I think modern series tend to be better at that. Lots of author kill people you wouldn't expect them to kill early on so that you know that this is a universe where even if the protagonists must survive for plot reasons, there is still plenty of suspension about who else survives.
I will also say that to me there is a massive difference between how much effort it takes to read one type of fiction versus another. I was reading Master and Margarita and I stopped because they simply kept introducing new characters and doing jumps for no reason. I'm sure I will get a bunch of well-read people telling me it's because I'm a poor reader or whatever, but I think that's bad writing.
What is a book? I mean, I spent some time over the last couple of days reading parts of the PostgreSQL manual — if you printed it it would be a gigantic book but it's online and linked. Does that make it not a book? Half a book? Still a book?
A blog post can be a few hundred words or a hundred thousand. It can even be a series of blog posts. Is that now a book?
I do think the publishing medium is relevant and not just word count. Books tend to be better researched, edited, triple checked and well planned out to convey the full information they want to. This isn't always the case but there's an inherent push in this direction when you're publishing a book under your name that you want it to be good.
On the other end of the spectrum we have social media posts which are anything but.
David Foster Wallace talks about reading as being an activity that requires you to sit quietly alone in a room and engage with a piece of writing. I think the act of doing this is quite different to reading the postgres manual, despite both of these tasks requiring ingestion of text.
People just assume that, but it's not true. If you have access to your Microsoft account, then you'll have access to your Microsoft passkeys in the cloud.
Passkeys are just passwords that require a password manager. You can login to Microsoft with a Microsoft passkey, but that's not the only way to login to your Microsoft account. You can still login to Microsoft with a password.
All password managers require just one last password outside the password manager to access your account. That's how Microsoft's password manager works, too, and that's why you'll always be able to use a password to login to your Microsoft account.
(If you're afraid of Microsoft banning you from your Microsoft account, then don't use Microsoft's password manager. Bitwarden is pretty good.)
If you had told yourself at age 20 that in that $NUMBER_OF_YEARS you would be able to sit in a car that drives itself, while talking to an AI researching babylonian grammar, it would have blown your mind.
As we got older, we can shift the goalposts and get used to things the way they are. And we need to step back, look and see HOLY FUCKING SHIT THIS IS WILD.
It would've helped a ton but it's not like electricity generation is the only source of emissions. You can't run a car or a plane on nuclear power. You can technically run a cargo ship on nuclear power but that's also not gonna happen. Yet transport is the second largest source of emissions.
Batteries have only recently-ish gotten energy dense and cheap enough for electric cars to be competitive, completely different solutions are needed for long distance shipping by sea or air.
It's the same situation across many other sectors like agriculture, construction and waste management. Lots of things causing emissions that's not electricity generation.
As Romanians will tell you in August 2026, you can't run nuclear power stations without a cooling mechanism. In this case, it's Danube which is failing to offer that. Fusion is almost nowhere to be seen.
I agree. I just wanted to point out that to "stop burning fossil fuels" requires more than green electricity generation. Green electricity generation is 100% necessary, just not in itself sufficient, as was implied by "Would have been doable if we could have switched to nuclear".
We'll never stop burning fossil fuels -- not in our lifetimes, anyway. They're too useful.
Like: Cement kilns. They're ridiculously intensive of energy, and they're necessary. They burn approximately everything, from coal and natural gas to heavy fuel oil and petcoke to used tires. About the cleanest thing I've heard of them burning is old railroad ties, which isn't really so great either. :)
But if we solve some of the other big industrial users and mostly leave the cement factories, then that's... that's actually pretty good.
And we can make cement with electricity. There are companies working on scalable processes to accomplish exactly that. Electricity has just historically been very cost-prohibitive compared to alternatives in the cement-making world for it to be practical.
But! If we'd landed in the age of cheap electricity instead of this timeline, then that process would probably have been solved long ago; the incentives would have been so great that solving it would be inevitable.
And it really may have once been possible at one point to have steered things in that direction, and it even may still be possible today. But we're certainly not there (yet?).
If that's true, people will leave for bigger libraries and netflix will have to rotate into quantity. That hasn't been the case so far (net flix is killing everyone in terms of subscribers/growth YoY), but doesnt mean it can't be, especially with the paramount merger potentially going through.
I think it's been a little bit proven that it's more about specific shows (friends, seinfeld, how to lose a guy in 10 days, etc) that just mass amount of quantity, but we'll see
I will also say that to me there is a massive difference between how much effort it takes to read one type of fiction versus another. I was reading Master and Margarita and I stopped because they simply kept introducing new characters and doing jumps for no reason. I'm sure I will get a bunch of well-read people telling me it's because I'm a poor reader or whatever, but I think that's bad writing.
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