Not that this is the perfect fix, but at least for sci-fi books you can usually look the Hugo Award winners[0] for ones that are solid. Not all of them are my cup of tea, but I have found that I definitely love some of the series that are found there. I'm sure there are other award types per genre that could help point you to some as well. Not that these can't be gamed, or sponsored or whatever, but at least it is a good starting point that is (¿maybe?) less prone to bot bias campaigns.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel

That was true until 10 or 15 years ago. They have been riddled with (accusations of) bias and fraud since then

The Hugo and Nebula winners (and shortlists, do not forget those) aren't perfect, but they're almost always worth a look. Pretending that they're total garbage is doing yourself a disservice.

Wow, I hadn't heard about the fraud in 2024, which I looked up in response to your comment. That's troubling to say the least.

Bias, though, is going to be inevitable and the Hugos are going to represent the taste of the Worldcon voters. It seems like overall there's been a happy confluence for awhile now between their taste and general sf taste.

I've discovered three of my favorite contemporary sf authors through recent Hugos: Ann Leckie, Arkady Martine, and Tamsyn Muir. I've read other recent nominees where I was unmoved or even questioned their inclusion.

I've also read a decent selection of historical winners, by no means exhaustive or even the majority, and the worst was without a doubt Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer.

I strongly support this! For the last few years, I've been signing up as a Hugo voter, and read a bunch of great stuff that I otherwise would have missed. Sometimes the best books are a bit divisive, but still make the shortlist. (Saint of Bright Doors, for example...)

You and me both. This was a surprisingly elucidating post about something that has essentially hasn’t been an option for me in a long time, hah.

The age groups who spend the most time on Facebook feeds though are the most likely to have voted for this administration...

Exactly. The 60 and 70 year olds I spend time with, women especially (not a dig, but an observation), are just as addicted to facebook as the Instagram / TikTok crowd are to those platforms.

Why did the dealerships not want them? (Honest question, I have no idea about any of this)

There is a hypothesis that dealers disincentivized salespeople from selling EVs due to a lower expected amount of service department revenue in the future. I work in the industry close enough to get a whiff of that and I never heard anything more than speculation.

Dealerships only make money on “the back end”, which is servicing.

Any vehicle that requires less servicing makes them less money, so they don’t want to sell them.

I did this, and yeah google maps is all but unusable without color, that and the camera takes some getting used to.

I'm on an iPhone, but what ended up doing was creating a shortcut that toggles the phone to grayscale and back, and then having two automations, one for when I open any of the apps I actually want color in (maps, camera, photos, etc) that toggles grayscale off and then another automation to toggle grayscale back on when I close any of those same apps.

The option is located in Settings > Accessibility >Display & Text Size > Color Filters

It isn't perfect, but it works most of the time (I also added the shortcut to the back of the home screen so if it is off or I need one-off color I can just toggle it manually).

On iOS, the grey scale filter can also be activated via triple clicking the power button:

It is the “zoom”, in which you can have 1.0 scale and add a color filter.

I like the combined grayscale and color inversion filter.

The triple click zoom is activated in Settings > Accessibility > Accessibility Shortcut: https://support.apple.com/111771

The scale can be set by activating the zoom controller once, zooming out, and then hiding it.

Shout out to KEXP!

looks cool I'll check them out, FWIW lately for me it's mostly chirpradio.org and somafm

Wow, I actually had no idea what he was a UW grad, let alone that I went there the same time he did... TIL

I did a for-profit course registration tool called uwrobot too if you or any of your friends were customers of that...

> Your brain doesn't live in isolation

Well, we can't completely prove that...[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat

Wow, and if you go to their website listed in they're profile, not only do almost none of the links work, the one that did just linked out to the generic template that it was straight copied from. Wow.

I can't find anything that would suggest this is true, but I would love if you were able to link me something proving me wrong, as I loved that movie growing up and like reading about it still.

You have no idea how old you saying "I loved that movie growing up" makes me feel :-)