Interestingly enough, Liu Cixin's books got me thinking in more pessimistic ways, and maybe even more realistic - how we are still just a bunch of brutal animals, MAD being the only thing that's keeping us from destroying each other. His "Wandering Earth" is also a very good read.
I read the trilogy, which is actually named “Remembrance of Earth’s Past”, with “The Three-Body Problem” being the first, and IMO the weakest of the books.
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Great read, but I can’t see how anyone would be optimistic about humankind after reading them: a group of humans who think we should be eradicated and invited aliens to do it, or at the least enslave us; collaborators when that eventually happens; and then as you mentioned, MAD, and then a series of bad, emotional decisions, all leading to near extinction.
I just can’t find any optimism in there. And it feels very realistic. I read the entire series during the pandemic, lockdowns, and the poor management of all of it, and the books resonated way too well.
I read the first book during the pandemic and Barely finished it. It seemed confusing until I realized the plot, but even that plot seemed incoherent. I couldn’t find any reason to pick up the second book. Your comments about the negative/pessimistic finale make it sound unworthy of continuing. Is there any reason to continue reading? Would you advise against it?
My opinion is that the 2nd book is the best of the trilogy, followed closely by the 3rd. The 1st, I could have done without, except that there's some information that will help make sense of things in the 2nd. Maybe a good summary can replace the 1st book entirely for some readers.
To answer your question, I think it's worth reading them. I enjoyed them both. There are some smart ideas in there, the Dark Forrest Theory being probably the most famous, and one in particular that is overlooked: an interesting (fictional) explanation for dark matter. There are some good characters too. Also, they're better written (or maybe better translated?).
The story progresses faster into the future, with some characters remaining present throughout the books (cryonics FTW), and there are some ups and downs, so it's not all dark and gloomy and pessimistic. But overall, I maintain that the story is one of pessimism.
Toyota does have the most fun to drive hybrid motors though, that is subjective of course. I really thought they would get all in into EVs, but the reasoning around limitations of battery technology does seem to make sense, maybe they will end up as winners in the long term.
The Chevy Volt hybrid was much more responsive and faster than the Toyota hybrids. The Toyota ones tend to fall back on the gasoline engine when pushed.
The problem was that is was more expensive for GM to build than a pure EV and they wanted to make a clear break.
The Toyota hybrids get better fuel economy in hybrid mode though. The Volt is better than a Prius due to the electric-only range, but not better than a Prius Prime.
It's crazy they cancelled the Volt to bring out the Bolt which is short range and slow to charge.
Overall it is a great tool and I completely do not get the hate for it, but I did have some issues with AWS EKS - we made two mistakes in our project by using k8s API instead of DNS for discovery and environmental variables instead of config maps and this ended up overloading master nodes, which started throttling sporadically, eapecially with load spikes. It seemed like AWS EKS support team were really puzzled by this and it took us weeks to get to the root cause, even with their support. This might be considered as more of an AWS issue than k8s one.
Google Keep is pretty awesome for notes. Has a good search, supports tagging, can pin, manually order notes, create calendar reminders from them, attach images, colors. Supports plain text notes and checklists. Also, there's not only a web app but desktop and phone ones too.
True. There is an export option for notes in Google Keep, and I don't think they will just shut the service down instantly without warning. I guess there's no silver bullets, every option sucks in a way. You go oldschool with a text document or directory structure, you loose out on usability, if you use any of the services there's a risk of them being shutdown, or you host some service yourself and take on costs of doing so.
