I clicked on this link using a work computer, and for the first time in years I was frightened about what might show up. Not because my work might find out, but at the thought of another disturbing image that you can't unsee being burned into my mind. Thank goodness it really is a Unix-like OS.
I had tried to get into Dune many years ago, but found it hard to keep track of all that was going on. I wish I had pushed through, because I'm now enthralled by the Dune universe. I can say that the movie helped lay a foundation for me that has made the book far more enjoyable - to the point where I'm almost finished with the audiobook after only starting it last week!
One thing that helped me with Dune is using the glossary at the back of the book. It's a bit odd and some might say due to bad writing, but he will just start using a word without ever letting you know what it means. The only way to know is from the glossary. Also, don't be afraid to consult a dictionary in some cases. I remember the word "qanat" appears a lot in some of the later books and I just ploughed through without even know what it was. Just look things up and you'll get more out of it.
My favorite part of "A Clockwork Orange" (book) was that very thing: the narrator just talking naturally and leaving the reader to figure out the slang (Nadsat).
There too was a glossary in the back of the book but I soon dispensed with it and found I could get the gist of the slang well enough to just roll with it.
If you read foreign literature, every single novel is like that anyway. Except that there is no convenient glossary at the back explaining the unfamiliar words.
Anybody can come up with a new language that happily condenses the concepts you need to have in your new world, but forcing the reader to read an encyclopedia to decipher it is just lazy. You are meant to weave the explanations in your narrative, so the reader picks them up seamlessly.
It's a bit like building a UI that is unusable without reading a boring manual.
There's plenty of exposition in Dune. I never used the glossary once. People familiar with fantasy and SciFi have no problems absorbing weird names and such at face value with the idea that context will be added as exposition continues. Looking up each term you don't know in the glossary is actually the wrong way to read these types of books. Youll be presented with information that you shouldn't know yet.
There are no rules except "be good". I've thoroughly enjoyed Dune every time I've read it and it had quite a profound effect on me as a youngster. There are countless thousands just like me and you can't argue with that really.
> It's a bit like building a UI that is unusable without reading a boring manual.
Well, I think the purpose of a UI is slightly different to that of a novel. One exists to be useful while other exists to be enjoyable. If it's useful it's useful. Doesn't matter if it requires a manual or not.
McDonald's is also enjoyable and enjoyed by millions, it's still not "good food"; as I always say, that sort of reasoning leads to us eating shit because billions of flies cannot be wrong (cit).
The best part of Dune is clearly the worldbuilding rather than the prose. Yes it can be used, and the software is great when you get to know how it works, but there is a learning curve that similar software does not have.
Your reasoning contains the same assumptions, just in the other direction. You seem to be saying that if masses of people enjoy something it must be “bad” on some level.
We've been using terraform for a couple of years now to manage our infra for dev/qa/prod, and aside from minor HCL changes we haven't had any major problems keeping up with the latest versions. Having the ability to rebuild everything (Kubernetes, DNS, MySQL, etc.) automatically has saved us more than once!
I've recently started using Terrastruct, which I've come to enjoy as I feel like I can quickly put together business logic and share it with the team without the tool getting in the way: https://terrastruct.com/
We've been using Nix for deploying a Rails app for an enterprise customer for quite a few years now. One area where it shines for us is the ability to build it on relatively recent version of Ubuntu and deploy to a (almost EOL) RHEL6 box. Bundling, assets and various other tasks take just a few minutes. We also have ~20 Go services that are also deployed via Nix, and building takes seconds.
However, it can be quite cumbersome to get a Nix expression to the point where it builds reliably for something that takes multiple steps like a Rails app, especially if you're building on macOS and deploying to Linux. It's come a _long_ way in recent years, but with Enterprise customers now embracing containerization we migrated everything to that and haven't looked back.
I'm having a hard time parsing -- you migrated everything from nix to containers (containers removed the need for nix) or to nix+containers (containers solved the "having to build for multiple platforms" issue)?
Ah my apologies - We use Bazel to build our services, and the output artifacts were then pulled into Nix and deployed as Nix packages. Bazel has _excellent_ support taking the same application code and creating Docker images from them (https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_docker#language-rules), and the tools available for deploying containers is orders of magnitude more feature-full and higher quality than what you get with Nix today. So we no longer have Nix anywhere in our pipeline, and all of our artifacts are now deployed inside containers.
For the last few years I've had the Feynman Lectures [1,2] sitting in my queue, and I've finally gotten around to starting them in the last week. It's been a fun ride so far, and it's been nice to have the time to digest the lessons without having to run off somewhere. It's also helped to have the MIT OCW lectures as a reference [3], in which I found a book title "Quantum Mechanics and Experience" [4] that I started reading as well and so far has been the most down-to-earth introduction to Quantum Mechanics that I've found. I highly recommend it.
I always thought Feynman's treatment of electrodynamics wasn't very original, that it was just the standard approach you could find in other textbooks. It turns out, Feynman thought so to, but later came up with a much better way of teaching electrodynamics: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/100951/what-was-...
About 2 years ago I had a customer that required their own private mail server. I set up Mail-in-a-Box on a $5 Digital Ocean droplet, and they've been happy with it ever since.
The integration with Let's Encrypt and a relatively smooth upgrade process has made it one of the more enjoyable services I manage. I would highly recommend it.
Accelerated Concepts | Frontend Engineer | Tampa, FL | Onsite, Full Time
We're a small 5 person development team based in downtown Tampa, FL. We build a proprietary network device monitoring & reporting tool, called Accelerated View: https://accelerated.com/products/accelerated_view/
Our stack includes Ruby on Rails, TorqueBox, Finatra, Scala, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Druid, Hadoop and Git.
We're looking for a frontend engineer who can implement a Javascript framework like React to unify the frontend design and user experience. You will own the whole process of designing and building the customer interfaces, and because we're a small team you will have wide latitude to the direction you want it to head in.
Accelerated is a private company that was founded 7 years ago in Tampa. We have been in the black for several years now. The owners are very generous with profit share / benefits and are flexible with working environments and schedules.
The only hard requirement we have for working here is that you're the type of person who never stops learning. If you're interested, please reach out to michael.zaccari@accelerated.com.
Excellent blog post to introduce the vue.js concepts (http://blog.evanyou.me/2015/10/25/vuejs-re-introduction/). I was able to get up and running pretty quickly with a good understanding of the tool. Thank you for putting this together.
