> science fiction titles have become more abstract and less literal over time.
Not even abstract, just not completely on the nose. Just as a lot if fantasy is not: only two discord novels would match the author’s search terms even though you’ll find all five inside the pages. None for Malazan. Or Nix’s old kingdom.
And worse, 40% of the sci-fi terms pretty only allow settings of “future solar system”. Not one of the Foundation books would match. Pretty much no classic sci-fi either. Wells’s fucking The War of the Worlds would not, because for some reason (of having any sort of taste) it was not titled “the day Mars invaded planet earth through space and then was beaten” like some lone star light novel.
In that sense I think it's less an overall literary trends and more reflecting the pretty basic way of marketing pulpy stories to teens means putting "vampire" rather than "planet" in big letters in the title. Also, people still writing fantasy novels about alien civilizations aren't setting them on the moon or Mars any more, for reasons...
Not one of the culture books either, even though several have spaceships as main characters. And only a handful of Hamilton books. And I reckon a single Polity book.
It is true but meaningless. Derivative works are not illegal, and you don’t need authorisation to create one.
So if you draw sonic in your living room you are indeed creating an unauthorised derivative work. And someone can call it an unauthorised derivative work. And the only reaction that should induce is raising an eyebrow and replying “ok?”
> There is a "pre-heat" feature which would be nice, but then it would keep it warm 24 hours a day which is ridiculous. Maybe some better boilers can time the pre-heat.
Yeah one of my colleagues has a preheat which can be triggered manually and via automation. They also have a preheat loop which cycles hot water through the entire piping as the boiler is on an edge, so it takes ages for hot water to reach the far bathroom.
> Does heating water in a boiler work well with a heat pump?
Sure, heat pump hot water tanks are a thing. Air-to-water heat pumps are less efficient than air-to-air as they need to reach higher target temperatures, but it will be more efficient that straight resistive heating by a factor of 2 at low input temperatures, and 3+-ish at high summer temps.
The primary concern would be the quality of the tank’s insulation. I would hope HPHWTs are good on that but if you’re looking into that you probably want to double check the heat loss of the tank.
> you’re permanently creating the string, so if it isn’t reused later, that means your memory usage needlessly goes up.
Nowadays lots of runtime will GC interned strings to avoid this, this can mean churn in the interning table but avoids mis-estimations bloating the process too much.
String interning only stores whole strings, dictionary compression stores substrings. Essentially string interning is a trivial subset of dictionary compression (because you don’t need a substringing scheme, which is the hard part).
Worse, half are confined to the solar system.
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