I really love Wolfe for his small almost throwaway visions of the future, which are used like an aside in a few lines and mostly inconsequential to the story.
In the Urth of the New Sun for example he has a kind of AI lock, the only function of which is to recognize a person and open only to that person. Being in that role for thousands of years, some of the locks develop a kind of personality or at least personal traits, but they are totally defined by and cannot exceed the role they were initially given, nor do they want to. It is still a haunting image for me how personality or something close to a soul might be an accidental byproduct of something as mundane as wanting to have a convenient lock. And of course you cannot stop to wonder how far we are from that.
In Book of the new sun there is the Green Man who Severian saves from imprisonment. He only appears on a few pages but we learn that he is from a distant time where mankind incorporated plant cells in their genetic makeup in order to perform photosynthesis. That brilliantly plays on two themes of the book: the sun as live giving and how a single person can be independent (or "autarch"), here in so far as producing their own energy.
There are many more instances and it’s what makes the Book of the New Sun or the Solar Cycle so fantastic. The future is so vast and strange here, that it cannot be fully depicted and ideas which another writer would stake a whole book or series on are only good for a few lines.
Is there any kind of geeky service that lists the range of political views held by the founders of all popular software products? Otherwise, maybe half the software on my computer was made by fascists, and I don't even know it.
For example, Linux — how fascist, communist, or monarchist is it? I'd also be interested to know which NVIDIA drivers are more supportive of the LGBT community—the open-source ones or the proprietary ones?
I had never even thought about this until your comment.
It's useful to know where your software comes from. If something is largely funded by one company, we know it will move in the directions favorable to that company - you can be ready for it to move in a direction that you aren't happy with. If your stance on privacy is "my software should preserve it", perhaps primary developers of that software's association with anti-privacy advocates is worth consideration. This is particularly important in OSS with it's "no guarantees, no warantees, no accountable party" disclaimers - otherwise you might get fucked over when the next release starts doing something you really don't want it to (to extend the example above: e.g. sending all the logs to google or whoever).
> My interest in the Bun JavaScript runtime evaporated when I was informed of Jarred Sumner’s connection to Peter Thiel.
Ok, he doesn't really explain it in your link, but there's another link in that text ... surely that explains it:
>Anyway, I was recently made aware of Sumner’s connection to/fandom of Peter Thiel.
WHAT CONNECTION!?!?!? Did Peter Thiel help him murder someone? Invest $100k in his project? Is he friends with his uncle?
Look I think Thiel is a toxic human being too, but he's a major Siliocn Valley figure: you can't ostracize any project with any association with him, so if you're going to avoid using an entire technology, at least have the decency to say what this giant terrible connection is!
Follow up: Thiel gave a (teenage) Summer some $$$ (ironically, the exact amount I guessed at randomly in my previous post!):
>In 2014, Peter Thiel's Thiel Foundation awarded a 19-year-old Jarred Sumner $100,000 along with mentorship.
So Thiel gave Summer, as a young starting entrepeneur, a $100k prize ... can you really fault him for liking Thiel a little after that? Apparently the OP does, and will refuse to use a technology Summer created simply because of it.
I'm saying if I'm a young dev, and I get $100k from a famous VC, I'm going to lean towards being a little bit more positive about him than most people ...
... but that doesn't justify boycotting the young dev and everything he ever makes in the future.
Debatable. Maybe they were less informed in the sense of not having access to as much so called news or content. But what about the quality? Being strictly less informed by emotionalized info shots could very well mean being less misinformed.
You can get an "unecrypted boot, encrypted root" setup though.
https://davidalger.com/posts/fedora-asahi-remix-on-apple-sil...
Did you consider that? I am personally using that and feeling pretty good about it, but maybe I am missing something?
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