This is what I've been using for a long time now. It's probably too technical for most people, especially if you're talking about syncing across multiple devices, but that's not a problem for me.
It's not really sci-fi but I also really enjoyed The Merchant And The Alchemist's Gate, and the one about the tower of babel, I forget the name at the moment.
It's been getting pretty bad around here lately. I had someone reply to a post I made in that Idiocracy thread a few days ago advocating for eugenics. Really really gross all around.
People here think that they're much smarter than they actually are.
My mind goes to the science fiction novel Footfall by Larry Nivel and Jerry Pournell, in which Earth is attacked by aliens and, at one point, a journalist figures out about a secret project to carry out a counter-offensive and is going to run a story on it, obviously against the wishes of those involved with the project.
Another character drowns the journalist in a toilet.
This is one of those threads that's making me feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Like, I don't think enjoying Idiocracy makes someone a bad person or anything like that, but it's pretty clearly making a eugenics argument without any mitigating counter-hypothesis.
It's particularly amusing because there are people quoting Neal Stephenson in this thread, ignoring the fact that when Stephenson tackles similar subject matter, he's very careful to make it clear that he's talking more about the cultural axioms which have a long-term effect on how people value learning and intellectualism. It's not even subtext, I've been reading The Diamond Age recently and very early on there's a line where a character clearly states that there's no coherent genetic theory of human intelligence, and the entire thesis of the book runs counter to that notion that intelligence is primarily genetic.
I think that the movie makes it really, really obvious that the intellectual degradation goes beyond just culture. The people are presented as being borderline mentally disabled.
I've been building some stuff with love2D for a while now, more a hobby than anything else, and I've really enjoyed the process. Nothing really crazy, just a 2D platformer.
I think that if I were making something in 3D or I were more serious I'd use an engine, but I've found that I get more satisfaction from building tools than from learning how to use tools that other people have built.
It's that brand of humor that isn't really humor anymore because the person writing it is clearly positively seething behind the keyboard and considers the whole affair to be deadly serious.
I've never really been able to get into it either because it's sort of a paradox. If I agree, I feel bad enough about the actual issue that I'm not really in the mood to laugh, and if I disagree then I obviously won't like the joke anyways.
It's super weird to me because none of the jobs I've had as a programmer have been super demanding of my time or effort? I have to work, sure, but generally not as hard as I had to work at college. I rarely get called to do things outside of work hours, but generally when I do it's because there's a serious problem that I'm the subject matter expert for so it's understandable.
I absolutely do just "switch off" at 5pm. I sometimes work on programming things in my free time if I feel like it regardless.
I feel like, if your job is demanding more of you than a nine to five, and you don't thrive in that environment, you certainly have a right to complain or look for different work. I'm just surprised that it seems to be so common when all the work I've stumbled into in this field has been very reasonable.
And yes, obviously there's a difference between software dev and blue collar, or even other types of white collar work. I'm not blind to the fact that this is a particularly comfortable career, even if it's not as extravagant as it seems to have be a decade or so ago.
I guess I'm just surprised that there are so many apparently ground-down people in a place like this which you would imagine would be primarily populated with people in the software industry.
To be honest while I dislike most AI integration that gets pushed, I really enjoy Firefox' local translation model features. I appreciate that I can conveniently translate things with a reasonable degree of accuracy without having to send that text to god knows where.
More stuff like that would be appreciated, though I don't know if their plans for the future will fit that definition.
It's always interesting to get a window into this sort of thing because I've never really felt the urge to just buy stuff for the sake of buying it.
Like, I don't live like a monk. I have a nice computer, a tv, my living space is furnished. But the transactional aspect of buying things always keeps me from just "shopping as entertainment" the way some people seem to enjoy doing. I don't like acquiring things more than I dislike spending money. I have to really want something, or need something to the point that doing without it is kinda a non-starter.