MetaFilter

Wouldn’t it be great if you could pay $9.99 a month and read all of the books you want? Just like you get all the movies you want from Netflix? Or all the music you want from Spotify?

I'm sitting here trying to figure out what that $9.99 a month would get me that my library card doesn't. (Faster access to new titles, I suppose. Is that a decisive factor for a lot of people?)
posted to MetaFilter by aws17576 at 10:31 PM on April 22, 2024

I hate doing the "is any of this new?" schtick, but is any of this new? Readers seem to like leaning into narratives where we remind ourselves how special we are; we can all be the elite readers who devour a couple hundred books a year but articles like this still let people who count reading as a virtue feel special.

A lot of the article is on distribution. There are a lot of books published; 10% of books seem to sell more than 300k copies (which seems a much... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by mark k at 9:53 PM on April 22, 2024

well I get you I drove by someone that got shot the other day. I don't know about fantasies but history is proven that Russian general strikes, bureaucractic/ industry has been effective in regime change. never ever underestimate the Russians whether it's the people, the bureaucracy. I've worked for them my grade school best friends father was Ukrainian history professor I love you but I don't like being chided in the times of other people's War. I'd like to know how they think. we've contained... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by clavdivs at 7:27 PM on April 22, 2024

The original software for the Voyager probes was written using Fortran 5 then ported to Fortran 77, and today there is some porting in C.
posted to MetaFilter by meehawl at 9:24 PM on April 22, 2024

Fuckin' SCIENCE, yo. Amazing!

The science is pretty amazing, but this story has not been primarily about the science but about the engineering.

Voyager's compute machinery looks comically primitive compared to anything in commercial use today, but the flip side of that is that unlike any modern system, Voyager's computers are simple enough for a single human mind to comprehend in their entirety. Packing... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by flabdablet at 6:36 PM on April 22, 2024

Maybe we should start adding a few extra chips to anything we send out, maybe a lil' bit of intentionally empty memory, just in case?

I don't know the deets, but I'm guessing there is plenty of dead code space given that there are no more planetary flybys and most of the science instruments are turned off. And if they ever had any free code memory, they probably used it up between Saturn and Uranus when they upgraded to Reed-Solomon encoding.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by credulous at 6:29 PM on April 22, 2024

Heck, I’d watch a TV miniseries.

Soap opera. We're going to need to swap out actors every decade or so while the actual engineers carry on in the same roles.
posted to MetaFilter by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 3:38 PM on April 22, 2024

Or the thing pretending to be Voyager 1 is sending us messages….
posted to MetaFilter by GenjiandProust at 2:38 PM on April 22, 2024

One of my least favorite things to troubleshoot is bugs that only exist on the remote build machine. Even if I disable everything except the affected portion of the build/test, it still takes a few minutes to spin up the VM to test a change. I can't imagine having the patience to wait 45 hours to see if a build passed or not, and god forbid you forget a semicolon!
posted to MetaFilter by TwoWordReview at 2:33 PM on April 22, 2024

I’d watch a movie about this. Heck, I’d watch a TV miniseries.

In all seriousness this should be a public lecture series, or a graduate level class.
posted to MetaFilter by mhoye at 2:20 PM on April 22, 2024

Developers sometimes talk or brag or pride themselves about working "close to the metal" but there is no software engineering team in the world who are simultaneously as close to and as far away from the metal as the people keeping Voyager operational.

Hotpatching code in specific regions of a near-50-year old memory core to work around a failure in a device 25 billion kilometers away? Incomprehensible.
posted to MetaFilter by mhoye at 2:20 PM on April 22, 2024

happybear I would suggest 20 days in Mariupol.

That's the biggest boost my mood has gotten in years.

I simply could not watch it in my current mental state. I won't bore you with the details but the last thing I need to do is watch an actual documentary about a city being destroyed. I'm lucky to get through episodes of Only Murders In The Building.
posted to MetaFilter by hippybear at 7:02 PM on April 22, 2024

Happybear 🐻
posted to MetaFilter by supermedusa at 6:59 PM on April 22, 2024

and I'll reassert my naive claim that one of the ways this war to end is for the Russian people to have the general strike. I was exuberant 6 to 8 months into the war that this might happen but Putin has solidified the police state and the Crux is that the crackdown forces more people to tell the mantra in other words the patriotism but the thing about patriotism, if it cannot spread and become infectious to other people to join their cause it gets internalized and has nowhere to go thus... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by clavdivs at 6:42 PM on April 22, 2024

happybear I would suggest 20 days in Mariupol. I watched it, then I watched it again.
ISW. I would suggest that each person do their own thinking and that's usually in the links at the bottom,oddly some are 404 but they generally are accurate about 70 to 82% of the time, a lot from main stream news and some interesting accounts from various social media. they published this piece, 'Why you can't be and Iran hawk and a Russian dove.' it's been my belief one the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by clavdivs at 6:04 PM on April 22, 2024

MetaFilter: the room full of old nerds
posted to MetaFilter by hippybear at 1:49 PM on April 22, 2024

Look at the median age of the people in that room. It does my ancient heart good. It's like a COBOL conference in there.

"Sir, we have a problem with one of the computers."
"So fix it."
"Well it's 47 years old, and it only has 68K of memory and nobody really knows how to program these systems anymore and --"
"What? Why are we still using that ancient crap! Can't we replace it with something all shiny... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by The Bellman at 1:48 PM on April 22, 2024

This is as badass as computer engineering gets. Programming a nearly 50 year old 64k computer that's outside the solar system with a lag time of almost a day. Simply amazing.
posted to MetaFilter by indexy at 1:40 PM on April 22, 2024

Yeah, I wasn't meaning to discount any human deaths anywhere. The amount of wreckage both human and physical structures from this war is pretty horrific.
posted to MetaFilter by hippybear at 1:35 PM on April 22, 2024

Good to hear from you V'ger, keep in touch!
posted to MetaFilter by mazola at 1:32 PM on April 22, 2024

I think the leveling of Mariupol, while not involving human beings as the resulting wreckage, is of equal magnitude. And the destruction of the dam.
posted to MetaFilter by hippybear at 1:15 PM on April 22, 2024

This makes me happier than is probably normal.
posted to MetaFilter by marxchivist at 1:02 PM on April 22, 2024

People will point to horrific war crimes like Bucha as evidence that actually Russia is going to murder all Ukrainians but that's hard to take seriously given Bucha was 2 years ago and people are still pointing to it as their only real example of a crime of that magnitude in this war. 

It happened in Irpin and Lyman and Kharkiv and countless other towns all throughout Russian occupied lands. Why are you trying to minimize Russian rape, torture and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by nestor_makhno at 1:11 PM on April 22, 2024

I said in one of the previouslies that it was too soon to write Voyager's obituary.

It's not over until the team says it's over, and they pack up and stop trying.
posted to MetaFilter by tclark at 12:54 PM on April 22, 2024

Sounds worthy of an article in Scientific American similar to ENGINEERING VOYAGER 2'S ENCOUNTER WITH URANUS (November 1986).
posted to MetaFilter by neuron at 12:37 PM on April 22, 2024

Yes!

And I want to celebrate the sheer glory of these lines:
"Launched over 46 years ago, the twin Voyager spacecraft are the longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history. Before the start of their interstellar exploration, both probes flew by Saturn and Jupiter, and Voyager 2 flew by Uranus and Neptune."
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 12:37 PM on April 22, 2024

Symphony No. 2, Bernstein, Vienna Philharmonic 1986. For years you could watch the whole televised piece posted on YouTube and it never failed to evoke tears. I have the cd now but the performance is what got me hooked…the cello player really digging in at the end…and if there were ever a time machine… Anyway, it got yanked and now only the 1st & 2nd parts and then the 4th are up and there’s something wrong with the frame rate, ugh. I’d buy the video but I can’t imagine one exists? Or is it... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by TWinbrook8 at 8:04 AM on April 22, 2024

The opening of the 2nd symphony is my current alarm clock sound.
posted to MetaFilter by neuron at 10:29 AM on April 21, 2024

That's the resting facial expression for most Finns. If you want to call it disappointedly resigned, you're probably not far off the basic emotional state of most Finns. (I married one.)
posted to MetaFilter by seanmpuckett at 6:49 AM on April 21, 2024

it's a way of thinking about the problem that I think is better than the flattened "you have just as much responsibility to the kid on another continent who might die of malaria as you do to the kid drowning in front of you" framing that effective altruists use

and certainly way better than the Greatest Good For The Greatest Number line that the longtermist wing of EA pushes, where they just make up... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by flabdablet at 7:11 AM on April 21, 2024

There is a moral problem related to EA that I think of in terms of a discussion I once had on Metafilter with Eyebrows McGee. (I tell this story to other people, but I'm a little afraid of telling it here!)

My own summary of the question we were discussing: "If you're an upper middle class parent, is it morally preferable to send your kid to the school you think will be best for that kid, or to send your kid to the school where the presence of... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by OnceUponATime at 6:24 AM on April 21, 2024

Thanks for this. I love Sibelius. Many mornings in ricklandia have begun in the shimmering light of his Sixth Symphony.
posted to MetaFilter by dutchrick at 6:02 AM on April 21, 2024

Czjewel: Sibelius is my jam. Have adored hom for many years.
I had a glonous keming moment there and went for horn.
Preciousss says: 7/8 Sibelius symphonies saved surpasses Sophocles 7/123 stage shows.
Thanks for the heads up, off to get a Violin Concerto fix now.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by BobTheScientist at 12:52 AM on April 21, 2024

Kitchen.

hi gram....
👆
(quiet ensues, quietly takes off winter scarf and coat placed upon 6 peg stand in foyer)

Sibelius.
who
Sa-bey-le-us.
When ...
👆
qui est-ce
A composer and violinist.
était une symphonie?

était-ce une symphonie.
perhaps I was lucky that my grandmother was a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by clavdivs at 9:22 PM on April 20, 2024

I only learned about Sibelius after I'd found a freeware music composition suite for the Mac called "Sibelius". That led me to the library, and then to Napster... But yeah, Sibelius was on the speakers in my house a lot during the covid-lockdown times! Thanks for this.
posted to MetaFilter by not_on_display at 6:31 PM on April 20, 2024

A fun Sibelius fact: the musical notation software Sibelius has nothing to do with Finland. It was originally written by Ben and Jonathan Finn.
posted to MetaFilter by madcaptenor at 6:04 PM on April 20, 2024

But if you can have a reasonable expectation that if you work on your stuff, and other people work on what is important to them, and from time to time there's some sort of "hey is anybody falling through the cracks?" assessment, then collectively we can act in a moral way.

Well...

Just as an easy and hopefully not-deeply-fraught, example, I've done a lot of work on ending exploitative practices by financial... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 7:02 PM on April 20, 2024

Thanks for this, Kattullus! Sibelius Symphony #2 is one of my favorite works ever, and my cat is even named Sibby as a nod to him. I used to be a violinist and encountered Finlandia in high school, a piece that still gives me chills. (It helps that my family has Finnish heritage!)
posted to MetaFilter by leftover_scrabble_rack at 3:27 PM on April 20, 2024

So I went to this because I knew I would be angry with myself if I didn't, but, as I was leaving, I realized that I was really glad that I went. It's full of joke, dumb and not, that land and not, some that are offensive, most that are not. It's an honestly amazing reconstruction of the Batman universe in a way that I haven't seen before. DC and its various owners have been notoriously hot and cold on allowing it to be screened, so, if you have a showing you can get to, this might be your chance.... [more]
posted to FanFare by GenjiandProust at 2:35 PM on April 20, 2024

I can understand the curiosity around unpublished works, but in most cases I think it's best to defer to the author. If they weren't satisfied with the quality (especially going so far to destroy all their work) it seems disrespectful to try to listen in.

I did make an exception for Go Set a Watchman, because Harper Lee had initially submitted it for publication, and I thought the quality was excellent and it explained a lot about her abbreviated career.
posted to MetaFilter by rikschell at 2:11 PM on April 20, 2024

Sibelius is my jam. Have adored hom for many years.
posted to MetaFilter by Czjewel at 2:06 PM on April 20, 2024

I don't know if it's strange that a book you read in high school and fall in love with, could just sort of--go blank? Slaves of New York is one of those books for me. I was reading it and The Andy Warhol Diaries and Ultraviolet's autobiography all roughly at the same time (it was a busy couple of years because around that time I also discovered Anne Rice and so there were these two poles of artistic decadence, two unreachable places,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by mittens at 4:19 AM on April 20, 2024

The thing that has always stopped me cold with EA is its name. Every form of philanthropy strives to be effective, by definition; they can vary wildly according to the honesty of the particular altruist in terms of what they want to accomplish (i.e. contribute to the infrastructure of institutions of higher learning, but also putting their names on those buildings to put them in the mouths of future generations), how well and thoroughly they examine the institutions by which... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 10:47 AM on April 20, 2024

Nick Bostrom’s Future of Humanity Institute closed this week in what Swedish-born philosopher says was ‘death by bureaucracy’

And nothing of value was lost. Well played, that bureaucrat.
posted to MetaFilter by flabdablet at 6:03 AM on April 20, 2024

Oxford's Future of Humanity institute closes

posted to MetaFilter by lalochezia at 4:56 AM on April 20, 2024

Which specific premise is untrue?

I'm gonna point to two:

- You can spend money to save lives: maybe, as many other people in this thread have pointed out, this depends a lot on the model for what happens when and how you spend money. If buy a pair of shoes, am I offering someone who needs it employment? Does that participation in an economy result in more or less value than just giving my efforts away? Is money a medium of... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by straw at 12:39 PM on April 19, 2024

Oh, this is very interesting. I don't know if I like it but I want to listen to it at least three more times to decide. Thanks for sharing.
posted to MetaFilter by EvaDestruction at 11:51 AM on April 19, 2024

Enjoying this much. Thanks!
posted to MetaFilter by slogger at 11:41 AM on April 19, 2024

I like the approach of putting in found sound that's unexplained, and doesn't have to be. Great quote in the Creative Independent article (the fourth link):

".. everybody should have something in their life that’s just for them. You’re an individual. You live your life, nobody else does. So having stuff that’s just for you that nobody else can access is important, I think."
posted to MetaFilter by Hardcore Poser at 11:41 AM on April 19, 2024

extra points for the title of this post
posted to MetaFilter by philip-random at 10:52 AM on April 19, 2024