>> Rocky's echolocation can even work through walls

Yeah, his echolocation can work through impervious xenonite walls and then through a completely different atmosphere/pressure on the other side. Give me a break!

>> Executive direction that the legacy codebase must be 'documented' fully

I'll assume you don't work in the profession, the execs usually don't care or even know. If they had wanted documentation they would have emphasized it when the code was being written, or at least shortly afterwards. Software rots over time and if its a valuable internal application someone will eventually have to fix it. I've been paid very good money at times to do that job.

Sometimes the first task is to determine where the source code happens to be, nobody remembers. The next hurdle is to figure out how to build and deploy it, often not documented either and nobody has done it for years. It may be tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of code, what the heck is it all supposed to do? Where might the buggy code reside in this opaque morass? An AI summary is mighty helpful in these situations even if it isn't perfectly accurate.

Yeah I have seen this whining from you previously. Clearly you don't use this tech and all you know about it is " Every AI fluffing article we've seen".

>> the closed source codebases I've seen for low quality slop

Same here, most established companies have a gigantic amount of legacy software written long ago by people who left. Little to no documentation and a rickety, brittle structure that is always teetering on failure. At least with AI you can make it document the code it writes and the architecture.

Fortunately you can also tell it to evaluate and document the legacy code. Very helpful.

I was an electronics technician back in the late 70's. I had worked for a year or so debugging circuit boards that came off of an assembly line (many parts were soldered on by hand) so I had experience with the simple IC's and CPU's of that time. This was rare skill in those days, and I leveraged that to get a job as the technician at a Computerland store that sold Apple II, Commodore Pet, Atari 400, etc. I didn't know a thing about them at first, but nobody else did either.

We didn't have circuit diagrams for most of the computers so there was little hope for repairing them, but all the IC's in the Apple were plugged in to sockets and were removable. I was able to get a diagram that showed which section of the board was responsible for what subsystem - display, keyboard, memory, I/O, etc. This made it possible to set a working machine on a bench next to a broken one and swap IC's one by one until you reached the defective component. I fixed a lot of Apples that way.

They were hugely expensive. A fully loaded Apple II cost about $2,500 in 1980, which would be about $10,000 in today's money. But people bought them! I think we sold one or two a week.

I didn't say Rocky was able to live in Earth atmosphere. I said he "swiftly sets up residence in the human starship".

In the book Grace quickly implements a language translation program on a laptop. They were communicating within hours, starting with rudimentary sign language. Meanwhile on Earth we've been largely unable to decipher the languages of fairly intelligent creatures such as birds, primates, and cetaceans. We don't understand their thought systems and vice versa, so it seems like quite a stretch to be able to almost immediately be able to communicate with a life form that isn't even water-based. I realize its essential to the story but it seems more like fantasy than science, clumsy writing.

I thought the book was badly paced, it careens from one improbable crisis to another. Even the initial setting seems artificial, all but one crew member is dead for some unexplained reason. The 'doctor' machine didn't revive them when their health started failing? And then conveniently there's an alien who is also the only survivor on his ship, strange coincidence. Grace immediately trusts this creature completely and gives it total access to his ship, highly unlikely. I can handle a few leaps of imagination but this was a pretty flimsy story.

What we really need are proper support systems for children in place, but in the real world they often don't exist. Some parents also seem to think they should have full control over their children and know everything they are doing at all times, which makes things like seeking support for being LGBTQ bother difficult for the child and something that the parents demand is not made available.

Maybe we could set up better moderated communities for this kind of thing, but that brings its own problems. As an example, with the current attacks on trans healthcare in the UK, a lot of trans kids are being forced to go the "DIY" route for treatment. It's not illegal as such, but it is something of a grey area. Any kind of official moderation is likely to make such forums useless to a lot of people.

Are you sure you were paying attention when you read it, because that's not what happens in the book. For example, Rocky needs essentially an environmental suit to survive in an atmosphere suitable for humans, due to his planet having much higher pressure and temperature. Communication is established over some time based on engineering principles, which are universal properties of the universe and a classic sci-fi trope for communicating with very different alien species.

I thought it was a pretty good book overall. Lots of interesting ideas and detail. Strong characters, at least for the protagonist and Rocky.

Artemis, about a woman living on the moon. I read it too, it was pretty good.

>> not going to offer up some phenomenal new science fiction shift

Just something a little fresh would have been nice. Most elements of that whole story have been around the block quite a few times.

Right, but the storytelling was ham-handed. One manufactured crisis after another. And really there's no excuse for writing things that are completely implausible.

His behavior is human for sure, emotions and all. But physically (according to the book) his blood is mercury and his atmosphere is ammonia under very high pressure. No eyes and it was never clear how he actually perceives things other than something to do with sound. He is ashamed of his 'eating' process which consists of splitting his body open to remove a waste sack and stuff in some new consumables.

And yet he somehow fits right in, which is critical for the story but so very unlikely.

I haven't seen the movie but I did read the book since there has been so much hoopla, and meh. A completely unremarkable book. At about halfway through I was starting to skim it. Written in the first person, the protagonist moves through a long series of improbable difficulties. Which he solves of course, with the help of his trusty alien sidekick. It gets a little tiresome.

The alien is so remotely unlike us that it's a little hard to believe it would have a thought system we could understand and communicate with. Plus it is blind. Nonetheless, communication happens almost immediately. The alien swiftly sets up residence in the human starship and they are cozy as bugs. The unbelievability factor ramps up from there.

I generally like science fiction and have read a lot of it, this book moves through some very well explored literary imagination. There are a few fragments of creativity but nothing at all special.

The Chinese have these kinds of robots deploying much larger installations. They also have drones that fly panels into mountainous areas for installation.

Not that I'm knocking it, it's good that they are copying good ideas. The cheaper solar gets the better, and for political reasons stuff like this has to be home grown.