Banning by TPM also makes ban evasion pretty expensive. At which point the cheater has to either buy a new mobo or solder a new TPM chip onto their mobo (not always possible). Though I guess at some point a sloppy vendor will leak TPM keys and it'll be spoof-able.
So, I intentionally refrained from recommending any specific works for "novel perspective", and I'll hold to that: There are just too many different angles for me to cover, my recommendations would be relatively low-quality in many places because I'm not an expert in all domains, and there's no real way for me to provide anything like a "primer" because the entire point is to get hyper-specific rather than easing people into things or starting with general coverage. If you're looking for novel perspectives, just keep digging. The key is that you probably won't find much that's particularly unusual in the top-rated lists because the top-rated lists filter for mass appeal in the same way that mass market paperback publishing does. As a specific example, Royal Road's community is infamous for leaving bigoted one-star reviews on anything with queer characters. Instead, you'll want to move sideways through things like AO3's tagging system and the shout-outs that RR authors put in their after-chapter notes.
For general introductions to amateur fiction and fanfiction, though, though, I'm happy to share my starter recommendations. These are just plain good fiction. You can find a lot of other good works starting from these.
* Xenoethnography (https://archiveofourown.org/series/913458): Optimus Prime, realizing that there are people whose job is facilitating cultural understanding, hires an ethnographer to live among the refugee Transformers and document their culture. Familiarity with Transformers not required. This one probably is a pretty good work for the refugee/immigrant perspective.
* Katalepsis (https://katalepsis.net/): A serial web novel about cosmic horror and human fragility, urban fantasy and lesbian romance.
* Super Supportive (https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/63759/super-supportive): Hopeful, sometimes cozy sometimes harrowing commentary on trauma, colonialism, sacrifice, and self-actualization. It takes its time about it, but IMO it's worth it.
* To The Stars (https://archiveofourown.org/works/777002/chapters/1461984): Old Man's War, guest starring Iain Banks and Greg Egan... as a Puella Magi Madoka Magica fanfic. It's shockingly deep and twisty. You do ~need to watch PMMM first, but that's absolutely stellar too, and I have no reservations recommending both.
* Lieutenant Fusilier in the Farthest Reaches (https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/lieutenant-fus...): Lesbian war robot questions her purpose while coping with the fact that the humans keep themselves busy in the post-scarcity space-future by cosplaying as victorian english nobles.
* The Commonweal, starting with The March North, by Graydon Saunders (https://dubiousprospects.blogspot.com/2018/09/where-to-get-m...): How to build a good place to live when physics hates you and every other polity is an expansionist totalitarian sorcerer-kingdom, featuring radical egalitarianism, military ethics, and eldritch spider granny weatherwax. The least amateur thing here, but I'm pretty sure still traditionally unpublishable - the text is aggressively dense and elliptical.
* Pound the Table (https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/pound-the-tabl...): X-men courtroom drama, written by a practicing attorney who brings the reader along with their own clear love for their work, using it as a lens through which to examine the real-life social issues that the X-Men franchise has always concerned itself with. It's really good. Seriously. I can't believe I forgot this one.
That one sounds interesting too, I'll check it out!
I also really enjoyed To the Stars (currently on ch50). Especially the beginning where most of it is fleshing out the madoka lore in a uh, comprehensive way. Like it seems well thought in how magical girls are integrated with science / the military / the govt. In terms of characters, not sure I really care for the SoL scenes but I thought each of the ancient's backstories was pretty interesting (I'm sucker for tragedy).
It's really 3x short stories (~200 pages each) but here's a synopsis for the first:
The story follows Mika Furutsuki's journey to become an idol. [...] After the Monopole Super Flares hit though, humanity is on the decline. Maori still tries to revive her idol friend and ultimately succeeds after 30 years. Mika may no longer human, but that doesn't stop her quest to become the #1 idol.
On the bright side, its easy to mod. If you don't like whatever UI customizations or just want cheats, it's usually possible to drop in a simple .py script to fix it.
Any recommendations for ONVIF-compliant cameras for home use?
I've tried a handful of used hikvision / dahua in the ~100usd range but they don't play nice with anything other than the vendor's software. Like VLC / open source VMSs can't play the RTSP stream. And even then, its a crapshoot whether features like stream configuartion or PTZ work.
I know the ONVIF group publishes a list of verified-compliant models but it's been a pain trying to find one that's affordable and in stock.
I've heard from devs that work on this stuff that most of this pain stems from how loose the ONVIF spec is. Too many optional features (even per "profile"), too vague on requirements, leading to lots of vendor-specific metadata / camera quirks.
I went through a bit of a spat with cameras, and had luck with things from Amcrest, Reolink, and various similar ones on Amazon. All worked with VLC over RTSP, though I didn't go deep into PTZ setups.
It's even more of a crapshoot because some of the cameras were absolute shite until I found some sketchy Chinese firmware of a particular version, which made them suddenly beautiful.
All of these are very securely cordoned off and unable to contact the Internet at large, of course.
Is Zoneminder your main interface? I've been using it for several years with a few Reolink 5MP cameras, and maybe it comes down to choices I've made which I should revisit, but it's painfully slow (say, 30 seconds) to start playing, or seek within, an event video. I record only events.
I am now experimenting with the RLN36 NVR instead, and thinking about having enough disks to record continuously instead of events only.
Ideally I want continuous recording, and I want a timeline of events that aren't separate files, but are just shortcuts to alarm times within the continuous recording, with minimal seek delay. Interface must be friendly to small screens (phone size) which the RLN36 web UI isn't particularly. Maybe the zmNinja app.
I used zone minder for a bit until I realized I don't actually care about recording at all for my use cases, now I just directly VLC to the camera itself.
If I were to set it up again, I'd go further down the home assistant path (one camera I got setup so it appears in HomeKit, but I never bothered getting the rest).
I've listened to about half of each and I think I believe the spotify / Lustig argument more.
For example, around 25:00 Lustig claims...
"[fructose in] fruit is okay because of the fiber and the fiber is what mitigates the absorption
[...]
you're feeding your microbiome. that frucose isn't for you."
And arouvd 10:50 Layne counters that
"I could find no evidence that fiber inhibits the absorption of fructose"
But searching for "fiber slows glucose absorption" on google scholar gives me a few frequently cited results [1], making me doubt Layne's research.
Also in terms of background, Lustig is a professor guest starring on a podcast sponsored by various companies (including one that sells supplements [2] [3]) versus Layne who runs a company that sells workout guides / supplements [4]. Not to say there's any obvious conflict of interest here, but I think the professor actively involved in research has more credibility.
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> [the 30kcal] has to come out somewhere else, or it’s going to stay in there.
That's a good point. I'd love to know what the practical difference between my gut bacteria consuming energy vs rest-of-me consuming energy is too.
But yeah Lustig saying sugar was as addictive as heroin also raised a red flag for me. Maybe true in a technical sense but definitely shows he's trying to push a point (anti-corpo maybe?).
So Egan's stories are basically a mathy whodunit -- start from first (fictional) principles and eventually solve some universe-scale question or crisis. His characters are basically walking textbooks meant for info dumping / FAQing the derivations.
In that light, some similar stories I've found are...
- Dragon's Egg (Robert Forward)
- Of Ants and Dinosaurs (Liu Cixin, 3 body problem author)
- The Andromeda Strain (Crichton, more medsci than math)
- Schilds Ladder, Diaspora (other Egan stuff)
The first two are especially similar to Egan's stuff in that the only real character is the civilization / setting not the people.
I've also tried some of the more common hard scifi recommendations like Reynolds and Stephenson, but I personally don't enjoy the dialogue / scenes meant for character development. I guess it's because the stories usually take a human-scale perspective instead of taking a what-if to its reality-bending extreme like Egan does.
https://lowendtalk.com/
Wouldn't reccomend any of these outside of personal use though.
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