Revelation Space series does not have FTL, but in its place, an engine that can produce 1G indefinitely (not manufactured anymore, powered by handwavium, it seems... but the secret is revealed in one of the short stories). There is further shenanigans with physics, but never FTL.
It definitely adds more nuance to the world, because now you can't have interstellar empires if you cannot communicate over large distances.
I worked for two smaller businesses (team of ≤ 10 software developers). One was mismanaged, ran by very unpleasant people, and abusive towards employees, resulting in a huge turnover and a "dead sea effect". The other company got government grants because the owner's relative was a politician, and had ridiculous surveillance software on developers' machines.
Ironically, the most "human" and enjoyable work I did was working on internal legacy software and code rewrites for a huge corporation before and during their move towards agile and modern "conveyorized" approach to software.
Reminds me of a "minimalist text editor" that my coworker showed me circa 2015. It was an Electron app that consumed more RAM to display a empty file than Firefox with 5 active tabs.
From some philosophical standpoints (determinism, for example), a person is their mind, a brain; so reproducing or simulating the brain to a very high degree would result in reproducing that person. Whether that is true or not is philosophical, and is similar to the Star Trek teleporter discussion.
In Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space universe, the classification is pretty sensible: there are three levels of simulation.
Alpha level is a nanotech scan-copy of a real brain which kills the subject, but the resulting persona is considered intelligent, a human, with rights and all. IIRC there were only 60 people who did that.
Beta level is a model built upon all available information about the person, all audio, video, text, etc. This is pretty much what we might now call a trained AI, but it is not considered intelligent.
And gamma level is a fully artificial persona, usually used for chatbots and what we would use LLMs for now.
I miss blinkenlights on smartphones. They went out of style circa 2015, and now all you get is the screen turning on momentarily, or some variant of a dim always-on view that wastes battery.
IMO tech terms evolve a bit faster and are more accepted with their new spelling and meaning. Older words are less prone to such adjustments, but "alot" puzzles me as well.
Here are a few more to add to the confusion:
From your own post, we now type "website" not "web site"
We use email now, not e-mail, and definitely not "electronic mail"
"Blog" is shortened "web log"
Is it "username" or "user name"? They could mean different things, but might not
It's always "password", not "pass word". Same with "passphrase".
Is it "filename" or "file name"? In software, this becomes even more confusing since "filename" could imply a full path to the file, or just the name (sometimes without extension)
Cheaper (€30/yr vs ~€50/yr; if you don't need custom domains, €1/mo)
More aliases (25 on mailbox, 50 on own domain. Proton has 10 TOTAL - why custom domain aliases are counted against Proton ones does not make sense to me.)
Support for any number of custom domains AFAICT (Proton Plus supports only one)
Trial account is not allowed to send emails, so fewer issues with services blacklisting proton.me and protonmail.com for spam (hasn't happened to me, but I have heard of some cases)
Can use a regular email client (security tradeoff for E2EE messages - but there already were plenty of discussions on whether E2EE has benefits, especially sending mail to other services)
Ukrainian "не лізь поперед батька в пекло" ("don't rush to hell before your father") - a mix of "don't be foolish / try to prove yourself / hurt yourself doing so" and also "let experienced people do their job / lead".
Also Ukrainian "або пан або пропав" ("Either [you become] a lord, or you disappear"), an important risky choice, or sometimes used as YOLO of yesteryear.
AFAIK as close as you can get is PinePhone or Librem5. But both have pretty poor battery life, an IPS display (technically could be OLED at the expense of even more battery consumption), and pretty jank camera (drivers for good cameras are proprietary, and a lot of modern smartphones rely on postprocessing for quality too).
Don't get me wrong, PinePhone made fantastic progress in 6 years, but your experience may vary (some people use it as a daily smartphone, some as a dumb phone, others are just turned off immediately)
Samsung Galaxy S5 checks all of these. I prefer it with Lineage 14 (Android 7), but ran it with Android 8, and it can support up to Android 10 or 11 IIRC, although later versions are somewhat slow.
Samsung Galaxy J7 (2015) might also fit the criteria, even though it's not a "flagship".
If you're looking for alternate OS list for smartphones and tablets, I compiled a list.
I thought SAP was shit until I worked with Microsoft Dynamics NAV, an ERP from alternate 1990s hell dimension. It has a built-in IDE that uses its own language called C/AL (syntactically similar to Pascal). The only source control is developers' ability to lock files they are working on. And the code editor is worse than notepad. Seriously, it does not allow to select or paste multiple lines, and in general, acts as if each line is it's own textbox. Forget about syntax highlighting or anything else other than black text on white background.
And, AFAIK, if your company needs to customize it, you are required to hire a "Microsoft-certified" NAV developer.
What's your usage pattern for those devices? Almost full discharge + fast charge?
Asking because I only noticed a very small degradation (judging by reported charge %) in a flagship device after 3 years. A midrange phone from 2020 with heavy usage (charged twice a day sometimes, often using a fast charger) for 2-3 years did not have noticeable battery degradation. A low-end device from 2016 had no noticeable degradation after 4-5 years. Another 5+ years old second-hand phone had some, but nothing catastrophic. The only case of bad battery degradation (shutdown at 20%, unreliable gauge, etc) I have only seen in 10+ year old devices.
I am curious if there have been studies on how much the slowness/delayed response of the device improves the attention span. (Since the distraction urge cannot be instantly satisfied)
Anecdotally, I find it very easy to get distracted when clicking on app takes fewer than a few seconds to start. When I test-drove the PinePhone, I felt I was much less distracted because bringing up the browser takes good 5-10 seconds, so I would only do that with a specific goal in mind.
Any details on the technology? "Beaming phone signals" doesn't tell anyone much. Would this require a proprietary antenna (thus new, flagship-only models after a few years, like iPhone 15 with its emergency satellite calls) for whatever protocol Starlink uses (unless there is some unified ground-to-satellite protocol by now)?
Satellite phones aren't new, but are expensive for obvious reasons.
Second-hand experience from many years ago when Starlink first rolled out: my friend has a cabin in the Appalachians, outside any cell service, so Starlink sounds great for that. However, Starlink site says there is "no coverage" for that area. Yes, somehow, no coverage for a satellite service. The nearest area with coverage was a town with already-decent 4G. And most large US cities had coverage too. So our inside "conspiracy theory" was that Starlink resells 5G/4G modems for hipsters.
I love the Revelation Space world. Just the right mix of plausible-yet-not-handwaved for me. Some factions but no grand Empire or militaries. No FTL travel, so you are never coming back to the same world you left. Technological nano-catastrophe (and horrors related to that). Semi-intelligent algae that rewires the brain (Turquoise Days is a great short story about it). Galactic-scale projects and space anomalies.
Thank you for telling me about Revenger, I haven't read those yet.
The Broken Earth trilogy by N. K. Jemisin. While at first, the setting appears to be a fairly standard fantasy, there is a sci-fi depth to the world, its climate, cataclysms, history, and orogeny ("magic power" of the world).
And, if you are a fan of heavy-handed dystopian satire, Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman. It takes place in a not-too-distant future where a somewhat-apathetic researcher and a corporate scammer are trying to find the last living Venomous Lumpsucker, a highly intelligent fish species. There is climate change, corporate greed, half-baked international agreements, hackers, horrible AI, and, of course, delusional megalomaniac billionaires.
Revelation Space series does not have FTL, but in its place, an engine that can produce 1G indefinitely (not manufactured anymore, powered by handwavium, it seems... but the secret is revealed in one of the short stories). There is further shenanigans with physics, but never FTL.
It definitely adds more nuance to the world, because now you can't have interstellar empires if you cannot communicate over large distances.