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.

On my Firefox Nightly I have an extension to set Yandex as an allowed default search engine. Makes it easier to pop up another browser for a session.

Somebody fix that extension to work on mobile, eh?

They don't - something like this needs an Act or Congress.

SCOTUS made up some BS "Chevron Deference" in the 80's which has been abused like this since.

The current /Maine Fisheries/ case should dissolve Chevron deference.

We may like the FTC proposal on this one but with that kind of power and no representation it's only counting the days until they do something we absolutely detest. And then there's no effective recourse.

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

Weren't the founders and top management of Google citizens of Israel?

It dozen't seem all surprising from that perspective.

These protesters should have gone back to writing code to surveil Americans, I guess?

It's the only scifi universe I've read from in years.

If you like police procedurals, check out the In Death series by J.D. Robb. It takes place in a near-future world that's not quite ours and the protagonist is Dallas, Lieutenant Eve, NYPSD and head of the Homicide Squad at Cop Central. Not only is she good at solving murders, she's quite capable of beating the hell out of a military trained man who's fighting for his freedom and is quite ready to take her life to get it.

Sometimes a Good paperback at ThriftBooks is $1 less than a new one at Amazon so I just get the new one.

Weird market!

PS unless the recent printings have been Trust & Safety'ed.

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.

“The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth” -Enos Hitchcock, 1790

Enos Hitchcock can finally rest easy!

Fiction:

12 books from the Deverry series
The Three Body Problem trilogy
Monkey
Treacle Walker
Various books on Powershell

Non-Fiction:
Linux Administrator's Guide
Linux Network Administrator's Guide
Both OpenZFS books
Ansible
Terraform
Various books on Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL optimisation
C++ manuals
Various Cisco manuals
OpenPF manual

... 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.

But it's not like the leather is going to be thrown away and Apple is pulling cowskin out of dumps.

Wrong

The global leather industry creates four billion pounds of scrap leather waste every year. Currently, thatâ(TM)s mainly sent to landfills or incinerated