I’ve been at places where the corporate policies were just buzzword doublespeak and they are a waste of time. Everyone knows it’s bullshit.
I’ve also been at exactly one place where the leadership team gave serious thought to what their goals were for the organization. Then they wrote down a set of goals that were
simple
coherent
actionable And that actually made it easier to do our jobs. When we had to make a decision, we could actually refer to these principles and use them.
It was crazy helpful!
…And then they hired a fuckton of Ex-Amazon managers into high-level roles and they promptly drove away all the best people and replaced the helpful principles with Amazon’s work-or-die philosophy. So I bailed. 😭
After the mildly stressful intro (which isn’t bad, just uses more sticks than carrots in the tutorial section), you basically just pick a direction and go.
If you wanna quest, there are quests available in (almost) every system.
If you wanna farm, pick a nice planet and get to building.
If you wanna fight, go find a planet with hostile Sentinel presence.
There’s always something interesting to do, but you can also just find a nice view on some planet, build a couch and just watch the iridescent grass blow in the wind for a bit.
Ah! A fellow holder of the belief that time travel stories are better when they are internally consistent! I hate e.g. Looper for having time travel that makes no goddamn sense. It takes me out of the story when the characters are literally watching the timeline change before them as it magically radiates out from one point. And then our protagonists somehow remember the original timeline… Bah.
…So I must ask - have you seen Primer? If not, maybe you’d like it!
Plus one for prazosin. I have a family member with PTSD nightmares. Prazosin has made them able to actually sleep for the first time in their adult life.
AI is a forever-in-the-future technology. When I was in school, fuzzy logic controllers were an active area of “AI” research. Now they are everywhere and you’d be laughed at for calling them AI.
The thing is, as soon as AI researchers solve a problem, that solution no longer counts as AI. Somehow it’s suddenly statistics or “just if-then statements”, as though using those techniques makes something not artificial intelligence.
For context, I’m of the opinion that my washing machine - which uses sensors and fuzzy logic to determine when to shut off - is a robot containing AI. It contains sensors, makes judgements based on its understanding of “the world” and then takes actions to achieve its goals. Insofar as it can “want” anything, it wants to separate the small masses from the large masses inside itself and does its best to make that happen. As tech goes, it’s not sexy, it’s very single purpose and I’m not really worried that it’s gonna go rogue.
We are surrounded by (boring) robots all day long. Robots that help us control our cars and do our laundry. Not to mention all the intelligent, disembodied agents that do things like organize our email, play games with us, and make trillions of little decisions that affect our lives in ways large and small.
Somehow, though, once the mystery has yielded to math, society doesn’t believe these decision-making machines are AI any longer.
I like both movies, but I think The Matrix has a billion times more spectacle going for it. I still think about The Thirteenth Floor regularly, but I’d rather sit down and watch The Matrix again for entertainment’s sake.
Ok, so the resource allocation of the moon/earth society is completely broken and the moon-dwelling oligarchs sucked. Agreed.
But the end of the movie makes the computer system unable to differentiate between the handful of moon lords vs the unwashed masses on the earth’s surface. There are not enough resources to go around in Elysium. All that medicine and food from the moon bastards is gonna run out in about ten minutes and then the last bits of society will finish collapsing. Any hope of ever rebuilding a functioning society ends about a week after the end of that movie.
The name of “Amazon” carries cachet. It sounds like impressive experience.
The thing is, Amazon famously treats its employees like shit - even the highly paid ones. There’s a sorta Stockholm Syndrome that develops, where you convince yourself that this misery is the cost of “doing great things” or you decide to bail while you can and go someplace that doesn’t suck.
Managers who spend any amount of time at Amazon tend to be the former. They end up with this mindset that if your team isn’t miserable, you just aren’t working hard enough and that having “tough” conversations means that you berate people until they break.
So beware Ex-Amazon managers. They’re not all bad, but a sudden influx is not a good sign.
(In fairness - One of the best managers I ever had was at Amazon. If he left that place, I’d be thrilled to work with him again. Just. Not there.
The hands-down worst manager I ever had was at Amazon as well.)
There are a bajillion distros out there and you already have a lot of suggestions here, so instead, allow me to note a few things I think are handy while learning Linux.
Most Linux distros are customized versions of a few base distros. Once you learn how the base distro lays things out, that knowledge is transferable (more or less) to other distros in the same family. But solutions that work in one family of distros may not work on another!
Some common base distros:
Debian: Stability-above-all; all-rounder distro. Updates slowly, but provides a very-well-tested base that many other distros build on. Ubuntu and its derivatives are built on Debian.
Red Hat: A commercially-focused distro that I haven’t used in a looong time, so I won’t say too much about it. Slightly less popular as a desktop basis than Debian, perhaps, but also a solid all-rounder.
Arch: If computers were cars… Arch is for the Hot-Rodders. You have a ton of control to optimize and tweak Arch to precisely meet your needs. When you want to really dig into the machine and tune it to peak performance, this is where you begin. Fortunately, Arch-based distros often forego the detailed install of their parent and just provide a fast-updating, highly-tuned Linux experience. SteamOS is said to be a customized Arch.
Software installation / updating is simpler and more confusing than either the Windows or Mac worlds.
It’s very rare to have a Linux program require an installer like Windows, and it’s not as simple as drag-and-drop install like Mac. Linux has had the equivalent of “app stores” for a looong time, just minus the tracking and selling parts.
Most programs in Linux get installed via a package manager tool. There are various front ends, but under the hood, there’s usually a command line program handling installation and updates.
Generally speaking, Debians use “apt”, RedHats use “yum” and Arches use “pacman”. There are also “flatpak” and “snap” both of which are more recent managers that attempt to solve dependency hell.
The terminal is gonna come up. Love it or hate it, the terminal is still at the heart of the Linux experience. There are guis for pretty much anything you want to do, but because Linux is so highly customizable, help forums and such tend to give solutions in the one constant: bash scripts.
That said, you can get around just fine without it if you really want to. Just recognize that you might be swimming upstream at times.
You can customize anything! Your desktop environment is pretty much a given on Windows and Mac. On Linux you can install something comfy, like Gnome (customizable, lightweight, akin to Mac UI) or KDE (less customizable, very pretty Windows-style UI).
Or try something experimental like Ratpoison - a window manager that requires no mouse inputs!
Part of the fun of Linux is trying out alternatives and truly customizing your personal computer.
A 3D, first person pacman clone that I played on a 286 MS DOS laptop in the nineties. I don’t remember its name and I’ve never seen it since.
A programming game from the early 2000s called something like Fleet Commander. (But none of the many games named something like Fleet Commander that I can currently find online are it.) This game had a VB-inspired, event driven programming language. You used it to command fighters, bombers and fleet command ships. Each ship had its own AI script it would execute.
I like Generations way more than say, First Contact.
Generations, for all its flaws, was a science fiction story passing the torch from TOS to TNG, and saying something about the characters and world of Star Trek.
First Contact was a generic action-adventure movie wearing a Star Trek uniform.
Honestly, I consider Generations to be the only interesting TNG movie.