"the genesis of misery" is a sci-fi / fantasy mech novel from the author of the "tensorate" series of novellas. **this review is quite spoiler heavy** but i'll preface by saying i really disliked the book and do not recommend it, so i think you won't be losing anything. it did get a fair amount of praise? but i felt very similar to "the house of hunger" (bad).
Short version: An astrophysicist from Canada recognizes the glaring contradictions between what we are seeing with JWST, and the standard model. JWST is believed to give us a window into the far distant past. But what we are finding is "mature" galaxies popping up in places where the universe is supposed to be in its infancy, according to the supposed 13.8 billion year age of the universe. And this astrophysicist is trying to put together a new model, which allows for these ancient galaxies, without hopefully adding too much time to the age estimate. What will the new age turn out to be? Nineteen billion? Twenty-nine billion?
An online friend of mine did a Depth Year in 2022. He documented both his successes and failures each month, and ultimately felt rewarded but exhausted after his pursuits. I thought that fulfillment and exhaustion that comes with a year-long project was something that I desperately needed, and so I embarked upon my Depth Year on January 2023, with the intention of deepening my understanding of habit and my relationship with my hobbies and studies.
Is there a best practice of automated recommendation systems? Clearly there are lots of bad recommendation algorithms out there. Either they don't work as intended, or they do but have undesirable side effects. I've touched on music recommendation in a previous post (rewilding music), here I will focus on video.
Youtube's algorithms have been criticised for promoting inaccurate information, serving scary content to toddlers, and much more. Since the algorithms are tightly kept secrets the criticism must be based on their observable effects, which partly depend on the interaction with millions or billions of users. And with individual customisation, each viewer will see different recommendations.
The panic about misinformation has hit hard on those who are critical of the current order of things, regardless of whether they present accurate information or deranged misconceptions. Project Owl in 2017 had the ostensible goal of diminishing the spread of false information, and if it succeeded at that it also had a deleterious effect on independent news sites of high quality, who may have presented opinion pieces that were not well aligned with establishment views.
Yes, that's all...Ok, maybe a terminal ? It's also very usefull. No problem for a PC under GNU/Linux of course but for the other computer that (almost) everyone has, the smartphone, it's not so easy.
Up until now, this site has been hosted on sourcehut pages. It was quite easy to get started since it integrates very well into the sourcehut ecosystem: the build gets triggered automatically on git push and it automatically gets the permission to publish the page.
I've been feeling increasingly disillusioned with the bloat and maintenance of my website, and the constant need to move social networks as each hub collapses.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
