Huh, I kind of think the opposite. I haven't read everything he's written, but it seems to me that he kinda sucks at endings.

I loved Anathem, and when you realize what's going on it's so cool, but then it doesn't explore that idea as much as I want, it just ends without looking around the next corner. Cryptonomicon is a fun, interesting read and gets you worked up about what a monumental shift is going to happen... And then ends right as it's coming to fruition. Even Seveneves had a 5000 year jump and spends hundreds of pages on the consequences of humanity's brush with death... And then tosses in another population with five pages left. I want to keep going!

Maybe I just don't like being tantalized in the last few pages of a book, but I feel like I'm left hanging and unsatisfied, like there's a missing sequel. His pulpier, early novels were much better in terms of wrapping up the story.

I have a tortoise and he's great. I wouldn't necessarily recommend them for everyone, but if you like reptiles they have a lot going for them. Calm, quiet, low maintenance, vegetarian (no crickets, mice etc.) and have a lot of personality. If you take care of them they can be a friend for life.

I like to take mine into the yard in an enclosure and chill in a hammock nearby. He even likes to cuddle into the crook of my neck on the couch. Not exactly the most active pet, but his calming energy helps my anxiety. When he's splooted, basking under a heat lamp I am almost envious.

Proton is amazing, but it's entirely overhead translating library/system calls to Linux. It's accurate to say they run better on SteamOS, not to say Proton is making it run better.

Now maybe Proton makes them run better than a janky but native Linux port, but that's a separate statement about games being better optimized on Windows.

Sports gambling is just terrible for everyone except the bloodsuckers that run it. Sports teams don't want it because it incentivizes cheating / rigging games. Personal bankruptcy and domestic abuse skyrocket when people lose money they can't afford to lose. Now the apps feed an unstable addiction literally all day long.

Thanks to the Supreme Court for pulling a bullshit ruling out of their collective asses in 2018 that makes everything worse for average Americans.

Shit, I don't even gamble and I'm just sick of their logos and ads all over every thing when I watch a game. Used to be they had "Gambling Prohibited" up around the stadium, now they may as well own the teams.

I always love this meme. The way that dude is simultaneously smiling, hitting weed, and in an action stance in case shit comes his way just makes me laugh.

If I don't bowl today the terrorists win.

They can't run a candidate that can win because that would require a platform that steps on too many donors' toes.

Ideally the FDA should not be swayed by business interests, but everything controlled by our government is. That said, you want the FDA to exist and protect us from bullshit snake oil products and keep corporations from lacing our food with cheap poisons and carcinogens.

Trump gutting the organization makes it go from "could do better" to "actively subverting its own purpose."

Bakula just hit the Archer casting too perfectly. The man just exudes boy scout, it's what made Quantum Leap work too.

Perfect headline.

For kernel dev it would be a disaster, there's too much implicit action, and abstractions that have unknown runtime cost. The classic answer is that everyone uses 10% of its features over C, but nobody can agree on which 10%.

As someone forced to get up to date with C++ recently, at this point it's a language in full identity crisis. It wants so badly to be Rust, but it's got decades of baggage it's dragging along.

In a world where Valve controls 90% of what is running on a device with immutable / containerized images, yeah I think Arch makes a lot more sense. A distro focused on rolling release is a lot less likely to hang you up when you choose to update.

Debian is great, but depending on where you are in the release cycle it can be a pain in the ass to stay up to date and, frankly, the last time I ran it, shit like apt/dpkg configuration and so many /etc files and structures just felt like mis-features or too complex for their own good.