The founding text is Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (1992). It's short, funny, entertaining, and full of new ideas in a freewheeling early 90's spirit. The list in the comment you are replying to is not bad, since most interactions you will ever have with someone about a metaverse will hinge on shared descriptions you have with them of a metaverse, so whichever books you hear about the most are by definition the most useful ones to read.
Almost everyone has read or heard of Ready Player One (2011), which contains extensive descriptions of its own corporate dystopic metaverse, albeit one that I find insufferably cliche and unoriginal.
Metaverse descriptions are descended from the first cyberspace descriptions in Neuromancer (1984) which is a beautiful book worth a read.
Obsidian is the closest thing I've found to the Pensive from Harry Potter. It's a data recording format good enough for me to extract thoughts from my mind, represent them with enough fidelity to reconstruct later, connect them to the concepts that they are related to in my head, and then forget the thought completely so I can move on and process it later.
I was only willing to try it out because I had heard it mentioned [0] on CGP Grey's cohosted podcast, Cortex, in the episode they did on productivity software subcultures. Specifically I think CGP Grey was saying he didn't "get" Obsidian but had observed a fanatic fanbase around it of people who thought it was god's gift to note-taking because it represented the links between knowledge in a unique way. Apparently I'm one of those people because I went from installing it for the first time to writing all my new thoughts down in it in the space of 3 days.
I suspect the real reason I liked Obsidian right away is that long ago I used Microsoft Onenote as a freeform notetaking app to just spew unrelated thoughts into that I could organize later. Onenote's interface was good, but there was no way to port those notes in an exportable format to a new computer when the one with a Onenote license died.
Bee genetics are wild. When I was a beekeeper we learned that queens lay two types of eggs - normal fertilized eggs, which will hatch into females and grow into workers if fed pollen, and queens if fed royal jelly, and unfertilized eggs, which hatch into males (stingless bees called drones) who will fly off and mate with the queens of other hives in spring. [1] At the time I had never heard of unfertilized eggs hatching, and the implication was that by creating male clones of themselves (haploid offspring, [4] not exact clones), queen bees are directly mating with the queens of other hives.
This information applies to the Italian honeybee subspecies kept in captivity (Apis mellifera ligustica) - the OP's article is about the african lowland honeybee (Apis mellifera scutella). The different honeybee subspecies are interesting: italian bees are nonaggressive, russian bees are hardy, etc.[2]
There's nothing special about workers having offspring either. When a honeybee queen gets old or weak, brood pheremones stop being able to suppress worker reproduction (worker policing fails [3]), and there are workers running around laying eggs in brood cells. Because workers have never mated with a drone, all their eggs are unfertilized and therefore hatch into drones [5]. This south african subspecies with a self-cloning female worker is really something unusual and unexpected, since those females should only be able to lay haploid eggs.
I've had the misfortune of several alcoholic roommates, and it's disturbing. They'll yell at you, threaten you, get emotional, violent, cry, the whole works, and then deny it all the next morning.
In contrast, every regular marijuana user I've known long enough to form a judgement about their habit is very inoffensive to the people around them. It doesn't seem to bleed out into their work and emotional lives as much.
I've been to a few antiques stores where they have a blacklight case to show off the fluorescent uranium glass teacups and candlesticks. If you don't have a blacklight with you, it's tough to tell the difference between truly radioactive glass colored with uranium salts, and green-tinted depression glass produced at the same time last century that is neither radioactive nor fluorescent. Depression glass has an interesting story all its own https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depression_glass)
It actually surprised me that you can buy uranium glass online on ebay or etsy. It's not controlled or anything, and there are some very weird old curios manufactured last century. (https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m...). I bought a tiny little salt cellar this way once the desire to own something radioactive overcame me.
Is it better to live in a world where the future is unknown, and the best we can do is guess where value will be, or one where the future is known, and the prices of all investments are stable and already priced at their exact values? In which world is optimism and class mobility possible?
I'm afraid it's only a matter of time before that becomes an astroturfing target as well. At least there's account history associated with it, so there is some effort associated with creating or purchasing accounts with believable histories. Long term I think facebook wins this space because they have the most in depth real digital identities tied to people.
The funding model is extremely sus. I used to trust them but your criticisms are right on, and their 'the best x' lists have a curious tendency to prioritize brands that already have high ad spend, rather than surface little known indie choices.
I've heard that Stephen King considers the Dark Tower series his greatest work[1][2], but almost none of his fans do[3][4]. The intent of a work can be far divorced from the public reception of it.
Interesting. When I took modern foil fencing classes, it wasn't dangerous in the slightest. The training foils (the long thin bendy swords that people usually think of when they think of fencing) are extremely flexible and have a button on the tip. You score a point by pushing that button against your opponent in a score zone of their body. You wear an electrified vest over your torso with a long wire leading back to the score machine, and when the opponent's sword tip touches your vest it completes an electric circuit. If that circuit is completed at the same time the opponent's foil tip button is depressed, they score a point. Both people have full cage facemasks, and there's almost zero chance of injury short of tripping.
Epee fencing, on the other hand, uses a heavier, stiffer sword, so when you poke somebody it can bruise.
Sabre fencing is the third modern fencing style, and allows you to score points with the blade (slashing) instead of just the point as with foil and epee. I've never done it but have heard it is the most physical style of the three.
I feel the exact same way about sampling 'alien' ad culture. It's fun to switch on the local TV station in a new city and see what ads are being shown to people there. It's like a form of social calibration that shows what 'is available.' Same thing with reading the ads in the back of Popular Science or The Economist. I don't get that online unless I VPN+incognito, and I absolutely cannot get it on my phone, which is locked down much tighter.
Putting hockey stick shaped lines on graphs with buzzwords on the x axis and dollars on the y axis does not a big idea make.
I am disappointed to see ideas that have failed to deliver for a decade like drone delivery (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-unveils-futuristic-plan-...) and 3D printing (https://www.economist.com/briefing/2011/02/10/the-printed-wo...) have a very long buzzword shelf-life, presumably because they are enduringly futuristic. First principles should tell us that most manufactured goods will never be 3D printed. There are entire fields of engineering dedicated to manufacturing processes, because the final material properties and cost of an item are affected by things like cooling rate, grain orientation, surface finish, tensile strength, and tolerances. 3D printing is another tool in the toolbox, not a replacement for the toolbox. I personally find them useful for ideation, but useless for creating finished products. It is worth considering that the entire market for 3D printers consists of rapid prototyping and Etsy knicknacks, and that it has been saturated.
I cook costco basmati in my zoji on the 'white' and 'harder' setting and it comes out fine. Less aromatic than my preferred jasmine rice but still great, distinct firm grains.
Oh the Places You Go was first published in 1990 and is protected by US copyright for the life of the author plus 70 years. Dr. Seuss died in 1991 (OtPYG was the last book published in his lifetime) and so the book will remain under copyright until 2061.
My problem with this ruling isn't that it clashes with my instincts, it's that it will continue to be enforceable halfway through the century.
My parents tried to make me do treatment for video game addiction. I was appalled by the simplistic portrayal that the entire older generation had of my habits, because although they were unhealthy, they were a far cry from addiction. There are several very different categories of long-playtime games popular today and they are associated with very different motivation structures. To the layman league of legends is in the same category as skyrim, but one is a single player campaign that you'll eventually grow tired of, even if it takes a thousand hours, and the other is an eternal online competition in which you will be just as likely to hit 'play again' after your 500th hour as your 20,000th. There are 3 categories of game that can rack up truly problematic playtimes in the tens of thousands of hours and extract great opportunity costs on the players:
1) Grindfests - e.g. Old school runescape, black desert online, korean mmos, classic wow, destiny 2, warframe. Motivation is collection of perfect sets of equipment and special items that prove account status.
2) Social Simulators - World of Warcraft (shadowlands), most mmos,Eve Online, roblox, vrchat. Motivation is that "people are doing something and I want to be a part of it."
3) Competitive Loops - Pubg, Apex legends, fortnite, overwatch, Call of Duty, League of Legends, Starcraft 2 ladder, most shooters and arena games. Motivation is competitive instinct, satisfaction if you win/get kills, frustration if you don't and resolve to play another and turn it around.
(Disclaimer: there's a lot of overlap between groups, most mmos are both social simulators and grindfests, many arena competitive loops are social games sometimes. I tried to categorize by primary motivator.)
Grindfests and competitive loops are fundamentally wastes of time, but they will always give you what you're looking for. Bored on a Wednesday night? Might as queue up mid or farm zulrah. There is obvious gender disparity between each category and the general population, and disparity between categories as well- women play social simulators, but competitive loops are usually over 90% men. Often closer to 99%. Social Simulators are only usually wastes of time, because the expectation of anonymity on the internet means you'll usually never leverage those social networks you're building for real value. In the case of people still building social skills, or isolated and looking for camraderie, these games do add value.
This is all to say that problematic video games are successful because they scratch behavioral itches many people want scratched. In that way, I'm almost uncomfortable calling them problematic. Sure, a 22y/o would ideally be spending his evenings on side projects. What fraction of his spare time is that a realistic expectation if he could be doing virtual competitions with friends or strangers? I wouldn't begrudge a retiree to play a competitive loops 6 hours a day, I look forward to doing that myself in the old folks home, but I'm much more comfortable condemning someone in the prime of their life because of higher opp. cost. Bear in mind that HN is not a representative sample, and the majority of humans waste all their free time anyway, if 'waste' means 'suboptimal use carrying nonzero opportunity cost'. Is this different from any other generation's opiate of the masses? My friends don't watch football but they do talk about doublelift retiring.
