I owe much of my career to trying to set up Linux From Scratch two decades ago. While it’s a much better experience installing Linux nowadays, there’s a lot to be said for the experience spending your weekend debugging a system will give you.

What you think of as important may change over time, as well - with the solution as written, you’d need to decide what the “subject” is at compress time, but what if you later realise that’s the last ever photo of grandma, or the AI decides that you were wearing different shoes than you actually were. Worst case, you need to rely on some detail in a photo later, like to absolve you of a crime.

Having just finished up 6 episodes on G. Gordon Liddy, knowing nothing about him beforehand, I second the recommendation of Behind the Bastards.

Ilya Naishuller has some fun stuff - check out his video for Leningrad - Kolshik if you haven’t already.

Fantastic Planet’s score was also sampled heavily on Quasimoto’s “The Unseen”.

Always worth checking if there’s more libraries you’re eligible for, for the best selection - I’ve got a card through my local library, one from the next town over (I just need to visit once a year to renew), and a town in California (Sunnyvale) that gives library accounts to anyone who applies. Some libraries will do digital-only accounts for like $20/Year, so that could be worth looking into if your local library doesn’t support Overdrive/Libby.

“I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

I always figured that’s what the pattern buffer is for - the replicator can make a person atom-by-atom from energy, but the buffer holds the ‘consciousness’, and that’s the unreliable bit. Thomas Riker happens because the transporter system copies Riker into the buffer twice due to interference, so when the replicator fires up it creates two Riker bodies and puts one copy into each, sucking down some extra power from the ship to compensate for the missing energy.

I could very well have been that developer. Usual story, sales promised the world, that our vmware-based system would run on anything and everything, and of course it’s all HA and load balanced, smash cut to me on Monday morning trying to figure out how to make it do that before it goes live on Wednesday.

They moved to a system where it would just auto-sale you the title if you kept it too long after the due date, which people were furious about when they showed up with a title that was due back a month ago. Netflix really ate their lunch though, Blockbuster online was too little too late.

Having worked network support, the number of times I’ve been on a screen share with someone who opens an excel sheet from the share drive that holds all the root passwords for every network device they own is high. A bad actor could take down some very large companies with some simple social engineering skills.