The Count of Monte Cristo was published in serial form. Daily from 1844 to 1846.
That explains a lot the format, which tended to try to retain the audience.
Also, the author wrote in advance of the daily publication, but the book was written "live", answering to public perception and response. This is a reason why the book is so "good": the author had the chance to adjust the story based on data from sales and feedback from readers.
Of course Dumas was a great writer too, but this live writing, data based is probably why the book resonates so well with audiences.
So, as a joke, if you read count of monte cristo in 3 weeks, you did the equivalent of bing reading it.
This happens with soap operas too. 10 years ago, they lasted 1 year. They had an initial structure, the story, the characters, but responded in "real-time" to audience feedback.
For those willing to read the book, give yourself some time. Try to read it over a course of some years. Read a little, come back to it.
There are several famous books written in the same form, like Crime and Punishment or The Three Musketeers.
Oh, and also authors got payed by installment, so that explains the lenght lol
Loved the stranger, I read it for the first time this year too. I read plenty of sub culture (mostly modern; Irvine welsh etc) but the stranger was just so different than anything I’ve ever read. Like the language is so olan yet it works so well, and then you have this great finish, it’s a weird masterpiece.
I'm confused by what Cursor is trying to be. They shipped plan mode and debug mode which are developer focused tools and I'm happy about them.
On the other hand, features like these are kinda distracting to me. I wouldn't mind if it wasn't for the core product and developer features getting buggier day by day.
I've been facing a number of rough edges lately. The plan mode's support for multiple plans in a single chat breaks often, todos don't get created or marked properly, the new changed files UX is atrocious (just take me to the file), it's not able to adhere to simple prompts in a low context window usage chat (Sonnet 4.5), etc.
It sucks to try different editors every few months but I might have to do that if this continues.
> We’ve seen 2x speed improvements in type checking times for internal projects when using TSGO.
That's a lot less that what TSGO promised when it was first announced (A 10x faster Typescript¹). Hopefully this is just the result of it being experimental.
The article is measuring full project build performance. That includes type-checking and compilation.
Maybe the `tsc` type-checker was already fast (so we only get some speed improvements in `tsgo`), or the `tsc` compiler was not that fast (so we get a lot of speed improvements in `tsgo`)?
*Update:* There was a performance regression in incremental type-checking between `tsgo` preview 20251209 and 20251211 [1]. But `deno` is using `tsgo` 0.1.11 which was already released last week (before this regression). So, does not seem to influence the type-checking times here.
- Smallest animal: Myxobolus Shekel. Smaller than a WBC at 10 micrometeres.
- Biggest butterfly: Queen Alexandra's Birdwing. Bigger than human brain at 18cm.
- Largest insect to ever live: Meganeura (283 MYA). At 40cm long, a dragonfly larger than a house cat.
- Rafflesias are larger than German Shepherds
- Earth's largest crab: Japanese Spider Crab. 1m, legs pan of 3.75m. More than half the size of a human.
- Always thought Mososaurs were largest animal to ever live but it's the Blue whale at 26m. I don't think I ever appreciated how unfathomably huge they are. (The largest Mosasaur found was 13m. There's a speculated size of 17m as well.)
- World's largest living tree: Hyperion - a giant redwood in california at 115m.
Love seeing something so polished and inspiring. Amazing illustrations and even better music.
I added a bit more information about Bun compatibility:
> While Bun is supported and Bun does support the `using` keyword, it's runtime automatically creates a polyfill for it whenever Function.toString() is called. This transpiled code relies on specific internal globals made available in the context where the function is serialized. Because the worker runs in a different isolated context where these globals are not registered, code with `using` will fail to execute.
A linter rule provided by the library could be helpful here. I know it's just a workaround but probably easier than going for a solution that does compile time checks.
I attempted something like this because I wanted a good books search service which provided me at-a-glance information I needed from Storygraph & Goodreads. The main things I look for when I search a book is genres/Storygraph's "moods", number of pages, whether it's part of a series, rating across services & how much does it cost.
The algorithm to decide what to merge is the hardest part, in my opinion, and very basic right now. Eventually, I wanna try doing something with machine learning. Definitely a fun thing to work on, though.
Having a full time job and a baby to take care of make progress slow, but I should have the website ready soon. Shoot me an email and I can let you know when that happens.. email is on my profile.
The first two sections reminded me of an observation I've made about myself: the more I delay "doing the thing" and spend time "researching" or "developing taste", the more I turn into a critic instead of a creator.
> Your taste develops faster than your skill
> "the quality group could tell you why a photograph was excellent"
They are critics now. People with a huge taste-skill gap are basically critics — first towards themselves and gradually towards others. I don't want to generalize by saying "critics are just failed creators", but I've certainly found it true for myself. Trying to undo this change in me and this article kind of said all the words I wanted to hear. :)
It's both dense and beautifully written. Feels like every paragraph has something profound to say. This kind of "optimizing-for-screenshot-shares" writing usually gets overdone, but since this actually had substance, it was amazing to read.
For those who haven’t run across it, I like the man in the arena speech from Theodore Roosevelt to put things in perspective when I turn into a critic, or get harsh feedback from a critic.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
If the Uranium came from multiple supernovae, then why is it shocking that earth has different concentrations of U235? Moreover, how is it proof of a past fission reaction?
What if that "part" of U235 came from a separate supernova which is a little older and some more of its U235 had already decayed?
There were unusual elements characteristic of the decay chain following a fission.
After a U-235 atom undergoes fission, one of the outcomes is it releases Barium and Krypton (and some neutrons), which then eventually decay to stable/semi-stable elements. If one of those stable elements is common in the deposit but otherwise rare naturally, it would point to a nuclear reaction having occurred.
Also note that the U-235 decay chain generally looks different from the decay chain following a fission reaction of U-235.
Funny, when I was in my 20s and not British, I knew what a Dalek was because it was just part of the zeitgeist. Tricoders are frequently mentioned as one of the life imitating art type of things that modern tech is striving to take from sci-fi to IRL. I had never even seen an episode of Dr Who, but I was familiar with it because of all the other sci-fi/nerdy stuff I was into. Ironically, I did know what someone wearing an H on their forehead meant from watching Red Dwarf, but that’s a tangent. It just seems like a strange Venn diagram where source code android and Star Trek tricoder do not intersect would be a very odd diagram
I think you hit the nail on the head there, you and the author are simply from different cultural zeitgeists. I also remember Star Trek and Dr Who being a big deal, but I was entirely too young to care. And I continue not to care, since I don't watch live action shows much. Never seen an episode of Friends or Game of Thrones either for example. Just a starkly different generation and subculture.
Indeed. There is such an immense amount of media that is produced from decade to decade that nobody can ever know everything and understand "all" the references. Things that may seem like "things everyone know about" vary wildly between location and year ranges, and in the recent decades with the Internet there are just so many subcultures that all could be classified as "nerdy" but which lack a lot of overlap.
I suppose I'm too young to have watched Star Trek when it was really popular (and have all sorts of other blind spots when it comes to TV shows and other media even for people my age), but I've definitively heard about it. And I know some other references to it like Spock and the Vulcan salute, but the Tricorder had completely missed me until now.
Also, with something like GRAVITY_DEATH_STAR_I I could pretty easily tell it was a reference to something fictional (in that case Star Wars) since there is obviously no celestial body with that name. But with the Tricorder I was looking to actually make sure it's not some kind of actually real but vestigial hardware sensor thing that Android might have supported in the 00s, tangentially related to the Tricorder that was on Star Trek. I have certainly witnessed stranger coincidences.
Like Android still has functionality in the API for supporting trackballs, which I know used to be on some really early Android phones. So if that had been among the list as "there's this joke input device called a 'trackball' in the API, implying there are phones with a big physical ball you can roll around to move a cursor on the screen", that would be quite silly. Because it was a real and used thing in the past, even though nowadays it's more of a legacy feature (though might be a bad example as I assume you can connect input devices over USB or Bluetooth that may be treated as a trackball by Android).
I guess that’s your answer. People have different interests and as such there’s a virtually unlimited number of culture combinations that people can be into. And people can have white spots in places that are surprising to others, there’s only so much time.
The most memorable read of this year was "The Count of Monte Cristo" (1846) by Alexander Dumas .
It's one of the greatest stories ever told. It's ~1250 pages but I sped through it in 3 weeks even if I'm a slow reader.
Highly recommended!
I also read The Stranger by Camus and the two top Orwells which lived up to the hype.
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