Notices by Fazal Majid (fazalmajid@social.vivaldi.net)

@filippo don't forget that drives lie about data being committed to disk to goose up benchmarks, specially SSDs. They will ack the disk flush when it's only in the on-drive RAM buffer, and most non-enterprise drives lack a power-loss protection supercap. To properly test for this, you'd need a rig with some software-controlled-hardware way to disconnect the drive from power when you receive the fsync/fdatasync ack.

The PostgreSQL community has done a fair bit of investigation on the subject.

@cstross FWIW, I found low vitamin D levels were correlated with general fatigue, and you live futher north than I do.

@TLB73 @aral Thatcher was originally a scientist (chemistry, studied under Nobelist Dorothy Hodgkin).

To this day she is the only British PM with a science or engineering background, which may explain why the country, run as it is by Oxford PPE or liberal arts wankers, is circling the drain.

@quixoticgeek @cstross yes, I have. Can't say I loved it, but at least I finished the series (well, the first trilogy).

It's probably more fun listing the *worst* TV adaptations. My vote goes for the SciFi Channel adaptation of Ursula Le Guin's *A Wizrd of Earthsea*, which was thoroughly disavowed by her.

@quixoticgeek @cstross in no particular order:
* Steven Erikson, The Malazan Book of the Fallen
* Ben Aaronovitch, Rivers of London (hat tip to Charlie)
* Martha Wells, The Murderbot Diaries
* Stephen Brust, the Vlad Taltos series
* Anything by Iain Banks
* Glen Cook, The Black Company
* L.E. Modesitt, the Recluce series
* Andrzej Sapkowski, The Witcher
* Neal Asher, the Polity series (avoid the foaming-at-the-mouth Brexiteer-inspired Owner series, however)
* Shannon Chakraborty, the Daevabad trilogy

@cstross @quixoticgeek same here. About 100 pages into the first volume, "why am I supposed to care about these horrible feudals again?" and "let's hope they kill each other and leave the downtrodden peasants alone", and gave up in disgust. And this despite having bought the first 3 books in anticipation (this was before the TV series, that I also found quite boring, but my wife loved it).

@cstross an anecdote from a book signing with Steven Erikson:

> When asked whether he was planning on extending the series beyond the planned ten volumes, he mentioned he had the outline of all ten almost from the very beginning (keep in mind it took him 8 years to get The Gardens of the Moon published, and that only happened after he moved to England). There is still a lot of room for spontaneity — as he puts it, if the author is bored when writing the actual books because he put too much effort in preparatory notes, the readers are likely to be bored as well. Erikson also committed to giving “payback” to his readers for sticking with the story (sounds ominous, doesn’t it?), with some snide remarks referring to Robert Jordan’s ever-lengthening Wheel of Time series. The anecdote he mentioned was that of a 75 year old woman who was asking a bookseller when the next installment by Jordan would be published, because she was afraid she might die before that series was completed… In all fairness, Jordan has announced the next volume will be the last, bringing closure to long-suffering fans.

(This was 2005, two years before Jordan’s untimely death)

https://blog.majid.info/a-book-signing-with-steven-erikson/

@cstross TIL Vincent Price was in Star Wars

@cstross Bruxelles-Midi, since it’s not mentioned as a stop as would be the case from Amsterdam.

@cstross as an engineer, the “engineer good, MBA bad” mantra assuages my ego, but it’s oversimplified. Harry Stonecipher, who instilled the rot into Boeing, had a STEM background.

@Patricia no, it’s called the Hilbert Curve