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AMA: I’m Eric Ries (The Lean Startup) & Author of New Bestseller Incorruptible
Hey gang, you may remember me from such books as _The Lean Startup_ and _The Startup Way_.

It’s been fifteen years since I wrote The Lean Startup, and in that time I’ve seen some things. In both big companies and tiny startups, NGOs and governments, in almost every industry you can name.

I’ve helped a lot of people create a lot of amazing companies, but I’ve also seen so many ways this can go wrong. There’s a darkness in our industry that … ⌘ Read more

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‘I knew the beating was coming’: When the Murdoch media went to war over Ben Roberts-Smith
In their new book, Getting Murdoched, Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson interview people News Corp has targeted, including journalist Chris Masters. In this exclusive extract, Masters shares his experience of News Corp’s campaign of support for Roberts-Smith. ⌘ Read more

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Gen Z Is Pioneering a New Understanding of Truth
The first generation to truly grow up online, Generation Z and their cohort live in a social media ecosystem that blends facts and feelings. It’s significantly shifting how they understand what’s true. ⌘ Read more

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What Happens When You Try to Treat OCD With Psilocybin
Colloquially, OCD is known as the doubting disorder. In his new book How to Not Know, Simone Stolzoff explores whether treating that uncertainty with magic mushrooms can help people through it. ⌘ Read more

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In-reply-to » I wonder if my elderly German neighbors have learned enough English by now to understand what I’m swearing about all day long. 🤔

@movq@www.uninformativ.de if they haven’t, I would recommend a “subtle” nudge. You know, like leaving an advert flier at their door for a “Basic English (including swearing words!) for Dummies” book, or something like that. :-D :-P

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In-reply-to » This weekend, I'm building a service that turns PDFs into chaptered, audiobook‑quality narration in minutes—upload, listen in a built‑in player, and download MP3/M4B files with clean metadata.

Has a bit of a long history story behind this, where last year at work we were reading this book called Engineering a Safer World and initially came across a service called Speech Reply that allowed me to upload a PDF copy of the book and start to read it, but unfortunately, the free trial right now before I can finish reading it turns out that Speech Reply service cost a whopping US$30 a month and expected me to pay a full year upfront, which was well over US$300 just for one fucking book! So I sent their sales and support staff a message kindly asking if it were possible to just pay for the audio transcription of just a single book or to change to a monthly subscription fee, to which they refused, so basically in the end I got very angry and told them to go fuck themselves and built my own service. A year later here we are :-)

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In-reply-to » I came across this on "Why Is SQLite Coded In C", which I found interesting:

@bender@twtxt.net They’re not completely impossible, but C makes it much easier to run into them. I think the key point is that in those “safe” languages, buffer overflows are caught and immediately crash the program (if not handled otherwise) instead of silently corrupting memory, not being noticed right away and maybe only later crashing at a different location, where it can be very hard to find the actual root cause. This is a big improvement in my book.

Some programmers are indeed horrible. I’m guilty myself. :-)

I like the article.

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Got a nice conspiracy theory for you:

https://mastodon.social/@mcc/115670290552252848

Actually wait I just thought about this and realized that the precise timing of the ACTUAL GitHub seed bank, by which I mean the Arctic Code Vault, on 2020-02-02, makes it more or less a perfect snapshot of pre-Copilot GitHub. Also precisely timed before we all got brain damage from COVID. This is the only remaining archive of source code by people with a fully working sense of smell

(Bonus points because the Arctic World Archive is located in Svaldbard and that’s the name of the AI in Stacey Kade’s “Cold Eternity”.)

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What are you reading this week?
Perhaps we may try to revive this genre of sharing book titles in order to find something out of usual interests? Anything that you have in your reading or listening queue: tech, non-tech, pulp or snob.

I’m planning to reread again Thinking Forth by Leo Brodie (he has published couple (mediocre) albums on Spotify BTW). Also Mastery by Robert Greene.

In audiobooks Strange Things Happen by Stewart Copeland (The Police drummer and VGM composer) ⌘ Read more

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ChatGPT Now Interacts With Multiple Apps Inside Conversations
ChatGPT users can now interact with a handful of third-party apps directly within their conversations, OpenAI has announced.

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The new Apps SDK allows developers to build tools that blend naturally into chats, and initial partners include Spotify, Canva, Zillow, Expedia, Booking.com, Coursera, and Figma.

User … ⌘ Read more

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Trent Dalton’s latest is about how far a journalist will go for a story
In Gravity Let Me Go, a struggling crime journalist lands the scoop of a lifetime, to the detriment of his loved ones. That’s something Trent Dalton understands intimately. ⌘ Read more

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** Read the Book **
There’s a whole lot going on, and I’ve been feeling myself develop bad habits concerning doom scrolling. I can’t reconfigure my life to not have a phone, so, instead, I made a thing to replace those things that invite me to doomy scroll. Meet Read the Book.

Read the book is a relatively simple website where you can read a book. The books are presented in short chunks so you’re never faced with a big scrolling wall of text. It has support for dark mode and light mode, and you can u … ⌘ Read more

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Top 10 Songs That Tell Stories Better Than Books
Some songs are more than just a catchy hook or a beat you can nod along to. They’re stories—self-contained, vivid, and often more emotionally effective than the 400-page novels gathering dust on your nightstand. In just a few verses and a chorus, the right songwriter can conjure entire worlds: doomed lovers, forgotten heroes, apocalyptic visions, […]

The post [Top 10 Songs That Tell Stories Better Than Books](https://listverse.com/202 … ⌘ Read more

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** Franconia Notch **
We went to the Franconia Notch, which is on objectively funny thing to name a region. It was beautiful and the weather was wildly clear. Even on top of Mount Washington, the highest peak in the entire north eastern United States, it was sunny and calm. We could see all the way back to Maine…supposedly…it all looks kinda like green lumpy blurs to me.

While there I started to read two books, Katabasis, by R.F. Kuang and The City and Its Uncertain Walls, by Haruki Murakami.

_Kata … ⌘ Read more

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«1977 United States Environmental
Protection Agency
Graphic Standards System

Designed by Steff Geissbühler,
Chermayeff & Geismar Associates

The EPA Graphic Standards System is one of the finest examples of a standards manual ever created. The modular and flexible system devised raised the standard for public design in the United States.

The book features a foreword by Tom Geismar, introduction by Steff Geissbühler, an essay by Christopher Bonanos, scans of the original manual (from Geissbühler’s personal copy), and 48 pages of photographs from the EPA-commissioned Documerica project (1970–1977).»

https://standardsmanual.com/products/epa

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In-reply-to » i went to a rilo kiley concert the other day and it was so special to me... i teared up at some of the songs but when "a better son/daughter" came on, i full on cried. what an amazing experience.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Ten stories or more are already very tall in my books. Not sure at which height I would start calling high rise buildings sky scrapers, but Wikipedia suggests around 150 meters, depending on region.

Oh, I just found

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and this really does not look all that high. I thought that this would be at least 50 or 100 meters up. I was completely wrong. :-D

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** A week notes to round out the summer **
I haven’t posted anything remotely resembling week notes since the middle of June! Since then many things have happened including, but not limited to: a trip to Minnesota to visit Isaac, a couple trips to New Hampshire for work, a family trip to Mount Desert Island to revisit our old stomping grounds, a whole heap of bicycle riding, I finished a couple great books, played some games, made some games, and wrote what is probably an unhealthy a … ⌘ Read more

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Its like TV. Very few good channels and many bad channels. Or like books. Very few good books and many bad books. Look for spezialized channels and educate your children. Read the bible.com . But only Jesus is reliable. Forget Moses and the punishing God.

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In-reply-to » Speaking of manpages:

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz On the one hand, all these programs have a very long history and the technology behind manpages is actually very powerful – you can use it to write books:

https://www.troff.org/pubs.html

I have two books from that list, for example “The UNIX programming environment”:

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It’s a bit older, of course, but it looks and feels like a normal book, and it uses the same tech as manpages – which I think is really cool. 😎

It’s comparable to LaTeX (just harder/different to use) but much faster than LaTeX. You can also do stuff like render manpages as a PDF (man -Tpdf cp >cp.pdf) or as an HTML file (man -Thtml cp >cp.html). I think I once made slides for a talk this way.

On the other hand, traditional manpages (i.e., ones that are not written in mandoc) do not use semantic markup. They literally say, “this text is bold, that text over here is italics”, and so on.

So when you run man foo, it has no other choice but to show it in black, white, bold, underline – showing it in color would be wrong, because that’s not what the source code of that manpage says.

Colorizing them is a hack, to be honest. You’re not meant to do this. (The devs actually broke this by accident recently. They themselves aren’t really aware that people use colors.)

If mandoc and semantic markup was more commonly used, I think it would be easier to convince the devs to add proper customizable colors.

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In-reply-to » https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1935344122103308748.html Interesting article on how ChatGPT is rotting your brain 🤣

About ChatGPT rotting people’s brains, similarly could be said about search engines, and reference books. Oh, also doom scrolling, and mobile devices, and the Internet… :-P

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Lately (since there are AI summaries at the top), each time I Google for the answer to a question, the AI summary has at least a part of the answer wrong. It makes up laws that do not exist, books that were never published - in sum, well written sentences that make linguistic sense, but with made up content.

Let me repeat: each time. Maybe I only search for hard stuff, or fringe stuff, or this some other explanation - but seriously, it’s hard to understand how isn’t Google ashamed of its AI overviews… or not sued under some regulation regarding fake news.

PS: yes, I know, my fault for using Google as a search engine.

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How a stupidity epidemic is threatening America’s actual existence
Bobby Azarian,  Cognitive Neuroscientist and the author of the new book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity.  -  Raw Story

_Stephan: In the history of the United States, over the past more than two centuries,  there has never been a stupider administration than the Trump coup people. The important point to make here is … ⌘ Read more

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The Luke Bateman backlash highlights publishing’s diversity problem
When former Canberra Raiders player and farmer Luke Bateman joined TikTok, he went viral for his love of fantasy novels. A month later he announced a book deal, but the news has generated controversy. ⌘ Read more

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10 Movies That Missed the Point of Their Source Material
When adapting books and comics into movies, certain changes must be made to accommodate the new medium. While fans sometimes bristle at plotlines and characters being altered—or even cut out completely—there’s no way for adaptations to be entirely faithful. However, some film adaptations seem to entirely miss the point of their source material. That isn’t […]

The post [10 Movies That Missed the Point of Their Source Ma … ⌘ Read more

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10 Secret Abilities of Well-Known Animals
As kids, we all learned about the world’s most famous animals from books, TV, video games, or the Rainforest Cafe and its incredibly biodiverse gift shop. However, Big Animal is keeping certain secrets from you, and the animals you’ve known and loved since childhood harbor some weird and obscure secret abilities, features, and effects. Read […]

The post [10 Secret Abilities of Well-Known Animals](https://listverse.com/2025/05/30/10-secret-abilities … ⌘ Read more

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[$] Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet
Cory Doctorow wears many hats:
digital activist, science-fiction author, journalist, and more. He has
also written many books, both fiction and non-fiction, runs the Pluralistic blog, is a visiting
professor, and is an advisor to the Electronic\
Frontier Foundation (EFF); his Chokepoint Capitalism
co-author, Rebecca Giblin, gave a [2023 keynote\
in Australia](https://lw … ⌘ Read more

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Rule change would allow Trump to ‘cook the books’ and hide collapsing economy: report
Tom Boggioni,  Senior Editor  -  Raw Story

_Stephan: Fascist governance is always inferior to democratic governance. Can you think of a single fascist ruled nation in history that was world leader in social wellbeing, education, science, or medicine? No, neither can I because there is no such example One of the hallmarks of fascists is that they never want t … ⌘ Read more

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Everything from animals to plants to atoms has consciousness, a scientific theory that is gaining momentum
Eric Ralls,    -  earth.com

_Stephan: I am an experimentalist who has been researching the nature of consciousness for over half a century, and have published hundreds of papers in peer-reviewed journals and academic books presenting evidence that materialism is not so much wrong as it is inadequate. What this arti … ⌘ Read more

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10 Groundbreaking & Historical “Firsts” We Witnessed in 2025–So Far!
While we typically perceive history as something we only read about in books, 2025 has already proven that history is happening right before our eyes. Despite economic, political, and social conflicts, this year has brought about incredible events and discoveries unlike anything the world has ever seen. Some leave us hopeful, others uneasy—but one thing […]

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10 Times Governments Banned Colors for Bizarre Reasons
When we think of banned things, we tend to imagine books, political speech, or the occasional controversial cartoon. But throughout history, governments have cracked down on something far stranger: colors. Whether tied to class, ideology, or sheer paranoia, certain shades have been restricted, outlawed, or made dangerous to wear—all because they said too much without […]

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Trump is Building A Global Gulag for Immigrants Captured by ICE
Nick Turse,  Staff Writer  -  The Intercept

_Stephan: Aspiring dictator Trump is reputed to read very few books, but the one he has clearly studied in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, since all the trends he has created to reshape the United States come from Hitler. Just as the Nazis created concentration camps in the countries they controlled so Trump, as this article describes, is creating an international a … ⌘ Read more

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** My not so pragmatic guide to running background services on macOS **
I self host a lot of stuff — these days, mostly weird little utility scripts and toys that run in the background, but also some web apps like plex, calibre, and a suite of irc things. For a long time I ran such things on a VPS, but being incredibly cheap, and hardly ever leaving my house for realsies, during the height of the pandemic I brought everything on to an aged mac mini I keep on a shelf behind some books.

I tr … ⌘ Read more

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In-reply-to » Sometimes things go wrong when buying CDs second-hand. I bought an album quite cheap – but as it turned out, they only checked the cover, not the content, so I got something else instead which is actually much more expensive. 🤣

@movq@www.uninformativ.de a first edition signed Superman comic book, carefully folded just to fit, but not damaged enough to have lost its value?

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Nobody want to be a shitty programmer. The question is: Do you do anything not to not be one?
Reading blogs or social media and watching YouTube videos is fun. After them, your code may be a little better, of course. But you need a lot. You need to study! Read good books and study the code of other programmers, for example. Maybe work with a new language, architectures and paradigms. You need break the routine.

If you know Object-oriented programming, you learn functional programming.
If you know Model-View-Controller, you learn Model-View-ViewModel.
If you don’t know anything about architectures, you learn Clean Architecture, Hexagonal Architecture, etc.
If you know Python, you learn Ruby or Go.
If you know Clojure or Lisp… you don’t need to learn anything else. You are already a good programmer. Just kidding. You can learn Elixir or Scala.

Be a good programmer my friend.

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The Trump/Hitler Controversy Misses the Point
John B. Alexander,  Contributing Writer  -  Daily Kos

_Stephan: John Alexander lays out in great detail what I have been saying without all the details. To anyone who is familiar with history and the rise of fascist coups it is very obvious what is going on in the United States. What I particularly liked about Alexander’s essay is the references he provides to books that will give the sources they need to fully comprehend how the Tru … ⌘ Read more

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In-reply-to » To the parents or teachers: How do you teach kids to program these days? 🤔

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I started with Delphi in school, the book (that we never ever used even once and I also never looked at) taught Pascal. The UI part felt easy at first but prevented me from understanding fundamental stuff like procedures or functions or even begin and end blocks for ifs or loops. For example I always thought that I needed to have a button somewhere, even if hidden. That gave me a handler procedure where I could put code and somehow call it. Two or three years later, a new mate from the parallel class finally told me that this wasn’t necessary and how to do thing better.

You know all too well that back in the day there was not a whole lot of information out there. And the bits that did exist were well hidden. At least from me. Eventually discovering planet-quellcodes.de (I don’t remember if that was the original forum or if that got split off from some other board) via my best schoolmate was like finding the Amber Room. Yeah, reading the ITG book would have been a very good idea for sure. :-)

In hindsight, a console program without the UI overhead might have been better. At least for the very start. Much less things to worry about or get lost.

Hence, I’d recommend to start programming with a console program. As for the language, not sure. But Python is probably a good choice, it doesn’t require a lot of surrounding boilerplate like, say Java or Go. It also does exceptionally well in the principle of least surprise.

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10 Cave Explorers Who Never Made It Out Alive
We all have our hobbies. Some of us come home and go for a run, while others read a book. Still others are a bit more extreme. Maybe you enjoy BMX bike riding or whitewater rafting. But a select few do something that most people consider quite insane: spelunkers, also known as cave explorers. Spelunkers […]

The post [10 Cave Explorers Who Never Made It Out Alive](https://listverse.com/2025/04/27/10-cave-explorers-who-never-made-it-out-alive … ⌘ Read more

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10 Surprising Legal Gaps That Let Chaos Ensue
We tend to assume that there’s a law on the books for every situation. But legal systems often lag behind reality, leaving major gaps at the worst possible moments. Whether it was due to technological change, moral blind spots, or pure legislative oversight, these are moments when people turned to the law—and the law shrugged. […]

The post [10 Surprising Legal Gaps That Let Chaos Ensue](https://listverse.com/2025/04/27/10-surprising-legal-g … ⌘ Read more

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In-reply-to » A visual flow chart diagram that illustrates how two different but very related concepts can lead to system accidents 👌 Media

These ideas are dr the two books:

  • Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems by Sidney Dekker (2011)
  • Engineering a Safer World by Nancy Leveson (2011)

The former I haven’t read. The later I haven’t finished reading 😅

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10 Comic Book Film Characters Based on Something Else Entirely
The comic book-to-movie adaptation is far from a fine art. In this hero-centric cinematic world, moviemakers and actors are inclined to bend the rules and break away from the source material when bringing characters to the big screen. Indeed, many writers, directors, and stars have all but ignored the comics they are adapting to suit […]

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