Honestly, a minimum viable product is entirely what Pokemon Go was designed to be. It exists to extract behavioral surplus from users and convert it into valuable action by inviting users to go to certain places in a community through placement of Pokestops and Gyms. Basically a tool to drive foot traffic, which Niantic can (and does) sell to businesses that want to drive that foot traffic. It worked brilliantly for years and still is a somewhat effective method of driving advertising and sales for real world businesses.

What specifically didn't you like about The Martian? Hail Mary is weirder and in some ways, a more exciting story, but Weir's writing style is the same in both books and there is some similarity in the plots.

Heat radiation in a vacuum is also an important aspect of space travel. If heat could not radiate in a vacuum, we would not be able to dump excess heat from space craft and, at some point, the combination of electric devices operating within the pressure vessel and human heat output would eventually roast the people inside. We need heat to radiate outwards, and, from my understanding, it’s actually a somewhat difficult problem to solve in a vacuum. We take air and evaporative cooling for granted sometimes when on Earth and in space, where air cooling isn’t going to happen, you have to practice other methods of heat transfer.

I literally watched this video about 10 hours ago. He’s the Internet’s favorite Chicagoan.

Mine is the Affinity suite of image manip software. I don't use it often, but I do use it often enough that I maintain a Windows box to be able to do so. That and I play a few games occasionally (at this point pretty rarely) that just work better/at all under Windows rather than Linux. Like 90% of what I do with my computers is great under Linux, but those last few elements make me not want to dump Windows entirely.

So 2025 is the year I finally move my desktop to Linux and run windows in a VM I guess. I still have a few apps that just do not play nicely in Wine that would make transitioning fully more difficult, but I've been full Linux on my laptop for years. Maybe I can finally make the jump on PC.

I'm up to 20 read and I'm currently working on 21, 22, and 23. I know it's a bid odd to read three books simultaneously (especially for a slow reader), but I've got my books in different contexts. One is my bed time book, Book 5 of Mistborn, which I'm slowly warming up to after devouring books 1-3. My living room book is House of Leaves, which just takes time to get through and can't easily be binged. My commuting book is The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which is excellent but also bums me out (the perfect going into work book).

Right now my favorite for the year is probably Age of Surveillance Capitalism. It's not exactly revealing new ideas but more it's expanding upon those ideas into terrifying new depths. Excellent book and well worth a read.

I'm excited to finish the Mistborn series this year and I'll hit my goal of 25 books easily. I've already got books 24, 25, and 26 planned out. I'd love to hit 40 books this year but I'm not sure that will happen. I've not read that many books in one year since before middle school.

Least favorite reads? I picked up a Ray Kurzweil book about the singularity and put it down at 10 pages. It just felt so self congratulatory that I couldn't really get into it. Plus the argument felt supported by extreme cherry picking.

I also enjoyed but was a bit disappointed in NK Jemisin's sequel to The City We Became, titled The World We Make. It felt like a book that didn't need to be written and didn't really add to the characters or the world of the story. It was entertaining and evocative as all of Jemisin's works are, but it didn't leave as strong an impression as City which was disappointing.

Another notch in the portfolio of "public companies" being made worse due to shareholder supremacy. Public companies aren't even really public anymore given the advent of a million tools to limit the role the public has in governance.

I wonder if it would be possible to develop a federated model for sales. You'd like still need a platform like shopify between the consumer and the manufacturer, but the point of Etsy wasn't just the commerce side, it was also the discoverability and searching side. I wonder if a federated approach to searching for products utilizing independent websites or marketplaces, but with a unified search and sales platform would even make sense as a means to offer a decentralized marketplace. On some level that'd be just a digital swap meet/flea market, but with less oversight and commerce protection of a centralized platform like Etsy or Ebay.

You aren't the only one. Ive been on Fedora for a few years because I liked what Gnome was doing, I liked the updated Kernel, and I was annoyed by canonical. Now I'm not really sure where to go, as both Pop and Mint do not, in their current forms, work well with my hardware.

I can listen to the soundtrack from The Messenger. RainbowDragonEyes just absolutely knocked that one out of the park.

This might sound silly, but I've been looking for a way out for a while. A lot of what reddit has done has been gross, but it has also been mentally salvageable for the good bits. I think the API issue is what finally allowed me to get over the mental hurdle of wanting to stay on reddit.

Good riddance.