I was honestly expecting something meatier than it is, but it’s definitely not bad. Fantasy EarthBenders living like singularly typed X-Men in an alternate semi-apocalyptic world is still pretty neat.

Kvaesito: minimal UI with many unique customizations/features.

I upgraded from that same phone to Fairphone 6+. Fairly lateral move in terms of specs but repairable, supported, & relatively ethical. Further, lots of custom ROM support (or you can straight up get the e/os/ variant). I am very happy with it, but mileage may vary.

That’s good to know. I fully intend to go back to both when the time/mood strikes better.

Same boat. Also started & bounced off of The Left Hand of Darkness. Now I’m halfway through The Fifth Season (N.K. Jemisin).

Cheekface - MFT

The support at this stage is usage statistics packaged as demand to legitimize further proliferation of data centers and further theft of IP to attempt to bump up the “knowledge” based fully off of mass quantities. This further creates an illusion of worth that they can exponentially sell to gullible upper management. In the end, once the grift reaches a terminal point, the only thing that will trickle down is the consequences.

If it weren’t for the implicit evils from mass scale LLMs that drain natural resources & are built off of mass theft, I would absolutely use them for little one-off low stakes things that rarely call for long term maintenance. But I cannot reconcile the relatively minor perks with supporting massively unethical & harmful trends & corporations.

There are 2 major types of devs in terms of their motivations:

1. People who were drawn to the profession due to passion of translating/architecting solutions to abstract issues (frequently with as much optimization & elegance as possible).
2. Business majors/hussle culture Bros that were drawn in by the profitability & relative esoteric supremacy.

The former are the people who report this feeling. The latter are the people perpetuating the grift & doing mental gymnastics to calm the cognitive dissonance that what they’re churning out isn’t ultimately slop.

I highly suggest short story collections. There are free ebooks of them (Some of the Best of Tor.com, for example). This way you only sink roughly 10 to 20 pages per story while sampling different authors’ writing styles.

A large barrier for me was finding authors who write in a manner that meshed with the language of how I think. I gravitate to simple declarative language (ex: Kurt Vonnegut, Octavia E Butler, etc).