Yeah, I don't know where the *good* Sci-Fi authors went either?

* Does anyone know if Lindsay Ellis' Axiom's End is any good?
* I'm extremely disappointed in Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary. I'm about 2/3 of the way through and it is SO boring.
* I was given Ready Player One as a gift and I'm NOT looking forward to reading given how shit the movie is/was. Are the books any good?
* Apparently the original Chinese book is better then Netflix's adaption of the 3 Body Problem but the series highlights the idiotic nature of the source material so I'm not interested in reading that either.
* Apple TV's adaption of Foundation was decent (even with the changes) but it just reminds me that I miss Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein even more.

SF/Fantasy seems to be the way things are going. :-/

* Netflix's adaptation of Lev Grossman's The Magicians was good.

What I want is a site is where I rate a book I've read 0 to 5 stars and it will recommend similar books that I will like. I haven't checked goodreads but maybe I should?

That was the reason I switched to Linux. Of course, I could have switched to BSD, but Debian potato was easier to install.

The hero tale is one with a long history behind it. I think it's always been the dominant style. So that's not really a legitimate criticism...not unless you are making an encompassing claim, and if you are, then it's false. (I've encountered several books with a heroine.) And the dominant style always reflects the zeitgeist. (In the late 1940's and early 50's there was lots of WWII echoes, often re-staged in different settings.)

FWIW, my tastes have always been quite narrow, and minority, but I think they've narrowed over the years. OTOH, possibly it's just that the net doesn't provide exposure to the tales that I would like. Perhaps they're still out there, but I can no longer easily browse through and tell that they're something I'd be interested in.

Part of the problem is definitely the sales channel. Grocery stores only carry "best sellers". (They may not actually be best sellers, but they're marketed as such.) 20 displays of 10 books, and two or three with only a few...probably left over from last month.) Also a few books that I already have on my shelf, from a decade ago.

Even book stores lean in this direction, sufficiently that I no longer want to browse in them. (OTOH, I always preferred science-fiction and technical books.)

But I really think part of the problem is the zeitgeist. Nobody wants to read it. It's like when the anti-hero became "popular with publishers". People found reading that stuff unpleasant, so they stopped. Except for a few. And some of those will be picked up, eventually, as classics that everyone should read. Just like "Jude the Obscure" was. Nobody that I ever met liked that story, but some academics thought it was important enough to force everyone to read it.

The last technical book I bought used grey ink for the examples. If I'd been able to see it before I bought it, I wouldn't have. I think they probably had a decent book, but the only editing was for the e-book, and that used color, but they printed the book in black and white.

Another turned out not to have any index. The text was decent, but just try to look something up.

The editors of print books are ... not quite worthless, as they may do a decent job for e-books, but the print version is merely an afterthought. If it weren't painful to read long text passages on the screen, I'd have given up on books.

Quite often looks just like it though. Like, just like it. "From the river to the sea", "by all means necessary", etc. That's like the Hamas theme music. And if you're humming Hamas happy tunes, you're supporting Hamas and their methods. Further, support for Hamas remains widespread in all available polling in Gaza. So a lot of them are on board with the genocidal terrorists running their government and all their actions as well. Supporting them is also supporting Hamas.

False equivalence in the extreme. Israel attacks valid military targets, even when fighting terrorists who don't follow Geneva or any other convention on war. Israel goes above and beyond by broadcasting where and when they're going to strike so civilians can leave. Except Hamas often doesn't let them leave because as Hamas themselves have stated in television interviews: dead Palestinian women and children help their cause and they aim to maximize the dead civilians on their side. Meanwhile, you've got Hamas specifically targeting women and children for rape and murder and live-streaming the whole thing to the world.

So no, they aren't the same. And it would take one ignorant motherfucker to think they are.

The old name of Coffee Stain Studios was actually a single studio not multiple so it was a little misleading / confusing.

The new name Coffee Stain & Friends makes this a little clearer.

I've found that most L2 chargers that are at commercial sites are more like 208V and 30A. The voltage is probably due to pulling from 3 phase power, and the amperage is just being cheap. The trucks have a 100kWh battery, but they probably don't need a full charge every night. If they're using 7kW chargers, and have used 80% of the battery, that would take just under 12 hours to charge. They do deliveries until 10pm, so they can probably count on charging from 10:30pm-6:30am, or 8 hours a night. So, yeah, they'll need more. If my numbers are right, then 10kW is exactly what they need to charge 80% in that window.

So the math says you're right.

CP/M is proof that shitty file system design (stupid 8.3 filenames) can have far lasting changes. Even today in Windows 11 we can't name a filename with a colon (:) due to the dumb decision of using colon to designate a drive instead of Unix's consistent and beautiful nomenclature to refer to devices with slashes.

My Apple 2 had 30 character filenames (WITH spaces) and using CP/M + Microsoft's Z80 SoftCard + Wordstar felt like a downgrade.

I still love Apple poking fun of MS blindly copying dumb features:

C:\ONGRTLNS.W95

At least MS was smart enough to use a recycle bin instead of a trash can.

/. editors had ONE job. /s

Guess no one cares about spelling anymore (original author or the editors.) :-/

I would love to see Rivian partner with someone like Winnebago and put out a small RV based on the same design. It would need a larger battery, but otherwise the basic platform would be great for a small RV.

So you don't list anything about CO2 or other pollution in the things you care about.

Of course, if you go with Green Hydrogen, the oil companies will flood the market with cheap hydrogen from gasified coal and natural gas. So hydrogen is an excuse to keep the oil industry going as-is. As someone who has driven an EV for nine years, they're a very solid technology, not some "silly approach."

Now hydrogen may make sense for aircraft or ships.

Yup, bought in bulk, a level 2 charger should be under $300. But that goes up here because you need devices that will stand up to a degree of abuse, and you need them networked to share power to manage consumption across the entire fleet at the location (which also reduces the need to upgrade the power from the utility). I could easily see that running to between $500 and $1000, even given that Amazon is likely buying these by the thousand. But that's still way less than the numbers cited in the summary. But I do agree that the cost of installation will be higher than the cost of the equipment.

That number seems wrong. A typical level-2 charger will run at or below 7kW. So unless they're putting in 400 or more, then that 3MW includes a lot of other power usage. And for a fleet, like this, they could easily install a thousand chargers that are configured to share power, so they would charge slower when all are in use, but it would still work fine: Some vehicles would get done early and start charging first, and as the spaces fill up, the charging rate would slow, but as those that need less finish, the others would speed up. That means they could install enough chargers for all their delivery vehicles now, and then upgrade the power when they start to have shortages.

That's fine. It's still putting out less pollution than the delivery vehicles they replaced. And it means as they switch to greener power, they improve their fleet without having to replace the vehicles.