Recently, saw some survey that explicitly said 1-7 is “poor”, 7-8 is “OK”, and 9-10 is “great”. Wild, not sure what the point of the scale is then.

Same with book ratings. Looking at StoryGraph, the average ratings I see is somewhere between 3.5 and 4.5. While I would rate a decent book a 3.

Born in Eastern Europe, live in the US, maybe that’s why.

Isn’t that a legitimate use-case for RSS (specifically Atom) though? My blog’s feed just points to the plain-HTML pages with the post. It seems wasteful to put my entire site in a single, polled file.

I have not heard of USB-C wearing out yet. What devices are those? Have to be new enough to have USB-C.

Thanks for pointing this out. The list is made by a scraper (and I haven’t updated it in a few months), so it probably missed some models depending on the model code.

Thanks for reposting, I subscribed to this community too.

postmarketOS is fully Linux (based on Alpine Linux) Choose this for more technical projects or if you want your phone to be like Raspberry Pi++.

LineageOS is a clean Android. Choose this for Android experience.

That would be great and I might add a scraper for xdaforums, but even XDA has a lot of dead links for old devices now.

I just installed Miniflux on my server as well.

Advantages (in my opinion) are: Package is in Debian repos (safe and no compilation needed), software is a static binary (thus does not require docker and only needs postgreSQL), documentation is good.

This tool looks fantastic, thank you!

And Snikket for super-easy setup and management

Synapse has seemingly improved since 2020. A word of warning though: if you join large rooms from your server, Synapse will eventually grow the DB to a huge size due to a “lookup” table state_groups_state, and will require manual cleanup. See https://www.sequentialread.com/matrix-synapse-out-of-disk-space-state_groups_state/

Revelation Space series does not have FTL, but in its place, an engine that can produce 1G indefinitely (not manufactured anymore, powered by handwavium, it seems… but the secret is revealed in one of the short stories). There is further shenanigans with physics, but never FTL.

It definitely adds more nuance to the world, because now you can’t have interstellar empires if you cannot communicate over large distances.

When I ran prosody a few years ago, I did so without docker.

I did try snikket in docker though, and it looks like it is still actively maintained.

Reminds me of a “minimalist text editor” that my coworker showed me circa 2015. It was an Electron app that consumed more RAM to display a empty file than Firefox with 5 active tabs.

I am not too familiar with animism either, but as far as I understand from the book, it’s the belief-idea-philosophy that humans are a part of nature, including both living and non-living things. (Contrary to modern idea of separating the “human” and “natural” worlds). In addition to awareness and careful choices, it believes in reciprocity, giving back what was taken from the ecosystem. Similar to what was/is practiced by many native communities.

(Please correct me if I am wrong)

Not just about climate, but Less Is More by Jason Hinckel. It is anticapitalist and pro-animist (!), and I found the historical parts interesting, particularly the philosophical angle of how separating the human from the rest of nature happened (and how it played into abuse of both nature and humans)

Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid by Thor Hanson is about climate change, how animals adapt to it, how forests can migrate, and local climate anomalies.

I love the Revelation Space world. Just the right mix of plausible-yet-not-handwaved for me. Some factions but no grand Empire or militaries. No FTL travel, so you are never coming back to the same world you left. Technological nano-catastrophe (and horrors related to that). Semi-intelligent algae that rewires the brain (Turquoise Days is a great short story about it). Galactic-scale projects and space anomalies.

Thank you for telling me about Revenger, I haven’t read those yet.

The most memorable reads from this year were:

The Broken Earth trilogy by N. K. Jemisin. While at first, the setting appears to be a fairly standard fantasy, there is a sci-fi depth to the world, its climate, cataclysms, history, and orogeny (“magic power” of the world).

And, if you are a fan of heavy-handed dystopian satire, Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman. It takes place in a not-too-distant future where a somewhat-apathetic researcher and a corporate scammer are trying to find the last living Venomous Lumpsucker, a highly intelligent fish species. There is climate change, corporate greed, half-baked international agreements, hackers, horrible AI, and, of course, delusional megalomaniac billionaires.

Time Management: The Game

Probably the most valuable IRL skill you can learn in a game. Or you can just chill and fish for a whole year, no one’s gonna judge you.

Proxies started getting blocked (by some auth-account methods) last year, but libreddit/redlib dev was able to outsmart them multiple times. Now it seems like reddit is blocking IPs (and/or IP ranges). Running redlib from a residential IP still works, but I would not expect it to work from a VPS.