Excellent! That's been on my TBR list for a while. There's a bit about PIE in Lost Worlds, mostly as supporting evidence for movements and connections between ancient (pardon the pun) lost worlds.
Patrick Wyman—of the Tides of History podcast—just put out a new book, Lost Worlds, which is worth a read if this is your bag. The basic premise is that the way ancient history is typically taught, "that we moved linearly from foraging to farming, and then from country farmers to city-dwelling, tax-paying subjects of kings and emperors," is essentially wrong. He goes on:
>All of those developments occurred in an orderly sequence: First farming and village life arrived; then surpluses born of human achievement that created social inequality; then hierarchies with priests and chieftains at the top; then massive monuments, cities, states, and writing to keep track of it all. Geographically, the old story of those developments centered on the Fertile Crescent of western Asia, and to a lesser extent the Nile Valley of Egypt....
>That story is wrong in some respects and incomplete in far more.
It's a constant rise and fall, with innovations and cities/civilizations that both did and didn't succeed often equally valid and appropriate paths to take. Sounds kind of bog-standard, I guess, but it's rife with examples of "Oh yeah here's a 1,500 year-old city, but it was 7,000 years ago and then disappeared so you've never heard of it."
>Slartibartfast: I'd far rather be happy than right any day.
>Arthur: And are you?
>Slartibartfast: No. That's where it all falls down of course.
>Arthur: Pity. It sounded like rather a good lifestyle otherwise.
Adulthood, career, marriage, parenthood, nearly everything since I first read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as a (pre?)teen has been slowly, stubbornly learning that this exchange is basically the key to everything.
That's specifically the secondary, more-powerful model. It was only mentioned in passing in the keynote, but on this page anyway, it seems to be just the improved dictation in Siri and ability to customize pacing, etc.
While in graduate school, the graduate student government had results from a student survey about their advisors. When presented with the results, nearly every administrator would give some response of "Well, it's really just a few bad apples," and we had to remind them every time of the actual meaning of the phrase!
He really is such a committed and dedicated developer. This here is of course a perfect example—"So… I commissioned a custom map" aka hiring a cartographer—but it was really cool how he blew up with Widgetsmith because he put in the effort with Watchsmith before, and was basically the world's expert on widgets? Couldn't happen to a better guy.
I hugely recommend reading Peter Brannen's The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything. I picked it up thinking it'd be a good book about climate change—it is—but it's so much more. It's an excellent journey through our planet's (bio)geochemistry, and really gives you a sense for the power and scope of CO2 over millions and billions of years. Snowball earth features prominently, and there are some really fascinating history and consequences of them.
Don't have it in front of me so I can't comment on the actual language, but wasn't ENIAC designed for the purpose of firing tables, but the time it was "completed" got used for e.g. H-bomb?
It's been mentioned before, but Chris Miller's Chip War from a few years back is an excellent, very-readable book on the topic. Goes into depth on the history and development of chips and their production. He did the rounds on the interviews back then, and it's definitely worth a read. The EUV stuff is great, but I particularly liked his history on how the USSR was always going to lose and how integral Apollo really was.
The book[1]—Super Nintendo by Keza MacDonald—is a fun enough read. Definitely written as a fan and for fans, it picks a few specific items/series and uses them to tell a narrative. It's not, you know, hard-hitting journalism, but there's good stuff in there I'd never read or heard before. Pretty quick read, and a delight if you're fan of anything Nintendo.
Basically, came for Zelda fandom and got fun things like Navi and Z-targeting coming about from seeing a ninja show to avoid a hot day.
The (excellent) Megan Greenwell wrote Bad Company, all about private equity; I'd recommend it. It does a good job of telling the story through a few specific and illustrative examples of people/industries[1], while still explaining everything in detail. Greenwell has a perspective, to be sure, but she's not wrong.
1: IIRC, it's a Toys 'R Us employee, a nurse at a rural hospital, a journalist at local newspaper, and a resident in a PE-owned apartment.
Siracusa—probably best known here for doing fabulous OS X reviews for Ars—is a co-host of ATP. He is also known is such circles for having Mac Pros, and using them for a long time (sometimes by choice, sometimes by circumstance). He thinks Apple should make a Mac Pro, not necessarily because it's a big seller, but because he thinks Apple should make a "best computer," much in the same way car companies might make a car that will never sell but pushes engineers, etc.
>Ê with the circumflex accent marks an “e” after which originally some other letter was written (usually an S), but this letter is no longer present in its modern spelling.
[snip]
>By imagining “es” instead of “ê”, we can often deduce the meaning of unknown words; for example, forêt = forest, fête = “feste” = fest(ival); intérêt = interest and many others. The circumflex accent is used in the very same sense also for other vowels, for example île = isle, hôte = “hoste” = host, hâte = haste.
I will always remember this, thanks to my high school French teacher who, knowing her audience, gave us a few examples like "hôpital," and then said "So you can probably guess was 'bâtard' means..."
For anyone vaguely familiar with ffmpeg, don't sleep on this video. Quite funny, and everything from `yadif` (which I dealt with today!) to mkvtoolnix to "But then it will explode if you have an apostrophe in your file name. Because it doesn't understand that."
I'm in the middle of reading Peter Brannen's The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything—it's excellent and goes deep into the (bio)geochemistry of Earth—and he presents a good case for a metabolism-first development of life, taking advantage of "a disequilibrium that needed to be relieved at the vents, an unending stream d free energy to dissipate," rather than the RNA information-first theories.
It fits his overall narrative but it was an interesting way to think about life "as a thermodynamically necessary mechanism to relieve the continuous production of free geochemical energy on Earth... more efficiently than abiotic processes could." (Brannen quoting complex-systems scientist Anne-Marie Grisogono) I highly recommend the book.
Indeed! He specifically cites Yanis Varoufakiss, dubbing this technofeudalism. If I may quote Doctorow a bit:
>Varoufakis defines capitalism as a system designed to preference profit over rent.
[snip]
>The feudal era wasn't defined by the absence of profits--rather, what made feudalism "feudal" was the triumph of rent over profits. When the interest of rentiers conflicted with the aspirations of capitalists, the rentiers won. Likewise, the defining characteristic of the capitalist era was not the abolition of rents, but rather the triumph of profits. When capitalism's philosopher-theorists lionized "free markets," they didn't mean "markets that were free from regulation," they meant "markets that were free from rents."
[snip]
>This is Varoufakiss technofeudalism exemplified. It's an economic system in which the majority of value is being captured by people who own stuff, at the expense of people who do stuff.... The fight between technofeudalism and technocapitalism is a fight over whether the landlord or the café owner takes the value that's created by the barista.
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