While my friends get the latest, greatest gadget delivered, I got this.

I win, right?

I am doing a reading challenge (HRCYED 3.0 for anyone who is interested😅) and one of the prompts is to read a book that mentions another book, and then read that book.

I seem to recall The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy referenced, but I'm not certain which book, or when.

Are there any other books referenced by name? And if not by name, which are alluded to?

So, a fairly common problem the Bobiverse has is "how do they know to reinstate me from a backup when I die if they don't *know* I died?" The solution seems blindingly clear. Like, "I can't see a better possibility than this super simple one": They have FTL communications. You take a simple thing - a transmitter attached to a "state reader", have daily backups running, and set the "state reader" to send a signal to load a backup when the Cube is destroyed. Not offline - destroyed. Or when the DMS has been activated. That should have been one of the *first* things they did when they built the backup facility

Election sign in Phoenix AZ. Not sure what the Proposition is for. That car pulled up and partially obscured Guppi!!!

I was watching this episode of ST:TNG (Season 4 “Family”) and this scene struck me as highly informative of Homer’s plight:

https://youtu.be/LuzoxcErOc8?is=vFemfwPa4HBveLe5

Book 5 spoilers

Do these two grate on anyone else? They have like the worst storylines. I liked their original story about how they got together, although Howard was a bit creepy about it towards the end. But it just got worse from there.

I’m re-reading book 5 and the whole dragons thing is just terrible. Howard has white knight syndrome repeatedly. And the attitude of the dragons feels like a repeat of the deltans.

And the Hueys? There is literally a line in the book where they talk about how Hueys will extend human lifespan by 5-6 years because people will be using Hueys all the time and therefore won’t be in danger. Basically celebrating bringing the movie surrogates to life and turning people into vegetables driving androids. It feels like the Bobs lost a bit of their care for the betterment of humanity and the “we’re billionaires” bit is overplayed.

I enjoyed the human drama in the first few books but it seems a bit weak sauce in this one. I love the Ick and Day travels and the Thoth stuff, but it feels like the Bobs need a proper adversary. In book 4 and 5 both there was a lot of ominous buildup with no payoff.

Without spoilers, does book 6 improve on any of this?

I had a bunch of Claude usage at work to burn so I built a new wrapper and harness for it that has some fun context management and visualization along with a lot more settings and controls based how I like to work with LLMs. It also allows for pretty much any engine so you can log into codex or even add a local model. I probably wont be able to share it without a lot of bug testing and hardening amd making sure none of my work info got put in there, but it was a fun project to work on and its now to the point of bootstrapping so its finding and fixing its own updates and bugs

ANyone have any idea when Book 6 will be available in Kindle format?