Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 6

A fast, enjoyable read with a few gut punches hidden throughout. I picked it as a sort of palate cleanser to the darkness of Overgrowth, though it turns out both involve strange transformations and potential planet-wide disasters.

It’s not really about the moon turning into cheese overnight so much as it’s about how people react to the moon turning into cheese overnight. Some people deal with it better than others.

Some of the vignettes are funny, some are touching, and some stand out more than others. Some people only show up once and others come back repeatedly. The feuding cheese shops that have gotten a lot more attention since the change. The pop-science author whose book on fantastic takes on the moon came out at exactly the right time. The astronauts whose mission is scrapped take it better than the billionaire rocket mogul whose company is building their rockets and spacecraft. (He really doesn’t take it well.)

The most impactful stories, though, are a set of vignettes around the 3/4 mark involving a long-divorced couple staring down mortality, and an extended chapter on a writer who has spent her entire adult life trying to get her first novel just right before shopping it around, or continuing with the other stories in her head.

OK, there’s one with a more literal impact, but you know what I mean.

And I appreciate how well Scalzi describes a total solar eclipse. (He mentions in the acknowledgments that the moon was kind enough to pass directly between the sun and his house last year, which helped quite a bit with that scene.)

And then there’s the epilogue. Or epilogues, rather.

SPOILER WARNING!

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Partway through, the story changes from one about people dealing with a massively weird but mostly harmless event to people dealing with imminent doom…but not yet, not until a few years from now, though it’s not hard to calculate the exact date. And it became strikingly clear that the COVID lockdowns of 2020 strongly influenced the psychology and sociology of the story…as well as the epilogues where people try to explain it away as a hoax, eventually succeeding in replacing the real story with a “realistic” version that we, as readers, know didn’t happen, because we got to follow along with the people who experienced it directly.

Anyway, it’s not high art, not even among Scalzi’s best (I think Lock In and Head On are my favorites of his so far, though I still have a lot on my to-read list), but it’s worth reading.

Connections

When The Moon Hits Your Eye forms sort of a thematic trilogy along with Starter Villain (which was a bit more fun) and The Kaiju Preservation society (which is the most interesting of the three).

And somehow I ended up reading a cluster of oddly-related books this summer: This and The Downloaded both cover character studies in an apocalypse that they can’t even mitigate. The Downloaded and Interference both involve long-lost interplanetary expeditions reconnecting with Earth. And Interference and Overgrowth both involve intelligent alien plants, mimicry, and invasions with shifting alliances.

I was very quickly impressed by how easy it was to switch from Google Authenticator, and how even if I wasn’t trying to cut down on my dependence on Google, it’s still better.

You can organize accounts into groups. That alone would make it worth switching, and now I don’t need to set up two non-Google apps to split work and personal two-factor authentication codes. You can also choose to hide codes until you tap on one (with double-tap to copy), and to protect the app behind its own password or a fingerprint scan. It’s also free, open-source, and works offline.

Aegis imports from several authenticator apps’ exported file formats. Rooted phones can import directly from another app. And it can import Google Authenticator’s QR codes in batches of 10. Yes, you can take a screenshot of the code to migrate on the same device. (Though you should try not to let that screenshot sync to the cloud!)

If you do set up a password to encrypt your 2FA vault, it will also offer to back up your vault locally or to a cloud account. This was you can restore from a bricked phone or move to another device. It doesn’t seem to recognize Dropbox, but does recognize Nextcloud. And you can optionally choose a different password to encrypt the backups.

Tuta recommend it in their latest Degoogling round-up of alternative apps and services, which is where I noticed it.

Extremely bare-bones two-factor authentication app for iOS and Android, sponsored by Red Hat. It’s secure, works offline, and doesn’t depend on Google. Free and open source. You can add, rename, rearrange or remove accounts (ARRR!), but that’s about it.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a good way to import codes from another app, on the same device or another. And it doesn’t seem to recognize the multi-account QR codes Google Authenticator can export. (It does have its own encrypted backup/restore feature, at least.) If you already have a lot of 2FA codes, switching them one by one will be tedious.

Tuta recommended it in their latest Degoogling round-up, along with Aegis Authenticator, which made a much better impression with its solid import/export and the ability to organize accounts into groups.

I haven’t decided whether Dia is an AI chatbot masquerading as a web browser or the other way around.

For now it’s in closed beta (and only on M-series Macs), but they’ve released it to anyone with an Arc Browser account. Not wanting to run it on my primary OS or log into any important accounts (Dia will look through your logged-in accounts for answers), I installed it on a virtual machine.

First impression: it really wants you to personalize it. And it really wants you to interact by chatting. Once it gets past the onboarding, the main window is a 50/50 split with the web view in one column and chat in the other. And they’ve finally implemented the UI change that big tech has been trying to do for the last 15 years: Hide the URLs. I spent several seconds looking for a place to type in the name of a website before I decided to type it in the “Ask anything” box, and was relieved that it works like Arc and I could pick the actual site from a drop-down.

But Why, Though?

The problem is that I don’t want to interact with the web through an AI chat bot.

I’ve tried. I really liked Arc Search, but I never warmed to its AI features either.

I just don’t want a generated answer that won’t tell me where to find more details, and won’t cite its sources. (I asked it why it doesn’t cite its sources, and it said it will if it has to do a web search, but not if it’s just using its training data.) And I don’t want a folksy-sounding “well, I can’t find an exact answer, but I can tell you sort of where to look for it,” I want to go to that place where I can find it.

I also don’t trust the technology yet: I don’t trust its accuracy. I don’t trust the people running it. I don’t trust the way summaries will entrench a single interpretation (just like classifying AI tends to reinforce the biases in its training data). And so much of it still relies on cloud services, meaning that your questions and answers are routed through another layer of remote computers, which need more energy and provide a nice central spot for surveillance. (This is also why I’ve avoided voice assistants for so long.) If I go directly to EFF.org, that’s between me and the EFF, but if I use Dia’s AI chat to get answers from EFF, Dia’s and OpenAI’s servers need access too. And while Dia assures you that your query is deleted immediately afterward, you have to trust them on it. And trust anyone who might eventually buy them.

And that’s not even getting into AI’s rapidly expanding energy requirements coming just at the point when the world was getting a handle on renewables, or the ethics of sourcing its training data.

Bottom (Command) Line

AI integration is the whole point of Dia. Without those features, it’s just a stripped-down Chromium browser, and not a very compelling one, either. (I’d go back to Arc or Ecosia in a heartbeat, or DuckDuckGo, and those are the comparatively bland ones. And Ecosia at least tries to work for the environment.) With the AI, it’s another panopticon funnel.

Maybe it’s just not my thing, or I’m just being a digital curmudgeon. (Maybe.) Though it is kind of funny that people are interacting with computers by typing text commands to get responses again. Of course, terminal applications are (usually) more deterministic about what you get back from them!

Update (September 2025): Atlassian is buying The Browser Company, which means it’s following the typical startup-to-acquisition path. Maybe the pivot to AI was sincere, but it certainly looks like it was an attempt to raise their profile among potential buyers.

Back when I was first using Mastodon on my phone, I tried a few apps and settled on Tusky. I was impressed at how smoothly it works, especially with multiple accounts. It’s more capable than the official Mastodon app, not too cluttered, and handles just about everything mainline Mastodon servers offer. And while it doesn’t go out of its way to support other Fediverse platforms, it does work well with other software like GoToSocial and Snac.

They recently polished the app’s look, and while the differences are mostly subjective, block quotes are a lot more legible than they used to be!

These days, most apps that support multiple accounts will ask which one you want to use when sharing from another app. Tusky was one of the first I found that did. I used to get so annoyed when I started posting something to Instagram only to notice at the last stage that it was on the wrong account! Another nice feature is the option to open the post you’re viewing in another of your accounts, something that I use just often enough that I miss it every time I try another app for a week. (Update: Moshidon does this too!)

There are a couple of maintained forks that I’ve tried: Husky adds Pleroma/Akkoma features, but lags a bit behind Tusky. Pachli is a solid alternative, having split over a project disagreement, and while Tusky and Pachli have diverged, Tusky is more mature, and they’re still similar enough that I don’t see a compelling reason to switch.

Bottom line: it’s still my preferred Fediverse app, though Fedilab’s support for additional non-Mastodon features makes it a very close decision.