wizardbeard

Maybe her other books are better, but Atlas Shrugged was such a slog for me. I can't even reccomend it as a curiousity.

Ayn made even the sex scenes mechanical and cold, which would have been a great artistic choice to show how dead inside the MCs all were, but she was going for "this makes Dagny strong and empowered!" It wasn't intentional at all.

Then there's the section in the middle where they fuck off to "galt-land" and everything the was building up in the real world just kind of stops mattering, until they decide to leave. Another thing that would have been great if intentional, if there were consequences for running away from things, but they just come back like nothing happened.

Except for the biggest problem of all in the book: The fucking radio broadcast chapter. It's 3/4 of the way into the book. If you don't understand the themes by that point then you're blind. But she devotes an entire fucking chapter to having John "perfect representation of the themes in human form" Galt blather on for (iirc) over 20 pages reiterating the themes explicitly.

Some jackass takes over all radio broadcasts, spends hours rambling about the supremacy of people who make things happen... and nothing fucking happens as far as I can recall.

It's been over a decade and a half, but I had the opposite problem with my English courses.

My writing classes established such a rigid pattern to our essays that they would give us an outline with what kind of sentence went where, you filled in the blanks and ended up with an essay. Which is great for kids struggling, but it didn't allow for any fucking deviation from the pattern at all.

Only need two supporting paragraphs with a little more in each to make your point? Like hell you do! Three supporting paragraphs or you lose points.

Things would flow better if you broke one of your supporting paragraphs into two smaller ones, for a total of four? Well that's just impossible! Three supporting paragraphs or you lose points.

One of your supporting paragraphs have a point that needs two sentences to communicate well? No it doesn't! One sentence for each detail in your supporting paragraph!

You have four supporting details/sentences instead of just three? Get fucked kid!

Lose points for any deviation.

It wasn't until my junior year of high school (penultimate year of non-university school, for folks who use a different structure) that one teacher finally went "Hey, this kid is reading college literature course books for fun (Don Quixote, at the time) and can hold a decent conversation about the themes and such. Maybe I could try letting him off the leash."

I went from the English class for kids who underperformed to the "Hey, take a college course for college credit early kiddo!" class, and killed it.

Nice, an analognowhere I missed!

Most AI company executives have already spoken openly about how that's their plan for future financial growth: advertisements delivered naturally in the output with no clear division between ads and the content.

Most streaming services and web browsers don't. Another good reason to pirate: more control over the viewing experience.

There's no reason it has to be post 2077. Silverhand was already an established character in the lore, there's plenty of shit that could be adapted. 2077 was in part a time skip epilogue to a whole bunch of notable characters from the TTRPG, and I think there's a decent amount of people who'd be down for the earlier stuff.

There are plenty of other horrific medical conditions without cures or significant funding into their research.

Blanking on the medical name, but there's a disease that fucks the immune system into turning bruised flesh into bone. Most sufferers of it don't even make it to 20 years old. And the existing treatments to reduce it all have terrible side effects.

Yes, it was one of the more contreversial changes he did. Before, you had to be "vetted" by xitter staff as being both notable and who you said you were. That wasn't a great system, and was effectively a nepotism/who you knew game, but you wouldn't see blue checkmarks for fake accounts.

It used to be a sign of trustworthiness.

Now anyone can get one for a monthly fee.

What the shit? Pressing and holding power and a volume button used to be for force shutdown. It's been that way for over a decade! Fucking hell.

Does that actually bring up a menu, or just outright shut it down?

The two button shortcut has historically been for forcing an immediate shutdown in the event of like, a full system freeze. It's the same as ripping the power cord from a running desktop PC, and isn't the intended graceful shutdown that these devices are supposed to get.

Unless they've changed things, that's been the standard since the first smart phones and PDAs.

I have a first gen iPod Touch somewhere in a box here. It was press once to lock and turn off screen. Hold to get power menu.

Fucking hell, Samsung? I'm typing this on a Galaxy A52 5g. Same thing. Press power to turn off the screen and lock, press and hold for power menu. They did have press and hold for bixby about a year after I bought it, which I disabled, but it wasn't out of box default.

I've never encountered this multi-button power shit you're talking about outside of old click wheel iPods, or as the force shut down option (equivalent of ripping out the cord on a desktop PC, definitively not the normal/intended power off procedure).

Don't know what you've been using, but this has not been some standard thing forever.

It's not about like or dislike. I'd have almost no complaints if they added a button or a unique gesture to open it, like they already had with holding the home button (looks like they may have removed that shortcut functionality). Or how some phones made the lock/power button touch sensitive so a touch (not press) or a swipe over it opened the assistant.

But silently changing the function of a standard piece of UI/controls that have been standard for over a decade, and common on even slide phones since the fucking pre-smart phone era?

I'm shocked that anyone actually needs this explained to them.

It would rightfully be a news story if Honda's newest car hid the window controls behind a settings menu, and what normally were window controls (still visually the exact same and located in the standard spot on the door) raised and lowered your seat instead.

That's all without getting into the mess that is a company trying to artificially pump user numbers of one of their products, or my personal dislike of these "assistants".

Internal emails from Google have become public through court cases which reveal that the rumor they were making search worse intentionally is true, and it was in order to inflate their ad impression numbers. There is no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt on this, and active explicit reasons to do the opposite.