I thought I also heard that the people who agreed to buy Twitter's debt got the deal sweetened with some XAi stock.
Sooo, did that debt get paid off, and they got XAi stock. If so, buying that Tesla debt might not have been the complete bloodbath it should have been.
I made my first 10" telescope - rough and fine ground, polished, figured, and built the telescope and mount at 10 under the instruction famous (later) John Dobson in San Francisco. It's not hype to say he was one of the most significant figures in popularizing astronomy in modern history.
I later went on to make a 16" and then "fell off the wagon" and bought refractors, equatorial mounts and cameras. But I never could have gotten started without him.
People don't talk about it now but when he first started the "established" telescope making folks spoke derisively of him, his techniques, and his telescopes.
Why?
To start with "we" - he and his students - made the mirrors out of old portlights (the glass in portholes), so it was "assumed" they would flex (since they were thinner than store-bought mirror blanks) and would be subject to thermal issues.
Then of course was the fact the telescope tube was made out of a heavy cardboard concrete form called a "Sonotube", which you'd waterproof and paint - paint color and pattern choice being one of the most creative parts of the project. The "diagonal" - the mirror which directed the light path 90-degrees out to the eyepiece - was mounted on a 1"-2" dowel with 3 slots cut into it and held in place by wood shingles.
The mirror mount itself was a 3/4" piece of plywood with 3 bolts in it, which you'd use to collimate the mirror once it was mounted in the tube.
And then the mount. Not only was it "alt-azimuth", it was made of plywood. You built a box around the tube, and two circles on the box fit into 1/2 circles in the mount.
But Dobson's ultimate heresy was his approach to figuring the mirror:
Instead of using a "Foucault Tester" to measure and figure the mirror, he'd mount the polished mirror in the telescope and point it at a point source of light - usually the sun's reflection off a ceramic power line insulator.
By moving the image in and out of focus and looking for bright rings in the image, you could tell the shape of the mirror and whether is had hills or valleys in the figure. The end result was a parabola accurate to 1/2 or 1/4 wave (he said he could get it to 1/10th wave, and I have no reason to doubt it).
To the folks used to using much fancier foucault or even more advanced testing methods on much more expensive mirror blanks this was impossible and widely derided and, frankly, made fun of. People weren't very nice.
But when they took the mirrors and tested them with their foucault and diffraction testers they got a big surprise - the curves _were_ accurate and of high quality. And, _big_ - people regularly made 16" telescopes this way, and the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers had a portable 24" for goodness sake.
(I think people kind of forgot he used to be a physicist, and probably knew a thing or two about light).
The other big beef was the alt-azimuth mount. Not only did it not have setting circles to find things in the sky by RA and Dec, it wouldn't automatically track, so it could never be used to take pictures (you can get Dobsonians which will do that today natch now that we have computer controlled stepping motors).
But the point was _none of that mattered_: He wanted to make telescopes for people to look through, not take pictures with. So if he could build a telescope he could wheel out into Golden Gate park, set up in 15 minutes, and have 100 people see stars, planets and nebulae, that was The Win.
And teaching regular people - including kids - of both genders - how to make their own telescope, well that was almost as good. A big part of that was it was _affordable_, which meant many, many more people could make telescopes than otherwise. In Dot-Com vernacular, he grew the TAM (Total Addressable - or would that be Astronomical - Market), well, astronomically.
(Bada-Bing, I'm here all week folks).
But seriously, I can tell you from experience, no astrophotograph you take will ever, ever, compare to seeing Saturn, or M31, or any one of many other things with your own eye, and in a telescope you built.
Sorry for the long screed - got started and stirred up some memories there.
No worries, he got me too.
No I do not subscribe to everything he thought on a cosmological level
but the importance of vintage photons direct to brain for everyone resonated.
Bringing telescopes out of the rarefied world of astronomers
where they were "precious" to professional and amateur alike
is what I see as his greatest legacy.
I build "public friendly" scopes as a result.
If anyone is thinking of a new mount for a Newtonian
may I suggest looking up "Sudiball" mount as they allow you
to accommodate a wider range of eyepiece heights for a given target.
(so parents are less likely to put their kids in a half-nelson screeching "DON'T TOUCH DON'T TOUCH" as they poke them in the ear with your scope)
Thanks to the generosity of Stewart and Tiny Speck releasing all the artwork and other assets for the game into public domain, a few non-Flash versions of Glitch showed up. One, Odd Giants (https://oddgiants.com/) is particularly successful and worth checking out if you're a Glitch Fan.
So does this include paying off all their past obligations, including, but not limited to: Rent(s), Vendor Payment(s), Employee termination and back pay, etc, etc?
And this are only the debts which have been talked about _publically_.
I often wonder if it's the writing that's bad or the translation.
I really get the impression lots of the sentences and paragraphs are stilted translations which don't succeed, either because of the translator of the inability of english to express the nuance of what the artist meant. To be clear, I think the latter limitation goes both ways, indeed any time you are translating between languages.
Ken Liu, who translated the first and third books, is a respected English sci fi writer in his own right, as well as being a native Chinese speaker.
I felt the same as you about the prose but, given Liu’s background and having read his other books, I assumed it was an intentional choice. Based on his other work, Ken is a good enough writer to know what he was doing, and the sentence structure was probably a balance between translating the ideas and translating the form. You can definitely argue with how it worked out but I do think it was mostly intentional and not a lack of writing or translating skills on the part of Ken Liu.
I will say, the middle book, “The Dark Forest,” was translated by someone else, and it felt way different to me. Sentence structure, pacing, themes, stuff that would be way out of scope of a direct translation. I always wondered how much of that was the original and how much was the translator doing more adaptation to make the whole book feel like a native English novel.
i read the three-body problem in chinese, but didn't read the translation. my impression was that liu cixin's writing isn't very literary - he rarely uses rhetorical flourishes or idiomatic expressions, and his vocabulary is very simple outside of technical language. however, it's very straightforward and accessible.
someone else i know described the novel as 'clearly written by an engineer rather than a humanities student,' and i think i'd agree with that description.
Engineers and scientists can be like that. Perhaps the most obvious English-language one is Andy Weir (The Martian, etc) where the characters can feel like they're agents implementing an story rather than part of it. But certainly author-first authors can lean into this too and end up writing basically a narrative report rather then a story.
Which is, to be clear, completely fine: sometimes the characters aren't actually the core of a story, especially when dealing with substantially non-human-scale subjects and abstract concepts. It's also much more of a challenge to keep characters front and centre when on a very large sci-fi stage. It's easy to concentrate on the people when it's just a few people in, say, a regular house, just doing human things. I think some of the genius of Iain M. Banks especially is that he manages to somehow place the people (and non-people like Ships) dead centre even though the stories are ostensibly on an incomprehensibly vast scale. It's one of the few sci-fi universes where I think first of the characters and not of the universe in which they exist.
The original Star Wars and Dune also had particularly good character-centrism, where the universes were clearly enormous and could be arbitrarily detailed, but existed to support the characters journeys rather then the reverse.
I ran into that issue when trying to read Yoshiki Tanaka's Legend of the Galactic Heroes. The translation for the first two books in the series was ok but not amazing, but for the third book they changed the translator and it became a complete and utter mess. I remember one part where a character says the complete opposite of what they said the previous sentence, and I'm 99% sure it was an issue with the translation and not with the original Japanese.
Still better than the copy of Miyamoto Musashi's The Book of Five Rings that I once found that appeared to have been copy-pasted into Google Translate at least.
Sooo, did that debt get paid off, and they got XAi stock. If so, buying that Tesla debt might not have been the complete bloodbath it should have been.