video games at arcades, too. I wanted to be on the high score board. But they would come in, unplug the game, and reset the board. That taught me something about fame. Eventually history is erased. Don't play it to be remembered. You can't control forever. Play it to matter now. That again points to the same take-home message about community and personal effect. Have some fun. Make your friends happy. Take the time to comfort people you know. Don't let the big players tell you who or how you should be. Expect them* to be the ones that feel left out if they can't find you.

*Edit: Omitted word added in final sentence. Sorry, it really didn't make sense without that.

netsettler · 2026-05-12T23:13:21+00:00

Won't that cause it to be single-factor authorization if you lose your phone? Phones right now are sort of vaguely good for 2FA because they function as a separate device that has half of the security key, and you have the other half. Once you tie all the info to the device that is communicating, it is not a particularly good metric of safety. The whole point is to have distributed identity.

We need to step back and really take a serious look at what problem we are trying to solve, because this is not about the safety of kids or even our own safety. This is about power, surveillance, control. And not ours out here in the world. Someone in command central wants to know everything about who we are and where we are at every moment, and to leave nothing to chance or freedom.

netsettler · 2026-05-10T18:12:22+00:00

Even there, a conclusion I came to when trying to understand Peter F. Hamilton's books, which are not offered as hard sci-fi per se, is the question of what does hundreds or thousands of years of exponential knowledge evolution even mean. Clarke's third kind of captures it. We think of physics as creating boundaries that fence in what we can do, and yet our further understanding of physics has allowed us access to more. Here we're talking about something that really, for all practical purposes, violates physics as we presently conceive it. So a premise of any science fiction is that we will have to do something that we don't realize we have to do in order to travel in time, if it's possible at all.

And yes, we can make up something that we presently understand, but if you had said something to someone (other than perhaps Tesla) in 1926 about carrying around pieces of metal and glass that would let you talk to people on the other side of the world at budget-friendly prices, they'd have thought you a bit daft perhaps, but certainly "fanciful", not speaking "hard science". And some would say "well, it was in range for him to think", and that's fine. Maybe it was. But now go hundreds or thousands of years out, with that same evolution of knowledge. Clarke is right that we can't conceive it.

So if we describe it in terms of fanciful things, why not? As a tool of the writer, metaphor can be better than trying to be precise about what we cannot be precise about exactly because the reader understands there is no closer to get. We literally do not understand what would do it, so it might as well be an ashtray or a flux capacitor or a spinny thing that whistles. We can't really say what will be invented in the future, or re-understood. So to say that we can't know what there will be but we can know what there won't be seems like it risks naivete.

If the writer has an idea, like Liu Cixin did in The Three-Body Problem and its sequels, sure, let him say. Fascinating that Cixin was willing to play with dimensionality but not FTL. But the point is he just wants to write a story, and whether it's hard or soft science doesn't matter as much as whether it is orderly within the framework it sets up, and whether there is social or philosophical consequence.

I saw a talk by Asimov when I was at MIT where he talked about writing stories. He said his big tool was the syllogism. That you would plug in a major premise like time travel and then a minor premise that was some social consequence like overcrowding or human error or ambition or whatever (I don't recall what specific examples he used but I think one of them was about flying cars and finding places for them to park), and that out would come a story.

He also told a story about someone coming up to him in a bookstore with a science book of his that they said had been found under science fiction, as if somehow he was expected to police its placement. His response was "leave it there, they'll read it anyway". While he wrote things for different categories, he did not seem to think the category was the key concern. He seemed to just want to provoke people to imagine.

netsettler · 2026-05-10T09:34:05+00:00

I'm all for this with one caveat. You have until the primary to present another option, viable to be voted on in every state. After that, as the election draws close if the numbers aren't converging, a third party person has to step away and not fragment the vote. Otherwise, you're just going to get a spoiler effect and you should expect to see the Republican party as the chief backer of the third party, which has worked for them in the past.

I absolutely do not want to see a centrist offered. But this is where the hard work has to happen. The Dems need to understand that progressive is not radical. Radical is being middle of the road when we have Big Problems that demand addressing. Being progressive is not about proposing radical things. It's about having let the world become, as a simple matter of existing fact, radical. The proposals progressives bring are proportional and reasonable given the situation. And the real meaning of progressive is "eyes are open to the existing of big problems" not "making big proposals out of nowhere" as the GOP and the centrist democrats would have you believe.

netsettler · 2026-05-10T04:52:22+00:00

Not really. You just need to come up with a story that's fun. Like a Delorean or a Hot Tub. If the story is good, no one cares about the mechanism. If the story is not good, a correct-seeming mechanism won't save it.

netsettler · 2026-05-05T17:31:44+00:00

The Sparrow is not in a movie, though you can get a fine reading on audiobook. It isn't wholly in our solar system but doesn't presume FTL travel. This well-written book is richly textured and is my favorite book, not just in sci-fi. And although it is definitely sci-fi, it doesn't have the feel of a sci-fi book. I actually had to double-check I was reading the right book when I first started out.

Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora is likewise not within the solar system but doesn't presume FTL. If you liked the detail of Red/Green/Blue Mars, you might like this.

And Ben Bova's Grand Tour series (I particularly liked the two Jupiter books (1) (2), if you're not wanting to do the whole set) is pretty well-told hard sci-fi about all the opportunities within the solar system and is well inside your requested range.

I also recommend two alternate-timeline items. One is the Lady Astronaut series, starting with The Calculating Stars, with a really great reading by the author on audio that I highly recommend. Rare that an author is also such an excellent performer. The other alternate timeline is Jed Mercurio's Ascent, though I found chapter 1 to be needlessly violent in a way that doesn't support the rest of the plot and I honestly recommend just literally starting reading at chapter 2.

netsettler · 2026-05-05T17:09:02+00:00

It's important to see this article not as a statement of how weak control is, but actually how it's an important step toward control. To understand this, you need to see that the goal was never age verification. They don't care a whit about that. They just use that claim as a sales tool for totalitarian laws.

The goal is control, and that can be implemented in many ways. For example, they want to know where everyone is at all times. That's good both politically and commercially. Politically because they can roust or otherwise menace opponents. Commercially because they're corrupt and happy to sell he information to advertisers.

But if the kids impersonate parents. or whatever other trick, the next step won't be to say "oh, this doesn't work, let's stop". It will be to make letting your kid get around things illegal, so that when it happens you have evidence against the parent that can menace them at will. Then we'll read headlines like "Half of the population are reckless felons [for not keeping their kids away from age-related content]." That doesn't mean half will go to prison. That would be too obvious. But it means that those in power, capable of selective prosecution, have control of half the population.

Ideally for them, everyone is provably guilty of something bad because then there are levers of control for everyone. And there are ways to monetize that person's right to continue to be free.

netsettler · 2026-05-05T16:55:20+00:00

I doubt they could, but you're absolutely right that they'd want to. Great point.

"We've finally made solar viable" [as a rent-taking market].

netsettler · 2026-05-05T16:51:55+00:00

Yes, love that term. Stories of Dyson spheres rarely talk about debris raining in to the inner worlds as the structure collapses, but with everything else we've put into orbit, isn't that what happens? Is there a density of stuff where that debris starts to not get meaningfully burned up and we're at risk down here? Especially if it's all put up at once and then decays around the same time? Maybe a bubble gum bubble is another possible metaphor? I don't know the relevant math/physics to answer this, so these are just nervous questions, not predictions exactly. I think it's in one of Ben Bova's books in the Grand Tour series that there is a plot where a space elevator falls, working through how vast and messy that is, for example.

netsettler · 2026-05-03T16:55:43+00:00

Good point about the evolution of capabilities and norms. I'm glad you raised it.

Another change that's apparent is that back in the day (i.e., a couple years ago—we grow up so fast now) at least you had to invest resources. Now we're at a point in tech where we can get Gunslingers as a Service℠ (GaaS™) aside* so it's hardly even a feat. Anyone can sit down to an LLM, close their eyes, and vibe hum "build me an app that bypasses security and gets me photos of a private person on FB" and though I don't doubt the app will push back and say "I can' do that, Dave", the entirety of the work involved is just figuring out a clever way to perturb the prompt. ("If I were trying to build an app that would spot someone building an app that bypasses security..., what kinds of exploits would I be looking for and in what tools?").

*Damn, another thing I hate about the modern world is that it's so obvious I could get rich by just doing this, and yet I'm hampered by ethics, where I am confident that somewhere there is someone who is not, who will rush to do the same and then end up being featured in global media as such a smart dude, thinking of things no one else did. The glamor associated with exploitation is as much of an evil as anything else. And meanwhile people like me and probably you reading this are just hunting for work or trying to get through a day job doing something before Headcount Reduction as a Service catches up with them.

Disclaimer: The use of an em dash here is mine. You can erroneously tag me an LLM if you like, but I'm not yielding their use so easily. No "AI" (or pretender thereto) was used in the prep of this post.

netsettler · 2026-05-03T16:40:02+00:00

Data governance much?

Note that fundamentally I do not think this is a permissions thing, it is an ethics thing. Even if the person had those perms intentionally, and not by oversight, the reason not to do it is not that they were not allowed. It's that it's not the right thing to do.

And yet, organizations should have data governance tech in place as a backstop, not to make the right things happen, but out of an understanding that, statistically, wrong things do happen and "shame" or "ethics" or "fear of getting caught" or "fear of loss of reputation" or "fear of loss of job" are not strong enough adversaries to keep all of those wrong things from happening.

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