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3 days agoThis concept is why I have a deep respect for DuckDuckGo as a company. When interviewing there for a SRE position, the round 2 and 3 interviews included coding challenges. They paid (IIRC) $75/hr based on the maximum time they wanted candidates to spend on each assignment. I ended up not getting the position, but they’re the only company I made it to the final decision step with that I didn’t feel was wasting my time.
Ironically, Star Trek is considered “hard sci-fi”, even if there are other shows/books that are harder. The hardness of science fiction isn’t related to how plausible the science backing it is, but how much effort the story puts into explaining the “science”, and how internally consistent that explanation is. Trek spends a fair amount of effort into technobabble, and had dedicated technobabble writers whose job was to try to maintain consistency with those explanations.
Compare this with something like Star Wars (the movies, not third party novels), where nearly zero effort is put into explaining how magical Force powers work or why laser swords have a fixed length.
Hard sci-fi says “this is how this works”, even if it’s complete bullshit. Soft sci-fi says “just accept that these things work, so we can use them as plot devices”.