Nobel-winning author Doris Lessing wrote a novel called Shikasta in 1979 that (to my recollection) is a rewriting of the Old Testament and Earth history from the point of view of an alien community who played the role assigned to the divinities and angels in human myths.
I read it as a teenager and it really stuck with me as a completely different, more spiritually influenced take on science fiction and “ancient aliens” theories of the era. She won the Nobel Prize on the strength of her more autobiographical and feminist prose, so Shikasta is an outlier in her own body of work too.
Shikasta is an incredible book. Completely out of left field for her, and a timely mix of politics and raw SF.
Incredibly depressing, but also unique. Neither the mainstream lit world nor the SF world knew what to make of it.
It's not so much a retelling of the OT as a suggestion that alien interference wouldn't look like flying saucers landing on the White House lawn, it would look like despicable politicians doing inhuman things.
It doesn't need aliens. The people would have to encounter such things as the ruins of Jericho (destroyed at the beginning of the new kingdom period), or later cities burned down during the late bronze age collapse. Either could easily represent an extent of destruction incomprehensible to unsophisticated herdsmen. Later it was Greece or even Rome itself, before the area became a part of the empire. It's pretty clear that angelos was something like a courier or mailman, for example, and only later it acquired the mystical meaning.
Xcancel.com is a site that archives discussions that took place on a site I don't want to visit. What's wrong with that?
Similarly archive.org maintains copies of the Fox News website in the past. I don't see that as sad. If anything, it's a way to keep these sites accountable because they can't just memory-hole the content they once hosted.
Maybe not for crypto, but they did spend a year or two surreptitiously installing their own VPN service on your Widows machine without any opt-out ability, and then failed to remove it, its Windows service, or multiple scheduled tasks once the brave uninstaller had been run.
The best part was this whole scam sitting as an unresolved issue on GitHub for months after they finally acknowledged it (after first denying it lol).
Closest browser I’ve seen to an actual virus in maybe ever.
And it’s a good lesson for developers that once you lose trust there are many of us who will never make the same mistake again purely out principle.
> “In my opinion, the traditional charm of the Mac isn’t just the desktop; it’s the entire ecosystem of applications that conform to the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines”
Sadly this barely exists anymore.
Cross-platform Electron apps have replaced native AppKit. Cloud-based apps like Linear, Slack and Figma cater to the lowest common denominator of desktops by shipping their web client in a wrapper.
The last real native Mac app that was truly successful was probably Sketch ten years ago, and Figma ate their lunch.
Meanwhile Apple themselves have given up on the HIG. In the Alan Dye era, it’s been form over function across all the Apple operating systems. Their own apps don’t follow any guidelines and the latest macOS 26 is a UI disaster – probably the most inconsistent Mac release since OS X early betas.
I wholeheartedly and sadly agree with you. Seems like the idea of native apps on both macOS and Windows has been losing ground in favor of Electron apps. I understand the challenge of writing applications tailored to each platform and why Electron is so appealing to many companies, but I’d feel better about Electron if it were more conformant to platform HIGs and if it were less resource-intensive, especially now with RAM prices skyrocketing.
I hate how mainstream desktop computing has gone to crap in recent years. Thank goodness for free, open-source software.
Last month the US president pardoned a Honduran politician who had been sentenced to 45 years in prison for trafficking 400 tons of cocaine into America.
Whatever is behind this attack, it has nothing to do with drugs.
Nobody with interest in politics thinks it's about drugs. It's a pretext and a way to gain legitimacy to exert force over foreign nation with some legitimacy that would otherwise clearly go against international law.
Most of the USA's refineries specialize in low grade oil. The best grade oil is often shipped out of the USA for refining. Shipping costs are so low on a grand scale that it's more profitable to ship the USA's high quality oil overseas than building new refineries in the USA just for that:
https://www.marketplace.org/story/2024/05/13/the-u-s-exports...
Many might not like it, but given US interests and Chinese ambitions, the Monroe doctrine is one of the few parts of American foreign policy that makes sense (in a realpolitik way) in the current geopolitical landscape.
The state sponsored drug smuggling is symbolic of a country not paying sufficient fealty to its master, but is secondary to the larger strategic issues in play.
It's not new, it's been the prevalent way of being for thousands of years - we had a brief moment of piece with the creation of the UN.
But apparently there are a lot of countries that think the UN and international law is cumbersome, and are in the way of securing their "sovereignty" (more like securing regimes) - it was obvious this was going to be outcome.
Funny enough, some of those have collapsed or are in the verge of collapsing: Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Russia...
Let's hope Europe doesn't flip to far right and start their own campaign, history shows they can be quite effective and destructive.
The best outcome is that this is just the final breath of those old regimes, and this is temporary.
Nokia had exactly this kind of CTO office during the 2005 - 2012 years when they lost the entire smartphone market.
The CTO fiddled with greenfield projects that had no path to products while the house burned down.
The best that can be said about it is that inventions outside of the product helped beef up Nokia’s patent portfolio, which played a role in the company surviving the post-phone years and transforming into a pure network company. But they lost a trillion-dollar opportunity and shrunk into an average B2B enterprise.
well you say that, but blackberry did exactly what you're saying Nokia should have done and we see how much that helped. Truth is iPhone was so far ahead technologically, no other company had a chance. At least Nokia still exists today, which can't be said about majority of other mobile phone manufacturers of that era.
Yes, but it wasn't iPhone that ate their markets, it was Android. Nokia and Blackberry were both at the top because they had their own operating systems, and while they were losing the high end market to iPhone, they would've kept the middle and low end markets where the volume was.
Android changed all that, all of the sudden all their competitors got a good OS for free. Commoditize your complement, Google took their markets.
California is not a representative slice of America.
You could imagine turning a few smaller states’ economies to be more like China (from the current government subsidized agriculture business) without messing with the tech and finance industries.
I don’t understand the knee jerk reaction of assuming you have to burn something down to build something.
The small states aren’t going to become like China because nobody abroad will want to import their products that are artificially propped up by tariff barriers. It’s going to be more like 1980s Brazil joined at the hip to California and New York. Doesn’t sound like an obvious winning recipe.
This is outrageous. We can obviously call a spade a spade. The idea that we can never criticize any policy, no matter how ill conceived, because somehow it might work and then we'd have egg on our face is ridiculous. "Maybe the White House Ballroom construction project will unearth a huge deposit of gold and pay for itself so we cannot possibly talk about its cost."
The claim that it is bad political strategy is also bizarre. Like, the right has been lying about policies from the dems for ages. "They are coming to force your child to transition to the other gender." Has this hindered their electoral chances? No. They have more power now than almost any time in the past fifty years.
Trump can be bad for the economy and the economy can still be fine. The economy doing well doesn't mean Trump was good for the economy. At the end of the day the policies and actions that have been enacted have not been great tailwinds for the economy regardless of the outcome.
We’re one step from harvesting organs from people in rural areas, or hunting them for sport from helicopter, and they’ll cheer as long as “their side” is the one hunting them.
The administration has wrecked US economic data collection, first with indiscriminate firings across the board and then a government shutdown. Labor and inflation statistics are completely unreliable for the past three months.
I read it as a teenager and it really stuck with me as a completely different, more spiritually influenced take on science fiction and “ancient aliens” theories of the era. She won the Nobel Prize on the strength of her more autobiographical and feminist prose, so Shikasta is an outlier in her own body of work too.
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