Blue pill. I’d miss my wife and kids, and even if I were transported back in time, I doubt I’d do all the required steps to get to them again.

If you have health insurance, you can get the free EHIC (European Health Insurance Card), with which you get free emergency care anywhere in the EU. Some countries may charge you (me or my family have experience with Germany, Belgium and Czechia for free admission, and Austria where a bill is later sent to you). However, over a certain income the Irish are required to pay for private insurance (if you don’t, you get taxed extra), and usually the insurance companies reimburse the costs as they are lower than they would have been in Ireland.

Nothing out of the ordinary, just very long wait times in the emergency room. Earlier this year, I got hit by a car, suffered a concussion and spent 12 hours in the waiting room. I was in no condition to travel then. However, a few years ago my wife suffered a chronic condition, which sent her to A&E trice. The first time, she was in the waiting room for 16 hours. The second time, she booked the first available morning flight to the continent and went straight to the emergency room. It took her seven hours (including the three hours between booking the flight and flying out) to see a doctor. The charge in Irish A&E is €100 per visit; the cost of flight and taxis was €90. We used to say that Ryanair was the largest healthcare provider in Ireland. Not anymore, as the prices went up, but it’s still worth it, especially in the case of chronic, un- or mis-diagnosed diseases.

Here in Ireland, it’s often faster to go to the hospital emergency department by hopping on a flight to Belgium or Germany than to drive to a Dublin hospital. Before Covid, it used to be cheaper as well.

Not satire, and not great lengths. I treat Windows as a shell, which runs virtual machines dedicated to specific jobs. I have an office VM, gaming VM, etc. It’s safer, better organised, lower maintenance, and at current levels of computer power, performant without being a drag on my computer resources.

I only used FB in a dedicated virtual machine, with vanilla Chromium in Incognito mode. So, I got the full experience, and I hope I limited my ad relevancy (on my main VM, I use Firefox with Ghostery and Ublock Origin, which I hope stops FB button trackers).

Earlier this year, I made a small experiment: I stopped checking my Facebook for three months. During that time, I received about 250 notifications of new posts by my friends. When I logged back in, out of the first 100 posts on my feed, 24 were from my friends and another 7 from groups I subscribed to. The rest were ads or “suggested” content. Checking my feed every day after that, I averaged 2 posts from my friends and 2 from my groups in the top 20 posts. I have since stopped checking Facebook altogether, and by this time I don’t think even anonymized ads will get me back.

I’ve read most of them, and I must say that I’m impressed by the list. A good half of the works are ones that I didn’t care about or outright didn’t like, but this is not a “best” list. As far as “essential” goes, they ought to be included.

If I may, I would only do a few changes.

To remove:

• The Empress of Salt and Fortune - This is a historical fiction with a tiny little magic gimmick thrown in, which largely serves only to gloss over the worst logical inconsistencies. That should disqualify it from the list, but if that’s not enough, I found it so bland and derivative that I fail to see how this book ever becomes influential.
• A Master of Djinn - Clark is amazing at worldbuilding, but one of his novellas should be nominated instead. I’d go for Ring Shout. A Master of Djinn entered the sub-genre of “public domain literary characters in alternate history” a little too late to influence it in a meaningful way, and made the main protagonist extremely unlikable.

To add:

• Too Like the Lighting by Ada Palmer - The entire series is amazing, and I’m shocked that it’s not being recommended more often. This book and its sequels may herald the return of more literary speculative fiction.
• Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds - Just like Palmer channels Zelazny and revives literary SF, Reynolds channels Cordwainer Smith and introduces gothic horror in space to a new generation of readers. This book spawned an entire series, and I wouldn’t be surprised if other authors started mimicking his style.
• Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey - If Relevation Space does not qualify (it was released in 2000, so technically in the last century), Leviathan Wakes and the series it spawned should take its place. The series is not high literature, but good, very accessible fun, which introduced loads of new reader to science fiction.

I still miss AltaVista…

Neither. Instead of overtime, we’re partly on flex time, where we can leave on Friday after lunch, if we reached our 40 hours. However, we always have more projects than people, so the hour or so extra per day when working from home is quite normal. No travel stipend, either - I’m lucky to live in a city where one-way journey is €2, which is negligible. It’s certainly cheaper than replenishing my burned calories when I cycle or run to work…

You are right, especially regarding the copyright law. My argument here, however, was the same argument as companies are using against non-genuine spare parts or 3D printing (even though the latter seems to be a lost battle): people who are able to generate substitutes based on the company’s designs (you can say their IP) are eating into their aftermarket profits. That’s not even taking into account planned obsolescence (my kids toys are prime examples) or add-ons to products (I printed my own bracket for my Ring doorbell). With AI, I don’t need to buy short story books for my kids to read; I’ll generate my own until they are old enough to use Chat GPT themselves.

I lived in Atlanta, and was told that this was the reason one of the counties (Cobb) refused metro transport. Had to reject a job offer there before I got a car.

Absolutely! I’m salaried, so paying for my commute wouldn’t make any difference, but I’m incentivizing my employer to let me work from home by spending my potential commute time at the computer. No big difference for me, but enough that they are happy to let me stay on hybrid.

To be the devil’s advocate (or GRRM’s attorney), I see the merit of his and other authors’ concerns. Chat GPT makes it feasible to generate short stories in their world and with their characters, which can easily replace their licensed products. This is not just their main work, but also other products that generates them some revenue stream.

Example: A friend of mine is using Chat GPT to generate short bedtime stories for his daughters. A typical request is something like this: “Please write a five paragraph story where Elsa from Frozen meets Santa Claus. Together, they fly in Santa’s sleigh over the world, and Elsa is magicking snow on all Christmas trees.” Normally, you’d buy a Disney-licensed book of short Christmas stories (I have one for my kids), but Chat GPT is more flexible and free.

Same goes for GRRM. He doesn’t write Children stories, but one can still prompt Chat GPT to produce stories from the universe, which scratch the ASOIAF itch. This substitutes the officially licensed products and deprives the author of additional revenue stream. Just for the fun of it, I prompted Chat GPT: “Hello GPT-3.5. Please write a four paragraph story set in the Game of Thrones universe. In this story, Jon Snow and Tyrion Lannister go fishing and catch a monster alligator, which then attacks them.” It produces a surprisingly readable story, and if I were a fan of this universe, I can imagine myself spending a lot of time with different prompts and then reading the results.

(On a side note,AI-generated content already has at least one group of victims: the authors of short fiction. Magazines like Clarkesworld were forced to close submissions of new stories, as they became overwhelmed with AI-generated content.)

Forcing companies to pay for commute time would also force companies to lobby for more efficient public transport and cycleways, and limit private car access to areas with regular traffic jams. In addition, there are certain job categories where driving time is limited by law: truck drivers, bus drivers, and others. However, these rules only apply when the driver is being compensated for being on the road. So, your bus driver may have driven for two hours to get to work, and now he’s towards the end of his nine-hour shift, bone-tired. If the company was forced to pay him for his commute, his shift would end after seven hours, and possibly five (if he has to drive back home for another two hours). That would improve road safety. I think the two aspects - more public transport and more road safety - should be enough for everyone to support the idea of paid commute.

Tree of Life: very intriguing trailer with one of the most beautiful tunes ever (Bedrich Smetana’s Vltava). The movie turned out to be a slog. With dinosaurs.

A former classmate of mine has her three kids there. She complained that the tent of one of them was burgled and most of her daughter’s things were stolen. So, add poor security to all the other issues.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. I absolutely adore the movie, but I’m actually content it didn’t get all the recognition I think it deserves. The entire vibe of the movie is one of contentment; no need to force higher achievements.

I’m mildly annoyed that the columns of sweets are not top- or bottom-justified, which would make them look like a bar chart.

Death was easy. The integer overflow from a maxed stat back to 1 was the real tragedy.