In some cases very, but in others not so much. Some of them have Patreon accounts or other ways to accept payment, but in many cases you’ll be doing good just to find a working email address for them. Ideally though I’d prefer to just pay for the books outright rather than trying to do some kind of grey area thing where I’d pirate the book and then donate the cost to them (if for no other reason than it causes tax headaches for everyone involved).
No you can’t. They changed the firmware so eBook downloads now go into a partition that’s not accessible when mounting the kindle over USB.
Plus I actually want to support the authors. My issue is with Amazon not the authors, so I want to pay for the books I’m reading so they can keep making more of them. If I could buy the books directly from the authors in some cases I would, and in all cases if it was available from the Kobo store I’d be willing to buy it there. Unfortunately that damn exclusivity clause on Kindle Unlimited means my options for them are Amazon, Amazon, or Amazon (or roll the dice on piracy and not support the author, not to mention even when it is the book in question the quality is often poor).
Sort of? Kindle Unlimited itself is digital only, but the exclusivity clause only applies to ebooks I think, so in theory you could purchase a physical copy elsewhere.
I’ve pretty much entirely abandoned physical books. It’s just far more convenient using an e-reader which has a backlight for reading in the dark, fits thousands of books in a device that’s pocket sized, and let’s me instantly purchase, download, and start reading the next book in a series as soon as I finish the last one.
I do have physical books still, but I haven’t bought new ones in about a decade now.
While that may be true, so far at least they seem to be doing an OK job. Their ebooks are often sold sans-DRM, and in the cases they aren’t every one I’ve gotten has used Adobe Digital Editions which are easy to strip the DRM from (and is a widely supported standard unlike Amazon’s proprietary DRM scheme). Additionally their e-reader devices, while not open hardware are repairable with disassembly guides provided by them and they even sell replacement components like screens. I have not verified this claim, but they also claim to use recycled plastic for manufacturing them and recycled cardboard for their packaging (should you care about such things).
For better or worse, if you want a Kindle like experience, you’re likely going to be forced into working with a large-ish corporation, but despite the average experience when doing so that doesn’t mean that corporation must be an evil anti-consumer hellscape of rapaciousness and greed. So far at least, Rakuten/Kobo seem to be doing OK by their customers.
Unfortunately Kindle Unlimited is a Faustian bargain due to the exclusivity clause. We’re now stuck in a catch 22. There are excellent (for consumers) alternatives out there to Kindle/Amazon, the most prominent of which is Kobo which has a variety of very competitive e-readers. Additionally Kobo Plus is essentially Kindle Unlimited, although I don’t know for sure whether it has an exclusivity clause (I hope it doesn’t, and the policies of Kobo make me suspect not, but I haven’t confirmed that). The biggest problem from a consumers perspective is simply that many authors works are just not available from the Kobo (or other) store.
However the consumer perspective is only half the picture. From the perspective of an author/publisher Kindle is undeniably the largest platform out there with Kobo being one of their largest competitors (in terms of e-readers, I suspect in just ebooks Apple is bigger) and it’s minuscule compared to Kindle. While functionally the Kobo store and Kobo Plus give everything that the Kindle store and Kindle Unlimited do, what they are severely lacking in is customers. An author could choose to publish on Kindle and Kobo as well as make their books available on Kobo Plus, but doing so means foregoing the option of Kindle Unlimited which will result in fewer consumers having access to that authors works at least in the short term.
So we arrive at the catch 22. Consumers get a much better deal with Kobo, but lose access to many of the authors works they may want to read. Authors need to stick with Kindle and Kindle Unlimited if they want to reach as many consumers as they can, but doing so discourages consumers from switching to Kindle/Kindle Unlimited alternatives like Kobo/Kobo Plus. Until enough consumers move off Kindle Unlimited authors won’t want to abandon it, but until enough authors abandon it consumers will struggle to move off of Kindle Unlimited.
Not going to tear down my de-drm setup any time soon. But optimistic I might be able to before amazon does it for me.
As far as I’m aware it’s now too late for that. Amazon has removed the ability to download ebooks to your computer meaning the only way to access azw files now is if you’ve found a way to rip them out of the Kindle memory (not possible using normal means, but maybe if you’ve cracked one open and probed the flash memory directly).
I used to de-drm all my kindle purchases using the manual download links Amazon had, but those have now been removed. That’s actually what prompted me to switch to Kobo. I’m not going to “purchase” a book I can’t create a backup of.
I recently switched to Kobo as a Kindle alternative, but that also highlighted a problem. Kindle Unlimited includes a TOS for publishers that prevents them from selling their books on any other platform. A significant chunk of the Kindle catalogue is also included in Kindle Unlimited, which means a significant chunk of authors works are locked into the Amazon ecosystem.
It’s been very annoying to discover how many book series I’ve been reading that are simply unavailable elsewhere because they opted to take part in Kindle Unlimited.
It’s not like AI is a massive secret or anything, it’s a very well studied field. The biggest difference is just the training set used. Individual people aren’t going to make any difference unless they’re carrying HDs full of training data around with them.
I mean it’s probably a good idea to avoid traveling to the US for at least a few years for everyone, but I’m trying to work out what AI has to do with anything.
Two points.
First, I’m not sure it’s a given China would side with Russia. That’s always been a relationship of convenience. China doesn’t particularly like either Russia or North Korea, but they grudgingly support them because they’re useful buffers. Increasingly the value of North Korea has been called into question in that regard as if North Korea actually collapsed it would cause significant headaches for China.
Similarly Russia is a gigantic backstop against NATO, but this war with Ukraine has demonstrated just how much of a paper tiger Russia is. In an actual war with NATO even with China backing them the odds for Russia are not good. Rather than be drawn into a war on the side of Russia who would very quickly lose leaving China to fight on their own with very little to gain, it’s likely China might just decide to stay neutral, or at least appear to. I could see China supplying Russia with supplies without being willing to engage directly themselves.
Related to that there’s very much a big question mark of where the US would land in all this. Less than a decade ago it would unquestionably have joined the rest of NATO in attacking Russia, but with Putin’s puppet now in the White House it’s equally likely the US would withdraw from NATO entirely rather than get involved in a war with Russia.
This leads to my second point. The US, or more specifically Trump, isn’t actually looking to get anything from Ukraine or Russia, that’s just a smoke screen. Russia is economically exhausted at this point. They literally can’t afford to keep the war going much longer. Putin wants a temporary ceasefire so that they can restock and rearm before continuing the war. They need Ukraine to give up on the territory that Russia currently holds and to stop fighting until Russia is ready to continue the fight. From Putins perspective if he can hurt Ukraine economically by siphoning their resources into the hands of an ally at the same time that’s just a bonus. So Putin instructed his puppet to make it happen.
Hmm seems like it’s only partially true these days. Looking at their webpage they have a screenshot of their Wikipedia entry (why they didn’t just link to it I have no idea) that provides some more up to date info. It was a testbed and they mention a project Quantum where the tech was added into Firefox’s Gecko engine. In 2020 Mozilla laid off all their Servo devs and handed the project over to Linux Foundation Europe. It seems like since then they’ve reenvisioned the project as an embeddable rendering engine similar to WebKit or V8.
Edit: Further details available on the Wikipedia page. In particular this last paragraph seems highly relevant:
In January 2023, the Servo project announced that new external funding had enabled a team of developers to reactivate the project.[23] The initial roadmap focused on selecting one of the two existing layout engines for further development, followed by working towards basic CSS2 conformance.[24] In February 2024, at FOSDEM 2024, the Servo Project team outlined their plans for a ‘reboot’ of Servo.[25]
It seems like the ‘reboot’ is focused on turning it into a competitor for WebKit/V8. Looking at the projects roadmap it seems there are currently no plans in the works to make it a proper standalone browser.
Servo isn’t a full browser, it’s a tech testbed for Mozilla to test out their various rewritten Rust components. I wish they would have promoted it to full browser status, but I think intention was always to take pieces of Servo as they were completed and drop them into Firefox.
Ah, I see the confusion. Originally you mentioned two Proton services, password manager and email provider. The person who replied to you suggested two alternative password managers (one commercial, the other one FOSS). You then replied saying without a specific email feature it would be pointless, which would be fair for an alternative email provider but doesn’t apply in this case.
What do you mean by email aliases?
From one senior dev to another, who remembers when O’Reily books were the gold standard, this, exactly this. Junior devs are junior because they don’t know how to code. The important bit is that they learn and become intermediate devs. If in another decade we’re sitting here complaining about intermediate and senior devs that don’t know how to program, then we’ll have a problem.
AI isn’t allowed on any of my systems, it’s practically the first thing I disable (alongside tracking and metrics, but that’s basically the same thing). The only AI I will ever allow would be something entirely offline and self hosted that I have complete and total control over.
Microsoft insisting on cramming this crap down everyone’s throats has finally convinced me to go 100% Linux for gaming. I’d rather abandon the small handful of games that won’t let you run them under Linux than let MS scrape all my personal data and shove ads into every crack of my OS. It’s been going great so far and I have absolutely no regrets. Best of all, not a single piece of AI or telemetry to disable.
$9.74 billion for the trash fire that is Twitter is honestly a really good offer, the muskrat should definitely take that.
I got lucky and picked up a 7900 XTX for a reasonable price last gen and it’s been a really great card. I’ve got a couple systems coming up on needing a refresh (1080 Ti and a 2080 Ti) and I’m planning on upgrading both of them to a 9070 XT. I’m staying away from Nvidia until they start pricing their GPUs at prices actual consumers can afford instead of corporations looking to build AI farms.
In my experience dealing with my deeply Republican parents it’s something like: