myrmidex

Not sure how much this project does Insights, but that would be a valid reason: for AI to better assess when followers engage with the content in order to optimize publishing times.

I like Maybe Finance. Perhaps a bit basic but it does the trick for me. And the interface is quite nice too. No automation or bank imports though so it probably won’t fit your purposes perfectly.

Added the exa aliases. Nice to see pacman points exa to eza as the former is unmaintained.

Yes it’s quite similar to the scrobbling and recommendations of last.fm!

Listenbrainz has decent recommendations

Fun fact, during the same trip he also mentioned that doctors assisting abortions are hired killers.

A local extreme right MP had his ties to Chinese spies laid bare this year, did not even make a dent in the polls.

The elections will be brutal…

Yunohost has a Lemmy app

Quite the emotional roller coaster this was… Went from ‘uh-oh’ all the way over to ‘WHATDOTHETRIANGLESMEAN’ and back round to ‘cool bro’

Ex-banker president targets banks… Now that’d be quite an unexpecred headline! Shame it’ll never be.

I’m from a country in western Europe, and our pharmacies are running low. My dad was told several times over the last months that they’re out of stock and he should come back next week. Sure, the price here might be okay, but Pharma seems to prefer selling it more expensively elsewhere.

Olauncher - very minimal, no distractions. Shows the app’s full name instead of icons, handfull of links on the main page, the rest can be found in the app drawer in a long list of app names.

Edit: just saw the mention here of mlauncher, an open source fork. Making the switch now 🙂

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Now onto an answer: I’m really into the soft sci-fi of the Strugatsky brothers. Definitely Maybe is such a great read. As for more popular works, I did enjoy Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir a few months ago.

Not an answer to your question, but I came across this lemmy instance focused on literature. Seems they’re still new, so not many communities yet, but you might have some luck there too!

https://literature.cafe - seems !fiction@literature.cafe is the most relevant community, but they really should open up a separate sci-fi community!

I came across this quote in the book I’m currently reading, Until the End of Time by Brian Greene. It doesn’t really go into what makes a great story, but rather what prevents a story from being great:

For a concept to grab hold of our attention with enough force that we remember it and transmit it to others, the concept must be sufficiently novel to offer surprise but not so outrageous that we immediately deem it ridiculous. Invisible people? Sure, so long as invisibility is the only counterintuitive feature. A river that answers calculus problems by singing them to the theme of MAS*H? Silly, and so is dismissed by most everyone and quickly forgotten. Aligning with the larger-than-life themes of mythic tales, the protagonists we encounter are larger than life but minimally counterintuitive constructs of the human imagination. No surprise that these protagonists have physical forms, thought processes, and even personality profiles that, at the very least, are thoroughly familiar, even if their powers exceed expectations based on anything we have ever encountered.

It’s very underwhelming. I loved the old ones, but this just feels awkward. I’m already sure this won’t have one percent of the hours I spent on Streets of Rage 4.

Do give Russell’s History of Western Philosophy a try. It places those books into a much needed context. When I first picked up that book, it was out of a hope to learn more about philosophy, but after finishing it, I only had those three books on my ‘definitely must read’ list. I know there’s a companion book to Das Kapital written by David Harvey, but he’s not the easiest to read either. And Marx, omfg, that mofo has a way of dancing around things for pages on end through the most labyrinthine sentences, so I can definitely commiserate! It took me months to get through the whole thing. Luckily I was in the middle of a move, without TV or computer, so that helped a lot :)

Plato’s Republic.

I got really interested by its description in Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. After reading the book, I realized how arbitrary the setup of current society is. Then I followed it up with More’s Utopia and Marx’ Das Kapital. A true Big Bang for my political views.

“Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.” ― Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

That’s amazing to watch! Most of the speedrunners don’t even defeat the enemies 😮