I want to see a website that links to whatever is the least viewed Wikipedia article at any given time until all Wikipedia articles basically have the same number of views.
I get the impression that one of the main goals of Lemmy World admins is simply to assert control over its users. Whether they realize this or not and are just doing habitually. There was a post awhile back about the feature of users being able to do instance blocking themselves and they were pretty against the idea of an instance that federates with everything in order for users to do their own moderation. As this would obviously take away their ability to control users.
In my opinion they are just bullies who have convinced themselves they are in the right.
There are actually 3 main books in this series with a couple spin-offs. The first book in the series is called The Quantum Magician. I read all three of these one after another awhile ago so it would be hard to distinguish exactly how I feel about them individually. There are clear and distinct plots in each book and I do remember where the plot ends and starts again, but my thoughts and opinions are going to be influenced by one another. So instead I am going to write a single post about the series as a whole. I find that in order to fully enjoy this book I had to suspend my disbelief about a number of things. Especially in regards to one of the primary premises this book hinges on. That premise involves the ideas behind quantum wave functions and how it can effectively “collapse” when observed by consciousness. I am not an expert on the matter, but from the many hours of documentaries I have watched and articles I have read I am not convinced that quantum mechanics and conscious observers could work anything like is demonstrated in this book. I believe one of the main points of the famous Schrödinger’s cat experiment was precisely point out the absurdity of applying these quantum mechanics on a macroscopic scale. Regardless, I do not feel like this detracts from my enjoyment of the book. One of my favorite things about science fiction is when it goes off into the deep end in its fictional science. This just happens to stray close to a real scientific phenomenon and extrapolates it into something fictional.
The protagonist Belisarius is a genetically engineered human who is capable of perceiving the quantum world without collapsing its wave functions through observation. This is explained as being possible due to their engineered ability to turn off their sense of self. While in this fugue state of mind they have no understanding of who they are and can’t easily respond to stimuli. These quantum engineered humans are called the homo quantus. Belisarius has left the comfort and safety of his own people to explore what it is he is meant to be doing and partially as an act of self preservation due to the risky nature of the fugue state on the body. Due to his engineered superior intellect he has found a way to live as a con man. Soon after he catches the attention of leaders of an oppressed nation and is contracted to help them bring numerous war ships through one of the most defended wormholes in human civilization.
The universe of The Quantum Evolution series feels incredibly vivid and well imagined. All of the companions that Belisarius recruits for what is basically a heist are unique and lively. There are many other forms of engineered humans that exist for various reasons from the homo pupa who were engineered to serve their masters and the homo eridanus who were engineered merely to survive at the crushing depths of an ocean planet. One of my favorite characters is a homo eridanus that is recruited for the job. He could be described as an incredibly ugly bulbous fish monster of a human. They are under no disillusion of what they are and how they look. One of the ways they cope with this unfortunate fate is their constant expression of nihilism as well as vulgar language. Despite its excessive repetition I found it consistently amusing.
Sometimes people describe a convoluted, but masterful plan as playing a game of 4-D chess. This is usually a wild exaggeration of the complexity of whatever scheme they are trying to pull off. However, in The Quantum Magician I feel that this is the closest thing to what could be described as 4-D chess moves that aren’t deus ex machina tier nonsense that completely changes the rules of the game after the fact. I enjoyed the incredible resolution and climax of each book and really hope there is a fourth book as a sequel to The Quantum War. I get the impression that there is more to tell about The Quantum Evolution universe.
3.5 / 5 stars
If adblocking becomes illegal I'm done using the internet.
Depends for how long. Buying a used NAS with a single 1TB drive is probably cheaper over a 10 year period than subscribing to some cloud service for the same duration.
Hello /c/sciencefiction. What have you been watching or what do you plan on watching?
Here is a collection of some of the most upvoted and discussed shows from last months discussion.
Hello again /c/sciencefiction friends. It is once again a new month so it is time to refresh the post.
Here is a collection of some of the most upvoted and discussed books from last months discussion.
Technically man-made diamonds are also the diamond industry.
Yea. The question is completely absurd. There is no such thing as "reasonable ads". It is also completely against the philosophy of the project and the developers would never agree to it.
You may as well just browse Reddit at that point.
Crazy to think that he could have decided to stop school shootings this whole time and only decided to do it now. 😔
This is a disturbing trend. Apparently a lot of these major streaming services are discovering that they can make more from ads than people paying for the service. At least when calculated with the subscriber counts they currently have. It seems they don't anticipate people leaving their services over this.
Personally there is no way I would ever pay for a service that has ads. I'm not going to pay for a service even if its paid service doesn't have ads if it has a free or cheaper service with ads as that would just be rewarding them for implementing ads.
For example with Amazon's plan here. If you pay this $3.00 to remove ads then you are paying Amazon $3.00 because they added ads. This only increases the amount of ads that will be added to things.
Hello again Lemmy. I put together this little collage of some of the most discussed shows from last month. It doesn't mean anything other than they were discussed and upvoted or commented on the most.
What have you been watching or plan to watch in September?
Worlds longest water slide. That's how gravity works right?
I wish the whole project was a little bit more clever with its names. Matrix and Element are not unique enough names and can cause a lot of confusion.
I like the project though and still hope it continues to succeed.
Specifically they are upset that I've mentioned that Sync has ads in it. Which is both curious and suspicious. I'd rather not think up conspiracy theories, but it doesn't make any reasonable kind of sense. If you can decipher this strange behavior then I'd be curious to know. Whatever makes this "toxic" is beyond my current understanding of the situation.
Privacy? What is this article talking about. Ads not displaying in no way implies privacy. They will harvest your data as much as it possibly can either way. All you are doing by paying to remove ads is directly funding the ad business model.