Yeah, I don't know where the *good* Sci-Fi authors went either? ... cry me a river. There are way more good SF books than you can shake a stick at let alone read.

Vernor Vinge just died. Read any of his stuff? Very well written classic SF.

The Expanse series.

The Dune books, not just the first one. Given, Dune is a tad overrated in some regards but the good bits are really good and well worth the read. That goes for the entire Dune series.

What about Cyberpunk, somewhat of a sub-genre of SF? Neal Stephenson, read him? If not you've got some catching up to do. ... William Gibson seems to put out a Cyberpunk novel every odd year and the latest stuff is still as premium as ever.

Cory Doctorov, Orsen Scott Card, Richard Morgan, Michael Weisser ...

If you get bored you can look into lore books. The RPG universe of Shadowrun is your type A Nerd fest but of the 80 novels or so they have the top 5-10 are really good and worth a look, even if you don't care about the franchise. I'm pretty sure other expensive IPs have similar traits. It's quite unlikely that the top 5 novels of the Battletech or Warhammer universe are a complete waste of time. The writers of those books tend to spend years working on the worlds before writing a book on them which does lead to consistency and a baseline of quality.

Bottom line: You likely have vast unexplored areas of SF still to discover. Old and new.

... only because some piece of software doesn't scale. Given, if you're hosts are clobbered with legit requests and you're still relying on uncashed PHP monoliths to handle the load you're being silly and should be let near a live server setup, but there are plenty of examples of perfectly successful large-scale companies built on PHP. Like Facebook for instance. ... Given, they eventually just built Hack which is basically a binary compiler for an updated PHP dialect, but the old saying goes for PHP just as much as for any other quick time to market web technology: If you have a scaling problem you don't really have a problem. And if somebody didn't know what they were doing in the first place it doesn't matter whether they used PHP or something else. It's likely their shitty design that broke their be app. Or bad management. I'd guess the latter.

As a thin server-side web templating layer API to the vast variety of well established tried and true FOSS C libraries that do the grunt work of most of todays computing needs PHP fits the job perfectly and does get it done pretty good too.

... was cancelled last winter and you could almost wade through the Rhine where I live last summer. Right now we just had 0C (freezing threshold) this morning before sunrise but 8 days ago people were walking around in T-Shirts with 28C outside.

Last year the tourists left the Mediterranean because it was too warm. The actual Mediterranean Sea was to warm, with water temperatures reaching 30C and more. Two years ago in summer you'd have 37C after sundown for days on end.

Not fun and bad news for Southern Europe AFAICT.

60%+ of the webs logic runs on PHP. It may be way less necessary to build massive new systems with any language, be it PHP or anything else. But as a runtime PHP is as popular and required as ever. The top ten of the webs systems run almost exclusively on PHP, all other technologies are dwarfs in comparison.

I consider Theo-Fascism the worst type of fascism, because it abandons reason even way earlier than regular fascism. Both have a quasi-religious perversion of government, but at least with regular fascism religion is more of a sideshow. In Theo-Fascist regimes its front and center which turns it evil way faster and harder. On top of that, because its religion at the center, reason has been abandoned at the onset of fascism and not as a final result, making it much harder for a society to turn around or find "justifiable" ways to make life work.

Religious fanatics are the worst and these days its the Islam variants are the most ridiculous, are causing the most damage and are the most dangerous. Somebody needs to off the troika leading that country.

Early April, close to 30ÂC here in Germany. This isn't normal. I'm in western Germany where April weather lasts months. This year it was like a few days, maybe 2 weeks if you're generous. We had weeks of 35ÂC+ last year and the year before I was driving back from Portugal through the Toulouse Area and it was 37Â+ even as the sun was about to set behind the Pyranees. The Mediterranean last year was so warm the tourists stayed away. And we're taking about water temperature. The _water_ was so warm the tourists stayed away. This year's skiing season didn't happen in Germany. .... What we where warned about is happening: Cascading runaway effects of man made climate change are kicking in and we're headed for a new global equilibrium. Let's just hope that that will be survivable for modern civilization.

We are screwed. The chance to avoid that has passed. How hard we are screwed however is still up to us.

Part 1 was made without part 2 being greenlit (they wanted to wait for the boxoffie numbers) and apparently part 2 was made more or less the same way. This is a tad annoying to say the least. Are movies going to be like video-games where I wait 18+ months for the fixed, debugged bargain deal gold edition to come out? Or will movies be crowdfunded in the future? Probably a mix of both. We see larger streaming serials becoming flaky and unreliable that way, now movies seem to go there too. ...

All that aside, Villeneuves Dune is _really_ good. I really liked part 1 and part 2 doubles down on the quality. Villeneuve didn't screw this one up and Dune is easy to screw up. He's proven once again that he can take a premium setting, _not_ botch it _and_ take it to a new level, as with Bladerunner 2049. His eerie brutalist visual style and "Lyonel Feininger Lighting" that he's know for hit the nail on the head when it comes to capturing the vibe of the Dune novel and the cast is top-of-the-line with good to very good performances all the way through. I also like the way he picks up and even quotes some elements and inspirations from the 1984 David Lynch version of the movie. There are obvious visual style-quotes from Gigers awesome set design present in the new Dune and some other details are clearly closer to the Lynch-Dune than the book. And all of it in a very good, awesome way. Hans Zimmers soundtrack is almost as iconic as Totos Dune theme from 1984 and is yet another grand masterpiece in movie scores.

Bottom line: I highly recommend the new Dune movie interpretation. Definitely a premium SF movie experience.

Improving quality of jpegs by improving its compression is a good thing. I still use jpegs a lot and I prefer them over PNG because PNG files usually are notably larger for the work I do. I hope GIMP ads this algorithm to their codebase ASAP.

That's a _lot_ of galaxies. Shame we have limited lifespans and no FTL-travel. Would love to hop on to an Elite Dangerous style spacecraft and explore the universe.

Sure sounds like it. ... It does fit the current wokeness fad too.

... my IDEs and GUI tools on a Chromebook with no extra hassle. That would be soooo cool and likely push ChromeOS forward by a large margin. Let's see what they're up to.

... if they offer you a severance package to join the first ones out. Mc Kinsey on premises is a red alert, no matter what they say they're doing.

Red Hat is getting ready for its final clean out.

... building and expanding nuclear fission plants? And no reason to worry about radiation? Great. I see absolutely no apocalyptic science fiction scenario coming out of this. One thing *is* certain though: That real-estate sure will hot, in more ways that one.

Read "A Fire upon the Deep" and "A Deepness in the Sky" by him. Awesome SF reads. He's widely regarded for some of the most imaginative aliens and alien cultures. If SF is your thing, definitely check those out.

... of Peak Digital. Which wouldn't be too surprising give the overall situation with IT and the digital space.