Patch

Or read Renée Descartes.

Autopilot could kill the engine and lock the brakes without turning itself off. By turning itself off and giving control to a human mere instants before a crash it's effectively ensuring the engine isn't turned off (as there'll be no time to do it before the crash, and the human may not be in a fit state to do it afterwards).

But more to the point, regardless of whether there's a good reason for it to do that or not, it shouldn't be used to claim on a "technicality" that autopilot wasn't active "at the time of the crash", as clearly it meaningfully was at all points leading up to it.

Maybe I'm a lone voice here, but my Skoda has QNX and it's...not very good? It takes an age to start up, and an age to load navigation mode to a point where it's ready to start being used. Bluetooth integration is rudimentary (in the context of the age of the vehicle) and unpredictable. The touch UI is spongy and easy to make mistakes, even if you're the passenger giving it your full undivided attention. The voice command system is almost unusable.

It's not terrible, don't get me wrong. But I don't understand why anyone would be writing any lovesongs about it.

It's a fair point. Curiosity has "only" travelled about 20 miles over its 12 year life so far. And while it weighs some 900 kilos, Martian gravity is only 38% that of Earth.

Obviously it's absurd to compare the wear and tear on something rumbling around the Martian tundra cut off from any support or maintenance for a decade, but it is a very different use case to your average Earthly car or lorry. What lasts a decade going at 0.1mph for 20 miles in an alien desert is not necessarily going to last a week going at 70mph down an asphalt highway.

At some point we're just getting bogged down in semantics. Someone invented the internal combustion engine, and the earliest versions ran on gaseous fuels. Somebody else "invented" versions that than on liquid fuels. Engines that ran on petrol (gas) and diesel were "invented" by separate people. Engines based on turbine, reciprocating pistons, and rotary mechanisms were all "invented" by separate people.

The degree to which you consider any of those independent "inventions" versus simply modifying and improving existing inventions is essentially arbitrary.

Sea mollusks and land mollusks; at the end of the day, it's all just mollusks, right?

I recently read The City & The City and it was a very enjoyably weird read. There was a TV adaptation of it a few years ago so it's one that might be more likely to be in the library stocks.

Funny you should say that. Someone had bought me The Book of Dust vol.1 ages ago, and it had been sitting on my bookshelf unread for exactly that reason. About a year ago I finally convinced myself to re-read the HDM trilogy so that I could finally get on and read it!

HDM held up decently well with adult eyes. It's still a very emotive, well-paced and convincingly plotted read, although there were parts that made me raise my eyebrows in a way I undoubtedly didn't as a younger reader, and the third book perhaps didn't hold up quite as well as I remembered. But all in all I greatly enjoyed the revisit, and like I said I really enjoyed La Belle Sauvage (which is a pretty weird and trippy book in a way, but a very enjoyable trip all the same).

If you haven't read Philip Pullman's other novels in the HDM universe they might be worth a go. The Book of Dust trilogy is still waiting for its third part, and the second book is not brilliant, but I really enjoyed the first one and it stands pretty well on its own as a prequel novel.

I've recently been reading the Rivers of London series, which is sort of urban fantasy / crime. They're not high literature, and I recommend them only relatively weakly, but they're very easy reading and pretty fun. Might be a nice one to ease yourself back into the habit again.

If you want some "serious" sci-fi that is also very accessible and action-oriented, The Expanse might be worth a look too.

I have read Three-Body Problem, and it certainly wasn't a bad book, but it also was far from top tier for me. The story is a little silly in places, and the writing (at least in the English translation) can be a bit of a slog. By all means read it, and you'll probably enjoy it, but maybe not as your first foray back into casual literature.

In an earlier iteration of the script, the machines were using connected humans as a distributed computer network rather than a power source. Which makes much more sense, but apparently they deemed it too difficult a concept for audiences to grasp so we ended up with the power source thing instead.

Not only does that make more sense in the sense of "humans don't make a great power source" (why not just use cows, or wind power, or geothermal, or nuclear?), but it also explains why the simulated world of the Matrix is so intertwined with the machine world itself, why The One is so important etc.

My head canon is that the distributed computing thing is in fact what was going on, and the humans of Zion have just gotten the wrong end of the stick.

Desecrates could think that if he has an idea it has to be true

That's not what Descartes said, by the way.

"I think therefore I am" was all about "I know I must exist, because I'm here to think about it". It wasn't about "if I think something it must be true".

In Discourse he sets about trying to establish what things you can know for sure, vs which things are subjective (and could just be a trick of the mind or an illusion). He establishes the first principle that the one thing he knows is definitely true is that he is an entity that is capable of thought (because otherwise, who else is doing all this thinking?) and therefore at the very least he must exist, even if nothing else does.

If you're of the position that truth isn't subjective, "Cartesian doubt" should be right up your alley. Trust nothing until you can prove it! Not a bad position for a philosopher to take.

In the context of the people who did it, I think it's just a "bit of fun"; a hobbyist hacking project to see how far you can take something.

But that said, it is absolutely insane how much disk space Windows needs. Windows Server 2022, with its most minimal "core" installation option, still has a minimum requirement of a baffling 32GB of hard disk space. By comparison, Ubuntu Server's published minimum requirement is for only 2.5GB (with more specialist minimalist distros like Alpine coming in at well under 1GB).