vlz

You are right, it’s not alien technology. But this is how it feels like.

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.

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.

> These are skilled labor jobs (plumbers, electricians, IT, etc.).

They are for now, but will a robot be able to do them in the near future? I don’t know. But there are probably people working on it.

> Turbo and view transitions go so well together because they have kind of the same philosophy: write the HTML once to describe what the current state should look like, and let the technology handle the transitioning from one state to another. This leads to writing expressive dead simple code, that is so simple to understand yet behaves like a modern SPA, I love it!

'He remembers the quip from a former dean: “The endowment is the gift that keeps on taking.”'

Bad content reaching kids is not the issue. (Well, it is part of it…) The whole thing is bad. We don't give cigarettes to kids either.

> Currently, BirdyChat supports 1:1 chats, with group chat interoperability coming in a future update.

I wondered whether it can be used with Whatsapp groups: Apprently not yet.