They justify it as defending their way of life, which can align with Tolkien a little bit with some mental gymnastics > I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend. but overall Tolkien was against war, being a veteran of WWI himself, and the LOTR saga is about the heroism of the meek. Peter Thiel clearly loves the…
> Thiel clearly loves the sword for its sharpness Palantir ceo too: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/alex-karp-wielding-a-sword
Always thought it was weird for the omniscient narrator to refer to her as “YT’s mom”
I found Snowcrash to be surprisingly poorly written. Especially given that I had read Cryptonomicon and Diamond Age before it. The quality of writing is so different. I thought perhaps Snowcrash was his first novel, but it wasn't!
Have to agree with you on this. Neal Stephenson is not a writer's writer by any means. But even by his standards I found the prose in Snowcrash to be plodding and amateur. I still love the book for its campy nature and for all the amazing ideas it birthed but it would have definitely benefited from a round of aggressive editing. Also the ending quite frankly was horrible, but I hear this is a general issue with Stephenson's works.
In general if you are new to Stephenson I would recommend reading Snow Crash first otherwise the transition from his other better written books will be jarring.
I don't work for Meta, but how many more years do I need to work in tech? I'm in my 40s and my kids are young. I've already set up 529s for them, and am paying for some expensive home upgrades. Maybe when that is finished and I've built up a buffer I can switch industries for the last 5-10 years of my working life. Curious if anyone here has any similar plans.
I have similar feelings. When I started working at my first job, we were trying to make our enterprise product so easy to use it would be like 'a piece of software you'd buy on a CD at the supermarket.' (this was the late 1990s). We really did spend time on polish that made the product better and easier to use (it was sold as a product, with optional support), and I loved re-writing bits of UI and refactoring on my own time to make it great. But over the decades that followed, the new features became subscription based, and metrics were introduced, and were gamed...
Now I'm quite cynical about the industry. I'm 54, and the company I work for is about to announce a restructure. I'd consider doing something else for a similar last few working years too, but I'm not sure what else I'm good at!
Reminds me of one of the more brilliant passages in Snow Crash , describing work in "Fed Land"... ''' Y.T's mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this m…
What makes this even more hilarious is that Meta's rebranding was in part inspired by the metaverse concept in Snow Crash. You can bet that Zuckerberg, along with many other tech executives, have read this exact passage while mining the book for ideas. Life imitating art?
I found Snowcrash to be surprisingly poorly written. Especially given that I had read Cryptonomicon and Diamond Age before it. The quality of writing is so different. I thought perhaps Snowcrash was his first novel, but it wasn't!
Have to agree with you on this. Neal Stephenson is not a writer's writer by any means. But even by his standards I found the prose in Snowcrash to be plodding and amateur. I still love the book for its campy nature and for all the amazing ideas it birthed but it would have definitely benefited from a round of aggressive editing. Also the ending quite frankly was horrible, but I hear this is a general issue with Steph…
Stevenson's endings are "pregnant endings" as in the Aeneid:
I don’t believe any of them have actually read it, but rather watched the WETA production on film.
I think the movie was every bit as deep as the books. Remember how terrifying it was for Frodo to be seen by Sauron’s eye? No, they know exactly what they’re doing and they don’t care.
Except the movies leave out entire characters...
In the books Frodo was a wealthy middle-aged hobbit. Not some boy hobbit.
Book Aragorn was eagerly awaiting his time to be king. Movie Aragorn didn't want anything to do with it.
Book, Denethor is being controlled by Sauron via the Palantir, in the movies he's a brutish, cruel, tyrant.
Of which Meta is but one source of, among a sea of countless other places to obtain it.
When was the last time you applied for a job and got an interview? I was on a salary of $550 a day with a bank. I left because how grim banks are. I have yet to find another job that pays that much outside of a banking circuit. If meta is paying you high-end why would you give it up for something that pays you less?
Because principles are more important than a paycheck.
No one mentioned Orwell so far? Well, in 1984 the protagonist learns after a while, that inner party members had the amazing perk of being able to turn off the mandatory surveillance screen for up to 30 minutes. But I guess in this case the workers still will be tracked by the usual Meta tracking that applies to everyone surfing the internet.
Always thought it was weird for the omniscient narrator to refer to her as “YT’s mom”
I found Snowcrash to be surprisingly poorly written. Especially given that I had read Cryptonomicon and Diamond Age before it. The quality of writing is so different. I thought perhaps Snowcrash was his first novel, but it wasn't!
There's something you'll start to notice in Stephenson's books, where a passage will be almost entirely standalone and you think, he wrote this some other time and just barely massaged it to fit into this text. See also "Part 3" of *Fall; or, Dodge in Hell* which is pretty much entirely disconnected from the rest of the story but god damn it Trump just got elected (for the first time) and I've gotta write this.