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Cake day: August 28th, 2023

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  • Peter F. Hamilton’s books may fit the bill: Futuristic, not hopeless/dystopic, and the main characters tend to make reasonable decisions. Be wrned though that he favours deus ex machina conclusions. Most will suggest Pandora’s Star as a starting point (with good reason, as the Commonwealth Saga is quite expansive), but it does not have to be. I personally read the Night’s Dawn trilogy first. The Salvation trilogy also stands on its own, and for a completely standalone book Great North Road was a good read.

    Adrian Tchaikovsky is another wonderful author! the Children of Time and Final Architecture series were quite enjoyable.

    Redemption Space (Alastair Reynolds) is another series one that I like to recommend. Closer to The Expanse. House of Suns also is a great read by the same author, as are several of his other stories.

    The White Space books by Elizabeth Bear should be on your reading list.

    Vorkosigan Saga (Lois McMaster Bujold) is a bit dated but similar to Vatta’s War in the earlier books. Later on the plot tends to be more along the lines of whodunnit mystery… in space.

    And let’s not forget another scifi favourite, Iain M. Banks! The Culture series are great of course, but I liked The Algebraist the best.



  • One series I haven’t seen recommended yet is Alastair Reynolds novels. Revelation Space is a wonderful series, and if you want to start with a standalone story House of Suns and Diamond Dogs are great choices.

    For lighter reading there’s also the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells.

    There’s other older series that may appeal to you: Vatta’s War and Vorkosigan Saga conf to mind.



  • It provides a safety net by pooling the resources of the community to support the less fortunate. This prevents people from having to sacrifice their long term goals because their short term needs may not be otherwise met.

    Also in contrast to capitalism that treats society as a zero sum game (“I can’t get ahead unless I take something from someone else”) socialism is a benefit multiplier (“I’m part of the community. By making the life of everyone in the community better I’m also improving my own life”).













  • Using containers from public registries is no worse than using third party software. In both cases there’s a risk of malicious code. The big difference is that for containers you can scan the image before running it, SBOMs are becoming ubiquitous so dependency vulnerabilities are easier to detect, and runtime protection software is more effective on containers because each container has a deterministic expected behaviour, making it easier to find deviations. I’d much rather manage runtime controls for containers than craft selinux policies.

    The bottom line (which the OP article misses) is that while individual container configurations require more effort to set up the additional work to manage them at scale is low, whereas compliance for host based installs is requiring more and more effort. In fact given how popular curl | sh ... is becoming for host based installs I’d argue that they are regressing in terms of safety and reproducibility.