I read Guns, Germs and Steel recently and loved it. After finishing it, I was wondering how well the theses had held up in the time since it was published and did some research, and seems like most (though not all) of the major points have held up pretty well or even been strengthened by recent evidence. However, the book seems to have attracted a surprising amount of hate, which this reminds me of! It feels to me like an instinctive hateful backlash to a remarkable achievement, like "crabs in a bucket syndrome" or the Einstein quote -

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.”

I think it got a lot of criticism because it was very wide ranging and some experts felt that Diamond was encroaching on their turf. Also it made a lot of sales, which probably provoked some envy. IIRC (some years since I read the book) Diamond made clear that a lot of the ideas were speculative.

It's very possible to get campsites but you do need to pounce right when they open up, especially in busier times of year - https://www.nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/camping.htm

I and many of my friends regularly wake up to do the 7am clickthrough on recreation.gov and often (though not always) are successful for the dates we're trying to get.

Hah hopefully not, if this takes off we'll be filtering for illegal/immoral use! Outbound AI calling is actually illegal although widely done :(

I kind of want you to be more proactive, and less reactive, with regard to this.

Excited to be able to use this, the demo was really impressive!

Oh yeah agreed that the change in prices doesn't prove it's a scam, my thought was more along the lines of - when crypto insiders who have been talking up crypto as valuable/important because it's independent of the government quickly change their tune and cheer on government intervention when it goes into their pockets, it makes it pretty clear what the dynamic actually is.

Lumping an entire industry into a single convenient strawman isn't very good for you.

Hey Ben, this looks great, but I'm getting a "Rate Limit Exceeded" error, anything to be done about that?

hey sorry about that - ran into a snag with the API but we got it back online an hour ago! hope you get another chance to take a look!

Thanks yep got it working, really great stuff!!

Definitely, but none of my obvious suspects from my immediate network are looking/a good fit. A post like this is both to find people I don't know who might be a good fit as well as to surface this to people I do know but that I might not have otherwise thought to reach out to.

I humbly suggest joining a local dev group and sourcing candidates from that.

I have some ideas for a game studio and I'd reach out to my game dev group if I'm ever in a position to hire.

The 12th of never when I'm able to fund my games...

I'd love to chat as well if you've still got bandwidth — I'm at alex@kolch.in

Thanks, appreciate it!

Check out Speechify and NaturalReader, IIRC they’re two of the most popular apps for that use case and I remember their voices were pretty solid.

Yes this is a very valid point, on a technical level it's definitely a 2-step thing. From a product perspective I'm framing it as a "this app reads books out loud to you" but if I start hearing about people using it to grab the text out (which is possible right now) I'll definitely consider paying more attention to that use case.